The Night Is for Hunting

by John Marsden

  THE TOMORROW SERIES

  JOHN

  MARSDEN

  THE NIGHT

  IS FOR

  HUNTING

  PAN

  Pan Macmillan Australia

  The poem on page 12 is by Ross Falconer.

  John Marsden’s website can be visited at:

  www.johnmarsden.com.au

  First published 1998 in Macmillan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  First published 1999 in Pan by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Limited

  1 Market Street, Sydney

  Reprinted 1999 (twice), 2000 (four times), 2001 (twice), 2003, 2004 (twice), 2005 (twice), 2006 (twice), 2008

  Copyright © Jomden Pty Ltd 1998

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted by any person or entity (including Google, Amazon or similar organisations), in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, scanning, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

  National Library of Australia

  cataloguing-in-publication data:

  Marsden, John, 1950-.

  The night is for hunting.

  ISBN 978 0 330 361361.

  I. Title. (Series: Marsden, John, 1950-

  Tomorrow series; bk. 6).

  A823.3

  Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Papers used by Pan Macmillan Australia Pty Ltd are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  For Charlotte Lindsay (Austin),

  without whom there’d have been no Ellie

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to the following, who helped in the writing of this book.

  Rachel Angus

  Ross Barlow (Murtoa Secondary College)

  Margaret Phillips

  Cate Hoffmann

  Olivia Hoffmann

  Rob Alexander

  Gabrielle Farran

  Col McCrae

  Jeanne Marsden

  Julia Hindhaugh

  ElieWeisel

  Charlotte Lindsay

  Nickle McCulloch

  Helen Kent

  Wayne Gardam from the Hay Veterinary Practice in Hay NSW

  Tony Porter from Baynton, Hay

  ‘The One That Got Away’ – Chris Ryan

  The title of the book is from ‘The Law of the Jungle’

  by Rudyard Kipling

  Chapter One

  It was hot and dusty. The sun sat up there all day without moving. It saw everything and it forgave nothing. Sometimes it seemed like you were alone in the world, you and the sun, and at those times you could understand why people in the old days feared and worshipped it.

  I hated the sun. For months on end it had no mercy. It burned everything. Everything that wasn’t covered or hidden or fed with water, it burned.

  It was mid-December and we were forty millilitres down on the monthly average. The dams looked like muddy pools, and the stock hung around in the drying mud, more interested in staying cool than in eating.

  Three of us were working in the yards: Dad, Quentin, and me. Quentin had been late, as usual, and that got Dad snarling.

  ‘Don’t know why I bother with him,’ he said to me as we waited. ‘If that new woman’s any good she’ll have half his business in three months.’

  The heifers milled around noisily. They didn’t know what was going on but they didn’t like it. We’d penned a hundred and fifty in the yard and run about thirty of them into the holding pen, ready to put them through the race, but of course to do that we separated lots of mothers from calves. So they bellowed and moaned, as they shifted backwards and forwards. Most of the time you were so used to it you didn’t even notice, but sometimes it got on your nerves and you felt like bopping the poor things on the forehead with the back of an axe.

  Not really. They couldn’t help it. They were just being good mothers. Good mothers and loyal kids.

  We saw Quentin’s little cloud of dust as he came across Cooper’s, one of our flatter paddocks. Cooper’s is about twenty-five hectares. It’s named after a soldier-settler who took up a block near our place after the First World War and lasted seventeen years, longer than most. When the bank got his place Mr Cooper came and worked for my grandfather. He died of liver failure. His block ended up as part of our place eventually: Dad bought it before I was born, and it’s now our eastern boundary, only we turned his seven paddocks into three, that we called Burnt Hut, Nellie’s and Cooper’s.

  Quentin arrived, as usual without bothering to apologise. He wanted to lean against the crush and yarn before he started work but Dad wasn’t having any of that: Quentin charges by the hour. So it was on with the overalls and straight into it. Quentin’s arm, wearing its long glove, disappeared inside the first heifer and a moment later he was nodding and coming back to the pen so we could put the next one into the crush.

  My job was pretty easy. The three of us helped fill the smallest yard, then all I had to do was swing down the big steel bar when the heifer was in the crush, and open the gate when she was allowed into the next yard. Occasionally a calf got in there too, which didn’t matter if it was in front but did if it was behind, because then Quentin couldn’t get at the heifer. That was about the only real problem.

  There was plenty of time to think. I spent most of it watching Quentin. It always seemed so unhygienic wearing the same glove all morning. Wouldn’t you think he’d pass on infections from one cow to the next? I asked him once and he said it almost never happened. And how come the heifers didn’t mind his arm going right up them? With some cattle, the quiet ones, you could fill the race and Quentin would just walk along and do them in there, one after the other.

  Homer would say they enjoyed it. But that’s just Homer.

