Horses Too Are Gone, The

by Keenan, Michael

  Nearly two hours later we arrived at Rowallan. A very subdued John Hamilton was waiting. He had Circus, Yarramin and his own horse ready in a yard, each with a bridle on. John had escaped injury at the rodeo, but Noel told me quietly that victory had eluded him. I told both John and Noel that Fiona was a hired hand.

  ‘I wondered why that old fat tub was to be loaded,’ Noel said with a smile.

  ‘Yarramin’s had it pretty easy,’ I said.

  ‘New one on me,’ John said dryly. ‘Mounted nurse. With only one leg and arm workin’ I reckon you need her.’

  ‘I’m not his nurse,’ Fiona giggled from the truck. ‘I am a photographer.’

  ‘Well the way he’s goin’,’ John said, still dry and serious, ‘you’ll need more bandage rolls than film.’

  It was a tight fit in the truck cabin for the four of us. Mick drove and I got John to sit Fiona on his knee. It was a long trip and John remained expressionless throughout. Sometimes Mick would hit a bump and Fiona would shoot up in the air and land heavily on John’s stomach. I asked him if he was comfortable and he said it was just part of the job.

  We had a late lunch and probably some of the cattle could have been mustered before dark. The heat of the day was a bad time to start and the holding paddock around the bore needed some repairs. Mick and John cut rails and strained wires and Fiona walked through the surrounding timber testing the light and taking photographs of the men working and cattle gathering around the long trough.

  I got my camp kitchen organised and lay in the tent for the rest of the afternoon. To get through the muster I knew I had to rest at every opportunity. As long as I didn’t bump my hand it was okay. In fact on light work I had very little restriction. The prospect of the bloke Frankie was looking for showing up without warning bothered me. I kept my rifle within reach and told Fiona not to leave sight of the camp. The danger was tens of thousands of hectares of forest, I told her. I never mentioned anything else.

  An hour before sunset there was nothing left to do. Without Fiona it might have been steak and potatoes and a long night, although I don’t think Mick would have minded a long sleep. While I cooked, Fiona induced these two taciturn men to relate their life stories. They were both sitting on their rolled up swags, and every time I looked at them I had to turn away so they wouldn’t see me laugh. It wasn’t that Fiona was behaving abnormally by being curious about these two men. It was that her two subjects were typical of the Australian outback stockman. They don’t weigh the value of their lives or dwell on the past. They don’t see themselves as being interesting. I once heard a young man from the city ask a veteran stockman a very common question.

  ‘What’s the most important thing in life?’

  The answer left the young man gaping, unable to comprehend.

  ‘Right now! That’s the most important thing in life,’ the veteran immediately replied. Then he added, ‘But you may have to live out most of your life before you understand.’

  Next morning the mustering plan was simple enough. Mick and John would head off into the high country and turn the cattle into the valleys that sloped towards the bore. Fiona and I would ride the heavily timbered valleys to the north. I didn’t expect many cattle in that area, but it still had to be ridden. I hadn’t ridden for several weeks, since my fall at the Roma saleyards. Apart from the swelling and the pain I thought riding a horse would cause, I couldn’t get on without being legged up like a jockey. But Fiona’s presence prompted me to try myself out in the saddle.

  Fiona said she had only ridden several times before. Thinking people always say that. Sometimes I wonder whether I ever thought much. Thirty years before I had arrived on a station and said I could ride. Boy, was I sorry. Anyway, Fiona could ride. I once operated a packhorse tourist operation and I learnt to spot the good riders at a glance.

  It was great to be aboard Circus again and I felt a wave of confidence almost immediately. Mick and John had quite a start on us. They had left at daylight. Fiona and I didn’t get away until about seven o’clock.

  The tropical lows in February had given way to very calm, hot weather. The forests baked in a brooding silence. March was the beginning of the dry season. The only rain before next spring would be unseasonable bands of moisture whipped up from the great southern bight.

