Dark Horse (3 page)

N
oise remained a threat. It was distressingly loud. Sarah looked over her shoulder as they fled. Not all of the bridge was gone. The piece they had jumped from had been washed away, but some of the far side was intact. The tree had come to rest on top of what little of the bridge remained. Its root ball was facing Sarah. The head of the tree lay on the other bank, pointing down the track, causing a redirection of water and creating a small flood down the dirt road Sarah had ridden up.

Once up and around the next bend, Tansy slowed her pace. Sarah could feel that the mare wouldn’t stop for a while yet. The sound of the water dropped away. Tansy cantered on. Fear was palpable in her. It was instinctive for the mare to climb. Sarah wasn’t given a moment to catch her breath. Animals don’t pause to dwell on the drama of things and contemplate their amazing escape. Sarah had to ride. Hard riding, too. Tansy’s movements weren’t smooth and easy to anticipate. She shied and jerked and stumbled. Sarah wasn’t connected to her horse in the usual way, the bond they were sharing was raw and stripped back, Tansy was in command. There was the sense that if another critical moment revealed itself, if the earth vibrated like that again and a wall of noise and water came chasing after them, it might be too much for Tansy and she would leave Sarah to deal with it on her own. Sarah clung on and feared that a small fright, like a crack of thunder from the darkening sky, would be enough to make Tansy throw her.

After a kilometre or so Tansy dropped down another gear and began to feel more like the horse Sarah knew.

‘We’re okay, it’s okay, girl.’

Tansy slowed further to a trot. After a few more metres she came to a stop and stood motionless on the track, her sides expanding in and out, her head lowered.

Sarah was concerned about dismounting, fearing that Tansy would spook while she was off and run away. Dark clouds gathered overhead. Sarah’s arms trembled. Her insides were loose and queasy. Thunder began to rumble, a low growl skimming the treetops. Once the thunder started it didn’t stop. At least there were no sudden claps of noise. The temperature dropped.

‘Okay,’ Sarah said. She swallowed. ‘Okay . . .’ she said again.

Nothing was listening to her. The wilderness wasn’t interested in her shock. The bush was unfriendly whereas before it had been familiar. Rocks, moss, stones, ferns, everything had lost its intimacy. Winter wind gusted. Not even the seasons were playing fair today.

Sarah remembered she had matches and a lighter, a torch, a set of thermals in her saddlebag. She turned and saw she still had her bedroll, the backpack of food and water, and the gun. She was wearing a rainproof coat and sturdy footwear. She wasn’t injured. She remembered her phone and searched her pockets for it, found it, checked to see that it worked and how much battery life remained. Eighty-five per cent. Her hands were shaking. Reception from here was usually pretty good, but all she had was No Service showing. The weather was affecting things. At least she had plenty of battery life.

Tansy began moving forward again. Her foot placement was considered, as though she’d become suspicious that the entire mountain was booby-trapped. They approached the fork in the track. To the right was the old logging route, which led off onto a clear-felled plateau. The plateau was as far as the loggers had come, from this point on the wilderness had been too rugged for their machinery. On the left was the road to Hangman’s Hut. Tansy slowed to a stop again. Perhaps she was allowing time for Sarah’s instincts, the human need to take stock and think through a situation. Or maybe the horse was confused; this was where they usually got to rest.

On a different day, with a group of mildly adventurous types in tow, Sarah would have taken the plateau route, and there the Devil Mountain Rides food truck would be, set up and offering salad rolls and hot soups, cakes and slices, in the perfect position to take in the view. No such luxuries today. Sarah steered Tansy around in circles, searching for phone reception. Tansy pinned her ears and swung her rump in the direction of the river, refusing to so much as face that way.

When the thunder roll struck a particularly low and guttural note, Sarah gave up searching for phone coverage. The thunder telling her to quit stalling. She had to concentrate on shelter. Sarah turned the phone off and stored it in her jacket pocket. She zipped up her coat.

Sarah cleared her mind, starting with a blank slate and then trying to visualise the mountainside and its creeks and tracks. Spinners Creek all but enclosed this end of the mountain range. Those places where it didn’t form an effective border, wrapping around, separating the top half of the mountain from the bottom half, something else did – Ten Tower Heights, Swingers Bluff, Dizzy View Gap. Normal annual flooding alone could cut off the top section of the mountain, who knew what the volume of water she’d just seen moving down Spinners Creek could do. Shallow creek-bed crossings would be metres underwater. The suspension bridge further downstream would be destroyed, as would the bush-pole bridge upstream of the main bridge. They were cut off. Sarah didn’t need to think too long or hard to know that they were trapped.

She leaned down to stroke Tansy’s neck. The mare was shaking. Sarah’s responsibility for Tansy coursed through her, blunting the fear she was feeling.

