‘How are ya, Tim?’
The station-owners, with their broad-brimmed hats and Harris tweed sports coats, shouted for him in pubs, threw him a fiver when some notorious dingo fell victim to his traps. They listened to his stories with interest, an interest born of an involvement with his successes and his failures. When on mustering rides they met him on lonely mountain tracks, they reined in their horses to yarn with him.
They vied with each other in offers of hospitality should he visit them to trap the dingoes that harassed their sheep.
‘Spend a few weeks with me at Geehi, Tim.’
‘There’s always a room for you at Khancoban, Tim.’
He was a good fellow, an honest bloke, a chap you could rely on.
Upon the attitude of these men towards him, Tim Sullivan built a framework of confidence and pride in himself.
He had never known praise in his childhood. Now, as a man, his fame as a dogger brought him self-respect. It pleased him that educated and wealthy men spoke to him as an equal. It was his great achievement. It gave some meaning to his life, supported him in lonely moments when the howl of a dingo at night made him look up from his camp fire.
For fifty years he hunted dingoes. He followed them into remote valleys, along ridges few men had trod. He knew every cattle and sheep pad that bound the hills. He drove the few remaining dingoes back to the inaccessible places where they lived on wallabies and from where they were afraid to venture down to the sheep country. He acquired great skill and knowledge.
When Tim was sixty-five his wife died. She had been a placid, stout woman with a friendly manner. She wore aprons upon which she wiped her hands before offering one to your grasp. She would then bustle round the kitchen making tea, anxious to please his guest. The glance she sometimes gave her husband affirmed what he was saying.
He had always felt young when she was alive. He could lead his packhorse into the mountains and stay away a month tracking some elusive dingo. But he thought of his wife a lot. He was always happy to return, and felt a reluctance to leave again, to subject his stiffening joints to the sway of a saddle over miles of mountain tracks.
When she died he suddenly felt old. It was as if a cloak had been removed from him and he felt the coldness of the wind. His movements became slower, and from thinking ahead he began recalling the past.
‘I can never sleep on Sunday nights. I keep thinking about when Nell was alive. Every Sunday we had a roast.’
He sold his horses and his traps. He became an old-age pensioner and hunted dingoes no longer. The attention of those people who noticed him walking up the street carrying a sugar-bag was momentarily arrested by his carriage.
‘See that old bloke! He carries his head like he was somebody. I forget his name but he used to trap dingoes or something. They say he was famous at it. He keeps clean, doesn’t he?’
He had been confident in the continuation of his friendships. But he was of no value to the station-owners now. He was finished, out, done . . . He was an old-age pensioner who bored you with tales of your past losses. Gradually the men he had once served began to avoid him. They passed him on the street without a greeting. He began to realise where he now stood in the complex of the district’s social structure.
‘It sort of hurt me, him not recognising me. I spent a month at his place once. I was going to say to him, “Look, I’m not going to bite you for a couple of bob or the price of a drink. I just want to say ‘hullo’, that’s all.” But he just kept going.’
So it was—until the Three-legged Bitch came over from the Snakey Plains to harry the flocks in the Snowy River area.
For eight years the Three-legged Bitch roamed the ranges around the Snow Leases of the Kosciusko country. From the Grey Mare Range to the Pinch River men spoke of her. Her howl had been heard on the Big Boggy and they knew her tracks on the Thred-bo. The bones of sheep she had slain lay along the banks of the Swampy Plains River on the Victorian side of the Snowy Mountains. She had crossed the Monaro Range, some sheepmen said.
The Three-legged Bitch was an outsize dingo with a thick rusty-red coat and a short bushy tail. When she was young and inexperienced she had been caught in a trap and one of her forepaws had been partly severed. Only one toe was left on this disfigured foot and the track it made was the brand by which she was known to those who hunted her.
She ran with a slight limp, her shoulder dropping a little when the leg she favoured took her weight. It had long since ceased to be the limp of pain or defective action; now it suggested a sinister development of style and her speed and strength seemed to stem from it.
