The Cattleman's Daughter Read online

  Sam pictured the snowgrass plains where the cattle grazed for four months of the year. Beautiful when fine, frightening when the weather came in savage. But always that country had a kind of majesty that even Sam felt running through his blood as a spiritual part of him. If he needed to escape for bright lights and action, it was a comfort to know he could always return to the mountains.

  For his family, it was a duty to care for those high-country grazing runs that also served them as a kind of insurance policy against drought. Even in dry times, cows that had struggled on winter pastures on their lowland property at Dargo would become glossy with health and rolling fat once they’d grazed on the high-plains government land.

  The snowmelt and the rich soils that had been spelled for seven months always did the trick for both the horses and the cattle. But without access to the high-country runs, the six thousand acres on the lowlands, split roughly three ways between Sam’s father and his brother, Bob, and sister, Flo, the lowlands simply could not support them all. Why did they continue to slave every year for a meagre, sometimes absent, income, when life could be far easier? Sam just couldn’t see how their struggle was worth it. The whole grazing enterprise hinged on the land up top on the Dargo High Plains, and Sam well knew the government could take that away overnight. It had been a noose around the family’s neck for generations – ever since the conservationists had come as bushwalkers from the city and begun to make noises about the inappropriateness of grazing cattle in the high country. Now with the massive campaign in the Western world that ‘meat is murder’, who wanted to live like a man sentenced to hang, reasoned Sam, when you could get on anonymously in a city doing your own thing?

  As Sam thought of his gorgeous, funny sister, he suddenly felt totally lost. Somewhere on the other side of the world she was fighting for her life, or worse, and here he was acting like some loser using grog, drugs and wild women to distract him from a neediness he couldn’t seem to quench.

  Looking around the Nashville dive, Sam realised how much he missed home – not his flat in Sydney, but home, in the mountains. Sure, he had loved his road crew on his Australian tours. The tour bus with the ice chest that was always kept topped up with beer. The pub crawls from state to state. The bright-eyed Aussie country girls with a thirst for beer and music and a good-looking bloke. But now all he wanted was to be jamming in the Dargo pub. To have life back to normal. An awful dragging fear for Emily gnawed in the pit of his stomach. He had to go home. If he stayed and carried on the way he had been, Sam knew he was headed for trouble. He’d get himself in deep. Schapelle-Corby deep.

  Three

  Flo Flanaghan ran her fingers over the ears of her wiry-haired mongrel working dog, Useless, to stop her leathery hands shaking. She was completely rattled after the call from Rod. Through the crackling line of the mobile, she’d heard Emily was in a helicopter on her way to a Melbourne hospital. She jammed a finger in her ear to block out the sound of the Hereford calves bellowing for their mums. Something about a collapsed lung putting pressure on the heart, or cardiac concussion, or some bloody thing. Flo didn’t know. All she knew was that it was bad, and she was worried sick for her niece.

  She squinted beyond the yards where her cat, Muscles, sat on a post licking his white paws, and looked towards the timbered rise. She pushed back her cap, searching for signs of a truck or a float. Rod had said they were sending Snowgum home, for Emily’s sake. He had told Flo the mare would either make it or not, travelling doped on painkillers after being patched up by a vet. Flo prayed Snowgum would come back to Tranquillity alive. Illogical though it was, she, like her brother Rod, somehow felt that if the mare lived, everything would be all right and Emily would come home to them too.

  In the cattle yards her other brother, Bob, came to stand beside her and followed her gaze along the dusty gravel road.

  ‘You could have a good feed for the dogs tonight if that horse carks it,’ he said. Flo shot him a glance. He was a sarcastic bastard at the best of times. Flo wanted to knuckle him right there in the cattle yards and in their younger days she probably would’ve.

  ‘Ah, piss off, Bob,’ she said. He always pushed her buttons. Deep down, she knew he was masking his concern with masculine bravado, for even he had a soft spot for Emily and her mare. But couldn’t he go a little gentler at a time like this?

