Coming Rain

by Stephen Daisley

  ‘Why’d you stop with that bitch? She get away?’

  The old man raised a hand and rubbed it across his eyes and face. ‘She took that young red with her from Yate Valley Station and got away all right. I went out with those army boys on contract to cull the emus…Got the horrors, come back,’ he said. ‘Time before that I tore the guts out of my car. Did I tell you?’

  One of the goats bleated and Abraham turned to it and raised a stick. Hushed it.

  Lew nodded. ‘Got the what came back?’ he asked.

  ‘Bad dreams. The horrors, from the war. The first one. Like a black stone in my guts and in behind my eyes a giant snake squeezing inside my head. Can’t sleep. Can’t hunt. What the hell you want dingo pups for?’

  Lew shook his head. ‘I just do.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know if I’ll shoot another. She and the young red been here all right. But they doubled back by the look of the tracks. Can you believe it?’

  The old man turned and looked at his goats. ‘Stay there Eunice,’ he said.

  Lew looked at him.

  ‘My head nanny, lead goat I always called her Eunice.’

  It seemed like a lifetime ago, joking with Painter about this old man dancing with a goat called Eunice, and less funny now. He wanted to ask why the man would call every goat Eunice, and knew he never would.

  Abraham had walked off about ten feet. He knelt. ‘Look at these boy. Those dogs been all over here.’ He reached out and touched a line of dingo tracks. ‘They got four toes and the back pad like a big dog. See the claw marks?’ He mused for a while reading the sign. ‘There,’ he said, ‘you see where she heavier on the rear pads, leaning back a little as she run? Carrying her weight over her hips, a sure sign.’ He pointed a few feet in front. ‘And further on when she lie down, her tits starting to hang. In pup. See where she make water? If you get it fresh you can smell it. That male dog he stronger but an in-pup bitch she strong too. The shape they make when they piss is different. The bitch is oval when they squat. The male they piss in a line, against things if they can and it drips back. Different pattern.’

  He pointed to another set of tracks, smaller and rounded. ‘They the feral cats,’ Abraham looked up and away into the middle distance. ‘Gone wild from the people used to live here. Lot of cats round here. Not too many birds.’

  Lew knelt next to the old man. He smelled him. Wood smoke and rank fat, an unwashed smell. He reached out and gently touched the tracks as Abraham was doing.

  ‘You don’t see the claws with the cat,’ Abraham said. ‘Retractable see, the cats’. Dingo, like a dog.’

  Abraham bent and brushed his hand over a bare piece of earth. He used his finger and the knuckles of his hand to mark out a paw print. Thumbnail marking the edges. ‘Fox, same to the dingo except they neater and smaller. Not so heavy. Don’t see the fox much when the dingo about. They kill them too. Same as any wild cat they come across.’

  The old man pointed back to the original dingo track. ‘You can see how long since they been here by which side of the track has had the wind over it. East wind comes in at the daybreak. West at sunset. They been here at least a night ago I would guess. That young red dog has been carrying his back leg where I shot him. See that?’

  Lew looked at the line of tracks and saw how the spoor on the left, the near side of the bitch’s tracks, had only three heavy and one lighter imprint.

  ‘He is healing though,’ Abraham said. ‘That bitch must’ve mothered him up good. I never seen a smarter female all the time I been trackin’ them.’ Abraham raised up and pointed to another shape about six feet away. Detritus from a ruined building was scattered about, broken timbers, pipes and old solid bricks. ‘And there,’ he said, ‘that’ll be their dinner last night.’

  Lew looked at the wide recurring S shape with sand pushed up on the lower sides of its travel. Two or three sheets of corrugated iron on the ground.

  ‘Python I would say,’ Abraham said. ‘Maybe a children’s and she been hunting him. That snake be in her belly now I would wager. If I was a betting man.’

  CHAPTER 56

  She stopped, one paw raised in mid-stride as a python came out beneath a sheet of corrugated iron for an early night hunt. The snake had not seen her and came big-eyed and dappled wet, beautiful into the night. Sweet food white-bellied slithering along towards her. Flickering tongue tasting the air upwind. The ecstasy of snake’s muscled coat. Gunya.

  It was an easy kill. She took it behind the head. Its body coiling and uncoiling as she crunched it dead. The python hanging from her mouth, she ran to the shelter of a collapsed veranda and shared the hunt with the red dog.

  When they had eaten, the bitch took them back to within sight of the old man’s house, downwind. They lay hidden in the thin covering of scrub and watched and listened. The smell of the goats and the man came in the air to them, almost something to drink. She heard metal moving in the wind. The bleating of goats in the last of the daylight; how they moved and she watched the kids. The head female had a bell around her neck and as she walked the bell clanked. The dingo saw she had a full udder and that there would be newborn close.

  Occasionally the old man would come outside to collect wood. Once he sat and milked one of the goats. She watched him as he moved about. He was a careful man and would stand still and cock his head to one side, listen and wait, studying the land around his house, his eyes going over each detail. Occasionally the young dog would glance at her, lay his chin back down on his paws. He had at last been taught what it was to wait.