She worked alone. Sometimes her howl brought a trotting male dog to a sudden halt on a valley track and he would stand a moment with lifted nose then turn and make up through the wooden spurs to the treeless uplands where she made her home.
But those wandering dogs who answered and went to her never possessed her cunning and they either fell victim to doggers or failed to survive long periods of hunger when the snow came.
On the crown lands above the timber where the tussocky grass grows thick and gentian flowers come in the Spring, sheepmen drive their flocks up from the valleys during the Summer months and leave them to graze on areas they have leased from the government—Snow Leases, they are marked on the maps that define them.
When the first horsemen appeared on the high plains the Three-legged Bitch would retire into the remote parts where they could not follow her. From here she came out to kill.
In March, before Winter begins, the sheepmen go in and bring their flocks down to the snow-free valleys round the homesteads where the wild dogs never go.
There are no sheep on top in the Winter and then the snow lies in heavy drifts on the Snowy Plains and the dingoes and wild dogs grow lean with hunger. Yet the Three-legged Bitch always retained her strength. Some said she raided the rubbish dumps of the tourist chalets on those wild nights when her tracks would be covered by morning. A few doggers—those who delayed leaving the high valleys until snow forced them out—suspected she lived on sheep missed in the annual muster. These animals are often buried in the snow and here the Three-legged Bitch would scent them as she trotted through the still, white world of the surface. When the warm breath of them came to her through the snow she burrowed down until she reached them huddled together in terror. Then she tore the living flesh from their backs.
In the Summer she came in about every third night, favouring boisterous nights when terrified bleating would be lost in the wind and her panting was just another sound. She had been known to slaughter fifty sheep in one run when there was a gale and a full moon was whipped by clouds. She had killed for a week at Thompson’s when Thompson was away.
All the sheepmen knew her work. She always revealed her identity in the method of her killing. She was the criminal betrayed by ‘fingerprints’. Long before she became known as ‘Three-legged Bitch’ tales were told of sheep with mangled throats lying in lines on the snow leases of the high country. The unknown dog that slew them ran on the offside of each panic-stricken victim until, in that stumbling moment of weakness for which it awaited, it leapt for the throat, jerking the head backward as its teeth sank deep, and breaking the animal’s neck as it came down.
Sheep still alive but gasping horribly through torn windpipes were brought in at the muster. Many sheep were never found. Their torn bodies lay in ravines and among rocks where their last frantic run had taken them.
Angry men held quick musters and swore at the count. In the bars of mountain pubs, with the froth of beer on their stubbly lips, they slew the Three-legged Bitch with fury.
‘I’ll fix her once I get hold of her.’
‘If she gets amongst my ewes I’ll follow her to the Murray.’
She robbed them of money and for this they hated her. Each murderous raid she made, each new killing, created in the minds of those whose sheep had died from her teeth a picture of a new and more ferocious dog, an animal governed by human passions of revenge
and hate, one that for some strange personal reason had selected them as victims of her vendetta.
The kill of minor dingoes was blamed on her; kills twenty miles apart did not save her from a double accusation.
‘She killed at Groggin’s Gap on Wednesday.’
‘She came in to Big Boggy on Wednesday.’
All slaughtered sheep were hers; the kill of every dog was hers.
She killed for sport, they said. She was blood-hungry, blood-mad . . . She snarled and drove in, she ripped down then back, she leaped like a shadow, whipped round and in again, on to another one. Snarl and rip and slash and on again. This was how they saw her, flecked with blood, her snarling mouth dripping. This was how they described her one to another, from man to man, across bar counters, in sheds and homes. The instinct that drove her to kill as many sheep as she could in a run seemed to them evidence of a creature with the mind of a murderer.
Before sheep had come to this country kangaroos and wallabies had been the dingoes’ food. These animals could outrun the hunting dogs. It was only when an unsuspecting mob of wallabies was quietly feeding near trees or sheltering rocks that they were in danger. The hiding dingo suddenly burst into view fully extended and was among them with ripping teeth before they had time to gather speed. Two or three would die before the mob bounded away.
