The Shepherd's Hut

  I et pretty hard for two days. Went at that grey roo like a bull shark. At first because I was hungry and then because I had to. Bits of the carcase were on the turn by the end of the second day. The tree where I had it strung up was mad with ants and flies and the crows got into it soon enough. The only thing I could do to keep it good a little longer was get the juice out of it. That meant cooking what was left. So that’s what I did. Hacked the haunches off and roasted them. Sounds easier than it was. It was always gunna take too long to bone it out with that butterknife so I left the legs whole. Didn’t have a bone saw of course. Used a rusty iron bar to bust the shins. Wasn’t pretty but it done the job. Then I folded them all up and shoved them in the oven. Stoked the stove till the shack was too hot to sit in. Cooked that meat till it was hard and dry as a publican’s heart. It was brutal to cut and a bastard to chew. But beggars can’t be choosers.

  And I guess by then I could see how things really were. I had two boxes of shells and one of them I’d dipped into already. If I wanted to last out there more than a week or two I had to make every shot count. You can’t hunt every day and waste half of what you get. And I didn’t want to leave so much spoiled meat out there I’d have wild dogs coming round. What I needed was some way to keep meat. There was nothing I had to keep it cool. I figured smoking might work, but the Cap never got round to showing me how to do it. Only other thing I could think to use was salt, but I didn’t have any of that neither.

  And that’s the joke of it. Because there was a billion tonnes of salt close by.

  I can’t believe how long it took me to cop on. When it finally come to me I was looking at that pissy map. And Lake Balthazar wasn’t even on it.

  Next morning I was up and fed in the dark because I didn’t really know how long the hike was gunna take. I was hoping to be back before sundown. Thought if I followed them wheel ruts I’d hit the saltpan sooner or later, come home with a packload, enough to get by on for a while. I was fully rolling the dice again but I didn’t even know it then because I was so fixed on the idea, banking everything on the salt being as close as I figured. It was a bigger punt than I knew and if it hadn’t of paid off the way it did, which wasn’t anything like the way I expected, you’d be coming across my bones in fifty years’ time wondering who this poor fella was pegged out in the middle of nowhere. So don’t ever feel sorry for Jaxie Clackton. Because I’m one lucky bastard, I kid you not. Or maybe it’s like Fintan said. I was sent. I’m destined. Be dead five times over if I wasn’t. Wouldn’t be where I am today, three hours away from everything that matters in the world.

  So I was all business that morning. Been scheming half the night. And by first light when I come out that door I had a full jug of water and plenty of meat in me pack. I had the glasses strung off me neck and the .243 over one shoulder. Me mind was already on the track east. I wasn’t ready for company. So when I saw someone standing out in the gloomy grey by the slagheaps I nearly shit meself. Took two seconds to see it wasn’t a man at all, just a big old roo the size of a fullback. He stood up straight and hitched his elbows and I don’t even know why I shot him except he was there. Can’t even say how I got the drop on him so quick. He sat back on his tail and fell sideways and I thought fuck me, now what.

  I didn’t have time to dress him out properly so I just strung him up, fetched his guts out and ditched them down a shaft. He was as big of a roo as I ever got close to. Rusty red. And heavy. I left the hide on. And the head. Which wasn’t ideal but I had to get going. Figure it out later.

  I guess it’s a rotten thing to do, bowl a roo over and just leave him there. But I didn’t know I’d be gone so long. And it’s hard to turn down a feed when it’s standing right in front of you.

  By the time I hit the track the sun was up and I was covered in blood. When I got past the diggings I looked back and it wasn’t a real pretty scene to see. All that dug up and fucked over ground. The sadsack humpy in the middle of it all. And out the front, hanging from a gum tree, a body twisting in the wind like some poor bastard’s had enough of this prospecting caper and strung himself up to be done with it.

  That was the last time I saw the place.

  The wheel ruts were no trouble to follow. There was no breeze, it was coolish still and decent walking. I hustled on quick as I could without blowing a flange. The little tin billy was the only noise I heard. I had it hung off the pack and it give a rattle and squeak nearly every step I took.

