Twenty-One — Mad Cows and Dis-Ease

But my star turn remained a ways off, with much work to do in the meantime. Marlee and Charlie intended to get the first of the five separate musters out of the way before Peter’s departure. All the work we’d done to prep the yards and laneways had gotten us very close to that mark. The next step involved clearing cattle from the small paddocks nearest to the new laneway. This we’d do on horseback. We started our day by saddling our horses in the golden breaking dawn, the morning mist and ambient dust turning everything more than an arm’s length away into a radiant silhouette. We rode as a group out of the horse pen and along the fence line in Bull Rush, all the way to its furthest corner. We then fanned out and began the process of aggregating and pushing the cattle within the arc created by the five riders. Eddie quickly showed himself to be an able horseman, riding easily in the saddle and moving his horse about with the slightest of gesture. I again found myself astride Silibark, where my main challenge was overcoming its compulsion to dawdle. A few times I overplayed my need, jabbing my heels into Silibark’s flank in a way which spurred him from a near standstill to a full canter. I managed to hang on in those circumstances and reined him into a trot without being ejected from the stippled gray steed. I congratulated myself for not being thrown, low a bar though that may be in the world of horsemanship.

I soon learned that these cattle were easier critters to muster than the half-wild brumbies we’d chased about the previous month. Most of the bovines took their cue easily, joined their mates, and began their slow walk to the laneway. Within an hour we had several hundred cattle contained in Homestead paddock. Though most moved easily along the fence line and towards the laneway, a few required a more vigorous coaxing. Most often the problem arose when calves became separated from their mothers. Bawling lustily, the calves would take only two or three steps unbidden. They quickly drifted to the rear of the pack, directly in front of us riders. Convinced that their mothers had been left behind, they would turn and face us, bleating pathetically. We’d ride up on the calves, yet most still would not move. Watching the other riders, I learned to urge Silibark to push his chest against the piteous bleaters to get them moving the right way. Occasionally a mother cow would hear her calf crying out and come running to find her little darling. Some of these desperate mommas faced up to us and tried to run past. In those moments, horsemanship proved its worth. Danielle or Marlee or Eddie or Charlie or even — a couple of times, I — sprinted directly in front of the bolting cow to encourage it back into the herd.

By midday we found ourselves pushing a thousand cattle up the laneway towards the yard. As the lead mob reached the holding yards they hesitated, despite the open gate. We riders continued our slow push on the rear of the mob. This was a tense moment; had the notion of reversing course swept through the herd we’d have been staring at the business end of a thousand skittish, hardheaded animals coming our way. I took my cue from the others, and stood in my saddle waving my hat, urging the mob on. Fortunately, those animals at the front sought their escape through the gate and the rest of the mob followed. At Charlie’s direction, Peter and I dismounted and ran twenty yards to shut the gate. I didn’t need anyone to point out the problematic potential of this moment; had the mob decided to relieve their claustrophobia by turning around  heading back out to pasture before we could chain the gates, Peter and I would have been waffled between gate and yard panels by a thousand marauding bovines. With swift determination we swung the iron gates closed against the rumps of the last to enter, throwing the chain around to secure the two gate sections as one. We celebrated our success — and gave the cattle a few moments to calm themselves — by taking an abbreviated lunch.

Our return to the yards marked my first experience with a large group of confined cattle. The potential stakes of working amongst these irate creatures in tight quarters were immediately apparent. Cattle are much larger than we city folk tend to think they are. Many reached to my chin along their backbones. With their correspondingly wide girth and suspicious eyes they made for a formidable presence individually, and a downright fearsome presence in their current collective agitation.

Our first task involved running the individuals one-by-one into a round yard, just as we had with the horses. From the round yard they would be let into one of several sorting pens. With this many animals, we needed to funnel the single mob through a series of progressively smaller pens in order to make manageable the job of allowing only a single animal at a time into the round yard. We began by carefully opening the gate from the main yard into the first holding pen, large enough for sixty or seventy animals. As we opened this gate the animals nearest shied away, leery of the newly available space. Peter made certain I’d seen two scrub bulls among the nearest faces. I kept my eyes on those two as we circled behind the crowd nearest the open gate. In a scurry of snorts and dust the appropriate number avoided our approach and scampered into the smaller pen. We closed the gates, pushing through the skittish and agitated mob to do so. I do believe I was looking seven different directions at once, monitoring the intent of the unhappy animals now at my elbows. The scrub bulls maintained their distance. We swung the gate closed and vaulted onto the railing, safely above the herd.

This sorting process—known as drafting in ringer-ese—filled the rest of our day. Cows with calves went in one pen, cows without calves in another, bulls into a third.  Anyone unbranded was segregated to that task. Yearlings, stout but not yet fearsome, comprised most of the unbranded stock. But because each year’s muster cannot be 100% thorough we found a dozen full-grown critters as yet unbranded, large and ornery, eight of these being full-grown bulls. Given that the highest-spirited animals were the ones most likely to resist being pushed around by a bunch of loudmouths on horseback, that the bulk of these would be testosterone-charged scrub bulls came as no surprise.

All the adult animals were intimidating, but these scrub bulls were downright terrifying. Solid as anvils, their musculature was front-loaded; massive necks and bulging shoulders tapered to comparatively thin hips. All had substantial, pointed horns. Battle scars tattooed their broad faces and shoulders. And while none of the cattle were delighted with the situation, these bulls were palpably enraged by their plight—confined alongside their rivals, red-eyed, menacing, malevolent. Our stated intention to stab red-hot metal onto their keisters hovered in that moment as a certifiable brand of crazy, to my mind.

