Silver Brumby Echoing, Page 4

  Choopa stood half-hidden in a prostanthera bush, shyly looking at the big horse, but then, remembering how the three stallions had looked almost amused at his somersault and dancing, he did a few dancing steps towards him, and the noble, gentle stallion bowed his head down to touch that blotched, blue-and-white head.

  Dandaloo gave a little sigh. Son of Storm would be a good friend to Choopa. A few of the Quambat herd had followed Son of Storm and they now stood with him.

  Ever since the fireball and the bushfire, she had been edgy, worried for the safety of her foal, and the safety of the tribe, part of her family now, but the tribe had the natural ability to escape. Choopa was too slow to be able to save himself. Somehow he should have grown, in these last frightening days and nights. But he had not grown.

  A dry, singed, heat-curled leaf fell on to her rump, and she jumped with fright.

  Son of Storm looked at her swiftly. Mares were often more sensitive to the approach of danger, and he wondered … The foal was certainly far too small to protect itself, or to escape danger from fire, or flood, or blizzard — or from men and their dogs.

  Both Son of Storm and Dandaloo knew that rain must come after fire, and they were thinking more about rain and grass than danger. In fact it was as if the world stood still in an uneasy, charred, black time — no green growth, no birds singing, and cold, cold nights. Into this silent, black, unmoving world, there came a sound.

  A dog barked.

  Son of Storm quickly began to gather the mares and foals together and drive them off into the timber. Close-growing trees could defeat men, or at least let a herd split into as many parts as there were brumbies.

  Choopa had no hope of keeping up. Son of Storm did not try to force him, but let Dandaloo and her foal stay behind, and out on one side.

  All the galloping hooves of the brumbies created a cloud of dust and ash; ash got up their nostrils. But nothing, neither dust, nor ash, could muffle the sound of horses and dogs coming swiftly through the blackened forest.

  Dandaloo tried dropping out further and further to one side, but then it was altogether too late. There was a dog at her heels and a stockman on either side, forcing her into the mob of mares and foals that they were rounding up. The strong smell of sweat, the smell of fear, rose around her. Her flanks were touching other flanks, chestnut and brown. Choopa. Choopa could have been knocked over and trampled; she could not see him at all. She dug in her hooves and stopped dead, then swung, crashing into a big chestnut mare, but there was a stockman just behind. Dandaloo reared, flailing with her forelegs, attacking him with her bared teeth. A furious man’s voice swore, and then said:

  ‘I’ll get you, you devil!’

  Another voice called: ‘She’s old … leave her,’ but the first man shouted: ‘No. She’s crazy. I’ll teach her.’

  But Dandaloo was desperately fighting to get back to find Choopa.

  Then a voice called: ‘Well come on. Keep her in the mob now, or we’ll lose ’em,’ and Dandaloo was driven into a mob of mares and yearlings that a third man was bringing in from one side. There were whips cracking, dogs barking, and men shouting and cursing.

  Choopa could not see what was happening. He lay down, his heart thumping at his ribs, fear and grief turning the sweat on his hide to ice.

  Then, in a cloud of ash and dust, the mob of mares were going, going far ahead, leaving … and trailing behind were a few part-grown foals. Choopa struggled to his feet, planted them firmly and neighed with all his strength, calling Dandaloo, who had never left him before.

  Then he started off with the other foals, following the cloud of ash. His tribe followed behind, staying half-hidden in the charred bush.

  Choopa tried to hurry, following the sound of whips and dogs, but the noise and the cloud only got further away, and he was becoming very tired. He stumbled on and on, now and then dropping on to the black ground, exhausted.

  At last he could not get up and start again. There was a little muddy stream close to where he had fallen down, and he stretched his nose out to drink. Then, still sobbing for breath, he fell into a half-sleep. His tribe crept around closely. Presently the other young foals missed him, and came back, because surely the little dancer, the spellmaker, would lead them back to the herd.

  Choopa lay asleep.

  One of the young kangaroos went foraging and found a bush with a few seed pods still hanging on to it, and brought a branch for him, nudging him awake.

