“You’ll drive the boys out in the morning,” Charlie told me when I returned to the homestead. “The bus will be passing our track around two in the afternoon. Sara’s got two new hands coming in. Bring those fellas back; we’ll be looking for you by supper.”
“Before that, I want you and Danielle to saddle up and ride into Homestead paddock. Ride among the cattle you see, but slowly, quietly. Let’s get them used to being around people. Don’t push them here or there, definitely don’t get them running. Got it?”
Danielle and my day began in the Toyota, driving stock horses into the corral. The cool morning light backlit the locomotive exhalations of the horses as they trotted in front of our vehicle. Their flowing manes danced in the blue directional rays of dawn, crisp flashes of the nascent day’s light arcing among the silken threads.
“Danielle, I’d like to ride Fleetfoot today,” I said, a veneer of bravado papering my trepidation. I’d been eying Fleetfoot, a radiant chestnut with a prominent white blaze and fetlocks, but hadn’t yet had the courage to ride him. Unlike Silibark, with a default gear set at ‘Mosey’, Fleetfoot’s drive jammed on the ‘Run’ setting. Much as I liked the idea of an upgrade, I couldn’t be certain I wouldn’t be outpacing my horsemanship angels. A low-stakes ride such as this offered the ideal opportunity to test my progress.
“I don’t know, Dave. Fleetfoot is a bolter. This is supposed to be a quiet ride. You sure you’re game?”
“Oh, I think so. Maybe this is a good chance to get a feel for him without buggering up a muster, or something foolish like that.”
“All right, mate. But don’t come crying to me if he sends you bum over teakettle.” Danielle offered this disclaimer with a smile, but her brow relayed concern.
Meeting this challenge, allaying her doubts, might be a perfect opportunity to prove I was more of a cowboy now than when I first arrived. The possibility excited me; what red-blooded male doesn’t relish the chance to impress a beautiful woman?
We separated our mounts and released the others back into the paddock. As I stepped towards the striking chestnut, Fleetwood snorted and threw his head. It seemed he’d heard my boast and was eager to test my mettle. I offered my hand to his wet nose; he blew a great gust of humid air in my face. I stepped closer to stroke his neck. He tossed his head and shied away.
“Easy, big boy,” I cooed, “Easy now. We’ll be friends soon. I’ll be nice to you. Be nice to me, okay?”
The handsome horse answered with an intense stare from his dark eyes, and tossed his head slightly, but as I stepped towards him again he stood still. I slowly wrapped my lead rope around his neck and cautiously walked him to the rail.
“Attaboy, big fella. We’re gonna have fun today.”
As I threw my saddle blanket across his back, he shivered his withers and whinnied. Keeping clearly within his field of vision, I lifted my saddle off the rail and settled it upon his broad back. He turned and looked at me, stomping his rear feet. This was a kinetic animal, built to move. Whether I was equally ready was a question about to be settled. I watched his eyes closely as I reached underneath his belly for the girth strap. Any horse is capable of pivoting with lightning speed to remove an annoyance with a deadly kick—annoyances such as some yahoo groping around its undercarriage being high on the list. And Fleetfoot was not just any horse. If I wasn’t careful I was liable to have a permanent horseshoe imprint on my frontal lobe.
With the strap secured—and my braincase intact–I stepped in the near stirrup and threw my leg over, keeping my torso close to his body to minimize torque on his frame. Fleetfoot danced and turned sharply to the left. I hadn’t been careful about my reins as I climbed aboard and had laid them against his neck on the right side, an indication to turn. This horse was raring to go.
I could feel the explosive potential beneath me as we walked from the corral. I concentrated on keeping my hands low, the reins taut but not tight, enough to let him know I was paying attention but not so much as to indicate I wanted to stop. He adjusted himself to my presence by stomping and tossing his head gently about. Whenever my reins slackened, even slightly, he would increase his pace, forcing me to gently remind him of the bit in his mouth. We went back and forth this way for a few minutes, my calves gripping his rib cage to keep me upright as he skittered his backside this way and that.
“How you going there, Dave?” asked Danielle from atop Blue Bob. “You gonna be right?”
“Oh yeah, I’ll be fine,” I said with a confidence multiple shades more than I felt. I was excited to be aboard an animal more revved up than ol’ Silibark, but I wasn’t convinced that my excitement wouldn’t, at some near point, turn to terror.
Ripe opportunity for disaster did not take long to materialize. We’d aggregated a small mob of cattle along a fence line when Danielle whistled me to her location. I’d been spending more time concentrating on Fleetfoot than on the cattle. I remained optimistic, was getting comfortable aboard the turbocharged critter. He’d not offered any indication of malevolence, any desire to buck me off, though I could clearly sense his desire to run. I urged him to a trot as we rode towards Danielle.
