drove carefully, downshifting to slow the vehicle so the horses would have a smooth ride. He sat silent for the most part. Vic had a few things to say about the muster, how she wasn’t so sure about the whole prospect, how the crew seemed a bit disorganized. The radio broadcasted a quiet stream of American country music. The flat landscape made for good radio reception even hours from the transmitters.
We parked out in the middle of the paddock near a water trough, and the three of us unloaded our horses and waited in the early morning heat. The plains seemed larger away from the yards. The first light blasted us, Vic with her button-down shirt and tight black Wranglers, her black hat and blond braid, Cole in his vest and faded jeans, a pair of old tennis shoes. His face, arms, and hands were burned a deep red and brown.
We watched as cattle began to arrive from different directions and gather at the concrete troughs. They came in as if pulled by a magnet, bawling for calves and raising enough dust to obscure the rim of the morning sky.
Miles eventually pulled up with the motorbike, dirt covering his bulk. His pack of little dogs hopped into the water trough, displacing cattle. The dogs eventually leaped out, shook, and came over to drop to their bellies in the dust beside him.
“A bit stirred up, that mob. Thought they’d’ve worked out the salt in this holding paddock.”
Vic said, “Wouldn’t surprise me if they’d run ’em with the chopper just to stir ’em up for us.” She tightened her cinch and swung up, one hand gripping the horn of her Western saddle, one hand on the neck of her horse. She headed off toward the mob.
“They’ll settle in once we get moving,” Cole said.
Miles nodded. He stepped off the motorbike, cast a worried glance toward the cattle, and climbed the metal ramp up to the truck to unload his horse. Some had already begun to disappear back into the scrub, and Vic took off after them. I tightened my cinch, pulled on my gloves, and followed Cole, who had loped out to hold the stirring mob that remained. Vic brought back her little dissidents and then she blocked and redirected others back until we could form a better net around them.
Miles joined us on horseback, followed by his pack of dogs. “Cole, if you’ll take the lead, Vic and I’ll ride the wings, and Rafael, you can take the tail? Guess we’ll walk them to the gate in the corner?” The corner of the paddock lay somewhere to the southeast, invisible in the distance. I rode away with a pounding heart. The tail was the easiest place to ride, usually assigned to the newest or greenest of a crew. A thrill flooded my chest, knowing Miles was considerate of what I could and could not do. Darcy seemed pleased with the task and stepped out with ears forward and a lift to his stride.
Cattle circled up and moved away from the troughs, calves running to their mothers and the cows in the lead drawing away and filing out on paths. Cole loped easily to the front and rode out ahead, orienting the lead cattle southeast. Behind him the smoky herd moved in a river of backs and heads. Heat gave a surreal cast to the plains as we rode. We whistled and hollered at the trailing cattle, rode up to turn breakaways, and trotted back to our places beside the mob.
The lead rider sets the pace, and turns back only if the cattle veer off to one side or another. Wing riders ride wide to the outsides, the horses walking quietly unless the herd spreads. A wing rider will point his horse to redirect the strays, but most often his presence is enough to keep the cattle in line. The rider on tail has more work to do, urging cattle forward, turning wayward cows, and breaking up fights between fractious bellowing bulls.
The cattle did settle in. Many had been worked earlier by the crew and, in some memory of the process, filtered out and down the trails, called pads. The Brahman blood in them lent the beasts a distinctly elegant appearance. Some were white or gray, with honey-colored points on the tops of their heads; others were light red, with drooping dewlaps and ears, dark eyes, and long lashes.
Vic dropped back to ride with me for a short distance. “How ya’ goin’ mate?”
“Good, you?”
“Yeah, good.” She let her tall thoroughbred pick his way through fallen branches. She added conversationally, “These cattle are going all right.” And then with a glare toward her horse’s ears, “Wait till they bring in the choppers though; they’ll rile ’em up and make us all crazy.”
In country so immense, with cattle spread far apart, motorized vehicles work more efficiently than horses. Many stations own their own helicopters or employ pilots to help muster the cattle. Choppers cover large expanses of paddocks and drop down to scare cattle toward a corner or a water hole. People on motorbikes or horses work beneath them, keeping the cattle directed, congregating the mobs, and lining them out toward the yards.
Vic rode with both hands holding the reins. Cattle threaded across a dry watercourse ahead of us and up the bank on the other side.
I asked, “What’s the largest mob of cattle you’ve mustered?”
She thought for a while. “Four thousand head. It’s a pretty picture, a big mob crossing a river. If you’re in the lead, you can see the whole thing full of cattle.” She turned her horse to ride ahead, saying over her shoulder, “You’ll get your chance, mate.”
The grass was a sea that bore us, vessels with sorrel sails aligning and realigning by the compass of the yards, navigating the flat waters and occasional swells of the gulf country. The skyline swung a flat 360-degree circle beneath the arcing blue. The thin current of fifty or so breeders, calves, and a few bulls stretched ahead, moving toward the corner gate with the early sun dropping shadows beneath them, to be trampled beneath their rhythmic hooves.
When we reached the gate, we held the cattle there until they quieted, and then Cole pointed his horse out along a track, riding into the horizon, and the cattle followed instinctively. Like many of us creatures, they were willing to follow if the lead was strong. I rode behind the last cow, sweeping back and forth to keep the mob moving. The work was familiar, but disconcerting in a foreign landscape.
I tried to read the braille of the place, the texture of wide expanse, heat, and bright sun, the Australian saddles and the lean, athletic horses. The horizon was my only reference to begin mapping the lay of the land in my mind—where channels ran, the fences, water holes—and I wondered which direction the storms would emerge from, if it would change depending on which ocean sacrificed its surface to the sky, which winds undertook the pilgrimage.
We reached the small paddock that was closer to the yards, defined only by lines of long wire fences. As cattle filed into the lane leading toward the yards, flocks of gray parrots with bright pink throats thronged overhead. Galahs, the silver and wild-rose birds of the tropical savanna interior, flourished in agricultural settings, and hundreds of them clung to the rims of the water troughs. Cattle flowed seamlessly into a large pen called the cooler. I swung the heavy iron gates closed behind the last of the trailing calves.
Drafting
MILES SAID WE WOULD GO AHEAD and draft the mob. Drafting entailed shifting the cattle through a series of pens to a pound, a small enclosure with gates opening to six different pens. If one wanted to divide hundreds or thousands of cattle, the pound worked like a human-run threshing machine—one set of cattle this way, another that way, a third this way. We could make six different divisions if we chose, and sometimes even that wasn’t enough. Vic and I moved cattle forward through the succession of pens up to the pound, where Miles worked on foot with a length of rubber tubing he used as a pointer to separate the cattle individually. Cole worked the pound gates to direct each solitary animal.
Miles called “Bush” for cows, “Calf” for unbranded calves, “Weaner” for branded calves, and “Cull”