I was impressed again with the horses Dan had selected for each member of the team. I had Pearl, Aria had Brodie, Jonathan had Monarch and Franz would ride Charlie.
Aria took one look at Brodie and frowned. ‘I want a different horse.’
I didn’t ask why. I already knew. Brodie was possibly the ugliest horse on Bundwarra – a mongrel stockhorse with a short spiky mane, scarred, flea-bitten hide, murky bloodshot eyes and prominent yellow teeth. But Dan had selected him because Brodie was also one of the smartest horses. He would keep Aria out of trouble if things got tough. All she’d have to do was stay in the saddle and he’d run the muster for her without a twitch of the reins.
‘Dan decides,’ I said.
But Aria rushed over to the other horses. She pointed to a sleek, creamy horse with a proudly arched neck. ‘I want him.’
‘Bella’s a mare,’ I said.
Aria shrugged. ‘Her then. I want to ride her.’
I shook my head. ‘Bella’s temperamental. She needs an experienced rider to handle her.’
‘I did pony club for seven years,’ Aria protested. ‘And I won prizes for dressage at the gymkhanas.’
I refrained from pointing out that prancing about in pony club hardly qualified her to be a ringer. At times out here the number one most valuable skill was to be able to hold on. I looked at Dan.
He nodded hesitantly.
‘Okay then, just hurry and saddle her up so that we can go.’
Jonathan was already on Monarch, trying to make him turn in circles, but Franz hadn’t mounted. He watched Elise cleaning up around the camp in her slow, stolid way.
‘I would like to stay with my girlfriend,’ he said. ‘What if the pig comes back?’
‘Dan will make sure Elise is okay.’
Dan nodded, but I was struck by an unexpected thought. ‘Maybe we should let Franz look after the horses?’ I suggested. ‘They’re only going to be grazing in the horse paddock.’
‘Sure thing, Boss.’ Dan chose Starlight, as if he’d already picked out which steed he’d ride for the muster, and saddled him up.
We were already behind schedule. Muster rule of thumb was to ride out the moment it was light enough for the horses to see where they were treading so that they didn’t have to blindly navigate the treacherous rock clusters, anthills and steep breakaways. Instead, we’d all gone into damage control after our unexpected visit from ‘this little piggy eats roast beef’.
My hatband was already soaked with sweat as we cantered out to the northwest of the Devil’s Horns. My plan was to follow what Dad and Damien had done on previous musters: treat the holding paddock like the plum in an enormous pie and muster from the outside in, wedge by wedge. If we rode out and mustered for the first eight or nine days, that would give us the next eight days to separate out the mob and draft them before the meat trucks arrived.
We galloped for three hours until we got into timbered country, where a belt of gum trees wove through dense copses of bush. I didn’t dare go out any further. It was tougher mustering in timbered country and once we’d rounded the mob up we’d have to walk them back at a snail’s pace. Timber country was where we were most likely to find rogues – they’d escaped previous musters, hidden back in the trees.
‘Aria will go with me. Dan – you right to go with Jonathan?’
Dan nodded but Jonathan glowered at my tone. For the first time since she’d arrived at Bundwarra, though, Aria looked happy. Her dark eyes shone with anticipation. Maybe I had underestimated her.
We trotted along until we saw our first mob, a herd of forty, grazing beneath the trees. Aria and I crept up behind, then charged. The cows scattered, panicking, but we cantered through the trees, ducking branches and clinging to the horses’ necks, as we wheeled them in from either side. Air rushed cool against my cheeks and my heart pounded as I narrowly missed being decapitated by a low-hanging branch. Through the trees, Aria whooped and screamed and nearly lost her hat as stray scrub clawed at it while she zigzagged like a mad woman, clearly having a ball. Finally, we got the mob clumped together and moving in an orderly fashion – cows, calves, weaners, heifers and steers.
We kept it up all morning, picking up strays that joined the mob docilely enough. The boring bit was walking them to the yards at a sedate pace, stopping at water spots along the way so the cattle could drink and not get too stressed.
I kept a lookout for rogues. All it took was for one cranky mickey, or feral steer, to come at us and the cattle would scatter like dropped marbles and we’d be back to square one.
