Circle of Flight (9 page)

As we approached the fence they were a hundred metres in front of us. But at the same time I could see something lumbering into view from the right. What the hell? For a moment I actually thought it was a large vehicle. The police were here already? Had someone heard the shots and called them? I felt like an idiot when I realised what it was. Colin McCann had put his bull in this paddock. I hadn’t seen the bull for a couple of months. He was a magnificent creature, one of the best in the district. A horned Hereford, and you don’t get those so often these days, dark red, the size of a delivery van, with hindquarters that shouted power, and a proud head. Col never dehorned his bulls. He was a purist, I guess, and liked the natural look. Besides, it was a bloody business, cutting horns off, and the bulls hated it.

Everyone has their own opinion about horns, but my favourite approach was Tammie Murdoch’s, who put tennis balls on her goats’ horns, held with metres of duct tape. It made the goats look pretty funny, like aliens. Goats have a perpetually bewildered expression anyway, which kind of matched the tennis balls.

These days most bulls are reasonably placid, because they’ve been bred that way. Nearly every farmer I know sends aggressive bulls to the abattoir. In fact, even a bull that’s been well behaved for years gets turned into hamburger if he makes a move in the wrong direction. Either that or castrated, if he’s young enough to grow into a good steer. Then he might end up as steaks or sausages instead of hamburgers. This is a much better outcome for the animal, and fills him with pride and joy.

Anyway, the thing is, aggressive bulls are just not worth the risk. They are such massive creatures, killing machines on land that are as efficient as sharks or hippos or crocodiles in water. They weigh tonnes, they’re fast, and although they can’t turn on a five cent piece, they can turn on a five dollar note. And the thing is, you can never trust them. It’s the same with stallions. No matter how long you’ve known them, no matter how pleasant and polite they’ve been, they can go for you. Sometimes the reason is obvious, for example if you take a cow in heat out of the mob, then you can’t expect the bull to like you very much. But sometimes you can’t figure it, although a bull that’s been raised by hand is usually more dangerous, and on the other hand a bull that hasn’t had a lot of human contact is a risk. Horned bulls are more likely to be aggressive than poll bulls. And when they’re out in the paddock, bulls have a flight zone around them, and the size of it varies from beast to beast.

Col’s bull was likely to have a big flight zone, because he was in a big paddock, because he’d been bucket reared, because he didn’t see people much any more. If you get in an animal’s flight zone, the idea is that they’ll turn and run. But it doesn’t always work that way. It does with rabbits and pigeons and usually with snakes. But if they have an aggressive personality, or you’ve caught them on a bad day, or they’ve been out drinking half the night, and you’re in their flight zone, you might be the one who needs to turn and run. And if they’re big, or they’ve got mouthfuls of venom, and what’s worse you’re coming at them in a way that has them feeling threatened, then you might think about checking your life insurance.

The two soldiers probably didn’t know much of that stuff, but they had an extra problem, which was that they hadn’t seen the bull. They were too busy looking back at us. The bull was on their right. I’d guess his flight zone would be around a hundred metres. The soldiers were within thirty metres. This was bad news for them. Even worse news was that the bull showed every sign of being majorly pissed off. He had the head down, was shaking it, was scratching the ground: his whole body was agitated. This was a bull contemplating doing some serious damage. As we approached the fence Lee looked like he was ready to take another shot, but I called to him, fairly softly, ‘Don’t fire, don’t fire.’

He looked perplexed. Amazingly, it seemed like he hadn’t seen the bull either. This two tonne monster had become invisible. I pointed and his eyes widened. We were just reaching the top of the ridge, and looking for a place to cross, but we both stopped. To make matters even worse for himself, one of the soldiers, still looking back at us and trying to get away from the most open part of the paddock, was veering further to the right. The way he was going, the bull would only have to open his mouth and this guy would pop himself in.

At that moment the man on the left saw the problem. He shouted to his friend, who propped and turned around. I couldn’t see his expression, but I’m guessing flabbergasted and panic-stricken would have been among the adjectives jockeying for selection.

