Shepherd Read online

  One time Carver stole a woomerang that wouldn’t come back to him. I doubt I could have done better even if he’d let me try, for it must take years to master. In the end he burned the thing.

  Gyp is getting nowhere, roaming hither and thither, her nose skimming the dirt. Our quarry must be upwind. All I can smell is bush and native squirrel musk, and… What’s that?

  Corruption. The faintest whiff of corruption.

  My throat tightens as I click my tongue, calling Gyp to heel. There’s something dead hereabouts. It can’t be too close or Gyp would have found it already but I’m scared now. Scared that it might be one of my sheep. Or worse—that I’m smelling Carver.

  Is this where he died?

  The stench isn’t easy to follow; it comes and goes on the breeze. Crushed undergrowth releases a spicy scent that masks the stink of dead flesh. Suddenly the brush parts and I stumble into a small clearing that looks man-made with its cut wood, white ash, old fire-pit…

  Who was here and when? Their tracks are long gone. They’ve left no midden. I’m casting about, looking for traces, when I catch the faint buzz.

  Is it bees or flies? If it’s flies, then I’m listening to the sound of death.

  I follow the noise back into the bush, where I soon pass a marked tree. Someone has cut footholds into its trunk. The blacks do that; I’ve seen such trees before. One, I recall, had a hive in its branches—but there’s no hive in this tree. The buzzing comes from somewhere else.

  I stop to finger the lowest foothold, which isn’t fresh. It looks days old. Weeks, perhaps. The blacks weren’t here last night.

  That will please Joe, who’s even more frightened of ’em than he is of Carver. I don’t know what to think. I’ve heard tales that would turn your stomach, but the signs I’ve found have never unnerved me. If the blacks eat each other, I’ve seen no hint of it. The worst I’ve seen is a bit of roasted snake skin, licked clean.

  As my breath hits the trunk, something stirs there. It looks like animal fur, grey and very fine. Opossum fur? Perhaps someone climbed the tree to hunt an opossum.

  ‘Gyp!’ She’s disappeared into the bush but comes quickly when she hears her name. Then she follows me towards the hum of massed insects, panting and grinning. She wouldn’t be grinning if there was anything to fear.

  There’s a break in the trees again, where a great wedge of exposed rock slopes gently down to a shaggy thicket. At the base of this shallow cliff, one tree is engulfed by flies.

  ‘God save us.’ I know instantly what I’m looking at, though I’ve never seen one before. There’s a platform resting in the tree with a man-sized bundle on it, sheathed in wood and bark.

  That’s a corpse, and it isn’t Carver’s. No black would have taken so much trouble with him.

  If Carver perished hereabouts, he wouldn’t have escaped the wild dogs.

  I reach the hut at midday with nothing to show for my efforts but a scratch on one hand. Even Gyp is downcast. We’ve both been outwitted; somehow the wild dog escaped us. Perhaps it doubled back on its own scent.

  Joe won’t be pleased. I’ve wasted a whole morning.

  As we hit cleared ground Gyp begins to bark and I look up from my boots, which need new soles.

  There’s a stranger sitting on the woodpile by the hut door. His face is thin and scrubby; his brown curls are matted. His trousers are like mine—scattered with arrows—but his shirt is of red flannel. His wrists and ankles are like mine, too, marked by the scars of manacles and leg-irons.

  ‘Don’t shoot!’ He has a thick Irish accent. ‘I’m a friend—I’ll not hurt ye!’

  My gun’s already half-cocked and aimed at his head. Squinting down the barrel, I can see he’s no great age—a dozen years older than me at most. His beard is sparse. Patchy. He’s all grime and sunburn.

  ‘Don’t shoot,’ he says again. ‘I’m sent by Mr Barrett.’

  Mr Barrett owns the flock, the hut and the land they’re on. All our supplies come from Mr Barrett. He sends a cart once a month from his homestead ten miles south.

  He has five hundred head of sheep, three horses, two cows and half a dozen staff, most of ’em lags. He’s been here five years and it shows. Though born a gentleman and book-learned, he’s losing his quality.

  His speech is as rough as his hands these days.

  ‘He said you had a feller run off,’ the stranger adds. ‘Name o’ Carver?’

  Carver. God damn him. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well—I’m yer new Carver.’