  Although Choopa was grateful for the offering of food, the biggest thing in his mind was his missing mother. The seed pods stuck in his dry throat, but he munched them and rubbed his head against the little ’roo. The tribe drew in closer around him, and some of the foals crept in, too, till they were touching in a magic circle. There they all were when the dark of the night began to rise from the burnt mountain earth. There they were, waiting for a frightening, lonely night — legs, shoulders, heads, fur and hair, even the echidna’s spikes, all touching, — and warmth and comfort flowed through them.

  A little light was coming from the rising moon when, half-asleep, they heard the sound of distant cantering hooves.

  Choopa sprang up, alert, ears pricked, heart thumping, a neigh half-stifled with wild longing, and then he began to dance. He danced on his hind legs out of the ring of young animals, and they left the space open for Choopa to come back with his mother into the circle. For there in the faint moonlight was the old blue roan mare rearing up to meet the dancer. Choopa danced around and around her, leading her inside the circle.

  There was a sort of rustling, a joyous sound as all the other animals, even the foals, began to dance around them. Dandaloo was the only one of the captured brumbies to return.

  At the brumby hunters’ camp, the Quiet Man had ridden in last of all, and saw the old mare pushing against the rails of the yard.

  ‘Let her go,’ he had said. ‘She’s old, and she has a crippled foal,’ and he himself lowered the sliprail and let Dandaloo out.

  Shadow of a Man on the Snowgrass

  The first great rainstorm that Choopa had ever experienced came at least two weeks after the fire. The small rain, falling almost like mist, was very good when it started, making his coat feel soft and pliable, but when the drops became bigger and colder, and were beating and splashing off shoulders and rump, it was really too much. The drops got right into his eyes and his eyelashes were matted together. His back kept shivering. He was glad when Dandaloo took him under a great shelter of interlaced black sallee limbs and some thick-growing tea-tree. A whipbird probably lived there, because his whip crack call went on until dark.

  Choopa was rather hungry. Dandaloo’s milk had been drying up a little, since there was no green feed after the fire, but also because she had experienced such terror during the brumby hunt, when she was caught and separated from Choopa. Now she was gently scratching his cold, matted, blue back with her teeth. Dandaloo knew that, unless cold weather came too soon, the rain would save their lives. Grass would grow, and shrubs that had been scorched would put out new leaves; the mountain world would be renewed. Surely Choopa would grow, as everything else would grow, with the awakening of the mountains.

  Even the day after the rain had stopped, a greenish mist seemed to be creeping slowly over the earth. Translucent green, and red, and copper-coloured little thin leaves appeared quite quickly up the trunks of the most severely burnt trees. Silver-blue young leaves suddenly became visible on the eurabbie blue gums.

  The first birds came back and began to sing — magpies celebrating life. Soon the currawongs’ clear call seemed to descend from the brilliant sky at evening. Joy sounded in the bush again.

  Choopa heard his own name called by yellow-faced honeyeaters, who had come back to see if their nesting place had survived. The same day, he saw a robin redbreast flitting among some bushes. The whole world was springing into life from charred wood and ash. Happiness began to flare once more, just as the eyebrights began to send up clusters of buds that would burst int
o lilac or even purple flowers, to make an autumn flowering.

  Choopa was always doing dancing steps of joy around Dandaloo. He was so glad to have her safely back with him that, more than ever, he stayed very close to her.

  They found Son of Storm again. He was not grazing Quambat Flat and he was being very careful to keep well hidden. With him was a mare, a buckskin, daughter of Boon Boon and Thowra, the famous silver stallion. Boon Boon had taught her daughter much of the lore of the mountains.

  Some mares were legends of mountain wisdom, and the greatest of all was the long-gone creamy mare, Bel Bel, dam of the Silver Brumby, and another was Boon Boon, the Silver Brumby’s first-chosen mate. Son of Storm knew that the spirit of Bel Bel had come to Dandaloo when the fireball was about to set the bush alight, and had bestowed some of her greatness, some of her own courageous wisdom, on Dandaloo. Now, Son of Storm brought Boon Boon’s daughter, Wingilla, to Dandaloo so that they would make a close-knit friendship. Wingilla, of course, knew some of the great secrets that must never be told. Had she not come, Thowra’s and Boon Boon’s daughter, from the place that was the greatest secret of all.

