trough, and the murky liquid pooled on the concrete. Another mob lunged forward, cattle jamming together and getting stuck between the narrow panels, slamming forward and backward and pushing legs out through the railing. After one group had plunged through the tick dip, dried off on the other side, and run into another pen, the ringers walked to the back of the yards to draft another.
Ivan said later he reckoned we all did as we were told because the government said so, and then because the station owners said so, and then the manager and the head stockmen and whoever reckoned he was in charge at the moment. We thought we operated under our own free will, he said, but it wasn’t that way, and the cattle took the brunt of it through no choice of their own. They tried not to, with all of their wily savanna fire. They smashed and cleared metal pipe fences, broke the welds on the rails, tore up each other and tore down wires, but in the end, most of them emerged tick-less, or at least should have.
Tanner swaggered up and down the race, checking whether each cow was full of milk or not, calling out “Wet” or “Dry.” They directed cows with full udders into a pen to be reunited with their calves after they had been drafted and branded. The dry cows would be loaded onto road trains.
Tailing the Mickies
WHEN THE DAY STARTED TO STRETCH OUT into afternoon, Miles got me to help walk the young bulls out—tailing the mickies, they called it—to the dried coastal plains to graze for a few hours. He let me ride his black gelding, Reb. The dark horse moved easily, giving his head to the bit. Miles and I rode in the lead, letting the young bulls find their way into the wide lane. A hundred yards out, we reined in and turned in our saddles to watch the slow herd. We sat on our horses in white sun in the dead swamp grass for an hour and a half while the dogs kept the mob together and the bulls had some time out of the mud and dust of the yards.
Savanna stretched in a choppy sea, and the low-angled sun leaned across scrubby paperbark tea trees. A nearly imperceptible breath of wind rolled off the gulf, gently sweeping away the dust and the daring, releasing the tension of cattle and crew. Pale grasses tossed their drooping heads among the gum trees.
Deep within us, cows and workers alike, lived the urge to breathe the moist air, inhale the expanse and feel just as wide and unbridled and quiet, away from the tumult and ruckus of the yards. The wave of noise, commotion, and pent-up anxiety slid from me and disappeared into the waving grasses. I was not sure how to take in all that had passed in the morning hours, as if it were perfectly natural to find oneself in with a lot of maddened cattle and an equally brave and rough crew. These were not domesticated cattle. They were wild animals, pressed into pens of heavy iron rails, from which they had little chance of escape.
I could not make sense of how I had been accepted in this situation, as a foreigner of no known ability in the intimate chain of human interaction needed for livestock handling. And yet I had not died. I had not even found myself hurt. And there I was astride a borrowed horse, a big dark horse I might only have dreamed of riding, waiting in quiet sunshine. Like the others, Miles didn’t seem to care about asking questions, or knowing anything more about me. I wondered briefly if there was a series of unspoken tests for me, and whether I could just as suddenly be shunned and dropped from the crew. Then I gave up trying to understand the situation and closed my eyes, feeling, through the leather reins, the dark horse lower his head and chew a few mouthfuls of coarse grass.
Miles sat his stallion a short distance from the young bulls to keep them from moving too fast. The mob of mickies spread in the lane, shadows stretching against the tall bunchgrass before them. Miles rode over and asked if I wanted to trade horses for a while.
He swung out of the saddle and gave me a brief glance before adjusting the stirrups. Ordinarily a cowboy would never trade out his best horse, even for a short ride, or adjust his stirrups, or trust anyone he didn’t know, especially with a good horse like Snake. I nodded, swung down out of my saddle, and took the reins when he offered them. I was less than half of Miles’ size, and I felt quite small astride the big stallion, unsure how to ride a horse with such supple power. I rode back slowly, letting the horse beneath me pick his way through hillocks of grass and melon holes and old water channels.
In the pens Miles showed me how to fill bags of grain for the horses. Each bag was made of a feed sack folded down to half size with a thin twine knotted into the corners so that it could be hung around a horse’s head. We put nose bags on the herd of biting, milling horses and waited until they had finished eating before leaving the yards at dusk, leaving the bawling cattle behind, the dead cow by the race.
Mudflats and mangroves patterned the gulf country, and we each had our own, less visible, emotional topography. I thought the reason the red cow had died in front of me, with one quick slam into the gate, was that I needed to write of her death. I needed to pause in the raucous tumult of loading and find the words of poetry that would be a strange prayer for this one death among thousands. I needed to brush one hand on the red swirled hair of her forehead before turning back to the cattle in the race. The wild wasn’t tender when it came to life and death. This cow had been born beneath some gnarled bloodwood in the gulf-country forest to live among the heat and flies of the coast, only to die suddenly in a chute because people wanted their will imposed where they thought there was none.
But she wouldn’t have been there to begin with if it hadn’t been for some human dream of order long ago. And she would have died anyway. A croc or a pack of wild dogs would have had less mercy. That it had happened before my eyes made it neither sacred nor profane. The kites would clean her completely. The wind and sun, bleaching bones and carrying away the dust of her living, would somehow purify her, or wrap her into the cycle that existed above and beyond human dilemmas. As it was, I would have to let go of my sadness, to learn, like the mangroves, to filter the salt out of my blood, or cry like seabirds do to flush out the sea, or release salt through my tongue like a crocodile. Vic had sat on the cow’s turgid lumpy belly and tallied cattle in a small green book. Later, when the road trains pulled away for long hours of dirt road and highways farther south, when dust had cleared from the air and the cattle milled quiet, one of the guys would drag her out to the mudflats to give the wild pigs and dingoes something to eat for the night.
Stock Industry
MUSTERING IN THE MODERN OUTBACK entails a large operation. Long stretches of barbed wire, several strands of it held up at intervals by metal and wood pickets, divide the property into paddocks. The entire expanse is cross-fenced into these smaller parcels, each a few hundred to a few thousand hectares in area. The herd of cattle, whether it numbers five hundred or fifty thousand, is split into several mobs, a mob being any subset. The different mobs graze year-round in the large paddocks. Twice a year, crews muster all of the paddocks, one at a time, walking or hauling the cattle into a set of yards to brand the young calves, wean the older calves, sort out the cull cows and bulls, and then vaccinate, doctor, tick-dip, tail-bang, and sometimes preg-check the cows that will be turned out again. During drought years, the owners or managers might sell off a larger portion of the herd, keeping only the best genetics—young healthy cows for breeding stock.
The stock industry—cattle, horses, and sheep—has long defined the outback. The land proved too harsh for most agricultural endeavors, but sheep in particular found ways to survive and even flourish, their numbers expanding from a hundred thousand in 1820 to over a million a decade later. In another three decades, the numbers had swelled to thirteen million. Yet in those years, the settlers were no more than four hundred thousand, and the tracks of settlers,
