Horses Too Are Gone, The

by Keenan, Michael

  I had never undertaken anything like this before. The risks were enormous. How many cows would die in transit? Would they mother the calves at the other end? Would they survive the inevitable dry stages? With the heavy storms widespread throughout the Injune district I felt confident I would find somewhere suitable to unload. I would need three or four days to settle the cattle down and I thought the local herdsman would agree to that.

  It was a hard couple of days for Sal. She was brave and said nothing, but she knew when I left it might be for months. The new territory had no bush pubs with handy telephones. Trips to town from the cattle would be rare.

  From Toowoomba I caught the connecting bus to Roma. I arrived late in the afternoon and booked in at the Commonwealth. The truck had been locked up in the Dalgety merchandise yard and I thanked the manager.

  I hadn’t slept much on the bus. The hotel gave me the same room I’d been in only ten days before. I lay down on the bed and felt a deep sense of loneliness almost smother me. So much had happened in a narrow space of time. The future was bleak. If the cattle perished it lay on my shoulders. The estate would be bankrupted.

  Next day Jim Scott generously loaned me his Toyota to go out to Injune. Jim owned Scott’s Roadways and had organised the lift of the five hundred and sixty head of steers and heifers from Myall Plains. He owned a property near Roma and had a great knowledge of the district. With each lift of the mobs from Myall Plains I always consulted him before making any decisions.

  About five kilometres south of the town I found a suitable reserve for unloading. It had green feed boot-high and there were ducks and ibis feeding in the billabongs. From the reserve there was little choice in direction. The tick border ran north and east of Injune. The south road went back to Roma and the eaten-out arterial stock route that I had just vacated. To the west and north-west rose the massif of Mt Hutton in the Great Dividing Range. The only passage out was to the southwest. I would have to walk one stage south and pick up the stock route that on the map zigzagged across the range to Mitchell. I decided to inspect the first few stages for availability of water.

  The strike and miss pattern of the storms became evident on this drive. There were bare patches, dry and drought-stricken. Other patches were still wet causing the rear wheels of the Toyota to spin. The surface water was disappointing. Dry creeks cut across the narrow stock route. Some of them had run water, but there were no natural holes on the stock route. Every watering point was a bore and that meant stages of twelve to sixteen kilometres—too far for weak calves. I would have to ask for water; if necessary, buy it.

  Back in Roma I discussed transport arrangements with Jim Scott. He was in the middle of a job. Cattle stations on the Gulf of Carpentaria watershed had missed the late summer Wet and were short of feed. Some of the station managers were destocking and transporting their stock to Roma for sale. The Roma saleyards had developed into the largest cattle turnover centre in eastern Australia. Jim expected two roadtrains in the next day and a third the day after. It looked like three roadtrains would head south to Myall Plains in two or three days. I telephoned Nick to see how he was going with the herd splitting. He told me it was painfully slow. The cows had their calves planted all over the place. Not to worry though. He would have the job completed before the roadtrains arrived.

  While I was waiting I decided to go out to Amby Creek the next day and collect the horses. I would drop them on the reserve and while they were consuming a big feed of oats I would put some wire netting and steel posts around a couple of bags on the ground. Old Yarramin would never stray far from the oats. But with other horses this trick didn’t always work. In the past I’d had horses clear out on me.

  On the way out I couldn’t believe the transformation of the big stock route. There wasn’t a blade of dry grass. The big droves of cattle had got their teeth to ground level. The heartening sign was the new shoots. The storms had been generous to this stock route and a burst of growth was already on the way. There were no cattle. The big mobs had all moved west.

  At Amby village I stopped and walked over to the bank of the local creek. The telltale mud along the rim of the bank was the mark of a full flow, what they call out west a ‘banker’. The same creek shared its name with the Old Boy’s place. There’d been big rain and if he had that storm I might be spared a stock route unloading.

