The Snow Pony

by Alison Lester

  ‘He’s a top hunter,’ Horse told them. ‘Knows his guns, knows his dogs, knows the mountains. Just don’t get him drinking rum. He goes feral on it.’

  Maybe wagging school this week wasn’t such a great idea after all, thought Jade. On Monday morning, it had made sense. Mum had come into her room on Sunday night and kissed her goodbye.

  ‘I’ve got to go to Melbourne, love. Shazz wants me to look after the twins while she runs another astrology workshop. I can get a lift if I go tonight. Travis will be …’

  ‘When are you coming back?’ Jade’s voice was muffled under the doona. If she sat up she’d probably start howling. She hated her mother going away, but she was always doing it.

  ‘I’ll be back on Thursday night. That’s okay, isn’t it? You’ll have a groovy time with Trav. He’ll be here. You can have take-away every night.’ She lay on the bed beside Jade and nestled her long skinny body up against her, then lifted the doona and kissed her on the neck. ‘I love you, Jadey, my beautiful girl, my big girl.’

  Jade didn’t feel like a big girl, she felt like a teeny tiny little girl, alone and afraid, but there was no point saying anything. Her mum always ended up doing what she wanted, always got Jade to see her point of view, but she had no idea how awful this house was when she wasn’t here. When Jeannie was home there was always music playing – loud music – there was food cooking, incense burning, crystals glinting, and always something being made, maybe to sell, maybe for them: sewing, painting, candles, jewellery. It was a house of fun. When she was gone, it was so quiet and empty. Suddenly you noticed the shabby carpet, different in every room, and the broken windows patched with rainbow transfers, plastic and masking tape. There was never any decent food. Travis just watched TV and never cooked anything or even made a cup of tea. When Jade woke in the mornings he was already gone, picked up by Horse at six-thirty. It was horrible getting up by yourself and having breakfast alone. Kayfer used to keep her company, but he had been skittled on the highway last Christmas and Mum wouldn’t get another cat.

  Jeannie stood up with a yawn and leant over to ruffle Jade’s silky blonde hair. ‘You’ll be right, won’t you, Jadey? I’ll buy you something cool in the city. You’ll be right. Goodnight now.’

  She rocked Jade’s shoulder gently, signalling her to answer, and even though Jade could feel her heart shrinking like a cold little stone inside her, she managed to lie. ‘Sure, I’ll be fine, Mum. Goodnight. Have fun in Melbourne.’ And that’s the truth, she thought as her mother rustled out of the room. She was going to have fun. She could easily look after the twins here while Auntie Shazz did her stupid star readings, but she wanted to be away, to be in Melbourne, to go out. Jade had heard her joking on the phone, ‘Yeah, we’re gunna party hard, sister. Go hard or go home, ha ha ha.’

  A part of Jade wished Jeannie was more like one of those fat mums other kids had; the ones who always did reading at school when she was little, worked in the canteen, baked cakes for birthdays, and never went away. The other part loved her for being the way she was: wild and funny and beautiful. The first time she’d picked Jade up from high school, even the year twelves were asking the next day who she was. She looked like a rock star with her long dreadlocks that changed colour every week, and silver and turquoise jewellery on every ear, arm, finger and toe. It was as if a famous band had passed through the town one night and she had been left behind. In fact she had come to live in Bankstown when Jade’s dad had got work on the oil rigs, and when he left, there didn’t seem to be any point in her leaving. The kids were settled in school and she could never afford a house in Melbourne. ‘As long as I can get away every now and again,’ Jade heard her telling her sister on the phone, ‘and get a bit of action, I’ll be cool. It’s dull here, but it’s peaceful, too.’

  Jeannie had only been gone for about an hour on Sunday night when the telephone rang, crashing through the TV’s dull noise like an intruder. Trav’s voice rose enthusiastically as the conversation developed, and then Jade heard it drop with disappointment.

  ‘Damn! I just remembered. I’ve got to stay here with Jade. Mum’s gone to Melbourne. Bummer!’ Jade listened, mumble, mumble … ‘Hang on. I’ll go and ask her.’ Boom, boom, boom, he thumped down the passage. Dad used to say Travis walked as if he was trying to poke holes in the floor.

