Shepherd Page 5

  A gun fires somewhere to the north.

  ‘Got ’em,’ says Carver, with relish, then raises his voice. ‘Cockeye? Where are you?’ His footsteps move away. I can feel Gyp’s breath on my calf.

  He’s leaving. But for how long?

  If he thought I was here he wouldn’t have left. He would have fired into the log. Perhaps I should stay instead of blundering about in the dark, getting lost. Getting hurt. Getting shot at.

  Carver has a light. He has men and guns. All I have is Gyp.

  I’m like a rabbit gone to ground. I need stealth, not courage.

  My life depends on it.

  5

  WHEN DAN Carver tried to kill me he took me into the forest to look for a lost sheep. He’d already killed the sheep, of course. Her name was Gilly. He’d cut her throat and stuffed her under a low-hanging rock. Then he’d hidden his spear nearby.

  We reached the place too quickly; it was clear that he knew where she was, for all his feigned surprise. He told me to drag her out but I didn’t want to turn my back on him. He would have speared me the way he had Sam and Walter, then blamed the blacks. He would have said we’d gone our separate ways.

  So I refused to touch poor Gilly.

  He couldn’t shoot me, because the blacks have no guns, but he hit me with the butt of his musket. Though I tried to run I was dazed from the blow; he would have killed me if Gyp hadn’t come. She dashed out of the bush with Joe close behind. Joe used his axe before Carver could shoot, striking a mighty blow while Gyp was still worrying Carver’s leg.

  That first blow felled Carver; the next killed him, or so we thought. I kicked him and felt for a pulse—his neck was slick with blood. I was frightened and Joe looked as if he was going to faint. He was already winded because he’d never been much of a bushman. I doubt he would have found me without Gyp.

  We lost our heads then. We thought we’d bury Carver and pretend he’d bolted, so we left him where he lay. I went to help Pedlar with the sheep. Joe went to fetch a shovel.

  When he returned, Carver was gone. We didn’t know if the blacks had taken him or if he’d fled on his own two feet.

  That’s why he’s stalked my dreams ever since.

  I wake with a start, gasping. Carver’s voice is still ringing round my skull; he was in my nightmare, roasting Gyp on a greenwood spit.

  But Gyp is alive, her hot breath grazing my ankle. She whimpers as I squirm. A pale light is trickling into the log. Daybreak. It must be daybreak.

  How long did I sleep? Too long. I’m parched and my belly is growling and I need to piss. Trouble is, I don’t know where Carver might be, or if I should risk leaving the log. I can’t stay here forever, though. And I’m a better bushman than Carver, as long as I can see. Besides, the branch I pulled in front of the log is wilting. He might notice that, if he passes again. I would.

  Slowly I push the branch aside, crawl out into the silvery dawn, rise, look around. The air is very still and smells faintly of smoke—not of blood or gunpowder or old sweat. In other words, it doesn’t smell of Dan Carver.

  I can see the smoke. There it is, drifting above the treetops into a cloudless sky. It must be coming from the hut, which is much too close. Gyp and I have to leave. We won’t be safe until we reach Mr Barrett’s homestead.

  As I slide out of the log, Gyp wriggles after me, still dragging the sheepskin. She shakes herself. I put my ear to the ground, but can hear no distant pounding of feet. When Gyp nuzzles my armpit, I hug her.

  ‘Shh,’ I whisper. ‘We must be very quiet…’

  She understands; she always does. Her tail wags. Her sheepskin’s falling off, but that’s all right because I need it. Before I do anything else, I need to cut up that sheepskin.

  I don’t want much of it—just two small pieces, each big enough to fit over a boot-sole. If I turn the fleece towards the ground, it’ll mask my footprints. Luckily I sharpened my knife yesterday: it slices through the leather without too much sawing or hacking. I can’t use Gyp’s tarred twine, though. The sheepskin has to stay on her back or she’ll leave her hairs on twigs and thorns. Her tracks are fine—they could belong to any wild dog—but her black-and-white coat isn’t common in this country. I want her to leave tufts of wool, like a lost sheep.