  Far as I could tell I was about a week gone from Monkton. Lee would of heard about everything by now. She’d be wondering where I was, why it was taking me so long. Then she’d figure it out. She’s smart, Lee. And she knows me well enough. In her wardrobe she’d have a bag ready. She’d wait. However long it took me, she’d wait. I just had to hope Auntie Marg hadn’t sent her off to boarding school in Moora. Or Perth, that’d be even worse. But that woulda only happened if she played up, if she carried on like a pork chop instead of sucking it up and staying chill. She’d keep smart and act like someone not waiting at all. She’d still be there in Magnet. I couldn’t of kept going if I thought she wasn’t.

  Middle of the morning the track come round northwards and I saw the first rocky ridge sloping down west to east. So I stopped for a bit of a breather and a sip. And in the quiet I heard a bird I always like, one with a sad song that gets me every time. Butcherbird. How fucked up is that?

  I got off my arse again and set out for the ridge. But it was further away than it looked. By the time I got to the foot of it the sun was overhead. The track got pretty rugged up that hill. There was washouts knee-deep some places. I figured no regular car would stand a chance and even with a 4×4 you’d have a job on your hands getting through. High up, the scrub was just thorny stuff et down to stubs by goats and their shit was everywhere. The rocks were red and yellow with chunks of quartz like frozen milk.

  When I got to the top I looked north and saw another jump-up maybe two kays off. It was higher and stonier by the looks. The valley between that and the one I was on was blue with trees and shadows. To the right it tipped down like I hoped it would and there in the east, across all them treetops, was the shiny pink-white skin of the lake. It was far enough away I knew right then I wouldn’t get back tonight but seeing that salt give me a bit of a charge so I didn’t crack sad about it.

  But it’s true I stopped there a bit, sucking it up before I started along the spur. I couldn’t help looking. It was a good thing I had the wheel ruts to follow because without them it’d be hard to find me way back.

  I took the down slope careful and come into the valley where everything was cool and shadowy and the salmon gums were shivering with birds. The going was easier here and I reckon most people’d say it was beautiful in the valley with all them million trunks and branches, prettier than the mulga I been in all this time, but you couldn’t see far ahead and it was a bastard picking real from shadow, so I wasn’t really getting off on it. And like I said, the hiking was good but there seemed no end to that valley.

  We always got along good, me and Lee. She’s younger by six months, I’m July 2 and she’s the fourth of December. And I spose we got to be mates because sometimes we were all we had for friends. If Auntie Marg wasn’t down at ours we was up there at Magnet. Long weekends, school holidays. One time we all went in caravans to Coral Bay, back when me Uncle Ted was still round. And there was a summer we got a beach shack at Dongara, all of us crowded in together, it was sick fun. We did everything together, all the kids, all the grownups. But I spose the women and the children was the closest. There’s something about the men just stops them being able. Anyway Uncle Ted done a flit when Lee was ten. Woulda been better if the same thing happened to Mum. You ask me, it’s safer when they shoot through.

  So we grew up together, me and Lee. For a long time she was the only girl I really knew. Up close that is. We used to go out scooping taddies and stuff. Dink each other on our bikes. I liked it when she was round and when she wasn’t I sort of missed her. Ma
ybe that’s why I didn’t care so much about kids at school. Because there was always Lee.

  I didn’t even know why I liked her. She was just there. I was used to her. Like I said, we did stuff together. The others were just babies. I remember when she lost her front teeth. She couldn’t even say my name right. She chased me across the oval calling out Jackthee! Jackthee! I’ll git you Jackthee Clackton! Sounded like a retard. I couldn’t hardly run for laughing.

  Thing is, she wasn’t like girls from school. She was game. And she wasn’t a whinger. She wasn’t one of them girls always fussing and farting about her dress or her shiny little shoes or getting her knees dirty and whatnot. She could throw a ball for one thing. But mostly it was that she was up for doing shit. Fun stuff. When Susie and that little sook Norman was plonked down watching The Lion King over and over we’d piss off up the granites or out the rez. That’s if we was in Monkton. Up at Magnet we’d go to the pool but I liked it better at the granites or out the rail line where there was no one else to deal with.

