The Shepherd's Hut

  I went back in and pushed a shutter open and set it on its pole for fresh air and light. Then got me boots on and went out and got some wood. There was plenty laying round, dead mulga and old bits of jarrah with wonky nails still in them. When I had enough to get me through the night I busted off a leafy branch and swept the mouse shit out of the place best I could. It was only near the end I found the broom behind the door and figured I’d finish the job properly tomorrow.

  I set a fire in the grate but didn’t light it yet. I spilled out everything I had on the floor and lined it up. Opened a box of ammo. I popped the mag from the Browning and loaded it. I layed the rifle and the mag on the milk crate table and sat just inside the open door, perched on the chair with no back. I figured maybe the roos’d come in at dusk and if I played me cards right I’d have some fresh meat by dark.

  But nothing come in from the bush at all. Those diggings were flat and still as a picture.

  When it got too dark to see much anymore I lit the stove and ate me last orange. Afterwards I was still hungry. That’s what happens when you start thinking about fresh meat. But I wasn’t down about it, I knew there was animals out there. They were a bit suss right now but they wouldn’t be able to resist the smell of that water. There was always tomorrow.

  I sat up that night and fed the fire till I was out of wood. It wasn’t cold but the fire was company. In the end I packed it in and put me head down.

  I was pretty wrecked and still happy but I didn’t sleep that good. At first it was the hard floor. Then I got the gripes. I thought it was hunger pains but it wasn’t bloody hunger pains. I squirmed and rolled for a bit. I wasn’t about to try that filthy reeking longdrop in the dark so I put me boots on while I still had time and when I couldn’t put it off any longer I ran out under the stars and got on with it. Christ, talk about bubble and squeak. I was in and out half the night, shitting like a duck. First I was worried about going out too far and stumbling down a hole. Later I was just glad to make it out the door.

  I had all night to wonder what it was. Sunstroke makes you puke, it doesn’t give you the trots. And it couldna been anything I et because there wasn’t hardly nothing to eat by then. So that only left the water. I never did think to check the tank before I started drinking. Coulda been anything floating in there, some dozy possum maybe, or a crow thought it was a swan. Whatever it was it went through me like a rifle rag. Come dawn me date was so hot you coulda lit a spark plug off of it.

  So I didn’t do much that first morning at the prospector’s camp. Dozed a bit. And twitched like a dog dreaming. It was kind of a flat feeling after being so buzzed the day before.

  In the afternoon I climbed up the tank stand and looked in but with no torch I couldn’t really see nothing. I started boiling the water anyway. I was glad of that saucepan.

  Me guts stayed grumbly till dark but the worst of the gripes was gone. And even though I was parched again I settled for teeny sips from the jug until I felt decent enough to get some wood in and kick dirt over all the places I’d shat. And believe me that was a lot of places.

  Just before dark a roo showed up behind the diggings. He edged out from the shadows of the bush but didn’t come in any further. I stepped in the doorway and got the Browning and levered a round in real quiet. But that bung eye was me sighting eye. I had to faff round a second or two to match the good one to the rifle scope and that’s what cost me. It was all too quick. I saw him lift his head a bit, like he was sniffing the air and didn’t fancy it. He could probably smell my doings everywhere. Big red fella he was, all shoulders and ears. Wily too, like he’d been round the block more than once. And I reckon he wasn’t just smelling me neither, he could feel me there. He propped quivering half a moment then turned on his heel and cranked off behind them big piles of spoil. And that was that.

  It was only that hungry evening I finally copped on to why Wankbag stopped hunting so much. Wasn’t the horsemeat thing put him off. Wasn’t even the shakes he got from being a pisshead. It was his eye. The right one, that was his sighting eye. So after his flyswat caper he was all cock about. It got up me a bit that it took so long for me to figure out. Because I fucking hate feeling stupid.

  So anyway there I was. Just as empty as yesterday. Just as weak too. But at least I was still kicking. I had water, if only I remembered to boil it. And a roof over my head. I had the makings to stay alive. I’d rolled the dice and got lucky. From here on I just had to stay smart. Be patient. Hold me nerve.