  The sun was overhead when the wind swung around and their scent carried to the herd. The belled nanny became uneasy and watched where the dog smell was. Her two kids ran and knelt, pushing her back legs apart as they suckled. She stepped over them, the metal bell clanked and she began to walk. Paced the perimeter of the enclosure. Her neck craning, eyes searching the outlying country, the brush and scattered debris of the old town. All the time, the clanking of the metal bell around her neck, keeping time to her pacing.

  The dingo, staying on her belly, crawled backwards and rose to a half crouch, swung around to lope away and cross over the leap of the direction of the wind. She knew she could not be seen from behind the old brick walls and the twisted waves of burnt and buckled corrugated iron. It was simply their smell which gave them away, and of course the damned dog crows that continued to plague them.

  They trotted back towards the town. Passed across a tennis court and ran into the fallen burnt timbers and iron of a collapsed stand. Ran along the shadowed side of the main street. She sniffed the tyre tracks and footprints. Loose dust blew through the streets, wrapping around poles and the broken facades of the buildings.

  She jumped sideways, taking fright at a sudden crash of something falling. Ran in a leap to a side alley. Studied the man’s footprints in the sand, the goats’ spoor, their pellets, the line of wheel marks. She bent and sniffed at them. They had been here before her and not that long before. She squatted and pissed on their footprints. Looked back at the red dog that had almost begun to put weight on his shot leg.

  She lifted her head as she heard, from a long way off, the approach of a vehicle. Yipped at the red dog to listen and they trotted out the side streets of the town into open country. She quickly decided to circle back to the goat yards. Once again, this time upwind, and see if there was a possibility.

  They waited
in the karrik bush and watched.

  CHAPTER 57

  Abraham’s house was built with the rocks he had gathered. He had cemented them using a burnt lime mix. It was roofed with tiles and had been added to what looked like an old shopfront. He had also built a series of staggered rock walls against the prevailing easterly winds.

  Lew watched as the old man removed the harness from the goats and allowed them into a fenced enclosure. He took the piles of sandalwood from the small trap and stacked them on sheets of corrugated iron. Lew lent him a hand and Abraham seemed to appreciate it. When they had stacked the last of the sandalwood, Abraham roofed it with another two sheets of corrugated iron and weighed them down with four bricks. Lew remembered the piles of wood he and Painter had stored away for the next charcoal burn.

  ‘Thank you young fella,’ Abraham said. ‘Lew McCleod is it?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘Good good. Come in.’

  Lew followed Abraham into his house.

  ‘Your father, they call him Mac? Mac McCleod? A shearer too?’

  ‘Never knew him Mr Smith.’

  The old man studied him. ‘Abe. You can call me Abe. Sit down, I’ll make us some tea.’

  Lew sat at a long table topped with thick wooden planks.

  Abraham bent to push some sticks into an outdoor oven. It had a square corrugated-iron chimney, a parallel flue used for smoking meat. A back leg, flank and shoulder of a young goat cured dark brown was hanging there behind wire mesh and hessian. When the sticks in the oven caught he added some larger blocks of wood and soon he had a kettle boiling.

  ‘So you going to catch up with those dogs and take the pups?’ Abraham sat and poured tea into two tin cups. Added a touch of yellow milk to his cup and spooned in sugar.

  Lew lifted the cup to his mouth and blew on the tea. ‘I plan to.’ Abraham made a noise of appreciation as he sipped his tea, stirred it and tapped the spoon against the edge of the cup. ‘I been hunting dingos for thirty years more or less. Fossicking for gold and picking up sandalwood except when the horrors come. I can’t do a damn thing when that’s on me, no I cannot.’

  Lew held his hands on each side of the cup, watched the steam as it rose.

  Abraham looked at him. ‘You shear with Painter Hayes?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You the young fella he took a shine to. I heard about you. Good shearer they say. Two fifty a day and clean, day in day out. You and old man Painter always running together. Now you by yourself here?’

  ‘I am.’

  Abraham frowned, tapped the table. Touched two fingers to his cheekbone. ‘He do that to you?’

  ‘No,’ Lew said. ‘I fell off a horse.’

  Abraham looked down at his cup, nodded. ‘How many times you fall off that horse boy? Three, four times? Same horse?’

  ‘More like five or six times. Same horse.’

  Abraham laughed. ‘You all right boy. By God that Painter can fight like a thrashing machine can’t he? Never known him to be beaten and when he on the drink, Jesus look out take cover. I saw him once in Derby fightin’ the publican and two coppers. Mad drunk he was.’

  Abraham stopped laughing and looked at the table, tapped his fingers on the wood. ‘Five or six times,’ he said and nodded. Repeated to himself in approval of something he did not understand.

  Lew cleared his throat. ‘Where do you think she has gone to?’

  ‘The dingo bitch?’ Abraham looked up. ‘Well I believe, like I showed you, she circled back here. Those tracks from last night tell the story.’

  Lew nodded as the old man continued to speak.