  The show of green grass improved as I drove north and by the time I got to Amby Creek there was cattle feed along the creek flats. Most of the property was still bare. The Old Boy had a few thousand sheep and rather than feed them he had opened the gates to let them have the run of the place. I still had eighty head of young cattle there and he had them in a good paddock of about eighty hectares. The creek country was unstocked, made up of three long narrow paddocks. The total area may have been only about one hundred and fifty hectares. But it would hold them for a fortnight, long enough to recover from the trip before I ventured onto the main stock route again.

  ‘It stayed hot and humid,’ the Old Boy said. ‘The grass has grown overnight.’

  The Old Boy had made a go at just about everything through the course of his life. He had a wealth of experience and was worth listening to.

  ‘I think those cows would bolt on you if you unloaded on the stock route,’ he said, sitting by a steel pot bubbling on the stove. ‘They’ll be spooked after a trip like that. Your biggest problem will be the mothering. When we unload here we’ll place the roadtrains so that they jump off and run to a corner where there’s water and feed.’

  I went back to Roma and discussed the change of arrangements with Jim Scott. The three roadtrains would leave the next day for Myall Plains. The only reservation Jim had was the border crossing at Hebel. The office was closed between 5.00 p.m. and 7.00 a.m. With strong cattle it didn’t matter. The drivers arranged loading so that they arrived at the border some time after midnight. It suited them to stop and have a rest. When cattle were weak Jim liked to keep moving. The less time on the truck the better.

  When the first two hundred and fifty cows were unloaded the drivers would rest for a day and return for the second lift.

  I telephoned Sal with the good news. Once the cattle had mothered, I told her, I would come home for a few days. She said we had to do something about the racehorses. We only had enough lucerne hay left for the bulls. Over the telephone we decided Dad’s two horses, Vodka Jack and an unnamed three year old, would come back with me on the truck. The yearling we would take to a horse handler for education. His name was Wonderous. The existence of Wonderous was one of those delightful stories which too rarely occur in a lifetime. In 1990 I had accepted a mount in the Macquarie Picnic Race Club Cup at Dubbo. The horse was called Stride for Glory. We went out onto the track at 20/1 and won by half a head. It was the most gruelling head-to-head struggle I can remember. The owners were stud breeders and gave me a free service to their stallion Wonder Dancer. Little Wonderous was the manifestation of that gift.

  Everything was arranged. I could do nothing but wait. I had told Nick to keep Rupert at home. The cattle were going to be in small paddocks. For a couple of weeks there would be little to do.

  I set up camp near the creek, not a camp site I would normally choose. The creek water was brown, full of fine silt and everywhere I walked clumps of galvanised burr caught my trousers. This time I put up a tent. The days were hot and nights sticky. Mosquitoes pounced on me from sunset. The storm season had started and would last until March.

  The horses were running in a big scrub paddock on the eastern side of the property. The Old Boy had been a keen horseman in his day. One had thrown him some years before and he was left with an injury that made horse handling impossible. The horses had been bushed and they ran as a brumby mob. Under the umbrella of Mrs Brown, it appeared Circus and Yarramin had been accepted. Malameen they held out. He looked poorly and I fetched the bridle the moment I saw him. The horse too knew he was sick and led away from the others without hesitation. I loaded him onto the truck a
nd took him to Mitchell. I didn’t know anyone in Mitchell and looked on the poor lady who owned the bakery as my information desk. Her adjoining coffee lounge was an added bonus. I told her I had this seventeen-hand horse who needed a special caring hand. She told me her name was Annette and introduced me to Brooke who served at the bakery counter.

  An hour later Malameen was in a twenty-hectare paddock with two mares. I bought a few bags of oats and chaff at the local produce shop and Brooke agreed to feed him each evening. He became the most pampered horse on the Maranoa.

  It was only mid-afternoon and the night on the creek would be long enough.

  ‘Now what do you want?’ Annette asked. ‘If coffee was even slightly poisonous you would be dead.’

  ‘I need someone to look after two racehorses.’

  ‘Old Bill Anderson is a trainer,’ she said. ‘I think he’s retired, but he might stable them and look after them.’

