Petrol Burps and Bovine Sneezes on the Day That Shouldn’t Have Been.

This is another double post. chronologically the last post comes before this one!

As it turns out I will be here at Delmore for one more week. The guys that I thought I’d be getting a ride had to push their plans forward a bit and it ended up not working out. Although, I will still be meeting them in Darwin and Sydney later on in my journey. I thought I’d be leaving with them this morning but I guess it didn’t work out. Oh well, I can do a lot with another weeks pay anyway.

So instead of having my first day off in a month, I started the day by trying to fix a bore that would only work for a minute before shutting off. I spilled petrol on my clothes filling up the engine, I soaked my arms in petrol while cleaning the air filter then worst of all I got a mouthful of petrol trying to siphon the bad fuel out of the tank. That was an awful experience that I will hopefully never have to repeat. I’m very lucky that I didn’t swallow any. . . I think. . . .  

Most of the guys went back to university last week so my week has been spent teaching the new guy Craig where all the bores are and how the intricate details of how to get them started. I’m sure that his skills will come quite in handy what with Delmore being run by unskilled backpackers up until now. A typical conversation may go . . .

Britt: “ This is Carmensita, the fuel line is too long and is bent on this one, so you have to hold it up when you are bleeding it in order to get all the air out.”

Craig: “Why don’t I just cut it shorter and reattach it the next time the tank is empty?”

Britt: “Oh yeah, I guess no one ever had time to think about that.”

He is a pretty cool guy and a plumber by trade, which when you think about it, most of what raising cattle in the desert amounts to is a giant plumbing job. Pumping water out of the ground then over thousands of kilometers of pipeline and keeping all the tanks full is 90% of raising the cattle. It’s only twice a year that you muster up the ones that are big enough to sell.

But despite his plumbing prowess, we spent the better part of two days zooming around Dnieper trying to figure out why water was not pumping from the dam next to the Dnieper homestead, to the yards a K away. And after driving, tap switching, on-foot-pipeline following, two burst pipes and a half a day spent hauling a trailer over some of the worst roads in the property we finally got it pumping. Of course then as soon as the water started flowing into the yards the thirsty cattle rushed over and broke the floaters off of the troughs and messed with some pipeline so we lost probably 20,000 liters of water according to Don (so it was probably more like 5000 liters but still a lot). So that’s a project for today.

I spent the rest of the day ear tagging cattle at the Old Macdonald yards. Yes, there is an Old Macdonald farm here, the jokes have been made. Actually the homestead there says Old Macdonald Downs right on the roof. But while the yards there are set up so as to make moving the cattle around very easy, the crush (the contraption at the end of the race that holds the cattle down while you brand and tag them) is at such an angle to the fence, that I while tagging I was in the perfect position to be slobbered on and blood-gushed-on and just generally thrashed around by the poor not-so-defenseless cow in the crush. But apart from my arm nearly being broken every time, my arms got covered in cow slobber as they threw their head in every other direction than the one I needed them to look. The slobber itself is not so bad you can just wipe it off, and getting really dirty in the yards is part of the fun of the whole adventure, but I found out something interesting today. I am allergic to cow saliva. I hadn’t noticed before because I was always wearing a long sleeve shirt when I tagged but yesterday, with a t-shirt on my arms got really itchy only where the slobber touched me, then my eyes got kind of itchy and I started sneezing a lot. The same order of events as when I am around cats for too long. It wasn’t so bad and we got the job done but you never think about animals you might be allergic to that you are never in contact with. I might also be allergic to dolphins, lemurs and porcupines for all I know. But actually, the cattle sneeze sometimes as well, maybe they are allergic to humans.

Today a bunch of us are going into town for the big cattle show. Unfortunately I am among that group but I am happy to at least have most of the day off. There is a mixed group of nine cattle that need branding at the Delmore yards, but that’s not a lot of work and it’s only like 3 K’s away so I basically have the day off. Not to mention I will be in Alice for good in less than a week’s time anyway. It doesn’t really seem like my time here at Delmore will ever end, or that there ever was anything before this in my entire life. But it has been a great experience to look out the window and see the box I was living in shrinking in the distance. I have learned so much and experienced so many things in my stay here that I will be forever changed. But most importantly, I think I can safely say that I have accomplished what I set out to do by coming here, namely to find the drive and inspiration that I felt I had lost after college, and to free my self from the worries of a future that was all to clearly laid out in front of me. I do have goals, but sometimes being able to see the path to them too clearly, holds you back from molding yourself a better route, and coming to a place where there really is only what is right in front of you, has been enormously helpful in wiping my etch-a-sketch clean. Now when I get back to the states I will be in a boat with paddles, rather than a raft. Not to mention sitting in the back of a ute and going ballistic chasing cattle across the open bush is really great time. And I have met some great people and made friends in New Zealand, England, Morocco, Germany, the Netherlands, Australia of course, and I can officially say that I know 1/1,000,000^th of the population of Denmark. But my journey and my travels are not over by far, literally anything could happen in the next five days or in the two months I have before going back home. It is a bit weird to think that I am only 2/3rds done with my trip here, as I said earlier it feels like I’ve been living here a lifetime. 