  That night by the fire I made meself a little billy from an old bean tin and a hank of fencewire. It was something to do, kept me mind off food. And I needed all the boiling cans I could find now. But by the time I got the wire handle twitched on I was nearly out to it. Sometimes when you put your head down at the end of the day you know you’re so rooted you won’t dream a thing. Too tired to worry, too far gone to even work up a nightmare. That’s another five minutes of mercy there.

  Second day there me bung eye wasn’t so bad. Puffy still, but not so tight. Just after sun-up I dropped a bungarra the size of a bloke’s arm. Cocky bugger too. He saw me and never moved a muscle. He give me that look like, you wanna piece of me? Well bloody oath I did, I wanted all of him. So I went in the shack and got the Browning and he was still there when I got back, sunning himself at the top of a slagheap. One second he’s the king of the castle, next thing his head’s hanging off a twig ten metres away. What do they say? Rooster Sunday, feather duster Monday. Now you might think a .243 is a bit rich for knocking lizards but by then I was gagging for a feed. I would of used a cannon if I had to. And licked him off the leaves.

  Cooked that goanna on the coals like a blackfella. And I’ll tell you now I’ve et plenty worse.

  There’s a sad feeling in a place people have just walked out of and left behind. Could be only me thinks shit like this. And you could probably say there’s plenty houses feel just as sad with people still in them. God knows our place was one of them for sure. Maybe it was just that empty shack getting on me tits. I never really been alone in a joint before. Not properly alone. Somehow it’s more lonely than being on your own in the bush. Could be why I got thinking about our house. It was never anything special, just another fibro like all the others in the street. Only thing fancy in the place was Mum’s piano. And I never did get why that piano was there. Never saw anyone play it. Not for real. Me little cousins liked to pound on it when they come down from Magnet but there wasn’t a single time I can think of when someone got a proper tune out of it. If Mum ever played it I never heard her. She dusted it every week, kept a line of photos in frames along the top of it. One of her and him on a beach somewhere. Maybe it was that party she talked about. They both looked young and happy. Her hair was long and he had no beard at all. There was a shot of me when I was a baby. I don’t look real pleased in that picture. I had the face of some fat old prick wants his lunch in a hurry.

  There was one picture of Mum on her own. She’s singing. Like she’s in a choir or something, holding a card or a book in her hands, and her eyes are aimed up like she’s singing at the roof or maybe the sky. I always liked that one best. Every week she’d fluff the doily and dust the top of the piano and Windex the glass fronts of the photos. Then she’d Mr Sheen the piano. And sometimes I’d catch her staring at it. Like when we were eating tea. She’d leave off the telly a sec and gaze at the piano and get a look on her like she’d just thought of someone she knew from long ago, someone dead. And then she’d stick her fork into a snag and go blank.

  I think of that photo now and then. Mum with her eyes set up like that. Looking at something high. See, I didn’t know her much at all. With Lee I know everything. But it’s not the same with your mum. She’s there all the time but she’s mostly invisible. It’s only when she’s gone you get that wanting feeling and get curious. Lee wants me to know her. I don’t reckon Mum ever really did.

  If anyone heard this shit they’d say I had too much time to think out there in bumfuck nowhere. And it?
??s true I had more time to cogitate on things once I got clear of town and people and all that mess. Cogitate, that’s a word I didn’t even know back at the diggings but I like the sound of it. Bloke who taught it to me was full of words. Christ, he had so many he was drowning in them. He was someone did a lot of cogitating. Had time enough to do it. But he was a dude wanted you to know him. Even if he didn’t really dare when it come down to it. Said it was too dangerous. And maybe it was. Me, I got nothing to lose. Not now. Only Lee.

  After the bungarra I got nothing at all for two days. Not one thing come in round the shack and the diggings. So I spent the nights hungry again. I boiled water in me little tin billy and drank it hot because that way it feels like it takes up more space. If I’d seen a crow or a galah I’da shot and et either one. I could hear peewees out past the miners’ crap but none come close. It was like the whole world out there was suss on me. Honest to God, I would of et anything, a snake, a grasshopper, a thorny devil. Any living thing that crawled by. But nothing did, not when I was looking. Thought about eating plain red dirt a couple of times but that’s for crazy bastards at the end and I was a way off that yet. The best I could do them days was a few bushflies and they wasn’t exactly swallowed on purpose. All that kept me going was hot water that tasted of smoke and beans and burnt tin.

