The Best Australian Stories

by Black Inc.

  Edna, for good measure, said, ‘It’s not fair on Blue, dear.’

  ‘But they do the work,’ Meg put in, ‘maybe they should have more say.’

  ‘Votes for dogs!’ Ben added.

  Hedley allowed himself a chuckle. ‘I tell you one thing, girl. A kelpie-cross or three would do a hell of a better job of running the country than this mob.’ He chewed a little more lamb before remembering his main theme. ‘You can’t spoil them, Ben. Next you’ll have them sleeping in the house.’

  Meg’s eyes slid immediately to her husband’s, alarmed. He winked, reassuringly. He wasn’t about to confess.

  ‘Woof!’ he said, and grinned. ‘Woof, woof!’

  After Blue’s rebuke, Ben kept the sire chained in the tray of the ute while working the flocks, often with Hedley – his sire, it occurred to him – sitting in the front seat for company. He toyed, briefly, with the idea of moving Nigger to the coast with his parents, but Meg refused to allow it. A working dog would be bored to death inside their tiny, enclosed courtyard, she argued. In fact, she had grown attached to Nigger, and often kept him inside the farmhouse herself, spoiling him with tidbits, enjoying his company, a familiar presence in the corner of her eye.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t the house nigger,’ Hedley declared over another Sunday roast, as the dog tried to remain invisible beneath the dining-room table.

  ‘Hedley!’ his wife warned him before Meg could bite. ‘You mustn’t say things like that.’

  ‘Sticks and stones, Edna my love. Sticks and stones.’

  It was a theme he often returned to, liking to shock his daughter-in-law with his version of straight country talk – but liking, also, her cheek in return, her willingness to give back as much as she got.

  ‘He’s not a full-blood nigger,’ he announced one morning. ‘Look here –’ And he ruffled the white patch, roughly diamond-shaped, that stained the dog’s black head like a horse’s blaze. ‘Bentley mark. Know what a Bentley mark is, Meg?’

  ‘Yes, Dad. But don’t let that stop you telling me again.’

  He grinned, pleased. ‘Sign of the true heeler. He’s got more than a bit of Queensland blue in him, this feller.’

  ‘I don’t follow. You mean they crossed a dog with a cheese?’

  Dash of blue heeler or not, Nigger was mostly kelpie. His coat’s blackness took on a reddish kelpie sheen in the afternoon light, although Hedley liked to claim it was mostly dust.

  Once, after Meg had spent the morning washing the old dog in a plastic washing tub, Hedley had leaned forward from his chair – a sort of cane throne on the veranda – and spat on the dog’s coat as it slept in the sun at his feet.

  ‘A working dog should be dirty,’ he said, with that glint of mischief in his eye that Meg was beginning to enjoy, and that she knew, also, was his harmless way of flirting with her.

  Blue’s dam had been a red kelpie from a property further down the Peninsula. The mother’s redness had come through almost undiluted in the son, hence his name. He was a beautiful dog to watch at work, prick-eared, sleek as a seal, forever on the move. As a pup he had shown no interest in the sheep, and Hedley had almost given up on him. Then suddenly, at six months or so, watching his sire squeeze sheep into a pen for jetting, some sort of lightbulb had gone on in the pup’s head. Within minutes he’d been walking across the backs of the penned sheep, up to his hocks in their thick wool. He hadn’t stopped moving among them since.

  ‘Gentler than his old man,’ Hedley liked to boast. ‘The cattle dog hasn’t come through. Which is why he’s not a biter. Never even nips.Doesn’t need to.’

  For a time, chained in the ute, Nigger seemed to take a similar pride in watching his son at work. But after a few days the whining started, and then the frustrated straining at the chain. The last straw came with the arrival of the alpacas. Ben bought the small herd against his father’s advice, or perhaps because of that advice. (‘Rooster one day, feather duster the next in that caper, son.’) When the bottom fell out of an oversupplied alpaca-wool market (‘Can’t say I didn’t warn him, Meg. Only the breeders made any money.’) Ben offloaded the herd at dog-food prices. The sight of Blue bringing these alien animals – half goat, half bonsai camel – in for transport drove Nigger into a frenzy. Maddened even further by Hedley’s dressings down, he managed to scramble over the near-side of the ute and almost hang himself on his chain.

