Love on Forrest Downs Page 8

  Before Harry had left in the buggy he had informed McCorry, ‘A bit more this way, you can cross ’em that river.’ So we followed Harry’s buggy tracks further north along the riverbank and after what felt like forever saw where he had driven across the bed of the river and back. The river had stopped flowing after the wet season, leaving great pools of water in the riverbed. The stock boys, hoping there was no quicksand, used Harry’s buggy tracks as a guide as they let the bullocks find their way steadily down into the riverbed and across to the far side.

  Malki left two stockmen to watch over the bullocks as they fed on the salt couch that flourished on the riverbank and rode back across to give McCorry, Churchill and Peter a hand with digging down the bank and laying a rough stone causeway to get the truck across. This was done at the beginning of every mustering season on Oobagooma. We had no machines, such as a grader or bulldozer, to develop tracks about the property because there was no money to pay for them, so it was all manual labour at that time. Oobagooma was surrounded by four wealthy properties owned by big companies on the eastern side and on the west was the sea.

  Then just as McCorry had got the truck onto the north side of the river, I heard the roaring of the bull buggy in the distance and it sounded as if Harry was in a hell of a hurry, even if he was a fair way distant.

  ‘What’s wrong with that Harry, yumun?’ Mary asked. She was hanging out of the truck’s window trying to spot him.

  ‘I don’t know, Mary. I hope he found the boys and stockhorses,’ I said. We only had a couple of kilometres to go until we reached One Tree Camp, where we had a rough holding paddock that ran off the side of a schist hill, one of the oldest hills in the district. We knew the paddock would hold the quiet coaches for the night, but not fresh or wild or feral cattle that had never seen humans before. Cattle like that had no respect for anything.

  While McCorry and the boys unsaddled their horses, Mary and I made camp by building a huge fire that we would let die down so we could use the coals to grill steaks later on. Two empty Dingo flour drums made good-sized billycans and were used for brewing tea. McCorry and I were sitting side by side on our rolled swags – they made comfortable seats – with a pannikin of freshly made black tea each, when Harry drove into camp in the bull buggy.

  ‘Old man,’ he said, ‘them horses bogged in quicksand.’

  McCorry muttered something under his breath and told Harry to grab a pannikin of tea while he went over to the truck and started pulling out ropes and girths from the spare saddles, plus the two new truck-tyre inner tubes that were brought along as spares and the shovels.

  ‘What can I do?’ I asked McCorry. But there was no answer: his mind was elsewhere. I understood that he was probably angry with himself for letting the younger stockmen start off early with the spare stockhorses. The boys had mustered with him for two years, while Old Yardie had been by his side for twenty years and understood the wilds of Oobagooma. I, for one, appreciated that it would take me more than two years to get to know and understand this vast expanse of rugged and sometimes cruel and treacherous countryside. And now it seemed that Charlie and Raymond may have got lost and tried to cross the Robinson River further south than they should have.

  With the bullocks munching their heads off on the salt couch in the old wire yard, McCorry knew that, at this point, they were the least of his worries.

  ‘Peter,’ he said, ‘you stay behind and watch them bullika.’ He also meant for Peter to watch out for Mary, who was his wife, and me. Then McCorry jumped into the bull buggy beside Harry, with Malki and Churchill, and the two stockmen who were new to our stock camp, and away they went, weaving erratically between trees and breakaway gullies, back south down the river in search of the boys and the plant horses.

  Once McCorry had left, Peter built up two more fires outside the rough cattle yard to show the old bullocks their boundary. His stockhorse was still saddled and ready so that if, by any chance, the dingoes spooked the bullocks during the night, he’d be prepared. We then sat on our swags around the main campfire talking and listening for any sound in the early evening that would tell us that the men and horses were okay. But no sound came that could encourage me to feel confident that everything might be all right.

  As the night sky became darker, and the thousands of far twinkling stars seemed brighter than ever, I battled to stay awake. I dragged McCorry’s and my swags to the dark side of the truck, cleaned my teeth, washed my face and hands, jumped in and waited for sleep to come.

