Tippicanoe and Kangaroo Stew

My beard has been getting quite long here with two and a half months and counting. But my hair was getting to be a bother. I have the sort of hair that grows laterally rather than vertically. I think sometimes that some air hose in my head never got disconnected and thus i get the bobble-head effect rather than long luscious locks billowing behind me in a wind machine. So getting in the DIY spirit of Delmore i decided to take on the clippers in single hand combat. What followed was the longest, most painful and irritating hour and a half long battle with hair that i have ever had. Keep in mind i have never cut ANYONE'S hair let alone my own. But innumerable "OW GOD DAMN IT!"'s and one floor covered in hair later i emerged bruised but victorious. Whether i gave myself a "good" haircut .. . . . .  i don't know. But make my hair shorter, albeit unevenly, I did.

Also, more beer was got from town and bad decisions were made. We decided that while we were here at Delmore we had to try a Kangaroo tail. We sell them at the store and the aboriginals LOVE them. they buy them 5 at a time if they can afford them. And i had heard that kangaroo is pretty good anyway. But the frozen tails that we sell, not only have the skin and fur still on them, but they smell HORRIBLE. Nevertheless we went for it. We thought the best way to cook it would be to cut it up and make a stew so that if worse came to worse we could mask the flavor of it with other stuff. Luckily getting the skin off was not a problem. Esben is a hunter and has skinned animals before so he tackled it like a pro even with my now very blunt knife and the musty old tire and BO smell that came wafting our direction from the flaccid appendage that would be our dinner. (It really was that bad) The first problem though, presented itself when we tried to cut the tail into chunks that would fit in the bowls. What we didn't realize is that the tails like most of the rest of the meat we sell here, are about 50% bone, 35% fat and or cartilage and about 15% meat. When my sharp but small knife failed to make it through a section, and when i couldn't stand the wet crunch of breaking the tail at all of the bone joints i resorted to violence. I went at it with the big kitchen knife which, though very dull, seemed to do ok in getting the pieces apart. But it proved to be just too much effort for something that we were less and less sure we were going to eat all of anyway. Nevertheless we chucked it in a pot with a bunch of vegetables and 11 herbs and spices and we boiled the hell out of it for 2 and a half hours.

I have to say that the kangaroo tail did not taste OUTRIGHT disgusting. It did taste a little bit like the smell that the skin had, but despite the high fat and cartilage content, it WAS edible. However, no one finished their stew completely i think. Buster was happy to chomp on the leftovers though, and an ENTIRE corned beef that had gone bad. Needless to say i don't think that we will be trying kangaroo tail stew anytime soon, although i do still want to try kangaroo stir fry with kangaroo fillet (which australians pronounce fill-eT, which is a bit like saying sham-pag-nuh or kay-suh-dill-ah)

The stew was not the only bad idea that the beers got us into though. What happens when you put four young guys in a room with beer, a fireplace, wooden furniture and a branding iron? Well i can say that from now on no one will forget that the dining room table is Delmore property. Also i branded my banjo. It is an old style banjo and has more wood surface on it than modern banjos, so i was planning on burning some cool designs into it at some point anyway, but the opportunity presented itself and i went with it. the whole iron didn't fit on the pot so there are just weird markings now but i am happy with the results. How many people in the world have a banjo that is branded with a cattle iron? Not many, that's how many.

Kathleen is not the only artist here at Delmore, I have been slowly filling my sketchbook with ramblings and doodles and here is a taste of some of them. Although I actually have been writing much more than I have been drawing or painting. It isn’t helped by the fact that trees and broken cars are only interesting to draw so many times and that’s all there really is to draw. There aren’t any coffee houses or streets with a lot of people walking by here. And I have already drawn buster a bunch of times. But I am of the opinion that writing is just drawing with different shaped lines. I am still exercising my idea muscle when I write or more accurately spew stream of consciousness willy nilly onto a page with no form or fashion. But I FEEL like I’m more creative and inspired than I have been in quite a while, and I guess that’s the whole reason I came out here. There are a lot of things that I would like to do when I get back to the states, most of which involve the flexing of my intracranial bicep and the mustering of enough willpower to get them done. And I’ve done plenty of mustering so I think I’ll be in good shape. But that’s enough rambling for now.

