by John Marsden
The gap between the next tree and me was a shambles of bushes and bark and a broken branch. A cow was floundering around in it, but the rest of the mob had avoided it so I scrambled through without much danger except that my breathing was still crazy. I’ve never had asthma but I got an idea then of how it would feel, the chest heaving without my being able to control it, the lungs begging for air but not getting any, the white lights going off in my brain as I waited for the oxygen to arrive.
Unfortunately I didn’t have time to wait for the oxygen. I ran to the next tree, dodging the last few cattle as I went. I thought I was home free but a young steer came charging at a different angle to the others. He came out of nowhere. I didn’t see him till the last moment. I spun to try to get away but he caught me with his flank and knocked me sideways. I deliberately kept rolling as he thundered past. He wasn’t interested in me, just in the mindless fury of the stampede. His back hoof caught me and the blow seemed to echo through my head. There was a dull shocked feeling. I thought the left side of my skull had been caved in. I got on my hands and knees and shook my head. It seemed to still be there, although I didn’t shake too hard in case it flew off and I had to waste time looking for it in the undergrowth. With no eyes it would take a long time.
I did think I heard my teeth rattle, and I certainly felt them. Trying to ignore the pain and the instant headache, I got up and went on towards the motorbike. For a few minutes I wasn’t even sure why I was looking for it, but I knew it was something to do with cattle and by the time I’d found it my head was a bit clearer.
Really all this took only thirty seconds. Cattle were still blundering around on all sides but the main mob were well away. I could hear Gavin’s motorbike, the farm Yamaha, but not Homer’s Honda. The Yammie was going up towards the ridge. ‘Clever Gavin,’ I thought. ‘He’s going to swing them back north.’
If they ran into the fence I didn’t know what would happen. A fence wouldn’t stop a mob of stampeding cattle but it could cause a disaster. If the leaders went head-on into it and the fence wasn’t immediately flattened, if there was a pile-up with the first twenty or so, then another hundred or two ramming them, we’d have an instant abattoir. It wasn’t difficult to get a mental picture of a mob of cattle piled on top of each other, with broken legs, broken ribs, broken necks. Mr Young would be a little slow with the next agistment cheque if that happened.
My head still felt numb and strange as I got on the bike. I went flat-chat though. If Gavin could swing them to the north, I wanted to be in a position near the western fence so I could turn them again.
Riding through the night at high speed like that is pretty crazy. You can keep your Luna Parks and the Wild Mouse and the Shock Drop. I knew that sooner or later I’d be in the clear part of the paddock, where it’d be safer, but those first few minutes, going through scrub, making instant decisions every second, with a head that felt like an overripe pineapple, were on the wrong side of fun for me. There were no tracks but there was bracken, fallen branches, bark, a log here, a hole there, a wallaby trying to outgun the bike, a couple of bewildered-looking cattle suddenly looming up in the glare of the headlights. I never knew whether high-beam was a good idea or not on that bike, because with high-beam you can see further but you can’t see the ground immediately in front of you. I kept switching from low to high and back again.
The rain started coming in hard. ‘Like we haven’t got enough problems already,’ I thought. Tiny ferocious drops stung my face. More strange-looking cattle appeared. They looked strange to me because I wasn’t used to cattle who’d turned their back on humans. And they looked at me strangely, as if they didn’t seem to know who they were any more. I ignored them and raced on, squinting through the rain, trying to get into some clear space. I crossed a narrow bit of grass and suddenly nearly slammed into the mob. Above the rat-a-tat-tat of the motorbike I could hear the thump-thump-thump of their hooves on the earth, like there was a band playing at the Anlezarks’ place and the beat of the bass guitar was travelling through the ground from five k’s away.
The cattle were focused now. They must have been tired, although you wouldn’t think it to look at them. But all their energy was going into the stampede. They didn’t have the strength to bellow. They were rushing to nowhere but all their strength was needed for the race. Reminded me of some of the kids at school.
