Stilwater. Rafael de Grenade

      The sky glowed a shade of orange umber when Miles drove up to the station compound one morning. I was seated at the small table on the veranda with Angus and Ross, awaiting a list of chores for the day. Miles pulled out the chair opposite me and gave a brief “morning” to the table before he sat down. I had met him briefly before, but he didn’t acknowledge me. Lamplight threw shadows from his silver hat onto his face, darkening his black beard. Ross offered coffee, but he shook his head.

      “What time you reckon the road trains’ll show?”

      “Early, they’re coming up from Normanton.”

      Miles waited a moment before he replied. “We should have ’em ready to load.” After another silence he said, “Maybe I could use an extra hand.” The crew had mustered two paddocks and had about a thousand cattle in holding, waiting to be drafted, branded, and shipped or released. When Miles needed an extra person or two, he borrowed them from the station.

      I tried not to notice the look of relief that crossed Angus’ eyes; he’d be free of me for the day. While Wade often took Dustin with him on long station runs, Angus had been finding odd jobs for me around the compound.

      “That’d be fine,” he replied.

      Miles rose to leave and Angus nodded for me to follow. I climbed into the rattling yellow ute with its wire dog crates on the flatbed against the cab. Starting the truck and turning on the headlights, Miles said it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t know much, I could work the gates while they hassled the mess of livestock in the yards.

      He gave me a ride down to the donga, where they had a fire going, water heating in billycans to wash the breakfast dishes in a makeshift sink, laundry strung up along the veranda, and dogs everywhere. There was one other woman, tall and blond, pulling on a pair of boots.

      “My name is Victoria—you can call me Vic,” she said with a white smile. The rest rose from the cluttered table or moved in and out of the lamplight, gathering a few things, passing comments. We piled into several vehicles and headed up the road to the cattle yards.

      That first day, I had a hard time remembering the names of the new crew in the melee of feral cattle as I tried to maintain my place at the gates. I knew livestock from childhood, how to handle them, move and manage and predict them, and a little of the Australian traditions of stock work. But that morning all I had learned blurred and disappeared in the noise and battle, and it was a struggle to stay upright and alive. Dust stirred so thick that every breath felt like a gritty drink. Cattle bawled and moaned, agitated and distressed. Calves separated from their mothers wailed in disbelief, loneliness, and fear. Mothers called back to locate them, to reassure them, to register their protest. The commotion made a pandemonium of sound, tones that filled the air and ears and overflowed into the brain and nervous system. Gates clanged and banged and the ringers called out, swearing, urging, answering, whooping. Cattle filled pens and smashed through fences, so many that they trampled the dirt and pummeled each other and the crew.

      One of the ringers, Ivan, worked near me, slamming the sliding gate of the race—or chute—shut behind a line of heifers. He was working full force; dust coated his skinny legs and arms, and his angular face. I could see only that he had three tiny gold earrings in one ear, and that he wore a T-shirt, shorts, and a once-red ball cap. We were waiting for the road trains Angus had indicated would be arriving soon, the huge trucks hired to haul loads of cattle south to the meatworks.

      Ivan took a break in a spare moment to lean against the pipes of the railing and said, “I wonder where that trucker is.” He smacked a young heifer through the rails with a battered piece of poly pipe.

      “Had too much goey and just kept on going,” he barked, answering his own question with a jolting laugh.

      Outback truckers often took methamphetamines to conquer the enormous distances.

      “Or not enough,” I said.

      From Normanton alone, it was 155 miles, four hours of potholes and bulldust. Beyond that, who knew how many hours to the next biggest town? Twenty, fifty, with a load of cattle that had to be unloaded along the way to water and feed, and then loaded again, many getting injured or dying en route.

      Some cattle are still driven along by a crew of horsemen for weeks, or months, just as we did in the United States before barbed wire divided the landscape. But in this tradition, called droving, the cattle have to be moved slowly enough that they can graze and not lose too much weight along the way. Entire crews of patient stockmen spend months trailing the dust of thousands of cattle from home pasture to their final destination at the meatworks. When they eventually arrive, they might be asked just to turn around and do it again in the reverse direction, taking young or new cattle to stations farther on. Most landowners afforded a half-mile track to the passing mobs of stock. Lined up, these spaces turned into what they called the long paddock. Now stockmen often lease stretches of grass along the margins of highways to fatten cattle as they pass.

      Ivan worked too hard and was too familiar with cattle to be a random junkie off the street, but he didn’t have the arrogance of a horseman or the solemnity of a stockman. Another four yearlings banged into the pen, and he reached through the bars with his piece of poly pipe and whacked a couple of them on the nose to turn them into the race. The cattle spun and jumped, frantic between the metal paneling. Ahead, ringers moved them through the race into the crush—a squeeze chute—to be branded and ear-tagged. Heifers bawled as the brands hit them. One of the crew took a pair of dehorners to the small nubs on their heads.

      Ivan called over his shoulder, “You get into that stuff much?” Meth, I guessed.

      I responded, “Me? No. You?”

      Between the crammed and bawling heifers, the dust, and the almost reckless work of directing cattle into the race, he gave a quick, unnerving, and infectious laugh, before yelling back, “I reckon, work hard, play hard, party harder.” Ivan sagged his long lean frame against the rails of the race, propping one boot up on the lowest bar. One of the heifers slammed a hoof through the bars, and he stood up. The crush gate banged open, and we stepped forward to move the heifers up the race.

      The road trains finally arrived and the truckers lined up monstrous vehicles, massive semi trucks with two trailers, on the dirt road. Each deck could hold thirty cows. These rigs were called type-ones because they had five decks in all; a truck with two double-decker trailers and six decks was a type-two, and those were restricted from the highways except in Western Queensland. They looked like American rigs used to haul cattle, except that the top deck on each was open to the sky.

      The crew shuffled to load the cattle bound for the slaughter-houses. Tanner, another ringer, nodded hello as I passed to take a place in the pens. A tall strong man with a drooping mustache, he worked one of the drafting gates. He walked with a stiff arched back, his broad chest thrust forward a little, and wore Wrangler jeans, black sunglasses, and a big black stockman’s hat. Sometimes, I noticed over the following weeks, he traded his black hat for a white hat, a change that seemed to match his mood. He rode a tall white horse for the cow work when he wasn’t riding his motorbike, and rolled the sleeves of his work shirts up past his elbows, as many did, his forearms thick, red-brown, and freckled.

      I learned later that he had broken his back in several places riding bulls, and that he had steel pins holding his spine together, which was why he walked and perhaps why he acted the way he did. Who knew how he ended up at Stilwater? He raised his own bulls for the rodeo circuit, but maybe he needed money, or just a job out far from town, where his life might find meaning again.

      Cole, who worked nearby, was shorter but just as strong, with dark curly hair. He wore work shirts cut off at the sleeves to reveal sun-browned, muscled arms, and he was so composed that I wondered if he wasn’t immune to the pandemonium. Sometimes he wore a bright purple shirt with his white stockman’s hat and wraparound sunglasses that made him stand out, though in all other ways he was the quietest. He was second in command on the mustering crew, perhaps because he was the most amiable and imperturbable.

      Vic was Cole’s partner.