Horses Too Are Gone, The

by Keenan, Michael

  The most dangerous activity was probably the bull running. Most of the vast range country was under forest. Cows and calves would be missed in the branding muster and the bull calves would grow into scrubbers. When the horsemen returned, these fellows bolted for freedom. The riders pursued them, one horseman to each bull. They clung close to the bull’s rump until he overheated and got the staggers. Then the rider jumped from his mount and threw the bull by the tail. It’s a highly skilled, split-second manoeuvre. If an untrained novice were to try he would probably get a horn through the belly. Once thrown, the bull’s legs are strapped. During a muster several wild bulls might be thrown. After the cattle had been mustered into another paddock or taken to a set of yards, the musterers would come back and release one bull at a time. If he didn’t trot along as required, he would be thrown again. In other words, the bull was broken in to human handling.

  The paddocks were huge, measured in thousands of hectares and riding back later in the day to find those scrubbers and unstrap them would seem impossible, considering the thick cover of pine. For the bull catchers however it was simple: they just followed their own horse tracks.

  In western Queensland and the Territory the term ‘tracking’ is as common as ‘mustering’. The highly skilled Aboriginal tracker has faded into history, but most station people can track a little.

  It was about mid-December when that short period of peace was shattered. At the camp in the evening I would cook a simple meal in the camp oven. I’d pour some olive oil into the old iron camp oven, cut up a little meat, some carrots, potatoes and a small onion. While dinner was cooking I would have a shower at the caravan park. The meal took about forty-five minutes to cook. I would wash it down with a billy of tea, clean up with some river water and walk across the bridge and up to the pub. It was never hard to strike up a conversation and while I had a couple of beers I waited for the weather report on the television. Before I left the hotel I telephoned Sal. In both states we had at last got on top. There were no more losses at Myall Plains and the cows were feeding out onto the scattered kurrajong. What we both hated was the enforced separation. Once the cattle settled down into their new home at Mt Kennedy I had in mind to employ someone to run the bore every second day.

  On this particular evening I was back at the camp by eight-thirty and went straight to bed. I didn’t worry about gas lights. My days started so early I was happy to be in bed by nine o’clock. About midnight I woke and heard something moving through the grass outside. For a while I didn’t pay much attention. Sometimes cattle would come around at night and I would hear them eating. But I soon realised this thing was a human. The leg movement through the grass was slow. The last sound was beside the tent, to the right of the front flaps.

  There are unwritten survival rules if you are camped alone in the bush. You never put your head out of a tent at night if someone’s around. If you do, you may be struck on the head. As quickly as possible I felt for the rifle and cocked it. I always left the magazine in. Then I groped around for the torch. Outside there was no sound. Finally I said, ‘I know you’re there and I am armed.’

  I lay there waiting, rifle butt in my left hand and the barrel across my thighs. In my right hand was the torch. I began to wonder whether I might have imagined the whole thing. Finally I fell asleep and didn’t wake until the morning. The first thing I became aware of was the extra space in the tent. All the food was gone and items such as toothpaste. The thief had even zipped back the insect screen. Nothing of any value was taken. I found the nature of the robbery disturbing. Rather than a common theft for food, it was like a message—leave. If he was only motivated by hunger the thief could have got the food without any hassle while I was at the pub.

  No one, goes hungry in Mitchell, as it is such a small caring community. With the sort of life I was leading I came in contact with a lot of people. I spoke to a lot of women as they ran the business world in Mitchell. Sometimes I had coffee with one or two, but I never made a pass and was always mindful of what a close community existed in the little town.

  I decided to leave town and camp on Mt Kennedy. The station was more than an hour’s drive from Mitchell. A burst of very hot weather had taken its toll on Amby Creek. Feed that was fresh and green in November had burnt off. The cattle had gained weight and calves for the first time had begun to play. But it was time, to move again and it would have been straightforward if it were not for the necessity of branding the calves. In the rangelands an unbranded calf becomes a cleanskin and cleanskins belong to the first person capable of planting a brand on the rump. That wasn’t the law of course and never will be. If someone brands a calf that you can prove belongs to your cow the offender can be charged. In the rangelands the problem is to prove it.

