Read The Horse Who Bit a Bushranger for Free Online

old that flowers grew in their crevices.
    There were few flowers here. There were dry yellow ones, from last summer maybe, and now in spring some of the gum trees were blooming. He could smell honey, and hear the heavy hum of bees under thesound of bells. One of the men back at the farm had said that bees here didn’t sting, but Billy didn’t want to rob a wild hive and find out that he was wrong.
    A cloud of stinging bees could kill you, just like the snakes, the spiders, the rum and the roads.
    He didn’t want to die. More than that—he didn’t want to die here alone.
    At least he’d been given a shepherd’s crook, to grab at the sheep’s necks and haul them in the right direction. He had a knife too, and even an old battered pistol to shoot the dingoes, if they came too near, or bushrangers or natives if they attacked, or to shoot a roo to eat. Sheep cost money, but roo meat was free, if you didn’t count the bit of powder needed to load your pistol. He only bothered with the roos’ tails, roasting them over the fire outside his hut, eating them with damper and a bit of treacle. He’d told Roman John he knew how to shoot (trust Master Higgins to learn any new boy that) but he’d been surprised he was trusted with a firearm.
    Roman John had shrugged. ‘You’ll soon run out of lead and powder if you go bush. Just make sure you keep the powder dry. Damp powder makes pistols explode.’
    Even your own pistol could kill you here.
    Billy didn’t mind the dingoes—much: their howling could drive you mad at night. He didn’t even mind the sheep. For the first time in his life he had all the meat he could eat, all the lambs’ tails and mutton from old sheep that’d died. He was ordered to cut the wool away from the bodies; wool was more precious than meat. Wool could be shipped and sold in England; meat only lasted a day or two even inwinter before it went bad, if you didn’t have enough salt to preserve it.
    The food, exercise and fresh air had made him strong again after the weakness of the voyage. He wondered hopefully if the meat might make him grow taller too, but his trousers didn’t seem any shorter on his legs.
    At first his skin burnt and blistered. He’d plaited himself a big wide hat, like the other men’s, using bark that peeled off in great sheets from some of the trees. ‘Cabbage-tree’ leaves made better hats, but there were none around his hut.
    The hut wasn’t flash, just poles in the ground with bark walls and roof, and more poles on top to stop the bark blowing away, and a fireplace marked out with rocks in front.
    The bark leaked when it rained, but Billy was warm enough under his sheepskins, though they stank a bit. The strange dull trees dropped endless wood for fires; he had to keep piling it on, for he had no flint or any way to make a spark if his fire went out. Raw meat and cold flour and water…it was threat enough to make him heave a big log on his fire before he went inside to bed, and to hurry out to put twigs and dry branches on the coals as soon as he woke up.
    But he’d got used to that. Got used to the old man possum that tried to steal his breakfast. Found he was even starting to enjoy the bush around him, sweet air you could breathe deep instead of choking on, birds yakking at him from the branches till he threw them crumbs.
    It was the loneliness that killed you.
    All his life there had been people. Pallets crowded together at the workhouse (he shut his mind to the years before that). The friendship in Master Higgins’s attic, him and Jem with their bed rolls next to each other, then the prison and the ship…he’d longed to have a bit o’ peace in those days.
    But now.
    He’d started talkin’ to the sheep. Singin’, just to hear a human voice. At times he’d reckoned he could hear voices, had leapt up hoping someone were comin’. But it was just a bird, or a sheep baa ing…
    Which was why now, when he heard the yell, he just sat there, holding the branch with