‘Don’t be frightened.’

They took the path to Hangman’s Hut. The road had been graded and levelled. Sarah guessed it had been improved to assist vehicle access during the hut restoration. Workmen’s tyre marks were still visible in the freshly gravelled road. The marks were older, though, than those she’d followed up the main track.

Sarah looked over her shoulder. She saw that the more recent wheel marks turned off at the fork, in the direction of the plateau. It would be wasting valuable time, though, to go in search of a vehicle that may or may not be on the mountain.

Night fell in that moment. It was only midday. Sarah pulled the hood of her coat over her cap. She tightened the drawstrings around her face. The clouds didn’t open so much as simply lower to the ground and pound the earth with water. Chicken Little was right: the sky had fallen. Sarah and Tansy continued up the track, water streaming down their bodies. Sarah was wet through to her skin. A veil of water ran off the peak of her cap. Her raincoat couldn’t be expected to hold up against this kind of onslaught.

Sarah focused all her attention on getting to the hut before nightfall. It was only an hour ride to the mountaintop, but it would be a push in these conditions. They pressed on, upwards, into the rain.

Water drenched the mountainside for an hour then the rain began to ease. As some kind of taunt, an impish grin from up above, the blue sky returned and the sun shone.

Sarah felt like she’d climbed from a pool fully clothed. Her jeans were plastered to her legs. Her boots were soaked. Beneath her coat, the thin cotton of her T-shirt clung cold to her chest and back. Droplets trickled down her face and neck. Her bra was like a clammy hand clasped to each breast. She squeezed one eye shut against the glare. It wasn’t any more comfortable for Tansy. Steam rose off Tansy’s neck and shoulders. Her mane dripped. Little black flies began to buzz about.

Sarah, worried about the state of her phone, reached into her pocket. At pains not to drop it, she hunched and cradled the phone against her belly. Her hands were wrinkled and clumsy. The phone wouldn’t turn on. It was wet inside.

Tansy’s trudging didn’t pick up pace during that break in the weather, if anything it got heavier and slower. Being able to see clearly again wasn’t such a great thing. Creeks and gullies all over the mountainside were flooding. Water was streaming down from the mountaintop and winding off in every direction. Water bubbled up out of nowhere, from between rocks and out from under rotting logs. Washouts began appearing in the track.

They came to a section of road that had fissured open and collapsed, leaving a hole the size of a small car. Sarah had to steer Tansy off the track and up the steep bank on the side, her hooves slipping as they picked their way up into the bush. She rode past the washout and back down onto the track again.

Any more rain, Sarah thought, and it was like the mountaintop would dissolve.

Sarah started to feel light-headed with hunger. She reached into her backpack and felt around for something to snack on. Cardboard packaging on the mince pies was soggy. Sarah tore it and was pleased to feel the cellophane, relieved that the pies would be dry inside. She fossicked around for a single serve of something. The chocolates were individually wrapped. She ate three peppermint creams. Her battered face hurt just to suck them. Water didn’t need to be meted out – she drank thirstily from her water bottle.

The sky closed in again. Cold gusts of wind started blowing. Sarah encouraged Tansy into a canter. They needed to make the most of the visibility before it disappeared again. It began to hail. They cantered on. The icy stones stung Sarah’s face. Her sore jaw ached. She lowered her head, using the cap peak to protect her.

Steady rain replaced the hail. Sarah became too chilled to stay inactive. She climbed off Tansy’s back and led her. As Sarah walked, to keep her mind off their situation, she thought about the better times on the mountain and of some of the more memorable characters she’d guided through the ranges. Horse riding often brought out the best in people. Complete strangers had shown her warmth, told her jokes and confided in her. Age barriers fell away on trail rides. Teenagers giggled with parents and grandmothers. Grandfathers got competitive and took on the younger men.

Sarah’s thoughts were interrupted by the sound of a tree crashing to the ground somewhere within the steep grey gum forest beside the track. She calculated how much further they had to go before returning to thoughts of her clients, wondering what they would have made of this adventure, imagining what would have happened if one of her trail rides had descended into this.

Sarah’s trail rides hadn’t come this high up the mountain. Hangman’s Hut wasn’t one of her destinations. Her business plan had been to target holidaymakers and novice riders.
Sightseeing on horseback
, her flyers had said, as a hint to the laidback nature of the ride. Overnight and weeklong rides were a different business venture, and Mortimer Ranges weren’t ideal for that. Open plains, beaches and alpine bushland suited long rides. Too much of Mortimer’s terrain was inaccessible and slow going. Sarah pictured a team of her beginners, a bright-eyed bunch of tourists, on Spinners Bridge when the flash flood had hit. They could have easily been there. Or maybe not – Sarah would have checked the weather before heading out. Long before the swarming ants she would have cottoned on. Looking back, Sarah knew now how dazed she’d been, perhaps even mildly concussed. The painkillers hadn’t helped either.

