The Call of the High Country

by Tony Parsons

‘Staying the night up here.’

  ‘I think we ought to leave that until after we are married,’ he said. ‘It might be more than a man could stand.’

  She blushed and he pressed her closely to him.

  ‘Speaking of which, when is the marriage to be?’ he asked. ‘I can’t guarantee my impeccable conduct for too much longer.’

  ‘I was beginning to think you only wanted me for my domestic value,’ she said and chuckled.

  ‘You’re having me on. I don’t give a damn for all that. I’ve always managed on my own. I just want you.’

  She reached up and ran her fingers through his thick brown hair. ‘We’ve never talked about children. I suppose you do want children?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. No good a man busting himself to make a good life and then have nobody to leave it to. I reckon three or four kids would be great. This is a good, clean, healthy place to rear children, and I think you’d make a great mother. But enough of that. We’d better get going if we want to make it down the mountain before nightfall.’

  So they came down off the peak of Yellow Rock, both in a kind of daze.

  ‘How on earth am I going to concentrate on getting down this slope now that I’m engaged?’ she said.

  ‘You’d better,’ he replied. ‘I don’t want to lose you now.’

  Chapter Four

  Anne and Andrew had a very brief engagement. They were married three months after Andy’s proposal in the small church near where Anne had been brought up. It was the second trip to Sydney for Andrew. After Anne had agreed to marry him, he had driven down to meet her parents, Jack and Mavis Gilmour. Jack was a no-nonsense fellow who ran a small printing business. His hobbies were fishing and following the St George rugby league team. The two men hit it off immediately. Jack was impressed by Andrew’s honesty, and admired the fact that he didn’t make out he was better than anyone else simply because he owned a sheep property.

  Looking back later, Anne thought it was a lovely wedding. It was not large in terms of numbers, but those who were there were all dear friends and close relatives. Andrew looked terrific, big and strong and even more ruggedly good-looking in his smart attire.

  Paddy Covers was Andrew’s best man. Paddy, old now, was Andrew’s automatic choice, having been more a father to him than his own father had been. Paddy was the greatest man he knew – apart from Tim Sparkes, who was away to blazes on the rodeo circuit.

  Andrew couldn’t believe how beautiful Anne looked as she came down the aisle on the arm of her father. He reckoned the night he met her at that dance was the luckiest night of his life. Later, with Anne dressed in her going-away outfit, he thought it seemed incredible that she had become his wife.

  Andrew and Anne had had a couple of minor differences of opinion about the wedding arrangements. Andrew agreed to have the wedding in Sydney as he felt it was the bride’s prerogative to choose. He demurred about going away for a honeymoon because of the cost, not only of the honeymoon itself but also because he would have to pay someone to look after High Peaks while they were away for the three weeks Anne proposed. When it got down to the money, Anne shamed him by offering to pay for half. This he could not countenance.

  For her part, Anne, while very much looking forward to becoming mistress of High Peaks, realised full well that this was probably the only time she would be able to have a decent holiday with Andrew. His idea of a break was a day at a sheepdog trial or campdraft, but she finally got him to agree to a honeymoon in Queensland with the lure of a visit to the Sparkes property north of Rockhampton.

  So as she left the wedding reception on Andrew’s arm her heart was singing. There were to be three lovely weeks in Queensland and then it would be back to High Peaks. What more could a girl ask of life?

  Tim Sparkes was a horsebreaker who followed the rodeo circuit and was regarded as one of the best all-round cowboys in the country. When he wasn’t attending rodeos and breaking in horses, Tim was helping out on his Uncle Bob’s cattle property near Rockhampton. Bob Sparkes maintained a top stud of stock horses, and Andy reckoned that as they were within a bull’s roar of Rockhampton it would be downright bad manners not to drop in on Tim – and have a look at the horses Tim was always raving on about.

  Bob Sparkes was a bachelor who ran a heap of cattle and had time for only three things in life – stock horses, whisky and his nephew, Tim. He was a lean, sandy-haired bushman with grey eyes that seemed to bore right through you. Tim had told his uncle a lot about Andrew MacLeod, and Bob reckoned his nephew wouldn’t have been laying it on. For all Andy’s size, Bob thought MacLeod sat a horse as well as anyone he had ever seen. He was even more surprised to find that Anne, originally a city girl, could sit a horse pretty well, too.

