As Emily climbed into the ute she smiled to see Evie’s arms around Meg and Tilly’s shoulders as if she was draping her wings over them. She truly was an angel. On impulse Emily wound the window down and yelled, ‘I love you, Evie!’
Frail on the wind, came Evie’s reply, ‘And I love you, my girl.’ Then she was gone, out of sight, as Emily roared the ute away around the bend.
Emily rushed inside the homestead and gathered up the boxes of precious things they had already packed during long hot nights that week. She took down the old family photographs that had been on the walls for years and wrapped them in a blanket, the face of old Emily staring up at her from one picture with her lively dark eyes.
‘I know,’ Emily said to the photograph. ‘I know you’re watching me and I’ll be careful.’
Emily had been through the fire drill several times before during scorching summers like this one. She knew the procedure and moved like clockwork. She and Sam had done it many times as kids. All the Flanaghans were fire-aware. Ever since the early nineteen hundreds, when the government had restricted the family from burning, they had tried to come up with other ways to protect themselves should a fire break out.
After the fierce ’39 fires, the Flanaghans had built a fire bunker near the homestead. It was still there and the family checked and restocked it every year. Emily’s grandfather had called it their ‘life insurance policy’ and Emily knew it was one of several bunkers he’d built on the mountain, such was his conviction that a raging hot fire would one day come.
Emily glanced at her watch as she loaded the boxes and some old handmade furniture onto the ute and drove it quickly to the bunker.
Inside in the gloom she shone the torch about. It was damp and cool in there. Rousie flopped down on the dirt floor as if to say, this is the place to stay. She set the boxes down and whistled Rousie out, sealing the bunker up behind them. As she did, she imagined what it would be like to actually use it one day. She and Sam had only ever gone in there to tell ghost stories and scare themselves witless when they were kids. She shivered at the thought of being in there while a fire raced overhead.
At the homestead, she disconnected the gas and dragged the canisters away from the buildings. She checked a small pump at the water tank and hooked it to a hose that ran up onto the roof.
After climbing a ladder, she quickly plugged the gutters with rags, her boots screeching on the tin. She checked that the line leading to the roof sprinklers was still nailed securely to the roof.
From the peak of the homestead, she looked around at the beautiful high plains trees and the home meadows, grazed short over the summer by the horses. The snowgums were listless from heat, stirred occasionally by erratic blasts of hot wind. She loved this place and would hate to see it burn, but it wasn’t the first time the Flanaghans had faced the destruction of fire and Emily knew it was all part of choosing to build a house in such a place.
Suddenly the wind dropped. Emily stood for a moment on the roof, staring up at the sun, which was now a sinister orange ball in the sky. As she did, she was sure she could hear the faint sound of a woman calling out. Old Emily? She shook her head. It was nothing, she told herself, nothing but the wind. She had to hurry. She climbed down the ladder.
In the shed she dragged out several big old dusty signs that were hand-painted in Flo’s sloping text. Emily propped one up next to the pump. The sign read: Hi CFA, If you make it this far, please start this pump. Then she set the other white signs along the drive. They had thick black arrows painted on them and they pointed to the water tank and pump. It was the family’s ‘Plan B’ and they hoped one day in a fire, it might work.
Back in the house Emily skolled a big glass of water, threw on a long-sleeved woollen shirt and ran to hitch the float onto the ute.
She paused, sticking her head inside the ute cab to listen to the radio as people keeping watch in the fire towers reported the locations of towering columns of smoke. It seemed the winds were fanning the fires away from them. Relieved, she continued on.
She jogged to the horse paddock to catch Snowgum. Bonus followed them into the yard, where she put the pack frame on him and strapped heavy water backpacks onto him. Ready to ride, she whistled Rousie to her as she swung up onto Snowgum. At the house the ponies whickered to them from the ends of their tethers and trotted in half-moons as they passed.
As she rode out towards the snowgrass plains, she could smell the smoke. Although it was barely past midday, the day was growing dark. She swallowed down her nerves and got on with the job of finding her cattle out on the runs.