  She’d put up with him for the best part of the afternoon as they tagged cattle. It was rare for Bob to offer help, so she had reluctantly accepted in the hope he was turning a corner. For the past eight years she’d fought hard not to resent him for inheriting the most and the best land when their parents died. He was the eldest son and that was his entitlement, as was the old-fashioned way, but looking at Bob now, with his belly pushing out his bluey singlet and his raspberry-red nose from too much grog, Flo wondered yet again how her parents could have left their land and livestock to a man like him. Tradition, she thought huffily. Blind, stupid tradition that said the farm must be left to the eldest son.

  At least her parents had been sensible enough to will her and Rod a third of the lowlands to scratch a living from, and they still shared the high-country licence. As long as Flo could pay the bills, have a counter meal now and then and maybe buy a new vehicle every ten years, she was happy. The Flanaghans had never carried themselves like landed gentry. They were workers who had over generations become the largest graziers on the mountains.

  Each generation increased the comfort of their lifestyle from hut to homestead, but no Flanaghan would spend money on grand furnishings or cars, instead choosing to splurge on the best bulls and stockhorses. Their Dargo property, Tranquillity, had a beauty all of its own: six thousand acres of grassy hillsides and bush-covered ranges flanking rich river flats that meandered along the Dargo River. Creeks had carved their way through granite cliff faces and fed life-giving water into the clear bubbling river. It was a waterway alive with trout and tiny native aquatic creatures and gave the whole place a heart and soul.

  Because Rod was the only one of them to have children, he had been left the white rambling weatherboard homestead that had been built in the early 1900s. It was set above a river flat, cooled by breezes running over a large spring-fed dam and sheltered from fierce sun and icy winter winds by a deep bull-nosed verandah. It was a lovely old home but now had a ragged air about it, like a beautiful woman past her prime. Every year Rod said he would paint it, and every year, with money tight, the job slid down the list.

  The same could be said for Flo’s home. She lived further along the track, near the cattle yards. Flo had made the former workman’s cottage cosy with her parents’ treasured old things. She was settled and happy there with her working dogs and her fat tortoiseshell Muscles, her animals taking the place of the children she had never had.

  Spectacularly above the houses rose the mountains that made up the other part of the Flanaghan property. Eighty kilometres along a sometimes dusty, always rutted mountain track, the family owned another nine hundred acres of the best alpine meadows to be found and a handsplit-timber homestead that had survived a hundred snowy winters. Surrounding the Flanaghan land were the stunning Dargo High Plains. A licence of a hundred thousand acres, secured by Flo’s great-grandmother Emily one hundred and fifty years before, had set the family pattern of droving cattle from the lowlands to the high plains every year as the seasons changed. Of course, not all of the mountain run was suitable for cattle, but it gave the family access to summertime grazing when the snow had melted and the native grasses, rested and revived, shot up from the fertile soils.

  Flo and Rod loved the land, both the riverside country on the lowlands and up in the mountains, but Bob seemed only to endure it. He rarely stayed at the homestead they all shared up on the plains. In fact, since he had inherited the family’s alpine country and over a third of the best lowlands country on Tranquillity, Bob had felt more and more cheated. He had all that land, all those cattle, but no money to show for it.

  Instead of working like a
dog, Bob began to drink like a fish. As he unravelled, so too did the farm, the fences slumping, land crumbling from overgrazing, the cattle’s coats looking dull and undernourished from depleted soils. His high-country runs were slowly overtaken by weeds and looking sour from overgrazing. Bob was the type who gave cattlemen a bad name. No matter how often Flo and Rod tried to help him, so as to help the land that their parents had once kept in top order, they were always stung by Bob’s arrogance.

  As Flo drew her hand away from Useless’s ears she realised the dog had rolled in a fresh pat of cow dung.

  ‘Ah shit, Useless.’ She frowned and wiped her hands on her grimy jeans.

  ‘Shit’s right,’ Bob said, rolling a smoke. He lifted his leg, scrunched up his purple face and let out a long, noisy fart as he lit up. ‘Christ,’ he said from the corner of his mouth, ‘I’ll blow meself up if I’m not careful.’

  ‘Please, just rack off, Bob,’ Flo said. She realised now it wasn’t tea he’d been drinking out of his thermos that afternoon. She could tell by the way he narrowed his eyes as he drew deeply on his cigarette, wobbling slightly as he did so. No wonder he was being a prick. Grog and Bob were a bad mix.

