Read Online When Colts Ran by Roger McDonald - Free Book Online Page B

pen where Abe kept his boiling fowl. There was an explosion of feathers, a screech, the sound of an axe then silence. Buckler half woke from a dream of stumbling over someone in the dark. Himself, he found, when he shone a torch on the face. In the dream he wrestled himself trying to get life back, whether with success he was unable to remember. But a sense of life stirred away below, sending out small white shoots, something like pea sprouts; they crunched under his boots, staining the heavy figure under him, leaving dangling webs of contrition.
    Buckler awoke more properly with a grunt and looked around, cursing his luck if Harris came at him in his sleep. Wrote up his diary at first light including confounded dreams, just as he had with a stub of pencil under fire at Gallipoli on the famed 25th.
    Buckler stepped outside for his wake-up piss behind the far end of the verandah, eyes screwed tight against the rising sun. Harris stepped up to him without warning, awareness of that moment was for later consideration – en route to Adelaide of all possible kismet-starred destinations.
    The leaden finality of a blow. Buckler’s pinpoint of consciousness knew only a darkening, a glimpsed hairy hand, a teeth-clicking jolt up the universe of skull.
    Jack Slim detected imagined engines for an hour before they stirred the air from the direction of Oodnadatta. He looked at his boss with a lumpy gash on his head matted with blood and busy with crawling flies. Buckler was conscious after being out for the count and thought it a great fuss being made. The DH Dove bore down like a chunky blowfly, its fuselage pitted by gravel and the tips of its propeller blades flashing silver. Buckler was tied to a stretcher with troops attending, but all the same didn’t like opening his eyes – could hardly do so – and spoke orders from the slurred corner of his mouth, of which nobody took notice.
    They saw Harris’s buckboard belting out along the flat. ‘Gone for another year,’ said Oakeshott, glad to have the shearing done before the mischief unfolded – Oakeshott not blaming Harris so much as rather putting it squarely on his friend Buckler’s preposterous morality.
    Buckler was threaded up and fitted into the body of the plane like a khaki grub. The pilot kept the engines turning while a nursing sister gave Buckler a veterinarian’s dose of hypodermic solution. In a knapsack held crosswise over his chest he carried shaving necessities and personal papers, his letters, and a hastily scrawled note from Slim wishing him luck.
    *
    Thermals rose in the heat, the plane tossed about. When the air smoothed engine vibrations ached the roots of his teeth. It was amazing what the heart provided – amorous wants persisting after such a lesson. Where would they go after their hotel dinner? Upstairs to a room previously engaged? Back to her establishment? Down in the dirt of a public park, as had previously been imperative, like a pair of clean-lusting dogs? What would she be wearing? What perfume on her skin like animal sweat, bursting to flame under his touch? He trusted ardour never to look beyond the hour. There must be a reason for that: it meant so much.
    They flew, Buckler calculated, over a place of charred sardine cans and bottle tops in ashes where he and Birdy Pringle had yarned, smoked and boiled the billy with a few meagre twigs back when Christ was a boy in short pants, when they had carried brushwood in bundles on pack camels. It was plausible the old-time tracks remained as fresh as when they first plotted the surface, deserts having such power of reminder. Those tracks would still be there in a thousand years. Anyone searching for mortal remains would know where to go.
    The ego wouldn’t shut up and would go on just as long. Each time Buckler memorialised himself it felt definitive. Original Anzac fighter. Protector of men back home. Thirties’ lighthouse keeper against