Some of My Friends Have Tails

by Sara Henderson

  SUNDOWNER, SCRUFFY AND BUCKSHOT

  We were working hard and were kept busy raising poddy calves. Every year we have a fair number, and as we have been raising them since we arrived on the station, there are a lot of cows on Bullo that were hand-fed from their first weeks of life. They all have names, and to this day, if you call to one of them in the paddock, it will usually turn around and moo back to you, responding to the familiar name that triggers old memories. I could fill a book with poddy calf stories alone, but as usual there are a few that will always stand out in my memory.

  Sundowner was the absolute menace of the animal world. If it shouldn’t be touched, enter Sundowner. The children were small when we raised her with a mob of other poddies, but for no special reason, Sundowner became a pet. After feeding time, she would attach herself to the children and follow them back to the house. Many a time I had to chase her out of the house because she forgot herself. But try as they did, the children couldn’t teach her to go to the toilet outside; in fact she seemed to make a point of coming into the house to relieve herself. So my association with Sundowner was always chasing her with a broom. I think she must have suffered brain damage at birth, because you could not teach or train her to do anything.

  By the time she grew into a small heifer, the children had singled out the next small calf to raise as their special pet, and Sundowner was drafted out into the herd with the rest of the now bigger poddy calves. But Sundowner had other ideas. I suppose she had spent so much time with humans, she didn’t like being sent away with a bunch of cattle. So she would crawl under and through fences until she arrived back at the homestead gate, wait, and squeeze through with the next person who happened along. In record time, Sundowner would be in the house again. If she just stood there or walked around, that would be acceptable, but Sundowner really was a menace.

  She wandered into the store room one Saturday night when we were showing a movie, back before the days of videos, way back in the days of movie projectors. All the staff were sitting in the living room, so she had a whole hour or more alone in the store room before someone wandered by and discovered her. By that time, she had split open and consumed half a huge seventy-pound bag of sugar, and a large bag of onions along with spaghetti, flour and a bit of tea for flavour.

  For the next few days, out on the airstrip, she made some amazing sounds, both ends, and no-one went anywhere near her because you would need a gas mask to survive. Even the cattle ran away from her!

  For years, we had sheets and towels with chewed corners. This was Sundowner’s very, very favourite pastime. Whatever is in the saliva or the chewing method, the process seemed to break and wrinkle all the fibres in the material, and you could not wash or iron it out. So for years, sheets, towels, T-shirts, all of Charlie’s business shirts had chewed corners or shirt-tails. Most of the offending chewed areas could be tucked under or in, so it wasn’t too bad, but it made interesting decoration when the towels were hanging in the bathroom, with those corners you couldn’t hide. She ate half of one of the hired movie reels that was left on the projector one night after the movie night. I came into the living room the next morning to find Sundowner standing in a sea of unrolled 35mm film, casually devouring it frame by frame. What she didn’t eat and ruin beyond recognition, she stood on, slobbered on, or pooped on; the whole movie was gone for ever.

  When I look back, I suppose we were extremely patient with this miserable cow, who really didn’t give any pleasure, only trouble! For some reason, the children liked her, but she really was impossible. She ate the music off the piano, she ate the children’s schoolwork, she ate our mail, any typed letters she could find, and like Honky-Tonk, our pet donkey, she chased the cooks if they were carrying food. None of which was funny.

  But she did give us non-stop laughter when the girls got her drunk. Charles had left his rum and grapefruit juice evening drink on the coffee table to go and get something in the office, and Sundowner happened by, strolling on the lawn; she saw the cheese and crackers unattended and hoed in. Having finished the plate of food in a few seconds flat, she tried the drink. Charles arrived back and caused such an uproar we all came running. He went on and on about the cow drinking his precious rum.

  This set idea lights flashing in the children’s minds, and it wasn’t long before they gave her a mickey-finn of mammoth proportions. They mixed a dash of everything they could find in the liquor cabinet, and finished off with beer for volume.