The Complete History of an Almost Escape.

The past two weeks have not been kind to Delmore. The generator has broken, the homestead bore has broken, one girls foot was broken by a charging bull and another is lucky to be alive at all after flipping a ute, Don nearly sliced his thumb in half, two more utes are out of commission due to clogged engines, another person smashed a rental car on the corner of another rental car and a whole host of other small mess ups and accidents have plagued us in the past few weeks. All of that is on top of having tons of cattle work to do. I haven’t been able to write much let alone think I’ve been so busy. But the end is in sight. I am leaving on Friday. It was one of those chance decisions that pop up and you just go with. Tom and Meri the gardeners from utopia . . .  did I mention them before? They were the people that randomly showed up one night and dropped off Celine. Tom and Meri turned out to be two cool guys that are doing perma-culture gardening in the aboriginal communities up in Utopia. They showed up to pay Celine a visit and Meri mentioned that they were heading up Darwin way on Friday. I figure that I would be spending the time and money just trying to find friends and rent a car anyway so I might as well skip the expense and go with two guys I know.

Also I helped Matthew (Kathleen’s son) skin a cow today. There is a big cattle show coming up soon and Don was mustering in the Delmore West Paddock , but he accidentally hit one of them with his ute, breaking its leg. He can sell damaged cattle so he shot it and gave it to Kathleen and her family. But Matthew was the only guy in the group at the moment so Ji and I drove out with Matthew, Kathleen, Elizabeth and Denisa to clean the killa. I did the knife while Ji and Matthew pulled back the skin. It was quite an interesting experience. I think we would have stayed to finish and to eat part of it with Matthew and them but Ji wanted to go when the cattle truck passed by. I imagine we would have actually been warmer staying by the fire with the aboriginals, than in the big truck with windows that don’t roll up.

So remember a few weeks back when I almost crashed a ute? One of the girls just rolled it. And not just rolled it but flipped it front over back, that’s hard to do. Even more amazing than that is that she escaped with only some big cuts and what was either a concussion or minor shock. Those are pretty big injuries, but considering what the car looked like after all was said and done she will never have any idea how luck she is to be alive. It was thoroughly trashed. We think she may have been following to close behind another ute in the big dust trail that is kicked up and swerved off to the side into the gutter but we might never know. She had some pretty weird memory loss right when it first happened and she still can’t remember the crash at all. When I first showed up at Dneiper homestead and saw Chloe surgically removing glass shards from Bridgett’s (crashed the car) foot, she commented on the fact that the huge gash went right through her favorite tattoo. 45 seconds later she made the same comment as if it were part of normal conversation. It was like this for the rest of the day. She would be flipping through pictures on the digital camera and commenting on them, get to the beginning and flip through again making the same comments. Short term memory loss is a very spooky thing to deal with. Of course Don had sliced his hand open whilst castrating a bull so he drove her halfway to town where they met an ambulance. She is ok now, she is in more pain but we’ve all been telling her that’s good because it means the shock has worn off.

I think this may be my last post from Delmore Downs now that it is Wednesday night and I started writing this on Saturday….. hahaha. But my adventure is not over I still close to two months left in Australia before going back to the states…and then….

Bushfire.

2AM

Don bursts into my room and flicks the light on. My first reaction is to think “OH S%#T I’ve slept in three hours late and he’s going to shoot me now.” I was sort of half in and out of consciousness and then I heard the words “blah blah blah blah BUSHFIRE….” Then I woke up.

It’s amazing how one word can spike your adrenaline so high so quickly. Something so serious that the simple mention of it is enough to clear any other thought in your head.

There were two fires in Dneiper that had apparently started when someone hit a kangaroo, flipped their car then escaped and tried to make a fire to keep themselves warm in the night. The first one was fairly small and didn’t spread that far. The second one started as a kilometer long and got big enough to spread to the neighbors property.

We took a little longer to get ready than I thought we might on first hearing that there were fires raging out of control on the property but you have to consider that we have to make sure that we have absolutely everything we could possibly need to fight the unknown. We loaded 400 liter tanks with spray motors on the backs of the utes and got the grader ready and left by 4:15.