  The last thing I want is a new Carver. But he knows the name and that reassures me. Slowly I lower my gun.

  ‘Ssht!’ I tell Gyp, who falls silent.

  ‘I’m thinkin’ you’ll be Tom Clay.’ The stranger grins. One of his teeth is missing; I wonder if he lost it to scurvy like me.

  He nods at the dog and says, ‘This’ll be Gyp.’ Then he looks at Gyp and jerks his head in my direction. ‘Unless you’re Tom Clay and he’s Gyp?’

  What a fool. Does he think he’s funny?

  ‘I’m Tom Clay.’

  ‘And I’m Phelim Cavanagh, but you can call me Rowdy. Everyone does.’ He gets up and strolls towards me as if he owns the place. ‘So where’s—ah—Joe, is it? Joe Humble?’

  ‘Joe’s with the sheep.’ And won’t like this cove one bit. Joe’s not over-fond of the Irish. Or of jokes. Or of strangers.

  Not that we see many strangers. It feels queer to be looking at a new face.

  Rowdy’s eyebrows climb his forehead. ‘I thought Joe was hut-keeper?’

  ‘He is.’ I make an effort. ‘But I had to chase a wild dog—’

  ‘—and you’re down a man,’ Rowdy finishes with a nod. ‘Did you kill it?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘Ah, well. Next time,’ says Rowdy, brisk and bright. ‘So what now? Cup o’ tea?’

  Tea. Curse the day. A wagon must have brought him and I missed it.

  ‘Did you bring any?’

  He seems puzzled. ‘What?’

  ‘Did Mr Barrett send tea in the wagon with you? Or sugar?’ We need ’em both.

  ‘No, but I brought meself,’ he says, all jaunty and strutting. ‘What else could you want?’

  What else? Why, to go back to England. Barring that, I want my mother, my freedom, a house with windows, a horse, a dairy cow, some chickens, and plum pudding for dinner every day.

  One thing I don’t want is a strange lag poking about asking questions.

  ‘We need to move the hurdles,’ I tell him, and go to put the gun away.

  2

  BACK HOME, we couldn’t afford brewer’s yeast for the bread even when we could afford a kitchen. Sometimes Ma would make her own yeast with flour and water and hops. On winter nights she would take it into bed with her, to keep it warm.

  When I was cold I had to sleep with the dogs. The yeast was more important.

  There’s no yeast in damper—just flour and water and salt. The skill is all in the kneading and the baking. An hour’s kneading goes into every good damper, and a foot of hot ash into every good bake. I can lay a fine baking fire and time it to perfection, but I can’t knead like Joe, who has bigger hands with more strength in ’em.

  I’ve been kneading for more than an hour and the dough still isn’t smooth enough.

  The fire crackles. The door stands open. Beside it, the woodpile is now almost as high as the eaves. Beyond the woodpile, the hurdles have vanished—there’s just a big patch of trampled grass and sheep shit.

  The new fold stands hard against the hut’s back wall. It’s all of a month since the sheep last grazed there, because it unsettles ’em to smell the wooden frame nearby. Joe calls this frame the gallows, though I think it looks more like a flogging triangle. We hang the carcasses on it to bleed out before skinning.

  Mr Barrett doesn’t grudge us fresh meat as long as we don’t eat too much of it.

  Moving the sheepfold took a long time because the ropes were so tightly knotted and Rowdy doesn’t understand rop
es. He’s not a seaman. He’s a city boy who’s never worked with horses or on a farm. Raised in Dublin but gaoled in England, he came here a year ago, lagged on a seven-year stretch for passing counterfeit coin in a pub. I’ve learnt more about him in four hours than I’ve learnt about Joe in four months because Rowdy never stops talking. He talked while we moved the hurdles. He talked while we split and stacked the wood. Sometimes he asked questions: how many sheep in the flock? When would the next delivery come? What was I lagged for?

  To shut him up, I sent him off to the creek for water, but he’s on his way back now. I see him out there, lurching and stumbling, a full bucket dragging down each arm.

  The sun is low. The shadows are long. Joe will be returning soon.

  ‘Mother o’ God!’ Rowdy staggers over the threshold and lets his two buckets drop to the floor. Then he collapses onto the nearest bed. ‘Sure, but that was a weary walk,’ he complains. ‘Why is this hut not close to water?’