In other news there was yet another bird trapped in our house. We leave the door open most of the time and mostly just big bugs join us for lunch. This time we managed to fully complete the food chain in our living room. There is us at the top, then the big lizard that lives behind the laundry room, then the bird, then the small lizards that live behind the sink, then the spiders and occasional dragonflies, then the regular flies, moths, ants and other invertebrates that make up the bottom rung of our cycle of life.

Speaking of the food chain, our food situation is getting bad again. We are currently out of meat, and this time we have almost no bread left. Hopefully some more food will be coming from town tonight but I guess we will see.  We can always eat Buster.

Buster has this eye infection and now we have to hold him down twice a day and put drops in his eyes. That is no small feat, let me assure you. He is a very small dog but he is all muscle. I think it is helping though.

Ok the internet is not cooperating so I will put this in word and upload it later.

And now it’s a few more days later. The generator has been acting up and I think it’s on it’s last legs. We have a back up generator but that’s on it’s last legs as well. Also there is a replacement generator but it is the wring brand or something so we can’t install it. SOOOO I guess the power may be about as spotty as the internet. HAHA.

I just heard on the news this morning about this island called Vanuatu off the coast that has the world’s most active volcano at the moment. If it is still going in a month or two I think I am going to look into plane tickets. Big Australian cities are cool but standing on the rim of an erupting volcano is freaking awesome! We’ll see though it may be out of my budget.

It has gotten pretty cold here in the two months since I have arrived. Today it is 17 degrees C which is low 60’s F which I suppose is not that cold but compared to the 106 degrees F that it was a few weeks ago it is freezing. Also considering that there is less than zero insulation here you can bet that much of the after dinner activities take place around the well used wood oven.

We saw a tv documentary about poisonous animals in the outback and the guy was in Alice Springs talking about all of the various critters that live around me. I found myself saying “Hey! I saw one of those in the paint cabinet or Look, by the phone! There’s one now!” Or my favorite “Hey! One of those took a crap on our living room floor!” (not even joking about the last one) also it turns out that the snake I was playing with a few weeks ago may be the most venomous snakes in the entire world. And I picked it up with my bare hands….. tee hee.

“Snakes with a round shaped head aren’t poisonous guys…” famous last words.

Also I have found that the picture uploader on facebook is much more efficient than the one on blogger so i may be uploading pictures to there from now on. 

my facebook outback album http://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150999902546393.480704.566766392&type=3

I think that might work. 

Also one of the other guys here is on a bike trip around the world. he has essentially biked to australia from Denmark. Minus water and certain warzones. his very cool website is www.cyclingtheglobe.com

Ch 34: In which Britt Gets an Awesome New Hat, The Magical Tire Tube Fairy Pays a Visit to Delmore, and the Pizza Demon Has the Last Laugh.

This certainly has been a very eventful week. The most major news being that I went to town for the first time in two months. When I write it down it doesn’t sound like it is that long of a time but it feels like it is forever since I have seen more than ten people in one place at a time. Also seeing buildings, and streets and having to obey things like speed limits and staying on a particular side of the road are foreign to me now. Especially the driving on the left side of the road. We came to a big intersection and I really had no idea what was going on. Also we came to a roundabout and had I been driving I definitely would have killed us. Not only do you have to stay on the left side of the road but you go around the circle clockwise. Craziness. BUT! I got myself an Akubra hat! For those of you that do not know I have a small but formidable hat collection and I get a hat everywhere I go in the world. Also others have brought me back hats from different places. But my world hat collection would never be complete if I didn’t get an Akubra. Akubra is a hat company in Australia and I have to say they are QUALITY hats. Very nice. A bit pricy but worth every penny, you really do need a good hat out here to keep away the elements. Plus my while most hats have a feather on the side, my hat has a real tiger shark tooth on the headband. And a feather of a bird that we hit with the ute.

BUT TOWN. It was weird being in real stores that have real inventory and more than ten kinds of products. Also it was a bit strange to actually need and use money again. There isn’t a lot of economic stimulus happening at Delmore . . . .  well for the staff anyway.

