Silver Brumby Kingdom (4 page)

When he drew near to the Tin Mine-Quambat track, he went with the greatest care. He could see nothing, hear nothing. He examined the bare, wet earth of the track: Lightning had not passed there. With even greater care, he walked back towards Quambat Flat alongside the path till he came to where Lightning’s tracks turned down towards Dale’s Creek, then he looked and listened.

He could hear sounds from not very far away, rather as though Lightning were coming back to the track. Baringa went silently a little way up through the bush towards the Pilot, then, when he was sure Lightning was almost on the track again, he came down towards him, making just enough noise for Lightning to hear. Lightning must be certain to look up and see him coming down off the Pilot. If he could make Lightning think that he and Dawn lived in the silver forest of dead trees that was on top of the Pilot, so much the better.

Lightning looked up as Baringa carefully bumped one hoof against a log and let a branch break under another. Baringa saw him jump as though a fly had stung him.

Baringa walked a little further towards him and then he jumped, too, as if he had only just seen Lightning. it was necessary to pretend that he had not seen him at all this spring, that he had not known whether he had survived the heavy Winter or not.

The two silver stallions greeted each other with friendliness.

“Where are you going?” Baringa asked cheerfully.

“I thought I would go over to the Ingegoodbee, and try to find that lovely chestnut mare we saw when Thowra brought us through to the south,” Lightning answered. “Why don’t you come too?”

Baringa remembered the golden chestnut with silver mane and tail. Thowra had told him that she was a throw-back to her great-grandsire, Yarraman, for she was a daughter of Son of Storm, and Storm was Thowra’s half-brother and great friend, both of them sired by Yarraman, Yarraman was Baringa’s great-grandsire too.

“I will go with you,” he answered, realising that was the only way in which he could know what Lightning was up to.

“I have seen the mare some time ago, running in the herd of a chestnut who is
not
of the Yarraman line — rather plain. His bimble is under the Pilot, close to where the Tin Mine Creek heads.”

“You seem to know,” Lightning said, and his voice had a suspicious edge to it, his eyes a suspicious gleam. “Is the chestnut horse quite a fighter?”

“I don’t know,” Baringa replied carelessly.

“Well, let’s go,” said Lightning, setting off at a trot.

Baringa let him lead along the track, then he followed through the bush at one side, where his hooves would leave no mark and where his silver shape was not visible.

After a few minutes Lightning turned round suspiciously.

“Where are you?” he asked, his voice almost angry.

“Here,” Baringa answered, poking his head through a bush.

Lightning snorted and went on.

Presently he swung round again. Before he could speak, Baringa stuck his head out from some hop scrub on the other side of the track.

“Why can’t you get behind and follow me properly?”

“I’m coming, never fear,” he said. “Keep going.”

Lightning’s temper was rather frayed by the time they reached the Tin Mine Creek.

“Now where to?” he asked Baringa, and he sounded sharp.

“Up the creek,” said Baringa. “It might be better if you kept in the bush along here.”

“I will go as I wish to go,” answered Lightning. “I don’t think there is a horse in the bush to beat me!”

“No?”

“Come on,” said Lightning. “This is going to be fun.”

There were great patches of snow all the way up, and often the track ran fetlock-deep with water from the melting snow. It was possible, Baringa could see, that much of the chestnut stallion’s bimble around the head of the creek could still be under a huge drift. He wondered where the herd might be — but most herds would be making back to their own country now.

Lightning led on and on, right to the Tin Mine Creek, and then turned upwards. In places the valley was a sheet of water. It was all boggy, and the brown, lifeless grass was muddied. There was no grazing and there were no horses to be seen in all the wide, gentle valley which Baringa thought of as always green and fresh, and golden with daisies.

Somehow there should be horses about. He looked far and wide again — and nearly bogged.

He pulled each foreleg out, squelching, and stood for a moment, to ease the pain in his back. It would not do for another horse — or even Lightning — to know that he had been hurt and might not be able to fight as well as usual, nor gallop as fast. The slippery, wet ground had been bad enough, each slip had wrenched his back, but bogs were even worse.

