Emily dismounted and began to unhitch the sack. The sack was heavy and damp from the early morning mist and her ribs twinged as she heaved it onto the ground. As she bent to tug at the hayband knot, water on the brim of her hat tipped out suddenly onto the ground. The weather had been coming in all morning. Alongside her father, she walked around the plain, tipping out little hillocks of the coarse salt.
The cattle were coming fast out of the bush, their calves gallivanting in little skips and letting out snorts of excitement. They carried their tails up and skitted about in babyish fun.
As they reached the invisible bubble that was their flight zone, the cattle stopped abruptly, skidding to a halt and bumping into each other, to sniff at the air. Then the boldest, a big deep-red cow, thrust her head down and ambled forward, bursting the bubble, closing the flight zone in around the riders. She extended her tongue out to the salt, then shoved her nose right in so that white granules stuck to her moist pink nostrils. Other cows came forward too, tossing their heads at Rousie, who lay panting not far off, the lure of the salt too great for the cattle to be much bothered by a dog.
Emily retied the bag and flipped it back over the saddle, while Flo counted the cows.
‘Fifty-six. That’s less than a third of ’em,’ she said.
‘Let’s shut the gate on these and go see if we can find the rest down at Shepherd’s Hut,’ Rod said.
Emily legged Snowgum about and rode on beside her family, pulling her collar up and her hat down to the weather coming in from the east.
Since Wonnangatta, Luke had called her father’s house several times, leaving messages. At first Emily had toyed with the idea of meeting him, but as the letters from the bureaucrats came in, notifying the Flanaghans of the revocation of their grazing licences, Emily felt that old anger simmering, even for Luke. After all, he was a VPP man. He was part of their eviction. He couldn’t be a part of her clan. He may have made love to her by that river like he meant it, but hadn’t he stood aside, mute, right when Emily needed him?
Flo came to ride beside her.
‘You know we’ll be out of range for the next two days once we get over this ridge. You’d better call the girls.’
Emily smiled at the thought of Tilly and Meg tucked up warm beside Evie’s woodstove, happy in her calm aura and kind ways. Emily pulled out her phone from her oilskin pocket just as Flo added, ‘And you’d better give that Luke a ring, too. Put the poor bastard out of his misery.’
Emily flashed a glance at Flo. Emily had left a cheque for the gelding for Luke at the store with a short note that gave him nothing at all. No clues to their future.
‘You can catch us up,’ Flo said, urging her horse away. ‘Do the right thing, Emily,’ she called.
Emily suddenly remembered what Evie had told her when she returned from the Wonnangatta, still stewing over her treatment there. Evie had said mildly, ‘Carrying around the energy created by an argument with someone is like carrying around a great big bloody anvil in your pocket. It simply won’t serve you. You’re best to clean up the messes you make and get rid of those anvils!’
But as the winter approached, Emily still felt an anvil there. It was like she was dragging the idea of Luke with her everywhere she went, even though he was the last person on this earth she wanted to love. He was a ranger, sent to evict her from her runs. She had better end it. Flo was right. She had to call Luke, finish things properly before they’d even begun. No more carting anvils about. Not Luke’s. Not Clancy’s either.
She didn’t have Luke’s number in her phone, so with her icy fingers she dialled a connection company and asked for the VPP’s Dargo office. As she sat astride Snowgum in the misty rain, it took her a while to realise she’d been put through to head office in Melbourne. She sat listening to a slick advertising recording being played over and over on the other end of the VPP phone.
By the time Emily had been waiting fifteen minutes, she was seeing red. She knew she’d have to canter Snowgum hard down the steep and slippery track to catch her family, though she didn’t want to push the mare. But she hung on the line, knowing she had to clear things with Luke. She listened to the over-cheerful advertisement selling passes to the ‘great outdoors’ as if the bush was just another commodity, like a six-burner gas barbecue or a new PlayStation.
‘But I don’t want to find out about kayaking or rock climbing or bloody fishing,’ she muttered. ‘I just want to talk to a human!’
Emily pictured herself carrying the heavy anvil with her. The vision stopped her from pressing the off button on her phone. Finally the crisp professional voice of a VPP staff member came on the line.