By the way a grader is a GIANT tractor thing that has a big blade on the bottom of it that drives across open bush and leaves behind it a perfectly flat dirt road as if by magic. And it happens to be a more useful firefighting tool than water. Fire can only spread if it has something to spread to. So the idea is to make a new road around the perimeter of the fire and to actually start fires around the inside edge of the fire side to burn away all the possible fuel for it. Then you just let it run its course and use the water to take care of any places where the fire is out of control or might jump the road.

Those two sentences comprised my 20 hour work day on Saturday. Actually part of it was spent pushing 40 massive bales of hay out of the top of a road train but that part was much less interesting that the fighting fires bit.

We started off for dneiper at 4:15 but then halfway through the grader got a flat tire. Something that doesn’t happen too often I don’t think. by 6 we had gone to the neighbors place and gotten a new tire (which are f__ing heavy let me tell you) and had started to change it. Don had a road train coming in to deliver hay in the middle of the night; it was actually the truckie that reported the fire in the first place; and while they fixed the flat I spent the next few hours unloading hay and gathering supplies and recruits from the homestead. By the time that I got to the first fire it was pretty much out. There was a new road around the perimeter and the whole inside was toatally burnt out, except weirdly enough, for the trees. It looks very weird to see just dirt and ash and flaming embers dotted sporadically by perfectly normal looking trees but that’s sort of what the aftermath looks like. The trees here must have evolved to live with the common occurrence of bushfires.

We spent a while patrolling the edges of the fire and shoveling dirt on the places where there was still open flame and smoke by the new road. The flipped car that was the origin of the fire looked the part. There were river flows of melted metal and glass that had cooled running out of the car. There was just nothing left but the siding and the frame. Luckily there was no one in the car, but unluckily they weren’t so good at watching campfires. Mopping up the first fire was exciting at the time but that was the most boring bit of the day compared to what came later.

After a very quick lunch we met up with Don, Masa and the grader that had just started making a road around the second fire. The plan for this much bigger and out of control fire was to start burning back at it from the inside of the perimeter road. We would do this with a thing called a firebug. It’s a can filled with a mix of diesel and petrol and a long long dripper with a flame on the end. You tip it down and a stream of flaming liquid drops out. And let me tell you, you have never seen a fire start so quickly. It has to do with the terrain more than the equipment. We dropped one match on the ground and absolutely instantly three bushes were two feet high in flames. When the firebug tips it lets out these tiny glowing blue dots that you seen hang in the air for a second and the instant even one of them hits a patch of grass, the whole thing goes up.

And so our convoy started into the bush. The grader in front, making a road, followed slowly by a ute with someone hanging off the side spreading fire to the inside perimeter, followed by a ute with a water tank on the back to put out any trees that might fall across the road or what not, followed by me in my own ute driving back and forth from the end of the convoy back to the beginning monitoring the whole situation and the state of the flames and directing the water ute if needbe. And so it went for several hours making a miles long road around the fire.

The fire is sort of less impressive than you might think it would be at first glance. “Bushfire” calls to mind towering 100 ft. walls of spiraling hellfire, but in real life from where we were making the road it was hard to tell that anything was happening apart from the clouds of black smoke rising from the other side of the hill. But I saw plenty of the danger from it in the fires that we started with the firebugs. One tiny bit of grass would be happily burning, minding its own business, then a small breeze would push by and like spilling water the fire would just move out onto everything the wind brought it to. And quickly it would eat everything 5, 10, 15, then 20 meters from the road and we could only see the flames working their way away from us and a charred ashen field between. Then the grader blew a gasket.

The grading and controlled burn had gone without a hitch, and we had surrounded the down wind side of the fire already and were just about to start working on the other half of the perimeter luckily, so we didn’t need everyone. And Don sent most of us back home. They had all been giving it their all and Masa and Ji had gotten up with Don and I at 2 AM so they had a well earned end to the day, But a chosen few stayed back to finish the job. Don, myself Chloe and Celine kept fighting for another few hours and it only got more intense after dark. This time I was on firebug duty, and I don’t know what the guys were doing with it during the day, but at night it might as well have been a flamethrower. During the day thwy would roll along and little fires would pop up here and there behind them; at night we were rolling along and I would watch the little blue dots fly out of the firebug and lite up the grass, then look back only a few meters to see an entire hillside on fire. Flaming trees falling, towering walls of smoke, everything, nothing but flames all down the road we just came from. And I started it all.

