The Silver Brumby (13 page)

His heart was thundering. How long it was that he had been galloping he did not know: he was tired, tired, tired, but at least Golden should be safely away by now, and Boon Boon and the other mares and foals.

The men were very close as he turned into the valley. He heard a rope whistle, and leapt into a great thicket of tree ferns.

In all the layers of rotten logs and the old fern trunks that were interlaced, to and fro, over the creek and across the valley floor, even Thowra stumbled and crashed, but he knew the men, with their tame horses, would never get through it as fast as he. There was hope now. He looked back once, just before he plunged into a tangle of the dark-barked swamp gum that was hung with green vines, laced with blanket-wood and bracken, and he saw the men, on two bay horses, saw the vivid colour of their check shirts — and then he saw The Brolga. What, oh what, was going to be the finish of this? If he got away from the men, could he ever get away from The Brolga? Would he escape only to be killed?

It was impossible to go very fast. Often he had to leap from one log to another; often he broke through rotting timbers into water or squelching black soil and steaming leaf mould. The heat was oppressive in this valley where no wind stirred, and Thowra had been forced to gallop twice for his life; first last night, when he had, too, the terror of being roped, and now, almost all the day, and he could feel his strength ebbing. Always there was the sound behind of the men and The Brolga.

The sweat streamed off him. He knew he must drink soon. He made an enormous effort to get ahead enough to have time to stop and drink. He looked back and could see only one man behind The Brolga and both he and The Brolga were sufficiently far behind to give him a moment at a deep, dark pool. As he drank he wondered where the other man was. If he had tried going higher up, in the hope that the country would be so much clearer that he could race ahead and get right around the two brumbies, Thowra knew he was going to be disappointed; the sides of the valley were all deeply cut by tiny gorges and creeks, each one filled with a tangle of fallen timber or with rock rubble and creepers.

Thowra drank with gasping gulps and then went on and on, and anyone watching him — seeing the lovely cream stallion leap on to a log, change feet and leap again, dance through a trap of branches lying this way and that — would hardly have known how exhausted he was. But, though he gained on his pursuers, they still kept on coming. The chase was like a fantastic nightmare, slow-moving because none of the horses could go fast through the immense tangle.

At last he realized that there was much less noise behind him. He looked around, standing for a moment with heaving flanks, nostrils dilating with every shattering breath. There was only The Brolga to be seen, The Brolga following, following.

Half a mile further on, Thowra knew another valley that came in from the south. If he followed that it would give him a good short cut on the way back towards Golden and his herd on the Brindle Bull — but he was not going to let The Brolga follow him for ever. Exhaustion rose in waves through him, and anger at The Brolga for having kept up the chase for so long a time.

He came to a small, peaty clearing: there he stopped and waited, his head thrown up proudly, even though he gasped for breath — at least snatching a few minutes’ rest while The Brolga plunged on up the valley through all the entanglement on the ground. As he stood waiting, the last glittering gleam reflected from the sunset died out of the valley.

Then a strange green glow began to flow through the deep valley; only the tall, slender ribbon gums stood out of the greenness in white majesty. Thowra looked around him, aware of the strange light, not knowing that he, too, stood out in pale splendour like the ribbon gums — the silver stallion indeed, as the men who had first seen him at night, by the light of the campfire, had named him.

There he stood, in the little clear patch of ground by the creek, surrounded by the interwoven green bush, with the tall white pillars of trees, and the green light. There he stood, waiting for The Brolga.

The Brolga came, striving to gallop towards his enemy, but slowed down by all the tangle on the valley floor. His breath was rasping in and out, and Thowra had had time for his own breathing to have lessened to deep, pounding breaths. He was exhausted and so was Thowra, but here, below the white ribbon gum pillars, with the flowing green light becoming deeper and deeper as evening approached, they must fight.

It was not the fight Bel Bel had prophesied — that was still to come: it was a weird fight between two horses that were too tired to hurt each other, a fight that went on, in silence, till they both dropped down at the farthest corners of the clearing, unable to move. Night came then, and the green light became grey, and then darkness covered the two stallions where they lay.

A fox barked nervously, and suddenly, from above, there was the chattering bark of a great, black flying phallanger silhouetted high up on the white trunk of a ribbon gum. The phallanger took off and went gliding right across the exhausted stallions. A mopoke, disturbed by his noise, gave his first call of the night: ‘Mopoke, Mopoke’ echoing in the dark-enclosed valley.

