puppy a part of his biscuit, but she was tied to the fence nearby and couldn’t quite reach it.
The heat gave all these moments an unpleasant weight, though the prospect of heading back to the din and adrenaline of the pens was equally uninviting.
I felt weak and a little shaky, my hands trembling along with the cup. The crew didn’t seem to notice, and I took a careful breath, resting my nerves. The morning had pitched everything in me to overdrive. The bulls weighed more than a ton; the mad-eyed cows could have gutted any of us with a sideways swipe of a horn—all this surrounded by hard iron posts and constant movement, shouts, hooves, and dust.
Cattle are prey animals, and they respond to humans appropriately, as predators. There are correct positions and distances to maintain with respect to a cow, and correct timing—when to press toward a cow’s shoulder or head, when to back away, when not to look a cow in the eye, when to move back and forth to stimulate reactions in the herd. And while the madhouse of the pens had made chaos and brutality of the art of livestock handling, the same rules applied. If they were flouted, the work would never be finished, or one of the crew could be injured or worse. My old instincts told me when to leap forward and move back. For that I was grateful, but everything beyond was stimulus almost entirely unfamiliar to my being.
Miles finally gave a nod and said, “We’ve got a pen full of cows we should put through the tick dip and draft up before we finish loading.”
He tossed the butt end of a rolled cigarette, shook his empty cup upside down, and set the bucket of biscuits and cups in the front seat of the yellow ute before walking back to the pens of cattle. The rest of the crew followed.
Tick Dipping
TICK DIPPING WAS A REQUIREMENT only for cattle loaded onto a road train, but all of the cows brought to the yards went for the black swim. That afternoon, we dipped a set of five hundred cattle, running the drafted mob through the race until they plunged into a putrid trough of chemicals that was supposed to kill the small ticks they’d picked up from grazing in the bush. Any cattle leaving the station and bound for destinations across the tick-range perimeter had to be dipped and later checked. It was standard government protocol for the stations in the North.
The cattle had to swim through the chemical liquid until they reached the opposite end, where the concrete sloped up to a set of pens with concrete floors. The cows behind pressed and pushed the lead cows forward over the drop-off and into the acrid pond, and it rose in a surging splash as the line of cattle plunged in, swam across, and climbed, dripping, up the other side. They glistened black in the sun, standing on the wet concrete to dry for a few minutes.
The ringers worked the chutes behind to cut off the ends of the tail hair of the cattle headed for the tick dip. It was a process called tail-banging, to mark which had been dipped and which hadn’t and maybe save a few from being run through the brew twice. The small black handle of the bang-tail knife fit easily in the palm, and with one hand pulling the cow’s tail and finding the last joint of the tail bone, a ringer placed the blade facing up, twisted the stringy hairs around it, and pulled hard.
Miles held the knife in one hand and a fistful of tail hairs in the other. When he reached the end of the line, he nodded to Cole, who pulled the slide gate and hollered at the cattle to move forward. Ivan moved another group into the race, cramming the end cow to slide the gate shut behind her. A heap of tail hair lay on the ground like a pile of discarded wigs.
Dust stuck to the wet cattle at the far end of the trough, and the murky liquid pooled on the concrete. Another mob lunged forward, cattle jamming together and getting stuck between the narrow panels, slamming forward and backward and pushing legs out through the railing. After one group had plunged through the tick dip, dried off on the other side, and run into another pen, the ringers walked to the back of the yards to draft another.
Ivan said later he reckoned we all did as we were told because the government said so, and then because the station owners said so, and then the manager and the head stockmen and whoever reckoned he was in charge at the moment. We thought we operated under our own free will, he said, but it wasn’t that way, and the cattle took the brunt of it through no choice of their own. They tried not to, with all of their wily savanna fire. They smashed and cleared metal pipe fences, broke the welds on the rails, tore up each other and tore down wires, but in the end, most of them emerged tick-less, or at least should have.
Tanner swaggered up and down the race, checking whether each cow was full of milk or not, calling out “Wet” or “Dry.” They directed cows with full udders into a pen to be reunited with their calves after they had been drafted and branded. The dry cows would be loaded onto road trains.
Tailing the Mickies
WHEN THE DAY STARTED TO STRETCH OUT into afternoon, Miles got me to help walk the young bulls out—tailing the mickies, they called it—to the dried coastal plains to graze for a few hours. He let me ride his black gelding, Reb. The dark horse moved easily, giving his head to the bit. Miles and I rode in the lead, letting the young bulls find their way into the wide lane. A hundred yards out, we reined in and turned in our saddles to watch the slow herd. We sat on our horses in white sun in the dead swamp grass for an hour and a half while the dogs kept the mob together and the bulls had some time out of the mud and dust of the yards.
Savanna stretched in a choppy sea, and the low-angled sun leaned across scrubby paperbark tea trees. A nearly imperceptible breath of wind rolled off the gulf, gently sweeping away the dust and the daring, releasing the tension of cattle and crew. Pale grasses tossed their drooping heads among the gum trees.
Deep within us, cows and workers alike, lived the urge to breathe the moist air, inhale the expanse and feel just as wide and unbridled and quiet, away from the tumult and ruckus of the yards. The wave of noise, commotion, and pent-up anxiety slid from me and disappeared into the waving grasses. I was not sure how to take in all that had passed in the morning hours, as if it were perfectly natural to find oneself in with a lot of maddened cattle and an equally brave and rough crew. These were not domesticated cattle. They were wild animals, pressed into pens of heavy iron rails, from which they had little chance of escape.
I could not make sense of how I had been accepted in this situation, as a foreigner of no known ability in the intimate chain of human interaction needed for livestock handling. And yet I had not died. I had not even found myself hurt. And there I was astride a borrowed horse, a big dark horse I might only have dreamed of riding, waiting in quiet sunshine. Like the others, Miles didn’t seem to care about asking questions, or knowing anything more about me. I wondered briefly if there was a series of unspoken tests for me, and whether I could just as suddenly be shunned and dropped from the crew. Then I gave up trying to understand the situation and closed my eyes, feeling, through the leather reins, the dark horse lower his head and chew a few mouthfuls of coarse grass.
Miles sat his stallion a short distance from the young bulls to keep them from moving too fast. The mob of mickies spread in the lane, shadows stretching against the tall bunchgrass before them. Miles rode over and asked if I wanted to trade horses for a while.
He swung out of the saddle and gave me a brief glance before adjusting the stirrups. Ordinarily a cowboy would never trade out his best horse, even for a short ride, or adjust his stirrups, or trust anyone he didn’t know, especially with a good horse like Snake. I nodded, swung down out of my saddle, and took the reins when he offered them. I was less than half of Miles’ size, and I felt quite small astride the big stallion, unsure how to ride a horse with such supple power. I rode back slowly, letting the horse beneath me pick his way through hillocks of grass and melon holes and old water channels.
In the pens Miles showed me how to fill bags of grain for the horses. Each bag was made of a feed sack folded down to half size with a thin twine knotted into the corners so that it could be hung around a horse’s head. We put nose bags on the herd of biting, milling horses and waited until they had finished eating before leaving the yards at dusk, leaving the bawling cattle behind, the dead cow by the race.
Mudflats and mangroves patterned the gulf country, and we each had our own, less visible, emotional topography. I thought the reason the red cow had died in front of me, with one quick slam into the