  The heat came in quickly and we saw only a few wallabies. It was easy riding, along a well-used cattle pad and the fragrance of pine remained heavy in the air. Circus was keen to stride out. I think horses can become very frustrated in small paddocks and love to see new territory. He was too keen. I frequently had to rein in and wait for Yarramin. I had a fleeting memory of a little girl in pigtails who always held me up when I rode out to bring the milking cows in. She was the overseer’s daughter on Myall Plains. She loved helping me and to my annoyance followed me everywhere. Reflecting back now over forty years I think she must have been a lonely little girl, because I didn’t like female company in those days and I wasn’t very nice to her, yet she kept it up. You can get too used to being alone and I realised while waiting for Yarramin I had to be careful not to drift back to the solitude of my childhood. It must have been in the early fifties. She took some verbal abuse from me and I’d love to see her again to say sorry.

  The first beast we sighted was a Santa Gertrudis bull. He was on his way to the bore. Not long after his elephant-shaped backside disappeared into the green, we rode onto a mob which had been driven off the top by Mick and John. We had left the pine forests behind and ascended onto the hard grey basalt and stunted box. This mob skidded down the slopes above us and their hooves dislodged round volcanic stones which clattered down ahead of them and narrowly missed the two horses.

  A group of four stopped in a cluster of box suckers. Scrub cattle learn all sorts of tricks, such as holding up in scrub patches, hoping the horsemen will ride past.

  I turned Circus towards them, but Yarramin was already on the way and we followed them down a gully, one horse either side. I had a gut feeling about this mob. Commonsense said they would walk to the bore, but one of the cows kept stopping and looking back. One heifer kept sidling away to my left.

  All went well until we reached a belt of brigalow. It was as though the big whiteface baldy had been heading for it, for she turned and galloped into a maze of twisted black tree trunks. She rushed heedlessly through it and several others broke away to follow her.

  Circus was gallant in the chase as always. He cleared logs and bullocked his way through the thickest of it. The ground began to rise and suddenly we were out of the brigalow and into the pine. The cow with her band of followers had switched course and I thought we were beaten. What the cow didn’t realise was the big mob ahead was under Mick’s control—she blundered straight into them and there was no escape.

  Both Circus and I had become very unfit. We both laboured for breath and when I heard the crashing behind I realised I had forgotten about Fiona. When old Yarramin burst clear of the pines. I didn’t expect to see Fiona aboard—but she was. She alone had loved every second of it.

  Mick had about two hundred head in hand and he said John had picked up a big mob about a kilometre to the south. By midday we had about three hundred and fifty locked up in the bore paddock.

  I had some sliced ham and several lettuces in the Esky, which I had half filled with ice before leaving Roma. We all hoed into it with heaps of multi-grain bread washed down with about four mugs of tea. I suggested Mick and John have a couple of hours rest before riding again, but they had set themselves a goal—get the lot in one day. Every paddock in the Blank Space has a rating, based on the number of days usually required for a clean muster. This paddock had a three-day rating. A hundred and sixty kilometres north in the Carnarvon Massif there were paddocks rated seven days. Of course helicopters speeded things up if anyone could afford them. This wasn’t the Northern Territory where immense belts of good grazing country and huge herds allow modern technology to be viable.

  Lame was hardly the word when I dism
ounted for lunch. The stiffness was mainly in the knee area and I thought if I lay down for a while after lunch I could take Fiona down to the gorge later and give her the opportunity to take a few action shots as Mick and John drove the cattle down. I thought I’d maybe rest for about twenty minutes but when I put my head down I had that feeling you get when talking to the surgeon on the operating table. You seem to be cut off in mid-sentence and when you wake it takes some minutes to remember where you are. When I opened my eyes the shadows were long and it felt much cooler. I crawled out of the tent and could see the cattle in the bore paddock, restless and wanting to feed out. Circus was still tied up under a shady tree. He had been asleep too and looked at me with enquiring eyes. There was no sign of Yarramin.

  I no longer had any concern for our safety. The ex-jailbird would have got back to town somehow and Frankie would have got too dry to keep looking for him. If there was to be any drama it would have been on the first night. I had come to the conclusion it was very easy to become paranoid about these anti-social characters.

