Hope's Road Read Online Free PDF Page A

get him upright.
    The chair tipped back and clipped Boots’s long hairy tail. The dog leaped into the air, yelping, and Joe staggered slightly sideways before groping at a verandah pole to steady himself. ‘Fuck it, Boots.’ Joe was more pissed off than contrite. He was finding he was stumbling a bit more every day, especially if there was a change due in the weather. Any alteration in atmospheric pressure seemed to make his knees and ankles seize up, particularly in the mornings. All part of getting old, he supposed. He didn’t like it, though. Not one little bit.
    Joe bent over and scratched behind his old border collie’s ears. The dog was still licking his tail. ‘Sorry, mate. Didn’t mean to hurt ya.’ Boots leaned into his wrinkled and veiny hand, thumping his tail in ecstasy. It never took much to make a dog happy. Shame humans weren’t the same. Joe’s eyes flickered back out to the east and the rich green spread of Montmorency Downs. Nothing he could do about that, regardless of Nellie’s yabbering voice in his head.
    â€˜Righto, enough dilly-dallying about. We’re off. Bales of hay to feed this morning.’ He dumped his mug on top of the flattened bollard beside the verandah steps and clumped his way to the rack near the front screen door. Sambar deer antlers of different shapes and sizes held coats, hats and vests, all in varying states of disrepair.
    Joe shrugged himself into a ripped oilskin with a barely discernible green chequered flannel lining. A flying cap with fluffy Biggles-like muffs for his ears went onto his nearly bald head. A pair of black, heavy gumboots onto his socked feet.
    And then they were off. Man and dog. Down the steps, into the bright morning, where dewdrops were still shining through spider webs on the corrugated walls of the barn.
    Joe made his way to the lean-to shed that housed an ancient Fordson Major tractor, an iconic piece of machinery. He checked the oil and water then climbed aboard, cranking over the engine. After a few false starts the cold motor caught and fired. The noise was raucous, drowning out the kookaburras who’d started cackling and destroying any peace that had remained.
    Joe backed the tractor out of the open side of the barn. ‘C’mon, Boots!’ The dog slunk around the side of the tractor, setting his sights on the hayshed behind the house. ‘Shame you can’t open gates,’ yelled Joe. ‘That’d make you worth keeping.’ Boots ignored him, and climbed through a fence that was missing a top wire then pissed on a post that was leaning sideways into the breeze. Joe swore Boots could understand him better than anyone, and dogs certainly had their own ways to thumb it at their owners.
    There were only a few gates on Joe’s eight hundred acres. The solid, galvanised ones fronting the roads and bush tracks circumnavigating the farm, the one into the hayshed yard and the mallee gate separating the front half from the back part of the property.
    Joe let his cattle roam the place. He didn’t understand all this new-fangled stuff about cell grazing, wagon wheels and strip feeding. Truth be told he hadn’t wanted to understand it. For to do that meant change, and he knew he wasn’t so good at change; never had been.
    He clambered down off the tractor and opened the gate to the hayshed yard. Got back on the vehicle and trundled through. Using the hay forks on the front he picked up a round bale, backed the tractor around and with the rear hay grabs picked up another one. He’d had hydraulics fitted to the old girl. It’d been worth it. One round was worth twelve or so small bales and lifting smalls had been hell on his back. Nellie had forced that change on him and, though he’d never admitted it to her, he was glad. His back had been caning him.
    Joe drove the tractor out the gate, closed it and set off across the paddock. He stopped when he remembered