  That cow staggered around the airstrip, bellowing, passing wind, hiccupping, sneezing, groaning and regularly falling flat on her nose. The next day was just as funny, as she worked her way through what must have been a terrible hangover. It seemed all her life’s punishments had come at once. Maybe it was fitting repayment for all the destruction she had caused.

  When I managed to grow banana trees and protect them from the pigs to the stage that hands of bananas actually developed, it was in vain. Sundowner would eat whole hands of green bananas at a single sitting. When I think back about Sundowner, all I can remember was that she ate anything, she ate a lot, and she passed wind and belched continuously—not what one would call fond memories of an endearing pet.

  The children came screaming into the kitchen one day to tell me Sundowner’s tongue had stretched and was lying on the ground in front of her. I raced out to find her quietly devouring one of our crêpe bandages. The bandage had been washed and was on the clothes line, which she had apparently just visited. It was a wide beige elastic bandage, and when Sundowner looked up at you, indeed it seemed as if her tongue was hanging down to the ground.

  When she saw me running towards her, her chewing accelerated to such a rate that I just managed to grab the last handful of the bandage before it disappeared into the cavernous mouth. With my knuckles up against Sundowner’s teeth and her reputation of eating anything, my first reflex was to pull, and so I did. The children howled behind me, ‘Is Sundowner going to die?’ My silent thoughts wished she would, while foot after foot of sloppy, slimy bandage was pulled out from the depths of heaven knows where. Unlike the film, I was able to retrieve the entire bandage.

  Sundowner had the most amazing expressions on her face as her eating process went into reverse. She stood and coughed for quite a while when the other end of the bandage finally joined the rest on the ground. The bandage was washed, but it was never quite the same again. On the sections she had chewed, rather than just gulped down, all the elastic had gone, so the bandage had a ruffled, seersucker effect when wrapped around a sprained limb.

  Although she was quiet enough to enable me to haul a twenty-foot bandage out of her mouth, she had grown to a large heifer. Unfortunately, though, Sundowner still thought she was a small calf, and this caused trouble when she wanted to play or nudge you with a friendly toss of her head. You would suddenly find you had moved several paces from where you had been standing. But action had to be taken when, again in a playful mood, she knocked Bonnie down on the ground, and started rolling her along like a ball.

  Sundowner was excommunicated from the garden and had to take up residence in the far paddock of Bullo Creek; and so the association with another unusual animal came to an end.

  As mad as Sundowner was, other calves were delightful. The girls arrived home one day carrying a very small, frail, starving, motley, miserable calf. I gave him one chance in a million of surviving, but the girls assured me he had spunk and a will to live, so we tried to help him along. He was such a moth-eaten creature which I called Scruffy.

  Scruffy was that one in a million, that beats the odds. I didn’t put him with the other calves, but kept him under the tree just outside the kitchen window so I could keep an eye on him. He was so weak that when he fell over he couldn’t stand up again, so I would go out and help him. But he was keen to keep living, and would try to get up even before I appeared. He seemed to know that as long as he was on his feet he would live. The weeks passed, and his bony ribs slowly disappeared as the regular feedings of milk took ef
fect, and to my amazement, he became strong and stopped falling over. His coat still looked as if a few hundred moths had been feeding on it, but a slight shine began to show through on the new coat growing underneath.

  He finally joined the other calves in the pen when he was strong enough to fend for himself. I remember Scruff as a gentle soul; he would always come up to me at feeding time and stand waiting for a pat before he romped off with the other calves. I felt this was a ‘thank you’ to me for bringing him through those touch-and-go first months. For all the times I told him he could make it, when I am sure he was tired of trying, when he was thin and weak and swaying around trying to control his legs.