  Bill and his wife Mary lived on the edge of the town, near the racecourse. He was a big man in his mid-sixties and when I got to know him I found him always good-humoured and ever ready to offer sound advice. He had four stables about fifty metres from his house. Each stable opened out into a yard. There were also small paddocks of about a quarter hectare and a sand yard. Most impressive of all was the shade. There were plenty of trees.

  Bill was lukewarm about the proposition for a while. He said his health had slipped and he wasn’t very active. The more he talked the more the idea grew on him. By the time I left he said he would train them if I could find time to do the trackwork. I told him nothing would give me more pleasure, but the cattle situation would need to change. I offered him a fee for the stabling and he cut the figure in half.

  I reported back to Annette. To myself I called her the ‘switchboard’, but I never told her. Over another cup of coffee I told her about the cattle. There would be calves left unmothered. It was inevitable they would have to be shot or picked up. She said her father reared poddy calves. Across the river she and her husband, also named Bill, had a farm and her parents shared with them the big old homestead.

  I left Mitchell thinking what a fruitful day it had been. Three horses bedded down and someone to collect the calves rejected by their mothers. I had no trouble with shooting a diseased animal, but a calf that someone might rear was another matter.

  The next day was a long one. I had no further business in Mitchell. The country didn’t invite any bushwalking. About 5.00 p.m. the Old Boy arrived in his Mad Max jeep to tell me Nick had telephoned. The first lot of cows was on its way.

  The onset of the stormy season had driven out the last vestige of spring. Only three weeks before I had woken to a light frost, a film of frozen dew on the sleeping bag. Now at the crack of dawn the sun rose with a different shade of orange. I left the tent with a jumper on, but by the time the billy boiled I had tossed it back into the tent. Two hours after sunrise I could feel the first trickle of sweat from my armpits.

  I expected the roadtrains about 2.00 p.m., the hottest time of the day. A hold-up at Hebel was the last thing a cattle owner and a roadtrain operator needed. Why arrangements have never been made to facilitate twenty-four-hour border crossing at Hebel is a matter of concern that strikes deep within the work psyche of this nation. If cattlemen were asked to pay a night-opening fee they would do it gladly to spare their stock. The stock inspector merely examines the health papers, the travel permit, and with a torch it only takes a few minutes to establish whether the cattle on board correspond with the papers.

  The day dragged on and the absence of news seemed to add time to every hour. I had established my camp close to the unloading point. The public road hugged the creek for some kilometres and I knew I would hear the roadtrains some minutes before they arrived. They would cross a culvert and at my direction swing off the road onto a claypan, dropping the rear wheels of the second trailer into a shallow drain.

  I had worked myself into a state of anxiety when they finally arrived. It was 4 p.m. The drivers were exhausted. Their eyes were bloodshot and faces drained of colour. From midday on they were forced to stop repeatedly and try and get the weak cows to stand. They said the six-hour delay at Hebel had been disastrous. It forced them to travel in the heat.

  It took about two hours to unload the trains. When the last live one was off we started with the dead ones—six cows and seven calves. The calves were dragged off easily enough. The cows we had to roll over and over. At the rear of each roadtrain lay a pile of dead cattle. The drivers were becoming used to it, but they still hated it. The only job satisfaction available for a truckie is to deliver goods in the same condition as received.

  From the trucks the cows trotted away until they reached a long narrow billabong. They drank and then commenced to swallow watery green grass like a child might gobble marshmallows. The calves walked around in a daze. Some tried to bleat, a muffled sound that was neither a calf bleat nor any sound I had ever heard.

  The trucks left and I found myself alone with four hundred and fifty miserable animals. The cows had skin off their hips from hours of standing and rubbing. A few swayed when they walked. Some of the calves began to orientate themselves and walk among the cows. But for the first hour not one cow was interested. They would feed with a feverish urgency, then simply stop and look around in bewilderment.

  I lit my fire and just before dark I drove down the creek to the Old Boy’s place to use the telephone. I knew an anxious little group would be waiting to hear from me. Nick came on and told me he thought the second lot were slightly weaker. When I told him storms were brewing in the west and we may have to delay a day he said he didn’t think we could wait even a day.

