Jumping Fences Read online

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Zoe said as they rode quietly side by side.

  ‘For what?’ asked Jen.

  ‘Causing so much trouble.’

  Jen looked straight ahead as she talked and her words were crisp. ‘If you don’t want to move to the city with your mum, you’d better hope your dad gets on top of the farm after these floods. Otherwise you’ll all be in a little box in the city.’

  Zoe kept her mouth shut, knowing there was a lecture coming. Jen rarely gave lectures, but when she did it was always better to just cop it sweet.

  ‘I know it’s tough, growing up on a farm with just your dad and your brother. It’s hard to get noticed.’

  As she said the words, Uncle Fred hollered in the distance. The guy beside him was tall and wore a peaked cap with tufts of hair poking out around his ears. Two skinny dogs raced around his heels.

  Zoe groaned. Not him again. Josh.

  ‘Seems they’ve caught some rabbits,’ said Jen, sounding glad of a change of subject. She waved.

  Zoe gathered up her reins. ’I remember that dog,’ she said, feeling suddenly weird.

  ‘I bet you do. The white one whipped Frankie’s tail in the dog high jump at the last Bush festival. You weren’t too happy about it if I remember correctly.’

  So that’s why she remembered that white dog. Damn. It had, too. There’d been five hundred dollars at stake and that scrawny white thing had jumped as if it had wings.

  Zoe’s stomach was in knots. She was beyond nervous. She had spent months training Frankie for this and there was five hundred dollars prize money up for grabs. She brought him to heel as she waited in the marshalling yard for the competition to begin. He thumped his tail on the grass.

  A crowd had gathered. They stood about eating campfire potatoes with plastic forks and talking through mouthfuls. A small tray-backed truck set the stage for the dog high jump. A wall of wooden planks had been set up on the back of it, with columns of straw bales either side and behind it, giving the dogs somewhere to land.

  She noticed Josh Miller on the other side of the marshalling area. A slim white dog with a brindle patch over one ear sat at his feet and looked up adoringly at him. His gaze collided with hers and his face spread into an open, friendly smile. Without thinking, she winked at him, just as he’d done last night.

  But Josh didn’t respond. His eyes cast somewhere behind her. She looked around and saw Samantha waving back at him. Oh Lordy, how embarrassing. Zoe wheeled away, but not before she noticed Josh smirking slightly with amusement.

  Double, triple embarrassment. What was she thinking?

  Right on cue, Scotty and Caitlin walked past. She stuck her fingers between her teeth and whistled them. ‘Coming to watch Frankie jump?’ she called out.

  ‘I gotta help in the yards,’ Scotty called back. ‘Catch up later. Go, Frankie!’

  ‘Can’t stop now,’ said Caitlin, smiling apologetically. ‘I gotta put my entries in for the barrels.’

  ‘You’re gonna miss a new Australian record,’ she called back, and then looked down and focused on her dog. ‘Got your jumping legs on, Frankie?’ she said. He wagged his tail at her and whined. She scruffed him round the ears with both hands.

  There were twenty-five dogs in the competition and Zoe could tell by looking at most of them that they would barely jump a metre. A labrador and a fox terrier were both knocked out before she brought Frankie to the start line. Most of the other dogs were border collies or kelpies, working dogs, like Frankie. But some were old and others were overweight. They wouldn’t make the heights.

  The steward called out his full name: ‘Frankenstein!’ She unclipped Frankie and brought him in front of the timber wall on the truck. She roughed him up a bit to get him excited. ‘Ready, mate?’

  Frankie crouched on his hindquarters and paddled his front feet. Zoe ran to the two-metre wall and clicked her fingers. ‘Up!’ Frankie sprinted, leaped and made a small scratching sound as his claws brushed lightly over the top plank. Too easy.

  Many more dogs scrambled over in the same way, but none so easily as Frankie, she noticed, and her confidence in him grew. Other owners yelled and hooted and clapped and banged on the planks. Each handler had a special set of calls and whistles. Josh’s dog was one of those that cleared the wall, but Zoe wondered if she would have the strength to clear anything bigger. She was small and wiry, a bit like a flying white rat.

