the cattle have to be moved slowly enough that they can graze and not lose too much weight along the way. Entire crews of patient stockmen spend months trailing the dust of thousands of cattle from home pasture to their final destination at the meatworks. When they eventually arrive, they might be asked just to turn around and do it again in the reverse direction, taking young or new cattle to stations farther on. Most landowners afforded a half-mile track to the passing mobs of stock. Lined up, these spaces turned into what they called the long paddock. Now stockmen often lease stretches of grass along the margins of highways to fatten cattle as they pass.
Ivan worked too hard and was too familiar with cattle to be a random junkie off the street, but he didn’t have the arrogance of a horseman or the solemnity of a stockman. Another four yearlings banged into the pen, and he reached through the bars with his piece of poly pipe and whacked a couple of them on the nose to turn them into the race. The cattle spun and jumped, frantic between the metal paneling. Ahead, ringers moved them through the race into the crush—a squeeze chute—to be branded and ear-tagged. Heifers bawled as the brands hit them. One of the crew took a pair of dehorners to the small nubs on their heads.
Ivan called over his shoulder, “You get into that stuff much?” Meth, I guessed.
I responded, “Me? No. You?”
Between the crammed and bawling heifers, the dust, and the almost reckless work of directing cattle into the race, he gave a quick, unnerving, and infectious laugh, before yelling back, “I reckon, work hard, play hard, party harder.” Ivan sagged his long lean frame against the rails of the race, propping one boot up on the lowest bar. One of the heifers slammed a hoof through the bars, and he stood up. The crush gate banged open, and we stepped forward to move the heifers up the race.
The road trains finally arrived and the truckers lined up monstrous vehicles, massive semi trucks with two trailers, on the dirt road. Each deck could hold thirty cows. These rigs were called type-ones because they had five decks in all; a truck with two double-decker trailers and six decks was a type-two, and those were restricted from the highways except in Western Queensland. They looked like American rigs used to haul cattle, except that the top deck on each was open to the sky.
The crew shuffled to load the cattle bound for the slaughter-houses. Tanner, another ringer, nodded hello as I passed to take a place in the pens. A tall strong man with a drooping mustache, he worked one of the drafting gates. He walked with a stiff arched back, his broad chest thrust forward a little, and wore Wrangler jeans, black sunglasses, and a big black stockman’s hat. Sometimes, I noticed over the following weeks, he traded his black hat for a white hat, a change that seemed to match his mood. He rode a tall white horse for the cow work when he wasn’t riding his motorbike, and rolled the sleeves of his work shirts up past his elbows, as many did, his forearms thick, red-brown, and freckled.
I learned later that he had broken his back in several places riding bulls, and that he had steel pins holding his spine together, which was why he walked and perhaps why he acted the way he did. Who knew how he ended up at Stilwater? He raised his own bulls for the rodeo circuit, but maybe he needed money, or just a job out far from town, where his life might find meaning again.
Cole, who worked nearby, was shorter but just as strong, with dark curly hair. He wore work shirts cut off at the sleeves to reveal sun-browned, muscled arms, and he was so composed that I wondered if he wasn’t immune to the pandemonium. Sometimes he wore a bright purple shirt with his white stockman’s hat and wraparound sunglasses that made him stand out, though in all other ways he was the quietest. He was second in command on the mustering crew, perhaps because he was the most amiable and imperturbable.
Vic was Cole’s partner. Her leathered hands conveyed the truth of her spirit, which was fierce and emotional, though she kept the skin of her high cheekbones smooth and wore small silver earrings. She and Cole were both thirty years old and the anchors of the crew, making it more domestic and civilized than it would have been otherwise. They had a seven-year-old daughter back at home, somewhere to the east, with the child’s grandmother, along with several young thoroughbred race-horses and a house and property of their own. A licensed jockey, Vic brought her tall, well-bred horses out to do the mustering work after they had won several races and retired from the track. She had a wispy blond braid, and she exercised a mostly charming but firm tyranny over the crew. Even Miles took her opinions seriously and considered her part of the already top-heavy strata of management on the station. He was also in love with her, as was almost everyone else.
Vic took the numbers down on the small tally book, making hash marks for the cattle as they ran up the race and into the trucks. She stood by the rails, her braid tossed back and her black hat dusty.
Max worked in the pens near Vic. He was the youngest member of the mustering crew, eighteen or nineteen, lanky with close-cropped blond hair and a red face. He worked hard at times, but he was also the first to whinge or complain. Max was the first one to leap into the pen with rank bulls and chase angry cows to get them to charge him through gates and into the proper pens. He would climb the rails and drop his long legs around the back of an old cow and ride it bucking across the pen until he could scramble off and over the fence again. I once saw a cow kick him down and smash his head against a heavy metal post; he recovered his feet and slipped through the bars with a bloody nose and a swollen black eye, then returned immediately to the work.
Cattle crammed onto the decks of the large road trains. The branding furnace roared, and the truck driver and Cole used yellow electric jiggers to jam cattle up the ramp and onto the top deck of the truck. When the last skinny cow caught in the race climbed up, Tanner pushed the slide gate closed and I opened the other gate to send another ten cows into the pen and up the race. They slammed their horns against each other and blew snot. Miles loomed by the rails of the race to check each cow for a brand as she passed. If the cow lacked a brand, meaning she hadn’t ever seen the civilization of a corral, he pressed the glowing-hot branding iron to her side as long as he could before the cow jumped forward and the iron slipped, leaving a burned pattern on the hide.
I would get all of the crew’s names eventually and see how each fit into the felting of that strange fabric, but for the moment it was a hurricane of dust and holler, bellowing and bodies, stockmen and cattle and a ramp into a big semi with a double-decker trailer. The cows were loaded onto the truck and headed south, to their deaths perhaps, or to better pasture.
One cow climbed over the railing of the top deck somehow and fell more than fourteen feet. She had leaped over the gates of the pound earlier, clearing the seven-foot rails, and it had taken a few of the crew to get her back. Amazingly, after her fall from the truck, she rose up and ran away, and Miles, who didn’t seem like he would intentionally harm anything, said she could use some lead—a bullet, in other words. He thought she might be a little chewy though, with the heat and stress and all. The rest of the cattle would have a long hot ride on that narrow strip of bitumen across endless red clay, no matter the ending.
Then a cow suddenly slammed headfirst into the gate and slumped to the ground. Max stepped in and slapped her on the neck and back, but she only jerked a few times.
“Reckon she’s broke her neck?” he asked.
“Hmm,” replied Vic.
Vic grabbed the cow’s tail and Max grabbed her ears and they dragged her until she was free of the race. Vic patted the dying cow and then sat down on the animal’s rounded side to rest by the sliding gate of the race while she waited for another pen to be drafted.
Troy limped over. He was supposed to be the cook, but he didn’t seem well suited to the job. Miles had adopted him as part of the crew after a stroke left his left arm and leg impaired and sunk him into a bout of depression so severe he wouldn’t eat or speak. Miles thought the open air and work might do him some good.
Troy
