A KANGAROO SQUATS IN THE MIDDLE of the red dirt road. Head drooped, front paws limp, it can barely hop out of the way. The scorching globe of the sun is literally cooking the meat inside the kangaroo's gray, tattered fur. I pull over, pour several quarts of my emergency water into a makeshift bowl, and set it beside the road along with some food. I know it's too late. This animal will die.

The drought is that bad. Kangaroo carcasses dot the desert like the skeletons of dead explorers, their hides stretched taut over rat-gnawed bones, sand drifting into their pecked-out eyes.

I stop for the night in Tibooburra (population 130), a ghostly, dirt-blown town 600 miles north of Melbourne, in the northwestern corner of New South Wales. The Tibooburra Hotel is a dilapidated two-story sandstone building with a peeling wood porch. Tiny rooms above the pub, bathroom down the hall. I am the only guest.

In the pub, a prosthetic leg and a dusty saddle hang from the ceiling, cowboy hats are nailed in rows along the walls, and the smell of cigarette smoke and abandonment is in the air. I order a mug of beer that immediately goes warm.

A crooked little man in a crushed cowboy hat bounds through the screen door, takes a stool at the bar, pours a mug of beer down his creased, gray-stubbled throat, and orders another.

"I'm the water hauler," he volunteers.
Turns out Tibooburra, an Aboriginal name meaning "heaps of rocks," went dry two years ago, and locals have had to truck drinking water in from an aquifer-fed reservoir.

"A third of an inch of rain in two years," adds the Pooh-bellied bartender.

"We got a 3,000-gallon tanker," says the water hauler, raising his mug to me. "Goin' tomorrow 3 a.m. for the fill-up, mate, if you care to come along."