‘This is a flash smoko spot and I get a choice of what to drink,’ Luke said with a smile.
‘You could have Milo too, but there’s only one sachet so you’ll have to share it with me.’
‘I don’t mind sharing with you,’ he said invitingly.
Emily lifted her head and looked into Luke’s eyes. It was a moment when she knew she could’ve leaned over and kissed him. But she wanted to savour this. To test him a little. She quickly poured him a drink and passed it to him.
‘Thanks.’ Emily could feel his frustration, the desire still leashed. Now she could tell he wanted her. Now she knew she wanted him. It was time to have some fun. To let Luke in.
She kicked off her boots, pulled off her socks and stood suddenly, unbuckling her jeans and whipping them down to her ankles.
‘What are you doing?’ Luke said, looking up with a mix of delight and confusion on his face at the sight of her tanned bare legs.
‘It’s tickling time.’
‘Tickling time? I didn’t know you were into fetishes,’ he said with a grin.
‘The trout,’ Emily said, pulling her shirt down over her loud green underpants.
‘Isn’t that illegal?’ Luke stood and took his boots and jeans off too. ‘It’s out of season. You’ll need a fishing licence and you’re not using the right equipment. You’re just heading for trouble, young lady.’
‘You’ll have to arrest me,’ Emily said, wading into the stream.
‘Only if I can frisk you again first.’
It sparked a memory of Wonnangatta, and their first kiss, in both of them. She smiled at Luke as he followed her to the mountain stream. Emily bent down, placing her hands deep under the water. Her fingertips felt about on the unseen rocks below the surface until she found what she was searching for. Expertly she soon had a trout gathered up in her hands. As she lifted it in the air its silver, spotted body glistened in the sunlight.
‘Got him!’ Luke said, smiling at her.
‘Got her, you mean.’
‘What are you going to do now? Eat her?’
Emily shook her head. ‘Nah. Set her free.’ Emily gently placed the trout back down into the darkness of the rocky ledge. ‘Put her back where she belongs.’
‘She’s like you,’ said Luke, turning to face Emily as they stood thigh-deep in the cold mountain stream. ‘You belong here.’ He took her hands and held them both, then leaned towards her and gently, cautiously, pressed a soft kiss to her lips. His mouth hovered near hers, waiting for her to return the kiss.
Emily answered by moving close, pressing her body to his, kissing him deeply. The relief of touching him again was phenomenal. Arcs of electricity sparked between them as they ran their hands over each other. Breathless, Emily led Luke back up onto the mossy bank.
They lay next to each other, the earthy smell of life rising up around them. Luke drank her in with his hands and mouth. He pulled her shirt from her and her singlet and expertly unclipped her bra. Then with sunshine on her skin, he kissed her neck, her breasts, moving his mouth down over her stomach.
‘Mmm. Plough my patch, eh?’ he said from where he lay, running a finger along the elastic of her undies playfully.
‘I thought, you being a wheatbelt boy, that’d crank your tractor.’
‘You did, did you?’
Emily bit her bottom lip and nodded.
‘I’m not into ploughing. It’s not so good for the soil over the long term,’ Luke said, slowly, tantalisingly easing her underpants down over her curvaceous, firm hips. ‘I prefer direct drilling.’
‘Direct drilling, eh? I don’t mind a bit of direct drilling myself,’ Emily said, running her fingers through his hair and looking skyward to the blue.
‘Do you now?’ continued Luke as he began to draw her knickers down. ‘I find direct drilling is gentler, slower, and lasts much, much longer.’ As he slowly delivered each word he punctuated it with a kiss to her thighs, her belly and then beyond. Emily arched with pleasure at his deft, practised touch. Never had she felt a man perform so expertly with such assurance. The quickness of his fingers, the dance of his tongue on her, the confidence in his moves. He sent her heavenward on a wave of pleasure to the very last gasp.