  Like all the others, he grew to the size where he could go out into the big paddocks and live on grass and water, and so the day came when his group left the safety of the poddy pen, and ventured out into the big wide world, a little hesitant group, holding back in doubt, wondering what was in store out there in the unknown. He grew and survived. The next year, Danielle and I were riding through one of the paddocks and she called out, ‘Hi, Scruff’ to a big, shiny, sleek steer grazing close by. The steer raised its head and bellowed back in reply. I couldn’t believe it was my ratty little Scruffy; I walked my horse over for a closer look and also called him by name. He recognised me immediately, and gave me an extra-loud, long bellow. I looked into his face and knew, yes, that’s my Scruffy. He certainly had made up for lost time; he was a very handsome-looking steer.

  The poddy calf that takes honours as everyone’s most favourite of all has to be Buckshot. She is still alive, around fifteen years old. Marlee had saved her from being trampled on in the yards when all the cattle were crowded in after a muster. Later, when the cattle had been sorted into their different pens and the little calves branded, this calf still had no mother, so Marlee put her in the back of the Toyota and brought her back to the poddy pen.

  The petrol fumes of the Toyota was the calf’s first remembered smell, and for months the crazy calf thought the Toyota was her mother. If the Toyota was anywhere near, you would find Buckshot running around and around the vehicle trying to find a drink. She never gave up looking for an udder under the Toyota. We had to watch her whenever the vehicle drove away from the house, or there she would be, trotting along behind it. Thankfully she outgrew this strange behaviour, realised that milk was in regular supply in the feeding shed, and became a nice, friendly, normal calf.

  She was a late end-of-the-season calf, and there were fewer to feed, so the girls had more time to spend with these calves than during the season, when we were feeding up to thirty or forty.

  Marlee called this calf Buckshot, and she grew into a big, beautiful, black and tan Brahman with long, wide, impressive horns. Buckshot, over the years, has presented us with some very beautiful calves. There is quite a Buckshot dynasty, out there, her daughter and grand and great grand daughters being called Spot Shot, Big Shot, Hot Shot and Pot Shot; Marlee gave up naming at this stage.

  Marlee can walk up to Buckshot anywhere on the station and she will stand there while Marlee pats her or scratches her chin. She knows the mustering routine so well, she is always the first animal through the yards when we muster in her area. She works her way through all the cattle in the yards to arrive at the gate that will let her into the ‘pushing pen’. Unless a cow needs medical attention, she goes straight through the yards and out the ‘bush’ gate, as nothing needs to be done to her. Buckshot knows this routine, and is first at each gate, until the round yard, where she walks straight to the ‘bush’ gate and waits to be let out.

  Buckshot is a great help to Marlee if she has a few ‘smart-aleck’ stockmen in the camp who look like they will cause trouble because they have a female boss. Buckshot is in the area where we have our first muster each year; Marlee always looks out for her and lets her through to the round yard straight-away. So when the men are ready to start, if we have a few troublemakers, Marlee will gather the men around the round yard and give them the rules of the yards. With a straight face and a serious expression, Marlee tells them that the cattle must be moved through the yards at a fast pace. She continues, saying if the animal won’t move through the round yard, then you jump down and do this; and she casually jumps into the round yard with Buckshot.

  Now Buckshot is a very, very big and impressive animal with horns of a three-foot span, almost a metre. She is by no means a sleepy-looking cow, but very bright, and always watching. Just the horns alone are enough to deter anyone from sharing a small yard with her. So the moment Marlee jumps into the yard, the men are immediately alert and sucking in their breath in admiration for her guts or stupidity. Of course they don’t know Buckshot was hand-raised by Marlee; they think she is just another of the few thousand wild cows penned in the last ten minutes.

  Buckshot turns to face Marlee, and all the stockmen hold their breath waiting for the wild cow to smash Marlee against the steel rails. Before they can see the obvious love in her eyes for Marlee, Marlee tells them, ‘Don’t give the animal time to charge you. Rush in and grab it by the horns, twist its head to the side, and push it through the gate!’

