Free Tiger Men by Judy Nunn Page A

the ridge, he could see way below the main company settlement at Circular Head on the rugged and remote north-west coast.
    The mare snorted again, and again he calmed her. He never failed to be surprised by the reaction of European animals to the so-called tiger. It made them skittish and Jim couldn’t for the life of him understand why. In all the years he’d been in the colony he’d never once seen a tiger display aggression, and yet his company overseers were obsessed with killing the damn things. In fact the company had a bounty on the animals of ten shillings per head. Why that was he would never know and he’d made little attempt to find out. Jim was not an inquisitive man by nature; he’d learnt as a child to keep his nose out of other people’s business.
    He looked down at the settlement of Circular Head. Situated on a promontory about five miles long and a mile wide, it extended finger-like in a northerly direction into Bass Strait. From where he sat on his horse it looked idyllic, but Jim knew that in reality it was quite the opposite. It was a festering wound of decaying huts and shelters full of angry, unhappy men and women. People who’d been promised an Eden by the damned company, he thought, and who were now left to rot in squalid, unsanitary conditions ruing the day they’d ever signed their indenture papers.
    Nothing, in Jim’s opinion, had gone right from day one. Apart from several hundred acres near the settlement, the area chosen by the company was rugged wilderness and dense forest that proved a nightmare to clear for farming purposes. The wild westerly winds known as the roaring forties seemed almost constant and during the winter months could destroy the soul. And then there was the company’s appalling disregard for the welfare of the local native tribes. That had been the most soul-destroying of all. Rather than come to the aid of the Parpeloihener and Pennemukeer, the Van Diemen’s Land Company had ignored their plight. They had turned a blind eye to the atrocious behaviour of the sealers, men barely human, who inhabited the local islands, kidnapping and raping black women and, on one particularly gruesome day in 1828, massacring thirty of the local black men and throwing their bodies off a cliff.
    Jim shook his head. The injustice of it all was beyond imagining. He was about to nudge the mare in the ribs when his eye caught a movement in the ferns to his left.
    Tiger pups, he thought. It had to be tiger pups: she would have dropped them in her flight. Jim knew that female tigers carried their young in a pouch beneath their body, like kangaroos and wallabies, and that when they detected danger or felt threatened, they ejected their young and ran, hoping to lure the threat away.
    He dismounted and walked the thirty-odd feet to the low-lying fern scrub where he discovered three pups, a male and two females. He picked them up one at a time, quickly dashed their brains out against a large rock and placed them in his saddle bag. Thirty shillings bounty was not a sum to be sneezed at and he was not about to pass up the chance of adding so considerably to his savings.
    He closed the bag, hauled himself into the saddle and nudged his mare in the ribs. With a bit of luck, he thought as the horse made its way down the hillside, I’ll be home before dark and a tot of rum would be a fine thing after the long journey back from the Woolnorth Run.

C HAPTER FOUR
    I n the months that followed, Mick O’Callaghan not only fitted in well, he became so much a part of the place that Ma Tebbutt wondered how she’d ever functioned without him. So did the girls: they quickly succumbed to the charm of their protector and it wasn’t long before they were competing for his attention. Mick found himself with a veritable harem at his beck and call, should he have wished to take advantage of the fact.
    Ma was aware of the situation. Upon the girls’ regular visits to her quarters when she would chat to each, sort