The Cattleman's Daughter

by Rachael Treasure

  Her fingers were numb with cold as she fumbled around in the dark for the heavy horse rugs. She shook the imagined spiders from them and took them to the stable to heave on the horses’ backs. Each snorted contentedly and got down to the business of chewing their chaff. As Emily shut the stable door, she caught a flash of another woman’s hand on the latch. She felt the energy of the touch.

  ‘Emily,’ she said aloud. She could feel her presence there in the darkness of the big old sheds. Fear zinged through her. Wind railed, far up in the treetops, but down here on the ground, it was dead still, giving the bush an eerie feel. Frogs croaked down by the well and the click of branches in the trees was all about her.

  A sudden loud tap of a branch startled Emily and she whirled about as if there was something there in the darkness. A wild dog? A hunter? A ghost? The night of the phantom horses in the Wonnangatta still haunted her. She felt panic rise in her chest.

  Control your thoughts, she told herself. Her great-great-grandmother had spent many nights in charge alone with her eleven children while her husband went off in search of gold in those cold, lean years. How brave and tough she must’ve been to have created a welcoming home on top of an isolated and sometimes hostile mountain.

  Looking into the blackness of the bush, Emily realised that, with time, she would no longer flinch at the eerie sounds of the night. It would become part of her. But right now she felt daunted. She had the sudden urge to rush inside and huddle close to Meg and Tilly.

  She summoned her courage and forced a smile to her face. She had wanted this, ever since the accident. She was here at last. Blissfully alone, with the energies of her forebears floating all about in this precious, most beautiful place. The wind whipped up again and Emily heard a snowgum limb crack and fall. She pulled her hat down low, tilted her head to the wind and made her way back over to the house.

  The warmth from the kitchen didn’t extend to the bedrooms, so when she checked the girls they were still covered by old featherdown quilts, and their beanies were jammed on their heads. In the candlelight, the gentle fog of their breath came steadily, in and out, in the icy air. Emily agonised again about her decision to bring them here, to a place so cold and remote. Was she doing the right thing? Could she and the girls remain here the whole winter? This first night she doubted it, but then she thought of Evie and the comfort of knowing she was nearby on the mountain.

  On their arrival, late in the dark, they found that Evie had left the fire smouldering, a giant new candle alight, freshly baked bread on the table and a pot of wallaby stew made tastier with bacon warming on the stove. Evie had also stocked the big old meat safe with spuds, onions, carrots, swedes, flour, rice, apples and pasta and filled the cupboards with tins. Emily had also brought food, so she knew that if they were snowed in, there’d be plenty of rations. Evie had left a note: Time heals and so do good thoughts. Enjoy!

  Emily sent Evie a silent thank you in the night for her care. Now she fell heavily into bed and eventually drifted into a fitful sleep, wakened throughout the night by the ghoulish wind moaning about the homestead.

  ‘What have I done?’ she said aloud in the darkness in the dead of night, feeling utterly lost.

  In the morning, Emily woke to complete silence, the wind blown out and gone. She lifted the blinds and gasped at the fairytale landscape before her. The world was white with snow, soft and peaceful. She leapt out of bed. Her clothes felt damp, even icy, when she pulled them on. She hurried to cajole the woodstove alight and set Meg and Tilly’s clothes out to warm.

  When she went to the toilet, she realised the pipes would be frozen and the water had been drained from the cistern. Flo had warned her she’d have to bucket water from the well to flush the toilet, and to keep it empty so the porcelain didn’t freeze and crack. The seat was so cold it burned the backs of her legs like a freezebrand. Her feet and nose stung from cold. When she went to make tea in the icy kitchen, she realised there was no running water. She’d have to scoop up buckets of snow for the stovetop. Emily laughed, realising she had a lot to learn.

  Heading outside with a collection of saucepans, she enjoyed the crunch of snow underfoot. She shooed Rousie away from where she gathered the snow. It seemed to fall deepest on the eastern side of the woodshed, but all about her was a snow-laden landscape. The calls of crows and currawongs sounded out from the snowgums. Rousie barked at the excitement of this cold, strange, white world and his bark echoed through the bush.