Food was life. Survival demanded the seizing of every opportunity to kill, for such opportunities did not come every day. Two slain wallabies were food for days.
Then sheep came to the mountains, helpless animals that could not escape by running. So the dingoes killed until they were tired, driven to slaughter one after another, not by a mind finding a savage joy in killing but by an instinct born thousands of years before when the animals they hunted had the speed to escape them.
The Three-legged Bitch had survived because of her skill in obtaining food, by her skill in avoiding the guns and traps and poisons of man.
She was afraid of men but there lingered in her some allegiance to them handed down from remote times when her domesticated ancestors had reached Australia with the first dark man. Sometimes from a safe distance she followed the cattle-drovers or a solitary musterer. She stood far back from the light of campfires, howling quaveringly as she watched them.
She was the last of her kind in those parts, the only pure-bred dingo that had survived the hunting of men. Yet she was incapable of feelings of revenge. That feeling marked the attitude of men towards her, the men from whose vast flocks she had taken her food.
For eight years the trappers hunted her. First for the price of her hide, then for the value of her scalp, then for twenty pounds reward . . . fifty . . . a hundred . . . They came up from the farms and the towns and the cities. There were young men with brown faces and strong arms and old men with beards. They came leading packhorses or tramping up through the woolly-butt and snow-gums carrying guns. Solitary riders with the stock of a cocked gun resting on their thigh walked their horses through the timber, across plains of snow-grass, down long ravines, their heads turning from side to side in an eager seeking. Packs of dogs, noses to the ground, followed in the confident steps of owners seeking a final payment. From some of the laden horses stumbling along the high tracks huge dog-traps clanked and swung. Men came with poison, with pellets of dough and ground glass, with stakes and snares. They shot brumbies and with bloodstained gloves upon their hands thrust poisonous crystals into the gashes made in the flanks. They poisoned the carcases of sheep, cattle . . . Groups of sheepmen rode in lines, shouting through the scrub. On the far side their companions waited with guns.
She watched them come and go.
The defeated men came down from the mountains with tales that made minor triumphs of their failures. They lied to save their pride, they boasted to impress.
‘I bowled her over with my second shot,’ Ted Arthur said. ‘She was staggering when she got up. I reckon she’d toss it in somewhere round by Little Twynam.’
He didn’t say how he came upon her at a kill on the Grey Mare Range, how he fired and missed. She went down that slope in long bounds, hugging the cover, with his kangaroo-dog at her heels, then shot into a clump of wattle. When Ted’s spurred horse reached the clump the Three-legged Bitch glided out on the far side and disappeared into the scrub. It was then he found his dog thrashing in a circle on the bloody leaves.
She had thrown up three of Bluey Taylor’s baits, and Jack Bailey always swore she lost another toe in one of his traps.
But they all came down—Ted and Bluey and Jack and scores of others. They all left the snow leases, left the mountains . . .
Five men visited Tim one day. They left their cars at the gate and stood in a group before his door, waiting for it to be opened to their knock. Tim invited them in. He knew them all. Once he had imagined they were his friends. They still were, it seemed, by the warmth of their handshakes and the tone of their voices.
‘We want to talk to you about the Three-legged Bitch, Tim,’ said one. ‘She killed seven of my ewes last night and Jack here lost five on Friday night. We’ve got to do something about it fast. She scatters those she doesn’t kill and God only knows how many we have lost. You are the only man who can get her, Tim. We want you to go after her. It won’t take you so long with your experience. Now wait till you hear our proposition,’ he hastened to add as Tim moved to speak. ‘We know you have retired from the game, so to speak, but . . .’
They all paid tribute to his skill as a dogger. Everybody said he was the only man who would bring in her scalp. They were all agreed on this. They would stake him, buy his grub, supply him with horses and packs, pay him a hundred pounds for her scalp. He was still remarkably fit. You only had to look at him. They recalled him coming down from the top in snow storms, they remembered the time he had ridden ninety-four miles between sunrise and sunset.
