Free Fifty Bales of Hay by Rachael Treasure

Stockman, and I’ll give you what-for.’
    ‘Oh, you just said head! Is that a promise?’
    As she went to move the toey heifers into the forcing yard, a smile crinkled Bronwyn’s eyes. Tommy was good fun to work with and she enjoyed his teasing.
    When she’d first left school a couple of years back, she’d done a short stint in the city, temping, where she’d lasted two months in a government office. From that job, she knew about ‘inappropriate behaviour in the workplace’ because posters about it had been plastered over the walls and she’d had to do a course and fill out a question sheet. She giggled now when she thought of the place and the dorky people in it. Yep, she sighed, things were nicely different out here, in the outback, thank god. Both she and Tommy would have been done for sexual harassment fifty times over by now, if they were in that office in the big smoke. They’d practically be in gaol.
    Bronwyn slipped her large frame through a side gate and slid open the back gate of the cattle crush. A scattering of galahs took flight from a battle-scarred bottle tree. Thetree offered thin shade in the giant holding yard, yet most of the thousand-head herd were still trying to cluster under it.
    The heifers mustered earlier that morning had settled and were now bored and hungry. A couple of the maidens who were cycling were curiously hanging around the fence near to where, beyond, the bulls waited. Some of the bull fellas sat chewing cud, one front foot cast out, the other hooves tucked under their beefy bodies, their giant balls drooping in the dust, eyes half closed in the sun. Their skin twitched and tails snapped the air at bothersome flies. The younger bulls stood bellowing to the girls at the fence and thrusting their heads low, tussling each other with long drawn-out head butts and throwing up dust with their pawing front hooves.
    Bronwyn laughed at the young guns. She noticed the older bulls with the blue ear tags knew what the go was. They were the ones who were waiting patiently for the cows to be moved to their fresh paddock. The old boys knew, when the gate swung open, they would be free to amble their way to a six-week bonkfest frenzy. In the yard to Bronwyn’s right were the other cows. The poor girls there were too skinny to bother with. In a drought year there was nothing to fatten them on, so it was off to the abattoir for them. No doubt Tommy would insist Bronwyn come with him in the double-decker on the trip to Rocky. She smiled at what the trip would be. A laugh and a half for sure. And maybe more?
    Bronwyn looked up to the dusty sky where the setting sun hung in a big yellow ball. It was hard to believe shewas here on Carnegie. The massive, beautiful stretch of a station was a far cry from the backyard where she had grown up in Drouin and her first job pulling tits for a dirty old perv of a dairy farmer on the outskirts of town. She jutted out her chin and puffed away a cluster of flies from her face with a sudden upward breath.
    ‘Ready to roll, Tom?’ she asked.
    ‘Go for it,’ he said, as she went to let the first heifer up. Yes, she thought, satisfied, she was glad she had gone outback. She stepped away a little from the railing and the first heifer ambled up. Bronwyn waited for the exact moment to pull the lever and catch the heifer’s head in the crush. The vertical bars came down either side of the heifer’s neck. The beast tried to push forward, then pull back. Realising she was trapped, the caramel-coloured heifer scrabbled her hooves a little against the rough, stone-rubble concrete, but then settled. Tommy arrived at the head bale with the drench gun and stooped at the head of the beast.
    ‘Better late than never, darlin’,’ he said to the heifer as he stretched to press his thick fingers onto her rump. The heifer bucked a little.
    ‘She’s a keeper. I’d score her a three,’ he said, then hooked the metal nozzle into the animal’s mouth and gave her a shot of