  ‘One day …’ Son of Storm thought to himself. ‘One day …’ But who knew what lay ahead? Who knew …? Who could tell what was ahead in space and in time — ahead in the lifespan of an old mare and her comic, loving, wistful foal?

  Choopa did a shy little dance for Wingilla and then saw the filly foal behind her, and his dance became an invitation to join in a game. This filly was a dark brown with the same golden mane and tail which Wingilla had. She had the kind expression in her eyes that Son of Storm had inherited from Storm, his sire.

  Dandaloo rubbed her nose around the little filly’s face.

  Every time the young ones romped away from the covering tree ferns, the tea-tree and blanketwoods, Son of Storm would call them back until they would be hidden again.

  He was obviously nervous and keeping a lookout all the time. Sometimes a branch screeving against another, or a distant currawong call, might almost sound like a voice. Dandaloo had never ceased to be jumpy since the brumby drive. Now she realised that Wingilla was nervous too, and that she was quietly edging them all further down the creek. Neither she, nor Wingilla, nor Son of Storm saw the man who stood as still as a tree on a rocky promontory that looked down on the creek. It was when Choopa leapt out from under the umbrella fronds of a tree fern into a clear patch of grass, and danced there for Wingilla and the foal, that, for the first time, he felt he was being watched — felt, and understood, the sensation of eyes almost piercing his hide.

  Neither of the young ones made any sign or sound to indicate that they had seen or felt anything unusual. To make himself feel better, Choopa danced a few steps and turned two somersaults.

  Later, Dandaloo got the faintest scent of a strange horse, and the smell of saddlery, and felt sure someone had been there. Son of Storm and Wingilla must have known, too, because they immediately followed Dandaloo away. Dandaloo saw that Wingilla was upset and anxious, she also knew that the lovely young mare was one of the few keepers of the Secrets — and that she would never willingly let the key to the Secrets be learnt by others … but, if the safety of her foal was at risk … would she take her, quickly, to one of the secret hiding places which might then never be secret again?

  The Quiet Man melted away and was swallowed up in the dense, dark swampgums and black sallees, only a faint scent remaining. There was a picture in his memory, too — of the queer blue and white foal turning somersaults.

  The Quiet Man was not a talker, not a yarn-spinner around the camp fire, but somehow there began to waft over the mountains a half-told tale, a half-imagined story, floating on the wind, and sometimes another lone man would go out into the mountains to try to find out if there was any foundation to this half-dreamt fable that was fading into the mists.

  Dandaloo might have ceased to notice that Choopa did not grow, if it had not been that they now ran with Wingilla and her foal, and the filly did grow. She was a late foal, too, but she soon began to look big when she joined the circle made by Choopa’s tribe.

  The flying phalanger had glided away during the fire, but now it returned to one of its favourite trees, gliding from one tall tree to the foot of another, and telling its tales of travel as it climbed that one, calling out as it sailed down from treetop into the bush. Thus tales had been spread, further than Suggan Buggan, perhaps to the Pinch River, even, perhaps, far down the Snowy to where the pine trees grew.

  It was the sweet scent of the white heath bushes at the end of a warm summer’s day that finally made Dandaloo’s longing for the high country get too strong to resist. Her restlessness infected Son of Storm too, for he had often wandered far over the Great Divide, as his father had with Thowra.

  Choopa, though so small and short-legged, was now very strong. It seemed as if it were almost something to do with Choopa that had formed itself into a quest in Dandaloo’s mind, invading her dreams, becoming an obsession. And the memory of the lakes held a strong attraction for that wise old blue roan: Lake Cootapatamba, high enough to be a drinking place for eagles; the Blue Lake, deep even at the edge; the double lake, Albina, below steep cliffs, lying in the Northcote Canyon. Dandaloo had drunk at the double lake once, and felt so wonderful that the memory remained vivid. Perhaps Choopa would grow if he drank at the topmost lakes. Obsession or dream, they had to go to those lakes in the high country. They had been through fire: now there must be water, the water of the highest lakes.

