When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald Page B

interested Randolph how Oakeshott was two people, one known to slaughter an animal in rage when it wouldn’t do what he wanted, the other reflecting on watching bare-breasted lubras in Western Australia leaning over sheep and calming them by understanding, following the tip of the blade shears with their noses, and the sheep loving it so much that when they were shorn they didn’t run away but seemed to want to come back again for another round of being nuzzled and clipped.
    So everyone was two people, while Randolph’s struggle was about becoming one person and sticking to that. Fair-haired, light-skinned, blue-eyed and of good strong build, Randolph Knox had one overriding physical fault – that jaw like a bag of marbles. It made him look as if he had a bad case of mumps all the time. His nickname at school was Bumper Bar. Being made Head Boy didn’t overcome the humiliation of that.
    Sitting on the hut steps with a .44-40 between his knees, Randolph counted out cartridges. It was the rifle that ‘Won the West’. For a week there were ten slugs allowed. Eureka flour and tea likewise came rationed but, oh boy, dingoes needed to come up to Randolph’s boots and make their crazy howling before he’d let fly and give Oakeshott the satisfaction of berating the waste of one shot. But that week he blasted at anything in a blowout marking his finish – bottles, tins, rabbits.
    Home was a thousand miles east on a sparkling river, the Isabel, across from the Snowies on the other side, where Randolph saw himself returning with the sun at his back, droving a mob of his own, a royal progress up the home valley with cold thunderheads and blue distances. The mob would flow, bumping his horse’s legs and funnel into a gate, pouring through into the evening paddocks, dust drifting as his father welcomed him without a word of praise, except he would mark the achievement with a broken blade shear driven into a tree.
    Hours passed in such thought, daydreaming and planning before Randolph went inside and made himself ready for the night – into that one room of corrugated iron containing a wire-framed bed, lumpy mattress, blankets from the saddle roll and a smoking lamp by the light of which he read the novels of Sir Walter Scott. He dozed, and woke to see marsupial mice skipping across the pages. By the light of the guttering lamp he saw them enter the leg of his trousers, where they hung on a wall-peg, and reappear, tiny-whiskered friends peering over the belt buckle. Nevertheless, he threw his book at them. Then his attention was strained through to the first faint weakening of darkness when he regretted the night was over. He lived on mutton, dried apricots and roll-your-owns, at the start of a week routinely slaughtering an old wether, leaving the skin drying under stones. Cooked the best chops, salted a leg, fed his dog, scattered the offal and sat chewing till his jaws ached. The skins were his to sell, likewise any dead wool found on carcases thanks to which he was in good credit with a stock agent.
    An older brother and uncles were away at the war, but Randolph was exempt by family agreement. Diversions were not in his nature. Those that were he wrestled and smothered down. By the sixth day he decided he’d earned a geek at a fuss though; and late that afternoon after checking miles of fence he rode the gypsum flats to look at the trucks closer. One came along and he was too far away to hail it, so turned around for the ride back. Thought he’d soon be at the hut, only down in the dry gullies dark came on. A horseman in that country was the hand of a crawling clock.
    Light flickered in a ragged stand of trees; men were camped there mysterious as plotters in the borderlands of Caledonia. Edging closer Randolph saw the outline of their truck. Around a camp fire figures moved against the flames, tipping their throats back, hard voices grumbling. Obscenities Randolph had never