When Colts Ran (10 page)

SIX

FOUR MONTHS AFTER COLTS BEGAN
at Eureka he flashed Randolph a letter. ‘It's from my sister, Faye. There's been a ruckus. You won't believe it – Buckler turned up at the mission.'

‘Struth.'

‘You can't get there by road – there isn't one. They used packhorses and took a fortnight from where they left their trucks.'

‘Still hauling the water wagon they took from here,' supposed Randolph.

‘Buckler used surprise because people always come by boat, not from inland, and guess who was there? Think of the last person on earth you'd expect to find, apart from Boy Dunlap and Faye and blackfellas and crocs.'

‘Emperor of Japan?'

‘Veronica. She left Adelaide, crossed the Nullarbor to Perth, caught the steamer to Derby, the lugger round the coast, the mission launch up the river and broke the regulations to get there. Buckler's bashing around in the bush, kicking over antbeds and shooting donkeys for meat and looking for some sort of weird thing, and he runs into her.' Colts spat it out. ‘I was meant for that, I'm the one. Why not me? He can take them all and shove them as far as he can go up himself, and then the extra mile.'

‘You'll get over it,' said Randolph.

‘Get stuffed.'

Bad moods prevailed on Eureka. It was the time of year for regrets. Randolph wrote home and said expect him by Christmas.

Oakeshott blasphemed a prizewinning ram, Ironsides, bought by a syndicate of directors and foisted on him by the board. For three seasons he'd dreamed of dispatching the sire down the pit. The boys followed him around making notes in their blue-covered 1942 Jackaroo's Station Diaries. Randolph placed his hand on Ironsides' firm fleece, feeling the defined tips of each staple packed together like tiles on a roof, and when he parted the wool with his fingers it was clean down through with celestial whiteness and protected from the elements.

Ironsides' progeny were excellent sheep by any standard except Oakeshott's. He'd bred from the ram through spite to prove his point, but no longer would, he declared, and counted out four thousand ewes whose characteristics he damned as they jostled past him in the yards. Oakeshott counted by mentally scanning them one hundred at a time, coming up with a figure accurate to the last digit as they were drafted off. Whatever price they fetched would be a lesson to the directors, Oakeshott ranted, a statement that started Randolph's mind working. When an arrangement was made to run them into a mob of ten thousand being gathered on the Queensland side of the border, Randolph was given the job of taking the ewes to the meeting point with the drover, Bulleen. Colts went with him. Bulleen knew Randolph and liked him.

Around Bulleen's camp fire Colts described the other droving outfit he'd met, the dumpy goat woman jerking up and down on a wreck of a motorbike these days, most probably, and with a goat sitting in the sidecar. Colts fingered the small bones on the back of his right hand, still sore six months after his knuckling, and watched Bulleen's face break into a grin as he said what a small world it was: ‘She used to be my wife, though we never made it as far as any church, boys.' He called her ‘the old bat'.

In the droving camp Randolph wrote a letter to Oakeshott and gave it to Colts to take back. Enclosed was a cheque made out to the company and the signatory was Bulleen. However the true owner of the four thousand was Randolph Knox himself under an agreement with Bulleen.

Randolph and the drovers moved into country straddling dry watercourses coming down from the Cooper. Randolph on his way home at last, a drive that would last one hundred and twenty days and be compressed in feeling as if all those days were one. The sheep were spread wide yet could still be seen at a distance. At first they ran in every direction and had to be chased by men stationed around the mob at intervals. But after a few days they settled and Randolph walked among them with his sheepdog running across their backs. Most of the droving team were young station hands, like Randolph himself, working their way south. They were a half-brained bunch without much instinct for the life except they would use it to escape the country and get in the war from the first proper town they reached, whether Cunnamulla, Bourke or Dubbo. Randolph worked his dog as smartly as Bulleen used his; whenever there was a problem and the station hands found themselves in trouble they would say, ‘Don't worry too much, Randolph will be here with his dog any minute.' Maisie the red kelpie bitch with prick ears turned a sheep so hard that the rest of the mob followed and saved everyone work. To block them and send them into a new direction, she ran several times back and forth across the face of the mob, and that was enough to turn them.

