Free Jacko by Thomas Keneally

helicopter lay between the beast and its line of freedom. The propeller was cutting the young bull’s vision to ribbons, just as it cut ours. But this was a brave beast and willing to try to fit itself amongst the tatters of air. It rounded on the machine. A reasonable helicopter pilot with a sense of the limits of his machine would have simply hung in the air and looked down on the bull. But Boomer Webb, Stammer Jack’s Vietnam veteran helicopter pilot, wanted to harry it more intimately.
    This was great news for Larson, and not bad news for me either. I had already secretly made my mind up that remote and vacant places favoured oddity, and Boomer was proving it for me.
    He brought his helicopter down until the skids were nearly at the bull’s forehead. It took that to make the young beast turn. After it had turned, Boomer descended further, sitting in the air at an inadvisable angle and seeming to prod the beast’s rump with the skids. The young bull gave it up and ran off to face the brand and the iron enclosures.
    Poor Larson would win some posthumous award for that shot, and you still see it widely reproduced in posters and magazines.
    All this before I really knew Jacko. Jacko would later tell me in New York that Boomer was still flying, although he had had a dozen or so crashes if you included the forced landings. The Department of Civil Aviation had been apprised of only one of these incidents.
    When the dust had settled a little, Chloe came out and introduced us to Peter and some of the other stockmen who had dismounted by the mustering yards and were smoking before beginning the branding.
    Peter said, You know my citified brother eh?
    I said I’d met him doing a television interview.
    â€”Can you tell me why anyone wouldn’t want to live up here?
    â€”No. Though he seems happy down there.
    â€”Yeah, well, horses for bloody courses.
    And then he said, You blokes’ll have a beer later eh?
    His mother said, Course they will. Even if they haven’t done any real work.
    Petie was not easy with us, but you could tell he was a happy man. He and the stockmen had been out for a week, erecting the great funnel of hessian every day to move and contain the herd, using the light aircraft and Boomer’s helicopter and the flash horsemen to flush new cattle out of the scrub, and to compact them into a herd which they could then move on in the afternoon. Corralling the mob at night behind those fabric walls, and then, next morning, driving more cattle in again to join the herd and send the numbers up.
    It became clear that Petie had not been in the bush solidly for a week. He was, after all, the boss, or at least the young boss, and he could get the pilot to fly him in to the homestead to see Sharon on most evenings. So Petie’s wasn’t quite the lonely drover scenario favoured by balladists.
    Larson of course wished he could have been out in the mustering camp, to see the white and black stockmen socializing together around the night fire, sleeping in the same camp. Whereas back at Burren Waters headquarters, they occupied separate quarters of the Emptors’ little city of cattle. Larson would have liked to have exploited, in his gentle way, the ironies of these arrangements.
    â€”What do you reckon next time we’re up here we go on a muster? he asked me.
    â€”Maybe for a few days anyhow, I conceded.
    Petie and the stockmen spent the rest of the afternoon letting cattle through some gates and not through others, and then laying the terrible iron to them. We saw a lot of enthusiastic bull-dusting – jumping off fences and wrestling cleanskins to the earth by their horns for branding. Best of all, this seemed to be the specialty of certain skinny Wodjiri stockmen.
    A half dozen of the shots Larson took that afternoon would honour the book which would be published eighteen months after his death.
    Late in the day I looked across through the dust haze and saw Mum Chloe