The Snow Pony

by Alison Lester

  Spike ran behind the cow, yapping, and Dusty could see that her father was in a bad way. He was trying to crawl through the fence, but the mesh of the old gate was in the way. He was as helpless as a baby. When the cow charged back, pawing and trying to hook him with her ferocious horns, all he could do was roll into a ball.

  Stewie leant over the fence, screaming, whipping desperately at her face with the rope. Dusty jumped into the yard again, screaming too, and swung her stick at the cow, but had to turn and race for her life. Spike was still heeling the cow and when she turned on him this time, Jade jumped down from the fence and ran into the yard.

  ‘Get him out!’ She was waving her shiny blue jacket. ‘Pull him under the fence.’

  The cow turned, and it was terrifying to see her furious anger focused on Jade’s slight figure.

  ‘She’ll kill you!’ Dusty screamed, but Jade wasn’t listening. She darted in front of the cow like a gnat, flicking the blue jacket, drawing her away from Jack.

  ‘Dusty!’ Stewie slapped her. ‘Help me with Dad!’

  Jack moaned as they grabbed his arms. Dusty could hardly breathe for the racking sobs that choked up her throat. They slid him easily across the packed snow and shoved him under the bottom rail, then climbed through themselves and pulled him over the snow until he was completely clear.

  ‘Stay with him, Stew.’ Dusty flew over the fence and saw Jade and Spike playing a mad game of cat and mouse with the cow. As soon as she turned on one, the other would taunt her. Dusty knew the cow would finally win that game. She ran towards them, waving her arms. ‘Get out, Jade! Get out when she chases me!’ She scrambled to the top of the fence as the cow roared towards her, and when she looked across, Jade was safe as well. Spike shot under the fence. ‘Get back to the hut, you mongrel,’ screamed Dusty.

  Stewie knelt in the snow, cradling his father’s head between his knees. His tears splashed on to Jack’s face, and Dusty felt sick when she saw how battered it was. Blood oozed out of a gash on his temple, and one eye was already closed with swelling.

  ‘Is he conscious?’ Stewie nodded. ‘Can you hear me, Dad?’ Dusty packed some snow into her glove and held it against his temple. Jack moaned and opened his good eye.

  ‘I’m all right.’ His voice was a whisper. ‘I’m hurt, but I’m not going to die. I think my ribs are busted.’

  Jade dropped beside him on the snow, panting desperately. ‘Is he okay?’

  Dusty tried to push down the panic that bubbled up in her chest. She felt as if she might vomit, but someone needed to do something and it had to be her. She tried to think clearly, logically.

  ‘We need to get you off the snow, Dad.’ She looked at the hut, about fifty metres away. ‘Do you think you can walk?’

  Jack grimaced and closed his eye. ‘Should be able to.’ His voice was still just a whisper. He was fighting for breath. ‘Just give me a minute.’

  Dusty could feel the cold creeping into her bones as the snow fell around them. ‘No, Dad, you’ve got to get up now. You’ll get hypothermia if you stay here. We’ve got to get you inside.’

  She knelt and slid her hand underneath his shoulder. Jade reached under, too, until their hands overlapped. ‘We’ll sit you up first. Are you ready?’ She realised she was talking like a nurse. ‘One, two, three …’

  ‘Aaaarrghh!’ Jack moaned, a terrible animal cry, and the girls gently laid him flat again. His face was deathly pale.

  ‘Don’t,’ Stewie begged her. ‘Don’t hurt him worse. You might make him a paraplegic.’

  ‘What about a mattress?’ Jade’s brain was going at a hundred miles an hour, too. ‘What if we put him on a mattress and drag him to the hut?’

  ‘It’d be pretty bumpy.’ Dusty looked at Stewie. ‘I don’t think he’s got a broken back, Stewie. I’m sure it’s his ribs. You could hear them snap when the cow hit him.’ Jade nodded. ‘It’s going to hurt him, he’s going to scream again, but we have to get him up.’ She leant over her father. ‘Can you try again, Dad?’

  Jack beckoned her closer. ‘Roll me over, on my good side,’ he wheezed. ‘I can get up on my hands and knees. Might be better. Don’t stop.’

  It was the hardest thing Dusty had ever done, forcing such pain on her father. His hoarse cries sounded so pitiful that Stewie screamed at them to stop, raining his fists on Dusty’s back and wrenching at her coat. When finally they got Jack on his hands and knees, Dusty turned and shoved her brother hard, so he fell backwards into the snow.