At the rear, and on the other side of the mob, Aria rode at a patient, slow-moving pace on Bella, only leaning out of her saddle to exclaim when a goanna scuttled across her path or a kangaroo hopped across the browned grass.
We stopped at a billabong for smoko. I bit into my cold steak and relish sandwich and scanned the surrounding scrub. Aria wolfed two sandwiches down: vegetarianism abandoned overnight.
‘You’re so lucky getting to do this every year,’ she said.
Lucky? I thought about the serenity of Gator’s Soak this morning and knew she was right. We were free out here. No rules or petty regulations. It was man against beast. Girl against beast. It didn’t get much more natural than this. My thoughts returned, like a tongue to a missing tooth, to Dan. Why was I so obsessed? He was really good looking and he was great with horses and he was kind and respectful and he was somehow . . . connected. It was more than that, though. Aaron Dearnly and his speech-and-drama tones and floppy fringe seemed like a figment of my caged-in St Anne’s imagination. I liked the way men were men out here. They embraced their testosterone, using it to throw bulls and build yards and ride wild horses. And they stayed connected with the land.
Static blared from the radio. Dan. ‘Skye we’re about two ks off the Devil’s Horns with a mob of two hundred. Where are you?’
I looked over to the twin peaks. The boys were ahead of us. And they had more cattle than we did. Good for the muster, but I couldn’t help myself – I wanted to beat them. ‘That’s great,’ I said. ‘Keep them circling, we’ve got a bit further to go. I’ll radio you when we reach the creek.’
When Dan’s voice crackled out, I looked over to a thicket of acacias, scanning for more scrubbers.
‘Are we going to meet up with the others?’ Aria called.
I nodded. ‘Yep. But first we’re going to bring in a few more.’
Aria grinned, and urged Bella into a canter.
The mob jostled into the holding paddock and clustered around blocks of mineral supplements Dad had trucked out earlier. He’d spent the past month, before he’d busted his leg, fixing up the fences. I kicked a couple of posts and then stayed to check that there weren’t too many steers locking horns.
We’d added three hundred and sixty head to the mob. By the look of their uncut tails, a fair few were cleanskins. It was impossible to fully fence thousands of hectares of land. Cattle wandered freely between neighbouring properties so it wasn’t always clear to whom the cleanskins belonged. Once we branded them, though, they’d belong to us.
I grabbed my Balinese sarong and went to the spring to wash out my horse blanket, and my jeans and the girth for good measure. If the saddlecloth or girth strings got too sweaty, they could rub away the horse’s fur. I’d seen horses get plate-sized saddle sores that put them out of action for months.
After hanging the blanket on an acacia, I snapped off a branch of the fuzzy yellow flowers. A drift of sweet, rich wattle pollen slipped into my senses and I turned full circle, inhaling the golden dust. I resisted the urge to lie down and shake the tree so that I’d be covered with sticky gold pollen. It calmed me. I knew everything was going to be all right.
Back at camp, Elise poked optimistically through the barrels for something other than golden syrup and mango relish to have with three impressive loaves of bread she’d baked in the camp oven.
Jonathan peeled off his boots and socks and inspected his blisters, and Aria threw herself down in a h
eap on her swag. ‘Where’s Dan?’ I asked.
His saddle wasn’t under the fly and Starlight hadn’t been with the others scoffing into their nosebags when I’d returned Pearl to the horse paddock.
‘He went into the bush,’ Franz said. He added, ‘Tomorrow I would like to go on the muster.’
I nodded. ‘Which way did he go?’
I mounted Flash and rode bareback in the direction Franz had pointed until I came to the lip of a depressed plain. My breath caught. Two brolgas were performing a courtship dance against the petal pink sky. Clouds above were wisps of glowing apricot. Waves of light flowed from the graceful unfolding and tilting of the brolgas’ strong silver-grey wings. I was caught up in the light waves, dissolved and made buoyant as my soul streamed across the land – melting into shadows and curling in on itself – a secret in the night.
I returned to my body and breathed shallowly, reluctant to break the spell.
‘Spirit of the plains.’