  ‘Two things, son. The length of the chain – Jesus! Second – you’ll have to leave him at the house in any case.’

  ‘Wouldn’t mind leaving both of you,’ Ben muttered to himself.

  In fact, he and Blue were alone in the top paddock a week later when the dog found the first of the spring lambs. Or found the crows which had already found them.

  ‘What you got there, feller?’

  Foxes were his first thought, but the ripped-apart lambs had not been eaten. It looked more like play, or playful torture, than hunting for food. His second thought was Blue – the dog had the freedom of the farm. But Blue seemed as surprised as he at the discovery, and had never been aggressive with the animals, apart from head-butting the nose of the odd angry ewe.

  Meg, back teaching six-tenths, was still in town when he arrived home, but his father was sitting in his cane throne on the veranda and his mother was ensconced in her old kitchen, baking, and chatting to her husband through the open window. Ben stalked straight to Nigger’s kennel. As he squatted on his haunches, the dog seemed pleased enough to see him, wagging its tail and innocently offering up its jaws for inspection.

  His father limped across the yard. ‘Problem, son?’

  ‘A few lambs have been killed.’

  ‘Foxes?’

  ‘They weren’t eaten.’

  ‘No sign of wool on Nigger,’ Hedley said, peering over his shoulder. ‘How fresh was the kill?’

  ‘Yesterday. Maybe the day before. The crows had got stuck in.’

  ‘Then you’re not likely to find anything today,’ the old man said, and straightened up and limped back to his chair.

  ‘Maybe it was a wedge-tail?’

  A chuckle from the older man, ‘No chance, son.’

  ‘What about Ted Chambers’ dog? I never liked the look of it. Plugugly. More pig in it than dog. And always out in the road chasing cars.’

  ‘Big call to make, Bennyboy. You wouldn’t want to say anything to Ted without hard evidence.’

  Gathering evidence would not be easy, but the chief suspect was waiting for Ben and Meg in the middle of the road – its section of road, clearly – as they drove home from church that Sunday, alerted by their dust from miles away. The dog’s front feet were planted firmly in the dirt, bracing itself less against the oncoming car, perhaps, than against the backward thrust of the force of its own barking. One especially powerful bark seemed to lift the entire dog off its paws, spinning it 360 degrees back to its original position. Instead of speeding past, Ben pulled to the side of the road and stopped. Ted and Joan, great talkers, were still back in town on the church steps; he had time for a little sleuthing.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Meg asked, alarmed, as he opened the door, but the dog had already stopped its barking and padded tamely up to the driver’s door with its tail wagging, a picture of innocence.

  ‘All bark and no bite,’ Ben said, chucking its pale, pig-like ears.

  In the adjacent field Ted Chambers’ spring lambs were frolicking, and even as Ben inspected the dog’s snout for telltale strands of wool, he knew that there was no chance of this dog travelling ten miles across stony country to kill his lambs. Behind them, the dust of another car was fast approaching. The Chambers, escaping the church steps earlier than usual? Edna and Hedley, more likely, arriving for the Sunday leg of lamb which Meg always left roasting in the oven before church.

  ‘We need to get home,’ she reminded him, and he pushed the blameless dog away and tugged the car door shut.

  He made sure Nigger was outside, out of sight, while they were eating, but Hedley warmed
to the theme nonetheless. ‘It happens to some dogs late in life, son. They turn.’

  ‘Into grumpy old dogs?’ Meg suggested.

  For once her father-in-law ignored the tease. ‘Might be the dingo coming through, of course.’

  ‘He’s got dingo in him?’ Meg asked, surprised.

  ‘He’s got blue heeler in him,’ Ben reminded her. ‘Heelers are part dingo.’

  ‘Some more than others,’ Hedley said. ‘Every now and then some genius decides the breed is getting too soft and crosses more dingo back into it.’

  ‘What’s this, dear?’ Edna interrupted, working with her fork at a white cyst-like pocket in a slice of meat.

  ‘Looks like hydatid,’ Hedley pronounced. ‘Better not touch that, Mother.’

  Meg laughed. ‘They’re just garlic cloves, Dad.’

  Hedley drowned the offending lamb in mint sauce. ‘And I thought the meat was off.’

  ‘It’s an acquired taste,’ she said, but he had already turned back to Ben.

  ‘There’s no cure for it, son.’

  ‘What are you saying, Dad?’