  The fire needed a bit of stoking and I was short of wood. The exercise was good for my leg, although painful. I had a slight nagging worry that Fiona might have ridden away with the camera and got lost. It was unfounded, of course, because Yarramin would always bring her back.

  Not long before sunset the leaders of the final mob began to drift through the timber. Then I saw Mick on his chestnut thoroughbred. He had placed himself near the lead in case they broke. After a few minutes I saw John on the other side on his roan gelding. At least a hundred head of cattle were in view now. Yarramin was not there and my anxiety flared again. Mick was too far away to call to. I just had to wait until they put the cattle in the bore paddock. The last of the cattle ambled into view and now I felt very concerned. It never occurred to me Fiona might ride ahead, way out on the flank, then ride towards the bore to photograph the cattle head on. I finally caught sight of her and relaxed.

  You can take hundreds of photographs of a droving unit on a stock route, but it is very difficult to capture that half wild look when cattle are first driven away from their favourite haunts. Fiona worked hard at it and she must have got some outstanding shots.

  After the mob had been turned in with the others Mick rode through them for a count. I don’t know how he counted them like that, but later he was to give me a figure of thirty to forty short. Meanwhile Fiona went on photographing and Yarramin decided she had had a fair go. He suddenly went down on his knees and commenced a gentle roll. Fiona vehemently protested, but to my alarm made no effort to get away. Fortunately Yarramin regained his feet and when I asked why she hadn’t scrambled to safety, she said it was because of her telescopic lens. She had strapped the case to a saddle dee and to abandon that would have been an expensive loss. Minutes later all horses were unsaddled and fed with hay from the truck.

  The thought of cooking a bush dinner weighed heavily on me that evening and when Fiona pushed a mug into my hand I knew it had better work. I sat on the big log by the camp and let the red wine spread through my veins. Fortunately I had boiled the billy and made tea. Poor old Mick would have loved a mug of wine, but I needed his expertise so badly I had to keep him dry.

  ‘Didn’t quite get ’em,’ Mick said, a little subdued. ‘Others might take a day or two to find.’

  ‘I’ll feed the big mob out.’

  ‘Reckon you can hold ’em,’ Mick said, not very convincingly as he poured himself a second mug of tea.

  ‘Going to be a bit of a spread. Six hundred head need access to at least three hundred acres.’

  It was going to be hard to hold them.

  ‘We better ride in later in the mornin’ and check how it’s goin’,’ John suggested. He already had his swag rolled out and didn’t look like staying awake for long.

  ‘Reckon we’ll get you started before we go,’ Mick added. ‘Push ’em down into the box country where there’s a bit of feed. They won’t look to walk for a while.’

  While we were talking Fiona got to work with the food. Under the lantern light I couldn’t see exactly what she was cooking, but I was so grateful I could have hugged her on the spot. Mick pretended she wasn’t there. Educated in the old school, he may never have seen a woman in a mustering camp before. John was more responsive and when dinner was served he suggested I be sacked as cook. I don’t recall what Fiona cooked but I remember agreeing whole-heartedly with John.

  From memory the men fell asleep where they ate dinner, exhausted. Fiona was fiddling around with her camera when I headed for my tent and I remember telling her not to go far from the camp fire. I noticed she had gone to a lot of trouble to groom herself and for the first time she had changed into a skirt. She wanted to change my bandage. I told her it was alright and I would soon take the old one off and throw it away.

  I lay on the thin mattress, uneasy and tense, listening to the night birds. Sleep should have been almost instant, but I still lay awake after midnight and listened for the sounds that would make my skin tingle. The dingoes howling near the camp didn’t bother me. The cattle were used to them by now. It was those indistinguishable sounds most likely to spark a stampede that I worried about.

