“What are those two dogs doing in the house?” demanded Rowena.

“They’re allowed in the house,” insisted young Kirsty, who had inherited her mother’s honey-blonde hair and good looks.

“Not before breakfast!” insisted Rowena.   However, the once hard and fast rule had started to be relaxed over the last six months or so, since neither Rowena nor Ernie was able to resist the feisty little girl’s entreaties.   So now more often than not one or even both of the farm dogs slept on the little girl’s bed with her.

“Time to get up,” said Kirsty, wisely deciding to change the subject.

“Oh my God yes,” said Rowena, glancing across toward the clock on the bedside table, “it’s nearly five-thirty.   I’ve overslept.”   However, the sarcasm was wasted on the little girl, so, reluctantly Rowena swung her long, shapely legs over the side of the bed, eased on her slippers, struggled into her dressing gown, then was almost bowled over by Blacky and Marg as the large Barb-Kelpie and smaller red Kelpie raced each other out of the bedroom and down the corridor to the kitchen, both hoping to be the first fed.

“Me first!” insisted Kirsty, kicking one of the dogs away from the kitchen table, as she climbed up into one of the four red-vinyl chairs.

“Yes madam,” said Rowena going across to put two slices of bread into the toaster, before reaching up to take down a box of cornflakes from the overhead cupboard.

It was ten minutes later that Ernie Singleton finally wandered down the corridor to join the others at the breakfast table.

“You overslept!” rebuked Kirsty.

“Yes, I did,” agreed Ernie kissing the little girl, then his wife.   Unlike Rowena, however, he was only half joking.   The Singleton property was only a small-to-middling sheep station, which rarely required more than eight or nine hours work, seven days a week to be kept running.   However, for the last few months Ernie’s workload had been doubled because he had also been tending to Brian Horne’s Cherrytree Farm, a few kilometres away in East Merridale.

*      *      *

Despite its name, Cherrytree was a small sheep-and-cattle station, or at least had been before the stock had been viciously slaughtered when the farm had been attacked by a dingo pack three months ago.   Brian Horne had been savaged by the dingoes, requiring eight weeks’ stay in the Glen Hartwell and Daley Community Hospital, followed by a month’s convalescence at home in the care of Ernie’s mother Victoria, and other local women, while Ernie had taken over the work of rebuilding and running Cherrytree.   With a little help from other local farmers, but not a lot since the Singleton station had been one of the very few local farms that had not been raided by the dingoes before their pack had finally been hunted down and destroyed.   As a consequence Ernie did most of the manual work on Cherrytree Farm, after it had been sparingly restocked with a handful of sheep donated one or two a piece by station owners less severely hit than Brian Horne, plus eight red Kelpies donated by Ernie himself — to the relief of Rowena, who was forever pleading with him to reduce the number of their farm dogs.   (Although the dogs paid for part of their keep by helping out around the farm, they were mainly an expensive hobby for Ernie, who was forced to concede that their station was far too small to justify the forty to fifty Kelpies, Barb-Kelpies, Border Collies and other breeds that it usually contained.)