Danielle is a first-rate horsewoman. She sat aboard Blue Bob, himself a spirited horse, in absolute command. She’d communicate her will with the slightest of taps, and off they’d go. Walking, trotting, cantering, in full gallop; she was always the picture of equestrian expertise.
“There’s a decent mob down in the riverbed over there. Let’s go collect them, then move ‘em this way. Once they’re moving, you stay behind ‘em and I’ll go wide to keep this lot together as the others arrive. Sound good?”
I nodded my assent, and we began walking the couple hundred yards to the shallow riverbed, with its sloping banks of sloughy sand over clay. As we approached the bank and stepped over, Danielle slightly ahead of me, Blue Bob’s front foot found a void and he collapsed onto his front knees. Danielle was properly leaning back in anticipation of the descent but was unable to resist the inexorable force of Blue Bob’s backside coming forward as its head dropped dramatically. The young woman was ejected and did a somersault down the soft embankment. Blue Bob regained his feet, but either the loose reins or Danielle moving strangely in his peripheral vision spooked the big gray, and he bolted.
“Are you okay?!” I inquired with concern.
“I think so!” the frontier woman answered, her urgent tone colored by embarrassment. “But Blue Bob! He’s heading for the Parkinsonia! His reins!”
Danielle needed to say no more. One of the more devilish plants of the Australian outback is Parkinsonia, an invasive weed introduced from arid regions of Central America in the 1800s by some boneheaded immigrant who thought it’d look pretty by their front door. It has since spread throughout northern and western Australia, clogging waterways and impeding movement across previously open bush lands. Its crowning menace, however, are the inch-long thorns which line the drooping branches of the fifteen foot tall shrubs. To the uninitiated eye it appears as though a rider could pick one’s way through a Parkinsonia grove, only to discover the forest of needles contained within. A horse attempting to run through a stand of Parkinsonia with loose reins would quickly be brought to an awkward and potentially fatal halt as those reins snagged on the malevolent thorns.
My call to action was clear. I spurred Fleetfoot, forgetting for a moment how little incentive the lithe gelding needed. My heels in his flank took him immediately from a standstill to a flat-out gallop. I managed to hang on, somehow, but didn’t manage to activate the steering mechanism on my spunky mount in time to avoid the single Parkinsonia which stood twenty feet ahead. With four long strides, Fleetfoot reached the weaponized scrub tree and zoomed directly underneath. Though I couldn’t turn my horse in time, I was able to duck my head, avoiding the face-full of thorns I otherwise would’ve met. As we flew past, a spiny comb raked my back.
That fact hardly registered; my attention was on Blue Bob, running several strides ahead and pointed directly towards the stand of inhospitable plants fifty yards distant. Standing in my stirrups, my chin close to Fleetfoot’s rising and falling neck, we quickly gained on Danielle’s slower horse. Is it possible that, without our pursuit, Blue Bob would’ve pulled up on his own? I don’t know. I’m not a horse guy. What I did apprehend clearly was an opportunity to make myself genuinely useful by short-circuiting a potential disaster. I was not going to blow the chance.
Fleetfoot and I pulled alongside Blue Bob, our encounter with the menacing Parkinsonia only seconds away. I secured both my horse’s reins with my right hand and with my left reached for Blue Bob’s mouth. Both horses remained at full gallop. Mercifully, I quickly managed to get ahold of one of the free-flowing reins. I reined Fleetfoot sharply, though with a smidge more awareness of his responsiveness than when I’d spurred him into action. Blue Bob felt the bit in his mouth, a reminder he wasn’t running free with his buddies. He turned our direction as his backside wheeled away, and he slowed with a hop and a snort.
As Fleetfoot also slowed through a trot to a walk, I was able to draw Blue Bob’s head near enough to grab both reins. I looked up and eyed the Parkinsonia, no more than forty feet distant. With the amped-up horses snorting and shivering—and my heart beating in my chest like a djembe sounding across the Mema Plains of Mali—I turned the two horses back towards Danielle.
Now, I suppose I should confess here that I hoped Danielle would thank me by smothering me in kisses and confessing her undying devotion. But, alas, that was not to be.
“Nice riding, Dave. I haven’t really seen that out of you yet,” she said, her beautiful white smile registering more than a bit of relief. I could tell she was happy and impressed, and that was enough for me.
And she darn well ought to have been impressed! Had I been called upon to do such a thing ten weeks earlier, I likely would have fallen between the two horses, been trampled, then helicoptered directly to the Swiss cheese packing plant. It felt a graduation of sorts, an accomplishment one might expect a seasoned ringer to pull off. I wasn’t that guy yet, but neither was I the greenhorn who climbed off the Greyhound. The realization warmed me. But dangit; where was the TV crew when you needed them?!
