He looked at the sheep penned on his side of the stage and could tell straight away that it hated his guts.
Sighing, he opened the gate and hauled the thing out. ‘It’ll be over soon,’ he told it firmly. Not as soon as the shearing ordeal would be over for the sheep Number One currently had gripped between her knees, of course. ‘Soonish,’ he amended. ‘If you cooperate.’
As he picked up the shears and brought them down in a smooth swipe through the fleece, he considered the fact that Joanne Tan might actually be in the audience. Checking him out.
Oh, yeah. Regina was going to have to dig deep this year if she wanted to keep her title, because he was going to shear the shit out of this sheep.
CHAPTER
41
Jo was wrecked when she squeezed the secondhand ute she’d bought after trading in her little hatchback into a spare strip of brown grass between two dusty caravans covered in tourist type stickers. The main street of Yindi Creek had been chockers, as had all the side streets, so she was probably a kilometre from the hotel where she’d booked a room for a few nights while she found herself more permanent accommodation. Who knew the place could get so busy?
Her worldly belongings—other than the stuff in storage—were in crates in the ute tray behind her, covered by a tarp and a tie-down net.
She had an employment contract. She had a tenant in her townhouse on a twelve-month lease to cover the mortgage repayments. And she had something even better than all of that: she had a text message from her son.
Hey Mum! Have a great time in Yindi Creek can’t wait to see you there at Easter. Say hi to Hux for me and Maggie and the Dirt Girls. Oh, and can you put twenty bucks in my bank account because me and my mates want to go play laser tag and Dad says it’s your turn to cough up. Luke x
She dithered for a moment about the wisdom of leaving the ute unaccompanied while she went to the Yindi Creek Agricultural Show and Shearing Exhibition, but really, what choice did she have? And while she was very attached to her trowels and lab coats and dino-print pyjamas, probably no-one else in the world was.
Also, the day was hot. Not as bad as it had been (she’d been watching the temperatures daily on her weather app, trying to decide when she could start calling in a batch of volunteer diggers), but still. Emptying her ute tray would turn her pretty sun dress into a sweaty rag and she had worn this dress for a reason.
She rummaged around on the passenger seat for a moment, finding a straw hat, then rubbed a bit of sunscreen over her nose and arms.What the heck, she thought, as she looked in the mirror under the sun visor and dug a lipstick out of her backpack and threw a bit of that on, too. Today she wasn’t here in Yindi Creek as Dr Joanne Tan, palaeontologist. She was here as Jo. A single woman who was ready to have a little fun and impulsivity, starting with a flirt with a good-looking local.
If he was here.
The Yakka was held in dedicated showgrounds a street back from the main street, and adjoining the pub’s backyard. Low fences had been painted white. Sheds were strung with flags. The dried brown grass had mud tracks revealing boot prints, hoof prints, thong prints and bare feet prints … a stampede, in fact, but a community stampede rather than a dinosaur stampede like the tracks found elsewhere in the Winton Formation.
She walked into the centre of the track and carefully pressed the soles of her sandals into the mud. Now there were Jo tracks, too. The thought made her smile.
A horse event was happening in an oval to her left and to her right were rows and rows of animal stalls. Goats were tethered on stakes, sheep and cattle stood patiently in low-walled stalls and pinned above the occasional beast were ribbons of blue, red and green.
An old church beside the showground with a distinct lean to its weatherboard frame had a massive cloth sign hanging from its side windows announcing it as the home of the art and quilting and food displays. She headed over, more to get some shade than to peruse jars of jam, and discovered she’d arrived just as judging was underway.
Two women and one man, brows furrowed and lips pursed, were marching like sergeant majors between the aisles with clipboards and a general air of intimidation. She spied Dot and Ethel in matching gingham aprons behind the jam stall and was edging her way through the crowd when she got trapped in the throng admiring the quilts.
A woman with a lanyard around her neck displaying the printed word JUDGEfrowned at her. ‘No touching,’ the woman said.
Jo looked to where her hip had brushed (barely) against the edge of a colourful number stitched, according to its label, by Yindi Creek School. ‘Oops,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. What a fabulous quilt.’
And itwasfabulous. The kids had (somehow—the quilting arts were as foreign to her as flora and fauna that postdated the big meteor) made a map of Yindi Creek and its surroundings: the creek; the Diamantina River running to the west of town; the historic hotel with, if you squinted, a stick-thin figure in its doorway that must be Maggie. Sheep and cattle dotted the paddocks around the town, with a sparse tree or two. Even, she noted with delight, a dinosaur had made it onto the quilt, on a track winding back out of town to the north.
The little fellow was anatomically implausible from a scientific point of view, of course, but she’d discovered lately that science wasn’t everything. The dinosaur had a winsome smile. And quite lovely eyelashes. He actually—and she had to smile at her own inanity—brought a tear to her eye.
‘No comment,’ said the judge, who had stepped forward to give the stitchwork a closer audit.
Jo left them to it. As wonderful as lopsided patchwork quiltosauruses were, they were not why she was here. The crowd around the jam stall meant procrastinating with Dot and Ethel was a no-go, so really, there was nothing left for her to do but what she’d driven fourteen hundred kilometres for.
Stepping from the showgrounds through the back fence of the Yindi Creek Hotel to where the shearing exhibition was underway was like stepping into a living museum. Old carts were parked around the perimeter, their wheels as tall as Jo but their shafts propped on sawn-off tree stumps. At first glance, the carts looked poised for action, as though any minute now a woman in a straw bonnet and a long frilly dress totally unsuited to the climate might appear and request a seat on the mailcoach bound for Longreach.
On closer inspection, Jo could see the timber spokes of the wheels were split; the remnants of leather reins and seating were disintegrating into dust; the paint—deep greens, enamel blacks, matchhead reds—was flaked and beginning to lift like bark peeling from a ghost gum.
The crowd gathered around the raised timber stalls where Maggie had let her stow her gear in December was going off, and Jo hurried over to see what the fun was all about.
In one stall, looking strong and fierce and utterly focused, was a tall woman with biceps the size of water polo balls and a practically shorn sheep wedged between her legs.
‘Forty-three,’ yelled the crowd. ‘Forty-four, forty-five …’