  I telephoned Jim Scott next and discussed the possibility of crossing the border at Goondiwindi where the office is open twenty-four hours a day. The problem was roadtrain access. The trains were not permitted through Coonabarabran and down the Oxley Highway. If we decided upon Goondiwindi we had to use a back road from Coonamble to Narrabri and travel more than one hundred and fifty kilometres extra.

  We adopted a different plan. The drivers would stay at the homestead with Sal and the boys and start loading at 4.00 a.m. The loading would be completed about 8.00 a.m. and they should reach the border at Hebel before 5.00 p.m. The cattle would be unloaded about 1.00 a.m. I didn’t like the night unloading, but having already observed the disinterest of the cows towards their calves I conceded it would make no difference.

  A storm lashed the tent in the early hours and in the morning the wood was too wet for a fire. I walked out among the cattle and took stock of the calves yet to mother. A dozen or so hadn’t moved a hundred metres from where they’d been unloaded, but apart from these pathetic creatures the mothering seemed nothing short of miraculous. Most of the cows had a calf. Four cows were bellowing around the dead cattle. Another two cows were down, lying on their sides. The crows had already gathered and I knew I would have to deal with them before breakfast.

  With dead cattle, crows floating overhead and already a stale smell in the air it was difficult to weigh a loss in realistic perspective. In prosperous seasons many a farmer has lost cattle to clover and lucerne bloat. Unexpected losses are a reality of the industry. To have shifted nearly five hundred head in drought condition for a loss of fifteen plus poddies was a fair result. Sometimes the business side of farming is ugly because we are forced to look upon death as an inevitable statistic.

  I needed the early morning tea badly and walked down the creek to the Old Boy’s house. The mud on the road stuck to my boots. The humid air hung like some invisible weight and soon my shirt sleeve was damp from wiping my forehead. The storms had cleared away for now, but high above the western horizon I could see a haze that was neither cloud nor smoke. Storms would regather, if not today, then tomorrow. I had to find a new unloading site on hard ground. On most properties in Queensland it would have been a simple matter of unloading at the station yards. On this place the unloading ramp was in a yard, giving access only
to small trucks.

  Below the Old Boy’s house a stony slope fell away to the creek. It was hard ground scalded from overstocking and diagonally across it a shallow gully had formed. The drivers of the roadtrains could drop the rear wheels into the gully. The cattle would jump off into a small bare paddock without water, but a gate led out into one of the creek paddocks.

  I discussed the plan with the Old Boy over a cup of tea and he thought the calves would walk out with the cows. In theory it seemed a good plan and better than the only other alternative, which was to unload directly onto the big stock route near Amby. The water trough was almost in the village and we both felt the cattle might shy off it. The creek downstream formed a much bigger watercourse with steep banks and the Old Boy thought some of the weak cows would slip and become cast.

  On my way back to the camp a Nissan four-wheel-drive truck pulled up. I looked through the windscreen and saw it was Scalp, the red-haired bloke I had met in the pub.

  ‘Hop in, I’ll give you a lift,’ he said cheerfully.

  I scraped the mud off my boots with a stick and got in. We slipped around a bit despite the four-wheel drive.

  ‘God, ya cattle need some decent feed in a hurry. This green stuff’s goin’ to run through ’em.’

  ‘How’s your feed?’ I asked.

  ‘Goin’ up now to have a look. Reckon them storms would have hit my place.’ He paused and looked at me. ‘Why don’t yer come? I got a spare paddock. It’s yours if yer want it.’

  I hesitated briefly. I didn’t want to be stranded out there if storms blew up and closed the road.

  ‘Be back this afternoon,’ Scalp added.

  Back at the camp three cows were still bellowing for their calves. It was too soon to contact Annette. Another two calves at least, I thought, would be claimed by their mothers during the day. The odour from the dead cattle was gathering potency and it was still too wet for my truck to grip and tow them away. The decision was easy.