He came to lie on top of her, and continued kissing her. Emily, a dreamy smile on her face, ran her fingernails gently up and over his back beneath his T-shirt. She nuzzled in his neck and pulled him down onto her. She wanted him close, inside her. She dragged his T-shirt over his head and the press of their naked torsos, skin on skin, sent them on a new surge of desire. Luke pushed into her and together they bucked against each other, the pungent smell of the mossy bank releasing perfumes into the ether.
They were lost now. In each other. In the landscape. They rolled over so that Emily sat astride Luke. He was the one lying back now. She was the rider. Luke, deep within her, Emily moved as if at a gallop. Luke, teeth gritted, eyes half-closed, grabbed at her beautiful hips and urged her onwards. As they both came in waves he reached up to her breasts and cupped them, then Emily fell forward, her hair brushing his face as they breathed and kissed and kissed and breathed.
‘I’ll always remember this special place,’ Luke whispered.
‘If you think this place is special, wait till I show you Mayford one day.’
It was getting late by the time Luke and Emily made it back to the homestead. Their faces were flushed from the heat of the day, their races over plains, the laughter that had spilled up constantly from them as they bantered, flirted and joked.
She left Luke to rub down the horses in the stables and ran inside to ring Evie to apologise for being late in collecting Tilly and Meg. When she picked up the phone there was a message waiting for her, and Evie’s kindly voice came over the line.
‘No need to get the girls,’ she said. ‘They begged me to stay for a sleepover at Auntie Bridie’s. We’ll see you back on the plains at my house tomorrow afternoon. No hurry, my darling girl. You enjoy the solitude.’
The solitude, Emily thought, smiling. She wondered if Luke would stay.
That night, Luke and Emily moved about the kitchen as if they had belonged in each other’s company for an age. There were no inhibitions anymore. No off-limit topics. Emily spoke of the effects of the bans, and Luke of the adjustments he’d had to make within the job. He sketched out his family situation. And he spoke of Cassy. Emily told him about Clancy.
They kissed in front of the open fire in the lounge room and made love there again. Snuggled up naked beneath a blanket, they lay in front of the fire, Emily flicking through the old photo albums and telling stories of life on the high plains. At one point, Emily stopped mid-sentence to find Luke gazing at her, gently brushing the hair from her face.
‘You are so beautiful.’
‘And so are you,’ she said.
They kissed again and then, holding hands, walked down the hallway to the bedroom. She pulled him down onto the cattleman’s bed, where they loved and tasted each other again and again throughout the night.
The next day they rode out together again. A ride out on a mountain ridge. Making love in a cattleman’s hut. A picnic by a stream. Then, as the sun sank beneath the line of the snowgums, Luke gathered Emily up in a hug and gave her one long kiss goodbye.
Watching him drive away down the mountainside, Emily felt like he was crossing back over that divide, the one that would see him back in his Parks uniform and on the job on Monday morning, while she returned to her life as a mother and a cattleman, set apart on the mountainside.
Thirty-six
For the following week, Emily wasn’t sure if she was lethargic from the unseasonal heat or from love. Her thoughts constantly ran to Luke and her body felt listless and languid. The mere recollection of their lovemaking caused her to flop down on the nearest chair or log and sigh. Never had she been so physically and mentally affected by a man. She wondered how on earth she’d cope with her girls’ energy and the work she had in front of her, wanting instead to just
wallow in the blissful memory of Luke.
She’d only talked to him once since their weekend together. He’d phoned to say he’d been called into Heyfield for a week of fire training. His conversation was brief and to the point, he was in a rush, but Emily could hear the excitement in his voice. As she set down the phone she knew the feelings were mutual.
Now, though, as she thought of Luke, she wondered where he’d be. Today was going to be bad for fire. She could tell by the way the summer storms rolled past the homestead, cracking fiercely with thunder, then sparking with lightning across the purple mountaintops. No rain followed to quench the storms and dowse the lightning. Instead the wind was warm and gusty and already the day was taking on an eerie hazy feel. The bush was limp after days and days of heat. Luke would have to bypass fire training on a day like today, Emily thought, and would be in for the real thing – on a fire crew.