Lightning went on. It was Baringa who saw the first hoof marks, but Lightning was heading in the right direction, so he kept quiet and just saw to it that he, himself, was even better hidden and left no track. Lightning was expecting fun — well, there could be fun if he burst on to a mob of horses unexpectedly.

Their way was blocked, after a while, by a broad drift of snow. Even there Lightning missed seeing the tracks which crossed the drift just above where he did. He was starting to get impatient, and had quickened his pace. The snow was solid and soon he broke into a canter.

Baringa went along more carefully, on the top tracks, fitting his hooves into the spoor of, he imagined, a tall mare. The stallion’s hoof marks were too close together for comfortable movement. He noticed how wide-splayed his hooves were, not like the usual mountain breed. One was badly broken: probably he was a soft-hooved horse, could be bad-boned.

Lightning stopped, turned round to make sure Baringa was coming, and then started off smartly again. There was a thicker bank of trees ahead. Baringa, in spite of the pain in his back, hurried forward. He was sure he remembered something about this particular piece of country. He and Dawn had climbed up this way to the Pilot (if only his back would recover enough for him to get through the flooded river, he could go to find Dawn) and surely there was a hollow on the other side of the trees, a hollow that was usually filled with sweet grass? There was such depth of snow in the drift that it masked the fact that the belt of trees grew on a small ridge. Baringa got there only a little later than Lightning.

Lightning cantered through the trees, not worrying if the country ahead were clear or not. Baringa stopped, saw the herd ahead in the sweet grass hollow which was now a mixture of water, mud and snow, and then saw Lightning, unable to stop, sliding fast down a great bank of snow, sitting back on to his haunches, gathering speed, snow frothing up around him.

The herd simply stood and stared. There was the chestnut mare and the chestnut stallion: there were other mares,

Lightning slid faster and faster, and the stallion gathered himself together and rushed towards him. Baringa watched carefully from the trees. Lightning was going to be well off balance when he hit the bottom. He was on his side: he was rolling over: he was up!

The rather ungainly chestnut stallion looked as if he did nor know what to do.

Some of the mares threw up their heads and tails, and galloped through the mud to the other side of the hollow, but the Yarraman mare stood still.

She was certainly handsome — golden and silver in the sunshine, and a bank of gold-lit snow behind her — but Baringa could only think of two mares in all the mountains, Dawn and Moon.

Lightning regained his balance and his dignity, and walked straight up to the chestnut mare as though the stallion did not exist.

The stallion snorted with fury.

Lightning stretched his nose out to the mare. Baringa wondered if he were going to be silly enough to let the chestnut stallion get in the first blow, but suddenly Lightning whipped round to make a spring at the horse.

Unfortunately the ground was more than muddy, and Lightning’s feet went from under him.

The chestnut was so surprised that he missed the opportunity of jumping on top of the fallen horse.

Lightning heaved himself up out of the mud. This time he moved more cautiously, but it was obvious to Baringa that the floor of the hollow was either bog or sheets of firmer ground which were as slippery as ice.

Lightning made a few cantering strides towards the other horse, tried to stop so that he could rise on his hind legs and strike, but simply went sliding on till he cashed into the chestnut’s shoulder. This turned out to be an unexpectedly useful action, because it pushed the chestnut into a bog. Soon mud was flying everywhere, Baringa could barely see the two horses.

The chestnut’s big, flat feet should be a help, he thought, and they were, because he did not sink as easily as Lightning did. For a moment or so the mud was only flying up about girth high, and Baringa could see them both, almost stuck fast, snaking their necks and trying to bite each other. The chestnut got his legs free first, struggled out on to firm ground, and landed a few blows on to Lightning’s shoulders, but he was not much of a fighter, he backed away as soon as Lightning began to pull himself out of the bog. Then Lightning tried to chase him but his legs went slithering in every direction. The great, wide feet got a better grip, and the chestnut kept out of range. Lightning, following, was blinded by the churned-up mud.