  By the third round, there were only five dogs left in the competition and a crowd had gathered as the men put another rail on the wall, taking the height well over two metres.

  Frankie was called up first and Zoe’s heart raced as she took him to the start line and unclipped him. In her nervousness, she ran to the wall without giving Frankie his warm-up cue. He went at the jump with nowhere near enough speed, clung to the top of the rail and then reeled backwards, landing on the wrong side of the wall. She cursed under her breath.

  ‘Have another go,’ said the marshal. ‘You get three shots at it.’

  Frankie jumped it easily on the second try, hooking his front paws over the top and using his back legs to climb over. He raced down the other side, and wagged his tail at her. ‘Good boy,’ she said. ‘That was easy, wasn’t it?’

  Josh brought his whippet to the start line and walked to the back of the wall to scramble up the haybales. ‘Wispy!’ He patted the top plank. The white rat raced at the jump and propelled her body from the ground as if she was flying. Halfway up the wall she began scrambling in a frenetic climbing motion, scratching the whole way up, until she weaselled her way over the top. Josh took the dog in his arms and hugged her while her tail whipped back and forth. He rubbed her head. Then together they scrambled back down the straw bales, both looking pleased with themselves.

  Zoe frowned. That dog could scale anything with that bizarre scrambling technique. She wasn’t even sure if technically it could even be called jumping. Surely it was cheating, climbing.

  ‘Is that allowed?’ she asked the marshal quietly.

  ‘As long as he doesn’t help the dog over, it’s legit,’ he shrugged.

  Hmm, this would be tricky.

  The next three dogs were knocked out and Zoe steeled herself to the challenge of beating Wispy, the flying white climbing rat. She took Frankie to the starting line and unclipped him.

  There was a yap from the side of the arena and Zoe looked up in time to see Josh’s fingers snapping in a signal to make his dog bark. Wispy yapped again and Josh innocently gazed around. He gave her a charming smile.

  Zoe’s jaw dropped. The nerve. It wasn’t cheating exactly, but it was . . . off-putting. Cheeky.

  Then the worst happened. Frankie trotted over to Wispy and began sniffing at her tail. ‘Frankie!’ she growled, in front of a couple of hundred people. ‘Here! Now!’

  To her mortification, he totally ignored her and began humping the whippet.

  ‘Is that thing on heat?’ she hissed at Josh.

  He shrugged, looking guileless. ‘She’s only young.’

  She had to jump Frankie with the leash on. It took him two attempts to get over the final height and Wispy squirrelled up and over it on the first try. Zoe was livid.

  6

  Fred wiped his glasses with the front of his shirt. ‘The rain washed out a lot of burrows,’ he said as Jen rode alongside him. ‘We caught quite a few.’

  Beside him, Josh wore a trucker’s cap and a faded flannelette shirt with the sleeves ripped off. Several dead and bloodied rabbits dangled from his hands.

  Oh, that is gross. Zoe turned away.

  But that white dog. There was something about it. She felt a tiny something flutter in an empty nook of her mind, as though she had something on the tip of her tongue but couldn’t quite turn it into words.

  ‘New pup working well?’ Jen was asking.

  ‘Yeah, he’s quick,’ said Josh.

  Jen and Fred never let any guns on the property. They’d always used dogs to catch rabbits. Yuck. This would be a gory conversati
on that she didn’t want to listen to.

  Then out of the blue, attention switched to her. ‘How you going, Zoe?’ Josh asked. ‘They finally let you out of the asylum?’ His voice was soft and teasing.

  ‘Good,’ she replied. Standard answer.

  ‘Why don’t you come too, see our new calves?’ Fred said to Josh. ‘Put those rabbits up behind Zoe. Old Turtle won’t mind.’

  Oh, gross. No! Zoe looked at Fred in horror. There were flies all over the rabbits already. Euwww!

  Fred chuckled at the look on her face. ‘Toughen up, kid.’

  Josh strode towards her and draped the floppy rabbit carcasses over the back of the horse, deftly tying the rope to the dee at the back of her saddle.

  ‘Hey!’ squealed Zoe, ‘Get these things off! Oh, seriously disgusting. They probably have lice!’