  Two other things I turned up round the shack was a hat and a map and it was really only the hat that was any use. Just an old black cap it was. Penrite Oil on the front. Dirty and chewed half through by moths, a piece of shit hat really, but it fitted good enough and it was better than going round like an Arab with a rag on his head.

  The map looked like some bloke drew it to work something out for himself. And he didn’t sketch it careful, just a rough outline of WA sawn off the rest of Australia. Monkton and Dally wasn’t even on there. Not Lake Balthazar neither. Only Perth and Kalgoorlie and Broome and Halls Creek and Wyndham. And a few figures in a line to one side. PER–KAL 590, PER–EUCLA 1428, PER–WYNDHAM 3227. Looking at those faded numbers took the wind out of me. It’s one thing knowing it’s three hundred kays from Monkton to Magnet. But getting us ten times that far, that’s something else. The map wasn’t any use to me, it was just something to look at and pretty soon I figured I shouldn’t look at it too often.

  I mostly mooched round the diggings them days. You had to be careful because there was pits and holes and channels everywhere. I didn’t wanna get this far and then fall down a mineshaft and snap me neck like a carrot. Or if the fall didn’t take you out you could wake up down the bottom of a pit looking up at a little blue square of sky like one of them poor buggers in a movie. I woulda liked to check out some of them old shafts with timbered frames and iron ladders but the wood was soft and grey and the steps rusted half through so I wasn’t game to try. Everything you saw and touched out there looked like tetanus waiting to bite your arse. Trenches full of jagged tins and broken glass, shotgun shells and rifle casings. There was piles of bottles taller than me, beer bottles, whisky bottles, Coke bottles, champagne bottles, shortneck stubbies and tiny fat medicine bottles, blue and green and red. It was like a museum full of redbacks and snakes. When I pulled up sheets of tin I found old boots and buckles, half a saddle some rat had bored right through. There was rusty bed frames with weeds growing up through them and rolls of wire that come to bits soon as you touched them. It was a bloody mess out there, like there’d been a war on and everyone had just packed it in, like suddenly they were fed up and fucked off. I wondered how many blokes ever got rich from it, how many even found enough gold to buy their mates a round at the pub.

  Now I look back I can’t believe what I was doing at the prospector’s camp. It was good to have somewhere to meself but I was sitting round starving to death. I wasn’t hunting food, not seriously. It was like I was too scared to go far from the water and the roof over me head.

  It was out in them junkpiles I found a toasting rack made of fencewire. A good one too, one you could flip the bread in and keep holding over the coals of a fire. But all it did was make me think of bread.

  And I thought about spuds a lot. The way we used to have them of a Sunday. Roasted in fat with salt all over them.

  Thought of fried eggs and bacon.

  Thought of rissoles and tomato sauce.

  And bananas.

  And cold milk.

  None of that thinking was any use at all.

  I got dozy enough to sit in the shade one day and spark the phone up. It said No Service but I pulled up Lee’s number anyway and looked at her face. It was an old photo, one I took at the rez. Just her in that gay hat she found. She looks different now. And even if there was some coverage out there it was no use calling because it’d be Auntie Marg picking up, not Lee. I wasn’t softheaded enough to forget that.

  And then I spose I wised up before I wasted away to nothing. I got off me freckle, geared up and pushed out into the bush. It was hard leaving the shack behind. Once it was out of sight I got a flutter. I was ashamed of meself but I couldn’t help it. I kept me bearings and left markers and tried to concentrate on the job of getting meat.