Baringa had pushed himself right in among the arched over branches of a bowed snowgum so that he would not be easily seen, but just then, as Lightning floundered into another bog hole, he noticed that the chestnut mare kept gazing at the trees in which he was hidden, Soon he was certain that, out of the puzzle of cream hide and cream bark, silver hair and silver bark, tracery of red-brown twig and black branch, and the over-all covering of olive-green leaves, she had pieced together the silver horse that was himself. He did not feel very worried about this. He could not realise that not one mare who had seen them, even as colts when they went south with Thowra, would ever forget them, nor would he realise that even then, when only a yearling, he was the most unforgettable of the two.

He watched the two horses floundering, slipping, sliding, falling, and rarely getting in either a blow or a bite. He hoped they were not just going to collapse of exhaustion. He was anxious to see Lightning at least started on his way home to Quambat, and his back was hurting.

The shadows were already growing long when, with some relief, he saw Lightning backing away from the chestnut, and the chestnut making no effort to follow him.

Baringa slid out quietly from among the branches. Lightning started in surprise when he saw him there, having apparently forgotten everything except the fight and the mare.

“Come on. Let’s get out of this,” said Baringa.

“I want that mare,” Lightning answered.

“I’d say that was up to her.” Baringa’s words had an edge to them. “You’re neither of you — you or the chestnut stallion — worth an empty gumnut at the moment. I’m going. You’d better come, or you’ll meet another horse when you are too exhausted to fight,” and he began to move off into the trees, silently blending into the pattern of light and shade, trunk and branch, leaf and grass.

“Come!” Lightning called imperiously to the mare, and he followed Baringa. There was no movement from the chestnut stallion, who stood blowing and sweating.

The mare did not move either, but when they had been gone a few minutes, she too had gone.

As the sunset light flared and died, Baringa realised that one other had joined them. He looked back and saw her following. The three kept jogging on through the bush.

Darkness had closed in before they reached Quambat, but there was sufficient light from a great full moon for Lightning to see his herd of roans and go straight to Goonda.

Baringa vanished then, slid away to one side through leafy trunks that had been badly burnt the summer before — vanished so that even the chestnut mare, who would have followed him through fire and blizzard, never saw him go, though she knew almost immediately that he had gone.

The full moon was now only a three-quarter moon shining down on Quambat Flat. For the second time the chestnut mare, Yarolala, had gone, and Lightning knew that she was searching for Baringa. He had been furious to find that she did not really wish to be his, that it was Baringa with whom she longed to run. Now she had gone again. Oh well, last time she failed to find him and she had come back to Quambat. She would come back this time.

He grazed quietly beside Goonda, who, as the grass started to grow, was becoming even lovelier than the stolen blue roans, but he could not stop restlessly wondering about Baringa. Baringa had more than one mare: who was the second one? Baringa had come down off the Pilot, but did he run there always? Where did that other white filly run, and why had no one heard of her since the big fire, last summer? Could Baringa own her now? This was a question that had been eating into Lightning ever since he came back to Quambat when the snow melted.

That unknown filly had looked so lovely, during the only fleeting moment in which he had seen her. She was just like Dawn, and Dawn was the most glorious mare he had ever seen.

What if Yarolala did not come back?
If anyone could find Baringa, she might.

Yarolala’s track was easy to pick up — easy even for Lightning — because she had jumped on a very sharp rock, two days ago, and made a triangular nick in her near fore hoof.

“I am going to find Yarolala,” Lightning told Goonda, and, barely hearing Goonda’s rather tart reply that Yarolala had no wish to be found by anyone but Baringa, he set off in the direction of the Pilot ridge.

He would have kept going that way if he had not suddenly got the fresh scent of Yarolala, and then seen her spoor on some bare earth, and he followed her onto the Tin Mine track. For a long way he trotted along unthinkingly, then her scent seemed to have vanished. He looked for her spoor, and it had gone.

Annoyed, Lightning turned back till he found it again — and found, to his surprise, that she had turned left off the track, north and westward.

