They bred horses as well as sheep on Bluewater, as he learned the station was called, and Tommy fell in with the trainersand breakers the next morning at the corral, talking about the different breeds and their temperaments, the particular characterseach had known. Again Tommy asked if there was work going, horses or sheep, he didn’t mind; and again the answer came backno. But he could stay on as a dogger, the manager told him, paid by the ear plus meals and a bed, assuming he could handlea rifle and didn’t mind shooting dingos. “You got a spare rifle?” Tommy asked him, and the next day he found himself ridingBeau through unfamiliar pastures on the lookout for his first kill.
It didn’t take long to find one. A lone male skulking through the bush, the red-brown flash of its pelt. Tommy dismounted and hushed Beau with an outstretched hand; the horse nickered and snuffled the grass. Tommy moved forward, into the trees, the dingo lost to him for now. Another memory leaped up at him: hunting with Billy as children, trespassing beyond the blue gums and onto John Sullivan’s land. He shook it off but they were coming after him, more and more these days. As if these years of droving, the summers in Adelaide, the drinking and carousing with Jack, had managed to pull a blindfold over his past, and now without those things to distract him the blindfold had been ripped clean off.
He followed the dingo to a shallow creek bed, watched it sniff the water and drink, ears twitching, Tommy creeping closerthrough the brush. He propped himself against a tree trunk and raised the rifle. It was already loaded. Heavy in his hands,warm against his cheek. He waited. His breathing slowed. Praying for a clean shot. The dingo lifted its head quickly thenbent to the water again, Tommy telling himself not yet, not yet, but if not now then when? He fired. A roar from the rifle,the kick of the recoil, and the dog keeled over on its side. Another memory hit him. Catching that group of natives and apack of wild dogs, Raymond Locke with a spear in his shoulder, putting one of the dogs down. Tommy cried out and slapped himselfhard on the side of the head, as if to knock the memories loose, lurched to his feet and went down into the creek bed. Thedingo lay dead in the water. Blood trickled away in the stream. Tommy took hold of its tail and heaved it up the creek bankand here came another one: Rabbit dragging the dead kangaroo out of the sand-drift, the other troopers applauding; “Good tuckerthese buggers. Yum yum!”—panting, Tommy propped his rifle against a tree and hacked off the dog’s ear with his knife.
He left the dingo for the flies and birds and dropped the ear into the bloodied pouch the station manager had loaned. Sickto his stomach but he had no quit in him, not anymore. He shot another four that day and with each the memories peppered himlike rain. Let them come. Let them soak him to the skin. It felt like a bloodletting, like leeching a poison from his veins.He deserved it, needed it, needed to remember so he could forget. There was a perverse catharsis in hunting, in claiming eachdeath for himself.
They let him train the horses eventually, once they realized he was more skilled at it than their own men. All kinds they bred here: stock horses and draft horses, those that would spend a life pulling coaches and buggies; even racehorses occasionally, if they had one they could stud. To the surprise of the others he was able to break the odd brumby, as his father had once done, coaxing them into obedience and watching for that change that came over them, the fear and madness fading from their eyes. And from his also: drink here was hard to come by, certainly anything stronger than beer, and somehow he didn’t miss it, didn’t feel the cloying need. He worked the horses until sundown, ate a meal with the others—quiet types mostly, reticent country men—then maybe read a book in the evening lying on his bed. He still had dreams occasionally. Noone laughing in the bloodied crater, Noone naked and arms-spread in the rain, Noone, Noone, Noone . . . but nobody asked him about it, nobody took the piss. They all carried demons in one form or another, or they wouldn’t have been here in the first place.
He wrote to Arthur but the mail was sporadic: he never received a reply.
In early ’97 he was forced to move on: drought was crippling the region, the horses would have to be sold. There wasn’t thework to keep him and he had no interest in hunting dingos again. It felt time to head for Adelaide anyway. He’d been puttingit off this long. There was a direct road leading down there, the men told him, the Broken Hill road, roughly a week’s ridesouth through a hellish country of giant salt pans and desolate rubble plains, no water, no feed, he’d have to carry it all.He wouldn’t have seen anything like it, they warned him gravely; Tommy smiled and said they’d be surprised.
On the fifth day out there he came across the mirage of a flotilla, a hundred white sailing boats dotted across the undulations and shimmering in the liquid haze. A township, he realized, not thirst playing tricks on his mind. The sails were canvas tents, empty, torn, unmoored, flapping loose on the wind; and here and there the skeletal frames of barns or other buildings stood like the salvaged hulls of stripped-down vessels in a shipyard. He drew closer. No movement, no sign of anyone else around.
