Horses Too Are Gone, The

by Keenan, Michael

I started back for the homestead. To the southwest, beyond the green belt of kurrajong trees, I could hear the drone of the tractor. We had received enough rain to start sowing and Greg was pushing the hours. At my feet as always were the three dogs. Millie looked at me with her soft brown button eyes, as though to say, ‘What are those sticks you’re leaning on? When’s the saddle coming out of the harness room so that we can fan out and run the cattle?’ I know she had such thoughts, because when we passed the harness room on the way back she stood by the door and wagged her tail. The old dingo was too old to care. He just walked and panted. Ellie, on the other hand, was forever on the lookout. A hare to chase would have been her equivalent of winning Lotto.

  To return to the shelter of the house again was a relief. The winter wind had arrived after the rain in late May. In the kitchen Sal had the oil heater going and when I came through the door she pressed the start button on the electric jug.

  ‘You were a while,’ she said. ‘I nearly came looking for you.’

  ‘You know me. The old dreamer. I feel good and reckon I’ll be walking in three days.’

  ‘I’m not letting you go to town,’ Sal said firmly.

  ‘Boy, I’d give anything for Butch and Sundance’s horses and the canyons of Utah. I’d give ’em hell.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a mad romantic and stop teasing me. You know I hate such thoughts.’ I had plonked myself on a seat at the kitchen table and Sal brought over a cup of tea. ‘You can be a writer and a dreamer any day, but right now I am a boring mum who wants to sleep peacefully tonight.’

  ‘There’s a few sheep left to sell. Two or three items of machinery we never use. Some scrap iron.’

  ‘That won’t pay the bills coming in here. You never go near the mail.’

  Sal was right. I looked upon the mail as out of sight, out of mind.

  ‘I promise we won’t have to cut firewood again,’ I said, trying to be convincing. In the wool crash I’d split wood for firewood and Sal had loaded it onto the truck. For a woman it was backbreaking work.

  Sal said nothing for a while. She drank her tea and focused her attention on the window. Clouds from the south had gathered and the light faded into the bleakness of early winter.

  ‘I’ll light the fire,’ she said at last.

  I gave myself ten days to get rid of the crutches following my knee operation which was no more than repair and trimming of two damaged ligaments. For the first time in months I could straighten my leg and if it had not been for the gloomy long-term prognosis I would have expected to be able to sprint and catch a calf once again—which I had done only three days before the accident. The calf had lost direction, gone through a fence and was a good six kilometres from his mother when I caught him and strapped his legs. He was the last calf I will ever run down and catch.

  I used much of this time visiting my mother in the nursing home at Coonabarabran. The cancer had her bedridden and the only thing left in her life was visits from family and friends. She loved my accounts of the Queensland bush and I did my best to make her laugh, as she’d always had a keen sense of humour.

  From the crutches I went to a knee brace and I could walk quite well. The second lot of weaners were long overdue to be taken off their mothers. There was little feed for them back home at Myall Plains—just enough to get them over the long haul from Queensland before they headed into the deep south. Sally and I had taken another trip to the Murray in search of feed and had met Geoff White, manager for Wesfarmers Dalgety in Albury. He’d found agistment for me at Jerilderie. The paddock was a lovely mixture of clover and natural grasses. After the inspection we’d gone into the little town and visited the original post office. The famous bush-ranger Ned Kelly had closed Jerilderie down for a couple of days in the late 1870s. He and his brothers and a couple of extras had enjoyed quite a blow-out, something a few of my mates and I would have loved to have done in the days of wild youth. In fairness to Ned it’s recorded he paid for his drinks and whatever else he may have needed that was not available across the border and back up in the mountains.

  It was about the twentieth of June 1995 when Sal and I left for Queensland with the boys.

  The winter trip to Queensland necessitated some additional equipment; namely, a four-wheel-drive bike. I couldn’t ride a horse but felt I would be of some use on a bike.

  Nick and Richard had come home at the end of the first semester and were looking forward to a few days riding. Tom had a late exam and would fly to Roma.