The rest of the perimeter went ok until the last hundred meters or so when Chloe and Celine in the follow-up ute got bogged in the sand just as the flames were licking up and were right in the path of all the smoke. We managed to tow them out just in time for the neighbor to show up and help finish the last hundred meters. All in all I worked 20 hours straight. But I have to say that I felt good every second of it. You might think that you would feel tired, and I could tell that my body was getting fatigued (especially from those stupid hay bales and hanging onto the side of Don’s ute) but my mind was ready to go as long as it needed to to get the job done. It’s the kind of thing where if you stop for even a second you won’t be able to start again but if you keep going you can go until you drop. Of course I didn’t feel tired until I was partway through the drive home, causing it’s own problems, but at least there wasn’t any fire around.

All in all the technique worked very well. I drove back today and checked on it and found just ash fields of what had been before grassen prairies and hills. Just black and grey. I have to say that this has been the most amazing thing that I have ever been a part of. I mean just watching the raw power of the bushfire puts you in shock. But it is a great feeling working in such a great team as we had and everybody working and doing what needs to be done to make sure that we win the fight. You don’t really notice how long you’ve been up for or how many snickers bars you ate instead of a proper lunch, you just do what needs to be done. And everyone that Don sent home was fighting to try to stay and keep going even Masa and Ji who had been up as long as Don and I so props to everyone on their hard work. We won the fight with no mistakes. Delmore:1 Fire: 0

And now it’s back to fighting steers.  

BUSYBUSYBUSY

So this is another backlog notice. It has been so busy with the cattlework until yesterday that i haven't had any time to post or even much to write. It's pretty hard to do anything but come home and crash right after feasting. so just read the post right under this one first if you care about timelines. however if you happen to be a time traveller you are probably used to stuff like this so don't worry about it. 

There have been major continental shifts in Delmore life over the past couple days. Tom, a fixture of Delmore life, has left for greener pastures, and the time of my new friends Espen and Rasmus has been cut unexpectedly and unfortunately short. Delmore downs will miss the touch of Danish in it’s accent for a long time coming. A few days ago it was just Rasmus, Espen, Tom and I, and now there are seven new backpackers. There are two English girls (Bridgett and Helen) an Aussie girl (Chloe) two Aussie guys (Masa and Ji) a German girl (Tina) and Moroccan girl (Celine).

The arrival of Celine last night was extremely unexpected. Ji was outside starting a fire and icame out to see how it was going. I said “oh yeah Ji that looks good” and then I realized that I was talking to three people that I had never seen before. You can’t imagine my shock. The only thing that was running through my mind was how did they get here? We weren’t expecting anyone because Don hadn’t told us anyone was coming let alone that we should pick them up and we are in the middle of nowhere. But it turns out that Celine’s boyfriend and a friend of his work on perma-culture in the aboriginal communities in Utopia so they are familiar with the area and they just dropped her off. I had a very interesting chat with one of the guys about working with the aboriginals and how different projects work or don’t, and about how the Australian government doesn’t really understand what the aboriginals want or need. Waves of projects come in to the communities to try to help bring them housing and this or that not really understanding the aboriginal worldview and the projects always fail. For instance, western people live in houses, so we see people sleeping in the dirt by the fire and we think “oh they must be poor or uncomfortable”. But that is how they have lived for all their lives and generations before that, so if you come in and build them a house they are very likely not to see it as a house as an interestingly stacked pile of firewood. And so on. So they are working on building gardens and orchards WITH the communities and in the right places so that tey will feel they have more ownership of it and be more likely to take care of it. But they were very cool guys and Celine’s boyfriend lives in Darwin so I may have found myself a place to stay when I go up there.

Anyway, so I learned to drive a car with snow on the road. I learned how to drive a manual car driving cattle through the Australian bush. Not only am I starting to get the hang of driving stick, but I did it while herding cattle in the bush. You want the cattle to go really slow so they will eat while they are walking and not burn too much energy, so you end up troding along in first maybe second gear and going that slow in the bush it’s really easy to stall out. So you get a lot of practice starting into first which was the last thing I was trying to figure out how to do smoothly. But I got it and I managed to get in some tearing around chasing cattle because at the end they decided that they were just going to turn around and go the wrong way. While I did do what I think was a good job herding the cattle, I did manage to put a nice big spiderweb shaped crack in the windshield. We were walking them along the edge of a creek and there were suddenly a lot of low scrubby trees around, which the v8 ute I was driving usually passes through like they were paper, but I found a branch that was just a bit too big AND bumped over some big logs at the same time. I had to dig the back wheels out of the sand and seriously work the four wheel drive, but we made it out.

            I have also been given the full (or mostly) bore tour of delmore so I am now set to do some bore runs, and there are new people to look after the shop if need be so I should see a bit more action than before I think. I’m moving up the ladder.