Rain turned to sleet. It began to snow. Light snow that melted on contact with the wet ground, but snow in December all the same.

Whoever had named Devil Mountain had it wrong,
Sarah mused.
Satan didn’t live in the ranges, Santa did.
She found the strength to smile. The amusement failed to thaw her though, and the smile faded from her lips.

S
arah made it to the hut before nightfall and was met with the welcoming sight of a caravan tucked in under a long four-bay shed. A Christmas miracle of sorts. The flat-roofed shed had no doors, a rear wall and closed-in ends. It was open right the way along the front. A potbelly stove sat beside the van. The flue coming up out of the shed roof couldn’t have looked any better against the bleak sky, except perhaps if it had been billowing white smoke.

Sarah walked closer through the wet grass. There was a newly erected toilet block, a stack of wood next to the potbelly stove and a tonne of split wood by the hut. The hut itself was in disarray. A stone wall was missing, scaffolding covered the back of the heritage-listed structure. She could see they were only halfway through the restoration. It didn’t matter though, not with the workmen’s caravan parked so conveniently, and with all the other amenities around the site complete.

Icy wind whipped through the clearing. They made a beeline for the shed. It had been built as extra cover for campers and as shelter for horses and for motorbike riders to park their bikes out of the weather. Sarah had been one of the local business people approached by the parks committee for input on what they believed was needed to improve the site. She’d been shown blueprints, informed of the works. She’d lost touch with the project these last few months though, hadn’t known they’d progressed this far.

Sarah let go of Tansy’s reins and she sank down on the first patch of dry dirt floor she came to. Tansy continued on a few steps into the shed, then stopped also.

Neither one of them moved or made a sound. Light dimmed to a grey haze and stayed that way. Sundown was still a way off. Rain hit the shed roof in waves.

Sarah rebooted in degrees – moving her foot, wiping the grit from her palms, sniffing, blinking, looking around at Tansy. Her mare was facing away, not interested in looking at anything; the day had been a sensory overload. Sarah pushed herself to her feet. She unzipped her coat and walked to the potbelly stove beside the van. The stove door was open, revealing a cold bed of grey coals inside. The caravan had a high undercarriage clearance, all-terrain tyres.
Bush Master 2
was written on the badge by the door. If a caravan could be classed as macho, this one would be. The tow bar was chunky, the sidebars and rear bar were galvanised steel, the step was thick checker plate.

Foldout chairs and a camp table were set up next to the potbelly stove. On the table were two coffee cups and a dusty plate. On the floor around the table were a couple of empty beer cans and the tin foil from the bottom of a meat pie. While Sarah stood there, a swirling cold gust pushed and rolled the cans along the dirt floor.

In Tansy’s bay there were signs of a second camp, wheel marks and indentations of poles from an annex. More workers, or separate sleeping quarters for the two men perhaps. Sarah draped her coat over the back of one of the chairs. Her teeth chattered. She glanced at the van, thinking of the clothes that might be inside it. Cobwebs covered the top corner of the door. She tried the door handle. The van was locked. In a crate beside the step was a stack of old newspapers. Sarah tipped the crate over and searched for keys, matches or a lighter. She straightened empty-handed.

She began peeling off the wet layers of her clothes while looking around the stove and in the pile of wood. After the Mortimer fires it was understandable the men hadn’t left any fire starters scattered around.

Getting out of her tight wet jeans was an ordeal that left Sarah breathless. Her frozen hands throbbed. She curled them against her neck for warmth. The taste of fresh blood from her inflamed gums filled her mouth. Her view was of the back of the hut. The scaffolding had held up well in the wind and rain. Some guttering was sagging. The end of the hut, where the stone wall was missing, might not have fared as well. But at a glance, in the murky light, the rain hadn’t destroyed anything or flooded any areas of the clearing. The only running water Sarah could see was coming from the water tank overflow pipe. A mini stream trickled off across the grassy belt and into the bush below. At the east-facing end of the hut, the chimney stood as straight and robust as Sarah remembered it. She’d always considered the rest of the hut to be failing that noble spine of a chimney.

In her mission for matches, the hut fireplace was her third port of call. Her second place to check was her saddlebag, but she had little hope that her matches would be dry. As for her trusty Zippo lighter, Sarah had remembered halfway up the mountain that she had given it to her stablehand as a memento when he left.

Sarah stripped to her underwear and put her coat back on. Her phone was still not working so she carefully propped it on a timber beam to dry out. She wrung the water from her socks and placed them on the caravan step. She slipped her feet back into her wet boots and returned to Tansy.