  ‘The brook floods.’

  ‘Oh.’ He’s silenced, but only for a moment. ‘So…poor old Sam Jenkins, eh?’

  What?

  ‘I saw yer two headboards down by the brook,’ he says. ‘Sam Jenkins and Walter somebody…’

  God ha’ mercy. ‘They’re dead.’

  ‘I should bloody well hope so.’ Rowdy sits up. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Blacks.’ I’m lying of course, but I don’t trust him. I don’t trust anyone.

  Rowdy nods. ‘Did they get you too?’ He taps his own temple in the exact spot where Carver struck me with the musket. I hardly feel the scar now that the scab’s gone.

  ‘I fell,’ is all I can think of to say. I don’t think he believes me. When he looks at me sideways, I turn back to my kneading.

  ‘You’re doing that wrong, boy.’ He jumps up, comes over and jostles me aside. Then he plunges his hands into the dough. ‘See—you’re treatin’ it like a gentleman,’ he explains. ‘You’ve gotta flog the bastard. Harder you punch, sweeter it tastes.’

  I’ve never met a man in this colony who didn’t think he had the knack of good damper. But I’m not about to argue. If Rowdy wants to make the bread, he’s welcome to it.

  He pounds the dough enthusiastically, the way my father used to pound me. ‘There,’ he says. ‘Now you try.’

  I try. He shakes his head.

  ‘Put yer back into it!’ he exclaims. ‘Look at the damn thing, layin’ there like Lady Muck! Great big lazy white lump—don’t you hate it? Don’t you want to make it pay?’

  I just look at him. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, there must be someone you hate. Someone you want to thrash.’

  There’s someone, right enough. Someone I wish I’d killed. It must be written all over my face, because Rowdy smiles crookedly and points at the dough, saying, ‘Pretend that’s him.’

  Come to think of it, Obadiah Johnson’s face was exactly like a lump of dough. The rest of him was like a bag of suet or a giant boil full of pus. He plagued the life out of every lag on the Lord Lyndoch because he was a thief without conscience and the most vicious bugger on board. I saw him steal tobacco from the mouth of a dying man. I saw him ‘accidentally’ scald five shipmates with hot tea. I heard him tormenting more boys than I can readily name, and only dodged his attentions myself (more or less) by giving up my ration of lemon juice while the ship’s supply held out. After that, my scurvy kept him at bay. He had no taste for bleeding gums or purple spots.

  Gyp barks, her warning yap pitched high over a distant chorus of bleats. I go outside to join her.

  Across the clearing, sheep spill from the bush like a foamy tide. Pedlar steers them, yapping and nipping, while Joe flicks a cane above their heads.

  ‘Come bye!’ I tell Gyp.

  She launches herself at the flock on an outrun. I head in the opposite direction, towards the new fold, where I pull one hurdle open. The first cluster of sheep approach—Skip, Daisy, Dancer, Moll. They veer away slightly when they smell the gallows, so I steer ’em back with a wave of my arms and a bark that sounds like Gyp’s. There’s a slight chill in the air, though the treetops are still touched with golden light. As the sheep flow past, the dogs dart about, casting and gathering.

  Whenever I see sheep herded, I think: that was us, aboard the Lord Lyndoch. We were herded up on deck every morning to have buckets of water thrown at us. Herded to the monthly haircut, the weekly service and the almost daily spectacle of a f logging. Herded through the fumes of hot vinegar or chloride of lime, which the surgeon claimed would keep us healthy.

  I don’t know how chloride of lime could have helped us. Fools poach fish with chloride of lime; it poisons the water. My father scorned the practice.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Joe demands. He glares at Rowdy, who’s propped against the wall of the hut.

  ‘Mr Barrett sent him.’

  I scan the sea of woolly backs, noting scars, stains, brands, gaits, chipped ears, crooked noses…

  ‘Where’s Sweet-pea?’

  ‘What?’ says Joe.

  ‘Sweet-pea. She’s not here.’

  Alarmed, Joe glances around. Some of the sheep are already inside the fold, pooling against the hurdles as the rest of the flock pour in after ’em. Gyp’s tidying up the stragglers: Mabel, Pudding, Doris, Rose.

  But no Sweet-pea.

  ‘Ah, the devil!’ Joe growls. Damn fool. He’s forever mislaying stock. Sometimes I wonder if he can even count.