  When she went back inside, the kitchen felt cheerier, the fire now lively and spilling warmth into the room. She heard Tilly and Meg talking in their beds. Emily rushed into their darkened room and whipped up the blind.

  ‘Look! Snow!’

  The girls shrieked and jumped up to dress. Outside, they ran about and tossed snowballs in the air, which Rousie leapt and snapped at with a Tassie-devil clack of teeth. They built snowmen, using sticks for arms, gumleaves for smiles and gumnuts for eyes. Soon, though, Emily cajoled them into leaving the snow-family. There was work to do. In the stables she handed a hay fork to Tilly and pushed a wheelbarrow into the stall. Emily let both horses and ponies out into the day yard. The horses slung their heads down low and snorted at the snow. Bonus pawed the ground, then trotted around the powdered paddock. Emily took in how the drifts settled on the poa grasses and the horizontal limbs of the trees. The world was soft and crisp. It was paradise. But so, so cold!

  By the time Emily had fully unpacked the ute, the sun was arcing up over the tree-line and the gum boughs were pelting down sludges of ice whenever the wind blew, making a sound like hail.

  The roofs of the homestead and stables, glaringly white, were now beginning to reveal the grey of the corrugated iron beneath as the snow melted, pouring down from the roof and spilling onto the ground. Small holes had been punched in the tin to allow water into the guttering beneath it, but most of the melt fell like rain from the tin. As the sun warmed the paddocks, the grass began to reappear and the world turned from black and white to full colour again.

  They traipsed inside, Emily stripping the wet clothes from the girls. They shivered, their feet and fingers red raw from the cold, stinging. Meg cried and Tilly whinged, but Emily soon had them huddled by the fire, dressed in fresh dry clothes and content. She set the mountain of wet clothing to hang beside the fire, then cooked a bacon and egg brunch to warm them. As the girls ate, Emily sat with a cuppa and began to make a list.

  Over several generations, the place had begun to look tired. For the past twenty years, the family’s energies had been focused on attending a constant round of meetings in towns and in Melbourne with an ever-changing roster of sometimes insipid, sometimes hostile government workers, all in order to keep their grazing runs.

  The Flanaghans had never been landed gentry. Their enterprise had been built on brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers all working together as one unit. There may have been hired help now and then, but most of the work they did themselves. One legacy of the constant battle with bureaucracy was that time was always in short supply. The high-plains base had suffered. Jobs started were rarely finished.

  Emily saw these next months as her chance to put things right. She was the custodian of this place now. The woman in her dreams had shown her that. All the huts and dwellings, crafted by hand by her forebears, would slump into the soil if she didn’t look after them. She would still care for this place, even if she didn’t have cattle. The government be damned!

  She picked up a pen and began to write a list.

  Fix Block Paddock fence

  Rebuild Lanky’s corner strainer

  Clad northern stable wall

  Nail loose tin on woodshed

  Re-swing door in stable …

  And so it began. A blueprint for the winter days ahead. The jobs would be crammed in around the labour required to run the home. There was still mothering to be done, Tilly’s home-school lessons, the cooking, cleaning, firewood to be fetched and animals to be tended to.

 
Many of her domestic duties were not so different to those she’d had in suburban Brigalow. But up here, the work took on a whole new meaning. It was linked to women of the past, who had raised children here. She sensed them around her now. She felt their grief at losing children to horse accidents and illness. She felt their pride as they watched their children thrive and grow into fit and competent adults. She felt their mixed emotions when their children moved away to have families of their own.

  All that was in front of her with her own girls. Always, in the Flanaghan brood, there’d been one or two children who loved the place so much they put their roots down here, despite the harshness of the climate and the landscape. Emily knew, now, she was one of them. The one who simply had to remain in this wild beauty. She couldn’t tell yet, but Meg or Tilly might have it in them, too. This self-imposed exile, she reasoned, could just be the making of them.

  Or the breaking of them. As the days wore on, cabin fever set in. Emily was tested to the limits by her girls. They were good kids, but their endless banter began to get on her nerves in the tiny rooms. She found herself saying over and over, ‘Not so loud!’

