HE makes it sound easy, but 86-year-old bronco branding great Charlie Rayment was born with it in his blood. And he remains modest despite leading the Winton team to equal glory with the Longreach competitors at the recent RM Williams Longreach Muster.
"I've always had to catch, but in old age, I've really slowed down and all that caper; I'm not as quick as I used to be.
"I'm happy younger players still include me and let me have a go."
The game is played a little differently these days to what it once was. "We had more men then; we used to handle it a little bit differently," Charlie said.
Six or seven ground men and two catchers would draft cattle into an open camp and pull them up to a tree to brand.
"That's where campdrafting came from," he said. "It was fairly hard work especially for the ground crew. They'd put the leg ropes on. It was dusty work down on the ground. "The catchers had it easiest I suppose; you're out of the dust, the horse does the pulling, you've only to throw the rope the right way."
Modern contests call for a slightly different method with certain rules.
"Now in competition, we have to catch with a clean head catch, but in the bush, if the beast put its leg through the rope, you'd still pull it up.
"And with little calves, you'd pull up close to the fire, grab it and scruff it without bothering to put leg ropes on. It was fairly quick; broncoing is fast."
And Charlie's keen finish hasn't slowed too much over the years. "In a good team, you would do one a minute. And in Longreach the other day, we had two in catching teams there, and were branding 10 calves in nine minutes."
In the bronco branding game, speed equals timing and precision.
"Well, as far as catching is concerned, you have to put the horse in the right position, and the calf has to be coming past the right way.
"I don't know, you just get the feel of when to throw and when not to throw.
"It's just practice I think, and some pick it up a lot quicker than others."
Before morphing into a competitive sphere, bronco branding was (and in some cases still is) a way of life.
Charlie has been doing it his whole working life, but stumbled upon the birth of the traditional branding battle by coincidence.
"I was in the yards from the age of nine or 10, running the brands and tying leg ropes. I'd done bronco branding all my life working, but they started this bronco branding in competition just over 20 years ago now in Stonehenge, and I just happened to be there.
"They were short of catchers and didn't know just how to take off. They tried it out to see how it would take on, and only a few of us there had done it in work form before that."
Charlie said South Australian rodeo figurehead Jim Nunn's previous attempt to kickstart contest was hindered by drought, and the first stockmen involved never dreamed it would outlast a couple of years.
It's the action-fuelled tempo that Charlie believes appeals most.
Helping out a mate is also at the heart of it all, and Charlie's lifetime of perfecting the ropes makes him the ideal teacher.
"A lot of the players in competition now, they've never done it (bronco branding) in the bush. They've just learnt by trial and error, so we help all we can, there's not a great deal of rivalry."
Between themselves, the men lend horses and swap ropes, which Charlie has always made himself. This unbending camaraderie seemingly innate in older stockmen is embedded in the strong ties formed through years of working and living as a team.
Charlie knows all about "getting the job done together".
"I got discharged from the Navy after the second world war the one day, then I was on the train coming back the next, and went straight out droving.
"We went out on a camp 11 weeks mustering. We drafted the bullocks out on the flat and watched them at night.
"We'd brand calves and cows as they turned up in the arvo. It was hard work, I suppose, but work never worried us; we enjoyed doing it and we all came back for more next year."
There was no room for slacking and little space for complaining.
"Sometimes, we'd complain about a cook, but we weren't allowed to complain too loudly otherwise they gave us the cooking job."
Charlie said experienced workers were scarce after the war, so it was all hands on deck and everyone had a go.
"We always took it in turns. You fell into place; whatever the job required, you had to get it done."
Back then, the work was hard and men became their own bosses. Stockmen broke in their bronco horses and ran their own packhorse mustering camps.
Charlie transcribed one of his final drives which signalled the end of the droving era and built up to an even bigger shift. He spent 27 weeks walking 1500 Hereford store steers from western Queensland into central New South Wales in 1951.
The cattle changed hands along the way. It was one of the last big mobs to move and sell the old-fashioned way.
"Cattle buyers would come out and ride through the mob. The expertise has gone a bit out of that; no one learns the hard way any more," Charlie said.
He said many of life's other hard lessons had been lost over the years.
"The best men come out of hard country and a hard boss. It goes the same with horses; all good horses come out of hard country - awkward scrub country. And it goes the same with men."
Charlie said helicopters and motorbikes had made the job easier, but more machines meant less experienced men.
"That much technology comes into it now. We used expertise in the understanding and handling of the cattle; we had more manpower."
He said the older generation disliked the way cattle were handled now. But some stations still honoured bronco branding's natural interaction between man and beast.
"It saves knocking cattle about by driving long distances to yards," Charlie said.
"With bronco branding, you push them together where they are running and brand them where they are. Old-time cattlemen are very careful of their cattle; everything is done quietly."
Charlie said the shift was a sign of the times: "Look, I can't explain a lot of those things. Younger people go for higher education, and by the time they get those qualifications, they don't feel like coming back into the pastoral industry."
Lower wages and casual labour also attracted little commitment or passion for the land, Charlie said.
"It's a different ball game, it's the way the country has gone and we can't do anything about it."
But despite the changes and the uncertainty rearing from this year's industry turmoil, Charlie has faith.
"Oh yes, we will continue to be strong into the future, we'll bounce back, we're going through a low period at the moment.
"Australia is primary producing country, we've got space and everything else, but we're overshadowed by these other issues."
Giving up on the land is not an option for Charlie.
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