  It was one and a half day’s drive to the camp I had in mind. I decided to break the trip at Mungindi on the border. Before the introduction of cotton no one would have thought much about this little isolated town. And if it were not for a sculpture in the hotel none of us may have thought of Mungindi again. The wooden sculpture is a giant penis perfect in proportion and detail. It seems to say, ‘You may think this town is a little dot on a thousand-mile river, but you will never forget it.’

  Next morning we went on to Echo Hills at Surat. The saddles were stored in a cottage there. Sal and I had returned briefly in April to draft off a wing of steers and sell them in Roma. On this occasion there was no one around. Ken and Rosie were away or had gone to town. We collected the saddles and drove out to where the horses were running. Circus was lame and in light condition. They had ample feed, so this worried me. Yarramin seemed in good form and the buckjumper had his head over the fence for a smooch. He was the most deceptive horse! You would have thought a child could be legged aboard bareback. Just the weight in the stirrup, Peter Anderson had told me, was enough to set him off. ‘He’s into it before you reach the saddle.’

  The horses were all we had left at Echo Hills. The few cows and calves I had transported home. The heifers and unsold steers I had to truck back to Mt Kennedy, as the feed at Echo Hills had cut out and there was not enough feed at home for them. There was nowhere else to go.

  At Roma we bought a week’s supplies and headed out. After six weeks absence what struck me most was the dryness. The autumn green had long gone. The tall grasses were finished and even the Mitchell grass had been frosted. It wasn’t a good sign for the higher tableland country.

  Picking the camp site was good fun. Clear skies heralded frosts at night and I discarded the old camp site near the bore, down in the valley. I selected a site on the tablelands, about a hundred metres off the road. We had to make a track in by throwing a few logs aside. The forest had been pulled at one time and the regrowth was about six metres high. The spot itself was a scalded piece of ground that had not recovered. To the west a tree barrier blocked any view, but to the east the ground fell away to form a low depression and beyond that a sandstone escarpment walled in the new emerging forest. The rock of the escarpment was cracked in a thousand places from a sun that had baked this land for millions of years.

  We only had about an hour and a half of daylight left, which is not much time when tents have to be erected, camp set up and a pile of wood gathered. To begin with the boys and I unpacked and Sal commenced the preparation of her ‘kitchen’. Nature threw in the basics—a big dead log wide and high enough to be a bench and a wilga tree with wide lateral branches. Among the branches of the wilga Sal hung the food safe, the cooking tongs, a ladle and the tea towels. Underneath, in the deep shade of the branches, she placed the Esky full of meat and the dry food boxes. Three or four metres away from the tree we set the fireplace simply by scraping the ground.

  With everything unloaded from the trailer and the four-wheel drive, the boys and I started on the tents. Choosing sites took longer than the actual erection. Nick named Sal’s and my tent the ‘presidential suite’. I’d had it made to specifications as I don’t like the modern camping tents. It was the same basic design as my old French tents, but much larger. When the boys were small I used to tell them they were sleeping in the tents of the Foreign Legion and that it was a great privilege. Now the tents were old and tattered and I had a feeling that if I said anything about the French Foreign Legion the b
oys might have tied me up in one of them.

  Richard chose a spot close to the kitchen for his tent. It was the fire he had in mind. Nick put his up half under another wilga. He loves sleeping in and I wondered whether he thought I might miss his tent on the dawn wake-up. Tom’s tent they put up near the presidential suite.

  ‘It’s no honeymoon for us,’ Nick said with that wicked grin of his. ‘Nor will it be for you and Mum.’

