Silly City Slickers
NOTE: This came out all funny when I copy and pasted. I'll be back when I can to fix it up.
It's only 10:37 on my last day in the outback and already it's turned out interesting. I woke to gunshots. Well, actually the commotion it caused between my mum and brothers. I roll over and hear my Mum's voice first, "Can you hear that noise?"
Josh’s deep voice answers in typical male form, "Nope. I can't hear anything."
"It's something,” Mum’s insistant, “It sounds like the thump of the washing machine but that can't be, it's already packed on the truck."
"Maybe it's the bass beat in the music.”
No reply from my Mum on this one but I can just imagine her pursing up her mouth in stubborn refusal at Josh’s non-dramatic conclusion.
“It sounds like gunshots,” pipes in Caleb, “just like the pistol.”
“Hey, you’re right, “ agrees Josh. Mum’s heart beat goes up at his quick admittance of her fears. “Is Dad around?”
“No, he said he was moving sheep from Warden into the Lake Paddock.”
“It really sounds like his pistol.” Caleb isn’t into soothing nervous female nerves at all this morning.
“Well, maybe he did get back early.” Mum is grasping at the loose dirt in the air now, eager for any kind of answer. She calls up Dad on the two-way radio. He answers almost immediately, “Hey, darling. How’s it going?”
“Ok. Are you outside shooting off the pistol?”
“No. I’m on the Warden fence pushing the sheep into the Lake Paddock.”
So much for nice endings. These strange booming noises are getting creepier every moment. I sit up in bed, wondering whether to join the debate, when I hear my Mum trying to calmly send everyone back to their jobs. Just as she’s instructing the boys to move the last desk out of the school room, I look up and see a strange maroon 4WD sedately driving past the front of our house. Are we expecting visitors today?
The boys see the car and within minutes everyone is hiding behind the front verandah curtains, peering out the windows like nervous jews in a german raid. Could it be shooters? People the boss has sent out to see the place before we shift? We hope not. Shooters tend to be heavy on the bottle and tipsy men with guns are never a good combination. Mum, Hannah, and I aren’t leaving our curtains. Josh sets out bravely to investigate.
A curious minutes goes by. A tense one follows. Another five minutes and he’s back. He looks intact. The car is driving away. And is that a smirk?
Hannah demands he tell us everything. Josh takes his time teasing us with his silence, “They were lost.”
Lost? But what about the gunshots?
They were looking for the highway, he says. Turns out they were a bunch of city blokes trying to cut through the back road from the small town of Eulo, a few hours from our place. In the confusion of a back paddock they’d taken a right turn when they should have taken a left and spent the morning wandering around all our back roads. This has happened before, though, never quite as dramaticly as this. Usually a local tries to draw these kind of people mud-maps but these guys had tried it blind. And what was the point of panic? They had their guns. They had time. When they saw a group of emus on the road they decided to take a shot, not realizing our house was only a hundred yards behind the trees.
Josh says they looked pretty sheepish when they came to confess. Obviously afraid their sins would be found out by a higher authority, they offer to leave their number plate details with us “Get it checked if you like.” The burly guy in the passenger seat suggests hastily, “We swear we’re clean.”
Josh takes them at their word. Besides what’s the point. Policeman have heard these stories all before. It would only make another good story to circulate around the pubs.
Just to clinch their place in pub story fame, one of the guys breaks off in mid-sentence and asks excitedly, “Hey, is that a fox?”
Josh looks and sees our orange cat walking by. “Nah, mate, that’s a cat.”
“Man, you guys have big cats out here.”
Our cats look pretty average to me. But then I’ve been here for eight years. Once we’re north I’ll not longer be “bushy”, but this is my last day and until my times up I’ll shake my head in country bewilderment and say, “Silly city slickers.”
2 Comments:
Josh says "mate"??? AGHHHHHHH! That. Is. So. Cool.
Well, I guess you probably say it too, it's just that I basically never hear anybody say that.
By the way, your HTML code seems to be messed up again, as it takes all of you " 's and changes them to ’. Been doing that for a while now.
Anyways.
Hehe. Drunks. Hehe.
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