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As an eleven-year-old boy, I’d listened to him both horrified and fascinated.
“Watching smoke plumes is a beautiful thing, just as mesmerising as watching flames, some say,”Dad would say every time there was a bushfire up in the hills.“But it’s the smoke that gets ya first, before you burn. If you burn at all. Smoke in your lungs is the real killer.”
He always talked about staying low and getting to safety in a fire. We were used to Dad’s lectures growing up. And then, in the end, the flames took him before the smoke could.
I stared out the front windscreen, looking for the fire break entrance off the road. The air was heavy with smoke, completely engulfing the vehicle, wisps like ghostly fingers clawing at the glass.
“Geez, this is thick,” I muttered the obvious under my breath.
Rosie wasn’t visible in the rear view mirror as we bounced along the bush track. But she’d taken the turn and wouldn’t be far behind.
“Had rain in the high country,” Ryan said, adjusting the CB radio. “None of it’s burning though. Just smoking up the place.”
“We are going to be covered in sooty shit after this,” I sighed. “The stink will take forever to get off your skin.”
Ryan grunted. I hated the smell of burnt eucalyptus—an acrid smell of spoilt oil. I gave Ryan the side-eye. How could he stand it? The job, the smell, all of it, when he had been burnt, and Stacey, as the chamferboard farmworker’s house we’d made our temporary home collapsed in the fire and killed Dad?
Did he hear Dad scream before he died?
Shit …Did Ryan smell Dad’s body as he burnt to death?Before the exploding gas cylinder took him?
I inhaled sharply, willing the panic to subside. If I hadn’t had stayed behind at school for swimming training, I would have been at home with Ryan and Stacey.
I might have died that day. Maybe Stacey or Ryan wouldn’t have made it out and they—
Fuck. These thoughts never helped. These thoughts led to a dark place.
I sat up straighter in the drivers’ seat. My right hand shook slightly on the steering wheel. I flexed it, hoping the tremors would stop.
“You okay?”
I glanced sharply to my left to find Ryan frowning before I pumped the brakes. “Ah, the parks team got here first. Looks like we owe them beers.”
One of the national park crew was dressed in firefighting gear and kneeling by our boundary fence. Ryan and I swung out of the truck as Rosie parked behind us. Smoke haze wafted through the trees, enough to make our eyes water, but thankfully, visibility and air quality were good.
The ranger looked up with a nod. “G’day, lads. Rosie. Got good news and bad news. Bad news, looks like you’ve lost a few sheep. Got caught in old barbed wire.”
Great, more money down the drain.
“Good news is the fire is contained. Barely even a thing. Everything is too wet for it to catch and take off. Sorry to have called you out.”
“Good to hear about the fire, better to be safe than sorry.” I acknowledged as Ryan and I approached the ranger and then saw it.
Blood. There was blood everywhere. Flies hovered above. A trail of rusty dots was splattered on the earth.
A ewe was dead, her intestines hanging out. Two more were beside her, all caught in old barbed wire.
The national park team hung their heads.
“Where would this have come from?” I picked up a loose end of the wire. “We cleaned up the firebreak two years ago and re-fenced along here.”
“Looks really old.” The ranger shrugged. “Maybe the rain washed it down here a few weeks ago. But there’s a break in the fence about one hundred metres up.” The park ranger nodded towards the track. “Wombats and roos have pushed the fence posts and wire over.”
Three dead ewes meant at least two grand we wouldn’t get at the saleyards, if not more. Not just what they were worth as a dressed carcass for the meatworks, but as breeders. Potential twins birthed by each ewe meant losing money at the saleyards now and future lambs after that. We’d lost many others over the summer and autumn months, a couple here, three there. And it was adding up. For every sheep we lost, it meant hanging onto failing equipment and machinery, and less cash flow to pay the instalment for the bank loan.
The farm was bleeding literally and metaphorically.
“We should bury them before wild dogs find them.” My gut churned. “Drag them across the firebreak to our land and bury them there.”