The matches in her saddlebag were a pulpy mush. She began unsaddling Tansy. The mare’s body was warm already, much warmer than Sarah’s. She could feel the heat radiating off the animal. Sarah used her hands to wipe and push as much water as she could from Tansy’s coat. She hung the saddle rug over the rail in front of Tansy. She made a home for the horse out of all the familiar things, placing the saddle down close, hanging the bridle on the nearest timber brace. When Tansy leaned her weight to one side and rested her back hoof, Sarah felt a welling of emotion. Tears stung her eyes.

‘See, we’re okay.’

Shivering with the cold, Sarah took the backpack, the wet thermals she’d taken from her saddlebag, and her gun up to the van. She leaned the weapon against the van step. With her torch she ventured out into the weather once again, trying not to think of the grizzled sky above.

Bent grass formed a mat and stopped her boots squelching too deep into the ground. The cleared camping ground around the hut had acted like a sponge, soaking up the water and holding it. She walked down the gentle incline to the hut and ducked beneath the scaffolding.

Hangman’s Hut had two doors – front and back – and two rooms, the main one with the fireplace. The door had been removed between the rooms. The smaller room contained the missing outer wall, and a floor that had rotted through. Yellow tape had been fixed across the doorway to keep people out.

There were three poky windows – two at the front and one at the back. The ceiling was lined with plywood boards. Rudimentary would be overstating it. There wasn’t even a verandah to add a bit of charm. Original doors, window frames and fittings had been lost to neglect and age, and the cheap materials used to replace them lowered the tone even further.

Sarah shone her torch towards the fireplace. The workmen had used the hut to house the timber for the repair job and to store the extra scaffolding. She climbed over the beams and poles and shone the torch down onto the fireplace stone hearth. Desiccated possum droppings had formed a scab over the blocks of granite.

After running the torch along the bare mantelpiece Sarah climbed down off the stack of timber. Her beam shone on the plywood front door. On the back of the door was written
Sid woz ’ere
in reference to the bushranger who’d hanged himself in the hut. Someone had added,
And he fucks like a demon
, below that was a rather skilled drawing of a skeleton grinning wickedly while straddling a naked woman.

Above Sarah were the original hardwood rafters that Sid had hung from. She walked to the window where he’d, allegedly, watched for the police coming up the track. The mountaintop was shrouded in rain and luminous mist.

Sid’s Gap was an outcrop of rock that created an opening in the bush. It must have eroded over the years because thick vegetation had taken root, and the view of the track winding up the mountainside was blocked by foliage. Sid’s gravestone was in front of the hut, facing the Gap, positioned so the outlaw could keep an eye out for all eternity.

Sarah listened for a moment to the rain and the drip of water from the leaking gutters.

She returned to the shed, went around the back of the caravan and found the rear window wound out. She had to edge sideways to fit between the shed wall and the van. Sarah shone the torch through the window opening. She got a tantalising glimpse of the van bed and blankets. After selecting a piece of pointed firewood from the pile beside the potbelly, Sarah used the wood to hack at and eventually push in the window’s flywire. The mesh draped down onto the bed pillows. It was going to be a contortion act to get inside, so Sarah kicked off her boots and removed her baggy coat.

With some tricky wriggling and slow squeezing of her hips, she made it through and tumbled inelegantly onto the bed. Sarah pulled the top bed blanket around her. It was laced with a stranger’s unpleasant smell. She pulled a second blanket around her and sat in a ball on the mattress. For a moment she focused all her energy inwards, willing warmth. It was dark in the van. She poked the torch out from between the folds of the blankets and shone the beam around.

The van had the basics: a kitchen sink, a small fridge, a stovetop, a microwave, a kitchen table, a bench seat and the bed. Spread out on the table were site specs and drawings. Leaning against the wall were spades and a crowbar, a bunch of hard hats and a bucket of safety goggles.

Sarah’s beam roamed up and over the tins of food stacked on the narrow bench. She shone the light on the washed pots and pans in the sink, the bottle of sunscreen on the draining board, and the unopened Jack Daniels with a Christmas bow stuck to the bottle.

Sarah pulled out a drawer beside the bed and a tingle of pleasure warmed her further. Socks, Explorers, and some flannelette shirts. In the next drawer – King Gee shorts.

The owner of the clothes wasn’t a big man. His shirt fitted her all right. The shorts would be okay with her belt. She put on two pairs of socks, bunched the lightweight fleecy blanket around her neck, the same way she’d carried a beach towel as a teen, and searched the kitchen cupboards for something to light a fire.

Minutes later Sarah swung open the van door. Dusk was approaching and the wind howled. Tansy was shuffling in the gloom. Sarah lifted the pistol-shaped gas igniter she had found and clicked the trigger in quick succession. On the last click she left the small flame alight. Tansy whinnied.