Mateship With Birds - By Carrie Tiffany Page 0,21

it touches the hot earth it solidifies, forming a bubbly purple jelly, piling up and up, on top of itself, in a frilly scum. Sip sniffs at the pudding blood. She tries licking it and biting it, but it disintegrates in her mouth. She tries a few more times and then slopes back into the shade. Harry stays put, though. It’s hot out here, in the weakening shade at the edge of the tree, but he pretends to be interested in the science of what is happening – how the proteins in the blood react to the heat, causing instant coagulation. He does this because he can see that the ewe is still blinking and he’d prefer not to have to look at this as Mues is peeling the pelt off her.

Harry checks the heifers for oestrus (the effluvium, the colour and thickness of discharge), telephones the stud at Bendigo and orders seven serves of Rosedale Dreaming Fox. The next day he drives to town and collects the semen off the train. The box travels in a nest of straw on the seat beside him to protect the glassware. Every so often he takes his hand off the steering wheel and reaches across to pat the box. Egg yolk is used to cool and thin the sperm, but it doesn’t keep for long. He’s already yarded the little heifers and they are waiting for him when he gets home. He changes into his overalls and leads the first cow into the bails, showing her the feed of pollard in the trough. He lets her get her head down while he lathers his left arm up to the shoulder in a bucket of water laced with Dettol. When he pushes into her he folds his hand in the shape of a gun so it is as small as possible. His fingers are soft and bald, the nails trimmed especially short. And he grimaces, at the moment his hand enters her. The vagina is an empty glove. He can feel her organs pillowed through the vagina wall. Her bladder bounces up against his hand, he bats it away. He pushes deep inside her. The side of his face is pressed against her flank. He reaches for the cervix, using his free hand to thread the glass pipette so that it is resting on the nostril-rim. The semen flows forwards and then backwards a little over his fingertips. It’s important to withdraw slowly, to fight the panicky feeling that his arm might get stuck inside of her, trapped by the girdles and belts of her flesh.

There are seven heifers to inseminate in one morning. Harry has bred them all and bottle-fed them and sat up through the night with them when they’ve had the staggers. He’s been forceful at times about their heads – drenching them and checking their teeth, inoculating them with rumen. But insemination marks the start of their working lives. Each heifer will be impregnated, calve, lactate and suckle her calf. After a few days Harry will take the calf away and the new mother will join the herd. She’ll learn to follow the long line of cows that walk up to the sheds every morning and evening, to approach the bails, to wait while the cow in front of her is unhooked and backed out, to tolerate the dousing of her udder, the dragging weight of the cups on her teats, the bulge of the hard rubber inflations. The dark shed with its smells of anxious shit and disinfectant and motor oil and sweet, loose milk will frighten her, but Harry will be there, and sometimes another milker – Michael or Mues – and always the thin dog shivering and standing off to one side.

Harry lets the first heifer out of the bails and admires the clean way she picks up her feet. Her mother was a fine cow. There’s every indication she’ll be a fine cow too.

On his next trip to Echuca to buy a part for the Waratah, Harry visits the municipal library and spends a morning in the adult section reading the famous English sex doctor, Havelock Ellis. In Studies on the Psychology of Sex, Harry reads about hermaphroditic slugs, the courtship rituals of spiders and a peculiar balloon-making fly.

But it is the intimate case histories at the end of the volume that interest him most. Ordinary folk from around the world, both men and women, have submitted to Dr Ellis a summary of their sexual