Luke shrugs, shifting the calf in his arms.‘That’s life.’
I wrap my arms tighter around myself, as if that might protect me from how deeply unfair it all feels.
‘What are you going to do with it?’I ask, dreading the answer.
Luke doesn’t miss a beat.‘Shoot it.’
I freeze.
My mouth goes dry.My brain can’t compute.
And then he smirks.
‘Kidding,’ he says, as if that was a perfectly normal joke to make when you’re holding a creature made up of matchsticks and hope.He lowers the calf gently onto the back of the ute.‘We’ll take her home.Give her some milk, keep an eye on her.See if she gets stronger.’
I bite my lip.‘And if she doesn’t?’
Luke straightens.His face is back to being unreadable: jaw set, blue eyes as vacant as the sky.‘Then I will have to put her down.’
I flinch.
‘If I leave her here,’ he adds quietly, ‘she’ll starve.Or get torn up by a dingo.Or picked at by birds while she’s still breathing.’
I say nothing, just walk over and rest my hand lightly on the calf ’s bony forehead.She doesn’t react, just blinks at me with eyes too big for her face.
‘Well,’ I murmur, ‘we’re not gonna let that happen, are we?’
Luke stares at me.His body centimetres away from mine.There’s something unreadable in his expression.There’s a beat, and then—
‘Don’t get too attached to your dinner.’
Arsehole.
We drive for another hour or two, assessing the rest of the herd before Luke checks a few loose fence wires and missing stakes.I help where I can, awkwardly holding posts, passing tools, getting blisters in places I didn’t know could blister.
The sun is relentless.My shirt sticks to my back.My thighs are coated in a fine layer of dust and sweat.My high ponytail is now a low mess of regrets.
The calf makes soft noises from the back tray.Each one lands like a jab to my ribcage.
‘You’re better at this than I expected,’ Luke says after I manage to not drop a pair of wire cutters for the first time.
I squint at him.‘That makes one of us.’
He smirks when I hand him the tool – and there they are, those damn dimples.
TWENTY-FOUR
The sun hangs low, bleeding gold across the dusty windshield as we pull up to the house.My skin is covered in a layer of dust and sweat, hair sticking to the back of my neck while I take out my phone and open the Notes app, thumb hovering for a second before I start typing:Alternative feed solutions?Government grants?
I stare at the list.Then, impulsively, I swipe back out of the app and open my messages.
New text.Dylan.My fingers pause over my screen, then start moving before I can second-guess myself.
Hi.Me again
Random question: where do you source your hemp?
Is the NT too hot to grow something like that?Is that even a thing?