  Richard was in his element with the firewood. He struggled with huge logs and wandered a long way to find the ones he wanted. He loved the bush and we had done the odd rock climb together. At the early age of twelve, he’d come with me on a roped ascent of Timor Rock which is a one hundred and fifty metre climb. Looking back I don’t know how he did it. I am a little older and hopefully wiser than I was in those days. The most memorable climb we did together was the twelve hundred metre peak of Mt Lindsay on the Queensland border when Richard was about twenty. The afternoon before our planned ascent we couldn’t find the track leading to the base cliffs. We split up and Richard found it. The only clues were tiny patches of bare ground and rock worn from the odd boot. Under the tangle of lantana and overhead jungle the ill-defined trail lay in heavy gloom. Unable to restrain his excitement Richard climbed three hundred metres to the first cliff. It was when he decided to return the trouble began. The gloom had deepened with the sun only an hour above the horizon and looking down the jungle yielded no sign of a trail. As dusk gathered I waited by the four-wheel drive, very concerned and periodically calling out to him. When Richard emerged from the gathering dark he was covered in ticks and had been laced across his bare arms by stinging trees. He still wore the cool that saved his life, but I could see he had been through a dreadful experience. He’d made several attempts to find the trail down and each time met an impenetrable barrier. Finally he decided to crawl so that he would be able to see even a disturbed pebble. He tracked himself down. We both knew the implications of a night up there were serious, with burns from the stinging trees triggering panic combined with the slow toxic release of the ticks. It wasn’t until we sank a couple of beers in the local Woodenbong pub that we learnt how serious. Only months before, a German tourist had died on the mountain. Lost like Richard, he panicked and, half crazed from the stinging tree burns, he fell down a cliff. When they found him a fortnight later the dingoes had picked his bones clean.

  We camped in the bush that night and at dawn headed for the base cliffs of the mountain. Richard had no fear of the trail now. It was very steep and we seemed to be halfway up the mountain when we reached the cliffs. Our order of ascent had been reversed over the years. Richard led the way now and I belayed out the rope. There were five full lengths of the fifty-metre rope to the summit plateau. There were pitches that pushed me close to my middle-aged limit and sometimes I wasn’t thrilled to glance between my legs and see the forest canopy more than a hundred metres below.

  Morning mist hugged the ancient cliffs of the summit and we pushed through ferns under stunted eucalyptus in search of the highest point. Out of the mist loomed a band of rock, not more than five metres high. It was a smooth wall and a lightning-sprung fire the summer before had blackened most of it. The fire must have had great heat because the few holds we touched crumbled. It was exasperating. Unless we scaled this wall we would fail in our bid to climb the mountain. Richard’s a strong man and I tried climbing on his shoulders, but I still couldn’t reach a handhold. For a few minutes we felt defeated, then I thought of a lasso. It was a long shot. A very long shot. I made it out of one end of the climbing rope and began throwing it up over the rock. On the fifth or sixth attempt the rope took hold. The problem was, ‘on what!’ A protruding boulder would be safe, but a shallow-rooted shrub was not. We both pulled on the rope and it held.

  At this point a gust of chilly wind parted the cliff-clinging mist and we saw that the ledge we were standing on was exposed to a drop of more than three hundred metres. There was nowhere to belay the rope. I hadn’t brought any pegs as I hadn’t planned such a serious climb.

  ‘I’ll go,’ Richard said firmly. ‘I am the strongest.’

  ‘And I am lighter by at least twenty kilos.’

  Richie couldn’t argue against that logic. The lighter the person, the more likely the rope would hold.

  I showed him a break belay. I had gone to a climbing school once and been taught some useful tricks. In snow and ice climbing the belay man uses his ice-axe to break the speed of the rope. The idea is to let the rope travel, but to steady it and finally stop it. In this situation we would use Richard’s knee. He would push himself hard against the wall and hold the rope just above his knee.

  Hauling myself up the rope was desperately difficult. If I’d had confidence in the anchor I would have planted my feet against the wall and walked up. Instead, I had to do a direct hand-over-hand pull. Near the top a hand hold presented itself and I moved away from total reliance on the rope. I put my head over the lip and looked for the anchor—a tussock of grass. I couldn’t go back without taking the strain on the rope once again and the edge, now level with my face, was crumbly. Gingerly, and anything but happy about it, I had to take hold of the rope again and ease myself over the lip. Richard I belayed, anchoring myself to one of the trees. The whole summit plateau was covered with stunted eucalypts.

  After this obstacle Richie and I walked to the summit and examined the entry book, which is kept in a little steel box. The previous climber was Tim McCartney-Snape, some nine months before.

