# Rummage

Now this is a yarn I had off an old stockman at the Bathurst races, and he told it with a straight face, so I'll tell it the same way, and you can take it or leave it.

In the year 1820, or thereabouts — for the old fellow was never particular about years, only about cattle — there was a squatter on the western fall of the Great Dividing Range by the name of Vellacott. He ran six hundred head on country that wasn't his, under a licence he hadn't paid for, and he'd have told you himself that the two things went together very nicely.

Vellacott had one stockman, two assigned servants, and a girl.

The girl was Nell Quill, and she was what they called currency — born in the colony, of a convict father, which is a thing that follows a body about like a smell. Her father had got his ticket of leave and then got himself killed by a falling tree, which the Coroner called an accident and everybody else called Providence.

And Nell had the dragon.

There was only the one in the whole of New South Wales, so far as anybody knew, and the Governor had a standing proclamation out for its destruction, it being described in the *Gazette* as a noxious and destructive beast, with five pounds to the man who put it down. Five pounds was a fortune in those days. It was also, as it turned out, about ninepence a pound.

The dragon's name was Cinder and he was the colour of a well-used copper kettle. Twenty foot from nose to tail-tip, no fire to speak of — a hot sneeze at best — and none of your vanishing-into-thin-air business the old-country dragons are supposed to have. He had to fly wherever he went, and flying tired him, and being tired made him hungry, and being hungry was the whole of the trouble.

Because what Cinder ate was beef.

Nell had come by him in a manner she never fully explained and nobody pressed her on, a currency lass with a dragon being a thing you argue with at your leisure and from a distance. She'd had him since he was the size of a heifer. She could put a picture into his head and he'd put one back at her, and he minded her about as well as a good dog minds — which is to say, generally, and not always.

The stockman called him Rummage. The name stuck. Cinder never answered to it. Cinder never answered to anything, being a dragon, and above it.

Now, the trouble. Vellacott's cattle had gone up into the high country in the spring — scrubbers, most of them, wild as the day, worth nothing at all unless they were yarded and counted and got to market. And the Commissioner was coming. The Commissioner came once a year to count your stock and your acres and your sins, and if the stock wasn't there to be counted, he counted it anyway, at a figure of his own choosing, and then charged you for it.

So Vellacott wanted the mob mustered down off the range in a fortnight, and he had three men and a bad knee.

"You'll not take that thing up there," he told Nell, meaning Cinder. "Last time you took him up we lost forty head over the cliff at Doughboy."

"We lost nine," said Nell.

"We lost forty, and nine of 'em were found."

Still, when the morning came, she took him. That's the thing about a currency lass — she'll take an order and then take the opposite of it, and do it so briskly you'd swear it was your own idea. She went up the spur before dawn with Cinder walking behind her like a great bronze shadow, and the plan was this: she'd keep him high and upwind and move him slow along the rim, and the mob, catching his scent, would drift down off the range ahead of him, neat as you like, into the yards at the bottom.

It was a good plan. It had only the one flaw, which was that cattle are not reasonable about dragons.

They came off the high ground in a long bellowing wave, and for the first mile it went beautifully. Nell sat Cinder's shoulder and pushed him along the ridge in short hops — he couldn't stay up long, he was heavy in the air like a wet blanket — and the mob rolled ahead of them down the spur, and the stockman, whose name was Dobbs, sat his horse at the bottom with his hat in his hand and his mouth open.

Then Cinder got tired. Then Cinder got hungry. And then Cinder, being a dragon and therefore a creature of appetite and poor judgement, dropped down into the tail of the mob and took a calf.

He didn't take it savagely. He took it the way a man takes a bun off a plate — quick, and with a certain apologetic air. But a calf is a calf, and a mother is a mother, and the mob went from drifting to bolting in the space of one long drawn-out bellow.

Six hundred head of scrubbers came down off that spur like a landslide with horns on it.

Dobbs turned his horse and went. He went the way a man goes when he has thought the matter through and arrived at a firm position. The two assigned servants went likewise, one of them into a tree, which was the best decision anybody made that day.

And down at the bottom, at the crossing of the Fish River, sat Sly Jemmy Rook's shanty, where the unruly locals drank, and where three bolters had been drinking since Tuesday.