I had to trust Gavin to turn them. I waited till they had passed then gunned the bike up the hill. I was getting coldly wet. At the top of the hill I let the bike idle and tried to guess from the throbbing of the earth where they were going. The noise sharpened, seemed to rise a note, became louder. The throbbing of the bike and the ground were now synchronised. Gradually the beat of the cattle hooves got louder and stronger. I squared myself around a little on the bike, to face them, at the same time thinking how amazing it was that one average-size human could have the cheek to think she could have any influence on a mob of huge mad beasts coming straight at her.
Before I could think about that any more they were there, the leaders toiling up over the ridge, galumphing now instead of galloping. I strained to look at their eyes, hoping I’d see tiredness instead of madness, but they were still too far away and the rain made it impossible.
‘Well Ellie,’ I said out loud to the wind and to the wild air blowing over the ridge and to the million miles of heaven above and beyond me, ‘this is where you get steamrollered.’
I revved up the bike and started forwards. Not too fast or I’d be in the middle of the mob in a second and the leaders would just go, ‘What was that?’ and keep running. Not too slow or they’d go over the top of me and I’d be under their hooves and mashed into the mud. I flashed the headlights on and off. The four-wheeler doesn’t have a horn but I yelled a lot. I zigzagged in big zigzags, shouting and waving my hat. A wave of heat hit me. It shocked me, that they could generate heat like that. They were almost up to me, the leaders rolling relentlessly on, and I could see their eyes now, and they were anxious and lost and wanting to stomp me into the earth so they could go somewhere, they still didn’t know where.
CHAPTER 3
‘WAKE UP, DEAR,’ the nurse said.
No, just kidding. I don’t know what it was that had run so hard through the blood of this mob, whether it was rage or fear or a desire for freedom or a force that has no word. I suspect it was the last one. But whatever it was, the charge up to the ridge from where Gavin and Homer had turned them was enough to slow them just a little and calm them just a little more. And my yelling and zigzagging and flashing lights turned them again. They ran along the western boundary of the paddock and soon the stragglers were standing with sides heaving and heads down, ignoring us three; the leaders lost their drive then, with no followers, and they fizzled out and wandered off into the scrub, snatching at grass as they went. They almost looked embarrassed.
We were puffing harder than the cattle, but we still had a lot of work ahead. I divided the paddock into three and we split up and went looking for injured beasts. The rain kept going, not spectacularly, quite light most of the time, but it was soaking and cold and got you down a bit.
While the other two were still looking I nicked off home, mainly because I needed the rifle, but I grabbed a loaf of bread and a jar of apricot jam and three cans of Coke as well. I could hear Marmie yelping with excitement and anxiety and loneliness from her pen – whenever she heard one of the bikes she went off big-time – but I had to be hard-hearted and ignore her. This was not a dog party. I went back to the paddock and met up with the other two and we had a picnic, trying to keep the bread dry under my Drizabone as I spread slice after slice and handed them around.
It was three-twenty a.m. The boys ate every slice I gave them. Gavin was shivering and Homer was too cold and tired to speak. I said to Gavin, ‘Have you done your homework yet?’ but it took him four goes to get what I meant and then he just turned away as if I were demented. It wasn’t much of a joke to begin with and by the fourth time aroun
d it had gone beyond lameness into permanent disability.
Gavin took me to a couple of steers who were injured. One was up, but with a leg hanging uselessly. I thought he was a chance but the other one had a leg fracture so severe that twenty centimetres of bone were sticking out, and I had to shoot him. I shot another one, a small beast with a funny face, all red and white squares. I’d noticed him before. But there was nothing funny about him now. He’d fallen off a bank, pushed by the rush of cattle I guess, and he’d impaled himself on a sharp old gum stump. Too many of his insides had become outsides for him to have any chance.
Homer had found a couple of others but they looked like they might get through with a bit of stitching and TLC. It would be a close thing though. Shock and blood loss and cold wet weather were three reasons they mightn’t make it. Altogether we had four who looked like they’d qualify for disabled parking stickers.
