The Company of Sheep

The last thing we heard at Nangar was Terarra Creek, and we did not notice losing it until we had been driving for an hour.

That is how it goes. A place gives you a sound for a week, you stop hearing it, and then it is behind you and the cab is full of engine and road and nothing else. We came down off the goat country with the heater on, and the morning did its usual business of turning us from people camped somewhere into people going somewhere.

Cowra took a few minutes. Then the bitumen ran out.

What followed was dirt, and dust, and more dirt, the roads narrowing and squaring off into the grid that farming country uses, right angle after right angle, a gum on the corner, a mailbox at the gate. Somewhere in there the country changed hands. We had spent weeks inside national parks, where the ground is left to get on with whatever it wants; now every hectare had a fence around it and a job to do. Grammy held station in our mirrors, her van going the same yellow as the dust we were making for her.

Tout Park sat on a bend, and the bend was most of what it had. Flat ground, room for two, nothing provided and nothing promised. Whatever we had expected of it, the thing worth having was there when we pulled in: the paddocks fell away west and simply kept going, ridge after ridge of pale winter grass, no roof or tower anywhere in it. There was nothing we had to be early for.

There was also nobody there to negotiate with, so we took all of it. We spent a good while longer than the parking required, shifting the bus a degree at a time until the windows held the whole of the view, and Grammy did the same beside us, her nose turned the same way as ours. Two homes on a bend in a dirt road, both pointed at a paddock.

She had bought that van at seventy four. Anth watched her settle it, level it, switch off, and kept the thought to himself: that a convoy is a thing with a number of nights in it, and nobody is ever told the number.

We had swapped kangaroos for sheep.

At Nangar the company had been kangaroos and wallaroos out on the flat at dusk, goats coming down the hill in the afternoons, a fox once in broad daylight among the cypress pines. Here it was sheep, and sheep keep different hours. They do not arrive at last light and they do not leave at dawn. They are simply present, all day and most of the night, complaining at length about something happening in the next paddock over. They sounded like a queue that had been waiting a long time. By the second morning we could pick one of them out of the rest, an old ewe somewhere south of us with a voice like a gate.

The days were small and we let them be. Coffee first, always, though at this time of year that meant coffee carried back to bed and drunk under the covers. The ground gave up its heat the moment the sun went and was slow about handing it back, and the bus held that cold well into the morning, so we held the cups instead and let the day get on with warming itself. The firewood we burned had been riding with us since Wanda Wandong, topped up with what we inherited at Nangar, so the fire each evening was made of two camps we had already left. Its smoke went straight up in air that had stopped moving.

A few travellers found the bend while we were there. Not many. They came in off the dirt in the last of the light and they were gone before the second coffee was made. None of them stayed more than a night.

We knew the habit without ever having taken it up. Two and a half years out here and we have always moved as little as we could get away with and stayed as long as we wanted to. We know what the other way buys, which is distance. What it costs is everything a place does on its second day. On the first day you get the view. On the second you find out what the light does to it between four and five o'clock. On the third you know where the ewe is.

And every dusk, the west burned.

It began as nothing, a wash of pink over the ridges that we nearly talked through. Then the far edge of the farmland caught, and the red came up off it and took the whole western half of the sky, and the paddocks underneath went the colour of the sky, and the fence posts and the sheep and Grammy's van all stood in it. We sat with our cups and stopped talking. Three nights, and it did it three times, and by the third we knew to be out of the chairs and standing before it started.

Canberra was somewhere ahead of us. So was the rest of the winter, and the cold that was already making a point of itself, and a diary that would want us back eventually. None of it reached the bend. It is a rare thing to be able to answer the question of how long by saying: until we have had enough.

Long after the colour had gone, and the fire was down to coals we were too warm and too lazy to feed, the sheep were still out there in the dark, saying to one another whatever it was they had been saying since we arrived.

By the third night we had stopped hearing them.Read more