We saddle the horses and mount up. Jewell rides with me on Ghost, Mary on Night. Otto spotted both our horses running wild in the Snowy Mountains. He had taken a fencing job up that way. This were the winter before we took on the farm lease. Otto and Mary were not yet married. Otto spent three days tracking both horses. Once he’d caught them, it were another two weeks before he could get either bridled. They were lavish gifts for Mary and me, and we both appreciated the trouble he went to, as our old horse, Chestnut, had just died.
When I first saw Ghost, I thought she looked too tame to be wild. She stood quietly in the round yard, while Night ran amok. But trying to mount Ghost for the first time were a different matter. She’s grey more than white, and sixteen hands high. Big for me. It were six months before she let me ride her, but we’ve made our way with each other now.
We gallop onto the road. Our dairy farm skirts the edge of the Five Island Estate that were once one large farm before it were thirty-eight small ones. North is the lagoon and south is the lake. Third Creek runs along our western boundary. We don’t fence the creek and our cows go there to drink when they are in the long paddock. That creek dried out last year but the rains three weeks back have got the water flowing again. The creek separates our land from Duncan’s dairy and the woodland below. Hooka Creek is beyond the far boundary of Duncan’s property, Budjong runs through it. Mullet Creek follows after Hooka and after Hooka and before Mullet is where Dempster’s farm is.
Jewell sings on the ride to her place. Drifty bits of sound, sweet as honey yet sad too, but when we canter into Dempster’s yard and halt next to the farmhouse, she stops and hangs her head.
Dempster’s place is full of straight lines. Behind the farmhouse are the sheds, and behind the sheds are his five long paddocks. He runs cattle and keeps fowls. Told me once he hates dairy cows, can’t bear the sight of udders heavy with milk. Most of his land is cleared. On the far side of the paddocks runs the last line of trees. Up from that is old forest that is not Dempster’s land.
I see Dempster loping across the paddock, axe in hand. He’s a big man, gruff more than rough. I figure if I tackle it right, I can change his mind on Jewell helping us in the dairy. We dismount, leave Ghost and Night to graze and go to meet him by the shed. Jewell tails Mary and me like a newborn calf. Dempster stops a few feet in front of us, a firm grip on his axe.
‘Jewell told us you don’t want her to make butter with us no more,’ I say.
‘That’s right,’ Dempster says.
‘You know we make the best butter in the district.’
‘We don’t need to eat the best.’ Dempster’s face is dull and firm, like an old bull ready to charge but in no hurry.
‘But Jewell’s been coming to us for two years now. She’s like our own sister,’ I say.
‘Tell that to your brother,’ Dempster says, quietly.
‘Abe is like her brother too,’ I add.
Dempster puts the axe head on the ground and leans on the handle. ‘Not from what I’ve seen,’ he says.
I turn back to Jewell, still hiding behind me. She is flushed. My look is like a question. She shakes her head as though she has no answer.
‘What have you seen?’ Mary asks Dempster.
‘The two of them, down at the creek, fishing.’
It’s news to Mary and me, those two going fishing, but I don’t let Dempster know that.
‘No law against fishing,’ I say.
‘It was more than fishing they were doing,’ Dempster says.
‘What more?’ Mary asks.
‘You tell your brother to keep his hands to himself and enough said.’
‘Are you sure you saw right?’ I say to Dempster. ‘Because that don’t sound like our brother.’
‘They was touching,’ Dempster says.
‘What kind of touching?’ Mary asks.
Jewell lets out a howl then. ‘I was catching a fish and Abe was helping me bring it in, that kind of touching!’
Her scream quiets all the farm animals. Dempster glares at her. I worry about what Abe told me – what if Jewell gets a whipping after we go?
‘Mr Dempster, our dairy is the cleanest on the estate—’
‘She’s of a certain age,’ Dempster says, cutting me off.
I try again. ‘If Jewell can keep making butter with us I’ll make sure her and Abe don’t behave improperly.’
Dempster breaks into a laugh and that surprises me.