  ‘You awake, Jadey?’ He was standing in the doorway.

  ‘Mmmnn. What is it?’

  ‘It’s Horse. He’s got a mate down from Bendigo and they’re going up to the high plains tomorrow to hunt deer.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘So he wants to know if I want to go too.’

  Jade felt the tears creeping back into her eyes. ‘No way. I’m not staying here by myself. And I’m not asking Natalie if I can stay at her place. I always feel like such a––’

  ‘I’m not asking you to do that.’ Travis slid to and fro across the lino in his socks, holding the portable phone like a laser gun. His silhouette looked excited. ‘Horse says you can come, too. Do ya wanna wag school for the week?’

  14

  Heading for the hills

  Just like the old days, thought Dusty – Dad and Stewie and me heading up to the high plains, horses in the back of the truck, dogs in the dog box, food and gear behind the seat, missing school for a week. It felt strange leaving Mum behind – she’d always come with them – but she had to stay at home this time because some new potential showjumpers were arriving.

  ‘I need to make sure that cow of yours feeds her calf, too.’ She said to Dusty as they packed gear for the trip together in the laundry. ‘You might have to be the strong one on this trip.’ She looked up and peered into Dusty’s face. ‘Do you know what I mean?’

  Dusty nodded and a squeeze of panic passed through her.

  Rita sighed. ‘He says he’s okay and I hope he is, but I’m not convinced. If he falls to pieces, I don’t know what you’re going to do.’

  Dusty patted her mum’s shoulder. ‘We’ll be right, Mum. He loves the plains. It’ll do him good to get up there.’

  ‘And you know I’m not happy about you taking the Snow Pony. She’s wild enough down here. She might go completely crazy when she’s back on her home ground.’

  This would be the first time the Snow Pony had been back to the high plains since Jack first brought her down, tethered to Chester. Jack and Rita both wanted to leave her behind, but Dusty had refused point blank and they were so desperate to maintain the fragile peace in the family that they had given in. Spook was so old he was nearly worn out, and Dusty longed to ride her wild horse in her own wild country. But at the same time, a little niggling voice in her head said, ‘What if she wants to stay there? What if that’s her real home. What will you do then?’

  The truck groaned up the hills.

  ‘I don’t like the look of this sky,’ Jack said, changing gears again. ‘We’ve never left the cattle this late.’ Dusty had heard her parents arguing for the last month about bringing the cattle down. All their cows were on the high plains, three hundred of them. There was plenty of feed in the mountains, Rita reasoned, and none at home, so it made sense to leave them up there. Jack agreed with her theory, but worried about the weather turning. He knew the high plains as well as anyone. The government deadline for cattle to be off the leased country was weeks ago, but in these tough times the rangers turned a blind eye. Rita had won the argument – as usual, Jack would say – and the cows had stayed on the plains for a while longer. The one time Dusty heard her dad laugh recently was when a joke came over the fax, saying: ‘For Sale, complete set of Encyclopaedia. No longer needed. Wife knows everything.’

  The truck groaned on. Dusty had forgotten how slow the trip was. She could have walked faster than the truck on this steep bit. ‘Mum’s an optimist,’ she said. ‘She wants the weather to stay fine, so she thinks it will.’

  ‘Mmmnn.’ Jack looked hard at the road ahead. ‘Her father used to say she was pig-headed, but perhaps it means the same thing. Anyway, wh
ether we’re snowed on or not, she’s given the cows an extra two weeks of good feed. They won’t know what’s hit them when they get home and start living on starvation rations.’

  ‘Look! The gate’s open, Dad,’ said Stewie. ‘Maybe Fred’s up here, too.’ They could see the padlock hanging on its chain.

  ‘No,’ Jack shook his head and his voice was puzzled. ‘He’s away droving, up in Queensland. And he wouldn’t leave the gate open, anyway.’ He drove the truck through the gateway then stopped the engine and jumped out.

  Stewie watched him in the side mirror. ‘He’s looking at the chain. He’s coming back. He’s getting in the truck … What is it, Dad?’