  Bob insisted on taking the newlyweds to see the whole property. Bearing in mind the size of the place, this was something of an undertaking, especially for Anne. Andrew had shorn and broken in horses on some very big properties, but Anne had never been on a property so large, nor had she seen so many cattle. By the end of the day she was feeling very rocky. And that was not the end of it. After dinner – which Bob and Tim threw together and was mostly comprised of pieces of steak as large as a plate – there was the yarning. Over several glasses of whisky, Anne heard so many wild and often improbable stories that her head was spinning. She whispered in Andrew’s ear that if she didn’t get to bed soon, she would fall asleep right there in her chair.

  The next day Bob ran in about thirty steers so they could have an on-the-spot campdraft between Andrew and Tim with himself as judge. Andy cleaned up Tim and won the unofficial ‘championship’. Bob told Anne, who had sat on a horse beside him for the whole time, that it was one of the best days he had ever put in.

  ‘You’ve got a great lot of horses here, Bob,’ Andy said when they had been at it for most of the following day. ‘A real even lot of horses. Some of those mares are the best I’ve ever seen, and there’s a couple of colts that could be real bottlers. That bay colt could make anything. They’re such a good-tempered lot, too. There’s good horses in our Hunter River Radiums but some are a bit hyper and cattle-mad. Whatever else you put in them has done the job.’

  Bob grinned. The big man knew his horses all right. ‘Next time Tim is heading down your way I’ll send you something along with him,’ he said.

  ‘Better let me know what you want for it, Bob. Money isn’t real plentiful back home. I’m still paying off the bank and blasted death duties.’

  ‘You send him a good horse and I’ll pay for it,’ Anne said. ‘It will be my wedding present to Andy.’

  ‘Forget the money, young woman,’ Bob said gruffly. ‘I can tell a man who appreciates good horses, and let me tell you that I’ve never seen a better horseman than your new husband. Besides, Tim tells me he can stay at your place any time. The horse will be a wedding present from Tim and me.’

  So that was how Andy came to get his first Sparkes colt. Maybe now he would be on the road to breeding the kind of horses he had always set his heart on.

  ‘Good old bloke, that Bob,’ Andy said as he and Anne drove away from the Sparkes property that afternoon. ‘Got a big lump of country with a heap of second-rate cattle yet he’s got as good a lot of horses as there is in the country. I’m afraid that the property is going downhill, though. Did you see the fences? Needs a young, active bloke to pull it into shape. You’d think Bob would get Tim to stay and run the place. Either that or employ a good man. The old fella must be worth a heap. The blasted whisky has got the best of him and he doesn’t care any more … except about his horses. If only Tim could stop chasing rodeos around the country.’

  ‘They sure are a pair,’ Anne said. ‘I heard Bob telling Tim that you were strong enough to hold a bull out to piss and yet you had hands like a feather on a horse.’

  ‘I’m shocked, Anne. I never thought I would hear you say something like that.’

  ‘Only repeating what I heard,’ she laughed.

  ‘Well, I hope you never hear
some of Tim’s yarns. You wouldn’t believe the stories he tells from life on the circuit.’

  Andy and Anne talked and laughed all the way back to High Peaks.

  ‘I must say it’s been a lovely three weeks,’ Anne said when they finally arrived home. ‘Now it’s time to do some work before school starts again.’

