Headhunters

Chapter Six

Two hours’ sleep wasn’t enough, but it was all he was going to get. He got up, washed his face and pulled on his dirty clothes once again.

Harry and the others were waiting for him outside. The other men in the crew were Eric, a brash Queenslander, and Mervyn, a Tasmanian who had lived up here for the last decade.

“It’s Sleeping Beauty!” Harry announced as Milton emerged.

Milton raised a middle finger in acknowledgement.

They had cheese rolls and coffee for breakfast and then, when they were done, Harry drew lots for the shearing pens. He drew the first pen, the favoured one for this particular shed. Eric drew the second pen, Milton the third and Mervyn the fourth. They walked across to the shed.

The sun was already brutally hot. Milton put his hat on his head and tipped the brim to keep the sun out of his eyes. His gear was heavy and trapped the heat, and he was dripping with sweat within moments.

The shed left something to be desired. It was an old building, falling down in places. It was also built on stilts. There was no storage for the sheep at the back of the shed, as was the case in the best arranged facilities, so the animals were housed directly under the catching pens. That was bad planning. Milton knew from experience that sheep tended to excrete while they were being sheared. That meant that the sheep in the top pens would soil the sheep beneath them, and then Milton and the others would be covered in it when the time came for those sheep to be sheared.

“Ready?” Harry called out.

Milton laced his fingers and cracked his knuckles. “You’re in trouble today. I can tell just by looking at you. You’re exhausted.”

“What? You’re not?”

“Feeling all right.”

“Fighting talk, John.”

“Ten bucks says I do more than you today.”

“Not a chance.”

“You taking the bet?”

“Of course I am. You’re on.”

They started. The sheep were fully grown merino wethers, heavy and antsy animals who had no interest whatsoever in making the process easy. Milton got his first sheep and dragged it onto the board. He wrestled with it until he had leaned it back enough to shear a circle around its hindquarters; that way, if it defecated, the excrement didn’t stay on the wool and attract flies. Most of the animals were infested with maggots and other insects. Milton was on the third animal when he noticed that he had sickly green pus that looked like a baby’s vomit all over his hands and arms. He had sheared through a boil. He ignored it. No point in getting wound up about it. He knew that was just the start. There would be more to come.

And he had been right about the shitting and pissing. When he dragged a new animal onto the board, it dropped its guts onto the animal below. Within five minutes he had their waste over his clothes and his hands. Within ten minutes, he was covered in a sheen of sweat and sheep urine and pungent shit, the smell of it enough to make him gag even when he forced himself to breathe through his mouth.

He ignored it, working steadily, occasionally looking over at Harry in the next pen across. The big Aussie didn’t have his agility, but he muscled the sheep with power and determination. He kept up a stream of colourful invective as he worked, as if their reluctance to do what he wanted was a personal affront to him. “Come on, you little bitch. Get over here. Don’t… don’t you fuckin’ dare… don’t you fuckin’ shit on me, you little bitch…”

“What you got?” Milton called out as the sun was at its apogee.

“Ten,” Harry shouted out. “What you got?”

“One behind.”

His tone was surprised. “Really?”

“Nervous?”

He laughed. “You’ll fade away. You always do. You don’t have the stamina.”

“Got plenty.”

Harry shook his head. “No way, mate.”

Milton had improved his technique day by day, and now he was able to shear a sheep in ten minutes from start to finish. You had to be careful not to cut the animal, for the manager would complain if his animals were sent back to him with too many nicks and scrapes on their freshly shorn flanks. It wasn’t always easy to avoid, though. Some of the animals were old and wrinkled and the folds of skin were easy to catch with the blades.

They worked on, took half an hour to rest, and then worked through until dusk. The crickets were chirping as Milton finally pushed the last sheep down the chute, wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his arm, and leaned back against the wall of the pen. He was done in. Maggots writhed in the cuffs of his trousers and he had a mixture of blood and pus and lanolin on his bare arms and clothes.

He had wrapped tape around two of his fingers where he had sliced into the flesh with the blades. His wrist and elbow were taped for extra support. His legs were weak and he was light-headed from the heat. He needed a drink of water, a cigarette and a shower, in that order.

Harry was in no better shape. His arm was wrapped where he had an unpleasant purple boil. It had worsened during the day. He said, with no effort to conceal his distaste, that it was an infection that he had picked up from the sheep they had sheared at Red River Station last week.

“Well?” Harry asked as he walked over to Milton, Eric and Mervyn.

“Hundred and five,” Milton said.

He grinned at him. “No way.”

“Straight up.” He had been marking each sheep with a stroke of his knife against the wood. The board was covered in notches.

“Good work, pommie,” Eric said.

Milton looked at Harry with sudden trepidation. He realised, with an awareness of how foolish it was, that this actually mattered. “You?”

Harry grinned wider. “Hundred and ten.”

Milton shook his head. “You’re kidding.”

“I told you you’ll never beat me.”

“He’s not bad, though, gaffer,” Mervyn opined.

Eric chipped in. “First time I saw you, I said to myself, ten minutes, I said, ten minutes is as long as you’d last. I said you’d be as useless as tits on a bull, ain’t that right, Merv?”

“S’right.”

“New at this, and a pommie to boot.”

Milton’s nationality was the main standing joke between them. Mervyn and Eric, tough and gnarled Aussies, returned to it again and again. They were fiercely nationalistic, proud of their country, and it was a source of great amusement to them that he was a foreigner in a foreign land. They didn’t spare Harry, either. Their foreman might have been born in Australia, but he had been in the United Kingdom for long enough to have ceded at least a little of his heritage. He was, they suggested, infected with Englishness. He was a half-pommie.

“I’m glad I have your approval,” Milton said.

“Don’t get too comfortable. You’ve still got a face like a kicked-in shitcan.”

Milton shook his head and laughed. He took off his hat as they walked together to the outbuilding with the mess and their dorm. Harry was alongside him, unable to wipe the grin from his face. Milton had always been competitive. He hated to lose. He and Harry had spent hours in the range together when they were in the Regiment, each of them determined to demonstrate that he was more accurate than the other. Milton had won most of those head-to-head duels and, indeed, he had beaten him two nights ago when they had set cans and bottles as targets and shot them with the antique .310 rifle they kept in the Jeep. But the sheep were something else. He knew that he had picked a difficult challenge, and that, in all good faith, he was never going to be able to best him. But it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t give it a damned good go.

“Don’t know about you fellas,” Harry said, “but I could eat the arse out of a low-flying duck. What you say we get cleaned up and drive into town? We can get something to eat.”

“You paying, skipper?”

“I’m paying.”

“Hallelujah!”

Eric was kidding. Harry always paid for their food and drink after a hard day in the pens.

Mervyn looked over at him with a coy smile. “Matilda still coming?”

Harry answered with staged wariness. “As far as I know.”

The grizzled shearer chuckled. “Best news I’ve heard all day.”

Harry was protective of his kid sister. Mervyn knew that one of the best ways to wind him up was to make suggestive comments about her. Milton knew — and Mervyn knew it, too — that Matilda was more than capable of rebuffing those comments herself, but it never failed to get a rise out of her brother.

They reached the door. Harry barred the way ahead with his arm. “If you think Matilda is going to look at you twice, you’re crazy. You’ll have more luck pushing shit uphill with a rubber fork on a hot day. And if you annoy her, you’ll have me to deal with.”

“That’ll be the least of his problems,” Eric said. “She’d eat him for lunch.”