The densely packed sheep covering many acres moved like cloud shadow. The mob rose and fell with every alteration in ground level. When saying goodbye to Colts, Randolph had held back from asking him to break his commitment to Eureka and come a-droving. He wished Colts was with him, though, for the greatness of the ride. Wagtails rode along or flew from sheep to sheep chasing insects. At noon the cook's cart was always to be found under a tree. There were hammocks sewn from wheat sacks slung under the cart and the dogs rested in them when they weren't working. Those dogs were prepared to work themselves to death rounding up sheep, but they knew style and luxuriated when they had the chance. Before the trip was out Maisie would have pups to the best dog known to anyone, Bulleen's Target. Randolph would train them up and in time rail the best worker halfway back across Australia with a label on her collar for Colts.

When the cook's cart got moving again the dogs stayed in their hammocks until they were called. The cook made fresh bread each day in camp ovens and made his own sausages using sheep entrails for casing. Randolph experienced the idealism of pure emotion, a ladder to stars that winked and turned in contented circles. He overlooked the earth and was a portion of creation, experiencing himself as a particle in the existence of God, which he knew himself to be, but wasn't always so assured of it.

One of Oakeshott's maxims had been that no man should be allowed to overseer on a station unless he had done two years' droving. He thought Randolph would rejoin the company one day as overseer rising to manager and had been content to see him go on that basis. Whether Colts would stick was a question without answer. Randolph wrote to Buckler saying he thought he would, and now Randolph found himself engaged in a correspondence with a man who wrote back correcting his grammar and spelling mistakes.

Sometimes Randolph took Maisie and drafted off a bunch of his ewes where he could see them, just to watch them move past interestingly, in the pride of ownership, and give him the opportunity to consider what sort of foundation they made for the flock he was planning. He often found himself asking, what made a flock or a mob? What number complete to the eye? There seemed to be an answer to that question dangling beyond technical facts or personal experience – a form, a quantity of that form, created by happiness being a matter of light, movement and dust such as might be roused by a dusty planet rolling through the sky.

They were medium-woolled animals but very correct sheep, free-growing with long staple, well framed with three drapes on the fronts and an impeccable genetic background despite the way Oakeshott knocked them. Oakeshott had warned, ‘Buy a ram to correct perceived faults and the chances are you'll be introducing new faults,' but the Adelaide directors with the little knowledge they had, feeling big in themselves and always going about getting second opinions, scientifically grounded, were intent on having a say. Oakeshott believed they were pushing his wool too far in the fine direction. Exactly that made the culls an opportunity for Randolph when the ewes were drafted out – their wool classed medium but the feel was softer. The Isabel district was all fine to superfine. There would be arguments with his father as Randolph introduced the idea of correlated mating: one sheep, ram or ewe to supply what the other lacked, distinct from the more usual mating of like with like. If he'd learnt anything from Oakeshott it was that stock naturally bred down whereas Randolph's father liked an even line in his paddocks, a tidy picture. The news Randolph brought with him – while the world at war had bigger intelligence to chew – was to have variety in your stock so that by selection you could breed up.

At the start of summer, Randolph and the stockman he'd engaged at Tumut came over the mountains on a track rarely used. They appeared at the headwaters of the Isabel bearing a weight of golden fleece on the backs of the four thousand. The behaviour of the ewes, long accustomed to travel, was precise as they came past the cemetery yard and moved steadily down the centre of the dirt road into the Knox paddocks, many with grown-out Ironsides' lambs at heel. Not a bleat did they sound.

When Randolph whistled Maisie the sheep stopped, and Maisie's run to the head of the mob was hardly needed. The sheep only trembled a little shaking off flies and blinking in the thin, hot, upland sun, awaiting the signal to move on.

Randolph saw his father coming from a fair way off, the lean man in the saddle with a contained way of riding grown from days of combing the hills, a short-handled spade tied to the saddle ready to dig out rabbits or consign clumps of thistle to perdition. His mother waited by the garden gate with a handkerchief to her cheek.