With the dry electrical storms and the air heavy with heat, there would be no more time to dwell on Luke. Emily called Tilly and Meg over from where they played on a gum-bough swing near the house.
‘There’s going to be fires about,’ she said, trying to keep her voice light. ‘So I’m going to send you down the mountain to Evie while I get the cattle closer to the yards. Grandad Rod and Auntie Flo will pick you up.’
The girls nodded solemnly. They knew not to argue with their mother when it came to talk of fire. All their relatives were part of the volunteer fire crew and they had heard the serious grown-up talk about fires their whole lives.
Here at the high-plains homestead, the ute had the firefighting unit on it with the boxy water tank, as it did every summer. The girls had been helping their mother rake leaves and clear tree branches and bark away from the house for weeks. They’d even been allowed to tether their ponies to the verandah posts, to keep the grass extra short round the house.
Over the winter, Emily had done a good job of reducing the fuel load around the homestead as she burnt many of the loose sticks and bark in the house fire. But snowgums were messy trees, and seemed to toss an endless scattering of bark and branches down come summer and spring, so that the work renewed itself each day.
‘Your great-grandparents always said, “Firefighting is done in the spring and autumn months”,’ she told the girls. ‘No use doing it in the summer. It’s too late then.’
She looked out across the treeline to the mountain. It would be too late for most of the government country. She thought with frustration of the constant pleading by the local fire crews to get the all-clear from the Melbourne authorities for fuel-reduction burns in the autumn. But they were either out of money in the budget or the ideal weather conditions for burn-offs had passed by the time they were organised in the head offices. The people living in the mountains did the best they could on their own country, but lived nervously, knowing that the fuel loads on the government-run lands and investment-scheme plantations around them were dangerously high.
Now Emily could see from the weather she’d have to put their own family fire plan into place, hoping she’d done enough to protect the homestead. But she felt that sinking feeling again when she considered that none of the run country’s new spring growth had been kept in check by grazing this year since the government cattle bans.
Hundreds of acres of spring snowgrasses would now be tinder dry. The weeds too, once kept down by the cattle, would also be shoulder high and whispering their dry stalks and seed heads together, calling forth a fire. It was country that couldn’t handle hot fires. She worried for it. But for now she must worry first about her girls and getting them out to Evie’s and then to the lowlands at Dargo. She went inside to phone her dad at Tranquillity.
‘I don’t like the look of it,’ Rod said, gazing out from the homestead towards the ridges of the Dargo High Plains. There, great leaping forks radiated down from the heavens and clouds tumbled blackly to the north. Behind him, the screen door banged as another gust channelled cool air into the hot belly of the house.
‘I’m taking Meg and Tilly to Evie’s now,’ Emily said. ‘Could one of you pick them up and run them down to Bridie and Sam in Dargo? And can Flo bring the stock truck and trailer up for the cattle while I go muster the cows?’ She swallowed nervously, knowing there was so much work to do. ‘We’d better get everything out of here, Dad, before we get called away to another fire. It’s not looking good.’
‘They’ve already issued a high alert and we’re all on standby here. The forecasters got it so wrong, so wrong,’ Rod said.
From the weather patterns, Emily and Rod knew they’d be busy in the coming days as volunteer firefighters. It was a frustrating job as it often took them away from their own land and families, but if they could make sure their cattle were in Dargo along with the girls, they would at least be freer to fight fires in other regions.
All the locals knew that if fires threatened, the government would spend millions and call in the army for heavy equipment and manpower to protect assets like the city’s water catchment, the ski fields, roads, and power and communication infrastructure. They’d ship in crews from interstate and overseas, setting up entire tent cities. Hotshots from the USA, men from Canada, teams from New Zealand. Fire was big business if it affected big business. But if it was just wilderness that was under threat, or a few private houses, like their own homestead on the plains, the firefighting was mostly left up to the locals.
Emily could hear lightning cracks over the line.
‘I’d better go, Dad. See you soon.’