  And work she did. Most of her goods had been moved up to High Peaks from the house she had been renting in town. It had been decided, mainly for financial reasons, that Anne would carry on teaching for the time being. She had only another three weeks before that came around. She loved teaching and, as much as she wanted to spend time at High Peaks, she didn’t want to give it up. She worked ferociously those first three weeks, because after school began she would have only weekends and holidays to get High Peaks homestead and its surrounds the way she envisaged it all could be. There was so much she wanted to do that she almost didn’t know where to begin. The vegetable garden had languished for years, and she set aside two hours every morning to extend Andy’s limited efforts. There was plenty of water because Andy had installed a petrol engine down by the creek which pumped water into an overhead tank and provided good pressure for quite an area of garden. Andy carted in sheep manure and dug it into the soil, and Anne planted more silver beet, tomatoes and lettuce, and added a variety of herbs, such as thyme, sage, parsley and mint. The rest of the garden was in something of a mess, too, but the vegetables were given priority. ‘They will save us some money and there’s nothing like eating your own home-grown produce,’ she said as she surveyed the fruits of her first week’s toil. Andy looked at her admiringly. She was dressed in a pair of brief shorts, a blouse and a wide-brimmed straw hat. She certainly looked a picture.

  Anne also mastered milking the cow, and in a matter of weeks she had reduced her milking time to just over ten minutes. She was determined to get it under ten minutes, and before the next school holidays came around she had achieved that goal.

  After she finished in the garden she would cook and sew in the big, cool house. All the curtains needed replacing and some of the rooms needed repainting. Andy repaired the poultry pens and yards to keep the foxes out and Anne purchased a new lot of chickens. There were not many of the old brood left and Anne wanted to have her own fresh eggs and cockerels for the table. She would never kill a fowl but didn’t mind the plucking and cleaning. She also took over the care of the kelpie litters. If there were horses in work or being prepared for campdrafting, she fed and watered them, too.

  When Andy came home from a day in the hills or from shearing or horsebreaking somewhere in the district, Anne had usually taken care of most of the outside chores. This gave Andy more time to handle his young dogs or to work a horse. Anne loved to watch him at work with his dogs. There were two paddocks set aside for this, and fresh sheep were kept on hand in both for when overworked sheep needed resting.

  What with all this work on top of her teaching, Anne had no trouble sleeping. Sleep had often eluded her before she and Andy were married because she had been so excited with the anticipation of marrying the man of her dreams. It had been even worse before they were engaged because she would lie awake for hours wondering whether Andy really wanted her. Now she slept right through the night and often didn’t even wake when Andy got up. She requested that he wake her when he rose, even though that was always before sunrise. Andy could never be found guilty of being in bed when the sun came up.

  Andy soon realised that he needed Anne to be able to look after High Peaks when he went away shearing. She would not entertain the idea of getting anyone in to look after the place. She knew it would be lonely without Andy, especially at night when the wind made the she-oaks moan right along the creek and the mopokes called from high up in the hills, but it would have to be endured.

  One of the really scary things about living on High Peaks, and, Anne realised, the land generally, was that you had to keep your eyes open all the time for snakes. The brutes were plentiful throughout the district, especially along the creeks. There were browns and blacks and even, way up on the peaks, carpet snakes. Blacks were bad enough but seemed to get out of your way quicker than the browns. These, Andy drummed into her, were deadly mongrels. He had lost several good dogs to snakes, mostly browns, and, despite what the National Park rangers and others said, he reckoned the only good snake was a dead one. So Andy bought Anne a .410 shotgun and taught her how to use it. He cut up pieces of an old hose and got her to shoot at those. But shooting a snake in a real-life situation was quite another matter.

  Anne’s first confrontation came one Saturday when she was on her own and Andy was away up in the hills. She walked out the back door to bring in some washing and there, stretched out on the lawn, was a very large brown snake. Her heart missed a beat. She had been just about to step off the verandah. She stopped and slowly backed into the house. Oh, God, don’t let it move, she thought. If it moves and goes under the house, I will die.

  She took down the gun and rammed in a shell. On tiptoe she walked back out to the verandah. The snake was still there, stretched out in the sun. Its tongue was flicking in and out and its head was moving slowly from side to side. Anne lined the gun’s sight up just behind the head and pulled the trigger. The explosion was followed by a violent thrashing from the snake. It coiled itself into knots and still seemed very much alive. Anne pushed in another shell and, walking a little closer, fired again. She leant against the wall of the house for support. Her heart was racing. She was between crying and laughing. The shock of seeing a big snake so close still affected her, and now she had killed it! This, she reflected later that day, was just another test she had to pass on her way to becoming a real country woman.

