Uncle Kevin drove to the Bourke vet, after his old red cattle dog named Bindo went in the back legs. It was time for the dog to die. It's a long hard road from Bre to Bourke when you are about to betray the one you love. But something happened to Bindo that day that Kevin will never forget. The dog came good ready for a second chance at life. 'The vet put enough poison in the needle to kill two bullocks,' dad said. 'On the way back to Bre Kevin felt something move on the front seat, and the dog woke up and looked at him!' Bindo was a big strong dog and not enough of the killing agent had gone into his system. It was like he had began his journey on the road to oblivion, then someone had whistled to him. Kevin was barely able to drive back to Brewarrina with his heart shocked into grief. The pain was so strong that he thought of ending his life with his own gun, after he had finished burying Bindo out at Red Hill.
Kevin hadn't bothered covering up the body of Bindo with hessian or canvas on the back seat. That way he could pretend the dog was still breathing just by seeing the dusty red coat out of the corner of his eye. But suddenly the old dog snorted and blinked as if to say, 'Jesus, what's going on?' Bindo woke up from the dead like a child wakes up in the morning. 'Fuck me dead!' Kevin swerved the car off the road. 'Jesus Christ Bindo. What am I gonna fucken do now?' Kevin started to sob out on the old gravel road with the drowsy dog, not quite living and not yet dead. It was a 50km drive back to Bourke. So Kevin brought Bindo back to Brewarrina and would have to kill him for a second time, as if killing him for the first time wasn't enough. Imagine having to kill your dog and then he wakes back up and looks at you? Dad walked out of his one bedroom fibro flat and said, 'Bindo come good.'
It is still the end of Bindo's story. It's just that some stories end twice. When death touches us, the world still lives in the corners of our psyches. Even though I had seen Toby die and I had seen the vet carry him away, some very deep hope was rekindled in me and, for what must have been two seconds, I saw Toby standing in the doorway come back to life. In those two seconds, all my faith in life on earth was renewed. I had witnessed a miracle. The rest of the time it was a different story. But for a dog to wake up and look at you after you had killed him, it was like someone coming back from the dead and saying, 'now why did you do that to me? I thought you loved me!' Then it was as if the old dog knew what was going on. Somehow Bindo knew and was now accusing Kevin of the ultimate betrayal, while Kevin nearly broke his own heart in two.
But the dog wasn't in a natural living state. He stood on the pathway to oblivion listening for the whistle from his owner, but no sound came. He grew sleepy inside his soul for a second time. We have not had the courage to go where Bindo has gone and can only guess this scenario for Bindo and the rest of his life story at this point. The old red cattle dog was still full of the poison. He went into a deep sleep and started to snore. Kevin got my father to come over. He rang the vet. My father said, 'he's snoring.' But he was actually in a deep coma. Later dad said, 'we killed him on the back of the ute. The vet made sure he done a good job this time. Stuck the needle six inches into his heart. I touched his mouth where the gums curled up and he stopped snoring.'
Dad said, 'he's gone now Kevin, he stopped snoring.' Kevin walked away from the side of the ute. We were all damned, our bodies endless chasms of endurance, too small and fragile for a universe of pain and sufferance. Kevin's mind expanded into numbness. Still, he could not let go of the pain, even for a smoke. He never forgave the world for Bindo's failed back legs, or that his dog woke back up after he'd killed him. He never forgave himself for killing the dog or for not being able to make sure that the dog lived forever. We all go the way Bindo went soon enough. 'He was always a lazy dog - too well fed,' he said. One of Kevin's last memories would be of how Bindo came good and looked at him, after he had tried to finish his life. 'He was a strong dog, his muscles and fat must have eaten the poison, 'cause he come good again in the end.'
Kevin buried him out in the rain at Red Hill. Dad said, 'It's really muddy out there. He'll want to watch he doesn't get bogged. It's beautiful out there in the red country.' In the end there was a red country enveloping a red cattle dog. The last thing that Kevin saw was Bindo's small dry nose sticking up through the clay, as if he was submerged under water and breathing through a straw. It was as though Bindo had taken to living again, even through the mud on this day of his burial. Kevin fought the feelings inside that kept telling him to rescue the dog from the ground, in order to bring him back to life again.
He feels like he has buried his dog alive, that he is killing him all over again, that he doesn't have the power to make him live forever. 'Neba min den, him goood dawg, Bindo.' At the end of the shovel is Bindo's present and by the time the dirt drops onto the tip of the dry black nose, the present will be the past. Then one day another will hold the shovel to bury Kevin in the country that he loves. Then my father will bury Patch and my father will be buried and then I will be buried and we'll just all keep needing someone to bury us all. At least with dogs someone has loved them enough to bury them. I'm just leaving it up to the elements. The bullants can shine my bones. There is no place for the idealistic human heart out here.
There was an emu on the side of the road with two broken legs. She sat with her big tail end to the bitumen 150 kms out of Bourke on the Mitchell highway. Imagine if I could touch that bird and imagine if all it took was my hands upon her grey brown feathers, to mend her broken legs. 'You'd be swamped,' Iain said. 'Your life would be swamped by the suffering.' I imagine the injured emus coming from everywhere and my hands upon them. For this I would never paint again. I would give up everything to do this anonymously and without fuss in the outback sun. And imagine if every pub and roadhouse I went into and every hand I shook, gave those people the ability and the desire to do the same. I know it's a dream but I can't help but dream it. It's in all of us somewhere. I walked around the edge of the emu who was as big as a house yard across the back. Her unsteady neck snaked along the ground but got nowhere. She had been hit by a car and left to die, but she seemed very alert. The other emus had wandered off. It would take three men to lift her, with a sheet over her head in order to contain her enormous clawed legs that could kick back like a horse. 'You're not going to put it in the back of the car,' Iain said. 'Fuck it! I can't fucking lift her up,' I whimpered, 'what am I going to do?'