Gradually, there came all the creeping, rustling sounds that are heard in the stillness of the night, as wombats climbed out of their holes and padded softly along a tree-trunk that formed a bridge across the creek, as possums climbed among leafy branches, as the snakes — the evil ones — wriggled along the ground.

Thowra lay so still that a possum passed quite close as it went from tree to tree. Presently the exhaustion of the horses changed into deep sleep and they lay there, their feet still gathered underneath them, as they had dropped.

The slow hours of the night passed, the stars moved across the sky above the net of leaf and branch that was the ceiling of the valley, and even in such profound sleep Bel Bel’s training, the birthright of cunning she had given Thowra, did not leave him. Before too many stars had slipped through the net above him, Thowra woke and got stiffly to his feet.

He looked over towards the heap in the darkness which was The Brolga, then moved silently away, turning up the southward valley that would take him on the first part of his journey towards the Brindle Bull and his herd. Like a pale, floating will-o’-the-wisp he went on and on through the night.

In the first grey dawn The Brolga woke and found himself alone, with no track to show him whither Thowra had gone; alone, and far, far from his own country.

Slowly, through the bright, hot summer, yet another legend began to grow up round Thowra, a legend the men started to feel was true — and one that the horses believed absolutely.

Bad luck, it was said, came to everyone, either man or horse, who chased the silver bruruby stallion. Had not men been hurt and their horses lamed? Had they not lost the beautiful filly, Golden? And Arrow, the horses said, Arrow had been killed. Surely this Thowra had a magic quality. Not only had he, when exhausted, got right away from two men on fresh horses, but he had vanished, simply vanished.

And just like the wind in a blizzard can twist and turn even wild horses until they are almost lost in the swirling snow, Thowra had twisted and turned The Brolga as they galloped, and The Brolga had woken in the weird first dawning, quite uncertain where he was.

Every horse was sure that Thowra, though a horse, was, in some magic way, the wind for which his mother had named him.

The men felt that something would surely happen to them if they chased him, but they could not resist the longing to try to catch him. The Brolga felt that Thowra would defeat him, in some very unusual manner, but he longed for revenge — and he longed to make Golden the pride of his herd.

All summer the stockmen and The Brolga sought for Thowra and, if they saw him, they chased him. All summer Thowra and his mares and foals were chased, but they always vanished. Sometimes they were heard, and yet not seen. If they left some tracks, these tracks would abruptly cease, as though they had all melted into the air. It was the mysteriousness of Thowra that made each stockman feel as if he must catch him.

Of all the horses running in the mountains, Bel Bel alone thought she knew the secret hiding-place that enabled Thowra and his herd to disappear from all their hunters. When she heard how Thowra and his mares vanished, she wondered if he had found again the deep valley that was like a cleft in the hills at the back of Paddy Rush’s Bogong, the valley with the grassy Hidden Flat that could not be seen from the top. The valley where Yarraman and his herd had hidden after the men’s brumby drive so many summers ago when Thowra and Storm were foals.

Old as she was, she decided to go off and see for herself if this was where he was hiding.

As she jogged along, purposefully through the bush, she came on fresh tracks and recognized the spoor as Storm’s, so she followed him and found him with his mares, grazing peacefully. She whinnied and he lifted his noble bay head with a swift movement that reminded her of Mirri. In a moment, the big stallion was rubbing his nose on her neck.

‘I go in search of Thowra,’ Bel Bel said.

‘I, too, came this way feeling that I might find him,’ said Storm, ‘and yet I don’t know why.’

‘If you come with me, I think you will remember why you have come this way.’ Bel Bel nodded her old head. ‘You have been here before, but you were very young, Mirri and I brought you here as two foals.’

Thus it was that Storm set off with the old creamy mare, carefully following her trackless way, because he knew they must not lead either The Brolga or any wandering stockmen to Thowra’s hiding-place.

Bel Bel scrambled down the cliff into the valley rather lower downstream than the grass flat, and she and Storm walked together up the rocky creekbed, or along narrow banks above the green water.

As she walked, Bel Bel was thinking that when autumn came she must go to the Ramshead Range, and there perhaps she would stay, for the time had come for the wild snow to cover her body. It was impossible that she should live as long as her cream and silver son. Perhaps, if she found him now, this would be the last time she would see him; perhaps they would meet again, high on the Range, before the snows came.