  When the snake had stopped thrashing about, she picked it up on the rake and hung it over the back fence. Andy saw it there that evening. ‘Well done,’ he said as he came into the house. ‘Did he give you any trouble?’

  ‘No trouble, Andy,’ Anne answered easily. She wasn’t going to tell him about the glass of brandy she’d had to drink to calm her nerves. ‘Just lined up on the brute and fired.’

  Andy nodded. It was what he had expected of her.

  Before the summer was over Anne had killed two more browns and a massive goanna which had been taking eggs from some of the hidden nests the hens had made outside their yards. The second big brown had been coiled up in the sun near the water trough in the horse yard and was still there when Anne crept back with the shotgun. When Andy returned from the hills that evening, the snake was hanging over the fence of the horse yard. After that episode he was sure that his new wife was going to be okay. But it took much longer than that for Anne to overcome her fear of snakes.

  When Anne went back to teaching there was no time to do more than a couple of early jobs – like milking and feeding the pups and chickens – before breakfast, and then it was time to drive into Merriwa. The evenings were better, especially in summer when it was light until after seven. Later, as the days closed in and it was dark not much after five-thirty, there was little time to do much else outside feeding-up after driving home from Merriwa. In winter, it was sometimes pitch-dark when she finished her jobs with the aid of a lantern. When Andy was home, things were much more manageable.

  Although summer could be trying with its heat and flies and snakes, it was winter that really tested her. This was when Andy went away shearing at his Queensland sheds and did not come home for months at a time.

  She hated him being away. She missed him so much, and she knew how hard he worked to earn money. He had to ‘ring’ all the sheds he worked in, and he worked like the devil to do it. It was hard coming home to a house with no Andy in it. When he was away, the kelpies had to be let off for exercise. They loved the weekends, when Anne would take them along with her for big gallops. Sometimes they would go as far as the creek where Andy had first introduced her and Kate to eel-bashing. The young dogs would charge into the water then swim around in tight little circles before emerging, water dripping ever
ywhere, to roll around in the grass. The older dogs would stand halfway into the water, lapping sedately. Ben drank like a dingo, submerging his snout in the water and dashing up water in quick grabs. But Ben was a law unto himself. Sometimes, Anne thought, he was more human than dog.

  She would sit on a log and after the dogs had finished their splashings in the creek they would all sit nearby and watch her with their agate-coloured eyes. At her first movement they were up and ready for anything. She also tried to watch the sheep for flies, and she often rode out to inspect their small Hereford herd. One thing Anne never did was ride up Yellow Rock alone: Andy had expressly forbidden it.

  ‘I would sooner lose every wether on High Peaks than have you ride up there without me,’ he had told her.

  There were several people prepared to help Anne out while she was on her own and who called in regularly to see her. Paddy Covers was now a very old man, but he was still quite sprightly and was sometimes accompanied by his son, Shaun. Paddy had been the manager of High Peaks when Andy was a small boy. He came from a pioneer family and lived on a small area of country just the other side of the turn-off to Poitrel, the Whites’ property. Paddy had reared a large family, mostly daughters. Shaun was his youngest son. Andy owed most of what he knew about sheepdogs, horses and stock generally to Paddy. Paddy’s youngest daughter, Eileen, had had her eye on Andy for years and nothing would have pleased old Paddy more than to have her marry his protégé before he passed on. But it hadn’t happened, and Eileen was looking elsewhere. Shaun was the only one of the boys who had any real aptitude with sheepdogs and he worked dogs at the local trial. Shaun was always looking to earn extra money, so Andy employed him when he needed another hand. He reckoned he owed it to old Paddy to help any of the Covers.

  The Campbells, Young Angus and Jane also came to see Anne, together at first, but as time progressed Jane began to come on her own. The two women had become very friendly since Anne had first invited Jane up to see her. She had waited until the interior of the house was repainted and the new curtains were in place along with some new furniture and rugs she had purchased from her savings. The once neglected gardens had been tidied up, and in some cases new shrubs had replaced ailing specimens. The vegetable garden drew special praise from Jane.