  There was no sending the girls off to their bedrooms to play. It was just too cold. So they all squashed into the kitchen and annoyed each other.

  Meg was at first fascinated by the candles on the table and was always blowing at them, making the flames flicker and waver. Tilly’s irritating habit was to pick at the wax, sometimes spilling it hot onto the table surface.

  ‘Ow, ow, ow,’ she’d say, flicking her hands. Emily would clench a scream inside herself, trying as best she could to humour them to bed early, rather than hunt them, just to give herself some space.

  When they did at last fall asleep, Emily would sit down to a book, only to find dissatisfaction brewing in her again. She glanced up to the gas mantel above her that constantly hissed like a pot simmering on a stove. Reading beneath that noisy, dim light was not as pleasurable as reading in a quiet, warm, modern, brightly lit home. She told herself not to be so fussy.

  She had many, many more luxuries than the Emily long before her, who had lived in a two-roomed hut on the King’s Spur. It made Emily realise how spoiled she had been in the suburbs, with food at the store and light and heat at the flick of a switch and running water at the turn of a tap.

  She struggled with the ever-present dull smell of smoke. It was in her hair, on her clothes, in the house. The fires in the kitchen woodstove and the dining room had to be kept going at all times or the house became an iceblock. Socked feet still froze on the cold linoleum, so they had to wear slippers always, and some nights Emily sat on the couch in the dining room in two jackets, dozing off from exhaustion but unwilling to move away from the fire.

  She dressed and undressed as quickly as possible, and never was it warm enough to lie naked between the sheets. In that big, icy cold bed, she longed for another body to warm her. To have Luke beside her, naked. Instead, she was covered neck-to-toe in thermal underwear, pyjamas, socks and even a beanie. There was no shower and the cold bathroom only had a bath, the water heated in a small wood furnace. Baths were now once a week, so Emily only vaguely knew she was getting fitter and leaner from the constant work of carting wood from the shed and water from the well. In bed now she ran her hands under her clothing, feeling her belly firmer, her waist more slender.

  ‘Ahh, ah ah, thinking about you naked,’ she sang in her best Sunny Cowgirls voice. She had another flashback of Luke and her at the river. All the quashed desires that lingered deep within her came rushing to the surface. A longing came over her so powerfully she thought she would suffocate if she couldn’t touch him again. She could visualise Luke here in this very bed, lying with her, both of them naked. She exhaled and ran her hands gently over her skin beneath her pyjamas, giving herself goosebumps, feeling pleasure rise.

  She began to sing again. ‘… and I’m sweating from head to toe just from dreaming ’bout that shirt of yours on my bedroom floor. Undressing you with my eyes – tell me, baby, do you read the signs. Oh-oh-oh, thinking about you naked.’

  Emily recalled the sensation of Luke’s body under her fingertips. The way she’d slipped her hand down his belly and been delighted by the firmness of him there. How she longed to experience the weight of him pressed against her, the skin on their bodies touching, feeling the electricity between them. Their breath coming fast from passion. It had been so different with Clancy. Luke’s lovemaking was generous, his moves so in line with the needs of a woman.

  ‘Oh and here you come, stirring naughty thoughts around this head of mine. Leave me breathless, restless, you do. Oh honey if you only knew. Oh, oh, thinking about you naked …’ she sang.

  Then Emily sighed. She grabbed a pillow and shoved it over her head. She had to stop thinking like this!

  She exhaled and forced herself to picture Bert Newton. Or Dame Edna. She began to sing a medley of Rolf Harris songs. Anything to shake Luke from her mind. But there he was again, in her mind’s eye, lying on a mossy riverbank, kissing her. Naked. His buttocks moving rhythmically under her hands as he pushed into her.

  ‘Arrgh!’ she cried out in frustration. She began to recite nursery rhymes, and an hour after she’d gone to bed, she finally found sleep.

  Deep in the night, the curtains stirred, but no window was open and there was no breeze outside. Emily was not awake to see, but as something gentle drifted by, only Rousie lifted his head from where he lay by the fire and flopped his tail down once in a lazy wag.