  ‘Stop it, you little baby!’ She shouted at him, letting rip her worry and frustration. ‘We have to do this! We have to get him inside! What do you want to do? Leave him here all night?’ She kicked at the snow. ‘Come and help us get him up.’

  Jade felt sorry for the kid, but she knew what Dusty meant. There was no point sooking.

  ‘Come and help me on this side, Stewie.’

  They had to inch Jack to his feet, relentlessly pushing him against the pain that overwhelmed him every time his ribs moved.

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ Dusty talked to him all the time. ‘You’re nearly there, nearly straight.’

  Finally he was standing, grey as a ghost, but standing. He breathed hard, like an old man, and Dusty saw a dribble of blood at the corner of his mouth. She wiped it away before Stewie could see.

  He walked very slowly to the hut, moving like a blind man. Dusty and Jade shepherded him, supporting his arms, talking to him all the time, ready to catch him if he passed out. Stewie went ahead, sliding his feet through the snow to check for anything that could trip his father.

  Dusty pushed open the door with her leg and stepped into the hut, her arms aching from the weight of the logs she was carrying. She had fed and watered the horses and now she wanted to get the fire blazing and warm up the hut. They had piled all their sleeping-bags on Jack, but he couldn’t stop shivering. Stewie had rubbed his hands and feet for an hour after they got him into bed; he wouldn’t leave his father’s side. She glanced at the bunk, expecting Stewie to be there, but it was Jade kneeling by the bed. Stewie was beside the fireplace, hunched up in his oilskin coat like a little brown bat. He looked inconsolable.

  ‘What’s up, Stew?’ Dusty rolled the logs gently on to the hearth. Any loud noise caused Jack to wince in pain.

  Stewie buried his face in his arms. Stringer, leaning against his knees, looked up mournfully through his hairy eyebrows.

  Dusty squatted beside her little brother. ‘He’s going to be all right, Stew. He is, really, we just have to keep him warm.’ Dusty didn’t know if this was true, but she had to believe it.

  Jade knelt beside her. ‘That’s not why he’s crying.’ She lowered her voice. ‘Your dad just told him to get out of his sight. He said it was his fault, that if he’d tied the dog up properly it would never have happened.’

  Dusty dropped her head into her hands. Why did he always have to blame someone? She remembered Rita complaining about it. ‘His dad did it too. They’re a family of blamers. It’s always somebody’s fault. Somebody else’s.’

  She pulled Stewie’s hands away from his face. ‘It wasn’t your fault, Stew. Don’t you take the blame for this. You’ve done nothing wrong.’ She looked across at the bunk and raised her voice. ‘I’m the one who made the mistake. When I took Spike’s paw out of his collar yesterday I didn’t buckle it up tight enough. That’s how he got off today, he just slipped his collar.’ Dusty stood up and took a deep breath. She felt a hundred years old.

  ‘Stew, Dusty, come over here. You too, Jade.’ Jack’s whisper was urgent. They clumped across the uneven floor and stood at the end of the bunk, looking down at him like gunfighters at a grave. ‘Look, I’m sorry, son. I had no right to speak to you like that.’ He closed his eyes briefly. ‘I just feel so damned useless,’ he whispered.

  Dusty crossed her arms and poked the toe of her boot at a hole in the floor. She was wild that her father could be so petty when, really, he was lucky to be alive. Now he was expecting to put everything right with a spe
ech.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking, Dusty.’ He lifted his hand and let it fall back on the bed. ‘But don’t be angry. You kids did a wonderful job getting me out of that yard. I know grown men who wouldn’t have got in with that cow. I owe you my life.’

  Dusty snorted and began to play an imaginary violin. ‘Take it easy, Dad, you’ll have us in tears.’

  He smiled ruefully and Stew sat on the end of the bunk and felt for his feet again.

  ‘You’ve got to stop being so hard on everyone, though.’ Dusty wasn’t going to let him off that lightly. ‘Especially Stewie. What Barney says is right. Shit happens.’

  Jack held his hand out weakly, as if to say ‘I surrender’, and when Dusty shook it he smiled through his pain.

