Pieces of Blue by McGinnis Kerry

Author:McGinnis, Kerry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781742280370
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 1999-09-24T04:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

There was winter rain that year of 1959. It fell ahead of us so that we came onto it after weeks of scrub-cutting and hauling weakened sheep back onto their feet. It made you believe in Heaven, Dad said. But I thought it was more like an emerald sea than harps and clouds.

We could only stare at the greenness of it. We had never seen a colour so intense. It flowed to the limit of vision, lapping at the dark trunks of the trees, shooting vivid tongues into the mouths of gullies at the foot of the Dulcie Range.

Almost overnight the stock picked up. The horses raced onto camp each morning, bucking and farting. Dragon’s breath steamed from their nostrils and their bodies smelt sweet from the green feed. Their coats thickened as winter deepened and, horse-tailing of a morning, when the frost crackled underfoot, we’d push our frozen fingers under their manes to ease the pain of chilblains.

Nights were like echo chambers beneath the white brilliance of the stars. The bitter cold seemed to magnify sound. Lying snug under the Wagga blankets Dad stitched for us, we’d listen to the whoosh! of mopokes’ wings and the distant quavering howls of the dingoes. Sheep would cough and stir in the break, and sometimes the fire would flutter as it hit a pocket of sap. And always, like a song on the wind, came the background ripple of the bells. I loved winter nights – it was getting up with the morning star that was hard.

It was coming up to lambing time and Dad was looking for a place to stop. Somewhere out of the public eye, he said, which made us grin because we’d scarcely seen a soul since the wool went with the carrier, months ago, at Karuba bore. The goats were producing the occasional kid, often giving birth overnight or on the dinner-camp. We’d carry them in the wool press, which made an excellent cage, handing them over to their mothers when the flock caught up to the wagonette. The nannies happily accepted them back – but it would be a different story with the ewes, Dad said.

So we passed by the rotting posts and weed-grown mullock heap of Bellbird Mine, and the timbered flats of Two Bird Creek. Then the camp by the roadside where the dingoes got into the goats, savaging Cedric, one of the big stags, so badly that Dad had to shoot him. And we came at length, at dusk, to Unca bore, under the shadow of the Dulcie Range.

A tawny-coloured nanny we called Shirley had kidded on the track that afternoon. It was a premature birth of triplets, delivered on the move. The tiny bodies slid onto the grass and lay still, mewling weakly as Shirley licked them clean to the accompaniment of throaty love sounds.

I pulled up to wait when she delivered them, squatting at a little distance, holding Tony’s reins, one eye on the sun. It was getting late, and though

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