  I don’t know what hour I drifted off. When I woke it was with a start. The silence was total, a stillness out of character in a wilderness of nocturnal animals and birds. I pulled my boots on and stood outside the tent. It was so quiet I could hear Fiona breathing nearby. I walked over to the glowing coals of the fire and threw a small log on. A mug of weak tea often did the job of soothing my nerves and when I lay down again I usually went back to sleep.

  The billy boiled quickly with only a little water. The cattle I imagined to be all lying down. I thought no more about them and contemplated taking the bandage off and washing my hand. The sudden rumble was a sound I had never heard before. It slightly resembled thunder, but remained distinctly animal. It only lasted a few seconds. The whole herd had moved as one and stopped. I expect the fence held them on the lower side of the little paddock.

  I glanced at my watch and saw it was three-thirty. The first crack of dawn was still an hour and a half away. A stampede across the camp seemed extremely remote and I knew if I woke Mick and John they wouldn’t get back to sleep. I thought of the Mitchell stampede a century before and wondered how six hundred large animals could be so silent. There was not so much as a cough or belch. The horses were in with the cattle and they must have been bewildered.

  Back in the tent I felt envious of the others. They had slept through the night. With the knowledge of dawn approaching I relaxed and finally fell asleep. When I woke again it was still dark, but not pitch black. Something had woken me, and very drowsily, as though my head were under weights, I strained to listen. When it came again it was a wail. It wasn’t a dingo. I tried to raise myself on an elbow. I knew I was very weak and wondered whether I was hallucinating. The minutes went by and I put my head down again. The next wail seemed human and I forced myself to sit up and pull on my boots. I staggered out of the tent and called quietly to Fiona. The fire had gone out and I could just see the dark form of Mick sitting up in his bed-roll.

  ‘It’s the missus.’

  ‘Not my missus.’

  ‘She go for a pee and get lost. Them cattle too quiet. Don’t call to her.’

  ‘I’ll go to her.’

  ‘You go slow. Very quiet.’

  I had only my underpants on. The tent was untidy and I fumbled around for my trousers. When the dingo howled it was high-pitched and blood-curdling. It was the same dog that had come to smell me up on the escarpment. It howled again and the cattle broke. First that strange thunder of hooves, followed by several sharp cracks as the fence posts snapped. They were heading our way and I bolted from the tent shouting, ‘Get down, get down.’ Mick was roaring obscenities, jumping up and down and flicking his lighter. He had the presence of mind to realise dropping to the ground was futile. Our bodies would be spread like butter. I watched as though mesmerised. Bu
t I couldn’t see them. The ground trembled and the timber erupted in a stick-splitting roar. I could just see Mick jumping wildly and the fire spark of his lighter. The rush came at us and enveloped the camp. Yet we were still standing, unharmed. Everywhere I could hear the snapping of small trees and the sharp cracks of dead wood. The cattle had split and gone around us. It probably all took less than twenty seconds. In horror I swung around to listen to the roar of destruction heading in the direction the original wailing had come from. I began to walk aimlessly, numb with fear at what I might find. The silence returned quickly and the only sound was Mick moving around, searching too.

  ‘What the fuck’s happened?’ I heard John yell out. He had just woken.

  ‘That missus is out here,’ Mick called.

  The light seemed to be gathering by the second. The adrenaline flowed and I felt wide awake and fit. When I found Fiona she was huddled by a tree. The cattle had missed her. As the light grew I saw that it was only by metres.

  ‘Why didn’t you come?’ she whispered reproachfully.

  ‘I didn’t realise until it was too late.’

  She rose stiffly and her arms fell around me. She was shaking to begin with, then sobbing. I held her as strongly as I could, as though strength alone might smother her fear.

  In silence the three of us walked slowly back to the camp. John had the fire going and a couple of billies in place.

  ‘Think I can see the horses in the far corner,’ he said calmly. ‘They’ll do that when spooked. Get close to one another and stay put.’

  Mick pulled an old jumper out of his swag. It wasn’t cold. He was never going to say it, but my guess is he’d thought sudden death was almost certain.

  ‘They’ll stop when they strike decent feed,’ he said, standing over the fire. ‘We’ll soon get ’em.’