  I’ve never lost a sheep. Never.

  ‘Have ye named every one o’ them beasts?’ Rowdy inquires as I stamp past him. With a nod I plunge into the hut, grab the musket and scoop up some spare cartridges.

  Outside, Rowdy’s introducing himself. ‘Joe Humble? I’m Rowdy Cavanagh.’

  Joe grunts. ‘You worked with sheep before?’

  ‘Aye,’ says Rowdy, then adds, ‘well—I’ve cooked a few.’

  Ha! Joe’s not going to like that. Shouldering the loaded musket, I head back outside. Past the woodpile, past Rowdy, past Joe.

  ‘That’ll do!’ I call to Gyp. She abandons the few sheep still trickling into the fold. Pedlar can handle ’em on his own.

  ‘Check yer traps!’ Joe advises me as I walk away, trying to blame me for his own carelessness.

  ‘Sweet-pea wouldn’t go near the traps.’ You fool.

  ‘Check yer bloody traps,’ Joe says sharply.

  I shrug. Behind me, Rowdy’s talking again. ‘How did a lad so young end up out here?’ he asks Joe.

  ‘He’s from Suffolk.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘He’s one o’ the Suffolk Clays.’ Pause. ‘Best poachers in the county.’

  Best? I think not. My pa was hanged for killing a gamekeeper. My brother was shot by the same keeper. I was lagged for a brace of pheasants.

  Seems to me there’s no skill in getting caught.

  I once had a long-haired lurcher named Lope. He used to run hares into my nets. Whenever I had to lie in a pond for hours, waiting for the keepers to pass, he would lie beside me, up to his chin in water, not making a sound.

  He was caught one night and lamed. A gamekeeper chopped off three of his paws. He was no use to us after that, so my father shot him, then beat me for his loss.

  If I were one of Suffolk’s best poachers, I wouldn’t have failed Lope.

  He still haunts my dreams.

  A narrow animal-pad runs between two walls of brush like a road between hedges. From where I’m standing I can just see, in the centre of this path, the carpet of dirt and dead leaves that conceals my empty dog-trap. A small log lies in front of the trap, but it might not be small enough. I want my quarry to leap over the log, not swerve around it.

  We haven’t much time; dusk is stealing in beneath the trees.

  ‘See this?’ I say to Gyp. ‘Empty. I knew Sweet-pea wouldn’t go near the traps.’

  Gyp doesn’t answer. She’s staring up at me, her pink tongue flapping. We’ll never find Sweet-pea at this rate—not with so much ground to cover.


  Slowly I squat until my eyes are level with Gyp’s and my arm is around her neck. Together we contemplate the trap.

  ‘You’d spy that, wouldn’t you? Eh?’ Of course she would. And so would any wild dog older than a pup.

  Look. Think. What would draw a dog’s notice away from the ground? There must be something—something like a wrecker’s lantern. In Cornwall the wreckers used to lure ships onto reefs at night by walking along the cliff-tops with their lanterns swinging. Ma told me that. She was Cornish. She had black hair and eyes, just like me; she said it was on account of the Barbary pirates who used to patrol the Cornish coast. She said we both came from pirate stock.

  But she was swarthy. I’m pale, like my father. He was a redhead, with a flaming temper to match his hair.

  Distraction. I need a distraction. Something high off the ground…

  My shirt-tails are ragged from all the strips I’ve torn off ’em, but I need another piece. Not a big one. The cloth is so threadbare that a single rip suffices; I rub some grass against the rag and scrub the soles of both boots with the same grass, which I crunch between my hands until I’m coated in its rich scent.

  ‘There,’ I tell Gyp, so she won’t follow me. One step forward. Two steps. Carefully skirting the trap, I stop just a few feet beyond it and grab a long, narrow branch. This branch is springy enough to arch over the pad and long enough to be fixed to a bush opposite.

  Finally I knot my rag around the twig, in the very centre of the arch. It flutters like a white flower against the dull green bush.

  Gyp studies it with interest.

  ‘Not looking at the trap now, are you?’ I join her again, dipping down to see what she sees. There’s the pad. There’s the log. And there’s the rag, drawing my eyes away from the trap. If I were a dog, I wouldn’t be watching the ground while I stepped over that log. My gaze would be travelling up, up, up…