What happened next played itself out like a terrible drama with two spectators. Lee and I stayed on our side of the fence, like an audience. Of course if the bull had wanted to smash through the fence he could have done so any time, but luckily nearly all cattle live and die without learning that. It’s like school, most students go from kindergarten to Year 12 without noticing that they could do a fair amount of damage if they wanted to. They stay inside the fence.

Occasionally you get a bull who can’t be contained by fences, and he’ll often get a one-way ticket to the killing floor as his reward. When I was a toddler we had a bull who even learned to get his head under the bottom wire of the fence and rip a string of droppers out of the ground, then lie the fence flat and walk across it, tiptoeing delicately so he didn’t get his hoofs hurt by the nasty barbed wire. I don’t know exactly what happened to him, but I can guess.

The man on the right started running. This was the worst thing he could do. Never turn your back on a bull. His best hope, his only hope, would have been to use his rifle in the same way that I use a cricket bat when I’m dealing with some bulls, to wave around and make myself look bigger and more threatening. Instead of which, this guy dropped his rifle. It seemed like they were both out of ammunition, because his friend didn’t try to shoot, which was good news for the bull.

Lee and I both still had our rifles, and we both still had ammunition. We looked at each other, and without speaking a word we came to the same decision. We turned back to look at the stage, to watch the tragedy.

We did even worse than that. The guy was running almost straight towards us. There was no other fence line near, and no cover, so I suppose he had forgotten about us, or thought we were less of a risk than the bull. Maybe he thought we were nicer than we actually are. They say nice guys finish last. I’d learned during the war that nice guys get killed. So I raised my rifle and pointed it at him, so that even in his terror he would know he was about to be shot.

I wasn’t going to shoot at him, but that’s not because I’m a nice girl. It’s because I was worried that a shot would scare off the bull. That’s how nice I am.

He raised his arms, as if in surrender, or perhaps to plead for his life, and he veered away, to the left, as if circling to get back to his friend. His friend was rooted to the spot. While they were performing their dance, the bull had not stayed still. Almost as soon as the guy started running, the big beast had come after him. Even with a twenty metre start, and even though his semicircle gained him a bit of ground, the man had no chance. This was rage on four legs. This was a huge red tank with the eyes of a pig and a tail sticking out like a rudder. This was murder on the most primitive level. The bull ran him down from behind. Just at the end the man put on a sprint, and again threw up his arms as the animal reached him. There was a flurry of dust and the guy went down. Either I was still pretty deaf, or else he made no sound, because I didn’t hear anything, only a few
whoofs
from the bull as he made that big body move like a runaway cattle train.

A couple of tonnes of beef thundered over the man’s legs and back and head, and he lay there unmoving with the dust settling around him again. But the bull hadn’t finished yet. Not just one human had invaded his territory. A second trespasser was over there, no doubt looking to take his cows off him, planning to pick up a couple of hot chicks. No way was this bull going to stand by and watch as the best-looking cows in the paddock disappeared down the road to have coffee with a stranger.

Quivering with rage, shaking all over, his little eyes pink, a heat shimmer rising from his back, he eyed the other man. With his right hoof he scraped the ground. It was almost like those little friction cars that you run repeatedly on the carpet before you let them go. He was gaining energy, building up momentum, ready for his next high-speed charge.

Cattle look in the direction they are about to go and this beast was staring at the man so hard that even someone who’d never seen a bull couldn’t help but get the message. The soldier – I don’t know why I call them soldiers, it’s an insult to the genuine ones, like General Finley – had been backing away and now he too turned and ran. He headed for the fence at a different angle, one that would bring him out forty metres to our left. Lee and I both had our weapons ready.

This time we had to use them. When the guy was a dozen steps from the strainer post Lee fired. I don’t know how close he got, but he missed. It wasn’t until afterwards that I realised he’d missed deliberately. The man reacted by swerving away from the fence, putting his head down and sprinting for a tree in the distance. The rumbling of the hoofs behind him must have sounded loud in his head, even if he was half deafened.

