hot irons made a clean, tan impression lined by burned hair. At the head, Miles snapped an ear tag in the right ear, clipped out the earmark from the thin skin of the calf’s ear with a separate device, and sliced the horn buds off with a large pair of dehorning shears. Blood leaked over the side of the calf’s face while Miles took the purple brush to paint antibiotic liquid over the patches. He slid the steroid gun into the flesh of one ear of each of the steers to implant a small cylinder of growth hormone. The entire operation took mere minutes. I had taken part in this ritual many times before, but the smell and textures—the scorched hide, the smeared dust, blood and manure together, the silkiness of calf hair—always jammed in my mind.
The calf bawled a complaint at the unfairness and sudden brutality of its world. Months of sweet sunshine and grass, interrupted only by a dingo or two, and then a roaring helicopter, a sweltering chase for several miles, motorbikes, humans on horseback, the crowding in the yards, separation from its mother. And then came the onslaught of pain, the stench of its own burning flesh and blood. This imprinting of human interaction was neither benign nor gentle.
The two men nodded, stepped back, and Victoria reached to release the catch and lift the top half of the cradle. The stunned calf jumped up and cleared the branding area in a few frantic leaps to join his bleeding mates. When the cradle was ready, I prodded another calf forward, and it clanged into the cradle and hit the ground. The three of them muscled the heavy cradle, pushed and pulled the calves forward, and moved through the rhythm all over again.
They worked with sweat streaming down their faces, coated in black dust. The pile of ear tags lay on a tipped-over barrel beside the crew. Miles had a bloody smear across his once-white shirt from the head of one of the calves. Manure and dirt streaked their pants. Calves crammed up the race and bellowed in the cradle, straining their sleek long-eared heads out the front for the few minutes that they were under the duress of the branding. The propane blasted a steady roar, adding to the heat, and the ends of the irons glowed and flickered translucent orange. One lived this experience completely, or not at all.
Flies stuck to anything alive. They covered hats like a multitude of hatpins and crawled up underneath the brims to bite; they clung to shirts like a black cape and worked their way under clothing to leave burning welts.
Ringers wore their hats pulled low, their hands and faces dark from work outdoors. During the first few weeks, I wore gloves and a scarf across my face to keep out the sun and dust. I soon abandoned the useless precaution. We finished the branding and worked the mob of cattle through the smoky pens again, the sound of our voices mixing with the screaming of galahs and the bellowing of cattle.
The horses drooped their heads in another pen, backs lined from a morning of riding and coated in mud where they’d rolled after being washed. They waited for the drafting and branding to reach its end, when they would be used again. Saddles, wet blankets, and bits lay in haphazard piles in the shade of the loading chute just outside the pens, caked with froth and sweat and a good coating of gulf-country clay.
Walking Out the Mob
WE SADDLED THE STREAKED MOUNTS again to walk the cattle out to the holding paddock. In the distance the clouds released virga—thin veils of rain that evaporated before it reached the ground. A few drops fell on our hat brims.
“You’d have to ride fast to keep up with that storm,” Cole murmured.
The rain wasn’t enough to settle the dust, but the flies seemed to bite less, and wind cut through the dense heat. After many months without rain, the grasses had crumbled and almost disappeared, the plains wide flats of dusty bare earth. The sun broke out intermittently. Clouds cut the light at intervals, teasing. This was winter.
As we rode, the mob lined out across the grasslands, shadows rippling as if the grass itself were moving along. Horses responded to the liquid spread of cows as if they were parts of the same thought, a symphony in which each echoed the other. Cole rode the left flank, backlit. His mount leaped into a powerful lope as the cattle spread to the side and dropped to a walk when they returned to the herd. Vic rode the other wing, one hand holding the reins crossed just above her horse’s neck, the other resting lightly on her jeans. Miles rode toward the lead, sitting easily in the saddle, his big frame just a silhouette at times.
We left the cattle at the water troughs and retraced our tracks. Dusk fell as we unsaddled the horses, washed hardened sweat from their backs, and turned them loose in the horse paddock. Evening pulled the scarlet sun down, leaving the shades of violet and blue that draw back just before the entire sky darkens. We rolled large round bales of Flinders-grass hay from stacks to feed weaned calves. The sky cleared of its circling kites and flocking galahs. Silhouettes of trees banded the horizon. We all pulled off sunglasses and sweaty hats, called to the scraggly dogs, and piled into the trucks for the ride home.
At dusk, alone again, I dragged myself up the stairs to my bunkhouse by the lagoon. Night had already darkened the water, and it glinted shards of silver moon. I scrubbed my face in the sink with a bar of harsh white soap and watched the water run black with dirt. I felt weak enough to collapse, mostly from the stress of trying to stay in the right place in the crew and not make mistakes, to work hard and stay attentive enough to be unnoticed yet helpful.
I stepped out onto the veranda with its few broken wooden slats. The liquid eye of the lagoon stretched long and wide enough that it looked almost as if the sun had set in the water to hide through the night. It would be weeks before I saw the lagoon in the light of day. I wondered each dawn if I would emerge from this cocoon a slightly different person, perhaps more lean, more sun-darkened, with more eucalyptus oil in my blood. The crocodiles in the black water would be witness to my metamorphosis, if I made it through alive.
The Choppers
I DIDN’T HAVE TO WAIT LONG to experience the choppers. Two flew in from Karumba, a town on the gulf a few hours flight to the south. I heard the roar of engines and saw the metal dragon-flies land on the flat at the end of the airstrip. The pilots walked toward the station compound carrying duffel bags and a case of beer.
Flynn Cooper owned the chopper company. He wore a plaid shirt and a brown cap over short sandy-gray hair, and had fair but gulf-weathered skin. Rich was one of the pilots with whom he contracted. They climbed the stairs to the kitchen veranda to join Angus, Ross, Mike the mechanic, and those of us on the station crew who drifted in at dusk to sit at the table and make light conversation over a few beers before dinner.
In the age before helicopters and motorbikes, the mustering crew waited for the floods during wet season—usually the months of November, December, and January—when most of the land turned into a sea. In those months, the livestock that escaped being swept out to the gulf sought refuge on the sand ridges and waited for the water to recede, and this made them easier to locate. Ringers set up temporary camps and endured the heat and sand flies for months, riding in the boggy country and spending long days to cover hundreds of thousands of hectares in the muster.
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