Now you want to understand that Sly Jemmy had heard about the five pounds. Everybody had heard about the five pounds. Jemmy had spent a fortnight telling his bolters that the way to a fortune was to sit on the crossing and wait for the beast to come to water, and here it came — only it came at the head of six hundred head of terrified cattle with a dragon flapping and cursing above it.

The bolters fired.

They fired at Cinder, and they missed Cinder, and they hit a rooster, and the rooster's death was the loudest and most insulting thing that happened all day. It put the finishing touch on the cattle. They went through the shanty the way a river goes through a paper bag — through the walls, through the barrels, through the sly grog and the beds and the good pewter that Jemmy had off a ship at Sydney — and out the other side, with three bolters, two dogs, and one shanty keeper riding the wave of them like men on a log.

And above the whole boiling, Cinder flew, and every so often he'd reach down with a claw and take a mouthful of something, not out of hunger any more but out of sheer high spirits.

They ran four miles. They ran through Vellacott's home paddock, which Vellacott had just fenced. They ran through Vellacott's vegetable garden, which was Vellacott's pride, and they ran through the fowl house, which was Vellacott's supper.

And then they ran into the Commissioner's camp, and there — because the Commissioner was a man who travelled with a proper yard and a proper gate and understood that a gate catches more stock than a musket — they stopped.

They yarded themselves. All six hundred of them, jammed in like sheep in a hurdle, with their tails up and their eyes rolling, and Cinder sitting on the top rail of the yard like a great bronze gargoyle, licking his foot, looking pleased with himself in the way of a creature who has no idea what he has done and no intention of finding out.

The Commissioner came out of his tent in his shirt.

The Commissioner looked at the yard. The Commissioner looked at the dragon. The Commissioner looked at Sly Jemmy Rook, who was lying in the mud with a pewter mug in his hand and no explanation for it. And the Commissioner, being a practical man and a magistrate besides, said the only sensible thing anybody said that day.

"That's a fine mob of cattle, Mr. Vellacott. Get 'em counted."

Well, they counted them. Five hundred and eighty-nine head, which is nineteen more than Vellacott had ever claimed on paper and three fewer than he swore he'd run, and it's a strange thing how the truth lands between the two. The Commissioner was pleased. Vellacott was pleased. Dobbs was up the tree still and didn't care.

But there was the matter of the beast.

The proclamation was read out. The noxious and destructive animal, five pounds, the *Gazette*, all of it. Sly Jemmy Rook heard the words "five pounds" and got up out of the mud like Lazarus with a grievance. Vellacott went the colour of a bad egg, because a man who harbours a noxious beast is a man who answers for it, and Vellacott had a licence he hadn't paid for and a run he shouldn't have been on, and he could see the whole of his fortunes going down the same hole as the vegetable garden.

Then Nell Quill stepped forward.

She was seventeen, and muddy to the eyebrows, and she had the dragon's mind in hers and her father's stubbornness in the rest of her, and she said: "He's not a noxious beast. He's a working animal."

The Commissioner said, "A what?"

"A working animal," said Nell. "He brought in five hundred and eighty-nine head for you today, and never lost one over a cliff. You saw him do it."

"I saw him do it," said the Commissioner slowly, "by eating a calf."

"He was hungry," said Nell. "Feed him and he'll not eat what he's working."

Now I don't say the Commissioner believed her. Nobody believed her. But the Commissioner had a yard full of cattle he hadn't had that morning, and a shanty full of bolters he'd been meaning to catch for a twelvemonth, and a dragon he wasn't confident of shooting, and he was a man who knew how to write a return so that it said what was wanted. So he wrote one.

On the Government stock return for that year, in the district beyond the mountains, under the heading *Horned Cattle*, there is a line that reads: *One beast, bronze, of a new breed, depastured by permission.*

Vellacott got his licence. Nell got a wage, and a hut of her own, and the right to feed her dragon on the calves that nobody else wanted. Sly Jemmy Rook got twelve months and lost his pewter.

And Cinder got fat.

They never did put him down, and they never did collect the five pounds, and if you go up on the Fish River to this day they'll tell you there's a beast in the high country the colour of a copper kettle, and that if you see him, you should keep your mob moving and your mouth shut and let the girl handle it.

Which is, when you think about it, the soundest piece of stock advice ever given in New South Wales.