“Come on now, Braden,” Miss Appin jollied, "and you too— what's-your-name — Angus, was it? — I need a couple of willing hands.”
She ushered us into the little blackened scullery and we fetched back plates of eggs, a great platter of sizzling rashers, bread, butter, scones. We were ravenous, all of us. But when we were seated even Jem Riley, who was a rough fellow, ate in a restrained, almost dainty way, swallowing quietly, blushing at every mouthful in an effort to keep up to the standard set by Henry Denkler and Wes McGowan, which was clearly what they thought was due to Miss Appin' “background.” As soon as he had gulped the last of his tea, Jem excused himself and bolted. He would drive their ute down to the store and fill the emergency cans.
Glen, in a high state of amusement at Jem's confusion, got to his feet, thanked Miss Appin with an old-world formality that delighted his father and which the McGowan boys could turn on quite effortlessly when occasion demanded, and went after Jem to help.
“So then, Millie,” Wes McGowan began, pushing back from the remains of his breakfast while Braden and I tucked into seconds, "what have you got to tell us about this pig?”
A SEVEN-MILE DRIVE south of Miss Appin's, the old Jeffries place where the boar had been sighted was no more now than an isolated chimney stack in a pile of rubble and a steel windmill whose spindly tower and blades could be seen in the long grass off the north — south highway.
We drove in slowly — there was no longer a track — and parked in a clump of water gums. I was directed to take charge of the McGowan dogs, Jigger and Tilly, but also of Matt Riley's dog, Archer, an Irish setter as new to all this as I was and very nervous, though Jem assured me, as the dog rubbed against him and licked his hand, that he was sweet-natured enough if you handled him right. And it was true. When I leaned down and hugged him a little, he immediately shoved his nose into my groin. I settled in the shade of the water gums, but the three dogs, excited by the sense that something was about to begin, remained standing, heads raised, lean flanks trembling, pulling hard at the leash. It was just after ten. The sun was fierce, the long grass a wave of cicada-voices rising and skirling, then lapsing, then rising again.
Matt, with Jem as usual at his side, went off to do some scouting and it was confirmed. There was a pig, a good-sized one.
Wes McGowan, whose party this was, had ceded authority for the moment to the professional. He was seated now, sweating under his hat, in the shade of the Bedford, having a quiet smoke.
Matt Riley, meanwhile, had taken Braden aside and was giving him instructions, pointing across the open grassland to where the boar was holed up and sleeping in the sun, somewhere between the windmill and the darker treeline that marked the course of a creek.
The other old-timer of the party, Henry Denkler, had set up a folding stool, and with his hat drawn down and his.303 across his arm, was dozing, for all the world as if he was having a quiet snooze in his own backyard in town.
The others, Glen, Stuart, Jem, were squatting on their heels in the shadows behind me. Not speaking. All their attention, like mine, was on the group Matt Riley and Braden made, Braden the taller by a head, which was all Matt-talk, low-voiced and slow, no more, as I strained my ears to catch it, than a few broken sibilants at moments when the cicadas cut out.
Braden was nodding. Allowing himself to be sweet-talked into a kind of high-pitched ease. Yet another area in which Matt was a professional.
I glanced back quickly at the others.
They too had been gathered in. A moment ago, Glen and Stuart had been as tense almost as the dogs, out of concern perhaps for Braden— more family business. They were subdued now. Almost dreamy. As if Matt had worked his spell on them also, as he had done three or four years back, when they had been where Braden stood now.
I too had a place made for me, but it was up to me what I made of it. I held fast to the dogs, watching their shoulders quiver in expectation. Something of their animal sense that we were set down now in a single world of muscle and nerve, mind both present and dreamlike afloat, communicated itself to me, entered my fists, where they held fast to the twined leashes and took the strain of the dogs’ forelegs and rump, ran back down my forearms to my chest and belly, set my heart steadily beating.
Matt had his hand now on Braden's shoulder and was singing to him — that's how I heard it. Slowing him down. Creating in him a steady state of being inside himself. In the eye that would sight along the barrel of the rifle. In the index finger that would gently squeeze the trigger. In the softness of his shoulder that would take the impact of the shot down through his spine, his buttocks, the muscles at the back of his calves to the balls of his feet where they were spread just wide enough to balance the six feet two of him squarely on the earth.
I wished that Matt was singing, in that low voice whose words I missed but whose tune I was straining to catch, to me, or to something in me. That he was discovering for me that state of detachment but deep immersion, beyond mere attention or nerve, that, once I had hit upon it, I might go back and back to — the sureness of something centred that I lacked.
I watched Braden and thought I saw it entering him. When Matt nodded and released his shoulder at last he would be fully equipped. They would go forward and the others would get up and follow, even Henry Denkler, waking abruptly from his doze as if even in sleep he too had been quietly listening. Twenty minutes from now, Braden would have it for ever. Even if he never returned to any of this, it would be his.
It was this, rather than the business of simply putting a shot into the brain of a maddened beast, that he had come out here to get hold of so that these witnesses to it — his father, his brothers, the professional, Matt Riley, Henry Denkler — would know he had it, that they had passed it on.
On some signal from Matt Riley that I failed, for all my tenseness, to register, Wes McGowan got to his feet, came to where I was sitting, and leaned down. His big hand covered Tilly's skull, tickling her with his finger behind the ears. “Angus,” he told me, "I want you to stay back here with the dogs.”
I swallowed hard, nodded glumly. I'd known this was coming, and Mr. McGowan, not to embarrass me by witnessing my youthful disappointment, turned away. I knew what he was doing. He was keeping me out of harm's way. But there was something else as well. If anything went wrong out there my inexperience might be dangerous, and not only to myself.
“Come on, boys,” I told the dogs, and I put my arms around Tilly, who turned and licked my face.
Glen and the others were on their feet now. Braden cast me a quick look and I nodded. I too got to my feet. The little party formed in three lines, Matt Riley and Jem in front to do the tracking, Braden, Glen and Stuart behind. They set off through the waist-high grass. Once again I would be on the sidelines watching, as I had been so often before when it was a matter only of the telling. I urged the dogs up into the tray of the Bedford and, scrambling up behind them, stood straining my eyes for a better view.