Dealing with the bulls would be one of our final tasks, however, and none of the other jobs began until we finished drafting the entire mob. After we’d moved half the original number through the round yard a new wrinkle in the drafting game became apparent to me. With all the empty space in the main holding pen, it wasn’t obvious to the remaining cattle where they needed to go. We’d fan out across the wide main pen to urge the animals towards the desired gate, but if they didn’t immediately perceive our intention they’d circle back and lope past our waving arms. On one of these pushes I was in the middle position, farthest from the fence, my attention focused upon the two scrub bulls among the remaining mob. Suddenly I heard a shout. To my right I saw a tall yellow cow with an impressive set of horns, shivering and snorting. She’d turned to face me directly from forty feet, and just as I set eyes on her she lowered her head and came my way at full throttle.

I’m not entirely certain exactly what happened next. I assume that light passed through my cornea, cleared the iris, hit my retina, was gathered by my neurons, and was then hijacked by my reptile brain. Without the burden of any higher processing folderol I launched into fight-or-flight mode, with ‘fight’ not an option. Marlee said later that I did a ‘proper somersault’ over the six-foot fence. All I remember is bolting towards the fence in the near distance, putting two hands on the top rail, then landing both feet on the opposite side. As I gathered myself and turned back towards the pen the half-ton cow crashed into the fencing, two feet from my wide eyes.

“I hadn’t seen you move that fast in three months!” cracked Marlee with a wry smile, “Good thing it’s not early in the day!”

“A bit too close there, Dave,” said Charlie, with a tone of disapproval. “We need you here today.”

“Yeah. I’ve got some aspirations to survive the day myself, Charlie ol’ boy”, I thought. “And tomorrow, and maybe even next Tuesday”, though that proposition suddenly looked a mite less certain than it had a few moments earlier.

Thusly was I introduced to cattle work; with the realization that my first and last taste of local flavor could easily end up being the taste of dirt. Or blood. Or cow muck.  When I reentered the pen—no time-out for the rookie ringer—I gauged more carefully my distance from the fence and scanned the entire mob more assiduously. Over the next several months I found myself being chased from the yard a half-dozen times, each incident becoming less dramatic than the one before. I eventually got to where I would lope over to the fencing, vault to the top rail safely out of harm’s way, then hop back into the pen with nary a worry. Perhaps I became too casual; one time I misjudged my distance and got chased around a eucalyptus tree like a rodeo clown around a barrel. I then chose my moment and made it to the fencing before the peeved cow could recover her line and get at me.

The Outback has a way of keeping a person humble, however. My strategy of avoiding a charging animal by hopping onto the top yard rail proved shaky when I saw one fiercely determined scrub bull do something I would not have imagined possible. This particular fella was full grown, fifteen hundred to two thousand pounds of solid muscle and malice. His face was crosshatched with scars of past victories, his eyes, red and venomous. He’d managed to elude the muster for several seasons. Why and how he made it into our yards this particular year I do not know, and the mystery was obviously equally apparent to him. He was one of the final candidates to make his way into the round yard, only after chasing all of us in multiple circuits around the large yard. Charlie called Kelly into the yard to see if she could persuade the ornery chap to move through the gate; he simply flung the gutsy but over-matched canine six or eight feet in the air and twenty feet distant when she closed in on the bull. Hunter, a solid 90-pound Rottweiler, entered next. Hunter managed to clamp his jaws on the bull’s nose, but the big fella started doing circles in an attempt to swing Hunter off. Around and around they went, the enraged bull with its dogged dance partner hanging valiantly from its schnoz. The bull then changed its strategy, dropped Hunter into the bull dust, put its head down, and overran its domesticated opponent. The force of the great bull’s forehead against Hunter’s chest caused the dog to release its grip and slink to safety. We wranglers gave the bull a few moments to collect itself and as it did so it perceived the open gate and ran through. Marlee, working from above, quickly chained the round yard gate, then opened the gate to the bullpen.

The bull seized its opportunity. Taking six or eight great strides, it taxied itself through the pen, then launched up and over the six-foot fence at the end opposite the round yard gate. It didn’t even rattle the fence as it cleared, its strong if stumpy legs projected forwards and backwards like a bovine Superman as it freed itself and galloped back into the open bush. Had I made the mistake of avoiding that particular bull’s pursuit by sitting atop the railing, I’d have been whisked unwillingly and rather awkwardly into the bush on the point of the bull’s horns. As an observer I froze in my tracks at this display of ferocious will and unfeasible physics exhibited by the aerodynamically preposterous animal.

“Bloody Hell,” said Danielle, “sign that one up for the Olympics!” I assumed that in her nineteen years she’d never seen such athleticism either.

Apart from these few moments of adrenaline the afternoon moved along in unvaried routine. Standing ankle-deep in bull dust and cow muck we moved the animals through the pens and into the round yard, identified their needs, segregated them into their individual pens, then made sure they had plenty of hay and water for the night. As we walked back to the homestead, the descending shades of evening light illuminating a mirror image of the morning’s visions, I was struck by the chorus of calls the cattle made. The plaintive mewling of calves and the tenor bawling of their concerned mothers echoed through the yards, the whole undergirded by basso profundo complaints from the captive bulls.

As I listened I also noticed a tide of insect noises rising with the encroaching darkness, the squawks and chirps of birds from trees surrounding the homestead, the distant cries of Gallahs settling in for the night among the eucalyptus. Along with the hum of the generator powering the evening’s activities and the subdued chatter of our tired selves I appreciated an unexpected fullness of sound within this vast emptiness, a symphonic presence discordant with the sparse visuals of the outback. The eye alone is fooled by this place, I thought, a device wholly inadequate for evaluating the breadth of living energy amongst the unseen shelters of the always surprising Australian bush.