  They kept walking and she could have sworn she saw their shoulders jumping just a little with laughter. She trotted up behind them and her stomach twisted as the carcasses flapped against the sides of the horse. ‘I mean it, Josh. Carry your own stinking rabbits!’

  He looked up at her calmly. ‘It’s okay. Lice are species-specific. Rabbit lice need rabbit blood to survive. Then again, species of lice that live on humans are not able to live on rabbits. No risk of cross-species infestations.’

  Zoe stared at him with a screwed-up face.

  ‘More over there,’ said Fred.‘More over there,’ said Fred, pointing to three bunnies hippety-hopping near some bushes.

  ‘Oh, don’t,’ begged Zoe, but Josh was already whistling his dogs onto them. Zoe watched them wheel away and sprint across the open flat. Each dog brought a rabbit down with one snap of its jaws. It was mind-blowingly quick.

  Josh walked across with relaxed, purposeful strides and took a moment to praise the white dog and then the brindle as he took their catch.

  He curled a finger at Zoe, gesturing her to come and get the rabbits.

  ‘No,’ she mouthed.

  ‘Would you prefer us to use myxomatosis, Zoe? Or calicivirus?’ said Jen from behind her.

  Zoe had seen rabbits take days to die with myxie, their eyes burning out of their sockets. ‘No, I guess not,’ she conceded. ‘Did you ask him to come and hunt rabbits?’

  ‘We pay him a bounty,’ said Jen. ‘He’s great, but he’s costing us a fortune!’

  They rode towards the paddock where the cows and calves were. When Josh got the gate and held it open for them, she realised he planned on hanging out with them for the afternoon, along with his dead rabbits and their species-specific lice.

  They spent the rest of the day checking fences for storm damage, moving cows across the river and searching for two missing calves. Josh’s whippets raced about his legs the whole time, seeming never to run out of energy.

  The calves had been hidden by their mothers in the long grass in one of the gullies. They were beautiful, all velvety-black with wet, silvery noses and waggly tails.

  ‘Their mums will call them back during the night,’ said Jen. ‘We’d better make sure we leave the gate open.’

  Surprisingly, Zoe found Josh easy to talk to. When he spoke about his dogs, his voice was kind of rough but sweet. Later in the day, he went off with Fred to look for more rabbits and Jen steered Zoe back out to another paddock on the other side of the swollen creek to bring some more pregnant cows across. Among them was a stout black mare, beautifully put together, with a pretty face and soft eyes. At her feet a brown foal lay on its side, sleeping.

  ‘Another colt,’ said Jen. ‘He’s a full brother to Blackjack.’

  Of course. Jen had bred Blackjack out of her mare and given him to Zoe as a gift. How could she have forgotten that? But she seemed to have forgotten an awful lot . . .

  ‘I haven’t seen Blackjack since I got home. Dad must have put him out in the back paddocks while I was in hospital.’

  ‘He never did like horses much,’ Jen said after a moment’s silence, and reined her young colt away.

  It was true. Her dad only ever mustered on bikes. Her mum had ridden, doing dressage rather than stock work, and when she left he had made her sell all the horses, saying he couldn’t afford to feed a bunch of dressage ponies. Zoe felt a weird mixture of agreeing with Jen and wanting to be loyal to her dad. He wasn’t a bad person. He was just . . . all injured inside.

  The phone rang just as they got back to the homestead. Jen ran to answer it while Zoe put the horses away. She had barely walked in the back door when her aunt thrust the phone into her hand. ‘It’s your father,’ she said, sounding unimpressed.

  Zoe finished kicking off her boot before putting the phone to her ear. ‘Dad?’

  ‘Where have you been all day?’ His voice was loud and slurred. Oh, God, he had been drinking. A lot.

  ‘Out mustering,’ she said defiantly. ‘With Jen.’

  ‘So you just racked off to Jen’s place?’

  ‘She finds me useful,’ she retorted. ‘For something other than washing dishes.’

  ‘You had your chance to be a useful part of this farm, Zoe, instead of just going off and leaving your jobs without doing them,’ her dad argued.

  ‘Like when?’

  ‘Like the bloody chookpen and the sheepyard that you were supposed to clean out. Instead I come back and find you’ve taken off to the waterhole with your mates and that idiot boyfriend – if he was any sort of a man he’d have come over and given you a hand.’

