The Pioneers

by Katharine Susannah Prichard

But on Friday morning at dawn, the cattle came pouring into the town, with a cracking of whips, barking of dogs, yelling and shouting of men and boys. With a rush and a rattling of horns, they charged along between the rows of huddled houses, swinging from one side to the other of the track, wild and fearful-eyed, with lowered heads, long strings of glistening saliva dripping from their mouths. They seemed to be searching for the opportunity to break and head out to the hills again; But ringed with cracking whips, brushing horses, snapping dogs, they were turned into the sale-yards.

The one street of Wirreeford had been cobbled for some distance on either side of the sale-yards because the cattle and horses made a sea of mud about them when the spring rains had soaked into the soft earth. The stores and shanties were full on sale days.

Drovers, rough-haired, hawk-eyed men, with faces seared and seamed with the dust of the roads, hands burnt, and broken with barcoo, slouched along the streets, or stood watching their cattle, yarning in desultory fashion, leaning over the rails of the drafting yards. They smoked, or chewed and spat, in front of the shanties, and at night sprawled over the table at the Black Bull, playing cards or tossing dice.

A mob that had travelled a long way was often yarded the night before the sales. When the selling for the day was over, the beasts that had come down from the hills were driven out along the Rane road, and got under Way for the northern markets; but sometimes they were left in the yards, lowing and bellowing all night, while the stockmen who were going to take charge of them spent the evening at the Black Bull, or Mrs. Mary Ann's.

The township was full of the smell of cattle and dogs, and of the muddy, slowly-moving river that had become a waste-butt for the houses.

In the early spring, breezes from the ocean with a tang of salt in them blew right through the houses, and later, when the trees by the river blossomed, and bore masses of golden down, a warm, sweet, musky fragrance was wafted to their very doors. It overlaid the reek of the cattle yards, the fumes of rank spirits and tobacco that came from the shanties. And in the long glimmering twilights when the light faded slowly from the plains and the wall of the hills changed from purple to blue and misty grey, they were caught up into the mysterious darkness of the night—those perfumes of the lightwood and wattle trees in blossom—and rested like a benediction in the air.

From their shabby, whitewashed wattle-and-dab hut on the outskirts of the town the Schoolmaster and Deirdre could watch the twilight dying on the plains and breathe all the fragrance of the trees by the river when they were in bloom. The plains spread in vivid, undulating green before the cottage to the distant line of the hills, and the grass was full of wild flowers, all manner of tiny, shy, and starry, blue, and white, and yellow flowers.

Deirdre had watched Davey bring cattle down from the hills across the plains. She had seen him riding off runaways. Once a heifer had broken and careered over the plains before the cottage. Davey had chased after her at breakneck speed, and, rising in his stirrups, had swept his stock-whip round her, letting it fall on her plushy hide with ripping cracks. He had flogged the beast, driving her with strings of oaths, his dog, a black and tan fury, yelping and snapping at her nozzle, until the blood streamed from it, and with a mutinous bellow she turned back to the mob again.

Deirdre had watched him going home in the evening with his father, or some of Cameron's men, at the heels of a mob, his eyes going straight out before him. He never looked her way or seemed to see her where she stood, at the gate of the whitewashed cottage within a hundred yards of the river.

She had been chasing Mrs. Mary Ann's geese from the river across the green paddock that lay between the shanty and the Schoolmaster's house, when Davey rode out of the township towards her, one evening. He was driving a score or so of weedy, straggling calves.