  The question plaguing me now was where to brand. Due to the high risk of infection, calves cannot be castrated, branded and then loaded onto cattle trucks. Trucking operators do wash their trucks out but it’s very difficult to remove all traces of manure. The cows and calves had to be dropped into a set of yards with a calf crush, so that I could brand immediately. The yards at Mt Kennedy were several kilometres from the bluegrass paddock, but if we started at first light and split the mob into three the horses could be saddled early and the cows and calves on their way by seven o’clock. I discussed the plan with Richard and John Hamilton and we decided upon a three stage lift from Amby Creek.

  Those pleasant mornings on the Mitchell racecourse came to an end and not altogether through fate. Vodka had started to misbehave. The oats and corn had him fired up. At first it was only a few pigroots. On the last morning I rode him I put the stock saddle on. No particular reason, other than instinct. I have been riding racehorses for more than thirty years and instinct has become a part of my decision-making with horses. It was as well I did. That morning he dropped his head and threw a couple of good bucks into me. He was strong and went high. In the racing saddle I would have been pelted. I made him move along to try and get his mind off it, but down went the head again. Cranky now, I sent him along and into the timber. We cleared logs and ditches and leaves of trees were scattered. Over a high bank and down went the head again. I drew the whip and we were nearly flat gallop. One and a half kilometres out I came upon drovers with a huge mob of Santa Gertrudis steers. Mouths open, they gaped at this madman on a horse. We went flying past the cattle and when Vodka saw the drovers’ horses he let out the boldest whinny I have ever heard. The rotten thing was loving every minute of it and I was breathless.

  Anderson’s son Peter was an experienced rodeo rider and he agreed to take Vodka over. Typical of the bronc riders, he was about ninety kilos, strong and game. Next morning he put Vodka in the sand yard and gave him a workout. Vodka bucked until he was too exhausted to keep going and has never bucked since. A horse that may drop the head on a racetrack is extremely dangerous. In a racing saddle you are perched right up on top of the horse’s wither and if you are covering the ground at sixty kilometres an hour and your mount props, chances are you will be speared to the ground head first. It happened to me once. I lay in hospital semi-conscious for a week and didn’t stand straight for three months.

  The three year old I didn’t ride. He had been broken in and not ridden for months. Peter offered to try him out one day. Not far away, across the railway line, Malameen had settled in well with his girlfriends. From the stable I took some oats and fed him out of my hat on slack days. He didn’t need the oats of course. Brooke fed him every day.

  To impose as little stress as possible on the cattle I planned a three-stage move to Mt Kennedy. I also only used single-deck trucks. Jim Scott provided a semitrailer and Scalp had a truck similar to mine. Richard and John Hamilton helped me and we mustered early in the morning to the Amby Creek yards, loaded and took the horses to Mt Kennedy and in the cool of the evening returned to truck the cows and calves.

  The first cut-out took in a hundred and forty cows and about a hundred calves. Each truck had to make a second trip to move th
em all and it was after midnight when the last truck unloaded.

  The Hamilton boys drove out early next morning and helped with the branding. We had a quick smoko and walked the cattle up the road to Mt Kennedy and onto the water trough at the bore.

  The same exercise was repeated and had it not been for another onslaught of storms I would have moved the whole herd inside a week. All the gullies ran water, the creeks rose to bankers and for heavy transport the road was closed. Fortunately for me the storms struck at night when I was parked on the main road, not far from the bore. It marooned me for three days and I took the opportunity to establish another camp. During the four torrid days of moving the cattle I slept in the truck and cooked a meal when I had time.