  Old Jim, McCorry’s faithful bull terrier, had taken a shine to me and now slept on the foot of my swag. Whiskey, McCorry’s other favourite, always slept on the saddle blanket McCorry used. But not even the company of the dogs or the chorus of Oobagooma’s nightlife could comfort me: neither the call of the dingo to his mate further afield nor the owl, nor the curlew was what I wanted to hear that night. I sat in my swag, my ears straining to hear the distant rumblings of the bull buggy’s engine and the whinnying of stockhorses as they acknowledged their mates who were hobbled for the night. And now Lychee carried a Condamine bell.

  Sleep never did come, and I was extremely restive and drinking black tea that was becoming stale and cold. When Whiskey growled, Old Jim sat up and gave a bark in reply, and I knew then that the dogs could hear what I couldn’t.

  Mary sang out, ‘Them men might be coming, yumun.’

  ‘I hope so, Mary,’ I said.

  ‘I stoke that fire up for tea.’

  We both got out of our swags and built up the campfire and poured fresh water into the billycans, ready to make tea. It wasn’t long before I sighted the faint glow of the bull buggy’s lights away in the distance and knew they would be in camp soon. And as the buggy drove slowly along the bed of the river and into camp, I realised there was no sign of our precious stockhorses.

  The Aboriginal stockmen moved about quietly, looking more like ghosts covered in what seemed to be white mud from the river. I could sense their sombre mood and realised things had gone terribly wrong.

  ‘Where are the stockhorses?’ I asked McCorry quietly while we sat together on our swags and drank tea. I thought surely the boys couldn’t possibly have lost the bloody lot and all at once.

  After a while McCorry’s thoughts returned to me and he answered, ‘They’ve gone back to the station.’

  Later that night, when we were in our swags, McCorry told me of the sight he had come across in the bed of the Robinson River. Keeping his voice low, he told me that where the quicksand was in the river was also big crocodile country. I understood what he was saying and also his fear, because there was a time when I had wanted to swim in a billabong that was situated not 150 metres from the bank of the river, and Mary and the boys had stopped me.

  ‘No good, yumun,’ they had said, shaking their heads. Mary had then pointed out the huge old-man croc tracks that came up out of the river and went into the billabong.

  When McCorry had arrived at the scene of the bogged horses he couldn’t believe his eyes, and he also wondered why the animals were caught in quicksand at that spot, because there were steep riverbanks on either side that would have made it difficult to get down onto the riverbed. He soon realised that the young stockmen had been running the camp horses along the riverbed and had got caught out, sadly, in the grey, oozing quicksand that had been ahead of them and that they hadn’t noticed.

  On their way to the scene, Harry had told McCorry, ‘One yaraman,’ – meaning horse – ‘him finished up, old man.’ And McCorry never blinked an eyelid; he just kept on drawing on his tailor-made cigarette and said nothing.

  Before Harry had returned to One Tree Camp for help with the horses, he and the two young stockmen had attempted to rescue one of the stockhorses from the bog. With only a rope and the bull buggy on the riverbank to help them, the boys fought for the stockhorse’s safety against the hungry mud that had one helluva grip on the petrified and floundering animal. Eventually, with only a rope around the animal’s neck and nothing to
support its frame, the boys – with no real understanding of the seriousness of the situation – broke the horse’s neck and pulled its body in two. They were left terrified at the sight of so much blood and guts – and, of course, the stockhorse was dead. These working horses meant as much to the stockmen as they did to McCorry and the camp.

  It was close to dusk by the time McCorry and his men arrived at the bog, and while there was still enough light to see the situation at hand, he instructed the boys to come away from the other distressed horse to let it settle down and for Harry to ‘take the bull buggy back a hundred metres or so and slip down over that steep riverbank and into the bed of the river. Stay on that high country and out of the bog,’ he said.

  McCorry understood that an even pull of the remaining horse was the only way to go in this situation, otherwise it too would be pulled in half. He also understood that once they had a rough bush sling of girths and inner tubes in place around and under the distraught animal, there would be a better chance of freeing it.