OH AND BEER. I bought a whole case of beer which like everything else in Australia besides kiwi fruit, is really really expensive. But it was worth it, after oh so many days of hard work it is nice to finally crack open a cold one.

Also while we were in town we climbed up one of the sides of “THE GAP” which is where the Stuart highway crosses through a small mountain at the south end of Alice Springs. The view from up there was awesome, I will put up some pictures if I can. Also we saw some wallabies hopping around near the top of the hill, but we couldn’t get that close to them before the jumped away.

We then drove over to meet Tom’s friend Greg who happens to be an amateur radio. . . guy. I don’t really know the right name for it but he has a giant radio antenna in his back yard that he can use to talk to people all over the world. Pretty awesome.

Then it was off to the gas station where we hogged up two diesel pumps and made off with 800 liters of fuel and two free meat pies from the manager who is very appreciative of our business.

OH AND I ALMOST FORGOT, I crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. I didn’t notice it the first time that I came out but the line is just north of Alice Springs. It was funny because the park was full of old people and camper vans on vacation and two filthy oil stained young guys with a beat up old ute and four oil drums on the back. I was standing next to the monument, and one guy comes up wearing slippers drinking some tea, looks at me wit my dusty hat, petrol and paint stained shirt and cow manure encrusted boots, looks back at the line of camper vans and says “So which one are you in?” Good times.

Back at Delmore when I opened the shop the next morning I found an interesting sight. On the floor of the shop were three boxes of blankets, and four boxes of tire tubes. The tiny mail plane would never carry that much stuff and I doubt that a Fedex truck could handle the road conditions here. So we decided that we had all been very good this year and that the magical tire tube fairy had paid a visit to Delmore. Which actually was really helpful because we were badly in need of some spare tires for the utes. It is very dangerous to go out with out two spares on the back. Yes two.

Then two nights ago we decided that we were fed up with the same dinner we’ve been having every night of essentially bacon meat and pasta with some canned veggies and we decided to make a PIZZA. Keep in mind that while I can stir fry stuff, none of us here have any sort of real cooking ability, certainly not BAKING ability. Which as it turns out is much needed for making pizza. Also keep in mind that there was a bit of drinking involved in the process…… but we found a recipie online and went for it. It was one particularly that didn’t involve yeast which we didn’t have but all the reviews said it was good. We decided to make three pizzas because the pizza doughs that we made didn’t look very big, so I started cutting up and cooking sausage and vegetables for what I thought was three pizzas ………..  which turned out to be a lot. Oh, and did I mention that we don’t have tomato sauce? In place of that we just cut up tomatoes and laid them around with the other toppings. DESPITE all of the various ingredients that we were lacking, we weren’t short of determination or beer, and the first two turned out….pretty good. I don’t really know if you could actually call them pizzas but they tasted good whatever they were. It was more like a lot of pizza toppings on a thin piece of crusty bread. But if the first two were “kind of pizzas” then they got all of the pizza genes that were to be had in that family because the third one was definitely NOT a pizza. The first two we made on the baking pans that we cooked them on, but then we ran out of pans so we made the third one (which was the one with the most potential) on a cutting board. But when we tried to move it to the baking sheet. DISASTER. The dough started coming apart left and right. So we decided to be inventive and make what I called a PIZZA-RITTO. A pizza rolled up like a burrito, but alas, it was not to be. You know when you are trying to make an omelet and then you give up and just make scrambled eggs? It was kind of like that except four times bigger and it was definitely a NON HOMOGENOUS mixture. COMPLETE STRUCTURAL FAILURE. There were parts of the dough that cooked and there were parts that had a good amount of vegetables but then there were huge lumps of uncooked dough with a bit of onion right in the middle. NO GOOD. At least we were full from the first two pizzas which turned out to be exactly the right amount of food. And we know better for next time.

