The Killing Shed Tally

Colin Speers tells you upfront that he drank his marriage and his last two jobs into the ground, and that the cook's position at Boornabbin Downs — nine days of no pubs, solid pay, and a manager willing to overlook a reference letter with a hole punched through the middle of it — felt, for the first six days, like the best decision he'd made sober. He explains the two ledgers he kept that season: the station's official rations book, meals tallied against souls on the board, and his own private exercise book, a habit held over from his first AA meetings, where a man writes down small true things until he trusts his own hand again. He mentions, almost in passing, an old boundary rider telling him the station's bore had "gone a bit willing" two seasons back and been re-drilled — sweeter water, the sheep drink better on it now — and thinks nothing more of the word than a colorful bit of station talk.

Small things start not adding up before Colin has a name for any of it. Boning out a carcass for the first time himself, he finds grey, pea-sized nodules threaded through the fat that the boundary rider waves off as ordinary grass-seed abscess — cut round it, every flock's got a few. That same week his own meal count comes out heavier than the kill tally says it should, which he chalks up to his own bad arithmetic, three months sober and still not trusting his own numbers first. The wool classer mentions, over a smoke, that this season's fleeces are weighing in heavier against her own eleven years of eye-judgment than they ever have before, and she's only ever wrong in one direction. And the quiet nineteen-year-old rouseabout has started filling his water bottle straight from the bore tap instead of the tank, embarrassed, insisting the water tastes sweeter to him lately.

By the second carcass Colin bones alone, deliberately looking instead of cutting around, the nodules have multiplied and grown to the size of shillings, and what comes out of one near the kidney has a structure to it under the lamp that is dead-still in the cold meat but unmistakably built rather than rotten — and he tells himself it's the drink still working its way out of him, three months on, exactly the kind of thing his sponsor warned him his own head might still do. He doesn't tell anyone. That night's stew tastes fine to every man at the table but him. And when his own careful count comes out, three nights running, to meals enough for thirteen men at a table where he counts twelve heads every single time, he starts telling himself a swaggie must be eating off the pot on the quiet — right up until the one detail he can't explain away: the boy who prefers the bore water has stopped sweating in the heat the way a man working that hard should, and has taken to standing at the edge of the trough, in his spare minutes, the exact way the sheep do.