Dad said, 'she stops at every fucking bird and insect. A cow moos in the wrong way and she wants to lift it into the car boot.' I went into the council chambers at Nyngan. A receptionist rang the wildlife rescue people in Dubbo. The volunteers at Dubbo all had daytime jobs and wouldn't be able to get the emu until after nightfall. By that stage the sun would have fried her brains and she would have suffered many times the length of a day, since agony increases everything, including time on the slow slide into sleeplessness and oblivion. The wildlife people at Naromine had gone away for the week. 'The best thing I can suggest is to go the Department of Agriculture and Lands and get the ranger to go and shoot it.' I hesitated for a moment, but couldn't see a way around it.
We were on our way to Sydney and there was no way to rescue the bird. There were so many emus to rescue and so few people to do it and my energy levels were low. Iain said, 'tell them it's a road hazzard.' So I did. That way people would attend to the bird that affected the highway that carried the livestock, the people, the school bus, the outback businessmen and the truckies. The poor dying emu with the broken legs had affected all those things and now she would be taken care of. It is terrible to see a snake going nowhere, because they are always going somewhere and that is exactly what it was like to see the emu's long neck twisting and winding into the dirt where she sat. The grey bitumen road was covered with feathers from left to right. Iain said, 'you worried all day over it. You did what you could. You did enough. Let those people do their job now. 'Okay?' But it was never enough.
Between Bindo's burial out at Red Hill, the cutting up of the sheep in my Uncle Kevin's backyard a few days later, the kangaroo boning factory down the road, the 'killers' (pieces of murdered cows) in dad's box freezer, the lambs beneath the tarp in the back of the trailer and the donkey dragged across the paddock with the tractor, I had the overwhelming sense of movement through life and death. It was an unstoppable force and my legs were growing tired as I galloped to keep up with it. My father killed his dog Patch-Em-Up just a few months later. He didn't say much, except 'I had to psyche myself up.' Then he went quiet. Not long after that he was dead too.
Before he died, it was another long drive to Bourke with Patch-Em-Up on the back seat with a faint heart beating but still dog-glad enough to be out for the ride with my dad in the car. On the way back from the vet, an old bloke had told dad to, 'put a sheet over her to cover her up.' Dad said, 'no, I want to see her face.' It was as if he was also giving her a last look at daylight, even after her eyes had stopped seeing it. It was as if somewhere inside her mind and body, with its organs now more silent than stillness in the mid summer scrub, that she might still sense the vibrations of the vehicle that had given her its 'favourite' car rides. She was an 'everywhere' dog who loved being everywhere that dad was. She was at my dad's feet for sixteen years. For the last six months that dad was flat out on a stretcher on the floor in the Dubbo hospital, dying of the golden staph and lymph node cancer, old Patch sat and fretted for him by the front gate.
Dad said, 'I thought of every friend I had in town but none of them could be trusted to look after my dog.' It changed the way he thought about everyone from then on, or until he forgot and repeated the same mistakes all over again. 'I'm like you,' he said, I could have trusted you with my dog.' Dad missed out on the last six months of her life and believed she half died of a broken heart. I believe my rat died of a broken heart when I was ten years old, but it was only old age creeping up. I thought Puff died of neglect, but it wasn't true. Patch lay in the dirt, beneath the pile of rocks out at Red Hill. From a distance it would have looked as if my father was digging a hole to bury some household rubbish and that just as usual, the old blue heeler bitch was still hanging around his feet. But this time she was beneath the shovel in the dirt.
I thought of Patch's life in the front yard at dad's garage house in Wilson Street and I felt her everywhere. I thought of how she had outlived most other dogs from her area, their harsh lives and untimely deaths. She had been a good little fighter and real ugly to go with it. This was her place, the same as it had been the place of many other dogs before her and after her. Bindo and Patch and my father are all gone now, leaving my Uncle Kevin alone in the duplex shack. Their time here has ended and soon all memory of them will also be ended. We are sad that we must end and that we always seem to be saying good-bye. But mostly we are sad when we have to end the time and place of our dogs. Here in Patch's burial place were the new endings and beginnings through this endless machinery of the planet, that we are all pushed through. But no new cattle dog pup would make it right while dad was still involved in the process of her ending, before the ending of his own process.
When we ended the dog we just wanted to end ourselves and we didn't want anything new coming along during that time. This whole experience has left us bewildered. Bindo was howling in pain, dragging his back legs along the grass and pissing and shitting himself, while old Patch's heart quietly gave out, followed by dad's. Death is very creative. I think that these decisions to kill an animal companion have to be spontaneous. The old blokes on my father's side of the family are very dependant on their dogs. They don't have partners. We all live with our dogs and they anchor us to this earth. It would be natural for me to have each of my dogs put down and then go with them into oblivion, death sucking us all into the same meaningless vacuum. Many families have died in each others arms throughout the centuries and I often think that this would be a good thing; it would be a place where we can all stop ending.
