Big Sky Read online

  Aria’s swag rustled. Her head peeked out from the top like a big-eyed marsupial. ‘Are you all right?’ she whispered.

  ‘I was checking on the horses.’

  A slim hand reached across and deposited something that glinted in the firelight onto my swag. A chocolate-chip muesli bar.

  ‘I saved it for you,’ Aria said. ‘It was my last one.’

  NINE

  After a quick breakfast of porridge with powdered milk, we rode off before the sun’s first rays struck the camp. I longed to take Blue Dreamer, but he needed a rest. Instead, Dan gave me Miracle. Aria had Missy. Jonathan got Snakebite. When I glanced at Dan there was a twinkle in his tawny eyes.

  I would have preferred for Dan to ride out with Jonathan and keep an eye on him, but Franz was keen to muster today. We stowed the sandwiches Elise had made for us into our saddlebags.

  This time we were going to tackle another wedge – one out beyond Gator Soak to where the timbered plains bordered dark soil country, boggy land that was swampy in the wet and curdled to clay in the dry.

  Aria and I worked well together. We rode a couple of hundred metres apart and gathered up a good mob without any rogues turning nasty. I kept in contact with Franz via the two-way and they were having a dream run too.

  We stopped for smoko beneath a stunted gum tree with tattered grey bark peeling off to reveal glimpses of smooth yellow wood. I inhaled the sharp scent of eucalyptus while trying to shelter in the few spindly bars of shade. Flies clustered thickly on our sweat-soaked backs. We drank our water and ate our sandwiches, exchanging few words.

  ‘Oh my god!’ Aria shrieked. She leapt up.

  ‘What?’ I grabbed a fallen branch and shot over to her, expecting a snake to come slithering from behind the silvery bark.

  Aria’s hands fluttered in panic and her eyes watered.

  ‘What is it?’ I demanded.

  ‘I swallowed a fly!’

  I laughed and sat back down. ‘Perhaps you’ll die.’

  ‘I’m not an old lady!’ she yelped, then laughed too.

  When we crawled out from the scabby shade, the air had an oily shimmer; even breathing singed my nostrils. At the next bore point I fixed a dicky pump by fashioning a washer from a scrap of rawhide. Aria and I took turns dunking our heads in the water.

  By the time we drove the mob to our designated meeting spot, it was three-thirty in the afternoon. Franz and Jonathan rocked up twenty minutes later. Choking on dust, we funnelled the cattle into the holding paddock. Then I rode out with Dan to fix a fallen fence he’d spotted when taking the horses out.

  Later I radioed Dad and Gran, reported the numbers and then collapsed on my swag, too knackered for conversation. But I couldn’t give in to the temptation to nap as we only had a couple of hours before dark and it was time to do what I’d been putting off.

  At the holding paddock, I separated out a killer from near the billabong and led it into a smaller yard. He was a cleanskin, not top grade, but with enough fat on him to give us a good dinner and extra meat to be salted and packed down.

  I was tempted to make Aria help me. That would revive her vegetarianism. It would be cruel to put her through it though. Instead, I searched for Dan.

  He was in the horse paddock, staring up at the escarpment that formed a natural border on one side. Even from a few hundred metres away he seemed to sense me watching him. He turned and smiled.

  My heart flipped. Steeling myself, I gripped my belt and walked towards him.

  ‘Help me butcher a killer?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘Good. I’ve got one sorted. Let’s do it away from the camp – don’t want to attract the wild dogs.’

  ‘Sure.’ Dan followed me back to the yard and helped me rope up the killer. We led it out at an easy pace. If it panicked and galloped the adrenaline would flood the meat and it wouldn’t taste as good. Dad had once told me how whenever his father slaughtered a domestic pig, he’d feed it a bowl of beer first. Said it stopped the pig from getting too scared and made it taste better.

  Once we were far enough away that the gunshot wouldn’t spook the mob but still close enough to cart the meat back to camp, I unhooked the rifle from where it was slung on my saddle.

  ‘Want me to do it?’ Dan asked as I loaded bullets.

  I shook my head. What good was winning the All-Around Cowgirl award for two years running and having dreams of building up the station if I wasn’t prepared to do every part of the job.

