and filing out on paths. Cole loped easily to the front and rode out ahead, orienting the lead cattle southeast. Behind him the smoky herd moved in a river of backs and heads. Heat gave a surreal cast to the plains as we rode. We whistled and hollered at the trailing cattle, rode up to turn breakaways, and trotted back to our places beside the mob.
The lead rider sets the pace, and turns back only if the cattle veer off to one side or another. Wing riders ride wide to the outsides, the horses walking quietly unless the herd spreads. A wing rider will point his horse to redirect the strays, but most often his presence is enough to keep the cattle in line. The rider on tail has more work to do, urging cattle forward, turning wayward cows, and breaking up fights between fractious bellowing bulls.
The cattle did settle in. Many had been worked earlier by the crew and, in some memory of the process, filtered out and down the trails, called pads. The Brahman blood in them lent the beasts a distinctly elegant appearance. Some were white or gray, with honey-colored points on the tops of their heads; others were light red, with drooping dewlaps and ears, dark eyes, and long lashes.
Vic dropped back to ride with me for a short distance. “How ya’ goin’ mate?”
“Good, you?”
“Yeah, good.” She let her tall thoroughbred pick his way through fallen branches. She added conversationally, “These cattle are going all right.” And then with a glare toward her horse’s ears, “Wait till they bring in the choppers though; they’ll rile ’em up and make us all crazy.”
In country so immense, with cattle spread far apart, motorized vehicles work more efficiently than horses. Many stations own their own helicopters or employ pilots to help muster the cattle. Choppers cover large expanses of paddocks and drop down to scare cattle toward a corner or a water hole. People on motorbikes or horses work beneath them, keeping the cattle directed, congregating the mobs, and lining them out toward the yards.
Vic rode with both hands holding the reins. Cattle threaded across a dry watercourse ahead of us and up the bank on the other side.
I asked, “What’s the largest mob of cattle you’ve mustered?”
She thought for a while. “Four thousand head. It’s a pretty picture, a big mob crossing a river. If you’re in the lead, you can see the whole thing full of cattle.” She turned her horse to ride ahead, saying over her shoulder, “You’ll get your chance, mate.”
The grass was a sea that bore us, vessels with sorrel sails aligning and realigning by the compass of the yards, navigating the flat waters and occasional swells of the gulf country. The skyline swung a flat 360-degree circle beneath the arcing blue. The thin current of fifty or so breeders, calves, and a few bulls stretched ahead, moving toward the corner gate with the early sun dropping shadows beneath them, to be trampled beneath their rhythmic hooves.
When we reached the gate, we held the cattle there until they quieted, and then Cole pointed his horse out along a track, riding into the horizon, and the cattle followed instinctively. Like many of us creatures, they were willing to follow if the lead was strong. I rode behind the last cow, sweeping back and forth to keep the mob moving. The work was familiar, but disconcerting in a foreign landscape.
I tried to read the braille of the place, the texture of wide expanse, heat, and bright sun, the Australian saddles and the lean, athletic horses. The horizon was my only reference to begin mapping the lay of the land in my mind—where channels ran, the fences, water holes—and I wondered which direction the storms would emerge from, if it would change depending on which ocean sacrificed its surface to the sky, which winds undertook the pilgrimage.
We reached the small paddock that was closer to the yards, defined only by lines of long wire fences. As cattle filed into the lane leading toward the yards, flocks of gray parrots with bright pink throats thronged overhead. Galahs, the silver and wild-rose birds of the tropical savanna interior, flourished in agricultural settings, and hundreds of them clung to the rims of the water troughs. Cattle flowed seamlessly into a large pen called the cooler. I swung the heavy iron gates closed behind the last of the trailing calves.
Drafting
MILES SAID WE WOULD GO AHEAD and draft the mob. Drafting entailed shifting the cattle through a series of pens to a pound, a small enclosure with gates opening to six different pens. If one wanted to divide hundreds or thousands of cattle, the pound worked like a human-run threshing machine—one set of cattle this way, another that way, a third this way. We could make six different divisions if we chose, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Vic and I moved cattle forward through the succession of pens up to the pound, where Miles worked on foot with a length of rubber tubing he used as a pointer to separate the cattle individually. Cole worked the pound gates to direct each solitary animal.
Miles called “Bush” for cows, “Calf” for unbranded calves, “Weaner” for branded calves, and “Cull” for cattle to be sold or checked for pregnancy. They sorted cattle into their different pens, the sound of Miles’ voice barely audible above the din of bellowing cows and clanging gates. Bulls mashed each other against the fences until we could separate them. Cows dodged the black tubes we swatted them with to urge them through the gates. The heavy metal pipe gates clanged against fences as they swung open or closed. Miles called “Hold!” when too many escaped into the pound, and he and Cole had to direct them through separate gates. Only Cole’s black hat and wraparound sunglasses, face, and shoulders were visible above the mob. Vic and I waited for the mess to clear before we opened the gates again.
Dust was the incense burned before the ritual. Our shouts were chants, but we spoke quietly for the most part, urging and clicking and tapping the animals with the black plastic lengths of tubing. We crowded the calves into a smaller pen with a narrow race that led up to the cradle used to hold the calves for branding.
Branding
MILES PULLED AN ORANGE PLASTIC CRATE of branding supplies from the tack shed and swung the crate across the high pipe rails of the race so he could carry it to the calf cradle. Miles and Cole brought a bucket of antibiotic liquid to paint on each calf’s head after dehorning, two branding irons, and a few bags of ear tags. Miles picked up one end of a large propane tank, and Cole grabbed the other. They lit the torch to heat the branding irons, poured some of the antibiotic liquid into a small coffee can holding a paint brush, loaded the steroid gun with small pellets that would be placed in the ears of the male calves, placed a tag and button in the ear tagger, and sharpened the castrating and dehorning knives. They slid the gates of the race open and pushed a line of calves up toward the cradle. When a calf leaped forward into it, Cole, Vic, and Miles squeezed the cradle shut. The calf immediately flopped sideways onto the ground, exposing its left hip or “near side” to be branded. A large tire cushioned the calf’s weight.
As soon as the calf flipped, Cole called “Bull” or “Heifer.” Miles held the small castrating blade in his mouth while he worked, and kneeled down on the flanks of bull calves to castrate them. He stood up when he finished and threw the testicles out to the dirt where the fork-tailed kites dive-bombed the bloody yard. Then Cole held the hind leg steady and reached for the branding irons. He pressed an iron briefly into the thin hide on the left flank. The hair flamed for an instant. With his other hand, Cole pressed a number brand to identify the year the calf was born.