  In summer the granites was always too hot so mostly it was the rez. That’s just a kind of big stone tank they built in the old days for watering the trains. There’s huge flat rocks you can jump off or lay round on. If you dive deep enough it goes all cold and green and it’s so slimy and gross on the bottom you can hardly let yourself touch it.

  At the granites there’s gnamma holes the blackfellas stored water in when it rained. Some of them’s only big as the inside of a hat. Lee and me used to get taddies up there and find bones in caves. Bird bones or bits of bandicoots or something. They wasn’t real caves, just bits that hung over, or long cracks in the side you could wiggle into and get cool. I liked the feel of the lichen stuff growing up the walls. On the far side there’s steep bits like cliffs you can monkey up barefoot if you’re game. That was a thing when we were little. Lee could get up a steep rock like a rat up a drainpipe. Later on when we got older we mostly just layed round in the sun there. Talking I spose. Or not talking at all, which was just as good.

  When we get out of Magnet we’ll have plenty of time to do either one, talk or not talk. It’s a lot of road to cover, all the way north. In Darwin we can work on a prawn trawler or head east for Queensland.

  Lee’s got one eye green and the other grey. Makes her sound freaky but it’s not like that at all. Her hair’s thick and straight and wheaty coloured. When she was little her mum used to curl it. Made her look like a bloody spastic. And maybe that’s why she snuck off and got it cut short like a boy last year. Can’t say I liked it at first. But I got used to it. When you run your hand over her head she felt like a puppy. But that was before everything went to shit. And now she’s got hardly no hair at all.

  It was nice hiking that valley. The old wheel ruts were pretty faint in places but the track wasn’t that hard to follow. It snaked about a bit, winding downhill all the way, the slope so gentle you mostly didn’t notice it. And everything round was cool and cut up with shadows. The ground was gravelly, or gritty more like, but covered over here and there with dead sticks and dry leaves. Salmon gums all bunched up like that, they make hard country look pretty. Cockies and twenty-eights flew past in mobs. I saw quail and plenty of birds I didn’t know at all. I coulda shot enough meat to feed meself for a week. Euros mostly, and an emu or two. I was happy just being there. Close to where I was headed. Keeping up a good speed. And kinda lost in my thoughts.

  Lee got grounded from Christmas to New Year’s. Worse than grounded, she was locked in. Boxing Day she cut all her hair off with dog clippers. All of it, like fully number one. And when she messaged me to let me know I couldn’t believe it, I thought she was bullshitting me. Then she sent a picture. And fuck, it was terrible. Her eyes were huge and sad and them shears musta been rough as guts cos she had cuts all over her. She was like something I seen in a movie, a girl getting ready to be burnt at the stake. It bloody frightened me. But she said it made her feel strong and pure. After a while I guess I got that, I think I understood, and pretty soon her picture put some steel in me. Still does. That’s when I knew we’d outlast all them cunts, every one of them. It was like she did it for both of us. So I buzzed my head too. Then I totally shaved it. And Christ, Mum really did her nana. Then she bawled her eyes out. Wankbag knocked me down the front steps and said I was a fucking disgrace, didn’t I have any fucking feelings for my mother. It was only then I remembered. Mum was wearing a wig most of last year. I guess it give them both a fright seeing me with a bald head. But I wasn’t thinking about any of that when I done it. I didn’t do it to be a smartarse. She stood and watched him flog me right in the street. After that I didn’t give a shit what either of them thought.

  For the longest time I didn’t know there was anything special with Lee and me. Anything more than being mates. I didn’t know about that kind of stuff, not till we was about eleven. It was one time up the rez when things got strange. That day it felt like everyone in town was up there. Those high school kids were making a big circus show of themselves. You know, rolling durries and talking loud and chucking each other in, and after a while the smaller kids got up and left and it was just us and the teenagers, and every time they laughed it was like the joke was on us. It was kind of miserable but we didn’t want to go home, so we just sat there on the shady side and didn’t swim or nothing. We camped on our towels and tried to make ourselves invisible and talked shit back at those kids in whispers so they couldn’t hear. I didn’t want a blue that day but I knew if one of them come over and said something straight out at us I woulda had to go him there and then. And maybe I would of got me block knocked off but whichever prick did it woulda took a few for his trouble. Lee reckons I’m all bite and no bark but I’m way chattier now than I used to be. Funny how talky you get when there’s no one round to listen.

