All this time we had lived in a free kind of way -- we wanted for nothing.
We had plenty of good beef, and a calf now and then. About this time
I began to wonder how it was that so many cattle and horses
passed through father's hands, and what became of them.

I hadn't lived all my life on Rocky Creek, and among some of
the smartest hands in that line that old New South Wales ever bred,
without knowing what `clearskins' and `cross' beasts meant,
and being well aware that our brand was often put on a calf
that no cow of ours ever suckled. Don't I remember well the first calf
I ever helped to put our letters on? I've often wished I'd defied father,
then taken my licking, and bolted away from home. It's that very calf
and the things it led to that's helped to put me where I am!

Just as I sit here, and these cursed irons rattle whenever I move my feet,
I can see that very evening, and father and the old dog
with a little mob of our crawling cattle and half-a-dozen head of strangers,
cows and calves, and a fat little steer coming through the scrub
to the old stockyard.

It was an awkward place for a yard, people used to say; scrubby and stony
all round, a blind sort of hole -- you couldn't see till you were right
on the top of it. But there was a `wing' ran out a good way
through the scrub -- there's no better guide to a yard like that --
and there was a sort of track cattle followed easy enough once you were round
the hill. Anyhow, between father and the dog and the old mare he always rode,
very few beasts ever broke away.

These strange cattle had been driven a good way, I could see.
The cows and calves looked done up, and the steer's tongue was out --