‘Um,’ Emily began uncertainly, ‘I was after Luke Bradshaw at the Dargo branch.’
‘I’m afraid I don’t have that number. I only have the Heyfield headquarters. You’ll have to call them out there,’ the woman said from Melbourne.
Just the way she said ‘out there’ stirred Emily’s blood. Surely, given the woman worked in an organisation whose job was to care for the land, she should not think of Dargo and Heyfield as ‘out there’, but as the very reason for her job.
‘Perhaps you have his mobile number on a staff list?’ Emily suggested.
‘I’m sorry,’ the woman said, not as an apology, but as a barrier. ‘Under the Privacy Act we cannot disclose the mobile numbers of employees.’
Emily wasn’t used to such officialese. She clenched her teeth. How could Luke have sold his soul to an organisation like this?
‘Never mind. Thank you for your help,’ Emily said. She tried to tell herself the woman was only doing her job.
Emily sat contemplating calling the branch at Heyfield, but she didn’t want to leave a message. It would have to wait until after droving. Instead, she dialled Evie’s house to tell the girls she missed them, and she’d see them in a couple of days for droving. She hung up and rode on.
On the lee side of the mountain the rain had stopped, but when gusts of wind shook the trees, big fat droplets spilled from their leaves onto Emily and Snowgum as they passed underneath. The horses’ hoof marks ahead of her had cut grooves into the muddied track. Emily had to ride quickly to catch up but she also wanted to savour the landscape. Once the cattle were mustered, there would be no reason to ride this way again.
She squeezed Snowgum into a canter and called Rousie along with a whistle. He leapt over logs, ears pricked, and fell in behind Snowgum’s hocks on the track to Shepherd’s Hut.
Emily reined her horse from the four-wheel drive track onto a shortcut, a narrow footpath only the cattlemen, the cattle and the wombats knew. She rode past trees that had been blazed by men a hundred years before. Despite its remoteness, this place had once been alive with the sounds of people and their toil. They had laid whole hillsides bare with their mining and dug channels for miles to bring water to the crush. They had cut trees to stumps on the tops of hills to build shelters and yards and rough bush furniture. Many starved and perished when the mist or snow bamboozled them, but a few wily pioneers made it rich from the gold they found in the alluvial creekbeds and in the bellies of hillsides.
In those earlier days, the sound of axes had rung out across the still bush. Bullock drays, anchored steady by sawn logs, gingerly scuffed their way down precipitous slopes with heavy loads of mining equipment. The creekbeds and the hillsides had been alive with men. Some went mad with isolation, some with fleas and flies. Others, like the Flanaghans, had stayed and thrived. Now, though, this land was called a ‘Park’, to be locked up and preserved as pristine wilderness rather than used.
What did those shiny-bottomed city bureaucrats know of this land? No Parks ranger had ever been on this track, Emily thought angrily. She knew it would only be a few seasons before tracks like these became impassable. Without regular traffic and a day out with the chainsaw clearing the way now and then, the secret places, like the fairy dens near hidden springs, would no longer be found. They wouldn’t even survive. The gentle filtered sunlight would b
e blocked by the overgrowth of robust grasses and weeds. The mid-story dogwoods and wattles would grow and smother the open grassy areas. And as more and more snowgum bows fell from the weight of snow on Park land, and the bans on gathering firewood and burning were enforced, the land would become choked with fallen limbs. That limbs dropped in winter was the natural way, but the government policy to put out the fires from electrical storms wasn’t natural.
Every year, as Rod, Emily and Flo travelled down with heavy backpacks to spray weeds, they commented on the fire policy, and all of them predicted an inferno, if not this coming summer, then the next. They could plainly see the disaster looming. A fire hotter than nature intended. A fire that would utterly destroy, not one that would breathe new life to the seeds of gums, so that the land grew fresh from saplings and wildflowers.