This was rough country, and it needed more than Lightning’s cunning to follow her spoor over the stony forest floor and the patches of snowgrass, but he persisted, and, more by luck than skill, he found himself where her scent lingered and where a footmark told that she had passed, just on the gap where Dale’s Creek headed, on the north, and the Pilot Creek on the south.

Yarolala was going towards the north.

Lightning stopped and wondered. He had only once been any distance down Dale’s Creek, and that was the day in which the whole bush had burst alight. He had seen the filly whom they called the Hidden Filly then, and had started to fight the stallion with whom she ran, the Ugly One, but the fire had come. There was, he knew, snowgrass nearly all the way down the creek, so that no hoof mark would show, and there was thick teatree which could hide Yarolala or hide another stallion.

He stood there, undecided whether to go on or not. The moon shadows were growing longer as the night passed. There was no sound of Yarolala, perhaps he should go home. He put his nose to the ground and sniffed. Her scent still lingered.

She was a strange mare, and lovely. She seemed to be one always to graze on her own, seeking no company — except Baringa’s. He sniffed the scent of her again — strange and lovely —
and if anyone found Baringa, she would.

Lightning began to move slowly down into the valley of Dale’s Creek.

He walked past the hanging valley where Baringa had found him blinded by smoke and fire, not letting himself think of it. He walked slowly over the moon-blanched snowgrass, across the shadows, step by step, along Dale’s Creek. A wind whispered, the shadows moved and wove together. He stepped nervously over them, through them, stepped nearer, nearer, nearer — nearer to what? Yarolala? Baringa? The filly who had once run there — charred bones and hide, or lovely shape of life?

On he walked down Dale’s Creek, on and on, nearer, nearer. After a while he realised that there had been no sign nor scent of Yarolala for at least a mile. He cast around, but there was not enough bare earth for a hoof print, and he could not find her scent. He wondered whether he should go back till he found trace of her again, or whether he should keep going. Feeling more and more doubtful, he kept on.

The moon shadows grew longer and they slowly paled as light filtered up the eastern sky. Lightning found himself going slower and slower. There was still nothing to say that Yarolala had come so far. He felt less and less inclined to go on. Perhaps she had already returned to Quambat.

He turned round to start back, felt sure there was someone close to him, looked this way and that, and then saw her. She was just a shadow in the half-light of the moon and the day — Yarolala and no one else. But what were the things walking towards her, weird shadows of grass trees?

Lightning felt suddenly muddled, puzzled, twisted. Who was coming from which direction? What were those strange things that walked and trembled like the fronds of grass trees? Half-lit by the waning moon and the first creeping light of day, and here, near where he had found the Ugly One, the moving grass trees filled him with terror. He stood shaking, so frightened that he could almost feel himself galloping through the bush, anywhere, anywhere to get away. But Yarolala was there.

“Come, Yarolala, come!” he called, but it was as though she did not hear him.

He saw that she had turned to the moving bunches of fronds and was walking towards them. Then he saw, in that faint light, that they were not covered with fronds, but with feathers, and he saw the beaks, the immensely strong birds’ legs and feet, and, as they got closer, the fierce, darting eyes. The emus!

Lightning should have remembered the emus. Once, when he was only a two-year-old, and being chased by Steel, they had called to him to go to Cloud for safety. They liked to be too wise, the emus, that was all.

Lightning’s fears calmed down, but because he had been very frightened, he now became angry.

“You come back with me,” he said to Yarolala, and walked towards her to give her a little nip and show her that he was master.

She was taking absolutely no notice of him, not even looking at him, but very respectfully saying to those queer-looking birds:

“Greetings, O noble birds,” just as though she had been trained in manners by Thowra, “I know that there is no secret of the bush which you do not understand, and there is something I would very much like to ask you.”

A pleased expression came over the two fierce and rather silly faces.

“Ask, O beautiful Yarolala. The secrets of the bush are indeed ours.”

Lightning drew closer, so greatly interested that his anger sank.

“I would know,” said Yarolala, who never dreamt that Lightning himself did not know, “where the silver stallion, Baringa, runs?”