  I touched the end of the steel pipe that formed the nearest crossbar to me. It was a bit rough, and there was a bolt sticking out near my head. Dad was always saying we needed to take the rough edges off the stockyards. They bruised the cattle, and you couldn’t afford that. Marbled flesh was all the go, because of the Japanese market. Everything had to be perfect. It put a strain on farmers. The ones who knocked their animals around didn’t survive any more. Even Mr George had given up using a cricket stump to move them through the stockyards. What we really needed was a circular yard, because you get a better stock flow then. Homer’s place had a circular yard.

  My time of thinking-music was interrupted.

  ‘This one’s empty,’ Quentin said.

  Empty. Such an ugly word. You could tell that most farmers – and most vets – were men. A woman would never have come up with a word like that. I let the first two beasts out and slammed the gate shut on the nose of the empty cow. Quentin grabbed his clippers, closed her in from the rear, banged her tail and put the tag on. I climbed over the rails and swung the bar up on the other side, so she could come out into her own little yard, with her new sh
ort tail.

  ‘Welcome to Failure City,’ I said to her. ‘You’re not pregnant. You’ve failed as a woman.’

  ‘Ellie, are you going to get her out or are you going to have a bloody conversation with her?’ Dad shouted.

  I went red. I hoped he hadn’t heard me. I waved my hat in her face and out she went. It was true though, what I’d said. They only got one chance and if they missed, they were finished. You couldn’t have them eating all the feed in the paddocks if they weren’t breeding. They had little value to anyone once they got that tail-tag. It was off to the abattoirs. Didn’t matter if they had nice personalities or a good sense of humour or were good to tell problems to, or were really intelligent. If they got pregnant they had value. If they didn’t, they hadn’t.

  At school, in Year 8, there was this young teacher from the city, I can’t remember his name, but one day I overheard him saying something about the girls off the properties being rough as guts. But God, why wouldn’t we be? As long as I could remember I’d been watching vets shoving their arms up heifers’ bums, feeling their wombs to see if they were empty. I bet that teacher never had to pull grass-seeds out of the eyes of four hundred ewes: all that white mucusy stuff and the slightly off smell which gradually makes you want to throw up. I bet he never had to pull a dead calf out of a heifer in labour; a calf that had died a week earlier and decomposed inside the mother. And I noticed he didn’t say anything about the boys being rough. Next to some of the boys, we were Qantas stewardesses.

  The next empty heifer might have been reading my mind because she was a bit mad. When she wouldn’t move I gave her a tap with some poly-pipe. I didn’t like using poly-pipe even, but you have to have something and I don’t think poly-pipe bruises. When she still didn’t move I bopped her hard. She dug her front hoofs in and lowered her head and stared furiously at me. In the end I had to get an electric prod from Quentin’s Toyota, and even then she was stubborn. When I got her into the rejects’ yard she stormed up and down for ten minutes, like a yabbie in a billycan.

  It wasn’t that good a morning actually, not because of the heat but because there were too many empty heifers. Fifteen I think, out of a hundred and fifty. When we’d finished and let the others back in their paddock Dad and Quentin had a chat about it, leaning against our Land Rover.

  ‘Probably this dry weather,’ Quentin said. ‘They’ve lost a bit of condition.’

  I never liked asking questions that made me look ignorant but I’d learned ages ago that if I listened I could usually pick up the answers. So somewhere along the line I’d learned that heifers won’t come into season when they get down in weight. If the feed’s poor they don’t cycle: they have to be a certain weight before they rejoin. I guess it’s Nature’s way of stopping them having calves they can’t support.

  ‘Hmmm,’ Dad said. ‘Maybe I should have given them more time with the bull. They had six weeks. Probably could have done with a couple more.’

  ‘What about another month?’ I suggested.

  In the end the heifers got a reprieve. Fifteen was too many to write off that easily, so they went back with the bull for another go. If they still didn’t get pregnant at least they could have a good time trying.

  Today we party, tomorrow we die.

  The very next day the rain came, good soaking rain that filled the dams and greened the country, even if it was too late to give us much feed. But I never found out if the heifers got in calf or not, because less than a month after that the soldiers invaded and normal life ended forever. There was no time then for carefully culling poor performers as part of a long-term programme to improve the fertility of the breed. No time for long-term programmes of any kind. From the day the bombers roared overhead, and the tanks and convoys rolled down our highways, there was time for one thing only, and that was survival. All our energy went on that.

  Sometimes there didn’t even seem much point to it. Why go through hunger, cold, exhaustion, burns, bullet wounds, the death of family and friends, when at the end of the day the invasion had been so successful that we had nothing to look forward to anyway?

  I changed my mind about everything every day. OK, I know that’s what being a teenager’s all about, but it was a thousand per cent worse since the war started. So one day I’d think ‘Yes, we’re not going so badly, there’s still hope, we can win.’ The next day it was more like ‘Oh God there’s no hope, we should give up. If only we’d been caught in the first place it would have been better.’ It was unfair: we’d been saddled with this huge responsibility just because we hadn’t been caught. Because of this incredible fluke we were expected to put our lives on the line.