How slow the human body seems sometimes. Even if he’d strained every ligament, dislocated every bone, stretched every muscle, he couldn’t have gone any faster. The man got all of a quarter of the way to the tree before he was run down from behind. The giant head tossed and a pair of horns caught him and flung him forwards like he’d been zapped by a million volts. Now he was not a person any more, even though he was still alive. He seemed like a thing, an object, with no mind or heart, and certainly no control over his head or arms or legs. The body hit the ground and the bull was immediately at it again, using his horns as the deadly weapons they were, punching with them, goring the thing, throwing it around, ignoring the blood that started to soak the thing’s clothing and splattered onto the bull’s face and forelegs. I saw the arms and legs flail and I heard one sobbing scream that was all too human, and then I turned away.

L
EE, MY
G
OD
he can be cool sometimes. I mean cool as in cold. While it was all happening in front of us, and my mind had stopped working because my senses were getting so much input that everything inside me had to be dedicated to processing it, Lee had been thinking, thinking, thinking.

When it seemed to be over, and the two bodies lay still and broken on the ground, and the bull was still huffing and puffing and snorting and stomping around, Lee turned to me and said, ‘This could work out pretty well.’

I stared at him in disbelief. ‘Don’t you feel anything?’

‘That comes later. And stop doing that “you’re a cold killing machine” routine on me. I’m sick of it.’

‘OK,’ I said meekly. The truth was that I also knew, even while it was happening, that the bull was acting in our best interests. It was just that Lee had taken it further, as he was about to show me.

‘Here’s what we’ve got to do,’ he said. ‘Three things.

Number one, check their bodies and make sure they’ve got no mobile phones or anything else. That way we can be sure they haven’t told their friends that we were chasing them. Number two, take away their rifles. Number three, pick up any empty shells around the place.’

‘Why do we need to pick up the shells?’ I asked slowly.

‘Look,’ he said, ‘in a way we’ve just committed the perfect murders. What happens when the bloke who owns this bull comes to check the paddock? He finds two dead guys, who have obviously been killed by his animal. He’s horrified. He calls the cops. They come out here. They search around and they probably find their campsite, and they realise that they’re members of the gang who kidnapped Gavin, and they’ve been spying on your property. They contact you and say, “We’ve just found two men killed by a wild bull.” And that’s the first you know about it. It’ll never occur to them that we more or less forced the guys into the paddock, or to put it another way, they forced themselves in there. It’ll look like they just went for a nice stroll through the bush and in their ignorance somehow provoked the bull. There’ll be no evidence to suggest anything else. No-one’ll know they’ve just been in a gun battle.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘The only danger is that if they’re found in the next couple of hours, they’ll smell of gunpowder or whatever. But to be brutal about it, once they start rotting, and once the foxes and crows and all the rest of them move in for afternoon tea, that evidence will disappear pretty quickly.’

‘What about the two steers I killed?’ I asked.

‘Yeah, bit of a problem. But they’re out of sight of the bull’s paddock. And again time and foxes’ll help.’

‘Also, they might think the soldiers shot them for food. They’re not going to do major post-mortems on a couple of rotting cattle. The cops are too busy these days.’

‘Exactly.’

I had to admit, it did sound good. And if anyone ever got what they deserved, it was these two. ‘We’d better do your three steps in reverse order,’ I said. ‘Let’s look for shells first. I don’t want to go into that paddock until the bull’s had a good long rest.’

‘I was hoping you’d say that,’ he said. ‘Actually, no, I was hoping you’d volunteer to go in there. But if you’re going to be a wimp about it, we may as well give him five minutes to settle.’

The one thing Lee didn’t have to do was spell out the reasons for covering up our involvement in the deaths of these two men. The way the world worked nowadays, if anyone found out that he and I had been exchanging shots with these guys and they’d been killed as a result of it, we’d be chucked in jail for twelve months while they interrogated us and collected evidence. We wouldn’t be going anywhere. And I’m not exaggerating much. Without knowing a lot about the law, I doubted if we’d be actually locked up, but it was possible, and we’d certainly be spending an awful lot of time talking to lawyers and the police.