Big Sky Read online

  It slowly dawned on Aria. ‘That’s not fair – you’re meant to tell the truth!’

  ‘I am telling the truth – you asked how many I’ve slept with and that’s what I’m figuring.’

  Aria’s eyes narrowed. I didn’t want to be her next victim. There was something wild in her tonight – like a horse about to bite. I swear if I could have seen her ears beneath the swing of shiny black hair, they’d be pressing right back. At school it was fun being around her when she was like this – we’d swim in the river or climb the fence and frisk in the pool complex or wander the city at night.

  Aria spun around, making a pretence of choosing, and pointed her finger. ‘Skye.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Truth, dare or double dare.’

  My mind raced. If I picked dare she’d probably make me do something awful like eat cow dung or take my top off or kiss Jonathan. I could pull out, but I didn’t want to seem like a piker. They’d all spent the past couple of weeks being bossed around by me. Now the power balance had shifted. Aria not only knew it – she was revelling in it.

  I figured there wasn’t much about me that Aria hadn’t already heard in long whispered conversations after the housemistress had thundered in to tell us to shut up. And everything I’d told her was pretty innocent. I had no deep, dark secrets she could try to expose. ‘Truth.’

  Aria smiled. ‘Have you ever been kissed?’

  What a cow! She knew I hadn’t. There’d been drunks at the rodeo who had tried their luck, but I’d backhanded them. I wanted my first kiss to be special, not tasting of stale beer and raw onions.

  ‘Yeah, of course.’ My parents had both kissed me.

  ‘With a guy. A full-on kiss, with tongues.’

  My face burned.

  ‘No.’ I tried to make it sound as if I didn’t care, but I did.

  I was seventeen! But I went to a girls school. Opportunities were pretty limited. When my cheeks finally stopped burning, I gathered courage to look over at Dan. He was staring into the fire.

  I wanted to get Aria back, make her pay, but by the time my turn came to challenge her, she chose dare. Even I wasn’t low enough to make her kiss Jonathan. I got her to sing all five verses of the St Anne’s school song because she had a crap singing voice.

  I went to sleep while the game continued on and on until it was just Jonathan and Aria, laughing uproariously as they dared each other to do more and more stupid stuff.

  There was a sharp crack. Gunshot. I burst out of my swag, heart pounding. Then another shot. An ominous rumble followed, like an earthquake. There was a fearsome bellowing. No. No way. ‘The cattle are rushing!’

  In the light of the dying fire, Dan, Franz and Elise sprang out of their swags in a rush of confusion – Aria and Jonathan weren’t there. I ducked beneath the fly and flashed the torch – neither was the rifle.

  I raced to the horse paddock and whistled. Blue Dreamer was worn out from two days of solid work, but he came, faithful as ever. I mounted him and then sped across to the holding yards, trusting he’d find his way in the darkness.

  The last mob of undrafted cattle had rushed the main yard fence and poured out like flour from a busted bag. I cracked my whip and charged into the melee. Dust stormed into my eyes as I tried to drive the mob back while keeping my seat and ensuring Blue Dreamer didn’t get horned in the guts.

  A shout through the cloud of dust told me that Dan was behind me. ‘Round to the left!’ he shouted. ‘We’ll drive them back from there.’

  I danced out on Blue Dreamer into a moonlit scene of total pandemonium. Dan charged in and plugged the hole by turning his horse side on. I galloped up. Dan had already leaped off Flash to repair the fence.

  ‘How many got away?’ I asked.

  Inside the enclosure, the remaining cattle still rumbled and paced in an uneasy circle. ‘Couple of hundred,’ Dan suggested.

  ‘No! We won’t make our quota for market.’

  ‘Skye?’ Dan called as I wheeled around. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To get them back!’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. They’re gone. You don’t want to take a horse too far out at night.

  ‘I don’t care! It’s my job to make quota.’

  Aria and Jonathan loomed up through the dust. Aria was crying and Jonathan carried the rifle.

  I grabbed it.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Aria sobbed.

  ‘What were you d — ?’ I couldn’t even finish the sentence. Ice froze my veins.

