The Silver Brumby (5 page)

Heavy frosts made ice on the creeks and froze small, still pools quite solid. In the wonderful bright days that came after each frost, though some of the more weather-wise mares might be worrying about the hard winter that was coming, the foals played and had mock fights with wild exuberance. The biting cold and the bright sun, as Mirri said, had put the devil into them.

Then one day, after an iron-hard frost, clouds came up before the dawn and a moaning, icy wind came from the north. Just as the grey light crept over the valley a flock of black cockatoos flew screaming, crying, to the south, borne on the wind.

‘Hmph,’ said Bel Bel to Yarraman. ‘I don’t like it.’

Yarraman looked as if he had not heard her, but as the light grew stronger he started grazing his way into the main valley and then south-east — just steadily south-east all day, without haste, but never turning back.

The clouds grew heavier and darker, the wind colder. No ice melted that day.

‘We haven’t seen any other horses,’ Thowra heard his mother whisper to Mirri. ‘The Brolga must have already decided to go to his lower pastures.’

That night they sheltered in an unaccustomed valley and just at nightfall the snow started to beat down in the wind.

The herd moved around under the trees all night, stamping and whinnying softly. Sometimes a foal dropped down on the hard, cold ground and slept; mostly the sense of disquiet throughout the whole herd kept even the young ones from sleeping soundly.

Thowra did not know what made him feel excited and yet afraid. He did not realize that his mother’s anxiety since the first heavy snowfall had been communicating itself to him, or that the strange feeling which all the grown horses had slowly begun to get — that a hard winter was coming — had somehow made everyone touchy, apt to gallop, kick, or bite. He only knew that the howl of the wind and the cold lash of the snow made him want to gallop now, even in the pitch darkness, and leap on to a high rock, rear and neigh loudly to the sky. He could imagine the wild neigh ringing out and the thought of it sent cold shivers down his backbone.

Suddenly he realized that Arrow was passing him and he lashed out with his heels. Arrow gave a squeal of rage and pain but Thowra had cantered off into the storm and the nigh; Unable to bear his own feelings any longer, he lifted his head to the falling snow and neighed with all his strength. There was a sudden hushed silence in the herd, and then from far to the south-east came an answering, distant neigh.

Thowra stiffened, tingling with a mad excitement, but Bel Bel came up at his side then, and she nipped him on the wither.

‘Be quiet, silly one,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Yarraman will punish you if you make too much noise. Don’t you realize we are no longer in our own country, and that he may have to fight for our food?’

‘Are we in The Brolga’s country?’ Thowra was quivering with nervousness.

‘Yes, we are, and we will have to go further into it yet, to get out of the heavy snow.’

‘I wish daylight would come.’

‘The winter nights are long,’ said Bel Bel. ‘Sleep while I stand beside you. Tomorrow you may have to fight Arrow for that kick you gave him. We may travel a long way too. You will need your strength.’

When the dawn came, grey and beating with hard, wind-driven snow, Yarraman led off immediately, still south-east, but upwards, over a gap in the hills.

There were strange horse tracks at the mouth of a small valley. Yarraman sniffed them curiously but went on his own way. Bel Bel and Mirri both branched off up the little valley for a few yards, looking carefully at the tracks.

‘No more than four young horses, I should think,’ Bel Bel said. ‘Certainly The Brolga is not with them.’

Just in the few minutes while they looked at the tracks, the herd had vanished into the storm and their tracks were fast getting covered. Thowra and Storm were both quite bothered, but Bel Bel and Mirri trotted upwards, and kept trotting till the herd came into sight, shadow horses behind a dense curtain of flying snow.

All day long the wind howled and drove the snow in this impenetrable curtain. Often the horses were almost carried along by the wind.

They were getting hungry now, and the only water they had was when they broke the ice on a pool. The foals demanded, and got, milk from their mothers, but there would not be much milk if they had to keep going like this, driven on the storm, and never finding grass. Even the mares were tiring, perhaps because the cold was so intense, and if they stopped they got colder still.

