At the end of a day following the path of a distant relative I drive from Northam through Bakers Hill, back to Toodyay Road and decide to deviate across to Walyunga National Park. I only have a couple of hours before they close the gates, so I park and walk up along the Gugglyar Avon River and keep going past all the tuarts and sheoaks and low water levels; past the teals and hardheads and galahs to where the trail moves away from the water. I decide to keep going but find there, in my unpathed path, a group of goats, one of whom has decided to brandish his horns a little. I give them some width—a herd of a dozen or more, I see now—and head further upriver, crossing on dry rocks to what would be an island during higher water levels. There I find a solitary kangaroo sleeping in the shade and sand of a tree. It gets up when it sees me and begins hopping in all sorts of directions; I can’t tell if its very young, or very old and waiting to die, or even if it might be blind. There is a deeper pool of water in the river nearby. I go back the way I came and cut in even further upriver. By now I’m aware I’m well off the track, without cell reception or a personal locator beacon, and snakes would be no surprise. But I walk on and cross the island towards the running river water on the other side, seeing a couple more kangaroos—mother and young—not really hopping away when I appear, as if I could almost touch them, as if they were not used to humans. I arrive at the water running over shallow rocks, with deeper stretches upriver. On the other side of the water is a trainline. And to me, the whole island and area feels a little untended, unloved by human hands and hearts and minds.