  21

  Making plans

  Dusty stood back and regarded the supplies on the table. ‘Not much, is there? We might have to eat a cow after all, Stewie.’ She and Jade had gone through the saddlebags and cupboard and put all the food they could find on the table. ‘I’d like to bash that roan cow to death with a hammer.’

  Stewie pushed the noodle packets into a pile. ‘We could eat her. Didn’t they used to eat their enemies in the olden days?’

  Jade held a silver can towards the light and tried to read the use-by date.

  ‘Some smartypants peeled all the labels off the cans in the cupboard last year.’ Dusty squinted at the bottom of a can, too, trying to read the tiny writing there. ‘It’s going to be a lucky dip.’

  Jack didn’t eat any baked beans, he didn’t feel like food at all, he said, but Dusty insisted that he took in plenty of fluids. She and Jade made him tea and coffee and watery soup, and saw that he drank them. Once he choked on his soup and the pain of coughing turned him grey. He had taken two strong pain-killing tablets when they got back to the hut, and after trying several positions found that lying back, propped up on blankets and pillows, gave him a degree of comfort. Dusty cleaned up his cuts with antiseptic from Mum’s first aid kit and pressed a plastic bag of snow against his eye from time to time.

  ‘How come you know all this first aid stuff?’ Jade asked her, and Dusty laughed. It was because of the showjumping. She’d sat in the front of the truck on so many hot summer afternoons, waiting to ride, or waiting to go home, and the only book that was always in the glove box was Mum’s first aid manual. She’d read it all: mouth to mouth, heart massage, the blue-ringed octopus, snake bite, electrocution. ‘If I had my pilot’s licence I could be a flying doctor.’

  Jade laughed and Jack moaned. Any movement of his chest was agony.

  Dusty looked at the half-empty bottle of olive oil, a picture of a matador on the label. ‘How come you knew the bullfighter bit? I thought you were a town girl?’

  Jade took the bottle and turned it to see the label. ‘I don’t know anything about bullfighters. I’ve seen the clowns at the rodeo, though. When Mum’s had a stall there, I’ve watched them. Never thought I’d do it myself.’

  ‘What are we gunna do, Dusty?’ Stewie was still sitting beside Jack, even though he had finally stopped shivering.

  Dusty clomped across to the bunk. ‘We need to talk about it, Dad. What do you think we should do? We have to get help.’

  Jade sat beside the bunk, too, and the three of them listened as Jack wheezed out his thoughts. He had a hard time trying to think logically as the waves of pain washed over him, and his brain felt like mud, but he’d worked it out. Firstly, Rita would be trying to telephone them at The Plains tonight, and she’d raise the alarm if they weren’t there. But the snow might well have brought the phone lines down, which often happened, and if that was the case she would not be alarmed. The outside world probably had no idea how much snow had fallen since last night.

  Secondly, Jade’s brother would surely have told someone by now that his sister had been abandoned on the high plains, and there would be a search party out for her, but they couldn’t count on that. Perhaps the hunters hadn’t got off the plains last night – they could be snowed in somewhere, too. The reality was, they couldn’t rely on someone coming to rescue them.

  ‘You girls are going to have to ride out,’ he wheezed. ‘Ride out along the river. I don’t think I can stay here and wait for someone to find us. I think my lungs will pack it in if I don’t get to hospital in the next couple of days.’

  Stewie started to speak but Jack raised his hand. ‘I need you to look after me, son. I can’t stay here on me Pat Malone.’

  Dusty looked doubtful. She’d never ridden out that way, and the track would be hard to follow under snow.

  ‘You can do it. After you get off the spur you just have to keep the river on your left and the mountains on your right until you come to Price’s Plain. You can’t miss it because of that big old pine tree. Been there since the gold rush. It’s huge. That’s where you cross the river, unless it’s up too high. Once you’re over the river, the forestry track goes straight up to Smokey Plain, and you can raise the alarm at the pub. The brumbies use that track all the time.’

  ‘The Snow Pony should know the way then. She’s been here before.’ Dusty smiled at the thought of her horse leading them to safety.

  ‘No,’ Jack wheezed. ‘You take Drover. If you run into brumbies she might go wild.’ His face was ashen again and Dusty didn’t want to upset him with an argument, but there was no way she was going to ride Drover. The Snow Pony was her horse, and she was taking her. She just wouldn’t tell him. Anyway, if Stewie did have to ride for help, he’d be much better off on Drover. The Snow Pony would dump him in a flash.