  The storms introduced a new problem. In a valley below the tablelands a run-off of water from the top had half filled an old dam with half a metre of silt. By watering there the cattle didn’t have to walk the extra distance to the bore, through a pine forest.

  The day following the storm I watched some of them water. Initially the water remained unaffected by the black silt underneath, but when the cattle waded out of this black hole they had a sticky black slime up to their knees. At some stage the water would turn putrid. My experience in the south was that cattle rejected bad water and without any prodding walked onto the bore. At the rear of the homestead at Myall Plains is a trough connected to the bore supply and a hundred metres away is a dam. If the trough is connected the cattle bypass the dam, even when it’s been freshly topped up by storm run-off.

  It was Christmas and I wanted to go home if I possibly could. We all knew Mum wouldn’t see another Christmas. Yet I felt uneasy about going and the premonition proved to be correct.

  Christmas time in western Queensland is not a time to ask for favours. The police call it the mad month. Before the New Year festivities had begun there had been a shoot-out in Injune and a Mexican draw near Yuleba. All involved had been drunk. One man was shot and barely survived.

  Before leaving to go south I collected Yarramin at Amby Creek and dropped him and Circus at the bore. I knew they would never stray far from the water. Mrs Brown I left once again. She had adopted a brumby foal and made milk. I suspect she had hunted away the original mother, knowing Mrs Brown. Poor thing, she had roamed the paddocks at home wanting a foal so badly. I had a Christmas drink with Bill Anderson, the horse trainer, before leaving for Chinchilla and he told me he had observed such an occurrence several times among horses running in a wild state.

  At Chinchilla I took on a load of lucerne hay—two hundred bales and half the price of quality hay in New South Wales, if you could get it at all. Sal still had her hospital paddock and the retired bulls had to be maintained in good condition for sale.

  The trip south took a day and a half via Chinchilla. Myall Plains looked terrible and almost lifeless. Sal and I greeted each other as though we were to go on a honeymoon and then she said, ‘The bulls! They’re starving. Throw some bales from the top.’

  Back five minutes and feeding stock already! Yet it was so good to be home. We knew the time was short. We laughed about it and called it R and R.

  Sal had so much to tell me and we spent the first day sitting under the old kurrajong in the garden. Through the shrubs at the bottom of the garden I caught a glimpse of the tennis court. I hadn’t played on it for thirty years.

  ‘Nick and I have been lonely too,’ Sal said. ‘We’ve done up the tennis court.’

  When I last saw the court it was a tiny paddock of grass and suckers. I had thought the surface was beyond recovery. It was all part of the little things of home and I tried not to think about the return trip.

  Poor old Mum was sad that Christmas. She had lived and breathed through my father. The only respite for her was the absence of pain. With painkillers, her doctor had managed to control it. Our boys kept my three days at home bright, and when it came time to leave the only spark about the return trip was Richie coming back with me.

  We left at 4.00 a.m. and by sharing the driving we covered the eight hundred kilometres to Muckadilla in about thirteen hours. I thought we should have a couple of beers before heading out for the camp. If I’d known a party was in full swing I would have kept going, but once we walked out of the harsh sunlight and into the friendly atmosphere of the bar there was no turning back.

  I instantly introduced Richard to Donna.

  She stood behind the bar in a two-piece costume and water from the pool dripped onto her breasts from hair that fell around her face in a wild tangle.

  ‘There’s a barbecue on,’ she said. ‘You better stay. I’m closing the pub and it’s all down the back.’

  I had every excuse in the world for saying no, but didn’t. One drink led to another and for the first time in a year I had far too much. It was a night under a summer sky, with the trace of a breeze from a billabong full of noisy frogs. For most of the time the frog chorus was drowned by music blasting through a window. The smell of cooked meat from the barbecue permeated the air. The red juice from the meat stained everyone’s lips and long after the sun had set the heat rose from the ground and saw to it that the beer cartons ended up in the fire, empty.