Also today I got to try one of the bush plums that Kathleen’s paintings are supposedly about. Freddie Jones is one of the big shot leaders of the local aboriginal community and as I was fueling up his car he pulled a weird branch out of the back of the ute and said “plum, bush tucker” Kaja, I think was his word for it but he pulled one off and ate it. They are pretty good I have to say. Kind of sour, but good. However, much like the pizza we made, they are nothing like what you might call a plums. They are tart yellow berries that grow on what looks like a short bush. But they are good, and now I know what Kathleen is talking about when she talks about her paintings.

Lastly and most surprisingly, this morning I broke a socket wrench IN HALF. I was tightening the bolts that hold on the shovel part of the Grader (a giant bulldozer sort of thing that they use to make roads out here) and one of the nuts really would not come loose so I just leaned into it and lo and behold the circular part that fits around the nut just snapped clean in half. Sometimes I guess you don’t know your own strength. 

Kathleen's paintings part 3? more like The Hardy Boys in: Escape from Air Compressor Island

Ok i give up. Im tired of staring at the picture loading screen. I will try to upload the pics later but she did a really good one the other day.....Monday? i don't know maybe today is monday. no it's Friday. You definitely lose track of time out here. But the time is now, quite early morning. I got up to send of Ashley and Anna who are going back to NZ for graduation week and a massive party. They left at around 5:30 so they can make it to town before their planes leave hopefully. But there are also two new guys here.... Rasmus (i'm not sure how to pronounce his name let alone spell it) and Espen. Danish friends of one of the guys that was here before. So that leaves us with three danish guys and an american. Not a lot of english is going to be happening around here so i better brush up on my Danish. Well i have to go check that the generator has fuel in it so i may write more later.

Ok now it is later and i am writing more. I spent the better part of the last 5 hours battling air compressors. Its funny how out here a simple task will turn out to be a rabbit hole of compounding problems. We were told: Go over to that tractor over there and fill up the tires so we can tow it to the shop. OK we thought. No problem. Then we found that two of the tires were blown out and one was completely flat and maybe punctured. So we decided to get an air compressor to see if the tires would hold air. So we got an air compressor but the battery wasn't working and we had to hook it up to a car. Then the head wouldn't fit right because part of the tire rim was blocking it and we had to find another head. Which turned into finding a new air compressor which had a broken starter motor. so we changed that. then the release valve broke so we got a petrol powered compressor that after clearing the flooded engine and having to pull start it several times started working. Then the engine jammed and we gave up and got peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. All of that JUST so that we could tow the tractor to the shop and begin to try to fix THAT. Also we need an air compressor to get the broken truck started. You can start to get an idea of how rich and complex the web of broken things is out here. To be fair the environment is quite harsh. If something isn't broken because it's clogged with layers of dust then it has probably succumbed to being thrashed about in the bush by cattle or drunken backpackers. Sometimes both.
Also i have started planning my escape from this place. I saw the news last night and it proved to me that there is actually a whole world out there. The forbidden lands beyond the boundary fences are actually populated with 7 billion people! Who would have thought.
Also speaking of the outside world; i don't mean to throw politics into this blog but props to our President for finally and actually speaking in favor of equal rights for ALL. Now, if he just decides that off shore drilling is a pointless waste of the environment and decides that he is a bigger man than to need a super PAC to fight his battles for him, i may actually consider voting for him. As far as congress is concerned i'm going to vote third party until they are at least old enough to learn to share. That happens when you're about 3 or 4 years old right? BUT that's enough of that. I don't get the news much out here besides the Australian budget debate, (them too? go figure) and everyone here has been Danish or Kiwi anyway so not much talk of the US happens at all.

And now i have customers so i will write more later....again....

Ok and now it's even later. Don't you just love how time works on the internet? Anyway i think i was talking about how i'm planning my escape from Delmore. I'm taking suggestions for things to see in Australia besides Uluru. I'll probably spend a few days in Alice Springs getting used to hot showers and ready access to diverse food and supplies, then i'd like to do some hiking around the area.... there are tons of places to do that. I'm pretty sure that i want to spend my birthday in August on the beach. Cairns or Port Douglas just north of it i think. But before that i'd like to see Kakadu National Park and Darwin. Then i'll have a bit over a month to see the rest of the coast. mostly Sydney and Melbourne. ...... I still don't know. Then there is  New Zealand. But that's a whole other beast. There is so much to see over here i may have to do a return trip!