  Jack pulled a face as he started the engine. ‘Someone’s cut the chain with bolt cutters. I hope they haven’t cleaned us out.’

  They drove through the snow gums to the house, expecting to see the door smashed in or windows broken, but it seemed intact.

  ‘The padlock’s still on the shed,’ said Jack. ‘Let’s get the horses unloaded, then we’ll have a closer look.’

  Dusty and Stewie led the three horses across to the horse paddock and let them go. They trotted away, propping playfully at imaginary snakes in the grass and shying away from each other. Dusty watched the Snow Pony carefully as she whinnied.

  ‘Do you think she’s calling Hillbilly?’ asked Stewie. They watched the edge of the bush, expecting him to appear. ‘Where is he? He’s always here to meet us.’

  ‘Hillbilly!’ Dusty called out. ‘Hillbilly! Come up!’ Her voice faded across the plain. Maybe he was in the trees and hadn’t heard the truck.

  They watched the horses break into a canter and race across the paddock. The Snow Pony didn’t look as though she was going to race away, sticking close to the other horses. At the gully they pulled up short, snorting and staring down at something in it.

  ‘He must be stuck in the creek, Stew.’

  They ran, stumbling through the tussocky snow grass, their hearts racing. The horses wheeled away like mad things as they got to the gully, and Dusty saw straight away why they were so upset. Hillbilly was dead, his legs sticking out stiffly, like a stuffed animal.

  ‘Don’t look, Stew!’ Dusty pushed him away. ‘Go and get Dad.’ She didn’t want Stew to see what she’d seen. Hillbilly’s sweet old face was caked with dried blood and there was bullet hole right between his eyes.

  The house and the shed were intact; nothing had been stolen. Jack shone his torch on the track as evening darkened around them, and from the wheel marks they guessed that the intruders had cut the chain, driven in and driven out again, touching nothing, just shooting Hillbilly.

  Dusty was stunned by the stupidity of it.

  ‘They probably didn’t even know what they were shooting,’ Jack said. ‘They would have seen his eyes in their lights and just gone boom. You get some pretty dopey people up here shooting deer.’

  It was dark by the time Jack unlocked the house and they got inside. Dusty lit the gas lanterns and the kitchen heater and looked around this house she knew so well. Her grandparents had lived here for a while when her dad was little, and her grandmother had given this kitchen the same treatment as the one at home, painting all the cupboards different colours.

  Jack put the casserole Rita had made for them – lamb again – in the oven, then sat at the streaky red laminex table and rang the Banjo police. Tom Jackson’s voice was so loud that Dusty and Stew could hear both sides of the conversation from the lounge room, where they were lighting the fire. Jack chatted for a while, then described what they had found at The Plains. The kids smirked at each other as Tom began to speak. He had the odd habit of grunting before he answered a question. Rita thought it was a nervous thing, but Jack said it was something he’d developed over the years to give himself time to think. Whatever the reason, his snort meant that everybody called him Grunter behind his back, which, as Rita pointed out, was an unfortunate name for a policeman.

  Jack continued. ‘Anyway, Tom, I thought I should let you know. Have you had anyone causing trouble?’

  Dusty looked at Stewie. He was nearly bursting with laughter. Here it came …

  ‘Hmmnnff … Well, there was a group at the pub yesterday. They didn’t exactly cause trouble but they looked like they could, if you know what I mean. Hmmnnf. Had some hounds and a stack of guns. Three blokes and a scraggy looking girl.’

  ‘Do you know where they were from?’ interrupted Jack.

  Dusty grinned, it was coming again.

  ‘Hmmnnf. One was from way over the other side of Melbourne. A mean looking begger. The hounds belonged to him. I checked their gun licences and I wrote down all the details, Jack, so we’ll be able to track them down. The girl looked right out of her depth. The younger bloke was her brother. Anyway, you look out for them because the two bigger ones were nasty types. Pity you haven’t got a two-way you can call me on. I guess once you get out to the leases you’ll be out of touch.’

  The fire started to catch and soon its crackling drowned out the conversation.