“Let’s get home,” she said, rotating her arm gingerly. “I need to ice my shoulder and you need to clean that back.”
In all the excitement, I’d forgotten about my encounter with the thorn bush.
“How’s it look?” I asked, turning my back towards my companion.
“Aw, I’ve seen worse. A couple of scratches. Those thorns can be nasty though, so you should give them a wash and a bit of antiseptic.”
We rode the short distance home, un-saddled our horses, then hosed them down and turned them loose before heading back to the homestead. When I pulled my shirt off, I saw that it had been turned into tatters. Multiple long incisions ran from my neck line nearly to my waist. Portions of the cut edges were stained with blood. After Danielle gently washed and disinfected the wicked thorn’s mercifully superficial scratches, I returned to my room to discover I had no clean replacement shirt. Every piece of clothing I owned lay in a filthy heap beside my door, a mound of mucky attire the result of an unwise procrastination to do laundry.
“Dave, let’s get a move on!” Charlie was calling me from outside. “We need to get these boys to the road!”
With no better option I pulled the shredded T-shirt over my head and pointed myself outside.
“Wait! Take these with you!” Sara handed me three fat steak sandwiches. I filled a large thermos with drinking water and joined Charlie and the boys outside.
“You’ve got three hours before the bus is scheduled to arrive. There’ll be two blokes getting off, so if you’re not there they might ask the driver to wait a moment, especially if they’re running ahead of schedule. But they won’t wait long.” Charlie cautioned.
The ride out was uneventful. Eddie, prone to quietude in the best of times, kept to himself. Denny and I chatted about superficialities. We’d made our peace the night before, and part of that connection was a recognition that we were two very different people. There was to be no bridging that gap in our last several hours together.
Our only delay came when one of our rear tires went flat. Given all the vehicles on the station, and the motley assortment of retreads and patched hardware which passed for tires at Bullo, changing a vehicle tire was a near daily experience. We never rode anywhere without at least a single spare, and on trips such as this we would carry two at minimum. The lug wrench and jack we’d need were always easily accessible, and any of us could change a tire as easily as we changed our skivvies. Back home, the ability to change a tire is thought to be the measure of a man. Here in the outback, the ability to change a tire is the measure of a ten-year-old child.
We completed our long drive and pulled to a stop at the bitumen. Within thirty minutes of waiting in the enveloping silence, a passenger bus appeared on the distant horizon. It hissed to a halt at our location and the driver hopped out, followed by two young men. The uniformed man secured Denny and Eddie’s swags in the cargo hold then, with a nod and a handshake I bid goodbye to my short-term coworkers. I turned my attention to the new arrivals and saw the more slender of the two waving towards the stopped bus.
“You’ve got a friend on there, have you?” I asked by way of introduction.
“Naw, mate. It’s not me. Appears some have taken an interest in you, though,” the young man said.
I turned to see a line of people with cameras before their eyes, or noses pressed against the green tinted windows. All appeared to be looking at me.
“What the hell…?” I quietly exclaimed.
“I reckon it’s your flash shirt,” offered the other new arrival, a stout fellow of similar age, sporting a military green button-up shirt with the sleeves hacked off at the shoulder, and a porkpie hat.
It occurred to me that the young man might have a point. My shredded and bloodstained shirt must have been quite a sight, especially to those foreigners or city folk fueled on tales of the rigors of outback life. I suppose they were thinking I’d had just survived a flogging. I can only imagine the concern the good people aboard that Greyhound must have felt for the two young men disembarking to head into a station equipped with a working cat-o’-nine-tails.
“Ha! Yeah, I had a bit of a run in with some Parkinsonia this morning. I suppose it must look a mite gruesome.”
“Bloody awful stuff, that. Did you come out okay otherwise?” asked the skinnier man. He had freckles and what we back home would call a trucker cap, the kind with mesh behind and the name of some industrial enterprise on the crown.
“Oh yeah, “I said, failing to resist the impulse to boast. This was an opportunity to show the new guys what I was made of. “I was riding this morning when my mate got thrown. Her horse bolted and I tracked it down and pulled it up short of a big ‘ol patch of the damned stuff,” I said with a swagger.
“All right!” said the skinny fella. “Well, me name’s Dave. I’m from Tasmania. You’re not, I can tell. Where’s your home?”
“I’m from LA. Los Angeles, USA.”
“Erik,” the second man said, extending his hand. “Sounds like you can ride. So you’re a proper ringer, eh?” he said in an even tone.
“Yeah, I suppose, a bit. You know, the basic stuff.”
“So you worked with cattle in Los Angeles? How long you been at it, then, mate?”
“Oh, only just a couple of months. Not too many cattle in Los Angeles!” I chuckled.
The Tasmanian laughed with me, but Erik only narrowed his dark eyes. “A couple months? You’ve been at it a couple months and you’ll call yourself a ringer?”