By the way we finally got the air compressor working and the tires were too full of holes to fill up anyway.

Oh yeah, I'm a mortal.

I laugh a lot about my near death experiences here, finding scorpions and venomous ants in my room, nearly being mauled by rampaging cattle and starving to death. But in all reality I actually almost died about an hour ago.

But first.

This morning we had one more truckload of cattle to take from one of the yards to another to be branded. So Tom and I hauled out the cattle truck and drove off to the yards. All was well and good until…. THA GUMP THA GUMP THA FUMP FUMP FUMP. OH CRAP. One of the tires had completely exploded and shredded itself and another had gone flat and popped off the rim. And with no spares and everyone in the yards away from the radios we were stuck. Working out here there is a lot more time spent sitting not really doing much than you might think. There is a lot of waiting around getting ready, waiting for customers to show up, lots of flat tires in the middle of no where, that sort of thing. I have decided that when I get back I am going to write a book called: 101 Great Places to Sit and Do Absolutely Nothing in the Outback. On that list luckily the place we were stuck this morning was about a 7 out of 10. We had water, we were near the yards and we had a decent view. It could definitely have been much worse. Also luckily after about an hour one of the girls checked in on the radio and we let her know we were stuck. Afterwards we had to go finish going over to the nearby yards and get the cattle water and back into their holding areas. Then we drove over to where the branding was going on just in time for a much needed lunch. This brings me to today’s near death experience. No my sandwich did not spontaneously combust in my face. This morning I was taught how to drive a manual and I drove myself and one of the girls an hour across really bad roads to the yards. I think I did pretty well especially considering how bad the roads are here and considering that it was my first time really driving a manual.

After lunch I was told that there might be some painters showing up this afternoon and that I should drive myself back to Delmore to meet them. ALONE. I did very well for the first part of the trip I think. I was driving very carefully and making sure to go extra slow around turns and through sand, or near the nearly meter deep trenches that run next to and through the road. About halfway home there was a patch of road that had two deep ruts in the road where someone had probably driven through when the road was muddy and it dried that way. I was driving with the ruts in between my wheels and I think that one of the tires slipped on some sand and I lost control of the ute and spun off the side of the road knocking into some of the short dead trees that are everywhere. The weird thing is that while I was spinning out of control the only thing that was going through my mind was,

“Wow, I’m actually crashing this car.”

Thanks to adrenaline, primal instinct, and probably some divine intervention, I managed to avoid the larger trees and stop the car. But all I could bring myself to do was get out and shove my face in the dirt for a minute or two, and thank whatever deity brought my foot to the brake in time. Even when I was directly charged by those huge cattle or nearly drowned by my dog when I was a kid or any car accident I’ve been in I have never been that in shock that I am actually still alive. I don’t even think that fear is really much a part of it. It’s like you know deep in your instinct brain, that you really probably shouldn’t be alive right now, and yet you are. So what I was feeling was an odd mix of relief and confusion. Even now probably an hour and a half later my heart is still racing.

I think what really saved me is that I wasn’t going that fast. I was probably only going 50 kms an hour (about 30mph) where earlier I had been had been going faster. It wasn’t really a matter of not knowing how to drive manual well, I’m pretty sure the same thing would have happened even if I were driving the automatic that I have at home. The sand and the deep ruts in the road threw my wheels all crazy and I tried to correct myself but just ended up going over the edge of the road.

As for the car, it’s hard to tell if I’ve done much damage to it or not. The utes here take such a beating and are so beat up and scratched and bent that I can’t tell what dents are new or not. The glass part of the right side rear view mirror definitely popped out but it’s not like we really use those much here anyway. There isn’t any traffic to look out for. If any of the damage turns out to be new I’ll post about it later. I won’t be able to find out until everyone gets home.

Also no painters have showed up today making the whole affair for naught. Except I guess for me to learn to be even more careful than I think I need to be on these roads.

But for now: WHEW. Thank god im alive.