When he recovers, he says, ‘You two girls and your brother got your ways, but your ways can’t be our ways. You can’t help it, I know you can’t help it. But I’m a father looking to keep my daughter safe.’
He says it reasonable, he says it with no bad words, but it’s almost worse than if he had used them.
‘What ways you talking about, Mr Dempster?’ Mary asks.
Dempster shakes his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mary, isn’t anything to be done about bad blood.’
‘Bad blood?’ I say.
‘That’s right,’ he says.
‘What about bad behaviour, how do you rate that?’ I ask him.
‘Bad behaviour comes from bad blood,’ he says.
I shouldn’t let Jewell’s secret out without asking her first, but Dempster has got me riled. ‘Don’t you think whipping a daughter so that you scar her back is bad behaviour?’
Jewell’s eyes widen with surprise. She stares off into the distance.
‘I don’t give Jewell whippings, she gives those to herself,’ Dempster says.
I laugh at that. ‘No girl whips herself,’ I say.
‘Those that are aiming to drive out sinful thoughts do,’ Dempster says. ‘You may not know much about that.’
Dempster picks his axe up, walks over to Jewell and takes her hand. She don’t resist but she gives me a look and it is like she is saying, Please don’t leave me here. Did she lie or not? Does he whip her or not?
‘She’s a young girl, Mr Dempster,’ Mary says. ‘Don’t forget that.’
‘She’s growing up and trying to find her way in the world. That’s not easy without a mother,’ I say.
Dempster grimaces when he hears the word mother. ‘You tell your brother he ain’t to come on this property again,’ he says. ‘Never. You girls, you’re not to come here either.’
Did I hear right? We’ve never been banned from someone’s property before.
Mary and me are stillness itself.
I am not looking at Dempster’s axe but I know it’s there. Something about the way he is gripping that axe, makes it seem as if he might use it if we don’t leave his property now. Something about the way he is glaring at us is worrying, never mind how calm his words are said.
A whipbird calls.
‘Well then,’ I say, and Mary and me turn away from Jewell, go over to our horses and mount up. We nudge the horses forward and gallop out from that yard and away from that man and from Jewell.
Abe, Mary and me stand on the track, cows swarming around us.
‘How come you never told us about fishing with Jewell?’ I ask.
Abe is riled at Dempster banning us from his place, but I want to know why he has been lying to us.
‘Do I need to report to you on everything I do?’ he asks.
‘It’s not something you need hide,’ I say.
‘You seen how Dempster reacted,’ Abe says, ‘More like we didn’t hide it well enough.’
He walks off down the track, towards the milking shed.
‘Move along there!’ he calls to the cows.
‘They were only fishing,’ Mary says. ‘Don’t keep at him.’
‘You know I don’t like secrets,’ I say.
‘We all got secrets,’ Mary murmurs. ‘You know that better than most.’
She’s talking about the father of my child, whose name I have never uttered, although no one suspects the reason why.
Mary walks off along the track. I stand there for some time, staring at the muddy ground, and then I follow her.
Wh
en milking is over, I go to the kitchen to get our dinner. Mary weeds the garden and Abe herds the cows back to the long paddock. It’s dark when I come out onto the verandah. I set a candle on the table and call them both. I’ve got potatoes and pumpkin cooked and they are good to eat hot with butter. Mary is already washing up at the side of the cottage. I call and call for Abe. Bud comes running into the yard, barking, but no Abe.
‘He’s gone again,’ Mary says, with a sigh.
She wipes her face with a towel and goes into the kitchen.
Abe has not been right since we told him about Dempster. Didn’t speak all through milking. He often goes walking at night, but this time I’m worried.
I stand on the steps and stare up at the stars that go on forever. No clouds. The moon still low. An owl hoots. Catbirds screech in the forest trees. Cockatoos flap their way towards the escarpment. Dark Dragon Ridge, Tommy Lin called it. In the starlight I see the dragon shape. The name Wollongong, I’ve heard it said, means hard ground near the water, or five clouds, or the sound of the sea. One group names the town for the land that is strong and solid behind it, the other names it for the water that lies before it or above it. As if one looks at how boundaries are marked, and the other at how they might merge.