At last, when they had gone a long way down the other side of the gap, Yarraman turned into a side valley that ran across the wind and had plenty of trees for shelter, and there they spent another restless, anxious night.

At dawn the storm still swirled and beat around them. They set off again, cold, tired, and hungry, and filled with a dread of staying still in one place. They were still steadily losing height and both the ground and the air must have been warmer than it was in the Cascades because the snow was wetter and not as thick on the ground.

They came, at last, to flatter ground in what seemed to be a basin into which flowed quite a number of streams. Yarraman went several miles downstream and then he started fossicking around for shrubs to eat and the odd patch of grass that might be sticking out of the snow underneath a tree.

‘It looks as if this is where we’re going to stop,’ Mirri said to Bel Bel. Bel Bel was staring at the bank of the stream: snow lay right to the water’s edge, but just where there was a crossing there were still the shapes of hoof-marks half-filled with snow.

‘Hmn!’ she said, peering more closely and then crossing over and looking at the other side. ‘Hmn! Quite a few horses have crossed fairly recently I think.’ She scratched away some snow from the bank and found muddied, tracked snow underneath.

‘Well, what of it?’ asked Mirri. ‘We’ve got to eat, and we may eat better here than higher up.’

‘Looks as if it will be a quarrelsome winter,’ Bel Bel said, and she turned her head towards Yarraman. A hard winter would not worry a horse approaching his prime, like The Brolga, but Yarraman would feel it. The Brolga would not have attained full strength yet, but he must be getting very near it. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘nothing is likely to happen during such a blizzard. Everyone will be too taken up with finding food.’

The blizzard continued for days. Sometimes, down in the low valley, the snow turned to rain, then it would snow again. The horses managed to find bushes which they could eat, and, though they were hungry, they were not desperate.

Now that they were no longer travelling, but wandering around trying to find food, Thowra thought he would be able to have some fun, particularly annoying Arrow, since he himself would be almost invisible in the flying snow, but he found it so difficult to see his own mother that he never liked to get far away from her in case he lost her in the blizzard and in the unknown country.

Once, Bel Bel left him with Mirri while she went off scouting further down the stream, and, by the importance of her behaviour, Tbowra felt sure Yarraman had asked her to go and see what she could see. In that time, he sneaked away from Mirri, crept up on Arrow and gave him a playful nip, but he could not help feeling afraid of the rough weather and the constantly falling snow, and he was glad when his mother came home, even though she had absolutely nothing interesting to tell them.

At last there came a day when the snow stopped falling, and the following night, close on midnight, the wind dropped. Thowra woke because of the sudden silence when there was no longer the howl of the wind, and in that silence he heard, far away but echoing, the shrill trumpeting neigh of a stallion.

He scrambled to his feet and was just going to neigh in tremulous answer when Bel Bel gave him a swift nip.

‘Why, oh why, have I got such an excitable son?’ she said, half in anger, half in pride. ‘It is not your place to answer that call,’ and just then Yarraman’s wild cry rang out.

There was an instant’s electric silence; not one of the herd moved or let go a breath. Then, faraway again, but shrill with anger, came the stallion cry.

‘Tomorrow will start the fights for the grass that we haven’t found yet,’ said Mirri acidly.

‘And the youngest, lightest horse will have an advantage in this snow,’ Bel Bel added.

The foals dropped off to sleep again, but there was a restless lack of ease among the mares and young colts and fillies.

Not long after the grey dawn, The Brolga and some of his mares appeared out of the mist and clouds.

Yarraman pranced forward out from his herd, stepping high, head up imperiously, tail held high and free.

Along came The Brolga, rearing and screaming.

A shock of excitement ran through the herd. The Brolga was growing into a noble horse; yet their own Yarraman was superb — like a sun god against the grey clouds and white snow.