Side note: I have found out that there was no new damage to the car except that the tire had a small hole in it. but now the tire has been replaced so all is good except maybe my ego.

OH SO MANY.

There are many titles I could give to this post. For instance:

Blood, Sweat, and Steers.

The 100 mph Creek Crossing Blues.

Am I red with white spots or am I white with red spots?

Redbeard conquers the Outback.

Hoarses yelling at Cows.

The Dnieper Derby 500.

Steer: 1 American: 0

Or simply (and my favorite)

MOOOOOOOOOOO. WALK UP WALK UP!!!! HEYHEYHEYHEY!!! MOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!! COME ON MOVE UP!!!!! MOOOOO!!!!!

For the past few days we have been working on the big muster in one of the far properties called Dnieper. One of the cool things about this place is that you can drive for an hour in one direction and STILL be on Don's property. All the cattle here are essentially free range (there are paddocks but they are the size of small cities) so mustering is when they round up a certain amount of them into trap yards, draft (sort them) , ear tag them, castrate some, clip horns, weigh and sell ones of a certain size. With between 8500 and 9000 head of cattle, you can imagine this is a big job. We were up before the sunrise and still working a few hours after sunset. I've mainly been helping with drafting the cattle which is sorting them into different areas depending on their age and sex. Calfs are obviously the young ones, wieners are male from 3-5 years (don't think that that means they are small), heifers are young females, steers are older males and Bulls are the BIG ones. Also cleanskins are any cattle that haven't been branded and don't have an ear tag.   The yards have special openings on them that let the cattle in to get water but don't let them back out again so they just collect at mustering time. And in the yards there are several different gated areas and a long chute with several different gates along it allowing us to deal with the cattle one by one. If you can't picture it just go to this

http://www.dpi.nsw.gov.au/agriculture/livestock/beef/equip/yard-design/conventional-200-head#Good-yard-design

It's that but five times bigger. The boss stands at the end of the chute and tells someone which area to let the cow into depending on which type it is. And several more guys work out at the other end making sure that there is a steady flow of cattle coming in to the chute and clearing up any blockages that happen quite frequently by running back and forth, sliding gates alone the chute to make sure that the cattle don't back out of it or just stand there. Very intense work. Especially since many of the cattle in the yards we were working in the other day were very pissy, because there wasn't any food in there for them and not all that much water. (It was supposed to be that way no one forgot to feed them) Normally the cattle always try to get away from you and you just have to yell at them to get them to go where you want but some of them gave us a real hard time. I don't know if anyone reading this has ever had the occasion to have an 1100 pound animal rush at them head on but i guarantee you won't ever forget it. We had gotten down to the last 15 or so steers in the main holding area and we were trying to get them into a smaller holding area just before the chute but these ones were EXTRA pissed off and stubborn and they really wanted to stay in the area they were in. Usually we take three or four people and form a sort of human net from behind them and just sort of lead them into the next area with few problems but these ones would either just turn around and run elsewhere instead. Finally we managed to get them into the next area and just as i was closing the gate they all decided to rush back out with me standing smack dab in the middle of the gate. Now, standing in the middle of the gate and yelling "WALK UP!!" is exactly how we were taught to get the cattle to turn around, and go where they should. But if a tiny shrieking monkey were standing in my doorway, preventing me from going into the kitchen, i would trample it without a second thought and get myself a sandwich. Which is why i promptly (AND NARROWLY) jumped out of the way when one of them came directly at me. It is very easy to think that cattle are stupid, and they probably are, but if they are capable of even one thought or feeling at a time, this one knew only hatred. Followed by the definite knowledge that it could flatten me without so much as slowing down. Afterwards we all jokingly decided that we need to keep a bottle of asprin in the ute incase of the heart attacks that you get when the cattle rush at you. At one point Tom fell over and was almost disemboweled by a steer with some wicked looking horns. We both agree that there is something about the way they are looking directly into your soul when they charge that horrifies you into moving. Anneleen, one of the girls working here is of course not afraid of charging cattle at all some how. The only one among us i might add. 

