skin of her high cheekbones smooth and wore small silver earrings. She and Cole were both thirty years old and the anchors of the crew, making it more domestic and civilized than it would have been otherwise. They had a seven-year-old daughter back at home, somewhere to the east, with the child’s grandmother, along with several young thoroughbred race-horses and a house and property of their own. A licensed jockey, Vic brought her tall, well-bred horses out to do the mustering work after they had won several races and retired from the track. She had a wispy blond braid, and she exercised a mostly charming but firm tyranny over the crew. Even Miles took her opinions seriously and considered her part of the already top-heavy strata of management on the station. He was also in love with her, as was almost everyone else.
Vic took the numbers down on the small tally book, making hash marks for the cattle as they ran up the race and into the trucks. She stood by the rails, her braid tossed back and her black hat dusty.
Max worked in the pens near Vic. He was the youngest member of the mustering crew, eighteen or nineteen, lanky with close-cropped blond hair and a red face. He worked hard at times, but he was also the first to whinge or complain. Max was the first one to leap into the pen with rank bulls and chase angry cows to get them to charge him through gates and into the proper pens. He would climb the rails and drop his long legs around the back of an old cow and ride it bucking across the pen until he could scramble off and over the fence again. I once saw a cow kick him down and smash his head against a heavy metal post; he recovered his feet and slipped through the bars with a bloody nose and a swollen black eye, then returned immediately to the work.
Cattle crammed onto the decks of the large road trains. The branding furnace roared, and the truck driver and Cole used yellow electric jiggers to jam cattle up the ramp and onto the top deck of the truck. When the last skinny cow caught in the race climbed up, Tanner pushed the slide gate closed and I opened the other gate to send another ten cows into the pen and up the race. They slammed their horns against each other and blew snot. Miles loomed by the rails of the race to check each cow for a brand as she passed. If the cow lacked a brand, meaning she hadn’t ever seen the civilization of a corral, he pressed the glowing-hot branding iron to her side as long as he could before the cow jumped forward and the iron slipped, leaving a burned pattern on the hide.
I would get all of the crew’s names eventually and see how each fit into the felting of that strange fabric, but for the moment it was a hurricane of dust and holler, bellowing and bodies, stockmen and cattle and a ramp into a big semi with a double-decker trailer. The cows were loaded onto the truck and headed south, to their deaths perhaps, or to better pasture.
One cow climbed over the railing of the top deck somehow and fell more than fourteen feet. She had leaped over the gates of the pound earlier, clearing the seven-foot rails, and it had taken a few of the crew to get her back. Amazingly, after her fall from the truck, she rose up and ran away, and Miles, who didn’t seem like he would intentionally harm anything, said she could use some lead—a bullet, in other words. He thought she might be a little chewy though, with the heat and stress and all. The rest of the cattle would have a long hot ride on that narrow strip of bitumen across endless red clay, no matter the ending.
Then a cow suddenly slammed headfirst into the gate and slumped to the ground. Max stepped in and slapped her on the neck and back, but she only jerked a few times.
“Reckon she’s broke her neck?” he asked.
“Hmm,” replied Vic.
Vic grabbed the cow’s tail and Max grabbed her ears and they dragged her until she was free of the race. Vic patted the dying cow and then sat down on the animal’s rounded side to rest by the sliding gate of the race while she waited for another pen to be drafted.
Troy limped over. He was supposed to be the cook, but he didn’t seem well suited to the job. Miles had adopted him as part of the crew after a stroke left his left arm and leg impaired and sunk him into a bout of depression so severe he wouldn’t eat or speak. Miles thought the open air and work might do him some good.
Troy didn’t cook much, but he rolled cigarettes of loose-leaf tobacco and another easily distinguishable herb, hung his limp arm in a sling, and came out to the yards to slide open gates and brand cattle with his one good hand. His drooping hat almost covered his eyes. The hat had once been a good silverbelly, but now it was tattered, sagging and stained, and the rest of him had followed suit. He sat down on the dead cow beside Vic while the crew drafted a load of bulls and prepared to run them into the trucks. The monstrous, mad, testosterone-charged Brahmans almost smashed them all several times. I didn’t even try to help them load and was quick to jump the fence any time one of the beasts charged in my direction.
Smoko
WITH TWO ROAD TRAINS LOADED and the crew sweating and mad, Miles finally hollered that it was time for smoko. The ringers set down their poly pipes, turned off the branding fire, and gravitated to the shade of the old shipping container that had been dropped by the edge of the yards to serve as a tack shed. A line of dogs whined at our approach from where they had been tied up along the fence behind the shipping container. We washed our hands of dirt, sweat, blood, manure, and cow hair with the rubber hose outside the pens and slumped on metal and plastic chairs. The day had grown hot in the sudden stillness, and we sweltered there among the flies. A few of the crew pulled out plastic bags of tobacco they kept tucked in their shirt pockets and rolled cigarettes.
Miles had a beat-up tin coffee can to put the billy on, a plastic bag of cups, tea, and sugar, and a plastic bucket full of cookies that his mother had baked for him before he left the east coast with the crew. He filled the sooty can with water from the bore hose and put a match to the blower from the branding pen. He hung the can by a wire handle from a rebar over the blasting flame. When the water boiled, Miles shook a small heap of black tea leaves into the tin can and splashed a little cold water from the hose into the black liquid to get them to settle and cool off the handle. Then he carried the old tin back to the shade, where he poured dark-reddish tea, offering me a pink pannikin full of it.
The billycan was blackened on the outside from years of wood fires, and it smeared his big hand with soot. The crew drank tea with breakfast, at the midmorning break, at lunch, and sometimes in the afternoon. They even called their dinner “tea.” Miles also had a couple of thermoses that sufficed when the branding blower wasn’t around and they didn’t have the muster to light a fire.
He poured the rest of the cups.
“Tea? You like two spoons of sugar?”
“Thanks, mate,” replied Cole.
In the wake of the drafting this civility was beyond strange. But it lasted only so long.
Ivan picked up his mug and asked, “You plugged the hole in the billy?”
Miles didn’t even raise an eyebrow. “Yeah mate, with my finger.”
“The hole in the side or the bottom?”
“Both—you could braze ’em for me, mate.”
“You could get yourself another can.”
“I’ve had this one nearly ten years.”
“Just tie a new one behind the truck for a while, and it’d get beat up like that one,” Ivan retorted.
“Then it’d get covered in cow shit,” Miles said.
“That one’s seen worse, I reckon.”
Ivan tipped up the old can and poured himself another cup, mixed in a little sugar, and sat back down. We sweated there for a while, with hot black tea in pannikins, pants smeared with manure, faces and arms coated in dust, boots caked and lying heavy on the packed earth. A wind picked up, sweeping most of the flies away and veiling the cups of tea with a film of dust. Ivan smashed an ant with the bottom of his pannikin and pointed to another, carrying a huge crumb. He pinched two off the ground, laughing, and said, “Ready, set, go.” Then he set them down, and the ants scrambled off in different directions.
Max said, “They do that with cane toads, draw a circle and make bets, and the first toad out of the circle wins.”
Max