  Instead of using Gyp’s twine on my feet, I cut the cord that’s been fastening my own sheepskin around my waist. Now I have a sheepskin cloak that hangs loose from my shoulders and two sheepskin boot-soles, which leave only the faintest, blurred tracks. My knife returns to its sheath. Gyp’s sheepskin returns to her back. Then I take a quick piss and make for the cart track that leads all the way to Mr Barrett’s homestead—and to his neighbour’s farm as well, if I turn right instead of left, though that’s fifty miles to the north; I can’t get there on foot. Even Mr Barrett’s house will be hard to reach before nightfall without a horse. That’s why I need to hurry.

  There’s an animal pad heading west, so I follow that until it veers away to the south. Now I have to make my own path—and a lot of noise into the bargain.

  An axe would help but the axe is back at the hut. I don’t want to think about the hut. Or Joe. Or Pedlar. I need to concentrate on where I’m putting my feet. I need to keep my ears pricked and my eyes peeled, my head down and my arms up.

  I crash through the bush, getting ripped to pieces. Gyp pads along ahead of me like a wraith. The branches that claw at my shoulders are too high for her. But she does have to skirt around a few tangles of brush and fallen timber. Once or twice she sniffs at a scent-trail.

  Suddenly she barks.

  I look up: Meg has wandered into the bush. She gives a plaintive bleat but I can’t do anything for her.

  ‘Sorry, Meg.’ I really am sorry. Beyond her, a solid wall of leaves blocks my route. As I push through it I wonder if I’ve made a mistake. Am I off course?

  Finally the matted branches give way and I stumble out onto the road. There’s no one on it; that’s a relief. To the south, nothing. To the north, nothing—except a pile of fresh horse shit, gleaming and covered in flies. The hoof-prints scattered around it are fresh too.

  Carver has horses.

  I can’t stay on this road.

  ‘Come!’ Gyp is making a beeline for the manure but returns when I call and pursues me back into the roadside scrub, where I pause for a moment to think. Think, think, think.

  If Carver has horses, he’ll use ’em. He’ll keep to the road. But I don’t have to.

  I’ll head for the hill, instead.

  Since I’ve cut my own path through the undergrowth, retracing my steps isn’t much of a challenge. It doesn’t take me long to find the animal pad, which leads south towards the hill. I follow it past a fallen tree, through a patch of ferns, into a dry creek-bed and out again. Nothing I see concerns me. Bark’s been stripped off one tree trunk, but the scar looks old and weathered. Dead leaves have been kicked up along the trail, but not by a man’s foot; those are the tracks of a beast, though I’m not sure which kind. At home I knew every paw-print. Not here.

  Sometimes I feel as if I’m half-blind, wandering around in ignorance. Mr Barrett showed me the native sassafras and the native red cedar because he cuts ’em for timber. Some of the other lags warned me against the nettle-tree, which stings. There are grass-trees and fern-trees and tea-trees (which can be used to make tea, though it’s a harsh, bitter brew). But no one I’ve met can tell me what the red blossoms are that appear in the spring and turn into little nuts. No one can tell me what the native bears eat. No one can tell me which creatures leave the square droppings or the scribbles on the bark or the little tufts of grass surrounded by blue parrot-feathers.

  At home I learned the forest lore from my father. In this place I’ve learnt almost everything by myself. I’ve learnt that white parrots squawk and red parrots pipe. I’ve learnt that snakes vanish in winter. I’ve learnt that the blacks strip off the white scales that appear on some plants—to eat, it seems, because I’ve seen tooth marks on discarded leaves.<
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  I’m as lost in this place as I would be in the middle of London. I don’t know what’s dangerous and what isn’t. The ants here bite like mastiffs. The leaves are sharp enough to draw blood. The very birds come swooping down to attack you.

  Every step I take, the earth feels strange to me. I wish I had someone to teach me what I need to know. How can anyone live well in a place without knowing it?

  Soon the path widens. The growth on either side of it thickens into a dense, green hedge. Gyp’s nose is glued to the ground. I keep glancing over my shoulder, because I’m very, very anxious. This is a well-defined path. Carver might have found it.

  Two birds swoop past, small and swift, the ones I call thorn-beaks. They look rattled.

  I don’t like this. We didn’t scare ’em, so what did?

  Gyp halts as soon as I click my tongue. Dropping to one knee, I press my ear against the dirt and hear a steady thumping. Before I can wonder what it means, something bursts through the green wall up ahead. I spring to my feet as a small kangaroo crosses the path, plunges back into the bush and is gone.