  ‘What’s up your bum?’ he said, blowing smoke out.

  Flo shook her head and surprised herself when she began to cry. ‘Emily,’ she said, as tears washed rivers of dust down her cheeks. She moved over to a rail and leant on it, resting her head on her forearms and shutting her eyes.

  The image of her niece came to her easily. Flo had practically raised Emily with Rod. The little dark-haired girl with the shining cocoa eyes had toddled into Flo’s life pretty much full-time after her mother, Susie, had died. Flo had never been a mothering type, so she’d been uneasy when Rod had silently placed the screaming newborn baby boy, Sam, in her arms and ushered Emily to Flo’s side. Flo had stood there, panic and grief swirling within her, watching her broken brother turn away to take care of Susie’s funeral arrangements. Now it was all happening again. How unfair that their family was once more entangled with tragedy and the remoteness of the medical world. While Susie had bled to death in a bush hospital with no doctors within cooee, Em was now fighting for her life in a chopper on the way to a city hospital.

  ‘Aw, geez, Flo! Don’t go acting like a woman on me, cryin’ like that,’ Bob said. ‘She’ll be right. She’s a tough nut, that little Emily.’ He clumsily thumped a hand on Flo’s shoulder. She sniffed and nodded, relieved he was showing some sympathy, then she swiped her nose with the back of her hand. She laughed at herself and at Bob. Yes, she thought, looking down at her wiry body clad in man’s clothes, she was more bloke than sheila.

  Flo Flanaghan wasn’t unattractive, she was just wiry and steely, as if metallic plates ran beneath her weathered skin. Her bones were angular, giving her face a striking look with her glowing almond eyes, yet she swaggered like a man, sat like a fella and held a teapot as if it were a spanner. Some people who didn’t know her well said she was half bloke, and that she must have a set tucked between her legs. She looked funny in a frock and whenever she wore one couldn’t seem to find the walk to match it. Her sinewy legs bowed out from years in the saddle. But every now and then she’d throw her bandy leg over some stock agent or overweight dozer driver, just to prove to all the bloody rogues at the pub that she wasn’t a lezzo.

  ‘You’re right,’ Flo said. ‘Emily’s tough. But I still want you to piss off. We’ll finish the tagging tomorrow.’

  Bob shrugged, sucking the last of his smoke before treading it into a cow pat. ‘Suit yourself. I’ll be off home.’

  Flo watched as he ambled like Shrek, all shoulders, no bum and skinny legs, over to his mud-splattered ute. On the back, his rust-coloured kelpie DD, short for Dickhead Dog, began barking like crazy as soon as Bob fired the engine and revved away.

  Home for Bob was the new brick house built for their parents’ retirement. It was not far from the original homestead but at least it was out of sight. Flo’s mother’s garden had once been welcoming and green but now it was a tangle of long-dead grass and twists of wire. There were broken bottles on the front porch and rubbish blowing in the yard.

  Flo was letting go the last of the cattle from the holding yard when the truck rolled in, rumbling to a halt outside the sheds with a loud choof of air brakes. Flo braced herself for what she might see in the back. Old Baz Webberly jumped out of the truck.

  ‘Thanks for bringin’ her across,’ Flo called to the old cattleman.

  ‘You mightn’t thank me if she’s not made it,’ he said, limping as he always did. ‘No one held out much hope for her. But we decided we’d try and keep her goin’ – for Em’s sake.’

  The mention of Emily’s name left a cloud of fear and uncertainty hanging in the still evening air between them. Flo knew Baz would be thinking of Emily’s quick smile and easy way with everyone. They walked to the back of the truck and dropped the door, expecting to find the mare keeled over dead.

  ‘I’ll be buggered,’ said Baz.

  Snowgum stood with her legs splayed and head hanging so her nostrils touched the rubber matting of the truck’s floor. Her breathing was laboured and her flanks looked as if a cheese grater had shaved the skin away. Her white snowdrift sides were now bloody, weeping and raw. As the light found her, she turned her head gently and half whickered and half groaned at Flo.