When they rounded a bend in the rocky, foaming river, just where there were great high cliffs, they came on the Hidden Flat, a long, quite wide, green valley. Above it were high, steep sides where the ribbon gums grew, white and slim, among the grey-green peppermints, the treeferns and the blanket-woods.

Bel Bel stopped and looked back at Storm. Storm was standing with one forefoot raised, his ears pricked, and a puzzled expression in his eyes.

‘I don’t remember it,’ he said, ‘but I know I’ve been here before.’

Then into view, between two white ribbon gum pillars, stepped Thowra, followed by his herd.

Bel Bel stood, arching her neck with pride, looking suddenly like a young mare with her first foal — so beautiful was Thowra, his feet stepping high and gracefully, his head held with such majesty as he led his herd to water.

‘It is no wonder,’ she murmured, ‘that man and horse are after him.’ Then she and Storm went forward to greet him.

Thowra threw his head right up, his nostrils and eyes wild, as he heard their steps, but when he saw them, he whinnied joyously, and trotted towards them.

‘Well, little old mother,’ he said, rubbing her wither, ‘you knew my hiding-place?’ Then he exchanged nose rubs with Storm. ‘And you, brother of the wild wind, did you know it, or did Bel Bel bring you?’

‘I brought him,’ Bel Bel said. ‘But, like you, he would have known the way in memory: long ago Mirri and I brought you here to hide.’

She walked over to greet Golden, because once she, Bel Bel, had been the one cream mare in the mountains; she had been the one that was beautiful and sought after by stallions for their herds, and by men because of her colour and her strong, sure legs which would have carried a stockman many miles over the mountains — but which never did. Now Golden was the prize, the famous and glorious mare, and Bel Bel must greet her and be proud that her son had captured — and held — her.

Thus it was that Bel Bel and Storm alone knew how Thowra vanished from his hunters, and when they heard horses — or cattle — say: ‘He is like wind — he must be partly a child of the wind — he comes from nowhere, he vanishes into nowhere,’ they would smile to themselves. Yet they, too, half-believed that Thowra had become almost magic, even though Bel Bel knew that it was she who had woven a spell over him at birth, and given him his wisdom and his cunning, all that made him seem to have the wind’s mystery.

When Bel Bel and Storm at last left Thowra, at his Hidden Flat, she said something that stayed in Thowra’s memory:

‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘I will see you up on the Ramshead before the snows come.’

As the days grew shorter, with summer turning to autumn and then to winter, he kept thinking of what she had said, and at last he set off to the face of Paddy Rush’s Bogong that overlooked the range, and there he watched and watched to see if the cattle mobs had gone. When he saw no sign of man or beast, he collected his own herd and led them down, over the Crackenback and up on to the Range.

He was so glad to be back in his own particular country that he might have forgotten his feeling of foreboding about Bel Bel if he had not, very soon after climbing up above the Dead Horse hut, seen one single hoofmark that he knew to be hers. Even so, he did not really go seeking her, feeling that if he visited all his old haunts he would surely find her. So he climbed up the Range, stepping gaily up the steep lane-ways of snowgrass between the tors and then climbing from rock to rock in the tors themselves, to some high rock from which he could survey miles of the lovely country. And his coat shone, in spite of getting thick for winter, and his muscles rippled beneath it.

Everything he saw, every cliff and crag, every rock or grassy glade, he knew of old, and yet he saw them now with a new intensity. He had trained himself never to forget any feature of the country through which he went, and now each tor, each weathered rock, was stamped on his memory like a photograph, and if he had to gallop through that photograph — escaping from either man or horse — he knew exactly where he could place each hard, strong hoof, exactly where he could leap, exactly where he could twist and turn.

All the world was very quiet, high up there on the Range. It was rarely that any other horses, except Storm and his herd, ever came as high, and most animals were already heading lower, anyway, before the snow came.

They saw dingoes, and occasionally a red fox, his pelt thick and good for winter, would show up against the grey-green grass. Thowra noticed how busy the scurrying insects were, from the tiny ants to the great bright blue and red mountain grasshoppers — but he, too, knew that it was going to be a heavy winter. A great deal of snow would fall to cover the bones of an old creamy mare if she chose to die up there among the high-lifted peaks of the Range.

Though the sun was shining, the first day they were up on the Range, a faint, milky haze was spreading over the sky the next morning. Already there was the winter hush of expectancy in the air.