  On the line? Three of my friends had put their lives over the line. They were dead. I had lost them. They were my friends and they were no longer on this earth and I would never see them again in this life, and it was all because of this rotten scummy war.

  It seemed so random. I don’t know how Robyn and Corrie and Chris were chosen, if choosing was how it worked.

  The stupid thing was that we didn’t have to be here. I kept dreaming of our days in New Zealand. It’s not like we did nothing there but laze around watching TV, sleeping, eating chocolate, and partying. Well, OK, we did do all of those things for a while, but we did some useful things too, and worked quite hard, visiting schools and raising money for the war, stuff like that. Until the pressure was put on us again. Colonel Finley, the New Zealand officer who seemed so powerful in saying how this war should be run, could be a smooth talker sometimes. I don’t blame him for getting us to come back, but I wish it had worked out better. I still burned with anxiety to know what happened to the Kiwi soldiers we lost near the airfield. I was proud of what we’d achieved at the airfield, and how we’d survived by using our own brains and taking some big risks, but it hadn’t helped us find Iain and Ursula and the others.

  And now here we were in hiding. Again. Half of Stratton was ruined: bomb craters and blacked-out streets and deserted houses. At least my grandmother’s suburb wasn’t too bad, and her place was OK It was hardly damaged at all, except for a bit of vandalism. But we were leading a pretty grotty life. We didn’t see too many people. Our only neighbours were young kids living much the same way we did, not far from us, and we knew how fierce and dangerous they could be. Sometimes I imagined the streets of the cities and the paddocks of the countryside teeming with feral humans like them, living in burrows and cellars, coming out at night: shadowy half-wild creatures.

  Certainly the kids were as scary as the soldiers who patrolled the suburbs on their motorbikes.

  All in all, I’d rather be back in Hell. Well, I’d rather be on the farm, helping Quentin and my father move the heifers through the race. Failing that, I’d settle for Hell. I missed that peaceful wildness, that deep sanctuary. But I knew we couldn’t just cruise on back there. I had to keep reminding myself of that, and push away the temptation to run out of the house and straight out of Stratton. I knew we didn’t dare go back into the bush yet, didn’t dare go near Wirrawee. After our little effort at the airfield they’d be looking for us till we were old age pensioners.

  And the truth was that while we were in Stratton we could do a bit more to help the war effort. There were still targets in Stratton: soldiers everywhere. I just hoped there weren’t any soldiers in Hell.

  But there was another reason I didn’t want to go back in the bush for the time being. It was because I thought it might be claustrophobic, stuck in the basin of Hell. I had a feeling the five of us might end up in an enormous fight. Until recently in this war we’d got on pretty well, but at the moment things were tense. In Stratton we could get away from each other, and that seemed important. I still wanted them all near me, with me. Needed them with me. But I also needed some space.

  The two who especially weren’t getting on well were Lee and me. I was so angry at him. Our relationship had hit a problem. And unlike some problems, which are about trivia and in the long run don’t matter much, this was extremely hor
rible and serious. I didn’t know where it was heading. I just knew our relationship had hit the gravel and rolled end over end, and was still rolling.

  So although I gave myself an occasional little holiday by going back to those lost days before the war, I couldn’t do it for long. My memory was fading. I started out deliberately thinking about my parents every day, as a way of keeping in touch with them, with the way life used to be. But it had become harder and harder. There’d been so many days when I was too scared or too tired, and other days when I just forgot. Then, when I couldn’t get a clear picture of how they looked I’d panic, and try desperately to remember every single detail of our lives together. That day with Dad and Quentin the vet, preg-testing the heifers: for some reason I could relive that so realistically that when I closed my eyes I felt I was there again. But there were only a few memories I could call up like that. Most of everything else had ebbed away. Getting with Steve at the Year 9 Social, digging out the old well, trying to reach the top apples in the tree, lounging against the Aga while I talked to Mum about the Nelsons’ horrible feedlots or the problems with Eleanor and our netball team or whether my short silver dress would do for the party at Robyn’s ... I could remember those moments but I couldn’t smell them or taste them or feel them any more.

  Other people used tranquillisers or grog or drugs I suppose, to shut out awful grey realities. I didn’t have those but I wouldn’t have taken them anyway. I clung to my daydreams, and tried to use them. They weren’t enough, not by a long way, but they were something. On the really depressing days they were all I had.

  Daydreams could be dangerous though. On my school reports teachers wrote ‘Needs to concentrate harder’. It didn’t bother me much back then. But in this war concentration became a matter of life and death. You missed hearing a twig break, you were dead. You ignored a truck parked off the side of the road, you were caught in a trap. You blocked out your sense that something wasn’t quite right, and the next minute you were lying on the ground with a gun pressed in your neck.