heaven above and beyond me, ‘this is where you get steamrollered.’
I revved up the bike and started forwards. Not too fast or I’d be in the middle of the mob in a second and the leaders would just go, ‘What was that?’ and keep running. Not too slow or they’d go over the top of me and I’d be under their hooves and mashed into the mud. I flashed the headlights on and off. The four-wheeler doesn’t have a horn but I yelled a lot. I zigzagged in big zigzags, shouting and waving my hat. A wave of heat hit me. It shocked me, that they could generate heat like that. They were almost up to me, the leaders rolling relentlessly on, and I could see their eyes now, and they were anxious and lost and wanting to stomp me into the earth so they could go somewhere, they still didn’t know where.
CHAPTER 3
‘Wake up, dear,’ the nurse said.
No, just kidding. I don’t know what it was that had run so hard through the blood of this mob, whether it was rage or fear or a desire for freedom or a force that has no word. I suspect it was the last one. But whatever it was, the charge up to the ridge from where Gavin and Homer had turned them was enough to slow them just a little and calm them just a little more. And my yelling and zigzagging and flashing lights turned them again. They ran along the western boundary of the paddock and soon the stragglers were standing with sides heaving and heads down, ignoring us three; the leaders lost their drive then, with no followers, and they fizzled out and wandered off into the scrub, snatching at grass as they went. They almost looked embarrassed.
We were puffing harder than the cattle, but we still had a lot of work ahead. I divided the paddock into three and we split up and went looking for injured beasts. The rain kept going, not spectacularly, quite light most of the time, but it was soaking and cold and got you down a bit.
While the other two were still looking I nicked off home, mainly because I needed the rifle, but I grabbed a loaf of bread and a jar of apricot jam and three cans of Coke as well. I could hear Marmie yelping with excitement and anxiety and loneliness from her pen — whenever she heard one of the bikes she went off big-time — but I had to be hard-hearted and ignore her. This was not a dog party. I went back to the paddock and met up with the other two and we had a picnic, trying to keep the bread dry under my Drizabone as I spread slice after slice and handed them around.
It was three-twenty a.m. The boys ate every slice I gave them. Gavin was shivering and Homer was too cold and tired to speak. I said to Gavin, ‘Have you done your homework yet?’ but it took him four goes to get what I meant and then he just turned away as if I were demented. It wasn’t much of a joke to begin with and by the fourth time around it had gone beyond lameness into permanent disability.
Gavin took me to a couple of steers who were injured. One was up, but with a leg hanging uselessly. I thought he was a chance but the other one had a leg fracture so severe that twenty centimetres of bone were sticking out, and I had to shoot him. I shot another one, a small beast with a funny face, all red and white squares. I’d noticed him before. But there was nothing funny about him now. He’d fallen off a bank, pushed by the rush of cattle I guess, and he’d impaled himself on a sharp old gum stump. Too many of his insides had become outsides for him to have any chance.
Homer had found a couple of others but they looked like they might get through with a bit of stitching and TLC. It would be a close thing though. Shock and blood loss and cold wet weather were three reasons they mightn’t make it. Altogether we had four who looked like they’d qualify for disabled parking stickers.
I left Homer and Gavin to bring in the ones that could be moved while I went home to ring the vet. I had the after-hours number for Mr Keech but it rang out, so I rang the surgery, which was annoying because then I had to sit through all the ‘If your cat has a headache press 3’ stuff. Finally I got an emergency number, which was different from Mr Keech’s so I tried that. It rang and rang. At last a bloke answered. He said, ‘Hello,’ but he didn’t sound like any of the vets I knew. I thought, ‘Oh no! I’ve rung some poor bloke at four in the morning and it’s a wrong number.’
I said, ‘Is that the vet?’ and he said, ‘Yes,’ so we were making progress. I said, ‘It’s Ellie Linton here, out at Mirrimbah. I’ve got four cattle who need looking at. The mob took off in the storm and quite a few got injured.’
He said, ‘Oh fuck.’
I struggled to keep my temper, then lost the struggle. ‘So far you’ve said four words,’ I said, sounding as cold as the weather. ‘ “Hello”, “yes”, and “oh fuck”. Are you coming out here or aren’t you?’
He didn’t sound the slightest bit bothered. ‘Oh yes. Where’d you say you were from?’
‘Mirrimbah. It’s on the…’
‘Yeah, yeah, I know it.’
The phone made that little durrup noise as he hung up.
As we waited for him we did a bit of cleaning up of the cattle that Homer and Gavin had brought lumbering in. We didn’t bother to take them up to the new yards and put them in the press, just used the old wooden yard behind the house. They were in shock, shivering and shuffling around. It was like some of the boys at the B amp;S’s, when they were supposedly dancing but they just moved their feet backwards and forwards, left and right, right and left, forwards and backwards. The cattle did their clumsy dance, grunting and rolling their eyes. We did a bit of cattle whispering, calming them down and shoving lucerne into their gobs. The lucerne probably helped more than the whispering. Three of them had big wounds, which would have sent a human straight to the floor, but even with their guts sticking out the cattle wanted to waltz.
They looked how I felt. My head seemed detached from my body. The jawbone wasn’t connected to the neck bone. I wanted to put my head in a cupboard for a few days until it stopped throbbing.
Gavin and Homer were talking about the stampede and where they’d been and what they’d done and how smart and heroic they were. I didn’t have the energy to listen. I think they probably had been heroic and smart but they were so good at telling each other about it that they didn’t need me.
The vet arrived in a Falcon Ute so splattered with mud that you couldn’t see if it had number plates or not. I had to admit he’d got here in record time. And then he was so nice that all the angry speeches I’d been planning went out of my head. He was a young bloke named Seamus, and he went to his work so neatly and quickly that I watched in fascination. We were all so tired — including Seamus — that I don’t know how we stayed awake. That heavy feeling behind my eyelids, the ache in my head… I did everything in slightly slow motion, and only the presence of my friends made it OK.
Homer stood holding the torch while I held the head of the beast who was being stitched, and Gavin was a general gofer, sitting on the step leading into the food shed when I didn’t have a job for him. I thought he would fall asleep but each time I looked his eyes were still open. Most of the time I watched Seamus at work. He had good, strong, patient hands and he worked steadily, pulling the edges of the wound together, stitching away, swabbing occasionally. Homer watched too, and the light of the big Dolphin torch gave us both a good view of the bleeding flesh, the torn edges, the white muscle and severed veins.
Then it happened. Homer said to me quietly, ‘Can you hold the torch for a sec, El?’
‘Sure.’
As I took it he added, ‘I’m not feeling all that well.’
With those words he slid straight to the ground and lay there unconscious under the big steer.
I yelped, which wasn’t all that helpful. The beast was penned well enough but we hadn’t allowed for a human coming at him from that direction. He shook his head and bellowed and started to step backwards. Homer was about to have a five hundred kilo-plus beast step on him. With cattle and horses the weight is all resting on those four thin legs and hard hooves. A steamroller running over you would have a totally different effect, but I wasn’t sure which would be worse. I dropped the torch, which meant no-one could see anything, although I was aware of the light rolling over and over and pointing away towards the stars. Seamus and I dived simultaneously under the steer, cracked our heads and somehow got a grip on Homer and started dragging him out. For one terrible moment I realised we were pulling him in different directions, like a Christmas cracker. Then we seemed to be going the same way.
All of this would have been too late, with Homer cored like an apple, if not for one thing which is that the steer, having taken two steps back, and about to take a third step which would disembowel my best friend, suddenly shook his head, gave a low grunt, kicked a leg, and inexplicably took a step forwards. It saved Homer’s
