I put a pot of coffee down on the stove harder than I needed to. ‘Fucking kids,’ I said to Dog, but he had his back to me and wasn’t listening.
I slammed the fridge and leant my head against it. Stupid to have become so comfortable. The fridge hummed back in agreement. Stupid to think it wouldn’t all fall to shit. That feeling I’d had when I first saw the cottage, squat and white like a chalk pebble at the black foot of the downs, the safety of having no one nearby to peer in at me — that felt like an idiot’s lifetime ago. I felt at the side of the fridge for the axe handle.
My sleeve was brown where some of the dead sheep had leaked onto it and I took my jumper off and rubbed the spot with soap in the downstairs bathroom. I smelled like billy goat but the idea of a full wash with the cold deep in my shoulders didn’t interest me, so I just splashed under my armpits. My hands clenched and unclenched to warm up, the right one aching and clicking in the way that it did in damp weather where the bones hadn’t knitted back together.
I smoothed back the skin of my face in the mirror. The last fringe I’d given myself had been an inch too short and I looked like a mad person. I found a blooded thumbprint below my ear.
I lit a cigarette, holding it with my lips and clasping my hands together in front of me to tense my arms as I inhaled to check the muscle tone and it was still there even if I hadn’t sheared in a couple of months. Strong lady. I watched the smoke snake its way out of my mouth and disappear in the cold air. The coffee pot began its death rattle, and I moved to take it off the hob. I still had a fear of the thing exploding.
Out the kitchen window, the flash of a windscreen across the valley. Don in his Land Rover. I spat my cigarette into the sink, ran the water over it, and then bolted out into the yard to get the wheelbarrow, and Dog nipped me on the back of the knee for running. I huffed up to the top of the drive, the barrow squeaking to buggery, and stood, blocking the road. Don pulled up and cut the engine. Midge stayed patiently in the passenger’s seat eyeballing Dog with her pink tongue lolling out.
‘Christ alive. You’re making my balls shrink,’ Don said as he swung himself out of the truck. It was sleeting and I only wore my singlet. He passed a glance at me that I rolled off my shoulders. ‘You look like shit. Not sleeping?’
‘I’m fine.’ I nodded to the wheelbarrow. Don looked at it.
‘What’s that you got there?’
‘Another dead ewe. Reckon it’s those kids.’
He looked at me. Our breath puffed white between us. He shook his head.
‘What’s a kid want to go and do that for?’
‘Why does anyone do anything? Bored and shitful.’
Dog jumped up at Midge sitting in the truck and barked at her while she looked back coolly.
‘No,’ said Don, ‘can’t blame everything on the kids. Even if some of them’s vicious little buggers.’
‘What’s gone on here then?’ he asked the dead sheep, bending forward and taking a closer look; his hands were on his hips. It was very cold. I folded my arms over my chest and tried to look comfortable.
‘I found her this morning out by the woods.’
‘By the woods?’
I nodded.
He shook his head and walked around the wheelbarrow. ‘She’s dead all right.’
‘Oh really? You a vet?’
Don narrowed his eyes at me.
I cleared my throat. ‘These kids…’
Don tipped his cap up off his eyes and looked at me. ‘Good night last night — you shoulda come down the pub last night like I said.’
Here we go, I thought. ‘Not my sort of place, Don.’ I pictured the men who would be there, leaning up against the bar and talking in low voices, their eyes flicking up when a woman walked by. The same sort as the three who had showed up in the first week, whistling farmer-wants-a-wife. Don was different. I’d called on him with my first breech birth and he’d come with me, calmly sewed the prolapsed innards back into the ewe and saved her triplets, poured me a drink and said lightly, All gotta learn one way or the other.
Still, he could go on for ever.
‘Three years. You haven’t been out to the pub once.’
This was a lie. I’d been there once, but Don liked to say it so much that he never listened when I told him.
‘You show up, arm in a sling, looking like a lesbian or a hippy or something, and you move in and we don’t have many of either of those round here. You’re not careful, they’re going to use stories about you to scare the nippers.’
I shifted my weight, feeling the cold setting into my jawbone.
‘It’s a lonely enough job sheep farming without putting yourself in isolation.’
I blinked at Don and there was a long pause. Dog whined. He’d heard it all before as well.
‘So what killed my sheep then?’ was all I could say.
Don sighed and squinted at the sheep. He looked about a hundred in the morning light; the age spots on his cheeks were livid. ‘Mink might tear a sheep up, after she’s dead. Or a fox.’ He lifted the ewe’s head to take a look at the eyes. ‘Eyes are gone,’ he said; ‘could be something killed her and then everything else took their pickings.’ He lifted the head higher and looked underneath where her ribs made a cave. He frowned. ‘But I’ve never seen anything round here flense an animal like that.’
I patted the pocket of my trousers, where I kept my cigarettes, then I touched Dog on the top of his greasy head. A crow called out, Caaa-creee; and caaa-creee. Midge stood up on her seat and we all looked over the fence at the dark trees there.
‘Just tell those kids if you see them, and anyone else who wants to hear about it, that if I catch anyone near my sheep I’ll shoot them.’
I turned the wheelbarrow around and started walking back down the hill towards home.
‘Yep,’ said Don, ‘happy new year to you too.’
2
We are a week from the end of the job in Boodarie. I’m in the shower at the side of the tractor shed watching the thumb-sized redback that’s always sat at the top of the shower head. She hasn’t moved at all except to raise a leg when I turn on the tap, like the water’s too cold for her.
The day has been a long and hot one — the tip of March, and under the crust of the galvo roof the air in the shearing shed has been thick like soup, flies bloating about in it. I’m low on shampoo, but I use a good slug of it, and feel the suds run down my dips and crevices, the water cooling off my lower back where the scars get hot and throb with the sweat. Above me, beyond the redback, is a fast blackening sky — the night comes quickly here, not like in the city where you could spend all night at work and not notice its difference to the day, other than the slowing off of customers. The first stars are bright needles, and in the old Moreton Bay fig that hangs over the tractor shed and drops nuts on the roof while I sleep, a currawong and a white galah are having it out; I can hear the blood-thick bleat of them. A flying fox goes overhead and just like that the smell of the place changes and night has settled in the air. Someone moves outside the pallet-board screen of the shower and I still my hands in my hair.