distinguishable herb, hung his limp arm in a sling, and came out to the yards to slide open gates and brand cattle with his one good hand. His drooping hat almost covered his eyes. The hat had once been a good silverbelly, but now it was tattered, sagging and stained, and the rest of him had followed suit. He sat down on the dead cow beside Vic while the crew drafted a load of bulls and prepared to run them into the trucks. The monstrous, mad, testosterone-charged Brahmans almost smashed them all several times. I didn’t even try to help them load and was quick to jump the fence any time one of the beasts charged in my direction.
Smoko
WITH TWO ROAD TRAINS LOADED and the crew sweating and mad, Miles finally hollered that it was time for smoko. The ringers set down their poly pipes, turned off the branding fire, and gravitated to the shade of the old shipping container that had been dropped by the edge of the yards to serve as a tack shed. A line of dogs whined at our approach from where they had been tied up along the fence behind the shipping container. We washed our hands of dirt, sweat, blood, manure, and cow hair with the rubber hose outside the pens and slumped on metal and plastic chairs. The day had grown hot in the sudden stillness, and we sweltered there among the flies. A few of the crew pulled out plastic bags of tobacco they kept tucked in their shirt pockets and rolled cigarettes.
Miles had a beat-up tin coffee can to put the billy on, a plastic bag of cups, tea, and sugar, and a plastic bucket full of cookies that his mother had baked for him before he left the east coast with the crew. He filled the sooty can with water from the bore hose and put a match to the blower from the branding pen. He hung the can by a wire handle from a rebar over the blasting flame. When the water boiled, Miles shook a small heap of black tea leaves into the tin can and splashed a little cold water from the hose into the black liquid to get them to settle and cool off the handle. Then he carried the old tin back to the shade, where he poured dark-reddish tea, offering me a pink pannikin full of it.
The billycan was blackened on the outside from years of wood fires, and it smeared his big hand with soot. The crew drank tea with breakfast, at the midmorning break, at lunch, and sometimes in the afternoon. They even called their dinner “tea.” Miles also had a couple of thermoses that sufficed when the branding blower wasn’t around and they didn’t have the muster to light a fire.
He poured the rest of the cups.
“Tea? You like two spoons of sugar?”
“Thanks, mate,” replied Cole.
In the wake of the drafting this civility was beyond strange. But it lasted only so long.
Ivan picked up his mug and asked, “You plugged the hole in the billy?”
Miles didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “Yeah mate, with my finger.”
“The hole in the side or the bottom?”
“Both—you could braze ’em for me, mate.”
“You could get yourself another can.”
“I’ve had this one nearly ten years.”
“Just tie a new one behind the truck for a while, and it’d get beat up like that one,” Ivan retorted.
“Then it’d get covered in cow shit,” Miles said.
“That one’s seen worse, I reckon.”
Ivan tipped up the old can and poured himself another cup, mixed in a little sugar, and sat back down. We sweated there for a while, with hot black tea in pannikins, pants smeared with manure, faces and arms coated in dust, boots caked and lying heavy on the packed earth. A wind picked up, sweeping most of the flies away and veiling the cups of tea with a film of dust. Ivan smashed an ant with the bottom of his pannikin and pointed to another, carrying a huge crumb. He pinched two off the ground, laughing, and said, “Ready, set, go.” Then he set them down, and the ants scrambled off in different directions.
Max said, “They do that with cane toads, draw a circle and make bets, and the first toad out of the circle wins.”
Max threw his puppy a part of his biscuit, but she was tied to the fence nearby and couldn’t quite reach it.
The heat gave all these moments an unpleasant weight, though the prospect of heading back to the din and adrenaline of the pens was equally uninviting.
I felt weak and a little shaky, my hands trembling along with the cup. The crew didn’t seem to notice, and I took a careful breath, resting my nerves. The morning had pitched everything in me to overdrive. The bulls weighed more than a ton; the mad-eyed cows could have gutted any of us with a sideways swipe of a horn—all this surrounded by hard iron posts and constant movement, shouts, hooves, and dust.
Cattle are prey animals, and they respond to humans appropriately, as predators. There are correct positions and distances to maintain with respect to a cow, and correct timing—when to press toward a cow’s shoulder or head, when to back away, when not to look a cow in the eye, when to move back and forth to stimulate reactions in the herd. And while the madhouse of the pens had made chaos and brutality of the art of livestock handling, the same rules applied. If they were flouted, the work would never be finished, or one of the crew could be injured or worse. My old instincts told me when to leap forward and move back. For that I was grateful, but everything beyond was stimulus almost entirely unfamiliar to my being.
Miles finally gave a nod and said, “We’ve got a pen full of cows we should put through the tick dip and draft up before we finish loading.”
He tossed the butt end of a rolled cigarette, shook his empty cup upside down, and set the bucket of biscuits and cups in the front seat of the yellow ute before walking back to the pens of cattle. The rest of the crew followed.
Tick Dipping
TICK DIPPING WAS A REQUIREMENT only for cattle loaded onto a road train, but all of the cows brought to the yards went for the black swim. That afternoon, we dipped a set of five hundred cattle, running the drafted mob through the race until they plunged into a putrid trough of chemicals that was supposed to kill the small ticks they’d picked up from grazing in the bush. Any cattle leaving the station and bound for destinations across the tick-range perimeter had to be dipped and later checked. It was standard government protocol for the stations in the North.
The cattle had to swim through the chemical liquid until they reached the opposite end, where the concrete sloped up to a set of pens with concrete floors. The cows behind pressed and pushed the lead cows forward over the drop-off and into the acrid pond, and it rose in a surging splash as the line of cattle plunged in, swam across, and climbed, dripping, up the other side. They glistened black in the sun, standing on the wet concrete to dry for a few minutes.
The ringers worked the chutes behind to cut off the ends of the tail hair of the cattle headed for the tick dip. It was a process called tail-banging, to mark which had been dipped and which hadn’t and maybe save a few from being run through the brew twice. The small black handle of the bang-tail knife fit easily in the palm, and with one hand pulling the cow’s tail and finding the last joint of the tail bone, a ringer placed the blade facing up, twisted the stringy hairs around it, and pulled hard.
Miles held the knife in one hand and a fistful of tail hairs in the other. When he reached the end of the line, he nodded to Cole, who pulled the slide gate and hollered at the cattle to move forward. Ivan moved another group into the race, cramming the end cow to slide the gate shut behind her. A heap of tail hair lay on the ground like a pile of discarded wigs.
Dust stuck to
