There were 20 of us left; not many for a tribe you’d think, but all of us had been together since the Great Departure and knew our brothers and sisters as well as we knew the lines on the palm of our hand, as comfortable around each other as an old glove clasping your fingers. Without saying it out loud, we just knew that anyone of us would do whatever was needed to help the others. One of the women summed it up best “if we say we love you once, you can assume that we mean this for the rest of our lives”. We were comfortable around each other, there was no concept of an awkward silence as none of us felt the need to fill silence with useless words. If we said something, it was important. Which isn’t to say we were dour. We looked dark, sullen, brooding but that was belied by the laughter at night, the warmth around the fire. We’d left the old hotel after a month, we needed to find somewhere higher away from the natives and came around the bend of the abandoned railway line to see the bridge arcing across to our new territory.