  Had she done that? When? Zoe squinted, trying to remember what he was talking about.

  ‘You’re to get your tail back here, now,’ said her dad.

  She paced back out onto the verandah in her socks, agitated. ‘I’m not coming home,’ she said, trying to keep the nervousness out of her voice. He was so ugly when he was like this. He didn’t drink often, but when he did all the bitterness just came rushing out of him. ‘And I’m not going to Mum’s either. I’m moving in with Jen.’ She hadn’t asked Jen, but Jen wouldn’t say no, surely?

  He didn’t answer, but she could almost hear him seething on the other end.

  She held her ground and didn’t answer either.

  ‘I want you to come home.’ His voice was suddenly low and choked up.

  ‘Only if I can work around the farm.’

  ‘We can sort that out when you get back.’

  Zoe didn’t believe him. She knew, as surely as a chook lays eggs, that her mum’s little silver sports car would be parked in the driveway when she got there and all her worldly goods would be bundled up in the boot.

  After another long silence between them, the phone went dead.

  Zoe felt frayed. She hadn’t meant to hurt him. He was right, she was always doing stupid things, always making him steaming mad, giving him reason to worry and be angry.

  It was late afternoon. Zoe put down her rake to check her beeping mobile. She read a new message from Caitlin.

  We’re going to the waterhole for a swim.

  Damn. She’d love to go for a swim. But she had a whole day’s worth of jobs to do. The yards hadn’t been raked out for a week and nor had the chookpen. Today was going to be one big poo fest. She messaged back.

  Who’s going?

  Me, Scotty, a few others.

  It had turned into a crap weekend. Scotty had spent the whole day Saturday helping his dad in the cattleyards and Caitlin had been busy with her riding mates.

  Zoe looked across to the flats where the tractor dragged the seeder back and forth across a field. Would her dad even notice that she was gone?

  He would sure as hell notice if the yards weren’t cleaned out. She sighed and hit the reply button.

  I gotta help Dad. You guys have fun.

  Scotty would be disappointed. He’d probably text her and tell her to do her jobs later. She grabbed the rake and began working again. Maybe if she got it done extra quick she would still make it for a swim.

  She got the yards done in less than an hour, but there were no further messages. Grabbing a bale of straw from the shed,
she scattered it about over the top of all the chook poo and left it at that. Dad would never notice.

  Then she unchained Queenie and swung a leg over the quad bike. ‘Up, old girl.’

  There was a grassy strip by the edge of the road all the way to the Simpsons’ property. Behind one of their front gates was a track well worn by locals, running along a steep gully and ending at the top of Rushing Falls, a fifteen-metre waterfall. Zoe parked the quad there and walked to one of the rock ledges. Against the roaring backdrop of the water she could hear echoing voices and laughter. She peered over the edge and instantly recognised Caitlin and Scotty, fanning their arms back and forth and treading water. Two more people sat on towels on the rocks nearby.

  She turned to Queenie, who sat next to the quad bike, guarding it. The old dog still took the job seriously, despite her complete lack of teeth. ‘Stay, Queenie.’

  In the deep pool at the foot of the falls, Zoe could see the logs and rocks that lurked beneath the water. She stripped to her cossie as she waited for Caity and Scotty to swim out of the way. There was only one spot where she could jump in, and they were swimming right in it. She curled her toes around the edge of the rock shelf and stood waiting, grinning as she imagined their surprised faces. This would be hilarious.

  It seemed ages before Caitlin finally turned and began swimming towards the edge of the pool. Zoe took her chance, hollered loudly and hooted as she leaped off the edge and clutched her knees to her chest. She aimed to land right between them.

  Sound and water exploded all around her as she crashed into the pool. She heard Scotty swear just before the water swallowed her. She pushed off the bottom and shot back up to the surface, laughing. ‘Surprise!’ she spluttered.

  ‘Bloody hell, Zoe,’ said Scotty, over his shoulder. ‘You nearly landed on top of me!’

  Zoe threw her arms around his neck. ‘But I didn’t,’ she laughed, still half breathless. She planted a big kiss on the back of his neck then looked around. ‘Hi, Caitlin!’