TWO DAYS BEFORE he was due to meet Bob, Luke woke after sleeping so soundly he barely knew where the night had gone. Darkness was shifting into day and the air was still and cool. He rose from his swag and dived into the river, letting it wash over him and clear his groggy head. He lay face-up with his arms pulling slowly back and forth through the water, watching the day slowly take on more colour.
Above the tree branches, silvery locusts flitted in the early sunlight. Birds came down to the water to quench their thirst, then rose again, darting in and out of the leaves. On the edge of the river, a small freshwater crocodile hid from the sun under the overhanging branches.
As Luke lay there watching it, thinking about ancestors and the land, he held his belly firm and felt the earth breathing all around him.
Then a low thrumming noise crept slowly into his consciousness. He instantly felt a twist in his belly and knew something wasn’t right.
Listen to your belly. It will keep you safe.
He pulled himself out of the water and walked hurriedly over to his boots, pulled them on and headed out into the open field beyond the river.
A small white helicopter skimmed along the paddock. Luke could see two people in the seats, as clear as day. It slowed, hovered momentarily, and then continued whizzing across the ground. It went up and over the hills and disappeared behind them into the rugged limestone country and off the pasture lease.
There were no cattle over those hills. That chopper was going after the brumbies!
Luke broke into a jog and quickly progressed to a sprint. He ran and ran until his breath tore at his lungs, drowning out the sound of the helicopter, which chugged away behind the hills. He grabbed a post at the edge of the paddock, leapt over the fence and began to scrambling up the hill, stumbling and tripping in his haste.
At the summit he saw the chopper again, low over the tree-lined creek. It hovered up and down and zigzagged from side to side.
The brumbies cantered along the edge of the creek, staying under the cover of the trees.
Luke ran along the top of the ridge, trying to keep up.
‘That’s it, stay on the river, Rusty,’ he said out loud as he dodged, bare-legged, in and out of spinifex bushes.
The brumbies reached a bend in the creek, and the little brown mare shot out from the trees and galloped across the flat plains. Two other horses followed and soon the whole mob was racing across the hard, dry savannah, out in the open, vulnerable.
‘No!’ Luke yelled helplessly. ‘Don’t come out or they’ll shoot you!’
He ran down the side of the hill, waving at the chopper, hoping to place himself between it and the mob, but they were drawing further and further away.
He scrambled down the hillside, and began to lose control of his feet as rocks rolled out from under him. He tumbled, faster and faster, until he could barely get one foot in front of another. Low spiky bushes scratched at his legs.
Then a large rock dislodged under his foot and sent him crashing forward, trying to brace his fall with his right hand but rolling over and onwards. The thousand torturous needles of spinifex bush brought him to a sudden and mute-rendering halt. His wrist hammered with big, excruciating belts of pain, and his spike-peppered skin screeched in protest with any movement he made.
He gasped for breath, and when he finally filled his lungs he swore as loud and hard as he could. Then he gritted his teeth and with his good left arm, he managed to pull himself out of the spinifex bush, tearing his shirt to shreds and gathering more spikes in the process. He stood clutching his right arm and cursing, over and over.
You still connected, boy?
‘No, I’m bloody not,’ he yelled angrily at the land. In the distance, the horses were still galloping, leaving streams of dust behind them. The helicopter was directly above them. But it wasn’t shooting.
What did those people want? They’d run the brumbies into the ground. Luke held his wrist and began walking after them with Tyson’s voice echoing in his ears.
Don’t walk like a loser anymore.
He stopped, glanced down at his boots and considered taking them off. Then he looked at the rough country ahead of him. He decided to keep his boots on, but he pushed them as deep into the soil as he could. The immense tableland, covered in grasses, growing out of ancient, cracked brown soil, was lined with fissures that carried the sky and the rivers and the past and the future deep down into the earth, all as one, the rocks and the trees and the canyons and gorges. Luke connected his feet to that earth and felt his body become a part of it.
He brought his fingertips together and sent the long nauseating waves of pain through his wrist down into his feet and emptied it into the land.
And then he felt it: the long, deep energy of the land, his ancestors, looking after him. Feeling strengthened, he walked, keeping to the western side of the hill where the morning sun had not yet hit.
Below him, the chopper seemed to be using the gully and a fenceline to channel the brumbies. Their pace was slowing, and Luke could see the stallion nipping at the old stragglers. A ball of red rolled in a cloud of dust. The stallion barely had time to leap over the top of it.
‘Rusty!’
Luke could see the little colt lying in a twisted heap. He quickened his pace to a painful jog and ran for what seemed like hours.
‘Easy, fella,’ panted Luke, as he reached him.
The colt lifted his head and rolled his eyes in panic.
‘Easy, boy, you’re going to have to trust me.’
The colt thrashed about and tried to get up. Luke crouched down and clutched his wrist, which was making him feel queasy again. He looked away from the colt and tried to let him calm, but Rusty snorted wildly with every breath.
Luke crouched lower and turned his back completely, trying to look unthreatening. He inched backwards towards the colt, but the closer he got the more panicked Rusty became.
‘You and I are gonna be good friends, little man,’ said Luke quietly. ‘No one’s gonna hurt you.’
The colt bawled a long, terrified cry to its mob.
‘You don’t want to go where they’re going, Rusty, you really don’t.’
The colt screamed again.
Luke took a moment to think. Rusty wasn’t a big animal – he could easily pin the colt to the ground and forcibly handle him until he was completely desensitised and submissive, then use the scraps of his shirt as a rope to lead him away. Or he could help Rusty up and allow him the same destiny that awaited the rest of his mob: slaughteryards or rodeos.
Luke clutched his arm to his chest. All that channelling into the ground wasn’t easy when he was in so much pain he could hardly see straight, and trying to gentle a panic-stricken brumby at the same time. He held the back of his good hand out towards the colt. ‘Easy, fella.’
Rusty panicked. He scrambled to his feet and limped away with his nose in the air, calling desperately after the mob.
The helicopter rose up from the horizon and Luke watched helplessly as it came back for the colt, rounding him up with the rest of the mob.