  Dandaloo always used to be a wanderer, and so had Son of Storm. Wingilla had never before left Boon Boon and Thowra’s Secret Valley, not until Son of Storm had come around the cliffs, one dark night, to claim her. So many of the tales of the Ramshead Range were part of the legends of their lives that she was eager to keep on travelling, exploring …

  Along the rather wide valley of the Tin Mine Creek, the golden podolepis daisies were flowering thickly — four golden heads, or perhaps six, on each tall plant. Choopa was not very much taller than the plants, as he threaded his way through them, his strange little blotchy face peering through the brilliant, golden flowers — sometimes dancing with excitement among them, sometimes leading Wingilla’s daughter a ‘tug you last’ game through them.

  Dandaloo stood, half asleep in the sunshine beside Son of Storm. She could see Choopa’s kangaroo mates in the bush, close by, and one of them sitting among the golden daisy heads, little paws folded, almost as though it knew it looked beautiful. Choopa went up to it and rubbed its head with his nose, but all of a sudden it became alert, sitting up straighter, ears pricked, listening, eyes staring into the bush.

  Dandaloo and Son of Storm looked quickly in the direction in which the ’roo was gazing, as though some danger lurked there. There was nothing to be seen, and yet … somebody, something, must have been about, even if only an emu hidden in the bush, because this fable began to be whispered on the south breeze, of the smallest blue roan foal imaginable, playing and dancing among the golden podolepis, up the valley of the Tin Mine Creek …

  The little band of brumbies reached the flats where the Ingegoodbee River headed, just on sunset. Here small, steep-sided pools held sweet spring water, peat pools, reflecting the sunset sky. The reflecting water was pale, duck-egg blue, rifted with rose pink, just as the sky was rifted and feathered with cloud.

  Dandaloo, Choopa and those of his tribe who had travelled with him, went to drink at the pools. Son of Storm and Wingilla led their foal out on to the flat, too. The springs at the source of the river were enfolded in an ancient peace. Three wild duck were floating on one pool. Two other ducks winged across the lovely sky.

  There was a circle of snowgrass among the pools, a splendid rolling place for them all, and when the stallion, the mares and the foals had rolled and rolled, Choopa sprang up, rearing and dancing.

  The higher land above the head of the Ingegoodbee is full of wombat burrows, and from these holes very young wombats peered out, watching th
e visiting band of brumbies, and then scuttling down to get closer and closer to the ring of young animals around Choopa till they, too, became part of the circle.

  One very young wombat, with soft grey fur, was fascinated by Choopa’s dancing and his flying legs. The wombat’s small eyes followed every movement of the blue roan foal, and his head began to go around, too, swaying round and round. Soon the tiny eyes kept flickering shut.

  All of a sudden there was a splash! The little wombat had overbalanced and fallen into one of those sky-reflecting pools.

  Choopa, startled, dropped out of a rear, and looked at the floundering, round, wet ball of wombat, just as a dingo grabbed a mouthful of grey fur on the wombat’s non-existent neck, and heaved it out of the water. Choopa rubbed his face against the wet face of the baby wombat. The pinpoint, round eyes looked adoringly at him through wet lashes.

  His mother came trundling across the flat and claimed the sopping wet bundle. Night settled, and the circle of animals disbanded and went off on foraging expeditions, or curled up to sleep, listening to the sound of possums and giant gliders, or the faraway howl of a dingo, and the strange cry of a bittern.

  Dandaloo and Son of Storm were both restless, dreaming of the high country, and of the high country lakes. It was the memory of the lakes that called them — Cootapatamba and the deep, deep Blue Lake, and the double lake below the steep cliffs of the Northcote Canyon, in which Dandaloo had once drunk and felt renewed.

  Choopa must drink at these highest lakes whose water must be the very water of life.

  The baby wombat was there, looking for Choopa, in the morning, trying to follow them when they started on their journey to the high mountains.

  Over and over again, in the next few days, Son of Storm got the feeling that they were being watched. He never saw anyone, but so much had happened here, and still somehow existed in the very shape of the landscape.