  ‘You know what I’m saying. Once they start, they never stop.’

  ‘Then you’ll have to have him with you, after all. In town. Where he can’t do any damage.’

  ‘It’s no life for a working dog in there, son.’

  Silence. Meg’s eyes met Ben’s, pleading. He turned back to his father. ‘I’m not going to put him down without definite proof, Dad.’

  ‘Bennyboy – listen to reason. In no time flat you’ll have no lambs left. Once a dog acquires the taste …’ He turned back to his daughter-in-law. ‘Speaking of which – could I pester you for a couple more slices?’

  Nigger left his breakfast untouched in its bowl the next morning. After stalking that bowl, and being unrebuked, Blue gobbled it down. Was the older dog sickening? A different explanation waited out in the fields, where three black-feathered undertakers were watching over the bodies of another two dead lambs, one of which this time had been partly eaten.

  Even now, finding no wool on the old dog’s jaws or blood on his coat, Ben was able to resist the obvious. Although he prudently kept Nigger chained up every night for a week.

  Prudently, but sleeplessly: bursts of angry, frustrated barking kept waking both of them. Desperate for a night’s shut-eye by the weekend, he left the dog unchained, and found three more lambs ripped apart in the morning. Circumstantial evidence? Only Meg still thought so.

  ‘We have to catch him red-handed, Ben.’

  A year or two before he wouldn’t have listened. The value of the lost meat and wool would have tipped the scales of justice against the dog. Now the wool mountain was a mile high, everyone wanted to eat beef, or battery chicken, and his monetary losses were negligible. He could afford to bide his time.

  ‘You were thinking of getting rid of the sheep anyway, Ben. Barley prices are up – why not put in a few more acres next year? Or canola – the Chambers are putting in canola …’ ‘If it’s not our lambs, it’ll be the neighbours’.’

  ‘I’ll keep him in the house, then. Or we can put up a higher fence.’

  ‘I can’t even afford to fence the back paddock.’

  He didn’t tell his father about the latest attack. Hedley’s trick knee needed replacement, he had enough problems. But when the older man next rode around the farm with Ben he saw immediately that the lamb numbers were down.

  ‘That cold snap,’ Ben lied, and Hedley seemed satisfied enough, or too preoccupied with his own health to care.

  Meg kept Nigger inside for the rest of the week, and when Ben found the fourth batch of savaged lambs it seemed at first that the dog might be in the clear. But a day later Meg found a leg bone in the dog’s basket. She told Ben as soon as he came in that afternoon.

  ‘You let him out last night?’

  ‘He might be able to get out. But I can’t see how he could get back in.’

  ‘He must have,’ Ben said, and walked to the kitchen door. The fly-screen door was open an inch; he pushed it open, watched it fail to close completely.

  ‘The spring’s gone. He could shove his nose in there.’

  ‘No wonder the mozzies were biting,’ Meg said, but mosquitoes were the last thing on Ben’s mind as he stalked outside and chained the dog to the tank-stand.

  ‘Why is Nigger chained up?’ Edna wanted to know over the roast that Sunday.

  ‘Just a precaution, Mum.’

  ‘You missing a few more lambs?’ Hedley put in.

  Ben said nothing; his eyes sought refuge in Meg’s, avoiding his father’s. But he couldn’t turn his ears away.

  ‘You’ve only yourselves to blame, Bennyboy. Both of you. You can’t get close to a dog.’

  ‘A few pats can hardly make a difference,’ Meg said.

  ‘A few pats? He has the run of the house. You feed him scraps from the table …’

  ‘Sometimes.’

  ‘He thinks he’s human, girlie. He thinks he’s a member of the family.’

  ‘He is a member of the family. And he feels things – just like us.’

  Hedley spluttered, amused. ‘Like you maybe.’

  ‘Like all of us. He feels anger. Jealousy. Love …’

  ‘Maybe you’d better get one of these social workers from the city out to talk to him.’

  ‘Hedley,’ his wife warned.

  ‘Just trying to help, Edna. The kids have made a rod for their own backs. All I’m doing is offering advice. You have to put the dog down, son. Before you lose any more lambs.’

  ‘We’ll think about it, Dad.’

  ‘Well don’t think too long. It might be your farm now, but I can’t sit by and watch it go down the gurgler.’

  Ben, through gritted teeth: ‘I said, we’ll think about it, Dad.’

