Free Coming Rain by Stephen Daisley Page A

like white cockatoos passing
porthole windows and Your Cheatin’ Heart playing on a radio. Heard the constant slap
and bang of catching-pen doors being opened and closed. This work, bright and real,
of noise and high metal on metal come to be surrounding the swaying lines of shearers
in their vests, wet with sweat; long padded trousers held up with the wide leather
belts that flared on the back as support. Bowyangs below their knees and moccasins
made from leather or wool-bale sacking and brown bale twine on their turning feet.
They were ever stepping and pivoting into their work with impossibly long arms, and
backs that straighten to finish and rise to step forward again and again and again.
    ‘Tween dog and wolf,’ Painter, standing behind him. ‘You been looking down there
for a while now son.’
    ‘I was thinking about the old gangs Painter. The ten-stand sheds. Those men. Twelve,
sixteen stands.’
    ‘Something to see when they going. Been in enough over the years. Errowanbang in
New South Wales had forty stands. Near Orange.’
    ‘Forty shearers?’
    ‘So I was told. Blades but.’
    ‘In the same shed, all those men shearing at the same time? Forty of them?’
    ‘That’s the story son.’

CHAPTER 14
    Seeking the cover of scrub land, fringes and hollows, she ran. Mouth wide open, tongue
wet and balanced, her body adjusting to the earth as she passed through the country,
she was what she had become, a pregnant dingo bitch running.
    When she reached open land or a space of cleared unfamiliar ground she stopped at
the fringe. Lay down and lifted her nose. Listened, waited. Listened again to the
wind and any birds other than the crows. She detested them, the dog crows, their
bold derision. They would scavenge her kills and yet perversely taunt. Once, she
had caught an old one by a leg, too slow to lift off, and she had relished the slaughter.
Ate its head off down to the breast, like a fox would. That was her disrespect.
    If she became content the unfamiliar clearings held no danger or were unavoidable,
she made her crossing quickly without breaking stride.
    The sun was high overhead when she reached the rocks where there was a path to the
water of the old mothers’ springs. Paused at the break in the scrub where a two-wheel
dirt track snaked towards the gates. Smelled horse dung; saw the droppings and the
lifted dish shape of hoof marks in the gravel. A riffled line of domestic dog prints
in the middle of the track where they had followed the horse. Their spoor markings
of urine and sun-white faeces scattered along their line of travel.
    She backed away, retreating further into the smoke bush. Panting from the journey.
She lay under the low branches and brush, waited, her eyes closing. When she woke,
she approached the track again, lifted her nose, smelled something rotting. She stayed
in the cover of the scrub and trotted to the fence. Waited and turned to follow the
fence line to where the emu gap should have been. Followed the sandy hollow alongside
the fence while remaining on the hip of it and came across the decomposing carcass
of a wombat. The foul smell above the exposed rotting body like a green mist, something
to be avoided. The gap in the fence had been repaired with fence wire and mesh. She
backed away, the deadly silence terrifying.
    Her need for water was becoming desperate.

CHAPTER 15
    Lew made his way to the motor room and found the Bentall generator in the fading
light. He primed it and inserted a crank handle into the motor. Rotated it slowly
then rocked the handle.
    Read: Timing at ten degrees of crankshaft rotation. Rubbed his eyes.
    It was darkening in the motor room so he returned to where Painter was sharpening
his cutters. A circle of red and orange sparks flew around the old man’s hand. When
he finished each cutter he threaded it onto its wire. It was becoming quite dark
in the shed. He glanced at Lew. ‘You right?’
    Lew shook his head in the gloom. ‘I want to start the