I left Homer and Gavin to bring in the ones that could be moved while I went home to ring the vet. I had the after-hours number for Mr Keech but it rang out, so I rang the surgery, which was annoying because then I had to sit through all the ‘If your cat has a headache press 3’ stuff. Finally I got an emergency number, which was different from Mr Keech’s so I tried that. It rang and rang. At last a bloke answered. He said, ‘Hello,’ but he didn’t sound like any of the vets I knew. I thought, ‘Oh no! I’ve rung some poor bloke at four in the morning and it’s a wrong number.’
I said, ‘Is that the vet?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ so we were making progress. I said, ‘It’s Ellie Linton here, out at Mirrimbah. I’ve got four cattle who need looking at. The mob took off in the storm and quite a few got injured.’
He said, ‘Oh fuck.’
I struggled to keep my temper, then lost the struggle. ‘So far you’ve said four words,’ I said, sounding as cold as the weather. ‘ “Hello”, “yes”, and “oh fuck”. Are you coming out here or aren’t you?’
He didn’t sound the slightest bit bothered. ‘Oh yes. Where’d you say you were from?’
‘Mirrimbah. It’s on the . . .’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know it.’
The phone made that little durrup noise as he hung up.
As we waited for him we did a bit of cleaning up of the cattle that Homer and Gavin had brought lumbering in. We didn’t bother to take them up to the new yards and put them in the press, just used the old wooden yard behind the house. They were in shock, shivering and shuffling around. It was like some of the boys at the B&S’s, when they were supposedly dancing but they just moved their feet backwards and forwards, left and right, right and left, forwards and backwards. The cattle did their clumsy dance, grunting and rolling their eyes. We did a bit of cattle whispering, calming them down and shoving lucerne into their gobs. The lucerne probably helped more than the whispering. Three of them had big wounds, which would have sent a human straight to the floor, but even with their guts sticking out the cattle wanted to waltz.
They looked how I felt. My head seemed detached from my body. The jawbone wasn’t connected to the neck bone. I wanted to put my head in a cupboard for a few days until it stopped throbbing.
Gavin and Homer were talking about the stampede and where they’d been and what they’d done and how smart and heroic they were. I didn’t have the energy to listen. I think they probably had been heroic and smart but they were so good at telling each other about it that they didn’t need me.
The vet arrived in a Falcon Ute so splattered with mud that you couldn’t see if it had number plates or not. I had to admit he’d got here in record time. And then he was so nice that all the angry speeches I’d been planning went out of my head. He was a young bloke named Seamus, and he went to his work so neatly and quickly that I watched in fascination. We were all so tired – including Seamus – that I don’t know how we stayed awake. That heavy feeling behind my eyelids, the ache in my head . . . I did everything in slightly slow motion, and only the presence of my friends made it OK.
Homer stood holding the torch while I held the head of the beast who was being stitched, and Gavin was a general gofer, sitting on the step leading into the food shed when I didn’t have a job for him. I thought he would fall asleep but each time I looked his eyes were still open. Most of the time I watched Seamus at work. He had good, strong, patient hands and he worked steadily, pulling the edges of the wound together, stitching away, swabbing occasionally. Homer watched too, and the light of the big Dolphin torch gave us both a good view of the bleeding flesh, the torn edges, the white muscle and severed veins.
Then it happened. Homer said to me quietly, ‘Can you hold the torch for a sec, El?’
‘Sure.’
As I took it he added, ‘I’m not feeling all that well.’
With those words he slid straight to the ground and lay there unconscious under the big steer.
I yelped, which wasn’t all that helpful. The beast was penned well enough but we hadn’t allowed for a human coming at him from that direction. He shook his head and bellowed and started to step backwards. Homer was about to have a five hundred kilo—plus beast step on him. With cattle and horses the weight is all resting on those four thin legs and hard hooves. A steamroller running over you would have a totally different effect, but I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I dropped the torch, which meant no-one could see anything, although I was aware of the light rolling over and over and pointing away towards the stars. Seamus and I dived simultaneously under the steer, cracked our heads and somehow got a grip on Homer and started dragging him out. For one terrible moment I realised we were pulling him in different directions, like a Christmas cracker. Then we seemed to be going the same way.