Lightning came closer still, and the emus shot him a quick, fierce glance. They did not wish Yarolala to lose any of her belief in their wisdom, and must not let her, or Lightning, know that they simply had no idea where Baringa hid.

The male bird answered:

“That is a dangerous secret, Yarolala, too dangerous for one as gentle as you.”

“I am not gentle,” said Yarolala, and she spoke fiercely. “Do you know where Baringa runs?” Almost immediately she tried to cover her lapse from manners by adding: “I am sure you do, for what secrets are hidden from you?”

The emus had begun to flutter their feathers with annoyance, but her covering remark smoothed them down. The female emu looked sharply at her.

Yarolala pleaded:

“Wise and noble birds,” she said, “please could you let me into just this one of your secrets.”

“Perhaps we might lead you there in the dark of the night,” the female bird said.

“No,” said the male, “not yet. She would have to be wise enough to keep a secret. Come, it is time we walked on, if we are to graze at Quambat Flat during this day that is breaking now.”

“I will not allow you to be at Quambat unless you tell me where Baringa hides,” said Lightning.

Yarolala looked at him in surprise, but even then she was too taken up with her own wishes to realise that there might be enmity or jealousy between the silver stallions.

The emu sneered, and when he sneered he looked nasty.

“It is not for you to stop us,” he said, and he and his mate strode off through the bush.

“Come!” said Lightning, and this time Yarolala followed him.

It was quite due. Lightning, unless he really savaged the emus — if he could — had no way of stopping them from visiting Quambat.

He was glad to be back at Quambat, glad to be with his mares. The day was warm and pleasant. Yarolala seemed to settle down quite happily, grazing in the sun, cantering round with the foals or other young mares.

“You are very fast,” he said to her once.

“My name means ‘to fly’,” she answered proudly, and did a quick gallop round him.

She
could
go fast. Next time he noticed her, she was over near the emus.

The warm sun and good grass had made him sleepy, and one of the blue roans was telling him a tale of the far south and of a strange, lone stallion, a killer, whip-thin, nimble and fast . . . He supposed that if Yarolala did find out where Baringa hid he would be able to follow her, but he really thought that those two over-wise birds would not tell her — or that they simply did not know.

It was Goonda who overheard the emu saying sharply to Yarolala:

“Stay with the stallion who wants you, and seek not Baringa. He has mares of his own who are the sun and the moon to him,” for they had seen Baringa once with Dawn and Moon.

Goonda felt sorry for Yarolala, as she watched her walk away from the emus, then she looked across the flat at Lightning. She remembered that when Baringa freed Lightning and the mares from their yard of ice walls, Lightning had promised him to leave his mares alone. She looked at Lightning and she wondered if he would keep his promise. Goonda was fond of Baringa.

One lovely, peaceful, sunny day followed another: grass and leaves began to grow. Yarolala had apparently quietened down, then a cloudy night came, at the dark of the moon, and she was gone.

Lightning was very angry. None of his mares had noticed her go, though Goonda seemed uncomfortable about her and did not say much.

“I will go and find her,” said Lightning, who thought she might have learnt of Baringa’s hiding place from the emus.

“The emus told her not to seek Baringa,” Goonda said, hoping to put him off, but Lightning went away into the night.

All the way up Pilot Creek, he got an occasional trace of Yarolala’s scent, enough for him to know for certain that she had come this way, enough to keep him jogging purposefully along.

He reached the gap. There was a faint movement of wind in the trees, taking away scent. He dropped his nose to the ground. Yes, her scent still hung there. Then be went over the other side.

He was out of the wind soon, and almost immediately he realised there was no scent there. He went hither and thither to either side, but he found no trace of Yarolala. At last he went back to the gap. The wind had become stronger, and the most noticeable smell was that of bruised eucalypt leaves, but just once he knew he was on the track of Yarolala, going a little towards the Quambat Ridge — then there was absolutely nothing more.

Search though he did, he could pick up no trace of her. At last he went home, thinking she must have turned back, but she was not there. In the morning she did not return, nor did she come back in the afternoon.