  ‘And I said, you’re running out of time.’

  Ben dropped his knife and fork with a clatter. ‘Maybe I don’t want the fucking farm, Dad. Maybe I never wanted it …’

  ‘There must be someone who would take him as a pet,’ Meg interrupted before anything more damaging could be said.

  ‘You could put an ad in the paper,’ Edna suggested.

  Her son picked up his cutlery again. ‘We’ll think about that too, Mum.’

  The young couple lay awake half the night thinking – and talking. Meg’s sleep, when it came, was eased by a sense that nothing had yet been decided. Ben left the house before she woke the next morning, needing an early start. Restringing wires in the top paddock, he waited until he saw her drive away to school before climbing into the ute and heading back to the house. He dragged a stool into the bedroom next to the wardrobe, and climbed up. Three guns had once been kept here, out of his child’s reach, until the Anzac Day when Hedley arrived back early from the Club, pulled down his old army .303, carried it out to the woodpile, set it on the block, and took to it with a sledgehammer. He had offered no reasons, then or later, and Ben had never seen him in such a state, before or since. Edna deflected her troubled son’s questions by talking vaguely of ‘a disagreement at the Club’, of someone calling him ‘a name that he didn’t like’.

  Two guns remained. The single-shot .22 Ben had used himself as a boy, spotlighting rabbits and kangaroos and even shooting the odd fox under supervision. The shotgun – a Winchester Type 12 – he had never been allowed to touch. He had been too small the winter his father had bought it. A pair of ducks had settled on the dam, but after breaking a tooth on a pellet while biting into a drumstick, Hedley had gone off duck meat forever. The Winchester had not been used since, except secretly, in play. In his teens, Ben would often take the gun down when his parents were out and familiarise himself with its workings. He was standing on the stool now, checking the pump action, when his father appeared in the doorway below him.

  Startled, he nearly unbalanced. The old man might have been a genie conjured up by rubbing the blue gun-metal.

  ‘Jesus, Dad – where did you come from?’

 
‘You can’t use a twelve-gauge, son. You’d take his whole head off.’

  Hedley turned and limped out of sight as abruptly as he had appeared. Ben placed the Winchester back on the wardrobe and took down the .22, an ancient single-shot Browning, plus a box of shells, and the squeeze can of gun oil. He spread newspaper over the kitchen table and carefully wiped down the open sights, broke open the breech and blew out the cobwebs. He oiled the hammer, checked its action, then opened the box of ammo and dropped a single shell into his breast pocket.

  He was about to replace the box on the wardrobe when he stopped, and took out a second shell. Just in case.

  Outside, Hedley was back on his throne. ‘Nigger,’ he called, and as always the dog ran instantly to him. ‘Sit, boy,’ he ordered, and as he leaned forward Ben thought he might be about to pat the dog for the first time ever. ‘You’ve been a good worker, boy,’ he said. A pause. ‘Well done,’ he added, then leaned back again, and turned to his son and nodded. To Ben, unsettled, it felt weirdly like a prison warden’s nod to an executioner.

  ‘You coming, Dad?’

  ‘You got to do these things by yourself, son.’

  Bullshit, Ben thought. You just don’t want to see it. But a lump clogged his throat; his father’s terse farewell to the dog had touched him somehow. He averted his face, and whistled Nigger up into the back of the ute. Blue tried to follow; twice Ben had to order the usually obedient dog to stay. The younger dog whimpered and paced around the yard, agitated. When Ben tossed a spade into the tray, Blue barked frantically up at his sire, as if in warning.

  Ben knelt and held the young dog’s head for a moment, looking him straight in the eyes. ‘It can’t be helped, Blue. It’s got to be done.’

  The condemned dog, its own mind-reading powers apparently diminished by age, showed no qualms at accepting a ride in a ute with a man with a rifle and a spade. The south paddock was three gates away. Each time Ben stopped and climbed out he avoided eye contact with the dog, but Nigger seemed oblivious to this body language, running eagerly from side to side of the tray, tongue lolling, happy just to be out and about. When they reached the stand of uncleared mulga that bordered the south fence, the dog jumped joyfully down and headed straight into the bleached summer grass. He had killed a brown snake here years before; the patch of scrub was clearly a techni-colour mix of nose memories and fresh scents, which was why Ben had chosen it.