Mary comes out from the kitchen with two plates of potatoes and pumpkin. We don’t sit at the set table and choose instead the verandah steps. A possum scampers along the roof of the milking shed.
‘Abe will be back soon,’ Mary says.
In the night I wake, hear a shuffling in the next room. Abe is pulling off his boots. Good, he is home. As I drift back to sleep I hear Abe sigh.
Next morning, milking takes longer than usual because two more of our cows have sore udders and I want to try the new treatment Mr Farrell suggested. I need Abe and Mary to hold each cow while I rub on a special ointment made up from berries, eucalypt leaves and milk. Mr Farrell experiments with all kinds of unctions and some of them do work.
Wednesdays, I always check my traps straight after milking. Abe usually comes with me, but today he won’t and is antsy for me to get going, says he will do all the chores on his own. No mention from either of us of last night and his vanishing trick. I keep quiet for my own reasons. Abe told me about the whippings and he meant it to be private, but I went and blurted it out to Dempster when I knew I shouldn’t. It were probably that as much as anything that got us banned from his property. Whatever way I look at it, it were me that made the situation worse.
I saddle up Ghost and lead her out to the yard. Mary is raking out the milking shed. Abe is carrying the feed buckets to the fowl house. High up, there’s an eagle hovering, looking for prey.
‘Watch out that eagle don’t get our chickens,’ I call to Abe.
We have an old broom that we keep at the fowl house and when we see eagles hovering we wave it in the air and yell until they leave.
I mount Ghost and ride out along the dirt road, splash across Third Creek, then Budjong, gallop on the track below Duncan’s dairy, and then over the Hooka Creek bridge. I slow Ghost down near Mullet Creek and we veer off into the forest, picking our way through the thick undergrowth. I duck branches. Some are moss green and frogs sit atop them. Small birds dart and chirp and cheep. The tree trunks are tall, like ship masts trapped in a storm of vines, the canopy their sail. We pass the narrow gully where dead cabbage trees – yellowed as old parchment – make a mat across it. I run my hand along Ghost’s neck, keep murmuring to her, the way she likes. Ghost is more at home in wide-open spaces. She’s always wary in the forest. It has too many noises and things she can’t see.
I pull up a few yards short from the first snare, slide from the saddle. Everywhere light peeks through trees, making shiny spots on the ground. I take my rifle and loop my pack over my shoulder and walk to the snare. Damp leaves underfoot, moist soil, rot and mould. When I get close, I see the branches that I had set around the snare have been trampled. I put my rifle on the ground and kneel to reset the branches. I push them deep into the earth, so the only way for a rabbit to run is into the wire loop. Water oozes up from the soil. A black spider runs over my hand. I fix the snare, measuring three fingers from the ground. I take an apple from my pack, cut a quarter, and leave it on the grass beyond the snare to tempt a rabbit. The rest of the apple I put back in my pack. A black cloud settles above the trees and the forest goes dark. A deep quiet. I sit back and wipe my hands on my skirt. I hear a scream but can’t tell where it is coming from. Were it human or catbird?
I take hold of my rifle, scramble up and listen.
Insects humming.
Is there something else? Someone else?
I strain to hear.
There. Someone running through the bush?
I wait.
Nothing.
The cloud above passes over and the forest comes alive again.
I am spooking myself.
I move on through the forest. I check the two traps set at the edge of a nearby clearing. Both are empty. There is sunshine on the water when I get to Mullet Creek. The air is warm and green leaves float down from the trees. I spy a rabbit in the trap closest to the bank. Grey and white, lying dead on the grasses, its body still warm. Only just snagged. It has its foot caught in the wire too, which must have been a feat. Fighting to escape maybe. I loosen the noose, and string the rabbit to a branch. The snares are meant to catch the animal, not kill it. I usually do that myself, because that way I do it cleanly. When Abe is with me we work together, one killing and stringing the animal up, the other resetting the snare. I am proficient but Abe is inventive. It were his idea to construct branch paths to guide unsuspecting rabbits into our traps. Something he’d learnt from the old swagman who camped by our creek last winter.