            It’s funny, it’s really hard to think of what else has happened these past few days despite the fact that so much crazy stuff has been happening. The crazy is second nature to me now I suppose. *eye twitch

            But it is very strange having people that were like family just up and leave, and I’m not really used to seeing this many new people all at once for a place so remote. But I have so many friends here, I’m sure we will be even close over the next few weeks as we live and work together we will be a new family.

Also with Tom leaving,, that makes me not only the oldest person here, but the one here for the longest which is a bit weird being a sort of elder on a cattle station. I didn’t really see it coming.    . . . . . . .

And then I fell asleep while writing and now I can’t remember what I was thinking about. . . .

The Fight Goes On.

(All of this was written on the 15^th of June so it’s a bit out dated)

Oh boy what a day. I suppose it’s been a few days since I’ve posted on the blog. We have been doing work in the yards and mustering and driving cattle everyday since. . . . I don’t know it feels like forever now. All I can hear is mooing in the back of my mind right now. Last Saturday we had the day off, truly off. Tom, Esben, Rasmus and I went to town and watched the prologue for the Fink Desert Race. That is a huge 500 km offroad car and motorbike race in the outback. It was pretty cool to see all of the motorbikes and quads going all out on the dirt tracks. Also to have another day in town to chill out was nice. But then we started the mustering again.

At this point I am actually starting to get used to the cattlework. I am definitely less afraid of the cattle and am certainly more confident blocking one when they charge. I have started to be able to tell what they are going to do by the sounds they are making and where to put myself so that I can avoid being hurt and get them to go where I want them at the same time. It may be less exciting to write about or to read, but for me it is a big step. Being able to overcome an instinctual fear and to think on my feet. Becoming acclimated to life as something adventurous as a cattleman is pretty cool if you ask me.

Over the past few days I have been doing more of the before mentioned eartagging as well as ear marking which means actually cutting a little circular chunk out of the ear to mark them somehow. Again I don’t really know what it is for I just do as I’m told haha. I got to brand a cow this morning that was interesting. I can’t tell how much it hurts them, some of them scream and kick and some don’t really do anything when the iron is pressed on. Either way the cattle are pretty hardy.

Today we were working on branding and tagging a large group of calves and I had the lucky job of filling up the race. Calves of course haven’t been in the yards before and most are only a week or two old, so they are scared and don’t know what to do. But most of the other cattle go away from you when you walk towards them but the calves just freak out and go in all directions. It’s like when you throw a football at the ground try to guess which way it will bounce. (haha an AMERICAN football that is) They just go crazy and smash themselves into the fence or they just freeze up and block all the other ones from going where they need to go. So I ended up getting kicked like 10 times today trying to get them up the race. And boy can they kick hard. One of them got me right square in the side of my right shin and another kicked me on the back of my left knee. Both of my legs are now pretty bruised and swollen but otherwise fine. I look pretty funny walking around tonight especially considering what happened later. But yeah, the calves may be crazy but they are so adorable. Especially the newborn ones; they can’t even walk so we have to pick them up and carry them from yard to yard. If they stayed that size, and that calm, I would love to have a little baby cow running around the house as a pet. But they quickly get to be 1000 pounds and pretty wild very quickly.

So we worked all today in the yards and that was good, but then it got to be almost sunset as we finished up. Then we had to get the cattle back to the paddock where we mustered them from. Rather than use the cattle truck tomorrow, Don decided to have us walk them the 4 or 5 kilometers back to the paddock. This is the classic cattle drive where there is a huge long group of cattle with a few guys at the back and a few guys running up and down the sides to keep the cattle in line, except we are in a ute and on motorbikes instead of horses. Theoretically it should have been pretty easy, we were just sending them back the same way they came in and there would be less of them this time. But we had no radios, the sun was down, there was no moon and it was actually RAINING. I know! Of all the times! At first we did pretty well, I was in the car with Don driving helter skelter through the bush, and then we started to lose containment. They were starting to go off the road to both sides and then it started to drizzle. For whatever reason that is a signal to the cows that it is time to stop and eat so they all just split up and started grazing. And then the wheel fell off of Esben’s quad bike. So in order to try and get them all back into the group Don had Esben and I go ON FOOT. There probably aren’t very many people in the world who can say that they have driven cattle on foot at night. Now I am among those chosen few. Our job was to walk through the bush and make sure that we didn’t miss any straggling calves and to get them back into a group. For the most part it worked. I started walking north screaming at the top of my lungs, “WALK UP WALK UP!” Then I noticed some cattle to my left and I brought them back to the group but then we crossed the road, or some road anyway, keep in mind it was pitch dark and I didn’t have a light. The cattle were meant to stay on the road but more so we want them to stay in a group so I pushed all the ones I could see towards the group. At this point I swear I kept going straight north or in the direction I started. I pride myself on my excellent sense of direction, but apparently it’s not excellent enough to handle walking the outback at night with out a flashlight and driving cattle at the same time. But apparently I lost my way big time. I think that everyone did. Every motorbike that passed me said they had no idea where the road was and that they couldn’t see anything. I told them to try being on foot. Anyway at some point Don showed up with the ute and showed Esben (who I had found elsewhere in the bush) and I where the road was and we managed to get most of the cattle going again up to the gate to the holding paddock, (which also happens to be the airstrip for the homestead) and then somebody told Don that one of the new guys was missing. Oh yeah I forgot two new Aussie guys showed up. So we hopped on the back of Don’s ute and started calling and searching for him back in the direction of the yards. At this point down a quad bike, a motorbike-r missing and Don’s ute searching for him the cattle were a lost cause. We just opened all the gates for them and eventually they’ll smell the water in the holding paddock and come in on their own. But we searched and searched and I turns out that he had kept going on the road like he was told and ended up way ahead instead of behind. We were all glad to see him safe.