I jumped. Flash started beneath me and the brolgas paused before resuming their dance. I’d been so absorbed, or Dan had been so quiet, or perhaps both. I had forgotten there was anybody else in the world.
‘Sydney Long,’ Dan murmured.
I nodded, recalling a painting with brolgas and a naked woman dancing on a dusk-lit plain from my Australian art book. ‘You into art?’
Everything seemed to change out here, even my speech. It got more curt. On a muster there wasn’t time for umming and ahhing or polysyllabic words or taking forever to get to the point or, for that matter, the niceties that teachers at St Anne’s insisted on: pleases and thankyous. Mum’s was a lost cause. I might act smoother, quieter, more polite in Perth – but the minute I returned to Bundwarra all the rough bits stuck right back on.
Dan slid off Starlight and picked up a stick. With a few deft strokes he created a clear picture. I recognised it: the Devil’s Horns, and the river and tributaries surrounding it! From my recollection of the map Mum and Dad kept in their office, it was spot on.
This was country Dan had never visited. And yet he’d drawn an aerial view of how many hundreds of hectares? ‘Have you seen a map?’
He shook his head.
I tried to turn the country over in my mind, tried to stand it to the side or see it upright – it was like trying to fit together a gigantic elaborate jigsaw. My brain ached with effort. ‘How do you know where everything is?’
He shrugged. ‘Just do.’
‘No way,’ I breathed. A year ago, one of the ringers had loaned me a book, battered, smudged with ash, and nicotine-yellow, by a guy called Bruce Chatwin. Half of it was meant to be gammon, made-up, but I didn’t know which half. What amazed me was the idea of how the Aborigines would sing the country, and that their songs were actually maps telling them where their Dreamtime ancestors had travelled and the significant features of the land.
Out here, station owners operated on knowing notable land features. It would have been useless telling a stockman to ride ten ks north to find a camp. We relied on recognising soaks and springs, billabongs, passes over the river, gorges, escarpments, ridges and hills. The land features were like a language; Dan seemed to have learned it effortlessly.
The pink twilight faded into duck egg blue. I felt peaceful. My body was tired and my backside was bruised from the saddle, but we’d done a good day’s mustering and here I was watching brolgas dancing, with a boy who had connected to this place within a couple of days of arriving. We remained silent until the brolgas flew away.
Dan turned to me. His eyes glowed in the last light. Without me realising it, we’d moved closer together. I could hear his soft breathing beneath the cricket song. The proximity was almost unbearable. I felt like an egg, cracking. I was terrified my secret self would come gushing out and I’d never be able to put the pieces back together again.
But it was Dan who broke away, saying, ‘Time to go back to camp.’
Elise had done the best she could with the remnants of salted beef, frying it up with onions and carrots in rendered fat. Tomorrow I was going to have to select a killer for fresh meat. We’d mustered up more than a few cleanskins and I figured we could afford to take one of them for food. Butchering a killer was the job I dreaded most. Selecting steers for the meatworks was different – they were loaded onto a truck and taken far away to an abattoir where I didn’t have to deal with their deaths. It was hypocritical – I enjoyed a good steak, but even after all these years, butchering still made me queasy.
I finished my tinned fruit and custard – no lumps, creamy consistency. Whenever I looked at Dan across the fire, my thoughts churned. I was the boss. How could I possibly have any real authority while I had such a crush on him? Crush wasn’t the right word. It felt deeper and stronger than anything I’d felt about a boy before.
‘I’ve got an idea!’ Aria exclaimed, shattering the sleepy murmur around the campfire. ‘Let’s play charades. I’ll go first.’ She held her hands up and mimed turning a page.
‘Book!’ Jonathan called.
Aria wasn’t a big reader. She preferred to listen to her iPod. In fact, since we’d met I’d only ever seen her read Brodie’s Notes for the books we had to study in English. Other than that she read shopping catalogues and text messages. Once, when she’d asked to copy my notes on The Life Of Pi, I’d loaned them to her and suggested she try reading it herself. She’d replied she’d prefer to live life than read about it. I’d whacked her with the book, but secretly I’d thought the story dragged on and I’d wished that the movie had already come out so that we could watch it in her parents’ home theatre.