  Thirty

  After weeks of living in snow, the horses and ponies now picked their way through the rocky, icy-white landscape with surefooted certainty. Emily, Tilly and Meg rode out most days on adventures across the mountains. On this day, the fog had lifted early, leaving them with relatively warm, settled weather.

  Emily was keen to teach the kids all she knew of the mountains and today she had a hunch the roads from Dargo would be closed after such a heavy overnight fall. Today she knew she wouldn’t be caught by the rangers taking Rousie onto Park land. They were on their way to the Long Spur, where Emily would show the girls one of the conservation reserves their great-grandparents had established.

  As they trotted over the snowplains, it was a joy for Emily to see Meg and Tilly’s faces bright with exhilaration. The little ponies looked comical, like Thelwell cartoons, leaping the tufts of grasses and dodging rocks, while her girls stuck to their backs with ease. There had been a couple of spills in the early days, but the soft cover of snow over spongy snowgrass had broken any falls, so that now, young though they were, Tilly and Meg were confident and happy to ride for hours at a time.

  In the natural snowgrass clearings, they paused to look to the high mountain tops, watching clouds race towards them in great tumbling walls that would eventually obliterate the views. Some days were perfectly still, others perfectly wild, an icy wind whipping the horses’ tails in a frenzy, wrenching hats from their heads. Most days were a mix of both heaven and hell, the weather forever changing and changing fast.

  They rode with scarves about their faces to stop the icy sting of the freezing air entering their lungs. Emily carried a backpack of food and, tied to her saddle and to Bonus’s pack saddle, were her cattleman tools.

  Emily was training the young gelding as a packhorse. He might as well be versatile. She had strapped her grandfather’s old saddle-packs to him, weighted evenly either side. Inside them she stored a chainsaw – not so big as to be a real nuisance but large enough to slice through the limbs of trees that had fallen across the fencelines. She also stored loops of high-tensile wire, some fencing pliers, staples, a hammer, a hatchet, a small shovel and some strainers. Bonus was a steady-minded horse and had taken to his job well, trailing Snowgum happily on the end of a lead rope. If the gear caught on a tree, he wouldn’t spook. He’d plant his feet and wait patiently for Emily to come and unhitch him. Despite him being a constant reminder of Luke, Emily was beginning to love the horse as they journeyed togeth
er on the snow-topped mountains.

  Some of the fencelines Emily checked as she rode were those that separated the Flanaghans’ own small acreage of private land, but most of the fences ran between paddocks that were now classed on a map as national park. A large portion of the land had never been fenced so there was some work to be done if Emily and her family were to continue to run a small token herd up on the home paddocks and state forest areas of the now diminished and divided station.

  When they reached the Long Spur track, Emily saw that snow had settled quite deeply. She pointed out the Mount Hotham and Dinner Plain ski-fields on the ridgeline opposite to the girls. Tiny black dots of skiers, like ants, weaving this way and that down the mountainside, surfing the white snow drifts. At the end of their skiing day, the holiday makers would head to the showers, the bars, the restaurants and the bands, or even flick on the TV or surf the internet for entertainment.

  Emily found it amazing to think she could see such sophisticated ‘civilisation’ from where she stood. The stillness here was in stark contrast to the busy, self-obsessed and distracting buzz of the ski-fields.

  Here she sat on her horse with her daughters in land that was still beautiful after one hundred and fifty years of controlled cattle grazing. This spur was one of her favourite places and a particularly lovely lunch stop when mustering, apart from the grating view of the ever-expanding ski villages and communication and electricity towers opposite.

  The Long Spur ran alongside a stunning cliff that dropped into a massive valley of bush below called Devil’s Hollow. Emily sat trying to get her head around the fact that her family and their stock were banned from here. How could that be, when on the opposite mountain thousands of skiers were welcome to run riot over the landscape?

  Emily had nothing against the skiers, but she did feel enraged by the developers who profited from the landscape in such a way. As she watched the swarms of people skiing over the mountainside and the sunlight reflecting off the ski villas that poured sewerage out into septics that seeped down the mountainside, the government decision to ban the cattlemen, while encouraging the developers, sat heavily with her.