Page 27 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
A whip cracked nearby, nearly taking out Hannah’s eardrums.
‘Disqualified,’ said the girl. ‘That must mean I’m up.’
‘Good luck.’
‘I don’t need luck. I’ve got two other horses I’m competing on later in the draft, so practice will make perfect, hey?’ the kid said, laying a hand on her horse’s quivering neck. ‘Ooh, he’s holding the gate open for me. I’m off!’
Such confidence. Hannah had been confident too, once. Fun. Plucky. Full of ambition. She couldn’t help but envy the girl.
‘Today is a new day,’ she told Skipjack. ‘Quit worrying.’
Her horse flicked his ear at her.
‘Okay, fine, I was talking to myself.’
She looked over her shoulder to the crowd perched on the old grandstands on the far side of the cut-out yard. Tom stood leaning on the metal rail, his face shadowed by his hat. All these months of avoidance hadn’t dulled the confusion she felt when he was near.
If only she understood what it meant.
The stockwhip cracked.
The competitor before her—the kid—had lost control of the young Brahman heifer she’d cut from the mob and timed out before completing her figure eight, so there was no time to dally now. Hannah dragged her eyes from Tom and took a long breath.
‘Let’s do this, Skipjack.’
She nodded to the two men holding the gates and her first draft was underway. She clicked her tongue against her teeth and Skippy trotted forward.
For a moment all she could think about was the crowd of onlookers because a whole lot of eyes had suddenly zeroed in on her and she could have sworn she felt every one of them. But then the mob of cattle huddled at the far end of the pen began to scatter and she remembered what she was supposed to be doing.
The two brahmans were dug in like ticks down by the back rail. She ran her eye over them and discarded them as too difficult, the clock ticktocking in her head on double time now that she was actually competing.No waywas she going to have time to cut the beast of her choosing. Kev’s hours of training were forgotten as she kicked her heel into Skippy’s side and drove him at the mob. Like her brother’s opening move at snooker: hit and hope.
The tactic—amazingly—worked. Most of the mob cut left, but two steers tripped over each other and found themselves on the right, with her and Skippy blocking their way back to the others. They put some speed on, trying to get reunited with the mob, but she kept at them, cutting back and forth until—ha! Okay! One of them was clear!
She drove Skippy side to side across the narrow yard, finally remembering the rules Kev had drilled into her, and was able to head off the steer every time he tried to find his way back. Once, twice—
‘Gate?’ yelled a voice from over the rail.
Oh, hell, she was supposed to be calling that. ‘Gate,’ she yelled back, and the blokes at the arena end of the yard swung open the massive gates. A clicking of the tongue, a squeeze of her knee into Skippy’s shoulder, and she and the steer were clear into the arena.
Their forty-second clock started now.
The posts that had been set up were bright orange and probably glowed in the dark, but the steer was rattled and bolting for the middle of the field, so the first post flashed past before she’d even caught up with the steer. She flicked a look down as she came alongside it, the braid she’d plaited into her hair that morning whipping at her cheek like a riding crop. The steer was dust-spattered and solid, all bunched shoulders and determination. His speed couldn’t match Skipjack’s, though.
The sheer joy of the moment bubbled up from somewhere deep in her belly and she laughed. Thiswasfun. Theworldwas fun and she’d been hiding away for too long.
Skipjack nudged the steer’s shoulder with his own and they managed a loose arc, the steer running beside them, nudging it over in the direction of the far post when the whip crack marked the end of her time.
Disqualified, but not disgraced. She dragged in a breath and hauled on the reins. Forty seconds had never passed so quickly.
A stream of horses and riders trotted into the arena—other competitors—to help drive the runaway steer back into a pen, and she trotted out with them beyond the showground’s ring of hessian-wrapped fencing as the master of ceremonies’ voice blasted from the speakers.
‘Hannah Cody on Skipjack is out of time. Points for the cut out, 10, horsemanship, 40, coursework, 1, giving her a total of fifty-one. Next up is Ryan Speedy-Kidd on Tabletop Tanker.’
She rubbed at the patches of sweat darkening the glossy coat of her horse’s neck. ‘You did so well,’ she murmured and sat back in the saddle. ‘Idid so well.’ Pride warmed her like sunshine and she gave Skippy a nudge until they were headed for the horse float.
Josh was nowhere to be seen. She spied Kev, deep in conversation with a brown sparrow of a man she didn’t recognise, and there was Vera, sitting on the tailgate of the old horse float, a smile on her face and Jane Doe lying across her boots.
Hannah started to smile back at her soon-to-be sister-in-law but paused. Vera’s eyes were closed. Her face was turned up to the sun and she had her hands resting over her belly in a protective way that made all Hannah’s ragingly unsatisfied hormones stand up and start shouting.