On the Block Paddock, where the cattle had last been moved, Emily checked the two knapsacks hitched to either side of Bonus’s pack frame. The gelding took the weight well. He’d done plenty of packing over the winter, but his ears flicked nervously as he listened to the slosh of water following him with every step. At a trot, the sensation of the water moving its weight independently unsettled him. He shifted sideways and tossed his head.
Emily tried to soothe him, but when he continued carrying on, she said sternly, ‘If you don’t like it, mate, you’ll just have to lump it. This is an emergency!’ She tugged on his lead rope a little. He seemed to take in her gruff tone and sharp check as a message, and knuckled down to his job.
After trotting north for about half an hour, Emily found the cattle hiding in the shade of a thicket of snowgums, on the fringe of an open plain. The cows cast their ears forward at the sight of the rider and some ambled out curiously, sniffing the air, made nervous by the smoke. Emily sent Rousie out around them and followed his cast in a canter, leaping ditches and logs.
On the end of the lead, Bonus put in a couple of bucks as they travelled, not liking the weight and feel of the knapsacks, but after another growl from Emily, he settled again. Thankfully the straps on his pack had held. She knew they could waste no time. Emily soon had the cows and calves mobbed, but a quick head count told her it wasn’t the full one hundred and fifty. Emily grimaced.
‘Twenty-five short,’ she said. The open plain gave her a view to the east where the sky was clear, but to the west there was a wall of smoke. Heartened that the breeze had dropped, Emily decided to take the cattle she had back to the yards. Some was better than none and she might have time to search for more. The truck would still be half an hour away and the wind was fanning the fires away to the south-west in the direction of Wonnangatta.
At the yards, Emily bustled the cattle into the pen nearest the loading ramp. Around her, the day had turned to dusk and the wind was gusting every which way. Every now and then a blackened leaf spiralled down and landed on the ground, like confetti from hell. One leaf, alight, or an ember would spark a fire.
She remounted Snowgum. If she could just take one last look for the rest of the cattle, she reasoned, just one gallop across the plain, she might find the remaining cows and calves.
She had heard horror stories about how cattle fat burns hotter than trees, so that firefighters had discovered eerie white shadows cast on the ground, caused by the radiant heat of a burning beast. She just couldn’t leave her cattle to die like that. The sooner she found the cattle, the sooner she could get out of here. And then she’d be back in Dargo with her girls, shouting them a lemonade at the pub after this fiery day was done.
She swung Snowgum about, Bonus following at a canter, and rode away from the yards.
‘Find ’em, boy,’ she said to Rousie and he bounded on ahead, his nose to the wind, his eyes keen, despite the ever-thickening haze of smoke.
Thirty-eight
At the yards, Rod and Flo peered through the thick fog of smoke to find most of the cattle in the pen. There was no sign of Emily. To their horror they saw flames sparked by embers beyond the treeline beginning to chew up the grassy plain. They knew Emily would be searching for the remainder of the herd. Rod’s eyes watered from the smoke.
Surely he couldn’t have lost her again, he thought in anguish.
‘Emily!’ he screa
med to the empty bushland. Flo, her face set, got on with the business of loading cattle onto the double-decker truck and trailer.
‘Where is she?’ Rod said as Flo swung the inner door of the truck shut.
Flo looked out towards the blinding smoke-filled plain. ‘I dunno.’
Rod was furious. How could she do this? How could she leave him and her girls? How could they endure losing her again?
As time passed and they loaded as many of the herd as they could onto the truck, then the trailer, in a scramble, Flo began to see the mad roll of her brother’s panic-filled eyes. He looked about desperately, calling out Emily’s name over and over, climbing high onto the top rails of the cattle yards, bellowing until his throat ripped with pain. He had no means to look for his daughter. He had no way of finding her. He knew he should never have let her muster the cattle alone, but he had so wanted her to be able to step out from his shadow. He’d wanted her to see she was so much more than just a cattleman’s daughter. Rod cursed himself. Flo came over and tugged on his arm.
‘Rod!’ she screamed above the roar of the manic wind. ‘We have to get out of here!’
‘No, I won’t leave her!’
‘We have to get the girls out. We have to leave. Now!’
