The typical Australian bullock -- long-horned, sullen-eyed, stupid, and vindictive -- is bred away out in Queensland, on remote stations in the Never Never land, where men live on damper and beef, and occasionally eat a whole bottle of hot pickles at a sitting, simply to satisfy their craving for vegetable food. Here, under the blazing tropic sun, among flies and dust and loneliness, they struggle with the bullock from year's end to year's end. It is not to be supposed that they take up this kind of thing for fun. The man who worked cattle for sport would wheel bricks for amusement.
At periodical intervals a boom in cattle-country arises in the cities, and syndicates are formed to take up country and stock it. It looks so beautifully simple -- ON PAPER.
You get your country, thousands of miles of it, for next to nothing. You buy your breeding herd for a ridiculously small sum, on long-dated bills. Your staff consists of a manager, who toils for a share of the profits, a couple of half-civilized white stockmen at low wages, and a handful of blacks, who work harder for a little opium ash than they would for much money. Plant costs nothing, improvements nothing -- no woolshed is needed, there are no shearers to pay, and no carriage to market, for the bullock walks himself down to his doom. Granted that prices are low, still it is obvious that there must be huge profits in the business. So the cattle start away out to "the country", where they are supposed to increase and multiply, and enrich their owners. Alas! for such hopes. There is a curse on cattle.
No one has ever been able to explain exactly how the deficit arises. Put the figures before the oldest and most experienced cattleman, and he will fail to show why they don't work out right. And yet they never do. It is not the fault of the cattle themselves. Sheep would rather die than live -- and when one comes to think of the life they lead, one can easily understand their preference for death; but cattle, if given half a chance, will do their best to prolong their existence.
If they are running on low-lying country and are driven off when a flood comes, they will probably walk back into the flood-water and get drowned as soon as their owner turns his back. But, as a rule, cattle are not suicidal. They sort themselves into mobs, they pick out the best bits of country, they find their way to the water, they breed habitually; but it always ends in the same way. The hand of Fate is against them.
If a drought comes, they eat off the grass near the water and have to travel far out for a feed. Then they fall away and get weak, and when they come down to drink they get bogged in the muddy waterholes and die there.
Or Providence sends the pleuro, and big strong beasts slink away by themselves, and stand under trees glaring savagely till death comes. Or else the tick attacks them, and soon a fine, strong beast becomes a miserable, shrunken, tottering wreck. Once cattle get really low in condition they are done for. Sheep can be shifted when their pasture fails, but you can't shift cattle. They die quicker on the roads than on the run. The only thing is to watch and pray for rain. It always comes -- after the cattle are dead.
As for describing the animals themselves, it would take volumes. Sheep are all alike, but cattle are all different. The drovers on the road get to know the habits and tendencies of each particular bullock -- the one- eyed bullock that pokes out to the side of the mob, the inquisitive bullock that is always walking over towards the drover as if he were going to speak to him, the agitator bullock who is always trying to get up a stampede and prodding the others with his horns.
In poor Boake's "Where the Dead Men Lie" he says:
Only the hand of Night can free them -- That's when the dead men fly! Only the frightened cattle see them -- See the dead men go by! Cloven hoofs beating out one measure, Bidding the stockman know no leisure -- That's when the dead men take their pleasure! That's when the dead men fly!
Cattle on a camp see ghosts, sure enough -- else, why is it that, when hundreds are in camp at night -- some standing, some lying asleep, all facing different ways -- in an instant, at some invisible cause of alarm, thewhole mob are on their feet and all racing IN THE SAME DIRECTION, away from some unseen terror?
It doesn't do to sneak round cattle at night; it is better to whistle and sing than to surprise them by a noiseless appearance. Anyone sneaking about frightens them, and then they will charge right over the top of somebody on the opposite side, and away into the darkness, becoming more and more frightened as they go, smashing against trees and stumps, breaking legs and ribs, and playing the dickens with themselves generally. Cattle "on the road" are unaccountable animals; one cannot say for certain what they will do. In this respect they differ from sheep, whose movements can be predicted with absolute certainty.
All the cussedness of the bovine race is centred in the cow. In Australia the most opprobious epithet one can apply to a man or other object is "cow". In the whole range of a bullock-driver's vocabulary there is no word that expresses his blistering scorn so well as "cow". To an exaggerated feminine perversity the cow adds a fiendish ingenuity in making trouble.