  Dinner was delicious. Food always tasted good at The Plains. Dusty forgot how she hated lamb, and mopped up the rich brown gravy with bread. Dad made a cup of tea, and the three of them sat at the table and planned the next two days. Tomorrow they’d ride out to the hut and the holding yards that Jack’s grandfather had built nearly a hundred years ago, and muster the cattle from there. They’d reach the hut before lunch, and muster all the south side of their lease that afternoon. After staying the night at the hut, they would muster the northern section in the morning, then bring the mob back to The Plains. The three days after that would be easy, droving the cows down the road to home. Jack would trot his horse back and bring the truck to their camp each night. Dusty loved it when he did that, when she felt like she was in charge of the whole show.

  Jack pushed back his chair and stretched. ‘We’ll have a lot of packing in the morning, so you two better get off to bed.’

  Dusty and Stew rolled their swags out in the lounge and cleaned their teeth. Dusty changed into some tracksuit pants, but Stewie just climbed into bed in his clothes.

  ‘You’re so festy, Stew!’

  ‘Don’t you dare tell Dad. It’s too cold,’ he explained. ‘And this way, I don’t have to get dressed in the morning.’

  Their father came into the lounge and knelt between the beds, his shadow like a monster on the wall behind him. He kissed them both goodnight. ‘Thanks for your help, kids. It’s been a sad day, but at least Hillbilly wouldn’t have known what hit him. It would have been instant.’

  He went out to the kitchen and they could hear him sorting supplies and packing saddle bags. After a while he dialled out on the telephone and talked for a long while to Rita. Her voice didn’t boom through the house like Tom Jackson’s did, so they only caught one side of the conversation, but it seemed as though their parents were talking more than they had for months. After he hung up the phone, Jack went outside and the banging of doors told them he was getting something out of the truck. When he came back, Dusty strained her ears to work out what it was, but it was the smell of oil that told her as much as the metallic clicking and snapping.

  He was cleaning the gun! Suddenly Dusty felt as if she were in a western with the bad guys at the door. The only thing she had ever been taught to fear at The Plains was the weather. It was their place, and no one was ever a danger here. She looked across at Stewie, but he was asleep, so she crawled out of her swag and padded out to the kitchen. Jack was holding the shotgun up, checking the barrels. The gun made him look wild and dangerous. She stood in the doorway, blinking in the light.

  ‘Dad! D’you think they might come back?’

  He laid the open gun gently on the table and held out his arm so she could sit on his knee, then rested the side of his head against her back. ‘No, I’m sure they won’t. They’ll be miles away, chasing some poor deer.’

  ‘Poor dear,’ joked Dusty. ‘Ha ha.’

  ‘No, I’m not worried abou
t them,’ Jack went on smiling at her feeble joke. ‘If they’d been real mongrels they’d have smashed this place up. They just made a dumb mistake. And I think a gun would only get us into strife if they did come back. It’s always better to talk your way out of trouble. No, it was your mum. She made me promise I’d sleep with the gun in the house.’

  Dusty padded back to bed and shivered in her sleeping-bag, waiting for the downy cover to warm her up again. The image of her father with the raised shotgun stuck in her mind, and she realised that if she’d seen him like that two days ago she would have thought he was about to harm himself, but tonight it hadn’t crossed her mind. Things had changed.

  When Dusty woke in the morning it was as though the night had passed in a moment. It felt just the same as coming out of the anaesthetic, when they’d stitched her cheek. One minute she was counting to ten, next minute the nurse was waking her up, and it seemed impossible that the operation could have occurred in such a short time.

  ‘Come on you two – up!’ Jack called from the kitchen. ‘I’ve already caught your horses and saddled them.’

  The outside door banged as he carried gear out to the verandah. Stewie groaned and climbed out of his sleeping-bag. His ginger hair always stuck out at crazy angles when he got up, and this morning it was wilder than ever.

  ‘See,’ he stood in his rumpled clothes and smiled sleepily at Dusty, ‘ready for action. No cold bits for this little brown duck.’

  Dusty laughed. ‘You look more like a cocky than a duck. Have a look in the mirror.’ She shivered as she changed into her moleskins and pulled her bra up under her shirt. It was freezing.