Thowra shivered. The Brolga, like his mother and himself, had that queer quality of merging with snow and cloud. In a real fight that might prove an advantage over the bright chestnut.

He could smell the two stallions’ anger and excitement as they went to meet each other; there was a roar from both horses as they reached within striking distance. Then the snow was flying from their hooves as they circled each other, striking, biting, screaming. Thowra saw blood staining the snow, and the mud and the snow and the blood churned underfoot.

Yarraman had The Brolga in a terrific grip with his teeth, but suddenly the older horse’s hooves slipped in the snow and he was forced to let go. Round and round they circled again. The nimbler, lighter Brolga could certainly keep his feet better and when Yarraman slipped again, he managed to get a cruel hold just above the chestnut’s wither. Screaming with rage and pain, Yarraman lashed out and missed him, and then with a tremendous effort shook himself free and planted both heels in The Brolga’s chest, almost winding him.

The Brolga had a gash above one eye, too, where Yarraman had struck. It half-blinded him, but he could still move more lightly and surely than the heavier horse. Now, each was trying for the deadly grip on the wither. Yarraman succeeded, but now he was so breathless that the watching herd could see that, even if he defeated the younger horse this time, he would not have the wind to give him a real beating.

Thowra looked with horror at all the blood on the snow, and at the two exhausted horses, and when Yarraman let go, for want of strength to hold on any longer, he found himself hoping and hoping that The Brolga would have no fighting strength left either.

With relief he saw the great grey horse backing off, every muscle trembling with exhaustion, backing, backing, his one good eye never leaving Yarraman who stood, a huge, bleeding statue, in front of his mares.

Yarraman had won the right for himself and his herd to eat what food they could find when the snow melted, but each mare knew that they could peacefully graze only just as long as they did not trespass on any territory on which The Brolga and his herd were grazing.

Throughout the winter there were several fights between the young colts that ran with each herd, but the two stallions kept away from each other, and let their wounds heal.

Yarraman’s took a long time to heal up. Perhaps the food was not good enough to keep his blood strong; perhaps it was just that the snow had got into the wounds. No one knew how soon The Brolga had recovered, only Thowra saw him once, standing high upon a rock, looking out over a snowy landscape — and, to Thowra, he looked vital, and strong, and terrifying.

It was a hard winter, snow fell often and the great winds roared down from the higher mountains. There was very little food.

Sometimes Thowra and Storm found a stream that danced and bubbled under its shimmering cover of ice; sometimes hoar frost fringed grass and leaves and made the lovely ice flowers on the frozen pools. Sometimes they heard the song the wind played on the ice-encased snowgum leaves.

Bel Bel and Mirri would not let them wander far away for fear of meeting the other herd, even they themselves wandered less than usual, afraid of bringing trouble on themselves and Yarraman. But when some instinct told Bel Bel that a great deal of the snow must have gone from the Cascades, she and Mirri and their foals set off for home without waiting for the others.

It was far from being springtime and the grass was flattened and lifeless, but the two mares and Thowra and Storm felt very gay to be home again. There was still a lot of snow in the Cascades, but it was patchy and plum-duffed with earth and grass. Their usual end of the valley was more heavily snowed than the southern end in which the foals had first seen The Brolga, so they mostly grazed there in The Brolga’s country.

Plenty of sunny days came and nights of heavy frost. Once, in a deep cleft in the hills, they found the rustling leaf snow, like Lux flakes, and Thowra and Storm descended the cleft magnificently, rolling and wriggling on their backs, the separate, shining icy leaves tossing over them, rising in spume.

‘You, who are nearly yearlings, play like babies,’ snorted Bel Bel, and lay down and rolled herself.

Sometimes the mares’ wanderlust would take them far up into the snow on Bob’s Ridge and they would all four chase each other downwards, ploughing through the snow, galloping and falling. Then one day they arrived back in the Cascades to find that the herd had returned. Thowra and Storm were not even sure they were pleased to see them — it had been such fun on their own.