Emily shut her eyes momentarily as she rode, feeling Snowgum’s steady rock beneath her. She’d read the accusations in the papers that it was the cattlemen and their cattle who had brought the weeds here, and who perpetuated them. It was so easy to point the finger and accuse with such ignorance. She reached out and pushed away against the firm trunk of a tree so she did not collect her knee on it. The tree felt cool and strong. She sensed the energy at its heart and in her mind she said farewell to it. Those men in the city were locking her out from all this.
Then, like a ray of sunshine through the tree canopy, she remembered Evie’s words.
‘If you focus on the bad things in your life, you’ll get more of the bad. You reap what you sow in your thoughts and actions.’
Emily suddenly realised she was being negative again. Her whole family was. Maybe they had spent so long focusing on the bad, on the bureaucrats, they had in some way created this situation themselves? Maybe it was time to start thinking differently.
As Emily and her silver-grey mare slipped down a steep bank, the vegetation began to alter beautifully from snowgums to groves of woolly butts. Soon they were trotting across a green meadow towards a small hut. The hut, named Shepherd’s, had been built by her great-great-grandfather and was now shared by rangers, shooters, bikers and four-wheel drivers. This time of year there was nobody about, and there wouldn’t be until summer came again.
She could see smoke curling up from a campfire and her family sitting on sawn-off stumps watching the flames. The time to start the change was now, Emily resolved as she rode towards them.
‘What took you? Sam’s eaten your share of the jam sandwiches,’ said Rod.
‘You bugger!’
Sam grinned at her.
‘How’d you get on with your phone calls?’ Flo asked.
‘The girls are great. Happy as Larry.’
‘And?’
Emily shook her head. ‘And nothing. Couldn’t get through to Dargo VPP.’
‘Ahh,’ was all Flo said.
As Emily dumped her saddlebag down she said, ‘You know, I’ve been thinking —’
‘Thought I could smell rubber burning,’ Sam said.
She gave him a shove so he almost fell off his log, then sat down next to him. Rod handed her a pannikin of tea and she wrapped her hands around it and blew at the steam.
‘We’re all moping around as if this is the last drove ever, said Emily. ‘I say, let’s choose to enjoy this trip and not see it as an ending. Let’s see it as a beginning.’
‘What are you talking about?’ Flo said.
‘Never say never.’
‘Isn’t it never say die?’ said Sam.
‘Whatever!’ Emily said, laughing. ‘But maybe, just maybe, if we all start to think positively, act positively, and begin to live like we know that they’ll ask the cattle back here to help manage the runs, it might just happen.’
‘You reckon?’ Rod said, shaking his head.
‘I know it sounds like it’s done and dusted,’ Emily said, leaning forward, ‘but once the grazing stops and the snowgrass and scrub get away, eventually there’ll be a fire here too hot for the land to handle, then the soil erosion will come, then the river pollution, then the weeds will run rife. Now, I know none of us wants that to happen to our land, but we all know that a huge fire is on the cards. How can a Parkie on a budget look after all this? One day, they’ll have to ask us back to help.’
‘Ha!’ said Flo. ‘In your dreams.’
‘They’ll even pay us for it.’
‘You reckon?’ Flo added sceptically.
‘Yes! If we start putting out positive energy, thoughts, words, actions, it’ll come back that way. We reap what we sow.’
‘She’s got in your head,’ Sam said.
‘Who?’
‘Those words you’re saying. They’re not yours, they’re Evie’s. She’s talked you into thinking you can do anything. Be anyone. But look at you. Look at us. We’ve lost.’
‘No, we haven’t,’ Emily said, turning to him. ‘Do we look like people who have lost? We’ve got our health, each other, our animals. We might not have all our land but we still have some, and isn’t this the best life in the world? We can still continue to have it this way.’
‘There’s just one thing you’re forgetting, Emily,’ Rod said. ‘Income. Now the bans are in, you know as well as I do that we’ll have to sell two-thirds of this herd. How can we all survive financially on that?’
She tossed more sticks on the fire. ‘There’s still Bob’s land. He might somehow help us?’
‘And pigs might fly,’ muttered Flo.
‘And there’s Sam. If you get out there again with your music, you’ll have the media at your fingertips. We could use that as a positive way forward. Not pushing an anti-government line, but a pro-environment one.’
