Spare

The Hills let me bunk with them in the main house, a sweet little bungalow with white clapboard, wooden steps leading to a wide porch, a front door that gave out a kittenish squeak every time you pulled it open and a loud bang every time you let it fly shut. The door had a tight screen, to keep out mosquitoes, which were big as birds. That first night, sitting over dinner, I couldn’t hear anything but the rhythmic slap of bloodsuckers against mesh.

There wasn’t much else to hear. We were all a bit awkward, trying to pretend that I was a jackaroo, not a prince, trying to pretend that we weren’t thinking about Mummy, who’d loved Annie, and whom Annie had loved in turn. Annie clearly wanted to talk about Mummy, but as with Willy, I just couldn’t. So I shoveled in the food, and praised it, and asked for seconds, and searched my brain for anodyne topics of conversation. But I couldn’t think of any. The heat had already impaired my cognitive skills.

Falling asleep those first nights in the outback, I’d conjure up the image of Marko and worriedly ask him: Did we really think this through, mate?

42.

The remedy to all problems, as always, was work. Hard, sweaty, nonstop labor, that was what the Hills had to offer, and plenty of it, and I couldn’t get enough. The harder I worked, the less I felt the heat, and the easier it was to talk—or not talk—around the supper table.

But this wasn’t merely work. Being a jackaroo required stamina, to be sure, but it also demanded a certain artistry. You had to be a whisperer with the animals. You had to be a reader of the skies, and the land.

You also had to possess a superior level of horsemanship. I’d come to Australia thinking I knew my way around horses, but the Hills were Huns, each born in a saddle. Noel was the son of a professional polo player. (He’d been Pa’s former polo coach.) Annie could stroke a horse’s nose and tell you what that beast was thinking. And George climbed into a saddle more easily than most people get into their beds.

A typical working day began in the middle of the night. Hours before dawn George and I would stumble outside, tackle the first chores, trying to get as much done as possible before the sun ascended. At first light we’d saddle up, gallop to the edges of the Hills’ forty thousand acres (double the size of Balmoral) and begin to muster. That is, move the herd of cattle from here to there. We’d also search for individual cows that had strayed overnight, and drive them back into the herd. Or load some onto a trailer and take them to another section. I rarely knew exactly why we were moving these cows or those, but I got the bottom line:

Cows need their space.

I felt them.

Whenever George and I found a group of strays, a rebellious little cattle cabal, that was especially challenging. It was vital to keep them together. If they scattered, we’d be proper fucked. It would take hours to round them up and then the day would be wrecked. If one darted off, into a stand of trees, say, George or I would have to ride full speed after it. Every now and then, mid-chase, you’d get whipped out of the saddle by a low-hanging branch, maybe knocked cold. When you came to, you’d do a check for broken bones, internal bleeding, while your horse stood morosely over you.

The trick was never letting a chase last too long. Long chases wore out the cow, reduced its body fat, slashed its market value. Fat was money, and there was no margin for error with Aussie cattle, which had so little fat to begin with. Water was scarce, grass was scarce, and what little there was often got grubbed by kangaroos, which George and his family viewed as other people view rats.

I always flinched, and chuckled, at the way George spoke to errant cattle. He harangued them, abused them, cursed them, favoring one curse word in particular, a word many people go a lifetime without using. George couldn’t go five minutes. Most people dive under a table when they hear this word, but for George it was the Swiss Army knife of language—endless applications and uses. (He also made it sound almost charming, with his Aussie accent.)

It was merely one of dozens of words in the complete George lexicon. For instance, a fat was a plump cow ready for slaughter. A steer was a young bull that should’ve been castrated but hadn’t been yet. A weaner was a calf newly split from its mother. A smoko was a cigarette break. Tucker was food. I spent a lot of late 2003 sitting high in the saddle, watching a weaner while sucking a smoko and dreaming of my next tucker.