  ‘Too easy!’ That’s all he wrote, apart from his name and the date.

  We weren’t impressed. For Richie and me it had been bloody hard, but we hadn’t climbed Everest solo either!

  We took our time on the descent and it must have been late afternoon when we walked into the pub. Apart from wanting a drink or two, we had some ticks to be removed. A bloke at the pub was an expert. Somehow he pinched the skin and virtually popped them out. We had to strip to our underpants, but the Woodenbong pub would be the most laid-back place I have ever been in. A couple of beers led to a game of pool, then dinner, and later in the evening Richie and I were fascinated by all the characters. Two drunks were watching a blue video.

  ‘I’ve seen your wife in those black panties,’ one said to his mate.

  ‘Yeah, well you think you’re smart,’ the other said.

  ‘Smarter than you.’

  ‘Yeah, well ya not as smart as ya think, because just about every bloke in Beaudesert’s seen her panties.’

  By nightfall we had everything in order. Each of us had a log seat and the boys had taken a XXXX from the Esky. For Sal and me it was red wine. The fire was ablaze and with a glass of cabernet sauvignon the chill of the June evening was held at bay. Just half a glass made the fire seem warmer and brighter.

  The darkness crept in and we were discussing plans for the next day when a little dark form appeared at the edge of the lantern light. She was later to be called Nug Nug, for a possum so keen to join us was deserving of a name. Each morning we would wake to a bit of a mess in the ‘kitchen’, and the only place for the biscuits was in the food safe. We learnt the hard way. She could actually open a plastic container with her tiny paws. She had no fear of us and one night when I was reading by a lantern she crept onto a log only two metres away. She sat there for some time and stared at me. I didn’t move and pretended not to notice, when all at once she startled me with that extraordinary husky sound possums make. She had something to say to me alright.

  That first night Sal made a casserole in the camp oven. It consisted of round steak sliced into small pieces, potato, carrot and broccoli. She tossed in herbs and spices and with red wine to chase it with we could have been dining at a luxury restaurant.

  Only among the great forests are the stars sharp and clear in Australia. After rain the desert stars may be sharper still, but usually there’s a high level of thin dust and in the settled areas smog and dust forever mingle.

  A dingo howled from the
escarpment, a curlew’s scream pierced the night air, and carrying on a light breeze from the south-west I heard a scrub bull vent his lungs to claim his territory. Tired and well-fed, we all slept soundly.

  I had been in contact with Gil and he had told me to just turn up when we wanted the horses. Scalp I had written to. It was hit and miss whether he ever got the letter. There was no telephone. The only hint he was about were the dead dingoes. His favourite spots for hanging carcasses were the cattle grids.

  Before any mustering could be attempted we had to repair the holding paddock where the cattle had knocked the fence down in the stampede. I had to do the same exercise again, but the odds were in my favour, I felt. The cattle had had another four months watering at the trough and would be generally more settled. Also I felt camping right away from them might help.

  All the fence posts were wooden. Twelve of them were snapped at ground level, some with ugly sharp spikes protruding from the ground. The boys had to dig them out and cut new posts with an axe. At least I felt it would be axe work. Nicholas had brought up an old power saw that hadn’t run for years and he was very optimistic when I left them. The only work I could do was strain the wires and that wouldn’t be for four or five hours. I had the opportunity to do a thorough inspection of the feed from the back of the four-wheeler bike.

  It was slow going up on the basalt plateaus. At the pass I left the road and weaved my way through an intricate network of boulders. Sometimes there was no stone or rock for half a kilometre and this is where the bluegrass grew like mature stands of lucerne, but now it was gone. The cattle had left the high country and were feeding on the tall scrub grasses, which had little nutriment. I had to move them, which meant I had to find Scalp if he didn’t find me. There was other country. He had offered it before, but there was a problem with water.

  I got back to the bore about midday. Nicholas had a look on his face as though he’d been posted a distinction for every subject. The posts were cut and in the ground. Waiting for me they had begun replacing broken rails at the trough. It was my turn to work and I got busy with the wire strainers.