As frightening as the cattle can be though i really enjoy working with them. The exhaustion you feel at the end of the day mixed with the concoction of things engrained in your shirt, pants and skin is an accomplished sort of exhaustion. You really don't feel like you wasted the whole day. 

But by far the most fun thing i have done in a very very long time was getting the cattle from the main holding pen into the before mentioned ones connected to the chute. This is made fun because we Don does it with a landcruiser. AND I GOT TO SIT IN THE BACK. To say that our boss is a crazy driver would be an understatement. He goes at speeds through complete bush, that would earn him jail time on the highway. So when he told me to get in the back of his ute and hold on with both hands, having no idea what was about to happen i was naturally saying my prayers. I thought he was about to drive an hour back to the homestead with me on the back until i flew off. Then they opened the gates to the yards and he floored the truck into the yards straight at the mass of cattle horn ablazin'. What ensued was a gut wrenching series of high G doughnuts through the yards at 30 or 40 miles an hour with me holding on for dear life in the back with a giant smile (and my ipod out documenting the craziness.) Just imagine what a cattle dog does but with a toyota. These cattle were stubborn as well and i had to stand in the corner of the yards and yell as loud as i could to get them to go the right way. Apparently i can yell pretty loud because it seemed to help and Don i think was impressed with the volume of my "baritone" as he called it. Of course I've nearly blew out my voice doing it. But the roller-coaster ride through the yards was completely worth it.

After we drafted probably 150 or 200 steers we started loading them on to this big cattle truck that we have and shipping them to some other yards on the southernmost part of the property. But the truck got stalled and couldn't start again about a km from the next yards. Once again i was ordered into the back of the ute but this time was much more scenic and a lot more bumpy. It was just about sunset as we headed off at 130 or 40 kms an hour across giant wide open plains with awesome views of the Harts Range mountains on the other side of the neighbors property and through creeks and over hills. The only hard part was holding on when we hit bumpy patches and wiping the windshield wiper fluid out of our face when Don cleaned his dirty windows at with Tom and I in the back. There wasn't anything we could do for the truck that night so we left it there with the load of cattle in it and went home for a much needed dinner shower and sleep. 

The next morning we got the truck started but when we off loaded the cattle we found that there was one that had been trampled in the middle of the night. It was still alive but it couldn't get up and out of the truck so we had to put a chain on it and tow it out by the neck. You might think that this would suffocate the cow but apparently they have really strong necks and can take a lot of pressure there. Not that it would have mattered if it had been hanged because Don quickly hunted it back down and shot it. Even though it was alive, it would have been badly injured and bruised and would be unfit to sell. So he shot it and gave it to the Aboriginal workers who were there to take home so i wasn't wasted. 

We had another full day of drafting and driving around the property shutting the paddock gates, crushing trees growing in the middle of the roads and almost getting stuck in ditches and then drafting some more before one of the steers got flipped UPSIDE DOWN in the chute and was stuck. They finally got it flipped back over but then it was pretty much dark so that put an end to drafting for the day. Of course we still had one more load of cattle coming in from the other yards, so i was ordered to stay behind and make sure that they were loaded in. That means i was waiting alone, in the dark, with 400 noisy cattle 40 or 50 kms from anyone else hoping to God that the others didn't just decide to go home because it was dark. Luckily they eventually showed up (i didn't have a watch but it was a while) and we had to load in the cattle in the dark. I thought that standing in the way of the gate from cattle was scary in the day, and then i did it in the dark. i had to stand in front of an opening to make sure that they went into the right holding pen, and with only minimal light filtering in from the ute in the background. It was pretty intense having to block and direct huge animals running at me in the dark only two feet away but we got it done with out any major incidents. I definitely prefer to see what is about to kill me though i must say. 

Today i had to run the shop and make some canvases, so its good that i have some rest for all the sore muscles i've got (just about all of them) and to let my voice rest and to get all of this down in writing. Hopefully i will be back up and helping with the rest of the mustering either tomorrow or sunday as we now have even less people to work with. (Anneleen left today for backpacking in New Zealand) 

So I have definitely had a full few days of work and i think many more good stories to come. I will try to get pictures up but i don't think the movie i took of my ute-herding will work.