All of this would have been too late, with Homer cored like an apple, if not for one thing which is that the steer, having taken two steps back, and about to take a third step which would disembowel my best friend, suddenly shook his head, gave a low grunt, kicked a leg, and inexplicably took a step forwards. It saved Homer’s life. All we’d needed was that extra second. We had Homer out of there just as he was starting to stir and give a grunt that sounded very like the steer. Come to think of it, he might have become a steer if he had been in there any longer.
I suppose this is another ‘amazing Gavin’ story. When we got Homer out, Seamus handed me my torch and in its strong beam I saw Gavin coming calmly towards us. I suddenly got suspicious. I put the torch on my face and waved at him and asked, ‘Where did you go?’
He shrugged and pointed and said casually, ‘Round the back.’
‘What did you do?’
I realised how pleased he was looking, and excited, behind his calm and cool face.
He shrugged again. ‘Made him go forwards.’
‘You did?’
‘He was going to step on Homer. Squish. Squash. Yuk.’ Gavin was beaming away like he was the face on Luna Park.
‘So how did you make him go forwards?’
‘Bit him.’
‘You what?’
‘Bit him. Like a dog.’
Homer was sitting up, holding his head. Seamus looked at me. ‘That’s the fastest thing I’ve ever seen,’ he said. ‘You should rent him out.’ He asked Gavin: Where exactly did you bite him?’
‘Where the dogs do.’ Gavin demonstrated on the back of his own leg. ‘Not too hard,’ he added. ‘I didn’t want him to go psycho.’
‘Give us your torch for a sec, Ellie,’ Seamus said. He took it over to the rear of the beast and, making sure he didn’t cop a quick kick to the head, bent down and had a look just above the hoof. ‘You can see the teeth marks,’ he said to me. He shook his head. ‘How’d you miss the kick?’ he asked Gavin.
‘Uh?’ Gavin looked at me for a translation. I demonstrated the steer’s kick.
‘Oh,’ said Gavin and mimed dropping flat.
‘My God,’ said Seamus. ‘He is a cattle dog. We’d better test your beast for rabies.’
It was fairly amazing. We hadn’t had any working dogs since the war, but Gavin had
seen them at the saleyards in town and at some of the neighbours’ places, like the Youngs’, where Dad had taken him. Cos of course that’s exactly what they do: bite just above the hoof, drop flat so they don’t get kicked, then bite again.
Homer was standing, looking embarrassed. ‘Can’t believe I did that,’ he said. ‘Never done that before.’
‘It can make you queasy,’ Seamus said. ‘Staring at it for so long. Happens quite often. You’d be surprised,’
We went back to the steer to finish the job.
I didn’t give Homer a hard time about fainting, although it was extremely tempting, and I hope he’s grateful to me for the rest of his life for being so restrained. He did look at me very hard on the bus, when I started telling Shannon and Sam about the stampede. And I did take him close to the edge, when I told them about Seamus the vet, and stitching up the steers, ‘. . . and Homer was holding the torch.’ Homer shifted a little closer and glared at me. ‘And I tell you what, there were some pretty chunky wounds. It’d knock some people flat just to look at them. There was a faint . . .’ I paused for a sec, just to annoy Homer some more. ‘A faint chance that one of them had internal bleeding, but he seems to be mending OK.’
The weekend slipped away. I had to take Mr Young on a tour of the cattle and I had to repair a lot of fences, but the priority for all that stuff was in the reverse order to the way I’ve written it, because I didn’t want Mr Young to see our fences when they were in anything other than great condition. And much as I was desperate for sleep I had to take care of the customer first, and Mr Young was our only customer. He coped pretty well with his cattle casualties. Some farmers seem to have an amazing sense of fairness, and he was like that.
Somehow we got to school on Monday. These days it felt like a TV show that you try to watch while you’re cooking dinner. You’re in and out of the room and then you’re concentrating on the chicken stock and then you’re in the pantry or asking Gavin to give you a hand with the onions, and suddenly the credits are rolling and you’ve missed two-thirds of the program. I was dropping into school and finding that they were talking about integration of polynomials in Maths and someone had changed the rules about who could use the computer room and Belinda Norris was now with Andy Farrar, not Ranald . . .