  As the extremely long and tiring day was coming to an end, Charlie looked down the river and spotted a saltwater croc about six metres in length, lying to the side of the muddy waterhole.

  ‘Him watching you mob,’ Charlie blurted, then burst out laughing. And with that the huge croc moved his position but kept watching from a distance.

  With the blood and guts of the other horse’s corpse close by, and knowing that the crocodile was watching them, the boys dug harder and faster than ever to save the stockhorse. Then, with the sling in place around the animal and each stockman with a good, solid pole cut from young gum trees, standing ready to place their pole under the stockhorse to help build a bridge to get the animal out of the quicksand, the horse was lifted out.

  McCorry said it was almost pitch black by then, yet where they were in the river really wasn’t that far from the homestead. So he sent Old Yardie, with the stockhorses and the two young stockmen, back to the homestead for the night. They were to make a fresh start for One Tree Camp the following morning.

  The next day we held up the coaches and waited for the spare working horses to arrive. Once they did, the stock camp was ready to move on. Old Yardie and his horses followed behind the mob of cattle, while I followed behind Yardie with Mary in the truck, and from that point on our muster of wild cattle on Oobagooma had only small hiccups. But whatever problems we faced, they were never enough to take the excitement out of cattle mustering in the outback.

  *

  The first helicopter muster on Oobagooma turned out to be the only one of its kind during our time on the station. I wrote of Stuart Skoglund in Diamonds and Dust – Skogy was tall, lean and mean, and a Yank. Word around the Kimberley was that an ex-fighter pilot who owned an old Bell 47 chopper was looking for work, that he was as game as Ned Kelly and could do just about anything with his helicopter. He sounded like the man McCorry wanted for a particular boundary muster on Oobagooma.

  Skogy was charging 160 bucks an hour, plus we had to supply the avgas and oil for his chopper as part of the deal – and, if I remember rightly, that old Bell 47 used a helluva lot of oil.

  Not having met Skogy before, I found his appearance to be that of a cowboy: long, skinny bowlegs; craggy face; a white Stetson hat glued firmly to his grey hair. The only thing missing was a horse. He was also a likeable larrikin and had more than an eye for the ladies. He arrived at the station with a bottle of whisky under one arm – ‘for medicinal purposes’, he said – and a coffee thermos under the other. Many years later I wondered if it wasn’t a nip of whisky in Skogy’s strong black coffee that kept him flying fiercely throughout the Kimberley for many years.

  Skogy wasn’t our only visitor for this muster. Monty was a tall, suntanned man born with a bucketload of natural charm. He was a New South Wales cattle farmer who lived south of Sydney with his wife on their prestigious farming property. In the late 1960s he was also the absentee owner of Oobagooma Station. Monty’s Cessna fixed-wing aircraft was nicknamed ‘DOA’, for ‘death on arrival’ – yet McCorry said that if he ever had to fly through bad weather in a Cessna, Monty would be his choice for a pilot. Monty was as good in a fixed-wing aircraft, diving and swooping to muster wild cattle out from the gorges and river systems of the outback, as Skogy was in the chopper.

  When each mustering season came around, Monty would arrive at the station with a new lady friend, usually scantily clad in a bikini that left her huge breasts exposed to the elements and the stockmen dazed. Heidi, Monty’s companion for this particular muster, was no different from any of the others he had brought along: good-looking, big boobs and short on clothing.

  On the flight from Sydney to Oobagooma, with Monty at the controls of DOA, he and Heidi were nearing the isolated cattle-station homestead when he spotted McCorry’s mustering camp by the edge of a tea-tree freshwater spring. Not far away was a claypan flat where McCorry and the stockmen had dropped two drums of avgas and one of oil for Skogy to refuel.

  There wasn’t much that would shock or surprise us with Monty’s flying. He seemingly dropped out of the sky, flew low across the claypan, did another lap around and then landed DOA safely among the ant hills and broken pieces of deadwood.

  Greetings were exchanged between the two men, although not many words were wasted.

