Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,1
Harry milks his herd.
Babs snorts pollard through her nostrils and swings her wet tail from side to side. Harry rinses her teats and pulls the cups off her. The rotary chuffs and swings overhead. They are slower to back out when it rains, hanging on for a few extra licks of the empty bucket, ignoring his voice and the flick of the towel, but when the balance tips and there are more out than in they start to hurry again. They don’t fear Harry. They don’t fear any man or dog, even a proper farm dog. What they fear is being alone. Being left behind. The last cow steps back. She looks in front of her at the long stream of cows ambling back to the paddock. She turns her wooden neck and looks behind her at the holding yard – empty. Her hooves scrape on the wet bricks. She bellows. Then she digs her back legs into the mud and runs out into the rain, her empty udder swinging slack and crumpled between her legs.
A whippet can’t ride pillion on a motorcycle. Many farm dogs can; not a whippet. The whippet is too leggy, has no balance, insufficient courage and not enough fur. Harry takes his bike out for a weekly spin to clear the fluids and prevent the engine from getting stale. When he changes up to third the wind pulls at Sip’s sparse coat. She leans hard against his chest for protection. She shivers violently, causing her bony bottom to lose traction with the saddle, causing her to tumble off sideways as they take the curve on Saleyards Road. Harry has never stopped faster. He nearly puts himself over the handlebars. He has to walk all of the way home with Sip hoisted over his shoulders. Mues isn’t home so he asks Betty from next door to drive him back out to the bike and guide him home because the headlamp has blown and it’s getting dark. The children want to come too, but Betty is firm with them. Michael has the dishes to dry and Little Hazel has her reader. Harry expects a bit of teasing; about the dog and the Waratah too.
‘It’s a constant labour of love,’ Harry says as he gets out of the car and runs his hand over the leather saddle.
Betty looks at the motorcycle. The spray of red flowers painted on the petrol tank reminds her of a sewing machine, and there’s Harry’s birdwatching binoculars hanging from a special bracket he’s welded onto the frame. There’s nothing particularly masculine about it.
‘It’s just a constant labour, if you ask me,’ Betty says. Then she turns the car around so he can ride in her lights on the way home.
She’s an antler covered in warm velvet. Her legs are sticks; her yolky heart hangs in its brittle cage of ribs. She can’t walk in a straight line. When Harry holds the gate open for her she slinks through it. She doesn’t stand next to him like you might see a dog in a photograph, but with her back snaked around so it touches his leg. She’s useless with the cows. She spends the winter curled up like a cat, she yelps at thunder, she’s afraid of heights, she hates the rain. There’s something obscene, dick-like, about the way her tail curves between her hind legs. She looks wounded when they go to town and he makes her jump down from the Dodge because he always lifts her when they are at home. Her whole existence, every sinewy fibre of her, is tuned to the feel of Harry’s hand across the smooth cockpit of her skull.
The beloved have many names. Harry calls her sweetie, luvvie, goose and bag-o-bones. Mues calls her a dog-shaped-object or rat-on-stilts. He says, ‘What’s it shit like, Harry? Does it shit like a pencil?’
That first day when he collected her, and in the Dodge on the way home took off his coat and tucked it around her shoulders … it went along the usual way after that. An alteration in the focal length – each fixed for the gaze of the other. The imbibing of odours. The warm soil of her head, the bread and vinegar of his crotch. A babble language followed quickly by regret for the first hard words. Physical changes. The sharing of personality and mannerisms.
All her expressions are known to him. Her squinted blink, the thwop of ropey tail against the lino, the shame-clamped jaw. Then