Aria extended four fingers.
‘Four words.’
She nodded and put up one finger.
‘First word!’
Aria pointed to the surrounding bushes lit orange by the fire.
‘Trees.’
‘Leaves.’
Aria shook her head then pointed to the swags.
‘Swags, Canvas. Green,’ She nodded then held another finger up. This time she mimed cracking an egg over my head.
‘Egg!’ Jonathan shouted. ‘Green Eggs and Ham!’
He and Aria laughed and Dan smiled but the Germans looked mystified.
‘Dr Seuss,’ I explained. ‘Do you have him in Germany? Children’s books. Green Eggs and Ham?’
Elise and Franz conferred and Franz looked confusedly at the group. ‘Gruen Eir und Schinken? ’ Aria and Jonathan dissolved into further peals of laughter.
‘I reckon we should steer clear of books,’ I protested. ‘Elise and Franz won’t know all the titles in English.’
‘Okay then,’ Aria agreed. ‘Let’s do people we’d all know. Celebrities or rock stars – someone everyone could guess.’
Jonathan leapt up from his swag. ‘I’ll go first.’
Aria giggled and plumped back on the swag beside me.
Jonathan seemed to visibly lengthen his torso and broaden his shoulders. He dipped his head slightly as if wearing a hat and bowed his legs like he’d just come off a horse. It was amazing – just like seeing some tough old ringer. I could see why he was an actor. He had that magical power of transformation.
Jonathan pretended to grab a knife from a pouch on his belt and lurched forward, as if throwing a bull.
Aria laughed with anticipation.
My own smile froze.
Jonathan leaned down over the invisible bull, leering. Then he looked up at me and, with uncanny ability, mimicked my voice – its exact pitch and cadence. ‘Sometimes you gotta teach the males a lesson.’
Aria shrieked with laughter. ‘It’s Skye!’
My body burned hot then cold. Is that how they all saw me? I stumbled away from the camp, not caring if I tripped over a rock or met a snake in the surrounding blackness – I just had to get away.
Blue Dreamer came to my whistle. I buried my head against his warm neck, breathing in the comfort of his familiar musk. Jonathan hated me. As for Aria . . . my hands locked into Blue Dreamer�
�s chest fur, taut with rage. She was meant to be my friend. She had offered to help and then made exactly zero effort as a cook. She knew what was at stake – Bundwarra could go under and she didn’t care. She just wanted to prance around and flirt with cowboys.
‘Skye?’
I pressed closer against Blue Dreamer. I didn’t want Dan seeing me like this – humiliated.
‘Skye?’
‘Just checking the horses,’ I said gruffly.
‘Me too. They’re all good.’
‘Yep.’
‘But you’re not.’
Why couldn’t he just leave me alone?
He stepped closer, his hands out from his sides, as if trying to reassure a panicked horse. ‘That Jonathan’s a bit of a snake. A legend in his own lunchbox, I reckon.’
I felt slightly better hearing Dan’s appraisal of Jonathan and then slumped again – Jonathan was venomous. He was a team member and I needed to trust him. But how could I?
‘Maybe,’ I said, ‘But Aria’s meant to be my friend and she’s just as bad.’
Dan shrugged. ‘Nah. She’s not bad. She just wants everyone to like her. She’s one of the ones with a hole in their heart. Can’t fill it by herself. Needs everyone liking her to do that.’
I contemplated this possibility. Aria had it all – mega rich parents, everything that opened, shut and could be plugged in. Pretty, stylish and with a mix of mischief and merriment that made boys flock to her . . . But a hole in her heart? I hadn’t thought of that. Was I like that? Did I have a hole in me? Nope. Too many rough edges. Sometimes I felt a bit lost at St Anne’s, but here at Bundwarra I was complete.
‘I can’t go back,’ I said in a low voice.
‘Sure you can. You’re the boss.’ I could almost hear him smiling.
It was quiet when we returned. The delicious aroma of freshly baked bread wafted through the camp. Elise and Franz had retired to their swags under a small, separate tarp, and Jonathan snored from his swag close to the fire.
Slipping into my swag, I burrowed down and gazed at the stars, trying to find the Southern Cross.
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