‘You couldn’t kill him with an axe,’ one remarked to another.
They continued to praise him, but Tim wasn’t listening. He was looking at the walls of his hut. Many things hung there, all with a tongue—an old bridle, a rusty broken trap, the skin of a dingo, faded photographs in frames of painted cork, frames of seashells, pictures of horses cut from the pages of magazines . . . How many times had he sat and looked at them! It was his life he looked at and it was a protection. He only had to turn his head and there through the window were the mountains with a thin track winding up into the cold and the loneliness, the loneliness that had often sat with him in this room.
‘You couldn’t kill him with an axe,’ he thought.
Their words were sweet to him. The pains, the aches, the digestive troubles his mind had fashioned from boredom and which seemed to lurk within him awaiting the trigger of pur-poselessness to release them, suddenly vanished and a deep breath filled his lungs with a new strength. He’d show them, these men who could discard a friendship like an old shirt. They needed him now. All the others had failed. He wouldn’t fail.
‘I’ll bring you back her hide,’ he said.
They took him down to the pub and shouted for him. They gave him advice. They all knew how the bitch could be caught.
‘You’d probably bring her into the traps using piss as a lure,’ said one of the men, a grazier whose wife, tired of life in the bush was living in a Melbourne flat. ‘They’ll follow the trail for miles.’
Tim didn’t reply. He knew all the lurks. Tie a bitch on heat so that she has to stand on a sheet of galvanised iron, catch her urine in a tin and bottle it—it would lure a male dingo into the traps or within reach of a rifle, but didn’t this bloke realise he was dealing with a slut? It had no appeal to her.
His mind even now was planning the methods he would use. He was remembering past triumphs when with unresented patience he followed a dog for months until he knew its every habit, its peculiarities, its weaknesses . . . He would do the same again.
Four days later he was following Barlees Track across Reads Flat. The Geehi flowed nearby, fed by the melting snow that sti
ll lay in drifts on the Snowy Mountains. He was making for a cattleman’s hut not far from Wild Cow Flats where the tracks of the Three-legged Bitch had been seen by several sheepmen preparing to take their flocks up above the tree-line to graze during the Summer months.
She had not yet killed, they said, though one of the men who had seen her several times trotting down from the Grey Mare Range said she was in good condition after the Winter.
‘She knows when you haven’t got a gun,’ he said. ‘She stood and watched me one day—only about forty yards away. You could tell what she was thinking.’
For two months Tim camped in the hut. He used it as a base from where he ranged the surrounding country. He had found her tracks, listened to her howl as he sat over his log fire.
He thought a lot about her while sitting before his fire. He developed a strange affection for her. Was she as merciless and cruel as they said? Was she evil? He had earned his living by killing. And he had got joy from it. He had looked down on the trapped dog with excitement. Then he had killed. Now he didn’t like thinking about this. He didn’t like thinking how he loved the admiration of other men, an admiration earned by killing.
‘There’s nothing you don’t know about dingoes.’
‘I’ll hand it to you—you’re the best dogger in Australia.’
Then he had seen her. He had been riding back with a load of stores he had bought at Jindabyne when he came to an outcrop of rock just off the track. Huge boulders leaning one against the other formed cavities that made a perfect shelter. He dismounted, left his reins hanging and began searching around the rocks for tracks. The indentation of each claw was always absent from her tracks. They had been worn down by age and travel and she left only the impression of her pads. The claw tracks of young dogs were always deeply impressed into the ground.
She had been there all right. He looked at her tracks. She was older than he thought. He noticed the mark of her injured paw. He turned and looked up the mountain side as if expecting to see her slinking among the boulders. Suddenly she shot from a cavity to the left of him. She bounded on to a flat rock and then stood looking at him for a few swift heartbeats. His gun was back with the horses. Then she was gone. She seemed to flow over the rock upon which she had been standing. She glided through the trees and rocks making of each one a cover that stood between them.
The Complete Stories of Alan Marshall Page 26