“Well, not a proper ringer, I suppose,” I backtracked, suddenly uncomfortable with the conversation. “Hey, toss your gear in the truck and let’s head back. We’ve got a long ride ahead of us.”
“A long ride?” Erik scoffed. “What, are we taking Dave back to Tasmania?”
Again, the Tasmanian chuckled, but I was finding Erik’s challenging tone unpleasant. “Well, three hours anyway. The homestead is seventy-seven kilometers from here.”
“Yeah, I can see that on the sign. Three hours is not a long ride.”
I met Erik’s humorless eyes for a moment, then nodded and turned towards the truck. “So hop in then. The house is just around the corner; it’ll only be a minute.” There was more sarcasm in my voice than humor as I made the point.
“So you didn’t tell us your name, mate,” pointed out the Tasmanian as we got underway.
“Oh, sorry. I’m also Dave. Not ten of us here, but two Daves.”
“You can just call me Tazzy. It’ll be simple that way.”
“Tazzy it is then. Tazzy and… Erik, right?” I asked, raising my eyes to the rearview mirror to meet a glare from the back seat. He nodded only slightly.
I registered Erik’s disinclination to chat and turned my attention to the Tasmanian. “So tell me about Tasmania. I haven’t had a chance to visit.”
“Aw, it’s all right, idn’t it? Me family’s from the mountains, loggers mostly. Not a lot to do, is there?”
I smiled at Tazzy’s manner of turning statements into questions a listener had no capacity to answer.
“So how do you keep busy, then? I guess you weren’t interested in logging?”
“No chance of that, mate! Between the piss and the windy roads and the bloody rough job most of me mates have been killed, haven’t they? I mean, I got six mates what been killed in just the last couple of years.”
“Christ! You’ve lost six friends to logging? Sounds like a tough life!”
“Aye, mate. Well, the logging, and the drinking and the drivin’. When the wind blows hard across Bass Strait for a whole month you’d wish you were dead, wouldn’t you? I buggered out meself a couple years ago. Been in Surfers Paradise for a bit. It’s all a bit milder there, idn’t it?”
I really had no basis for evaluating the ease of life in Surfers Paradise, having never been there, but it’s hard to imagine it wouldn’t compare favorably to a windblown hollow where men drink and drive and log themselves to early graves.
“Couldn’t take the working life, eh?” Erik interjected, the churlish curl of his cold grin visible in my rear-view.
“Naw, that wasn’t it, mate,” Tazzy said, turning his chin towards the rear, “I just reckoned I’d either be dead or married pretty quick if I didn’t cut out. Didn’t neither sound too good to me, did it?”
“Well, you’ve got to have a girl to get married—unless you’re a bloody poofter. You’re not poofy, are you?!” Erik was finally having fun, smiling for the first time since we’d met.
“Hell no, mate! Bloody bugger that!” Tazzy didn’t seem to sense the ugly intimation I attributed to Erik’s sporting homophobia. “Me girlfriend came with me to Surfers Paradise. She was a hairdresser, the only one in Vole Creek.”
My mind flashed on an image of a town full of drunken citizens, careening about in automobiles, covered in sawdust, their windblown hair relegated to tousled knots by the departure of Tazzy’s girl. “So where is she now? Why isn’t she here with you?”
Tazzy returned his gaze my direction. “Well, mate, I don’t fancy getting married any more now than when I was back home. Me wild years are behind me, aren’t they? But I reckon I’m still due a bit of fun before I’m all done…” Tazzy’s voice trailed off as he turned his attention to the dry terrain outside the window.
“So you figure you still got a few good years in you, do you?” I attempted to convey a thick sarcasm, but Tazzy’s answer told me I didn’t succeed.
“Aye, mate. Maybe a couple, eh?” the young man said wistfully.
“And how old a man are you?”
“Oh, I’m already twenty-two, mate.”
My eyes left the road ahead long enough to take in the image of the wrangler to my left, his head leaning against the window, his eyes unfocused on the passing scenery as he contemplated his compressed vision of the future.
Hard lives are often short lives, and the expression of ebbing possibility across the young man’s unlined face made me wonder whether that fact was made truer by circumstance or volition. Hard physical labor has its lethal potential, certainly, but I suppose there must arise in some men a desire to extinguish the ground nub of their existence before infirmity renders them, not merely enervated, but incapable. It’s one manner of challenge to muster the energy to get about one’s day, another thing entirely to be unable—crippled by abuses self-inflicted and otherwise—to be able to act upon those energies, once conjured.
That a man as young as Tazzy might be confronted with such contemplations at the dawn of his twenties suggested something ominous to me about the sandpaper nature of existence among mountainous hollows, where horizons are perpetually close at hand, and ever above eye level.
Barking in Nutwood 