‘You take care, you hear?’
Rod Flanaghan put down the receiver and jumped as thunder suddenly boomed, loud as a cannon, above the house. He stepped onto the verandah to watch the rain arrive, slowly at first in giant lazy drops that landed, splat, on the green garden outside. Then it began to teem down, steam rising up from the hides of the bulls that stood in the house paddock, listless and uncomfortable in the summer heat.
Then, as quickly as it had come, the storm passed. The cold air pockets moved on and the wind again felt like a fan heater on high. Rod looked up and saw what he had expected. Thin coils of smoke were drifting up in the mountains already as the fires from the lightning took hold.
He shook his head, fear settling in the pit of his stomach. Everyone round here knew the government land had a fuel load on it so high that an inferno was on its way. Rod tried to count the decades since the area had been burned.
He cursed the department policy to put out every lightning strike, instead of allowing some naturally lit fires in the cooler months to trickle along harmlessly and burn away the vegetation that created such a volatile environment come the summertime. His daughter was up in that.
As he ran outside to find Flo and get the stock truck and trailer on the road, all he could think of were the stories his father had told him of the ’39 fires, when eighty or so people died. His father had told him how the stables on the high plains had almost burned, a dog escaping when the rope he was tied with smouldered right through. Three times the family had managed to save the homestead and yards. But in that ’39 fire seven hundred Flanaghan cattle had perished, the fat in them sizzling to white ash.
Rod had fought many fires, although never a giant monster like the one of ’39. But today he knew something massive was on its way. In their inability to truly see and read this land, whitefellas had been laying the trail for this fire for decades. And now, Rod Flanaghan shuddered, they would all have to pay.
Thirty-seven
It felt like an age to Emily as they wound down the mountain bends to Evie’s cottage. There was so much to do in such a short time, and as the day got hotter, the winds stronger and the haze thicker, Emily felt fear driving her forward, faster and faster. On the radio the callers’ fire reports were becoming increasingly urgent.
She was relieved when she at last saw Evie, waving from behind the stone wall of her lush garden. There was less haze on this northern side of the mountain and, with the shady greenery, the place seemed unli
kely ever to burn. Emily tooted the horn and watched as Jesus Christ went nuts, barking and chasing his tail in manic circles. Leaving the ute to idle, Emily leapt out, helping the girls with their bags.
Meg and Tilly hugged Evie, and Emily gave her a quick kiss on the cheek.
‘Thanks so much for minding them.’
‘My pleasure, my dear. They’ll be safe here for the time being.’
‘Dad should be about three hours getting the cattle, then he or Flo will collect them. I’ll be along after with the horses.’
‘Right you are.’
‘Are you going to come down with us when we leave? I don’t reckon it’s a day to be staying behind up here,’ Emily said, looking to the smoke haze now spreading out over the landscape to the west.
‘Try moving me,’ Evie said.
‘But —’
‘I’m fine, love,’ she said. ‘I’ve done all I can to prepare.’
‘We’ll check you on the way down,’ Emily said. ‘If the fire’s heading our way, I’ll chuck you in the stock truck with the other stubborn cows and make you come, if I have to.’
Normally Evie would’ve laughed along with Emily at this point, but she seemed distant, almost dreamy.
‘You sure you’re okay?’ Emily asked again.
Evie nodded and her smile returned. ‘I’m fine, really I am. You just go, and know your girls are safe with me.’
‘Thanks,’ said Emily, giving Evie a hug. ‘I’d better run. Got cows to get in.’
‘You’ll need to run with that at your back,’ she said, looking up towards the smoke, ‘but God will carry you along the way.’ Evie raised a hand to Emily’s cheek. For the first time Emily noticed a tremor in Evie’s touch. ‘Goodbye, dear.’
‘See you soon!’
Emily gathered both her girls to her and kissed them.
‘You help Evie out, okay? Grandad will be along soon. And I won’t be far behind with the horses in the float.’
The Cattleman's Daughter Page 28