  Aria shrank behind Jonathan. ‘I’m sorry Skye. I really, truly am. It was a dare. And I didn’t realise it would scare the cows. I just didn’t think that —’ The ice cracked. A rush of red-hot hatred spewed forth. ‘No, you didn’t think! You don’t seem capable of it. Cattle get killed out here, Aria. People too. It’s not a movie. It’s real. This is my real life and I wish you’d never come!’

  Jonathan stepped in front of her. His irises clouded, as if a second eyelid had rolled down. ‘Leave her alone. She didn’t mean to do it.’

  ‘How can you not mean to pull the trigger on a rifle?’ I spat.

  ‘Well maybe if you’d let her have a go when she asked —’ ‘I can’t listen to you. You’re no better than her. You think this is some hick game for your amusement. If I was a guy I’d have you sorted in no time.’

  ‘Who do you think you are?’ Jonathan hissed. ‘You big, ball-breaking bitch!’

  So much for peace, love and Save the Blue Gropers. Stung, I spun Blue Dreamer around. Jonathan made me feel bossy and butch and I no longer knew if I still had a friendship with Aria. Or, for that matter, if I even wanted to . . . There was no way I would be able to calmly return to camp. All the pent up anger and frustration and anxiety frothed out in a furious rush of heat. I was a volcano and lava was exploding and spewing out of me and I had to be doing something. I had to be useful.

  Ghostly white outlines of cattle glimmered in the night. I spurred Blue Dreamer on. He was a good horse, good at night too. I didn’t fear for his safety. I trusted him and he trusted me.

  We closed in on one of the beasts. Just one. If I got just one, I would feel something had been redeemed. My family was relying on me. I wanted to do a good job. Blue Dreamer shied. I urged him forward.

  We were almost on the beast. Blue Dreamer tugged at the reins, trying to turn. ‘No,’ I commanded. ‘We can do this,’ I tightened my grip and spurred him to charge.

  In a blur of night and stars, the earth dropped from beneath us. I flew through the air and landed with a bone-cracking thump in a grevillea. Dazed, I scrambled to my feet and rushed to where Blue Dreamer had fallen. In the moonlight a glimmer of bone protruded from below the hock.

  No. Not my horse. Not Blue Dreamer.

  He lay, collapsed, whinnying with high-pitched, terrified pain. My horse was crying.

  No. No. No. I threw my arms around his neck and buried my face in his mane. Hot tears mingled with his sweat.

  I hardly registered Dan riding up behind on Flash. He didn’t matter. Nothing mattered. Blue Dreamer had a broken leg. There was no way he could heal. Horses need to stand and move to drink and feed.

  Dan slid from the saddle. He put his arms around me and I shoved him away. Everything was a tangle of pain. Blue Dreamer was my true best friend. He was the one who adventured with me, supported me, worked with me, and now I had as good as killed him. Three stupid minutes of riding into the night, it couldn’t have been anymore, but I was so stubborn, so . . . angry.

  Blue Dreamer screamed.

  Dan gently touched my shoulder. ‘Skye. Do you want me to do it?’

  I shook my head. ‘My horse. I’ll do it.’

  I gave Blue Dreamer a last hug, squeezing him, willing my love into him, thanking him. His eyes were like moonstones, hazy with panicked pain, as he stared at me.

  Like a scene in a movie, images flashed into my mind – Blue Dreamer as a wobbly foal nuzzling at my pockets for pieces of carrot I’d filched from Gran’s kitchen. Blue Dreamer
racing over the home paddock whenever I whistled. Blue Dreamer resting his large head on my shoulder as we gazed at a big country sunset.

  I shot him.

  I flung the rifle to the ground and raced to my horse.

  ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I’m sorry.’ Hot tears scalded my cheeks and dripped onto Blue Dreamer’s coat as my horse slowly stiffened in my arms.

  I curled into a ball around him and sobbed. How could I have been so careless? Arms slid around me. I let go of Blue Dreamer and sobbed into Dan’s shirtfront, soaking him with tears and snot.

  ‘He was my best friend.’ But he was more than that.

  Dan rubbed my back, as if he were soothing a frightened animal, with a long even sweep until, finally, it seemed as if I’d emptied out all the salt water inside me. I felt raw and dry, wrung out.

  I pulled away, not caring that I must have looked a total mess or that his shirt was saturated.