  Gyp barks. Another kangaroo comes crashing out of the scrub, then another. The brush closes up behind them like a curtain. There are more on the way; that’s the drumming of their feet I hear. They’re fleeing something. Dogs? Blacks?

  Carver?

  Two more kangaroos sail past, flashing across the path behind me. They’re frightened. The path ahead is straight and open for at least a hundred yards. If we’re going to hide, we’ll have to follow the kangaroos.

  They don’t like me chasing ’em. They certainly don’t like Gyp. Bouncing away from us, they scatter through a thick wall of tea-tree and I have to shade my eyes to keep out the slapping branches. Gyp surges ahead. Then she barks, startled by a kangaroo that jumps right over her and keeps going.

  ‘Shush!’ Dammit, girl, there might be a man with a gun behind us.

  If there is, I can’t hear him through the noise of the kangaroos. Another goes by, then another. Gyp’s keeping up with ’em, but I’m not finding it so easy. Even where the undergrowth has been flattened, I still have to push through the higher branches.

  Wait. That’s not kangaroos; that’s something else. A rhythmic stamping. Dry leaves crackling.

  Footsteps. Someone’s on my tail and Gyp’s nowhere in sight.

  I can’t call to her. I have to stay mum. But the twigs snap and rustle when I pick up my pace. The thorns tug at my hair and my clothes, I’m stumbling forward, arms raised, head down, squinting, and all at once the ground drops away…

  I hurtle out of the thicket. My feet slip from under me. My arse hits dirt and I’m sliding down a rocky slope held together by knots of exposed tree-roots. The canopy thins. Boulders rear up.

  I don’t stop until I hit one. The impact leaves me winded and Gyp hurries over, panting, worried. Her ears twitch. She hears the footsteps too: they’re coming closer.

  My knee hurts, but I’ve no time to waste on that. I signal to Gyp: a circling motion and a clenched fist. She darts off. Then I scramble behind the boulder, which is as big as a post-chaise. The ground around it is littered with rocks. I grab the largest, most jagged stone I can find.

  All I can do now is wait. Poised to strike, trying not to pant, I crouch with my rock raised and listen hard.

  Above me, at the top of the slope, the footsteps stop abruptly with a skidding noise, a rattle of falling pebbles, a sharp gasp, a familiar voice.

  ‘Mother o’ God!’

  I don’t believe it.

  Rowdy Cavanagh teeters on the edge of the drop, carbine in hand, scratched and sweaty. He sees me and blinks.

  ‘Tom…?’

  Then Gyp hurls herself out of the bush and clamps her jaws around his wrist.

  I saw my first kangaroo on the way to Mr Barrett’s farm. Though I’d heard tell of ’em, I hadn’t believed such wild tales. I thought the old lags were toying with fresh meat. But when our rattling cart scattered half a dozen big grey beasts on the road and I saw ’em bob away like the bastard spawn of a deer and a rabbit—well, after that I was ready to believe anything I heard about this place.

  Mr Barrett took me straight from the barracks muster in Sydney. I’d been two weeks on dry land in the barracks hospital, where I’d lost a couple of teeth to scurvy. But fresh food soon put me on my feet again and forced me out into the crowds that came as a great surprise, since I’d no notion that the town would be so hectic. After sharing a county gaol with one hundred and fifty souls, and the hold of the Lord Lyndoch with twice that, I’d hoped for more peace in this empty land. Ixworth is a small place surrounded by game reserves, so even Bury St Edmunds, where I went to trial, had come as a shock to me.

  I’d hoped for a country assignment in New South Wales, and was given one by Mr Barrett.

  He was looking for farm hands, but there were precious few on offer. Most of the other lags were city-bred—hawkers, navvies, shoe-binders, stay-makers—and not one of ’em knew a copse from a coppice. When Mr Barrett learned I’d been done for poaching, he asked me what game I favoured. Then he asked me how I’d catch it. Then he told the overseer to loose me, and suddenly I was assigned.

  Mr Barrett is a young man, but the harsh southern sun has scoured the bloom from his skin. He was born to a Cambridgeshire colonel, and was once an officer of the 17th Regiment. Perhaps that’s why he deals out his discipline so roughly—or perhaps his temper has been soured by the fact that his wife is still in England. He drinks too much but never during the day. He’s a magistrate and very free with the lash, handing out fifty for every theft as if he’s lost patience with all the thieves in his employ.