  I was only gone a few hours but it was a rough run. I was almost back at the diggings and out of juice before I saw anything worth a shot. A little euro come bouncing in through the gimlets like he didn’t have a care in the world. Which he didn’t till I showed up. There’s no other kind of roo pretty as a euro. You could see he wasn’t expecting anyone. Reckon he never seen a human in his life before. He pulled up just as I got a round up the spout and that’s when he saw me proper. He looked more curious than scared. I’m trying to get me breath under control, keep him in the scope, and he’s wondering what the deal is. One ear my way, the other twitching round. I told meself not to rush it, I had plenty of time. But hell, I was hungry enough to eat leaves by then. I couldn’t afford to miss.

  That euro figured out pretty quick there was something wrong about me. So he made that first turn sideways like it was time to bust a move. Then he pulled himself forward a bit, the way they do. Glanced off to the south. And I knew for sure he was ready to bolt. He looked my way one more time like he couldn’t help himself and as he turned his head back to go I had him.

  For half a sec, before the sound of the shot caught up, it was just like his neck had an itch. Then he went down on his arse as the sound let out like a hard slap. You always know when you’ve hit something. Even if you blink and don’t see it go down. It’s a thump you can’t mistake. You can hardly believe a bit of lead the size of your pinky nail can make a noise like that and do that kind of damage. It was beautiful.

  I tell you I was glad to be so close to camp when I took him down. He was only small but I don’t think I’da been able to haul him in from any further out. Once I made it back and got a fire lit on the ground out front of the shack I found that butterknife wasn’t the best bit of butchering gear you’ll ever use, but it done the job good enough. By the time I had that fella skun and hung from a tree I was red to the elbow. Blood gloves is what it looked like, and when the gore went dry and tight on me arms it felt like gloves too.

  I didn’t want dingoes and feral cats coming round for the skin and guts, so I wrapped it all together and walked it out to one of them deep shafts and dumped it in. Then I washed off at the tank with a bit of sand and water. I wondered if I’d still be there when the tomatoes come good. I wondered what I woulda done if I’d missed that euro. But that was like wondering what your life’d be like if your dad wasn’t a douche.

  I was ready to eat, I’ll tell you that for free. I couldn’t even wait for the fire to die down so I could cook that poor little bugger. Before he was even properly bled out I cored a loin out of him and I don’t mind saying I et it raw. Then I ripped some more cuts off and layed them on the fridge rack I’d scabbed from the miners’ junk and watched them fizz and twist over the coals. It was meat tasted like nothing you ever had in your life.

  That night the stars come out early and clear as I’d ever seen them and I co
uld smell everything in the bush round me. I tasted smoke and gum sap in the air. Moths and bugs heavy as birds bumped and skidded off me. It was like my blood was bubbling, like food had charged me up fresh and new. I was knackered but I knew I wouldn’t sleep. I was too excited, so relieved. I just piled wood on the fire and watched the Milky Way running down the sky like spilt fat, and next thing I knew the birds was stirring and I’m out there on the dirt next to a warm pile of ash.

  There’s one thing I learnt being out that way. There’s more meat on a spring lamb than a euro. After breakfast there was hardly enough left to take with me for lunch.

  I went further that day, out into country full of desert pines and yorkies. And I took down a grey big enough I had to field dress it and heave it home on my back. I could of done with that Ka-Bar knife back in the safe. And a gambrel too. It’s no fun butchering a roo in the dirt. But I come in with more meat than I could eat, more than I could properly keep. I was too tired that night to see the problem, too glad of the food and the place to come home to.

  I strung that doe up from a dead tree by one of them piles of junk. There was rope out there and no shortage of wire. I wished I had a gambrel again but I made do and ripped him best I could and grilled big chunks and stuffed me face.

  That night I slept inside on the hard cement floor and I tell you, it coulda been a waterbed. All night I dreamt I was out at the train tracks behind the house. There was no one home. Only the washing turning on the line in the wind like a white wheel behind me. I just walked on down the tracks. And when the first wheat train come rumbling in across the paddocks I didn’t step off, I walked on through it. I could smell the diesel and the orange peel on the floor beneath the driver. I could taste the steel of the cars and the grain dust that hung in the air after it was gone. It was like I couldn’t be stopped. I was gunna keep walking till I got where I was going. But I couldn’t remember where I was headed. That was the thing of it. And I went through it over and again like something stuck.