The Idea of Perfection (12 page)

Curious,
he told himself calmly. It was something he’d heard people say.
They’re simply curious.
He stared back at the thing, noticing how its eyes were set wide apart on each side of its head. Poor
binocular
vision. He was probably just a blur, a kind of tall mushroom, a stalk with a hat on. That outraged and astonished look did not mean anything, it was just what it did when it was trying to focus. He’d had a teacher at school who did that, stood giving you the outraged and astonished look until the whole class fell silent, and you suddenly realised it was you he was being outraged and astonished at.

The thing opened its mouth and mooed, a long deep sound with a little shrill hysterical thing on the end, and without thinking he mooed back. It was an uncharacteristic thing to do and he wished straight away he had not. The cow stared at him as if its feelings were hurt and took another step towards him. When it stopped again it was really very close. He could see a bit of grass stuck in one of its cavernous nostrils, and a little greenish froth on what he supposed you’d have to call its lips.

After what seemed a tremendously long time, it dropped its big brown head and started tearing at the grass. He could hear the muffled crushing noise as it ground away.

Being boring seemed to have finally paid off.

Smoothly, unprovocatively, boringly, he got up from the log and walked away sideways, keeping an eye on the cow. When he was able to get a tree between them, he turned and walked quickly up the paddock. Glancing back he could see that they were doing the I-am-outraged-and-astonished thing again.

It would be easy to get sick of cows.

The adventurous feeling had gone. He was feeling watched now. In the city no one looked. You were just another object taking up space on the footpath. Here you were huge and conspicuous, moving over the rounded bulge of a paddock. You could never be sure you were alone. There were cows, and perhaps people as well, watching you, screened by the hum of insects.

All this, grassy paddock, cows, trees — he had thought it was Nature. But now he could see that that was ignorance, or lack of imagination. It was not
Nature.
It was actually
property.

That fence, for example, over beyond the chimney, was not just a picturesque feature of the landscape, put there to make the most of the perspective. It actually belonged to someone. Someone had paid money for it. So many days of labour at so much an hour, and so much for the posts and the wire. It was not decoration, it was a sum: cost of fence subtracted from number of cows contained by it, divided by the number of years it stayed up.

What he was doing was not
exploring.
It was
trespassing.

He looked around from side to side as he walked up the paddock, swinging his arms vigorously. He was a person
out for a walk,
telegraphing his innocent intentions by a great attention to clouds, trees, birds. Country people were not big on
going for a walk,
but he thought they knew that
going for a walk
was something city people did.

His footsteps were unsteady on the rough grass. Grasshoppers sprang out of the tussocks with every step he took, like flights of little arrows. When two tiny fat birds swooped low in front of him he flinched. He was hot, could feel sweat running down his forehead from under his hat.
Slow down,
he told himself.
No need to panic.

When he glanced back he saw that the cows were still staring at him. Some of them had just twisted their heads over their shoulders to stare but one or two had actually turned their entire bodies around.

Somehow at Scouts they seemed to have missed out on
Cows.

 

 

Up close, the poplars and the chimney were disappointing. He’d been looking forward to ancient treasures in the grass, but there seemed to be no old bottles or bits of brass bed-stead. At least here he was hidden.

Just beyond the poplars, two fences met at right-angles, and beyond that was the road, picturesquely curving up and away around the corner of the rise, like a road in a story-book. Seeing how close he was to the road, with his ute parked a little way further along, it felt silly to have got himself hot and bothered, panting here in the sun, just because a few cows had looked at him.

A willy-wagtail swivelled on top of a fence-post. One of the fences was higher than usual and one strand had a tin label with a picture of a lightning-bolt. He supposed that meant it was electrified. The other was a double fence with two separate barriers of barbed wire an arm’s length apart.

He stood there in the quiet, wondering why you would want to make a double fence like that. His brain started to work on the little puzzle, going systematically through all the possible reasons. It could be to make doubly sure that nothing strayed on to the road. Perhaps it had turned out to be cheaper to put another line of fence in than repair the old. Perhaps they’d drawn the boundaries wrong the first time. Or perhaps it was to stop cattle being
rustled.
Did cattle really get
rustled,
though, outside cowboy movies?

There were situations where, even if you had got a
Special Mention
for
Knots,
it was still best simply to admit that you were out of your depth.

He was just embarking on the idea that a double fence would be doubly strong if you had something that was doubly powerful to be kept within it, when he heard a yell.

Oy!

He looked around but could not see anyone. When he took off his hat to see better, he heard it again, more urgently.

Oy! Oy!

Then he saw two things in quick succession: a person far away up at the curve in the road, gesturing and shouting
Oy!
and all the cows coming up the paddock towards him at a lumbering trot.

The person was still far away, a little figure in the distance, but the animals were close. They were closer every second. He had never seen cows behaving like this before: running heavily in a pack, kicking up their back legs, butting each other with their shoulders, tossing their heads around, pricking each other’s big round ribcages with their horns. As they ran, their bony hipbones were purposeful and their dewlaps swung vigorously from side to side.

There were more of them than he had thought, and he could see now that quite a few had horns. They were sharp, straight horns that were not particularly decorative. His wish to know whether they were cows or bulls had become an urgent anxiety within his chest.

The ground rumbled under them, and part of his brain busied itself with being interested in the way the sound was too low to hear. It was fascinating, really: he was actually hearing the cows with the soles of his feet, through the ground, the way a snake did.

He wondered whether he would hear them better if he lay down. Then his whole body would be like one long ear.

Perhaps they would think he was dead. That might be a good idea. You could hardly be more boring than dead.