  Breathing heavily, I lined the range up with the steer’s forehead, steadied, and braced myself against the hummock of bare rock we’d chosen so that the blood would drain easier and the meat wouldn’t get covered in dirt.

  I pulled the trigger.

  The steer crumpled. Dan quickly slit its throat with his old timer. Blood oozed down the rock, staining it rust red. We got to work, cutting off the forequarters and stabbing a hole through each hock to hang overnight from a eucalypt to soften the meat. We cut off the backstraps, eye fillets and the chuck meat before bundling them up along with the liver, kidneys and heart to take back to camp.

  At the sight of the bloody mess, Aria paled, as if she were about to be sick. But Elise was stoked. ‘Good meat.’ She fried up onions in the camp oven and barbequed the heart and liver and kidneys. Tomorrow we’d pack the rest of the meat into brine between layers of gum leaves to help flavour it – an old trick a bushie camp cook had once taught me.

  Dinner was fantastic – the eye fillets were medium-rare, just the way I liked, and the organs were slightly charred on the outside and sweet and juicy to bite into. I washed it down with a pannikin of black tea, savouring its sweetness. After the day’s hard slog, I was contented. I never felt this level of satisfaction at school. Tonight I’d sleep well, not toss and turn beneath the seepage of the fluoro hall lights, my legs restless and aching. This was what Mum called ‘virtuous sleep’.

  ‘So, what are we going to do tonight?’ Aria demanded, fired up on the sweet tea.

  ‘We could sing songs,’ I suggested.

  ‘Like Edelweiss?’ Jonathan sneered.

  ‘Or Valtzing Matilda?’ Franz countered.

  ‘You know Waltzing Matilda?’ Aria asked. ‘How?’

  ‘Lonely Planet.’

  ‘Okay what’s the cheesiest camp song ever?

  ‘Kumbaya?’ Jonathan suggested.

  Aria rolled her eyes. ‘We’d all know Abba songs.’

  I shook my head, envisaging Aria belting out Dancing Queen.

  ‘Do you know any songs?’ Elise asked Dan. ‘I would like to hear the Aborigine song.’

  Dan ducked his head.

  ‘Yeah, go on!’ Aria enthused. ‘Sing for us Dan. That would be so cool. Like a corroboree or something.’

  I winced at Aria treating Dan like he was some cultural spectacle. But I was curious too. If she was ignorant then so was I. I knew Aboriginal people, of course. Competed against them in the rodeos and camp drafts and hung out with the kids and women in the waterholes and bought stuff in the shops from them. But I didn’t really have a clue about this other part of their lives.

  ‘Aria, Dan might not be able to. The songs could be private.’

  ‘It’s okay, Skye,’ Dan said softly. ‘It’s good to share some songs.’

  I wanted to swallow my words.

  Dan flashed Aria a crooked smile, but his eyes were shy.

  He picked up a couple of sticks near the edge of the fire and clapped them together to set up a clacking rhythm.

  Elise aimed her camera and pressed the record button.

  Dan set up a drone that could have come from any time, but only one place – Australia. I closed my eyes and listened to his lone voice threading the night. I could hear hills in the song and sinuous twisting rivers. Or maybe I was just imagining it. For a moment though I felt I almost got it: this level of connection that I could never have. I rubbed my smoke-stung eyes and shifted against my swag. I could never belong like this. I could never listen to the land
and sing back to it like Dan. It was a foreign song, completely mystifying to me, but it was being sung in the right country. I’d never questioned that I belonged here. Now I felt uncertain, wistful. I thought about Dan’s map in the dirt. Any one of us could wander out there and get totally lost, but it was unlikely for Dan. This was his country.

  When Dan finished, Elise clapped and Aria cheered. Elise turned to me with her earnest round face. ‘Australia is very lucky to have the Aborigine.’

  I nodded, feeling humbled and ashamed. What would I know?

  ‘Encore!’ Jonathan called.

  Dan adjusted the brim of the Stetson, screening his face from view.

  ‘Come on, Dan,’ Aria wheedled. ‘More! More! Encore!’

  Dan shook his head. He’d warmed up. ‘Not a song, but I’ll dance if you like.’

  ‘Right on!’