As Rod saw his sister’s terrified face, he began to pray. Over and over he prayed, the same way he had last summer as he sat outside the operating theatre of a Melbourne hospital, praying for the life of his daughter.
‘Rod,’ Flo said again, ‘she knows the country. She knows to go to Mayford. She’ll be fine once she gets down off the King’s Spur. It’s our Emily. She’ll survive. It’s her girls we have to worry about now.’
Rod nodded. Numb and mute, he clambered up into the truck while Flo let the remainder of the herd that wouldn’t fit on the truck out into the biggest, barest yard, in the hope they would survive. As Flo drove on towards Dargo at a madman’s pace to beat the fire front, she radioed through that Emily Flanaghan was missing. Her words jabbed urgently into the radio and each one pierced Rod like a knife.
Shaking, Flo turned to Rod. He was hunkered down in his seat. We can’t lose Emily, she thought. Not again! She began to feel the panic rise. Then Flo shook some sense back into herself. She had to comfort Rod.
‘Emily’s savvy. She’ll be right. I know she will. Any minute now and she’ll come riding through the trees on her fat horse and her gangly goofy dog and we’ll be on the whisky in the Dargo River Inn. After you’ve given her a proper flogging and then one from me to follow for scaring the crap out of us. Again!’
Glancing up from the steep winding mountain road, Flo was crushed to see her brother crying as his eyes searched the smoke-filled landscape in hopeless desperation. Flo jammed the gearstick into second as she took on the first of many bends down the mountainside, praying that Emily would find her way. Praying the fire wouldn’t beat them to the girls at Evie’s house.
Emily at last spotted a red hide in the trees in the distance. The cows were in the far-flung corner of the paddock. Emily swore. She’d already put far too much distance between her and the yards for her liking. The smell of smoke was now definitely a taste and even Snowgum was getting twitchy, throwing her head and jiggling her bit between her opened mouth. Her mood was infectious, and Bonus was sweating from nerves as well as the oppressive heat. But Emily couldn’t leave the cattle. She urged her horses on.
The cows and calves were stirry in the hot gusty wind, with the haze of smoke all around them and the sky so dark. It took Emily and Rousie a while to mob them.
So focused was she on the cows that it was a shock to glance up and see the tumble of smoke moving towards her. Emily realised the wind had swung.
The flames on the horizon came fast, gobbling up kangaroo and poa grasses in an instant, gnawing on the bleached skeletons of snow-fallen trees. In the distance, the fire was exploding, fizzing and whining like fireworks as it ignited the oil from green gum leaves. It consumed everything in its path. The fifty-degree temperatures created thermal eddies in the air, and burning bark and embers were twisted upwards in the sky.
Fire was now spotting all over the plains. The weather had turned and fire had come from out of the skies. Emily knew there was no way she could now drive the cattle into the wind that way, towards the yards.
She had to think quickly. A voice came into her head. Breathe slowly, regain your calm. Instantly, Emily thought of the gully to the north-east, which would take her to the King’s Spur and then on down to the Little Dargo to Mayford.
She knew fires burned more slowly downhill and the wind, if she was lucky, would push the main front beyond it. Mayford, she thought suddenly. It was the valley she’d seen in her dream at the time of her accident. The place where old Emily’s hut had stood before it was consumed by fire years before. Mayford, she thought again, where her grandfather’s fire bunker was and the big deep pond in the meandering river that was spring-fed and always full. She knew there was an island in that deep pond. She and Sam had swum to it as children. Mayford. Mayford. Mayford. It became like a mantra. If she and the cattle could get there, she knew they would survive.
Thirty-nine
On the Little Dargo River, as Luke set down his back-burning drip torch and reached into his vehicle for a bottle of water, he froze. A woman was on the radio repeating over and over that Emily Flanaghan was missing on the Dargo High Plains. Her voice was full of fear. Although the words were barely audible above the noise of two dozers, which were putting breaks in to protect Dargo, Luke was certain of what he heard.
He didn’t pause to tell his fellow VPP crew members where he was going. He jumped in the VPP vehicle and swung it about, driving straight for the High Plains Road through Dargo.