He glanced at the double barbed-wire fence and imagined himself getting through it. The image that came to his mind was of his anxious bony bottom, pointing at the cows like a bull‘s-eye. It was not an encouraging picture. The other fence was too high, and there was the electric strand and the little picture of lightning. He did not know how many volts a fence like this might carry.

He imagined the way he would jerk and twitch like a puppet.

The cows were still coming on, but they had slowed down, shifting in a little crowd, pushing and shoving at each other with their hoops of ribs.

They were bold now, but he was confident that when they got closer they would lose their nerve. They would stop and go back to the staring business. He had already handled the staring. He was okay on that now. Cows stared and cows mooed, but if you were good enough at being boring they left you alone.

The voice of Chook Henderson in his head was rich and authoritative.

Show them who’s bloody boss, mate!
he was saying, and Douglas straightened up, getting ready to take a firm line.

But what if they were bulls? People were killed by bulls.

He found that he had picked up a piece of branch lying on the ground. Now he was a two-legged thing with a stick. He had the branch in his hand but he was trying not to think of it as a person
defending himself.

But having the stick in his hand, he knew how frightened he was.

They were very close now. He could hear them breathing. There was one at the front that seemed to think it was some kind of leader. Its horns were very straight and very pointed.

He did not let himself think the word
sharp.

When it lowered its head and looked up through its eyelashes at him he thought of pictures of bullfights he’d seen. The bulls lowered their heads like that when they were about to charge. He could see the mechanics of it. The head was perfectly shaped and the eyes were perfectly placed for being able to see while the head was lowered. Moreover, lowering the head brought the horns into exactly the right alignment to maximise damage to a two-legged thing that carried its soft part around its middle.

It was a lovely bit of mechanics.

But he was no bullfighter in little shiny slippers and tight sequinned pants. There was no cheering crowd. There could be no running around behind the wooden palisade, no shouting men on horses making the bull go away.

He was just a man in a paddock, sweating and holding a foolish piece of branch.

I am a human, he thought, and this is just a cow. I have to make it frightened of me. He waved the stick, jabbed it forward threateningly, yelled
Yah! Yah! Garah!
The cow — but perhaps it would be more realistic if he thought of it as a bull — scraped at the ground with a foot, took a step closer, tilted its head around so that the point of the left-hand horn was perfectly lined up with Douglas’s stomach.

Actually, he thought, what bullfighters did was just like this. They flipped the cape and jabbed at the bull with their stick. They taunted it and goaded it, and finally it did the
lovely bit of mechanics.

Maybe the stick was not such a good idea.

Now, he told the cow in a loud unsteady voice. Now, boy. Take it easy. There, boy.

He heard his voice and saw that the cow heard it too. It waggled its ears and shook its head as if a fly was bothering it. But it did not seem especially soothed. It went on scraping at a piece of ground with its front hoof and pointing its horn. He thought its eyes actually looked quite intelligent.

Whether it was a cow or a bull, it was not losing interest.

Oy! Oy!

He glanced around at the person on the road. It was a woman, a big woman, making a wide looping gesture with both arms.

He saw this in a quick glance but he felt he had to go on watching the horn and turned back to the cow. When he risked another quick glance at the person, she was scrambling down the bank towards the double fence. He checked the cow again, took a few steps closer to the fence. The cow followed him. When he stopped it stopped too.

It was closer to him than it had been before.

He glanced behind him. The woman was at the fence now. She was close to him and that was a comfort. Another of his own species. But she was on the right side of the fence and he was definitely on the wrong side.

Oy!

He was not going to look again. There was no point in looking, and while he was looking the cow would get its chance. Someone on the wrong side of the fence calling
Oy!
was no use to him and it was important not to be distracted from the job of keeping the cow at a distance with the power of his watching.

Quick! Over the fence!

He glanced in spite of himself. A gate, perhaps, that he hadn’t seen. A ladder. A pair of wirecutters.

But there was no gate, no ladder, no wirecutters. She was just standing waving her arms and wasting his time. The cow had moved closer while he had been thinking about wirecutters. No! he called.

His voice sounded high and thin. He wobbled his branch at the cow again and called over his shoulder.

How over?

That sounded ridiculous. He tried again.

How?

He did not want to get into a long discussion about it. He needed to concentrate. If you kept your eye on the horn and kept moving, there was no reason why you would ever be jabbed. It was like tennis.
Eye on the ball.
He crouched towards the bull as if it was going to serve, holding the branch across both hands like a racquet. It seemed to help.

Suddenly the woman was beside him. He glanced at her in confusion before he remembered
eye on the ball.
It was nice of her to try to help, but she did not seem to realise the danger. He bounced from foot to foot and concentrated on the cow. There was something that did not add up about the fact that she was beside him, but he could not stop to think about it now. Stopping to think could be fatal. He felt powerful, bouncing like this on the balls of his feet. He could keep bouncing all day if he had to.

Quick! she said. Over here!

She pulled at his sleeve so he nearly dropped the branch. The cow was pawing the ground with both hoofs now but in doing so it was moving backwards. Getting a run-up, he thought. Here we go. Eye on the ball.

Quick! she shouted. Come on!

She was over at the electric fence, holding the strands apart. As he watched, she folded herself in through the fence and stood on the other side. It was like a magic trick.

Quick! she shouted, and held the strands apart invitingly.

She sounded exasperated. He watched himself run over to the fence and poke himself at it. He braced himself for the electric shock but none came. He braced himself for the thunder as the cows chased him, for the pain as the first horn got him in the bottom. Then he was through.