  Anyway it got hot about lunchtime and soon them high school kids packed it in and it was just us at the rez. And the shade was gone from the rocks our side so we chucked off our shirts and shorts and went in like we’d been let out of prison. The water was brass monkeys. We mucked round splashing and that and she did this big lap up and back, showing off her freestyle cos she’s the kickarse swimmer in the family. Magnet school champion Auntie Marg reckons, though I never seen a trophy. After a few minutes we’re both shivering like rabbits. And just by the step rock that’s all slimy and weedy and makes you think twice about climbing out we kinda bumped together, each trying to be first up. It was a deadset accident, something you wouldna thought nothing of. I just bumped into the back of her and she turned and looked at me and put her arms round me and then we were hugging. Hugging against the cold pretty much and then holding on hard, pressed up bone to bone. And it was funny. We started laughing. Until I got a horn on. Then she got out and I swum round till it was safe and we both pretended everything was normal.

  Afterwards we was just layed there in the sun warming up, kind of shy, but I couldn’t stop looking at her. Her hair pushed back and dripping on the rock and her hand over her face for shade and her skin all goosey from the cold. Bikinis she had on. Them brown arms and legs. And the look of her there on the rocks was like a kick in the guts. After that I guess it was never really the same for the both of us.

  But nothing happened. Nothing we wouldn’t normally do. Not for a long time anyway. We was just kids, we did kid stuff. And we didn’t have things to do like people in the city. We couldn’t catch the bus to the beach or the movies or hang out in big shopping malls. We had to ride everywhere or shanks it. Go for a milkshake at the roadhouse, check out the tip. Because there was no KFC or Subway. We’d walk along the highway looking for eagle feathers. She’s fully into animals, Lee. She comes up with shit about birds and snakes even I don’t know. She says sometimes I’m a bull looking for a china shop but when she’s round I don’t feel like that. There’s people might say she talks too much but it doesn’t bother me. In our house no one hardly said a word. Jesus, it’s nice to hear someone talk.

  Before we got our own
phones Lee used to ring me from the landline at Magnet or I’d skate up to the public phone outside the roadhouse. Once or twice I called her from the shop. And we just talked shit really, like anyone else. If it wasn’t about animals it was people we knew or wished we knew or people who were hell famous. And we liked to muck round. What would Ryan Gosling look like with JLo’s head, that sorta thing. It didn’t need to be anything important. I was just happy when I heard her voice, the sound of her laughing. Deep down I did remember that feeling from the rez though. And I wanted more days like that. Once you been up close and hard like that with someone it’s tough to forget.

  I only ever got the shits with Lee the one time. We never had fights. All our arguments were for fun, just taking the piss. But I didn’t like it the time she said I walked funny. It was out by the silos she said it. And then she did my walk, right in front of me, and it got me wild. I could see it straight away when she did it along the gravel road. I recognized it. But I was fucked off. Fully. I didn’t hit her or nothing, didn’t even tell her to take it back. I just left her there. Walked away. With me hands in me fucking pockets. And later at the oval she said she was sorry. And I asked why she’d do something like that. And she said because she understood me. She got me and she wanted to show me she did. She said I had this elbows-out walk like a scorpion all burred up for a fight, so it made me look bigger. And I could of punched her in the throat then because I don’t like people laughing that I’m small. She said it was natural, that puff adders did it and blowfish too. But I didn’t need to do it round her, was all she was saying. So it turned out she wasn’t sorry at all. And I told her that, kind of hot and raw, and she admitted it was true. And it’s funny but I stopped being wild at her then. The steam just went away. Maybe I saw what she meant. Like I could relax with her. Lee’s the only one I don’t have to worry about trying shit on. She’s the only person doesn’t want to fight me, cut me down.