When Colts Ran Read Online Free Page B

where he lived too much in himself.
    *
    Next morning, looking up the track from the kitchen window, Colts remembered a great sight of Buckler – a man going away the moment he was seen – heading off with a handkerchief around his neck, driving a finger-slapper grader.
    With its hard metal blade screaming against the earth, a grader had the power of returning without turning around, sending out sparks and the acrid smell of gunpowder rocks. It clanked under kurrajongs with leaves dusty in the heat as down it came into the dry creek bed and up again, scraping a path for farm lorries on limestone and quartz. A road was raised under the boy’s eyes as Buckler banged the controls, flipped levers, spun handwheels in repetition. Colts drank crushes of heat and gulps of diesel fume and noise.
    The homestead’s tennis courts were built by Buckler from forty ant hills especially so young people and their friends could use them. The last time Faye was there Colts smashed, volleyed, lobbed and backhanded with an accuracy that wiped away smiles as the three of them played cutthroat. Buckler played to win but Colts toppled him. Faye wasn’t so flash: she ran for a shot, concentrated on preparing a serve, laughed when she lost a point or received service badly, parachuted to earth after missing a high lob and stood there, giggling, just for the fun of it. That was Limestone Hills in the days when Buckler stayed put.
    Swallows nested in the kitchen and the smell of the fat-stained boards and old iron cooking pots swam round the boy sitting with a breakfast cuppa and reading Joshua Slocum’s Sailing Alone Around the World and waiting for his toast. Afterwards Veronica laid out harness along the verandah stones for soaping and mending.
    He looked up at her.
    â€˜Those horses are immortal,’ he said.
    No need to ask which horses, or who coined the phrase. Buckler and his big-noting. They both understood where they were going, then, on this wartime excursion released from ties, what the first target of their march would be – a triangular paddock far away.
    Dunc Buckler’s Clydesdales were kept on that reserve of the Darling River, downstream from Wilcannia, two hundred miles away, eating thistles and rare green pick. They were as old as Moses, wiry whiskers on rubbery lips, shaggy hairs matted over their hoofs. They had the stars for company and visits from a swagman to see they weren’t ever bogged, foundered or caught in wire. Veronica’s old tin caravan stood nearby, shuttered tight against snakes and mice. A painted arch gave shade protection. Old George and Mrs Dinah, they were called, released to a life of greater ease. Last seen in ’39, they’d snuffled their nosebags and ambled closer, giving Colts the feeling of hoofs about to stand on him, a delicious fear that he encouraged while curling his toes inside his boots.
    The best idea was to take the truck but the petrol they found was almost all siphoned away, so off they set on the motorbike with a cluster of spare containers and a canvas waterbag. Colts took the controls wearing dust goggles, Veronica huddling in the sidecar protected by cushions. They had bags, boxes and bottles stacked, everything roped or wedged for the ride west, both intently hopeful of make or break. With stubborn ceremonial pride devoid of reason, Colts wore his cricket boots – a pair of once-white Niblicks bought from a man named Kippax in a store hung with bats and pads and pyramids of cherry-red stitched balls. Those boots charged to Buckler left a distinct impression of Colts in his footprints, heart shapes riveted with studs. He found patches of smooth sand and made perfect stencils of them as they went along.
    The small towns they came to had one long road unravelled at either end by thistly stockyards, tin shacks and smoking garbage dumps, with a motor garage, a stock agent, a bank, a school, a police station, a pub with a long, high verandah, a