  Tears filled Flo’s eyes at the sight of the broken, bloodied mare.

  ‘Good ol’ girl. You’re home, you’re home.’

  They settled Snowgum into the skillion shed with a deep bed of straw and thumped a needle into her neck to inject more painkillers. Flo sighed from the stress of it all and was suddenly surprised to feel Baz’s arms about her. She had to stoop a little to rest her head on his shoulder but was glad of the comfort. Then she pulled away and swiped her face with her big hands.

  ‘I’m good now, Baz. All good.’

  ‘You’ll be right, love.’ He patted her hand.

  Suddenly not wanting to be alone, Flo forced a smile.

  ‘Fancy coming in for a cuppa? Maybe you could stay the night. Drive your truck over the steep pinch in the mornin’. If you like.’

  ‘If I like? Aw, come on, Flo,’ Baz said, eyes glistening. ‘You know me. I’m a mount’n man who loves mount’n women. Course I’d love to stay.’ He sidled closer to her. ‘And how ’bout a little touch and feel for a sad old bugger like me too, eh? A fella gets lonely on my side of the mountain now the missus has passed.’

  Flo laughed. ‘You dirty ol’ fart,’ she said, thumping him on his arm.

  He looked up in a parody of dejection. ‘Oh, all right then, if I can’t tempt you with me body, we’ll just have tea. And I’ll stick in the spare room, I promise.’

  As they walked back to the house, arms linked, Barry wobbling slightly on dicky hips, he muttered, ‘No harm in asking though, eh, Flo? When you get to my age, you know what they say …’

  ‘And what’s that, Barry?’

  ‘Never trust a fart and never waste an erection.’ He wheezed with laughter.

  ‘Oh, Baz,’ Flo sighed. ‘It’s gonna be a long night either way I go, I can just see it. Stuff the tea, let’s just get straight on the whisky.’

  Four

  Emily saw herself being carried across a mountain clearing. She turned her eyes away and drifted up into the sky, hovering over the canopy of gum trees. A narrow stream of black clouds pulsed towards her. The intensity of the approaching storm sent electricity through her very being. The world around her seemed to vibrate and shimmer into a blur just as she felt the frightening rush of storm clouds on her face. But once Emily found herself immersed in the eye of the storm, she knew not to be afraid. She knew to be calm; that she was everything, and everywhere, and had nothing to do but feel love and peace. For the first time ever, she had a clear understanding of the spiritual. The truest notion of what those on earth called God. She saw beyond the word that had confused her all her life. She was entire and complete and it was a joy t
o simply drift as an energy of life.

  But suddenly, the clouds pulled back and Emily looked down to see a valley spread out below, its tall green grass dotted with cattle. Weaving through the valley’s centre was a silver river, flanked by lush trees. She recognised the landscape as Mayford, but somehow it was different. On a small rise above the valley, in a clearing, Emily saw a hut and a woman standing beside a smouldering fire.

  Emily knew she must go to her. She drifted downwards. As she neared, she saw that the woman wore a high-necked navy work dress that was worn and faded. Her skirts fell all the way to the ground, dusty at the hem and resting on the toes of her scuffed lace-up boots. Her grey hair was parted at the centre and pulled back into a bun piled atop her head, but her deep-set dark eyes were bright and youthful. She had a long, strong nose and a kind expression on her oval face.

  The sturdy hut to the woman’s right was made from thick logs, laid horizontally, topped with a steep shingled roof and a thick square chimney. Behind the woman stood a man, his arms folded across his broad chest. His braces hung in loops beside his thighs and his open woollen work shirt was stained with sweat. He too had grey hair, balding across his brow. His eyebrows had remained dark, as had his bushy moustache, but his trimmed beard was snowy white. His deep brown eyes also looked youthful and alive. Emily noted his hands, huge and square, a contrast to his short stocky stature. Her own father had these hands. To the man’s right, a glossy chestnut horse with white socks dozed on a hitching rail. A black shaggy dog with a sliver of white running the length of its nose and across the dome of its head stood on the verandah and barked once at Emily, but then wagged its feathery tail before settling down at his master’s feet.