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Alex looked at Mack, who was swabbing Brad’s upper left chest with alcohol before inserting the14g needle into the second intercostal space in the midclavicular line. A hiss of air escaped as the needle punctured the pleura and after a minute or so the young man’s breathing deepened and his respiratory distress abated.

“Alex, put on this hard cervical collar,” Mack directed, handing her an adjustable cervical collar from the red section of his pack. “Then I’ll need to put in a chest tube. Can you take his pulse and BP and put in a large bore IV line?”

“Of course,” Alex said and looking up at Brad’s father asked if he could help support his son’s head while she attended to the tasks Mack has assigned her. At least he had given her something to do, she thought, trying her best to put her resentment aside for the patient’s sake.

Joe Ellis crouched down in the dust, his weather-beaten features looking haggard with fear, his throat moving up and down as if he was trying to swallow a boulder lodged there. “Is my son going to be all right?” he asked Mack, completely ignoring Alex.

“We need to get him to hospital,” Mack said. “Once I’ve got this chest drain in I’ll call the Flying Doctor on the satellite phone. Is there anywhere on the property they can land?”

“We’ve got a strip cleared near the homestead,” Joe informed him. “We’ve only used it once about ten years ago when one of the jackaroos came off one of our horses and broke his back. That’s why we shifted to bikes, not as dangerous, or so we thought...”

“There’s danger in just about everything,” Mack said by way of comfort before addressing Alex. “I’m going to call for back up. Put in an IV line and run a liter of normal saline.”

When he came back Alex reported tachycardia and hypotension, which was responding to IV fluids, but which indicated intra-abdominal bleeding. “It’s probably from his spleen,” she said.

“We need to get him out of this blistering heat,” Mack said sweeping his gaze around for something suitable to use as a spinal board. His eyes narrowed as they settled on a flat sheet of roofing iron about fifty meters away near a water trough.

Alex followed the line of his gaze, and keen to show him how innovative she could be, leapt to her feet. “You take over monitoring him while I get the sheet of tin.”

The tin was partially covered with strips of eucalyptus bark and the red ochre dust of the outback and as she turned it over she leapt back in shock, her blood-curdling scream echoing across the shimmering-with-heat paddocks. “Snake!”