Western saddle, and swung easily. They were burned into a polish where the last rider’s knees had rubbed.
I wanted to know the horses intimately before the muster work began, and so I caught Darcy later to ride him again. I led him out of the corrals where the new station horses still milled and tied him to the fence near the shipping container. He snorted and raised his head high, his neck stiff. He was taller than any horse I had ever ridden before, his shoulder at the level of my eyes. With his narrow withers, the saddle fit him well. I adjusted the bridle carefully, so that the rings of the snaffle bit pulled a couple of wrinkles at the corner of his mouth. Then I walked him out past the paddock gate and into the open bunchgrass clearing, took a deep breath, and swung into the saddle.
He tensed immediately, and I let him step out in long strides to release his nervous energy, riding with my legs pressed in alternate rhythmic motion against his ribs to establish control, my hands exerting light but firm pressure on the reins. He was a thunderstorm ready to roll across dry grass. I let him break into a fast trot and we covered the ground across the clearing, then passed through forest and yet another clearing in moments. A horse prefers a rider with focus, feels more comfortable if he doesn’t have to make decisions other than where to place his hooves. I chose an invisible point in the distance, feigning confidence for the sake of the dark horse beneath me, and rode straight ahead, into the unknown landscape.
I kept riding and almost didn’t return. We broke our course forward only to dodge around deep melon holes and fallen trees. The country unfurled like bolts of linen, forest and clearing, without any distinguishing characteristics or landmarks. If it were Arizona, I would have ridden for hours, climbing ridges when I needed to reset the compass of my mind or remember elements of the terrain described to me at one point or another, the internal lay of the land, maps drawn from story and memory. Here I had no such assets, no history, no stories, no outback formation.
I reined Darcy in and we stood there, quietness filling in the space around us. I would go no farther. A light wind erased our tracks in white tendrils of dust and eucalyptus leaves. If I were to die, it would take them a while to find me. I felt an unsettling in the pit of my stomach, an intuitive warning that this was not my landscape, and I had little right to be here. I shifted in the saddle to ease my discomfort and saw only the same close screen of weepy eucalyptus trees. So easy to get lost out here. Darcy flicked his ears. He was standing still anyway, the tension released from his muscles and neck. I turned back in the direction we had come and, choosing my angle carefully, let Darcy pick up speed for the ride home. I would saddle Crow and venture out another day.
Stephen Craye
MIDMORNING A FEW DAYS LATER, a stocky gentleman I didn’t recognize approached me and offered a ride around the station in his pickup truck. He had short silver hair and a beard and wore a clean, pressed, button-down shirt, jeans, and dusty leather boots. He was not tall, but his shoulders were so broad he looked as if he could have wrestled an ox to the ground, and he stood, unconcerned, with a steady and ambivalent gaze. I said I would need to ask permission to abandon my chores, wondering silently what sort of danger he might present. He indicated then that he was the boss, and I could do as he said.
“You are the security man,” I said. He was supposed to have met me when I arrived.
“Yes.”
“Nice to meet you then.” I climbed up into his white Hilux.
Stephen nodded. Then, almost apologetically: “I get busy.”
He headed east, driving past the yards into the successive waves of forest and clearing. I stared out the open window, at times able to see for a ways. After a while I became intensely aware of the security man at the wheel, guiding this foray into some reach of the station.
I overcame my sense that small talk was not his forte, and asked, “What is it that you actually do?”
His face was impassive as he replied, “I protect the family’s interests.”
He sped down the straight dirt track. The landscape around us was, I presumed, the family’s property, or a piece of it anyway. Stephen had appeared at the station apparently without notice or being noticed.
“What does that mean, exactly?”
He waited before answering. “I am in charge of overseeing all their operations.”
He continued after a while in measured, unhurried sentences. He worked directly with the owner, Gene, and his children, driving or flying to all of the many stations the family owned across two states in Australia. I gathered that his work was to haunt the remote reaches of the properties and know what was going on at all times. He was ultimately responsible for directing the overhaul of Stilwater. He was the one who had placed new managers and a new head stockman on the property.
We encountered occasional swamps, lagoons with crocodiles, and stretches of coarse grass too thick to walk through and almost unpalatable to the stock. The types of plants changed dramatically over short distances, and yet the overall look was almost the same: white slender trunks and stretches of grass, in repeating patterns.
“Can you tell me more about the owners?”
“Gene and his family?”
“Yes.”
“They are a good group.” He added, “They take care of me, and I take care of them.”
The few cows we passed threw up their heads when they saw us and disappeared into the scrub. Sarus cranes hefted up from swamp grasses on great gray-blue wings, masks pulled over their heads. Ibis clung to dead tree branches, their long hooked bills like sickles. Whistler ducks huddled at the edges of the murky waters. Wild boars rooted along the swamps, one sow with squealing piglets, one male with his head buried in the water, eating water-lily tubers and freshwater mussels. Paperbark tea trees wept along rivers and water holes while the bloodwoods bled down their shallowly ridged bark stained black with sap. Carbeen gums with white trunks and broad leaves; ghost gums with white bark and narrow leaves; ironbarks with poisonous leaves and dense heavy wood; black tea trees, low and almost bushy-topped; broad-leaf tea trees with elongated wide leaves and sparsely foliated short branches. Kapok trees grew almost naked with a few yellow flowers.
“What were you before you were a security man?”
“I was a cop. I was also a livestock inspector. I didn’t have such a benevolent reputation.”
As the hours of our station tour passed, he offered more information. He described different stations in the region and wove stories of people and families who had lived for generations in the sparsely populated wilderness, raising and stealing cattle and horses, slipping in and out of human tangles. He had a family in Cairns, a wife who waited for him through all his escapades and four sons who were better off when he was gone, he said; they were about as independent and strong-willed as he was. He preferred long intervals of solitude with short respites in the ocean air and civility of the eastern coast.
He started asking me a few questions then. Where had I worked before? What were my plans after Australia? I could see for myself, even as I began to answer his questions openly, how he gathered his information. He made me feel a sense of camaraderie, showing me his favorite places on the station, talking about his family, telling me what it was like to work alone and apart, to be a sea hawk over a long stretch of open plain. He said he knew everyone and was a friend of no one, preferring the distance afforded by an air of enigmatic malevolence. He liked Stilwater because it was the farthest away, the quietest. He liked inhabiting a world where urban laws of social interaction had no place and weren’t tolerated anyway.
We drove to a point on the Powder River where it was joined by another creek, the plain opening up suddenly into a wide tidal flux that carried jellyfish and crocodiles clear from the gulf. The water cut high along the banks, still swollen from the previous wet season. A white sandy beach and a band of trees on the opposite side separated the blue of the river from that of the sky. Stephen knew a crocodile that haunted this confluence. We crawled down the mudstone ledges sculpted with patterns of watermarks and onto an outlook of rocks that jutted into the river to look for it, but the monster never surfaced. Then