  I’ve seen a good number of Mr Barrett’s men flogged, but never was myself because I don’t steal. I have eyes in my head, so I don’t have to. Though everybody at the farm picked the haws from Mr Barrett’s hawthorn hedge, I was the only one with sense enough to eat the spring leaves. I was the only one who ever collected eggs from the birds’ nests or noticed when the berries on a clump of flax disappeared overnight, after a party of blacks left footprints around it.

  There’s no need to steal food in a place where the bees don’t sting and the eels clamp onto your dangling worm like a miser grasping a coin. At home, after my father was gaoled, I had to live on wood shamrock and pignuts half the time. So I’ve never been tempted to anger Mr Barrett by filching a handful of his sugar or a mouthful of his rum.

  He’s a hard master but not vicious. He trusts me with his dogs, his sheep and his gun. Sometimes he even speaks to me as if I have some sense, since he knows I’m a country lad who can pleach a hedge or set a snare.

  I’d like him better if he weren’t a fool. Only a fool would trust Dan Carver. Only a fool would believe Carver’s lies. Mr Barrett thinks far too much of strong men, and Carver is strong. Mr Barrett is strong too, but Carver’s stronger. He can carry a full-grown ewe under each arm and not get winded.

  After Carver killed Walter Hogg, Sam Jenkins fled back to the farm and told Mr Barrett that Carver had confessed to the crime. Mr Barrett flogged Sam for absconding and insisted the blacks had killed Walter. ‘Dan Carver’s putting the fear of God into you,’ he told Sam, ‘so you’ll not be so wayward.’

  I heard this from Joe, who was there when Sam returned to the hut.

  A few days later Sam was dead.

  One word is enough to make Gyp stand down, but it’s too late—she’s already left her teeth-marks in Rowdy’s arm.

  She has good grip.

  ‘I swear, I thought they’d got ye,’ Rowdy mumbles. His colour is bad.

  ‘Did you shoot Cockeye?’

  He shakes his head. ‘No cartridges.’

  What a numbskull. His carbine is lying on the ground, so I pick it up and pull a cartridge from my pocket. Then I sit down beside him to load the gun while he tears a strip off his red flannel shirt and ties it around his wound—which is barely bleeding.

  ‘They have our musket now,’ he says.

 
; They do.

  ‘We need to get to Barrett’s,’ he adds, wincing as he tightens his bandage.

  ‘Then where were you going?’ I ask.

  He stares at me. ‘To Barrett’s.’

  I can’t help but frown.

  ‘South,’ he says, pointing.

  ‘That’s not south.’

  ‘It is.’

  Reaching over, I pat a nearby tree trunk. ‘Moss grows on the south side of trees,’ I tell him.

  Rowdy blinks as he absorbs this. He glances at Gyp, who’s sitting nearby, smiling and panting.

  ‘Well. I might have strayed,’ he admits. ‘But d’ye agree we should take the road south?’

  I shake my head. ‘Carver’ll take the road. He’s got horses.’

  ‘He does not!’

  ‘I’ve seen their traces.’

  Rowdy looks aghast. He thinks for a moment, chewing his bottom lip. I poke a ramrod into the carbine’s muzzle.

  ‘That road goes both ways,’ he says at last. ‘Carver might not head for Barrett’s.’

  Have you lost your wits?

  ‘’Course he will.’ You lobcock. ‘He knows we’ve nowhere else to go.’

  ‘But why risk it?’ Rowdy argues. ‘Why brave Barrett’s guns just to revenge himself on us?’

  ‘No witnesses.’ That’s Carver’s watchword. He was lagged for highway robbery on the word of a living witness, and told me many times that he would never make the same mistake again. ‘Carver knows we could hang him if we talk.’

  Rowdy glares at me. ‘Then it seems we’re both finished,’ he snaps. ‘Since we can’t outrun horses.’

  ‘We can if we keep off the road.’ Rowdy’s carbine is loaded now; I wonder if he’ll let me keep hold of it? ‘That road is the long way to Mr Barrett’s,’ I say, because Rowdy’s expression is blank. ‘It goes halfway round the hill yonder. But if we go over the hill, we can warn Mr Barrett on the other side.’

  In all truth, I’m not sure I want Rowdy with me on this trip. He’s noisy. He’s foolish. He’s wearing a bright red shirt.