  Dan laid a calloused hand against my cheek and cradled it as gently as if I were a baby.

  ‘I…’ ‘Shhh.’ He put his fingers to my mouth.

  My lips parted.

  His mouth stopped a moment away from mine. I hesitated. Then, as he took a deep breath in, I realised what he was doing – he was breathing in my spirit, just like he had with Blue Dreamer. Tentatively, I breathed him back in.

  ‘Skye!’

  We sprang apart.

  Wearing a head torch Franz appeared through the scrub on Brodie.

  ‘What is it?’ I demanded, my cheeks burning, relieved for the cover of night.

  ‘Is Aria with you?’

  ‘What do you mean? I thought she was back at camp?’

  Franz shook his head.

  Not for the first time that night, I felt a primal squeeze of fear. One of the cardinal rules of a muster was to stick together. This was wild country. There were gorges, snakes, and crocodiles, and, in the daylight hours, there was deadly heat . . .

  We hastened back to the camp. It would be at least another couple of hours before dawn. How could she?

  At camp, I turned to Dan.

  He nodded.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Jonathan – stay here with Elise.’ No way did I want to be searching for Aria with him. ‘I need you both here to look after the mob. ‘Franz will come with me. Dan’s in charge until we get back. We’ll radio the homestead for back-up.’

  I caught Dan’s eye, silently pleading with him not to challenge my authority right now. I needed him to keep the cattle safe and the camp together.

  ‘I’m coming with you,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘I know this country like the back of my hand. Aria won’t have gone too far. She likes people to chase after her.’ I pictured her, close by, sitting out the rest of the night feeling sorry for herself. ‘It’s better that I go and you put through the last cattle. The truck’ll be arriving any day and I need someone who knows what they’re doing.’

  Dan’s mouth straightened to a stubborn line. He shoved his hands further into his pockets. ‘Your gran can keep everything in order. I’m not letting you go alone with Franz.’

  I was too broken to argue further. ‘Fine then! We’ll leave at first light. I’m not risking any more accidents.’

  TWELVE

  I perched on the holding yard fence, unable to sleep. Blue Dreamer filled my thoughts. I wished it had been Aria instead. No! That wasn’t true. In the big private mental game of truth, dare or double dare, the truth was: I was jealous of Aria.

  Wherever she went boys swooned. I was crap at the complicated dating dance. I couldn’t flirt like she did. I didn’t bat my eyelashes and lean forward to show my cleavage and do that trilling little laugh thing. I was blunt and honest. I tried to hide my breasts and my laugh was deep and boom ing like Gran’s. I couldn’t be bothered making stupid small talk. I wanted things to be real. I was probably going to become one of those crusty old CWA spinster sisters doomed to a life of baking scones and endless knitting for the Flying Doctor charity drives, while Aria mowed through a string of rich husbands.

  Aria’s stricken expression just before I’d taken off on Blue Dreamer flashed into my mind.

  My best friend, my only real friend at St Anne’s, had flown all the way from Perth to spend her holidays helping me out on the muster. Aria could have chosen to do anything else – she could have partied with friends, bought up half a shopping mall, headed down to her father’s winery at Margaret River. But she’d chosen to be with me. And instead of appreciating it, all I could do was find fault with her. Her cooking was crap. She had no idea how to calm an animal. She didn’t have a sense of duty and she didn’t seem to care. She didn’t seem to realise what was at stake. This was my life, my family’s livelihood. Not a game. She was a show pony, prissying and prancing across my home territory. And that was the whole point: it was my show. I was running the show – and she was ruining it.

  ‘You’re too hard on her,’ Dan said, coming up beside me silently.

  How did he do that? ‘So you think I’m a cow, too? Like Jonathan does?’

  He took off his Stetson and fiddled with the beaten-up brim. ‘I’m not saying that. She’s never been on a muster before. We can only be and do what we know. She was trying.’

  ‘Trying? Trying isn’t good enough! We’ve just lost a horse thanks to her carelessness. Not just any horse,’ I choked out. ‘My horse.’ I stalked back to the camp.