All in all today was the hardest day yet I think. Any way I am the most tired and hurt I have been so far even more than the seventeen hour day I worked last week. That time we had an assembly line going and I was just bending over and eartagging most of the day. But today was jumping fences, blocking big angry mama cows, battling calves and on top of it all basically walking home and shouting my lungs out. At least you get good cardio at this job. I’m sure that there is stuff that I’ve missed (haha like the fun I had this morning driving the Subaru with the broken engine to the yards) but I’ll have to save it. I am indescribably tired. Sleep.

And now another day is done. Spent loading steers onto our cattle truck, branding and tagging calves and drafting steers to get ready for the road train to come tomorrow.morning EARLYEARLYEARLY. But the past few days have been great, Don’s girlfriend has come to visit and she has cooked us wonderful gourmet meals every night. And we get wine! The work is hard and there is not much time to sit down and think, but life is pretty good right now. Even for Delmore life, which I always an adventure. Although I haven’t had time to draw or play my banjo in a week or so hopefully I will get the right side of my brain some exercise soon. It’s funny how doing a job seemingly 24 hours a day, that requires you to be thinking in the moment and react quickly gets you thinking in such different ways that a job where you have to be analytical or can just think about things all day. I can tell that I am thinking differently now than I was just a week ago when I had time to sit in the shop and reflect and write and draw. Now I am working physically all day and have to use my action instincts all day and I can’t seem to access my creative brain at the moment. It’s not that it won’t come back, my point is that I can see how people really are products of their environment.. . . and now I can’t remember what I was saying because I fell asleep and now it’ s another day later. This one marked by the arrival of three new girls, an Aussie a German and a Brit, and by the leaving of Tom, the four month hard-hitting world traveling Danish Delmore veteran.

Never Mind the Bullocks, Here's the Cowboys.

(For those of you who enjoy reading chronologically, you should read the post directly below this one first. I have a bit of a backlog because of bad internet and the lack of time as described below)

I need to find some other way to describe how my days are going because everyday is seeming to be more crazy than the last, and I can’t keep saying “Today was the craziest day of my life.”

AND YET

I got up at 6AM and was tagging, drafting, counting and mustering cattle until well past midnight. This made the last muster look like we were putzing around twiddling our thumbs. I spent the first part of the day as the designated ear tagger.

In addition to a big colored ear tag that designates whether the cattle is a steer or heifer, or is from Dnieper or Delmore; there is a smaller button shaped tag that goes on the other ear that has a particular code on it. Several years ago some of the (quote) “stupid f___ing backpackers” put tags with the wrong code on all the young cattle. Now several years later the cattle are huge, ready to sell and need to be retagged. So it was my job to reach into the cows ears check the tag number, and if it was wrong or just didn’t have one to cut off the old one and tag the ear. Luckily there is a big clamping device that holds the cow in place by the neck so I could do my work and Rasmus could get a tag on the tail. (He got the crap job) My job was made harder though by the face that the cow could still move vertically in the clamp, and though they couldn’t break out they could sure thrash about and with a knife in one hand and my arm shoved between the head and the metal fencing I could stand to lose a finger or break my arm very easily. But I got the hang of tagging pretty quickly and the other guys did very well on their second day in the yards, Don said we all did an excellent job, which is a big compliment from him.

My new hat is definitely well broken in by now. When Don releases the clamp on the cow, I have to put my hat in front of its face so it won’t charge out when we don’t want it to. And more than once the cow shoved its nose right in my hat and blew a bunch of slime in there in addition to the blood that was on it from the horns we were cutting off. Cutting the horns off, does something to affect the growth of the cow at a certain age, I’m not totally sure about the reason though.