The final two traps are both untouched so I decide to hunt. I load my rifle and again hear a cry. I look along the banks. Did it come from around the bend? I stop and listen again. Nothing. Maybe just possums fighting.
I walk along the creek banks, keeping a watch out for rabbits. Milky water bubbles past. There’s near two hundred men camping half a mile up in the bush, all employed at the smelting works. Most are down from Sydney and not used to bush life. They wash in the creek, stirring up the water in all the best fishing spots.
Up ahead is the smooth rock ledge shaped like a fish and beyond it the cabbage tree trunk that straddles the width of the creek. Someone placed it there to be a bridge some time back. There’s another rock ledge beyond the trunk, that is uneven and full of holes. I could easily jump from the smooth rock ledge to the trunk, run along it over the creek and leap to the other bank. The property on that side were named Exmouth, once owned by Captain Brooks. He is long dead and most of the estate is taken over by the smelting works but the land down this way is too marshy for buildings. Tall trees grow on the creek banks, but walk in a short way and there are dead trees rising up out of ponds, with vines, tough like rope, curling through their branches. It’s a dark watery place in there, and the insect hum sets me on edge. But the animals are less cautious, and there are patches of grass that are lush and green. It can be an easy place to hunt for rabbits. I’ve only been there once because when I told Aunty about it she warned me to stay away. Her mother’s sister, she said, suffered a calamity in that place. She refused to say what, only that it weren’t a place I should visit.
There’s a whistling in my ear, unnerving. I turn quickly, my rifle raised.
‘Oh you!’ I say, seeing Connor.
‘You going to shoot me?’ he asks.
He has four rabbits bound together.
‘You snuck up on me!’
Connor’s face is blotchy and red. If he weren’t smiling I’d have thought he’d been crying.
‘You done good,’ I say.
‘One is Niall’s,’ he says. ‘There’s two hunters further up. The youngest of them nearly shot Niall in the foot. Niall gave them a mouthful. No joy that way. You’d do better back at the creek mouth.’
‘Who is it hunting
?’ I ask.
‘Loafers from the smelting works.’
‘I met one of them two weeks back,’ I say. ‘He’d pitched his tent near the creek away from the others. He seemed a shifty character.’
‘I don’t know about shifty, but those smelter workers are all bad shots,’ says Connor.
We walk back along the bank and come to where the creek empties into the wide lake. The clouds hang long and low over the water. Two wallabies drink by the creek edge but they hear us coming and are gone before we can raise our rifles. We take cover behind a coachwood tree. It’s a hundred feet high and has a smooth grey trunk with branches overhanging the creek.
I look to Connor but his face is turned away.
‘Something happen, Connor?’ I ask gently.
He is breathing in and out like it hurts.
‘Nah,’ he says.
Then he looks at me.
‘Niall,’ he says, as if that explains it.
Niall is a nasty piece of work. I’d take Connor over Niall any day. I decide to tell Connor that I will go with him to the eisteddfod. And maybe we should take Jewell with us, and maybe Abe and Mary as well.
I spot two rabbits in the clearing ahead. Pressing my rifle into my shoulder, I take aim, and pull the trigger. I hit one rabbit, the other scarpers.
‘Don’t pay any attention to Niall,’ I say.
I stride into the clearing, pick the dead rabbit up and string it together with the one from earlier. When I turn back, Connor is staring at the water.
‘I’ve got to get home, Lola,’ he says. ‘Da wants us fencing this morning.’
He strides off quickly and is gone before I have time to tell him I’ve changed my mind about the eisteddfod.
I trek back through the forest to Ghost and strap the rabbits to the saddle. I mount and we pick our way out between the trees to the track. I gallop home but when I ride in through the gate the place looks deserted. In the barn I dismount and unsaddle Ghost. Night is in her stall, standing with her back to me, like she always does when I go out with Ghost and she is left behind. I brush Ghost down, lead her to her stall and give both horses some feed. I go into Night’s stall and give her a brush, just so she feels included.
Storyland Page 8