Still they persisted. What choice but to go on? Limping over the sandhills like the explorers of long ago, those men for whomthese places were now named—Sturt, Burke, Strzelecki—and the many others who had died along the way. They came across remindersoccasionally, harbingers of what was to come. A boot, a satchel, a rusted canteen; once, a shallow grave marked with a littlecairn of stones. By a dried-up waterhole from which they wrung moisture out of mud, Tommy found a set of initials carved intoa fallen tree—APC—and the simplicity of that message, of someone recording that they were here, moved Tommy to take out his knife and do thesame. TGM, he wrote, Arthur looking on.
They’d been nine days in that desolate nothingness when they felt the earth tremble beneath them and heard the unmistakable rumble of cattle on the move. They reined up and sat listening. Tommy lowered the kerchief covering his mouth. Both of them were like sandmen: gaunt, sunburned, squinting; a film of red dust like a second skin. Their lips were cracked, their cheeks hollow, it was painful just to breathe. Still, they knew the sound of a mob rushing. They’d been listening for that noise their whole lives.
“There,” Tommy said, pointing to a thin dust cloud rising above the wavelike dunes. He jabbed his heels into Beau’s wizenedflank and despite his own condition the horse took off like he’d sensed it too. Arthur cursed and followed, Tommy by now upand over the first sand dune, no view yet but he was close. He urged Beau down the bank and up the next two dunes and whenhe crested the second pulled the horse up hard. There in the gully below him raged a thick flood of cattle a good few hundredstrong, charging between the dunes in a great roiling cloud of red dust. At their flank a lone drover was trying desperatelyto keep up, snapping his stock whip again and again. Nothing was working. The drover struggled to keep his mount. Where thegully narrowed, his horse was buffeted by the mob, almost crushed against the dune. The cattle had their blood up. He’d neverhold them on his own.
Arthur was still clearing the sandbank when Tommy disappeared down the other side. Traversing the slope at a gallop, spillingslides of red soil in his wake, he raced to get ahead of the mob from on high, to cut it off at the pass. If they made itout of the gully it would be hopeless; the mob would scatter and be gone. The drover hadn’t seen him yet, but Tommy couldhear his shouting and whipcracks over the frothing surge of the mob. The smell of them, the noise—he knew this all too well.Every year since he’d been able to ride he’d pushed his father to take him mustering, and even when he hadn’t Tommy had watchedwith his brother as the men brought the cattle in. Down he came now, out of the sunshine, sweeping past the stampede, standinghigh in the saddle, his head down, his backside raised, his face lit up with joy, screaming his parched throat raw.
Now the drover noticed him. His whip fell limp in his hand.
“We’ll turn them!” Tommy shouted, making a circling motion in the air. “Wait till we’re out!” The drover nodded and fell away, taking a position at the mob’s rear flank. By now Tommy was level with the lead bullock, its red eye glaring, spittle foaming in the corners of its mouth. He looked back for Arthur, but Arthur wasn’t there: coming down the distant sandbank at a stroll. They cleared the gully and came into the open plains and Tommy began moving in, yelling at the cattle, forcing them to turn. Which they did, wheeling away to the right, the drover at their other flank, making sure they kept in line. Slowing down finally. The madness fading at last. Tommy brought the head of the column to the tail and he and the drover kept them turning like a mill wheel.
“I thought I’d bloody dreamed you,” the drover panted, pulling up at Tommy’s side. “Glad I didn’t, anyhow. I was in the shitback there.”
He was a man of around thirty, with skin tanned so dark he was barely still white, a three-month beard and blue eyes crackedlike leather left too long in the sun. He wore moleskins and a filthy shirt, had two gun belts around his waist and a darkred kerchief at his throat. He took off his hat and ran a hand through light brown hair that he’d allowed to grow down tohis neck. He said his name was Jack Kerrigan. “Got any water?” Tommy rasped.
Kerrigan pulled a flask from his saddlebag and Tommy drank until he coughed. Arthur joined them cautiously. Tommy motionedwith the flask and Kerrigan nodded. “Don’t be shy now. I got plenty back there on the mules.”
Arthur drank his fill and returned it. Kerrigan stoppered the flask, saying, “So, do I dare ask what you fellas are doingout here?”
“Looking for the Cooper Creek,” Tommy replied.
“The Cooper? Shit-in-hell, you’re about two hundred miles too far south. What you heading out that way for?”
Tommy glowered at Arthur, said, “He thought we could pick up the Birdsville Track, get ourselves into SA.”
“Some tracker you’ve got there, mate—you’re already in South Australia, probably been here about a week. You don’t need thebloody Cooper . . . where’s all your stuff at anyway? How are you boys still alive?”
“The other horse went lame a while back. Had to lose most of our things.”
“Well, shit.” Another stroke of his hair and he settled his hat back on his head. “I’ve seen some sorry bastards in my time but few worse than the pair of you. I thought I was lucky to have found you—I reckon it might just be the other way around.”
“Where are you going?” Tommy