  We danced in the paddock and made a pad in the Mitchell grass plain, and when most of us were down the strongest of all fired shots at the moon and declared he was immortal.

  When Richie woke me I felt sweat all over me, as though I had stepped out of a sauna. There seemed to be a radiator against my cheek and after the waking moments and a clenching of teeth against a throb deep in my skull, I realised the sun had been up at least three hours.

  ‘Where did you sleep?’ I asked Richie, as I struggled to my feet.

  ‘In the truck with a million mosquitoes.’

  I looked at him and despite how I felt I realised he was exhausted. It must have been the last night out on earth he would have hoped for.

  ‘We’ll go to Mitchell,’ I said. ‘Book into a hotel and straighten ourselves up.’

  ‘It will take more than a hot shower.’

  We stood there on the plain, in the grass, like lost souls. I saw him gazing out towards the tree line that marked the twisting course of the creek. The kites were there again, slowly wheeling, hovering above some dead animal. That morning, I think he thought I had brought him to the edge of the world as we know it.

  At Mt Kennedy we were greeted by a scene that made me feel doubly sick. The black hole had become a pond of soupy mud, the colour of oil. One glance at the cattle and it was clear fifty to eighty cows and their calves were not going to the bore for water. They looked terrible and some of the calves were near death. To add to the frustration two or three hundred were walking daily from the tableland to the bore and passing within two hundred metres of the black hole. That these cows, with stinking mud up to their bellies, didn’t tag on and attach themselves to family groups on the way to water defied explanation, until I realised the presence of dingoes was the cause.

  I had not realised the effect dingoes have on cattle never before confronted with them. Once the surface water dried out the dogs relied on the troughs too. In the summer they must drink twice a day. Cattle reared in the rangelands take no notice of them except at calving time. My cows were spooked by them. Even when they weren’t around they could smell them, so they had been avoiding the bore.

  In the stifling heat the cattle were reluctant to move. They would have just looked at a man on a horse unless he had a stockwhip. We broke branches off brigalow trees and with a lot of yelling we finally got them walking towards the bore. At the bore we found the storage tank nearly empty. It too had been neglected. The cattle drank until they looked like they might burst and before the last beast had buried its head in the trough, I heard the dreaded gurgling sound from the float valve. The tank was empty.

  Dripping with sweat I walked over to the pump jack to start the big diesel. The fuel containers were gone and the fuel line to the engine’s fuel tank was disconnected. There wasn’t an ounce of diesel. R
ichie and I just stood there, saying nothing. In each of our minds was the dreaded return trip in the heat to Mitchell.

  The return trip took three hours. I reconnected the fuel line, filled the fuel tank and swung onto the crank handle. The bore was two hundred metres deep and equipped with thirty lengths of rod. When the down stroke commenced you thought of crystal clear water, crossed yourself with your left hand and drove the crank handle. Halfway through the stroke you snapped down the compression lever. Bad timing means a broken arm with these monster pre-war diesels. I didn’t get it quite right. A burst of blue smoke shot into the air and I hit the ground.

  ‘It’s going Dad,’ I heard Richie exclaim. ‘It’s going.’

  I don’t think he could believe it. I caught him looking at that engine and then at me. He didn’t hold out much hope.

  I regained my feet and was about to walk over to the tank and wait for the water when the engine began to die. The rotten thing had air in the fuel lines. I had to bleed the lines and the injector and start it twice again. Water began to flow before dark.

  We were filthy and I had no fresh food in the bore camp. Exhausted, we went back to Mitchell to the hotel. I was busting to show Richie the tableland country. He had only seen the brigalow and the pine and may have been wondering whether I had gone troppo in the heat and imagined all that grass.

  McCafferty’s ran a bus service from Charleville to Brisbane every day. The next day was a Thursday and Richie could stay only till Friday. But when we went to book a seat, the Friday bus was booked out.

  ‘There’s a bus due in half an hour,’ the booking lady said. ‘There is one empty seat on it.’