  ‘I would say she and that young dog have run east into the Sandy. But,’ he paused and sipped his tea, ‘she will loop twice north and then southwest and come back to her ground. Where she knows best. I believe she will whelp at Winjilla. Her kind been doin’ it for a thousand years. Along those lines anyway. Good water, plenty of game and dry rock caves there. The run into the big Sandy is a ruse to fool any following, me that is. I don’t know if she even knows how good she is; by God she is clever. But those pups is close. That Winjilla. Known as Daybreak Springs now.’

  ‘Daybreak Springs?’ Lew wanted to laugh.

  ‘Yep, you know it?’

  Lew stood up. ‘I know it,’ he said. ‘But it is fenced off.’

  ‘It is fenced off, about two miles of it anyway but she will soon go around it or dig under the wire. Or get the youngster to. You going to shoot them?’

  Lew nodded.

  ‘What you got?’

  ‘A shotgun. Twelve gauge. Remington side-by-side.’

  Abraham nodded. ‘Do the job if you get close enough.’

  He stood up and walked inside the house. After a few minutes he returned with a rifle. He laid it on the table. The bolt was open. Placed a spare magazine and a brown box of shells next to the rifle. ‘This,’ he said, ‘is the old fully wooded Lee Enfield .303 Mark Three. It is reliable and accurate. The barrel is stabilised hot and cold by the wood, see. Take it.’

  ‘I have the shotgun,’ Lew said.

  Abraham touched the stock of the rifle with a finger. ‘The shotgun is all right if you are close. This,’ he tapped the stock, ‘will do the job at two, three hundred yards. Aim at the biggest part of the animal behind the front shoulder. Takes out the heart and lungs, see. Dead before they hit the ground.’ He mused for a moment. ‘Don’t aim at the head.’

  Lew picked up the Lee Enfield. He pressed the magazine release, closed and opened the bolt.

  ‘You used one before by the look,’ Abraham said.

  Lew nodded. ‘Was shown.’

  ‘Well, you take it, I have another. That used to belong to old man Drysdale anyway. Get it back to me when you can.’

  Lew reached out and shook his hand. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I appreciate this.’

  Abraham waited. He looked at Lew and Lew saw a tightening of his mouth. Something uncertain pass across his face. ‘Would you do something for me?’

  ‘I will if I can.’

  ‘I have left set traps around Daybreak. And some poison baits. When the horrors came I didn’t get back to them. Especially the traps. Would you check them for me please?’

  Lew nodded.

  He saw Abraham’s eyes become frightened as he rubbed a hand across his face. ‘I cannot abide,’ he said and his voice shook. ‘I cannot abide the thought.’

  CHAPTER 58

  Clara sat on her bed and stared at the door. Was there a stranger behind it? Had someone come to stand between her and the world? Was her mother waiting for her on the other side? Her dogs? She felt cold and when she touched her face with her stiff fingertips it was numb. Her cycle was due and had not come and she did not know why except perhaps that it was all that blood, the dogs and the filly whose name was to be Rain because she had never known the rain except that once, the night before her father came. How could he and why won’t it come?

  She still wore the moleskins, stiff with the blood of the dogs. She had not changed her clothing. The blood made monstrous patterns on her white shirt. She had not eaten and the blanket had fallen behind her. When night came she simply fell sideways on the bed and looked at the door until she slept.

  Lewis was gone and she held his voice to her, I will be back Cla
ra. She clenched her hands into fists around the words that came through the walls and window to her. The memory of his voice was fine and rounded like a river stone smooth like skin and soft and hard and wet…Him at Daybreak Springs and would he bring himself? Where was Gwen? Daddy had become a monster when he stormed in through that door and began shouting at her, have you been with him, is it true? Standing right there with that very door open and yelling no until the saliva rolled out his mouth and he turned and then soon enough after that the shooting started. Nothing making sense.

  Jimmy hiding the baby roo in a broom cupboard and Mr Painter Hayes came running, holding her and yelling at Jimmy to get a blanket and take her in the house. Hush now Miss Clara, saying this as Jimmy with his arm around her took her in. She had wet her pants, she remembered this too. And Mr Hayes saying it’s all right, doesn’t matter. It’s nothing.

  Then she remembered carrying the dogs to the pit Mr Hayes had dug. Him sweating and being so very kind to her, saying it’s all right Miss Clara. It will be all right. Everything passes. Even this and apologising for his mouth. And wanting teeth, the old man gentle with the deaths for her. She said nothing but did not smile at him. No. She said goodbye King and Swift. Oh Boofy you idiot. She could not say all their names aloud but in her mind she did and knew they would know. Saw each of their faces looking at her in adoration. Running with their love behind her, they would have run themselves to death for her. But of course she would never let that happen.

  Her father shot them. He shot them into pulp.

  She felt a wetness between her legs, pushed her fingers into her pants, looked at the blood. How her mother would have kissed her head with these bloody fingers, say that’s all right isn’t it and whisper, Zorro est arrivé. Her joking code for the arrival of their menstrual cycle. Her voice. ‘Zorro came in through the window during the night darling, with his sword in one hand and the curtains in the other. The hero arrives and now there is blood everywhere.’ Zorro est arrivé. The hilarity of that. The immense toughness of that.