  Jade put her hand up. ‘What about me? I can’t even ride. Shouldn’t I stay here with you?’

  Jack shook his head slightly. The truth was, it made more sense for Stewie to ride out with Dusty, but he wanted his son to stay. He wanted family to be with him, someone he loved, when he felt so wretched.

  ‘You can do anything, I reckon, after last night’s effort.’ He winked at her with his good eye. ‘You’ll take Captain, you’ll be right on him. He’ll be handy if you have to bash through deep snow.’

  They sat with him for another hour, questioning, discussing, planning. They decided to let the cows out of the yard in the morning. It hadn’t rained, as Jack hoped it would, so the cows would never get through the deep snowdrifts further up on the high plains. The best chance for them was to go back down the spur. Cattle had wintered down there before, and if this was a false start to winter, they could come back and muster them again.

  ‘Half the cows are still out there anyway,’ Dusty said. ‘I hope they’re okay.’

  Later, Dusty and Jade sat at the table sorting out the food. They were only taking food for tomorrow, they wouldn’t be spending a night outside. If they couldn’t cross the river, Jack instructed them, they were to turn around and come back.

  Dusty wanted to make sure she left Stewie and Jack plenty of supplies. ‘Come here, Stew, and tell me how you’re going to cook this stuff.’ She held up a bag of rice. ‘What would you do with this?’ Before Stewie had a chance to answer Jack banged his tin cup urgently against the side of the bunk.

  ‘I’ve just realised – you’ll have to take their shoes off. Captain and Drover’s shoes. If you leave them on, the snow will ball up under their hooves in big icy lumps. You’ll have to take them off, but wait until morning, it’ll be too hard to see what you’re doing now.’

  Well, thought Dusty, that’s another good reason to take the Snow Pony. She didn’t have any shoes to take off.

  Dusty and Stewie had been up since dawn, removing Captain’s shoes. She’d watched the farrier do it a hundred times, holding the horse and chatting as he whipped them off in easy expert movements, and now she was glad she had. She hammered the buffer against the front of Captain’s near side front hoof, knocking the ends off the nails so she could pull the shoe off. She was bent over in the pigeon-toed stance of a farrier, facing away from the horse, holding his enormous feathered hoof between her knees.

  ‘He�
�s leaning on me,’ she puffed, red in the face. ‘He thinks he’s funny.’ She released his hoof, which thudded to the ground, then took some deep breaths and massaged the small of her back. ‘It kills your back. I don’t know how Ron does ten horses a day.’

  She picked up his hoof again, this time facing his hindquarters so she could hold his hoof between her knees and work on the bottom of it. Stewie passed her the hoof cutters and she closed them around the shoe near the back nail and levered it off carefully, shifting the tool around the shoe to make sure it came off cleanly without breaking the hoof. She wiggled the nails out, stowed them carefully in her pocket and hung the shoe on the fence. ‘One down, three to go. I’m glad the Snow Pony doesn’t wear shoes.’

  Stewie laughed. ‘She’s a feral. She is. She’s just like those feral people we saw at the Bankstown Show, the rainbow tribe. Her mane goes into dreads real easy, she doesn’t wear shoes, she’s a bit weird …’

  ‘Shut up, Stew, and make this smarty stand up so he doesn’t lean on me. I reckon he was resting one of his back legs before. Give him a good whack if he goes to do it again.’

  She thought about what Stewie had said as she hammered at the nail ends, trying to prise them up, her hands clumsy in their gloves. The Snow Pony was a bit feral, but that’s what Dusty loved about her. She was brilliant to ride, but you never felt you had complete control over her. There was part of her that would always be wild. Her hooves were as hard as iron and, although Rita and Dusty had taught her to have her feet picked up, the farrier, Ron, had told them it would be a waste of money for her to be shod.

  Drover whinnied anxiously as they led Captain and the Snow Pony out of the stable. ‘Stop sooking,’ Dusty said to him, trying to sound braver and more in control than she felt. ‘You don’t like them much anyway.’ Her heart was racing. She hadn’t told her father that she was taking the Snow Pony and she wasn’t going to. She just knew she was doing the right thing. Anyway, Jack wasn’t thinking straight, because if he was he’d have realised that the Snow Pony would go crazy when Captain left. She just hoped that her faith in the Snow Pony would be justified; that she would get them out.