Free A Kindness Cup by Thea Astley Page A

he was explaining to them. Tactics.
    There were ten men of God with him that sweating noon, well-mounted, well-set-up fellows, muscular as their horses and dangerous as their guns. Pillars of the town. Not even the flies troubled them as they sat loosely in their saddles, their thighs gripping lightly and easily at their edging mounts.
    â€˜We’ll split into two groups,’ Lieutenant Buckmaster said. He was enthusiastic and sullenly young. ‘If Mr Sweetman would take the northern side of the hill with four of you, the rest of us will go round by the south and pin them in.’ (After all, he hadn’t read his Hannibal for nothing and momentarily, crazily, in the tea-tree scrub, Dorahy’s face and sour snaggle-tooth smile blazed at him above a chalky desk.) ‘If they take to the slopes, as I think they will, we’ll tether up and follow on foot. There’s toomuch shale for the horses.’ His face was set in firm lines. ‘The dirty buggers,’ he said.
    Trees were mnemonics for more and more trees.
    In silent cheers and leaves the two parties cantered off, Buckmaster senior taking his burly form after Sweetman.
    Sounds now of hoof-rattle and leather-squeak in a thickening air of tenseness and anger leaking out of their sweating flesh.
    They had dogs with them, too, yelping and barking in a pack hunt as the leader scented and took off after the odour of black skin glimpsed briefly a hundred yards away.
    On the eastern side of the mountain trees became denser than the logic of their movements.
    â€˜My God!’ Roy Armitage panted, drawing in beside his leader, ‘this is too bloody thick. We’ll have to leave the horses.’
    Young Buckmaster chewed on this advice for another hundred yards. His thighs took a bashing in the scrub.
    â€˜You’re right,’ he admitted. A whip of tree cracked his face half open and there was blood apart from the pain. ‘Tell the rest.’
    They crowded each other in the one small space, clumping their horses together, and unslung their guns. Their irritated skins were demanding retribution.
    Dismounted, they crackled through the trees on the lower slope that swept up to the beige and lilac shadows of the peak. Bracken dragged at their boots and argued with them. In the distance there was the sudden scream of a dog.
    â€˜There they go!’ Benjy Wilson was yelling and pointing through thinner scrub at the rockier patches of the lower mountain where a score of clambering bodies glistening in light were scrambling fast and scattered up the steep slope. It was apparent from below that there was nowhere they could go but up.
    LieutenantBuckmaster paused, held up a masterly hand for attention, then tamped a leisurely pipe while his men fretted in check.
    â€˜The others will be here in a minute. The buggers can’t get away now.’
    â€˜I believe,’ Benjy Wilson volunteered eagerly—and there was saliva—‘they’ve some sort of ritual ground up top. It flattens out near the summit. They’ll head for that.’
    â€˜Catching ’em at prayer, eh?’ Buckmaster grinned and drew suckingly on his pipe. He was a lumpy lad with all the confidence of a very average intelligence. ‘Listen a minute. I think I can hear the other party.’
    The dogs were in first and then the men who held a confrontation under the disturbed trees, glancing up now and then at the distant diminishing figures still stolidly climbing up to the peak.
    Snoggers Boyd, who had come, despite his protest, for a variety of subtle reasons the others did not know about, said over Buckmaster senior’s shoulder, ‘Let the poor bastards be. We’ve given them a run for it.’
    â€˜Are you mad?’ Buckmaster questioned. ‘They’ve got to take a warning. They’ve got to be dispersed. We’re going up that hill. Are all rifles ready?’
    â€˜Not mine,’ Boyd said.
    â€˜Jesus! Well, fix