  ‘How you going, mate?’ Monty asked McCorry.

  ‘Good, mate,’ McCorry answered.

  ‘Where you mustering?’

  ‘Springs on the boundary.’

  Monty said he would drop Heidi at the old homestead and return to help Skogy do the boundary muster that day. Monty never stayed long on the station – usually just for a week, and then he’d return to the big smoke.

  McCorry had heard on the galah session on our Trafalgar radio that the Meeda stock camp – from the next-door station – was mustering miles south of the boundary between Meeda Station and Oobagooma. With this knowledge McCorry had decided to put a chopper into the springs, which were very close to the boundary. He wanted to hit that country hard and fast by using a chopper to muster and push the cattle back into Oobagooma country. With McCorry’s love of challenges and his silent, steely side I knew there was no way he would miss this opportunity to muster the springs.

  McCorry was in the bull buggy with Harry, ready to push along the stragglers if needs be. But when fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters are used in a muster, it tends to be best to let your pilots push the cattle into the stockyard without any interference from horsemen.

  The sound of Skogy’s Bell 47 was music to our ears. The powerful blades belted out a constant throbbing tune as he dived in and out of the thick undergrowth around the springs, trying to push the rogue bulls out from their hiding places into the open where he could see them and control them better. Then, to the north, we could hear the drone of Monty’s aircraft as he began to move feral cattle towards the homestead.

  McCorry and Harry were waiting by the drums to refuel Skogy’s chopper. They understood he was due in any time when Harry said to McCorry, ‘That helicopter noise stopped.’

  They listened for a while longer and could hear nothing that resembled the constant throb of a chopper as it mustered cattle, only the distant drone of Monty’s DOA working much farther away.

  Then, with much more confidence, Harry said, ‘No, old man, that helicopter stopped. Maybe he crashed.’

  McCorry got on the two-way radio and called Skogy constantly for the next half-hour, then he gave that idea away and decided to do a search. The two men jumped into the bull buggy and navigated their way through the undergrowth, around breakaway gullies and across claypan flats in search of the springs. It was quite possible that Skogy had crashed, as he’d previously informed us he had done twelve times already. McCorry wasn’t necessarily superstitious, but he thought the thirteenth time had to be on the cards.

  On arriving at the springs you couldn’t help but feel that you had found the most beautiful patch of tropical paradise in the Kimberley. The springs looked
like heaven rising out of the centre of a claypan flat, with an island of rich green couch filled with the four-fingered livingstonia palms and wild figs hidden in the cool centre. Amid the tropical growth was a crystal-clear spring.

  ‘No cattle here, old man,’ said Harry. This meant that the cattle had most likely already been pushed further into Oobagooma country.

  McCorry decided to drive through the springs in search of Skogy. If they were unable to locate the helicopter, they would return to the camp to use the radio to call in Monty and his DOA to do a search of the surrounding area before raising the alarm with the Department of Civil Aviation in Derby.

  Just when McCorry and his Aboriginal mate were about to give up their search, they came across Skogy’s helicopter sitting up nicely, with no sign of damage, on the claypan flat on the far side of the springs. There was no sign of Skogy, though – then the men noted two sets of footprints leading into the undergrowth surrounding the springs.

  ‘What do you reckon, old man?’ asked Harry, now with quite a silly grin on his face. Harry knew damn well that if McCorry could find Skogy he’d want to bloody kill him because it was costing the station 160 bloody dollars an hour to hire the man to muster for them.

  Could the chopper have engine trouble?

  The chorus provided by the wild birdlife throughout the tropical springs was extremely loud – so loud, in fact, that the men had trouble hearing themselves talk. So McCorry followed Harry as he tracked the footprints through the undergrowth, until they found the craggy old chopper pilot hard at it. Not mustering. On top of Heidi.

  McCorry lifted his Akubra and gave his scalp a damn good scratch while thinking he’d been taken for a bloody ride. He and Harry turned and walked back to the bull buggy and eventually drove to the homestead. Instead of an accident or breakdown, there was just embarrassment for Harry and McCorry.