  The stockmen almost fall off the rails in amazement as Marlee does just that. Unbeknown to them, and out of their sight, she is scratching Buckshot under the chin with one hand, while pretending to wrest her head and twist it violently around by the horn with the other. The secret is, if you scratch Buckshot under the chin she turns to putty and you can do anything with her. Of course she would also just follow Marlee through the gate, if asked, but then the stockmen would know she was a quiet cow. Marlee’s way had far more impact.

  After wrestling Buckshot to the gate, she appears to kick her out the ‘bush’ gate and, slamming it shut, tells the stockmen that’s how she wants them to handle the wild cattle. If this didn’t convince them that their female boss was as good as, or maybe even a little better at handling cattle than they were, when they saw how fast and efficiently Marlee could castrate the male cattle, they were left in no doubt that she excelled in the art of cattle work, and suddenly were quite willing to take orders from a woman.

  Eventually they would learn that Buckshot was as quiet as a lamb, and would take the joke in good humour. Although it nearly backfired one day in the next muster, when one of the stockmen jumped down into the yards with a big black Brahman cow with enormous horns, and shouted to Marlee, ‘Will I throw this stubborn cow out of the yards?’ It looked as if Buckshot had been mustered again, and the stockman was going to play Marlee’s joke, on her this time. Just as he was about to grab the horns of the cow, Marlee said she thought he maybe shouldn’t try with that cow, because it wasn’t Buckshot. The stockman scaled the rails at lightning speed, with enthusiastic help from the cow.

  Buckshot still rules supreme in her paddock, and she visits us now and again at the homestead to show off a new calf or to just say ‘hullo’ when passing. A few years ago, I came into the living room to find Buckshot quietly chewing away on our Christmas tree; the rains were late that year, and it was the only green feed in sight that was low enough to reach, so she walked in and started eating. She avoided the decorations, but still had made quite a mess of our Christmas tree by the time she was discovered.

  13

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  BEER, CHICKENS AND DONNA

  While thinking back over the early days in the North, I would have to say beer was the major problem. If you had beer it was a problem guarding it, if you didn’t have any it was also a problem. Especially during the days of the operation of the Bullo River Abattoir. If you ran out of beer, the abattoir staff would down tools: no beer, no work. If the beer wasn’t cold at the end of the day, more trouble. Keeping up the supply was a major problem. Charlie used to fly it in by the crate; the Beaver often carried a ton of beer at a time.

  The big problem was where to put it when it arrived at the station. Where to put it where it was safe, that is! It had to be under lock and key at all times, or there was havoc. On the few occasions the entire
abattoir staff got drunk, the experience defies description. The problem was you could lock it in a secure shed, with extra padlocks. If you went away you’d be sure to hide the bolt cutters or take them with you, and the jemmy, but on your return, the shed would still have been broken into. Uncle Dick was almost always the ringleader. Once when we took with us all the implements that we thought could be used to cut padlocks, or pull the tin sheets off the frame or roof, we arrived back to find Dick had cut an opening in the tin wall with the oxyacetylene torch.

  Another time when we both had to leave the station for only half a day, Charlie also took the oxy fittings. But we came back to a massive excavating project—they had dug in under the foundations and broken through the floor. Again the entire population of Bullo was raving drunk; Charles and I were the only sober bodies within a few hundred miles, but we were raving mad.

  So the beer not only had to be always under lock and key, but also had to be right under our noses, where it couldn’t be got at, especially at night, the favourite raiding time. Though stealing beer was actually a twenty-four-hour project, the thought was never out of their minds.

  So in desperation, the beer ended up in our bedroom, under our bed. Charles congratulated me on the brilliant idea. Well, at least we didn’t have to sit up and guard it all night or race out and check the store room, every time we heard a noise. But, of course, this didn’t solve the problem completely. One night the bedroom door slowly opened, inch by inch; I was lying awake planning the next day, and Charlie was snoring deeply. I heard rustling and then tearing. I turned on the light, and there was Dick, flat on his stomach on the floor on Charlie’s side of the bed, trying to pull a case of beer out from under the bed. So our bedroom door had to be locked nightly.