  Elise and Franz seemed unfazed by the prospect of being left in the middle of nowhere, a day’s hard riding from the homestead. I wondered if it was because they were from another country. Damien had once told me that when he was travelling it seemed like the dangerous animals in other countries weren’t real. He’d actually followed bear tracks in Canada and gone searching for Komodo dragons in Indonesia. That was his theory about why so many croc attacks involved foreign tourists. Either that or they couldn’t read the English warning signs.

  As dawn broke, I took Magic from the string and fought back another bout of tears as I fitted him with Blue Dreamer’s saddle. Magic was longer and rangier than Blue Dreamer and I had to tighten the girth.

  ‘Ready?’ I asked Dan, once he’d mounted Sandman.

  He nodded.

  If Aria had been riding Blue Dreamer he would have eventually taken her back to the homestead. But Blue Dreamer was dead and Aria had ridden off on Bella, an unpredictable horse. ‘Do you think she went towards the homestead?’ I suggested, not really having a clue. It wasn’t as if there was a defined riding track, and the ground was so stony there were no visible hoof prints.

  Dan shook his head. ‘I think she went north.’

  The exact opposite direction.

  He pointed to a branch of grevillea that had been partly broken from the bush. Sap seeped from the crack. I followed him along through the rocky country, scraping past acacias, intrigued whenever Dan halted Sandman and slid off to examine the ground, or point out a snapped twig or a bent branch or some kinked spear grass. At any other time this would have been my fantasy come true – riding through the wild country, gilded with honeyed light, with a beautiful boy who could read the land. But it was marred by the ache of losing Blue Dreamer and the thrumming fear that Aria was out here alone. What if we couldn’t find her? It happened out here. People vanished.

  That was one of the reasons I’d found it so difficult to settle into St Anne’s. Not only was I used to the freedom of wild, open spaces, I was used to wild people. People who didn’t legislate against sandbars on the beach, or expect that issuing a certificate, or insuring everything, would keep them safe from nature. Out here we lived with nature. We were nature. Bad things happened. Calves were torn apart by dingoes. Crocs ate the occasional dozy cow. The summer storms threw down lightning and flooded the plains. If you didn’t drink enough water you could die. If you went swimming in the wrong waterhole you could die. If you got caught in a flash flood you could die. If you got lost you could die.

  Life in the Kimberley was dangerous. But that w
as also its appeal. There’s something totally real, adrenaline-filled and completely satisfying about tackling a rogue bull and landing it; about pitting yourself against nature and her dangers. Anything could happen – snakes in the swag, feral pigs, crazed bulls on the loose, bushfires raging in the scrub. Red dirt and red blood. Blue sky and white trees. Emerald water and ochre cliffs. It was all so blaringly, vividly real. It made life in the city seem tired and grey. Tame. Safe.

  Aria must have ridden hard because we were in the saddle all day, tracking her with careful slowness. As the sun began to sink, the earth turned rose-gold then pink. A thin turquoise line framed the horizon as the sun’s rays fanned across the blue-green sky.

  ‘Think we’d better stop,’ Dan said. ‘Set up camp.’

  I shifted in my saddle. ‘But Aria . . . She’s all alone.’

  ‘Can’t see her tracks in the dark and we can’t risk the horses. We’ve already lost one.’

  ‘Right.’ I rubbed Magic’s neck and felt the tears well again. ‘At least let’s aim for the escarpment,’ I said. ‘It’s not far and if we light a fire on the edge, maybe Aria will see it.’

  It was painstaking getting the horses up along the back of the escarpment. The ground rose in a gentle undulation, twisting past boulders and up narrow ravines until we came to the butte at the top. Steep cliffs fell below, forming one wall of Lizard Gorge. The country stretched out below like an enormous basin, like the sea it once was.

  ‘She must still be on this side.’ I gazed down into a twist of jet-blackness below. ‘The river’s full of crocs. It’s impassable even in the winter, right up to Skinner’s bridge.’

  ‘How far along is that?’ Dan asked.

  I frowned, trying to estimate the distance between our camp and Skinner’s. It wasn’t a real bridge – just a heap of rocks the stockmen had piled up to make the river passable in the dry. Years ago, Gator Pearson and his men could ride the horses straight through the river. But that was when croc hunters could still fetch a bounty for croc pelts and before crocodiles were declared an endangered species and protected by National Parks and Wildlife. Since then, the croc population had boomed.