Thowra had still not found Bel Bel, so he headed up yet higher, that second day, leading his herd through the chill dawn. The quietness was intense, there was no bird call, no rustle of leaves, and up there, not even the sound of a creek. Nothing moved except the silent-footed herd.

Into this still, quiet world, through an opening in the rocks, high above and to one side, burst Bel Bel, galloping for her life.

In a flash, Thowra knew that a man, or men, were after her and that she had taken that particular very rough way through the Ramsheads, hoping that she would not lead her hunter to himself.

Quickly, Thowra and his herd made themselves invisible among rocks, and from his hiding-place Thowra watched. He could only see one man, on a big chestnut horse, a well-bred-looking horse, and Bel Bel — Bel Bel galloping like the old mare she was, tired and not so nimble, depending on her own cunning and courage, rather than on her speed.

Then Thowra did something that no wild horse could be expected to do and which all the stockmen for ever afterwards spoke of as just another example of the mysteriousness of Thowra — he left his hidden mares and went off swiftly and silently on a line that would take him just below Bel Bel. He aimed to reach a certain clear snowgrass platform among the rocks before she did.

In the centre of this clear snowgrass, when he knew the man on his galloping chestnut would be able to see him clearly, he reared up and screamed the wild, triumphant scream of a stallion glorying in his own strength.

The man pulled up his horse on its haunches and stared at the gleaming stallion. Then, just as Thowra knew he would, he forgot Bel Bel, dug his spurs into the chestnut’s flanks, and went after him at racing speed.

Thowra switched round and led him right away from Bel Bel — and away from Golden and his own mares, too.

Perhaps that stockman had recognized Bel Bel as the mother of Thowra, but he could not have hoped that Thowra would try to save her as he had, because no man would have believed — till then — that a full-grown brumby stallion would remember his mother. Quite certainly that stockman would not have expected Thowra to draw him off and then lead him such a terrifying gallop as could only have been devised by the most cunning of minds.

Thowra was enjoying himself. This rock and snowgrass world was his world. Not far from here was the great granite overhang under which he had been born. This was the country Bel Bel and Mirri had loved so much, the country in which he and Storm had romped as foals, and later, as irresponsible young colts.

How well he knew it all, the wild, high land, where wedge-tail eagles planed overhead, and dingoes howled to the moon at night, where a silver stallion could leap from rock to rock right to the top of a granite tor, and scream his defiance at the pursuing man.

So Thowra raced ahead of the man — and mocked him — as he had raced with Arrow and mocked him. Up and down the ribbon lanes of snowgrass that lay between the tors, he went leaping through tumbled rocks, or up and up a tor, jumping from block to block. And Bel Bel, who had stopped to watch, saw her son, as she had once known she would, galloping free and wild, with his silver mane and tail foaming in the cold sunlight, like the spray of a gleaming waterfall. She saw him in all his perfection, poised on the top of a tor, noble cream head thrown up, as his defiant cry rang out, a great strong-shouldered, deep-chested stallion, not a fault in him, not in his powerful quarters, nor his strong, clean legs; a silver horse against the sky, free and wild, never marked by saddle, or girth, or spur, his speed never checked by a bit.

For a while she lost sight of them, but after some minutes she saw Thowra galloping along a narrow, rocky ledge below the South Ramshead, then along a ridge against the skyline, mane and tail streaming out like spun silver.

Bel Bel trotted across the mountainside. She lost sight of them again and, tired out, thought she would make towards the sandy cave where she had put her cream foal to shelter from the storm, long ago. On and on she trotted until suddenly, as she was getting near the cave, she heard the thundering of hooves. Quickly she hid herself in among some rocks. Outlined against the milky clouds was the great overhang of granite under which Thowra had been born.

As she watched, Thowra, all cream and silver strength, cleft the air above that granite rock, leapt, and landed twelve feet below, on soft snowgrass that had been his first bed, barely checked, and went galloping on.

Bel Bel saw the man on the rock’s edge, trying to pull his horse back on its haunches and stop, but his speed was too great. The chestnut hurtled over, pecked badly on landing. The man somersaulted off and the horse went madly on. Stirrups flapping, reins trailing, he vanished into the trees below.

The man lay still for a while and then got slowly to his feet and started down the mountain. Bel Bel moved towards the cave, making no sound, leaving no track, and feeling supremely happy. The winter snows would come now, to cover the bones of an old mare. She had seen Thowra as she had always known he would be — a king of mountain horses.