Headhunters by Mark Dawson Read Free Book Online

chirping as Milton finally pushed the last sheep down the chute, wiped the sweat from his eyes with the back of his arm, and leaned back against the wall of the pen. He was done in. Maggots writhed in the cuffs of his trousers and he had a mixture of blood and pus and lanolin on his bare arms and clothes.
    He had wrapped tape around two of his fingers where he had sliced into the flesh with the blades. His wrist and elbow were taped for extra support. His legs were weak and he was light-headed from the heat. He needed a drink of water, a cigarette and a shower, in that order.
    Harry was in no better shape. His arm was wrapped where he had an unpleasant purple boil. It had worsened during the day. He said, with no effort to conceal his distaste, that it was an infection that he had picked up from the sheep they had sheared at Red River Station last week.
    “Well?” Harry asked as he walked over to Milton, Eric and Mervyn.
    “Hundred and five,” Milton said.
    He grinned at him. “No way.”
    “Straight up.” He had been marking each sheep with a stroke of his knife against the wood. The board was covered in notches.
    “Good work, pommie,” Eric said.
    Milton looked at Harry with sudden trepidation. He realised, with an awareness of how foolish it was, that this actually mattered . “You?”
    Harry grinned wider. “Hundred and ten.”
    Milton shook his head. “You’re kidding.”
    “I told you you’ll never beat me.”
    “He’s not bad, though, gaffer,” Mervyn opined.
    Eric chipped in. “First time I saw you, I said to myself, ten minutes, I said, ten minutes is as long as you’d last. I said you’d be as useless as tits on a bull, ain’t that right, Merv?”
    “S’right.”
    “New at this, and a pommie to boot.”
    Milton’s nationality was the main standing joke between them. Mervyn and Eric, tough and gnarled Aussies, returned to it again and again. They were fiercely nationalistic, proud of their country, and it was a source of great amusement to them that he was a foreigner in a foreign land. They didn’t spare Harry, either. Their foreman might have been born in Australia, but he had been in the United Kingdom for long enough to have ceded at least a little of his heritage. He was, they suggested, infected with Englishness. He was a half-pommie.
    “I’m glad I have your approval,” Milton said.
    “Don’t get too comfortable. You’ve still got a face like a kicked-in shitcan.”
    Milton shook his head and laughed. He took off his hat as they walked together to the outbuilding with the mess and their dorm. Harry was alongside him, unable to wipe the grin from his face. Milton had always been competitive. He hated to lose. He and Harry had spent hours in the range together when they were in the Regiment, each of them determined to demonstrate that he was more accurate than the other. Milton had won most of those head-to-head duels and, indeed, he had beaten him two nights ago when they had set cans and bottles as targets and shot them with the antique .310 rifle they kept in the Jeep. But the sheep were something else. He knew that he had picked a difficult challenge, and that, in all good faith, he was never going to be able to best him. But it didn’t mean that he wouldn’t give it a damned good go.
    “Don’t know about you fellas,” Harry said, “but I could eat the arse out of a low-flying duck. What you say we get cleaned up and drive into town? We can get something to eat.”
    “You paying, skipper?”
    “I’m paying.”
    “Hallelujah!”
    Eric was kidding. Harry always paid for their food and drink after a hard day in the pens.
    Mervyn looked over at him with a coy smile. “Matilda still coming?”
    Harry answered with staged wariness. “As far as I know.”
    The grizzled shearer chuckled. “Best news I’ve heard all day.”
    Harry was protective of his kid sister. Mervyn knew that one of the best ways to wind him up was to make suggestive comments about her. Milton