I climbed over the gate of the truck and Stuart followed. We staggered, the dogs around our legs, and Braden, to make room for us, settled on the pile of bedrolls at the back.
“Get down, you stupid buggers,” Stuart told the dogs, and grabbing the head of one of them under his right arm, plumped down heavily next to Braden.
I sat opposite, drawing the other dog, Tilly, between my knees. Braden banged the flat of his hand on the cabin roof and we were off.
He had said nothing as yet. Now he looked at me, grinned, and pulled his hat down firmly over his ears.
“Hi,” I said.
“Cold, eh?” was all he said in return.
Stuart laughed. “He's always cold, aren't you, Brade? The warm blood in this family ran out with me.”
Stuart was wearing an old plaid shirt frayed at the collar and with the sleeves rolled loosely at the elbow. No jacket, no woolly.
Braden, hunched into his thick turtle-necked sweater, made a face, and looked away. A draught of cold air streamed over us as we rolled down to the town bridge with its drift of bluish mist and up to where the other ute, with Matt Riley and his nephew Jem and their dogs, was parked at the petrol station before the entrance to the highway. Matt Riley, the white breath streaming from his mouth, was out of the ute, checking one of the offside tyres. Jem was driving.
I had known Matt Riley for as long as I could remember, though we had never had a proper conversation. His wife, Eileen, was our ironing lady. Every Monday morning he dropped her off in his ute, and he was there when I got home, silent, drinking tea at our kitchen table, waiting to take her back again. She ignored his presence, laying aside the shirt she was working on to make me a malted milk.
I was fond of Eileen. She was full of stories, told in a language, all jumps and starts, that I had got so used to at last that it seemed the only language for what she had to tell. I had never asked myself what might be peculiar about it, or where it came from. As I never asked myself why Matt Riley was so subdued and retiring in our kitchen and yet so quietly sure of himself, and so readily deferred to, when he was inspecting tyres or setting right an unbalanced load.
As for Jem, he had been one of the big boys when I started school. In the same class as Glen McGowan. A dark, sulky fellow, I thought. Although he was a big boy he could neither read properly nor write. At fourteen he had gone off to become a roo-shooter like his uncle.
He was no longer sulky. Just big and silent, almost invisible. His uncle Matt's shadow.
An hour later we had left the bitumen and were bouncing due west on a clay highway cut clean through the scrub. The sun was up and had burned off the early-morning chill. The dogs were alert but quiet. Braden, his knees drawn up, one of the dog leads round his wrist, was dozing, his head toppled forward under his hat. Stuart, after a bit, leaned across, unwound the lead and passed it to me. The big dog, Jigger, turned its head in my direction but did not stir. “Good dog, Jigger,” I told him, roughening the gingery ears, "good old boy.” He lowered his head and settled.
I was beginning to feel good. We were riding high up on the camber of the yellow-clay road, which had been washed by the rains so that it was all exposed pebbles with eroded channels on either side, then tough grass, then forest.
Stuart shook a cigarette out of the packet in the breast pocket of his shirt, dipped his head to take it between his lips. He offered me one. I shook my head. Smoke blew towards me. Sharp and sweet.
“Big day, eh, Angus?”
It was. He knew how long I had wanted this. To come out here, be one with the others, part at last of whatever it was. The sky above us was high and cloudless, as it is up here in winter. Stuart followed my gaze as if there was something up there that I had caught a glimpse of, a hawk maybe; but there was nothing. Just the huge expanse of blue that made the air so clean as it tumbled over us; as if all this — sky, forest, the warmth of the big dog between my knees — was part of the one thing, a consciousness — not simply my own — that belonged not only to the body I was in, back hard against the metal side of the truck, muscles flexed in my calves and thighs, belly empty, but also to some- thing out there that I had melted into as one melts into sleep, and was infinite.
I did sleep, and was woken by Stuart punching me lightly in the shoulder. “Wake up, Australia!”
We climbed down. The other ute was already parked.
We were at the little junction station where the Chillagoe line branches west into anthill country: a water tank and pump, a general store, and the two-roomed cottage-cum-stationmaster's hut. It was the established custom for parties going out to the Lagoons to stop here for breakfast, before going down to the general store to fill the emergency petrol cans.
“I'm famished,” Braden announced. It was after eight.
I agreed.
“Don't worry, son, you'll get a good feed here,” Matt Riley told me. “Trust Miss Appin, eh, Jem?”
Like most of the older members of the party, Matt Riley had been stopping here for nearly forty years.
Suddenly in a storm of dust a dozen or so guineafowl darted out from under the house, which stood on three-foot stumps, and got between our legs and began to peck around the tyres of the trucks. There was a clatter of hooves, and a young nanny goat skittered down the stairs from Miss Appin's dining room, with three more guineafowl at her heels, and behind them Miss Appin herself flourishing a tea towel in her fist.
“Morning, Millie,” Henry Denkler called across to her, and took the hat from his stack of white hair and made a decent sweep with it. “Mornin', Millie,” Wes McGowan echoed.
“Drat the thing,” Miss Appin shouted after the goat, which had propped in the yard ten paces off and with its wide-set, sad-looking eyes stood its ground looking offended.
“Garn,” Jem told it, and at something in his unfamiliar growl it started and fled.
“Good on you, lad,” Miss Appin told him. Then, reverting to her role as hostess, "It's all ready, gentlemen. Eight of you — is that right?”
I knew about Miss Appin. She had been described to me a dozen times by kids at school who had been out here and known what to expect, but had still, when they came face to face with her, been startled.
Forty years before she had been a beauty. Her family ran the biggest spread in this part of the state. She was one of those girls that a young Wes McGowan or Henry Denkler might dream of but could not aspire to. The best horsewoman in the district, she had been to school in Europe, spoke French, and had been “presented” at Government House in Brisbane.
But at twenty, in a single moment, fate had exploded out of a trusted corner and turned her whole world upside down. A horse had kicked in all one side of her face, flattening the bony ridge above her right eye, shattering her cheekbone and jaw. Over the years, the damaged side of her face had aged differently it seemed from the other, so that they appeared to belong to different women, or to women who had lived very different lives. Only one of these faces smiled, but you saw then why a girl who had been so lively and pleased with herself might have chosen to live in a place where she saw no more than a few dozen people each week, and most of them the same people, over and over.
Miss Appin was responsible for changing the points on the line, and had turned her front room into the station buffet, where twice a week, while the two-carriage train waited and took on water, she served freshly baked scones and tea out of thick white railway crockery, and in winter, breakfast to shooting parties like ours that called up beforehand and put in their order.
Two tables with chequered cloths had been laid for us. Otherwise, the small neat room was a front room like any other. There was an upright piano with brass candelabra and the walls were covered from floor to picture rail with photographs of Miss Appin's nephews and nieces, all of them known, it seemed, to Henry Denkler and Wes McGowan and even, though he was shy to admit it, to Matt Riley: family parties on lawns, the ladies with their skirts spread; young men with axes at wood-chopping shows or looking solemn in studio poses in the uniforms of the two wars; other boys (or the same ones when younger) in eights on a sunlit river or standing at ease beside their oars; five-year-olds in communion suits with bow ties, or like baby brides in a cloud of tulle. Three or four guineafowl crept back, and flitted about under the tables. There was a smell of bacon.