  Dan handed the two sticks to Franz. ‘Can you keep a beat?’

  Franz blinked and slapped them together in a jerky rhythm.

  Dan slipped off his boots and socks, stood and then bowed his head and raised his arms behind him like the wings of a giant bird. He leaped up on one leg, pushing up from his toe, and spun around. He crouched and leaped back up, flapping his arms with fluid grace. He poured himself from one movement into another and we all watched, mesmerised. There was no doubting who or what he was – a courting brolga, the spirit of the plains . . .

  It was stunning and it made me feel like an ant. I yearned to match his grace, his ability to be the soul of another creature.

  Dan did a couple more leaps in time with Franz’s wonky clap-sticking. Then he cried out and landed, arms-folded over his head, in front of me.

  Aria’s eyes gleamed with more than firelight. I recognised that look – it was the same one she got just before flinging a new pair of jeans or a dress on the counter without even looking at the price tag, when she just had to have it.

  I willed Dan to stop and sit back down, even as I wanted him to keep dancing, forever, just for me.

  On a muster there’s not much you can do to keep people apart. When the mustering was done for the day, the cattle were in the holding paddock, the fences checked and saddlecloths washed down, everyone was free to do as they pleased.

  As much as I longed to keep Aria away from Dan, she bee-lined to him at every possible opportunity, asking him about horses, unleashing that tinkling laugh of hers whenever he said anything even vaguely funny. I didn’t want to fight over Dan. I had a muster to run. At the same time I longed to find moments with Dan when Aria wasn’t glued to his side.

  Jonathan was sulky, the only upside of which was that he aimed his dagger-looks and barbed comments at Dan instead of me.

  Franz and Elise remained the odd-couple self-sufficient unit. He was skinny and talked a mile a minute and bossed her around, while she was solid, quiet, smiling. Maybe that was the secret – they complemented each other – because at the end of each day they snuggled up as if they had found their true home in the other. Despite the hot nights, it made me feel cold and alone.

  We were doing a good job and had brought in on average three hundred head a day for the past eight days, less than Damien might have managed, but respectable. Still, I was miserable. In a day or two I’d have to call it quits on the muster and start drafting so that we’d have the killers ready for the trucks.

  When Dan followed me out to the horses on the evening of the last day’s mustering, I was chewed-up and empty. We might have stood in comfy, companionable silence, if Aria hadn’t come tripping behind him in her stupid boots, her shirt unbuttoned almost down to her bra, and making Dan laugh at some dumb story about the time she wore a purple wig for the Queen’s Assembly at St Anne’s.

  I stalked off to the camp unable to bear the way she pulled her flirty poses, neck arched and tilting her head to the side, and asking him to show her how to do things as an excuse to get him to touch her. Sure enough, when I returned, Dan was demonstrating to Aria how to check Bella’s hooves. Her small hand pressed against his calloused brown fingers. He might have been oblivious, but I saw how Aria’s hand lingered.

  Later, Dan found me at the spring. ‘Thought I saw some tracks today.’

  ‘What kind?’ I asked, washing my face and squeezing my spare pair of jeans to spread out over a wattle.

  ‘Dingoes.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Five or six.’

  By his tone I knew he was concerned. The cattle were all in the holding paddock – a four hundred acre holding paddock. If they were at the far end, a dingo could easily slip the fence, attack a calf and spook the mob, making them rush.

  ‘Do you want me to follow them?’ Dan asked.

  ‘I’ll go with Dan!’ Aria said, parting the fronds of two close-growing acacias.

  I wanted to whack her with my wet jeans – so much for the sisterhood of the travelling frigging pants. What sisterhood? ‘Can I go?’ Aria batted her eyelashes at Dan. At least she’d stopped wearing make-up; in this heat it ran down her face like melting ice-cream. Without foundation to hide it, a tiny pimple gleamed on her chin.

  Dan raised his eyebrows in question.

  I tried to make my voice sound casual. ‘It’s up to Dan.’

  Aria clapped her hands and grabbed Dan’s arm. ‘Please! Pretty please?’

  Dan held his hands up to free them and backed away as if calming a frisky horse. ‘Come on then, I’ll go get the gun.’