Sam frowned. ‘I know what you’re saying but isn’t it too late? They’ve kicked the cattle off.’
Emily knew Sam didn’t want to cloud his music, his one joy, with all the negativity that had come with being a cattleman, but surely, if they took it from a new angle, and gave the public their side of the story in music, things might turn around.
‘I’m not saying continue on with the same old fight. I’m saying continue on, but this time light the way for people.’
‘Praise the Lord, hallelujah!’ Sam said in a Nashville accent. ‘You ought to go on one of them big American happy-clappy religious TV shows. You’d be rolling in greenbacks the way you’re talking!’
‘Sam,’ said Rod, toning him down, ‘Emily’s right. It’s all about finding the positive spin, and I guess when you’re in the middle of something you tend to lose sight of the good stuff. I was like that for a long time after your mother died.’
Sam and Emily looked at their father’s lined face in shock. He never talked about their mother. They sat in silence. He went on.
‘Then I started to see the blessings she’d left behind. In you.’ His blue eyes fell on Emily and then on Sam.
‘It was actually at this hut, the first time you’d both come mustering on an overnighter. Remember? Your first night out here?’
Emily and Sam nodded. How could they forget? They’d ridden their ponies for hours on end, too excited to complain of cramps, rubbed calves from the stirrup leathers or freezing hands. Exhilarated to know they would be sleeping in a hut tucked away in the hollow of a massive mountain. Emily tried to recall how old she had been. Sam was at least five so she must have been almost seven. Her father had been swamped by a black cloud of grief before that time, until something in his mind lifted and cleared, like fog on a moonlit night.
‘It was that night,’ he said, ‘around this campfire, with you sleeping in your little bed rolls and your ponies tethered to that very same tree over there, that I realised Susie was still here with us. I realised it was up to me to see the good, not the bad. That’s when I knew I could keep going, no matter what.’
He tossed the remains of his tea into the fire. The family sat in silence, save for the hiss of the tea fizzing on the hot stones of the campfire.
Emily flung off her hat and moved over to hug her father. Flo sm
eared a tear over her cheek and patted Rod on his leg.
‘Geez,’ she said. ‘Will you look at us? Talk about Days of Our Lives on the Dargo High Plains.’
Emily laughed, feeling the moment slide into history. But it lingered with them all. It was an ending, but it was also a new beginning.
Twenty-six
Two days later on top of the Dargo High Plains, in the blue hue of pre-dawn, Emily dropped the rails of the old chock and log yard to let the cattle out. They were beginning the last drove on the steep winding road that fell southward to Dargo. Rousie at the lead steadied the cattle as they made a rush for the long roadside grasses. They knew it was home time and were keen to begin their walk to the warmer climes on the lowlands. They set off at a cracking pace and Rousie, along with Sam on his brumby, worked hard to hold them up and get their heads down to settle them.
There were three hundred head of cattle, with a further two hundred and fifty of Bob’s to collect from a holding yard on a lower ridgeline of the cattle run. Flo had the cattle in hand for Bob, who had rung to say he wouldn’t be there for the muster, nor the drove. The family had taken the news with a collective roll of the eyes. It was typical Bob.
Once the herd was settled, Rod called out from his horse, ‘Sam and Flo, you take the front. Em and I will take the back.’
‘As long as we can swap,’ Sam said. ‘Flo will want to yak all the time and I need to compose a few songs.’
‘You’re here for droving not composing,’ Flo said.
‘And you’re here for droving not yakking,’ Sam said.
‘You cheeky little sod!’
‘We’re all supposed to be in Emily’s positive happy-land. Remember?’ Sam teased.
The family tactic of thinking positive had started out as a joke but it had kept them buoyant during the muster as they’d gathered and yarded the cattle across the mountainside.
‘Fine,’ said Flo crossly.
‘Fine,’ said Sam, but each had a smirk on their face as they rode away to the lead of the mob. Useless watched his mistress go, then snuck into the back of the horsefloat near the yards, in the hope of snoozing there for the day. Soon, though, Flo’s deep voice bellowed out, ‘Useless!’
The Cattleman's Daughter Page 20