At the base of the mountain road a police car was parked with lights flashing, their reflection bouncing eerily off the smoke haze. The policeman was setting out signs saying the road was closed. A volunteer fire crew member was helping him.
‘Sorry, mate,’ the cop said. ‘It’s no go. Not even for rangers. The mountains are alight. It’s deadly up there.’
Luke got out of the vehicle.
‘But there’s a girl missing. Emily Flanaghan. We gotta get up there,’ Luke said urgently.
‘I know, mate,’ said the firefighter. ‘We gotta get to a lot of places, we gotta get to a lot of people, but the clowns in Melbourne say we gotta stay here and protect Dargo. A whole town is more important than one person.’
‘But Emily’s missing and her family needs help!’
‘The Melburnites ain’t going to pull a unit out, not when there’s a whole township in the firing line. I’m sorry, but there’s nothing we can do right now.’
Luke looked at the well-meaning fireman. He knew this kind of dilemma happened to them each year with the hierarchical nature of the firefighting organisation. They knew the lie of the land, how the fires would run, how the weather changed, but the shots were called by people further up the ladder. Luke could tell this firey was jaded and worn out. Of course he cared for the Flanaghans but he’d seen it all before.
‘I’m going up,’ Luke said.
‘No, you can’t —’ the policeman began as a big red stock truck came roaring into sight on the other side of the road block. They heard the driver change the gears down as it slowed and at last hissed to a halt. The pungent smell of cow manure greeted them as the cattle bellowed on the back of the truck.
Luke recognised Emily’s father and aunt as they got out of the cab. Then felt a pang of sorrow when he saw the distressed faces of Emily’s girls staring out at him from the windows of the truck.
‘You’ve got to help us!’ Rod said, running over, his arms outstretched. ‘My Emily’s out there! Please!’
The policemen stepped forward, a frown on his face.
‘I’m sorry, sir.’
Rod turned to Luke and Luke flinched at the utter fear in the cattleman’s blue eyes.
‘Luke,’ he said, grabbing hold of his upper arms and c
lutching them so his skin bruised, ‘she’s still out there! We’ve got to send a crew up.’
Luke looked across to the firefighter, who shrugged.
Flo stepped forward to put a calming hand on her brother. ‘Rod, please. They’re not going to send a crew into that and you know it.’
‘Just give me a truck and I’ll go myself!’
‘Rod,’ Flo said, ‘you know they can’t. If she makes it to Mayford, she’ll be fine.’
‘Mayford,’ Luke repeated, looking at Emily’s girls, and then he was running, leaping into the VPP vehicle. Before they could stop him, Luke was gone, revving up over the bank beside the road, spinning dust up with the wheels.
Up on the high plains Luke struggled to find the homestead gateway, so thick was the smoke. When he realised he’d overshot it, he reversed back. Perhaps she was there? He bumped along the driveway and got out. It was almost dark around the house. He called out, ‘Emily!’
No answer. The girls’ ponies trotted about urgently on the ends of their ropes. Luke frowned. Emily would’ve come back to get them. She mustn’t be here.
Then he saw the signs. The arrows. He ran in the direction they pointed, hoping he’d find Emily, but instead he discovered Flo’s instructions on starting the pump. He flicked the switch and ripped on the cord. The motor shuddered to life and Luke watched as water from the tank spurted up through the hose and out through the sprinklers on the rooftop. Silver jets spouted up and over the building, filling the gutters, dowsing the house in a cooling skin of water. The ponies, soothed by spray that fell as mist upon their sweaty coats, settled a little. Luke threw them each a biscuit of hay and left the pump running, knowing the big tanks would run like that for a good few hours. He got back into his vehicle, now thinking only of Emily. Mayford, he thought. He had to find her on the Mayford track.
Back on the road, Luke flicked the headlights. They shone on a warped, eerie world of dull, dirty brown. Adrenaline coursed through him. He was shocked at how quickly the fires had been and gone in places. Trees were still burning high up in the trunks, the understorey of the bushland black and smoking. He had to veer around fallen logs that smoked and sizzled. Near the creek where he and the girls had panned for gold he had to chainsaw through a still smoking fallen tree so his vehicle could pass.
The Cattleman's Daughter Page 29