  The sun was low on the horizon as I watched them go. Something hard and cold in my belly gave a couple of sickly flips. They looked so right together. Same dark glossy hair and golden skin. Aria, so petite and pretty in her designer jeans and cherry red mid-calves and the mysteriously still-white linen shirt, and Dan, tall and slim with his battered Stetson and R.M. Williams boots.

  I suddenly wished I could be tiny and cute and flirt like Aria, not tall and capable and rough around the edges. Stop it! I ordered myself. No wallowing. Try and be useful. That was the motto at Bundwarra: Be Of Use. Gran had even embroidered the Gaelic version onto a handkerchief and framed it.

  Back at camp I helped Elise carry pots down to the spring and we scrubbed them until our knuckles stung and arms ached.

  When they returned, Aria looked flushed and Dan wouldn’t meet my eye. I steeled myself, trying to tell myself I didn’t care.

  ‘You find them?’ I asked curtly.

  Dan shook his head. ‘They’d gone too far and I didn’t want to get caught out. I think we should keep a watch tonight.’

  Over dinner, Elise asked Dan if he had any more songs or dances.

  Dan said he was too stiff and sore to do any dancing, but at Aria’s insistence he offered to tell a story. It was about Emu sisters fighting over the same man and how they’d fought and pecked each other to death until they ended up as stars in the sky. None of them got the guy. Dan pointed out the constellation, but I didn’t want to look. I’d never understood Dreamtime stories – I couldn’t get their logic. I only realised why when a ranger at Kakadu had explained how there were different versions of stories, depending on the age and level of initiation, and that white people get told the simplest versions – stories that would be told to preschool kids.

  While the others gazed up into the starry sky, straining to see the constellation, Dan glanced across the fire at me. I flushed. I knew what Dan was getting at. The story had been simple; so was his point.

  We’d agreed to take turns riding Flash or Brodie, circling the sleeping mob throughout the night to scare the dogs off. I arranged it so that Dan and Aria’s shifts wouldn’t be back-to-back.

  Even before it was my turn, I woke with a start. It was as if an alarm clock ticked inside me. I checked my watch: 11.53. I was still churned up. Aria had everything she could ever ask for. Why did she have to have Dan too?

  I rubbed my eyes, shook my boots for any creepy crawly surprises and stumbled to the gate that led to the holding paddock. Dan wasn’t back yet. I climbed on Brodie and rode out, trusting his sup
erior sense of smell to lead me to the mob. Finally, I saw the glow of white humped cattle cuddled together. A dark shadow circled them. Dan. He was talking.

  I couldn’t see anyone else with him. As he drew closer on Flash I made out snatches:

  ‘. . . dying away in the west,/The wild birds are flying

  In silence to rest;/In leafage and frondage . . .’

  When night doth her glories,/Of starshine unfold

  ’Tis then that the stories/Of bush-land are told.’

  Banjo Patterson! There was a stockman who’d come through when I was a kid who could recite nearly all his poems off by heart.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘Talking poetry to the mob, it keeps them settled. It’s a trick I learned from my dad.’

  ‘What’s your dad like?’ So far I’d heard a bit about his mum and grandmother, but this was only the second time Dan had mentioned his father.

  ‘A bushie,’ Dan said. ‘Grew up in a rich family in Adelaide and couldn’t handle it. He hated the way all the nature was boxed in, so he came west and then he met my mum.’

  ‘Do they live out on a property then?’

  Dan shook his head. ‘Nah. Dad died last year. Mum went to live back in the town where her sisters are.’

  I thought about my dad and how terrible it would feel to not have him around. ‘That must be really hard for you.’

  Dan shrugged. ‘I can still hear the old man’s voice in my head. He’s the one who got me into star-gazing.’

  ‘They’re pretty amazing out here,’ I agreed. ‘No light pollution. Not like Perth.’

  ‘You don’t like it down there?’

  ‘I miss the colours and the smells and the way everything seems so much bigger and brighter up here.’

  Dan nodded. ‘Never been to Perth. Maybe I will one day so I know what I’d be missing too.’

  I laughed. ‘Believe me. You’re not missing anything.’

  ‘My grandmother says when you’re always hurrying around, going to a lot of different places, it splits off bits of your soul, until you don’t know what country you belong to.’