Colin Knox did not know where to begin with his second son. From information gleaned there had been the fragile belief, chosen as gospel, that Sandy was missing, not KIA, and would write as other men had on a Red Cross postcard even this long afterwards. The belief had sustained Colin, Edwina and Randolph for these past eighteen months. Australians were overrun on Crete, a Stuka attacked stragglers. Out of dozens of men exposed running, diving for cover, it was Sandy with his brilliance on the sportsfield and supremacy in the ram shed who was left in the open. He was not seen since. It was believed he'd gone ahead, hidden on a farm, found a cave or joined the partisans. That he'd been shipped to Germany finally as a POW was a good chance under the circumstances.

Now forget all that. Colin Knox and Randolph had never embraced but Colin lurched against his son for support. They both let the tears run. Nobody in authority told the Knoxes very much except for the brute fact conveyed by their parish minister doing his bereavement duty up the valley road from Isabel Junction – ‘That Sandy would have felt nothing was a comfort,' he said.

Randolph learned details kept from his parents, those suddenly old, lost, strong ones. Sandy had been cut to pieces and went to his death screaming, a mate taken prisoner the lone witness. The mate was the one who'd written on a Red Cross postcard almost two years afterwards, on learning the Knoxes hadn't known. They learned that Sandy's remains were buried under a rock amid olive trees, weighted down by boulders on Crete.

Feeling came over Randolph as he wrote to Colts. It was possible Colts had never understood what Randolph meant or else chose not to react as he had when Randolph pledged lifelong fidelity so strangely. Each line of Randolph's letter burned but bereavement and shattered emotions could be used for excessive statements, and the recipient makes allowances. That was how Randolph dared a love letter anyway to a young man who offered no such strong feeling in return. The unanswered portion, the usual month or two coming, was Randolph's most heartfelt reply, while the answered portion – taking the identical time span, offering warm thanks for the brilliant pup named by Colts Cubby (Tiger's cub) and making sheep talk intricate as any breeder might wish – assured Randolph that friendship had not gone backwards at least.

For Colts had studied with Oakeshott at the wool table and in the joining paddocks and stuck to his post on Eureka, earning his stripes, as he expressed it, in the boundary rider's hut. He had been commended in the Manager's Report to the Board as Randolph himself had been commended in his time. Buckler wrote congratulating Randolph on playing a part in stabilising a runaway.

Then Colts's situation changed. Oakeshott dropped dead and Colts, just eighteeen, wrote from New Guinea. Apparently he was in some sort of small boat unit up in the Islands, Japs everywhere but so were Aussies. Randolph feared he would never see him again, prayed for his safety and kept writing.

‘I am very pleased with our rams this year of 1944 and even Dad considers them much better than we ever had before, the wool being deep grown thanks to the infusion of the bad Eureka blood, so called . . .'

‘I went ashore for the heck of it,' Colts replied on Christmas Day 1944, ‘carrying a swag of batteries from the beach up through some steep jungle, giving the boys a hand. It was a bright moon, we waited at the edge of a ridge until it set, no cigs, then walked through tall grass over the saddle. It was cool up there at four thousand feet. We walked, stopped, listened, keeping dead still we heard a crash. It was the sound of a wallaby in the bush at night when you know it's a wallaby but makes your hair stand on end. We tapped shoulders, the signal to move on, when the Japs opened fire. They'd never heard a wallaby taking off. Didn't know what a wallaby was. It was them and us, each end of the clearing. We didn't fire back, they never knew we were there. Bullets banged in every direction you can think of. I got one, but it's all right (left lung under armpit, if you want to know, clean healed thanks to miracle drug in powder form, sulphur).'

He didn't call out
, thought Randolph.
He suffered, but wouldn't show it
.

As blokes returned from the war Colin and Randolph Knox were the first to find work for them, to settle them in. They located cottages and helped them win town acceptance. Quietly to himself Randolph hoped Colts would be one of them. He would not be the same – none of them were – and Randolph was ready for that. The war years put development on individuals. Some grew like trees by staying, though, and Randolph was one of those. To Randolph's outrage, bordering on disgust, he learned that his mother was pregnant at forty-four. ‘Another Sandy,' Edwina Knox prayed.