Brownie gave Bel Bel a spiteful look when she saw them.

‘You two’ll turn your foals into lone wolves like yourselves,’ she said. ‘And you’ll each one of you probably meet a bad end.’

‘We’ll have had a good life, though.’ Bel Bel bared her teeth at Brownie.

It was only a few days after that that Thowra and Arrow had their first real fight and finished bruised and cut, with neither victorious. Thowra came away a little wiser; he knew his mother had been right, that he had made a vindictive enemy in Arrow and that maybe there would be many fights.

‘Spring will be late this year,’ Bel Bel said, on one of the many days when cold winds swept the valley. ‘I am glad I am not having a foal this time.’

As it was, only one foal had been born. Then on a day when the breeze was soft and warm, and the sun shone brightly, then did the mares realize that Yarraman’s coat, and their own, were beginning to get a gloss on them again — that spring had come.

Spring had come and the robin redbreasts were up in the snow, hunting the black insects; the dingoes howled to their mates in the full moon at nights. Then one day there was the sound of a wild stallion screaming, farther to the south.

Yarraman pricked up his ears and listened and when the scream came again, unmistakably, he threw up his head with the lovely cream and gold mane and roared his wild answer. As the sun got higher, he trotted a little way up on to a ridge to watch The Brolga, standing with his head well in the air, and the sunlight glinting on his coat. Sometimes he would call out a challenge, but The Brolga did not come. Yarraman would reign, that spring, undisputed king of the Cascade brumbies.

So the foals became yearlings and, in the good spring and summer that followed the snowy winter, they grew large and strong, and learnt to gallop much faster. It took Arrow a long time to realize that though he was the biggest of them all, and the strongest, Thowra was living up to his name and could travel like the wind, faster than himself or any of the others.

There were no organized brumby hunts that summer, but Thowra learnt to recognize — and dread — the whistling sound of a rope flying through the air, and once felt the rough blow of it as it glanced off his shoulder. As Bel Bel had known he would, the beautiful cream colt attracted any man that saw him, and, in his strength and gay courage, he did not seek to hide himself in the same way as she did.

She tried to teach him all her cunning, but realized she could not expect him to learn everything in one short year.

Storm became a faster mover, too, and the mares were proud of them both — watched them grow more and more independent throughout the summer and autumn; watched with pleasure how the friendship between the two remained as staunch as ever. They saw, too, the enmity increase between Arrow and Thowra, and wondered what the outcome would be.

In the two colts’ second winter the snow did not fall heavily or continuously in the Cascades, and the herd were able to stay there.

Both Thowra and Storm saw The Brolga several times and knew that he was now a superb horse. Thowra told Bel Bel, once, that he had seen him and she said:

‘With the spring grass and sunshine, and the mating season, he will reach the height of his strength and agility,’ but she said no more, and left the young horse wondering.

Towards the end of the winter, Thowra saw less and less of his mother, and he and Storm ran more with the other young colts, biting and fighting, galloping, feeling a sudden restlessness. Spring was coming once again and they were almost two-year-olds. Now, Bel Bel and Mirri were both in foal, and they went off to higher slopes where they could have their foals undisturbed. The young colts went wandering farther and farther afield, sometimes returning to the herd, sometimes spending a night in other country.

There were about six or eight two-year-olds rapidly becoming independent of the herd. Sometimes Thowra and Storm ran with them. Sometimes they, the lone wolves, went off on their own, but they were all together and grazing not far from the main herd up a narrow valley the evening Bel Bel came back with her chestnut foal.

Thowra was beginning to move inquisitively nearer when he heard a clamour that made the sweat break out on his gleaming coat, and he knew that it was the challenge to the leader of the brumbies which, in a way, he had expected.

The Brolga came high-stepping up the valley.