The first part of the day we processed 200 of the “truckers” that I drafted out the other day. Which went from early in the morning to three or four when the road trains showed up.

All is normal in the Delmore yards, save for the mooing of the cattle in the pens and the occasional “WALK UP WALK UP!” Suddenly a grave hush falls over the cattle, cockatoos stop squawking, the dog growls slightly. One worker notices pebbles on the ground start to bounce and shake. The workers take off their hats and look to the south where a billowing thundercloud of dust can be seen growing in the distance behind a dull groan. As the cloud grows huge in the foreground birds take flight and cattle on the road outside flee in terror as what was before an ambient noise grows into a huge chest rumbling growl of 15 electric guitars cranked up to 11. The train powers off and silence returns once again. A faint whistling can be heard in the distance as the dust clears to reveal the opening door of the cabin. 

ENTER THE COWBOY.

I had no idea they still existed. I thought ok so the cattlemen drive around in utes and yeah mustering is crazy but when the truck arrives we just load them up and they drive them to wherever, end of story. Nope. This guy was the real deal. With a cigarette in one hand, a bullwhip in the other and no hint of hesitation he jumped right in with the craziest of cattle by himself. At one point the cattle were bunched up tight and he jumped up on their backs AND WALKED OVER THE GROUP OF 15 COWS.

Now they didn’t have cars in 1877 so what sort of truck does a 21^st century cowboy drive? He drives a ROAD TRAIN.

Yes the road train. It is exactly what it sounds like. Imagine a normal eighteen-wheeler. Now make it a double decker. Now, make it THREE TRAILERS LONG. We have pictures of our land cruisers far in the distance and the road train right next to them doesn’t even fit all the way in the picture. Just massive. And by the way, there were two.

We were finishing up in late afternoon when the trains arrived and Don decided we had time to do some more mustering before the sun went down. Now I have maybe described before what mustering IS but not exactly what that entails. Mustering is where we go out to the paddocks where the cattle live most of the time and we go “collect” them. This involves using three or more guys on motorbikes and two utes driving going absolutely apes#&T in the bush, flushing out the cattle and herding them in this case into some portable yards to load onto a road train. I of course took my usual position on the back of Don’s ute. I thought that driving around the yards was crazy, HAHAHAHAHA. How naive I was. When Don is mustering in a ute it’s as if he is running through the bush on foot, completely disregarding the fact that he is driving a car completely in predator mode. Zoom forwards into a grove of trees BEEP BEEP BEEP! Lurch to a stop. Reverse at high speeds zoom forwards again. Cattle running on all sides and motorbikes swarming around and poor Esben and I holding on for dear life in the back of the ute. All of this is completely off road, trees be damned we don’t have the bull bars on the front of the utes for nothing. I managed to capture a bit of it on my ipod before it just got too crazy to keep filming. Half of the video you can just hear “TREE TREE TREE!”  “WATCH THAT…. OH S*#T DUCK!” It’s a bit long but I will do my best to upload it to facebook.

But we (and by we i mean the cowboys) managed to get most of the cattle into the train (which I can’t imagine driving that road train out into the bush like that but he did it) except for a few that managed to jump a fence (yes cattle can jump very high especially if you chase them with a Toyota) Then it was back to the yards, by now well after dark, for a night shift of loading the nearly 300 cattle and finishing up the tagging of the crazy fat angry ones that I knew so well from the other day. And thus the night went until almost one in the morning. By the end of it I had worked 17 hours with only small breaks in between for lunch and dinner. And when I say worked I don’t mean I clicked away on the computer for 8 hours, And I feel exhausted (still a day later) but great. It is a good feeling to both do such hard work and have such excitement. I definitely have one of the coolest jobs around no question. I much prefer the exhilarated but wiped out feeling of having run around working my butt off all day, to the boring lazy back-aching wrist-cramping eyeball-frying computer work of a desk job.

When compared with yesterday, today was a very strange and quiet day. We all definitely got off to a late start having gone to bed around two fifteen and we all felt like we had a hangover. Later on, Kathleen and the painters showed up and did a good set of paintings and then Don came and took me over to the yards where he shot two sick cattle and we dragged them out of the yards with the ute. I had to bury just the heads of the cows because they had big infections on them and Don didn’t want the living ones to get sick. Then it was back to the yards where he and I drafted and watered some cattle then Tom showed up and he and I checked some tanks. All in all it was a pretty boring day. (When compared to yesterday of course)

Revenge is a dish best served fried with onions.

Ok so I’ve done yard work before but this was something else. I should post pictures to describe more accurately how this whole thing worked; but essentially there was a group of cattle that we had to sort into the different types. One that would be sold or Truckers, ones that would be sold in a different weight category, Fats, ones that would be released back to grow a bit more, Bush, one for Calves one for big females, or Cows and one for the Race which is the chute you send the cattle up to get branded at the end. Each of the different categories has a different holding pen and in the middle of them is a circular chamber about ten or twelve feet in diameter, with a door leading into each one. So someone had to be down in the middle area pushing the cow into a certain door and making sure that they went in the right door. You guessed it, that was my job. And these cattle today were extra big and extra pissed off. The other guys and James the helicopter pilot mustered the cattle yesterday from a paddock where Don keeps all the big ones and the ill trained ones. And the sound of the helicopter in the morning really got them going. They were actually all right in the beginning but they got progressively bigger and more pissed off. I have to say that I’m not actually frightened of chasing the cattle around even in a small pen, if they have room to move away from you they will with nearly no problems, but I have seen how high these bulls can jump and buck and there isn’t really a lot of room in that circular chamber. If they went crazy and I wasn’t able to get up on the fence that would be it for sure. Especially if it had horns. The Fat ones were the worst by far. The bush gate ones were a bit wild but they just went right in and the trucker ones went pretty quietly but of course the big ones had to be the problem children.

Then there was the cleanskin bull. A clean skin is one that has managed to avoid being trapped and branded and this one was not only older but it was a bull. It was three or four years old and had never been in the yards before or delt with a helicopter and now these monkeys were trying to get it into this tiny litte pen, and it was PISSED. It huffed and puffed and kicked sand everywhere, bucked stamped, bent two steel beams of the fence and broke one welding joint. Needless to say I was well up on the fence before Don even opened the gate. I guess we’ll have to deal with him tomorrow somehow. Hee hee nervous laughter.

The ambient fear level I would say was pretty high today. Every time Don let another one or two Fat ones into the pen I could feel myself tense up my stomach and muscles and brace for impact, as if tensing up would do ANYTHING. I would be but a rag doll if they charged. Which many of them did. On most days in the yard the cattle are very well behaved and there are only a few crazy ones that give you the stories to tell. Not today. Today my stories are about the ones that actually DIDN’T kick at me or chase me up the fence. Every so often I would have to stop and think to myself….”This is you’re idea of a f___in vacation?” If I die here at least I have no one else to blame. Although if I’m going to die here at Delmore, I want it to be in style. It has to be in a flaming ute driving off the side of a cliff and crash into the helicopter exploding into a herd of stampeding bulls. Or fighting a bushfire. But as scary as it was Don told me that I should get a medal for not showing my xfear, which I took as a big compliment. But not showing my fear was more out of self-preservation I think than an attempt to impress the others. The cattle are fairly stupid, as far as stupid goes, but sensing the fear of something you are bigger than and angry at does not require much brain power. They know when you are afraid of them and they take that advantage to charge. Also if you let your fear get the better of you, you won’t be paying attention to the hoof that whizzes past your ear. It’s better to just suck it up and keep them moving. But still when you are standing behind a cow whose leg alone is as tall as you are, and you know it can’t see you it is very hard to get your self to reach out and push on its butt. By the way that is actually how you DON’T get kicked. If you are standing behind a cow that doesn’t know you are there and you just start yelling for it to move you will scare it and their first reaction will be to kick. But if you reach out and gently put your hand on their tail or back leg they will know you are just some pesky little monkey that can’t really do them harm anyway and they should just walk away. Also most of how you direct them where to go is through body language rather than making noises at them. In fact as I found today, sometimes making noises at them just scares them more and its better to just stand behind and where they can see you and to keep your arms out so you look bigger. You have to let them know that you are ALLOWING them to go in to the gate and not chasing them through it. Fear is no way to rule.

Haha, and Buster the trusty failure dog showed up halfway through. Buster is the worst cattle dog in the outback. He does go after the cattle, but the only problem is that he always chases them AWAY from where you need them. Also the cattle think that he is a dingo so they get more agitated. We always try to leave him at home but he always wants to follow us., and usually he just turns around and goes home but this time he ran the 5 or 6 kilometers to the Delmore yards. So he spent the rest of the day chained to the ute barking and whining away. He certainly is a very good-looking dog but his looks are only fur deep. And he sheds all the time.

And after a very long day of nearly being kicked in the face by angry cows. I was able to take my anger out on some very well cooked steak at the end of the day. It felt and tasted that much better.

But I think tomorrow we will weigh, brand, tag, castrate and check the teeth of the cattle (to find out their age) then the giant road train will show up and take away one hundred and sixty of the probably 500 cattle in the yards. Then more mustering. Its going to be a long month I think.