Silver Brumby Echoing

by Elyne Mitchell

  Possums rustled among long, narrow leaves; a mopoke called; rats and mice snuffled across the forest floor. Echidnas poked their long, sensitive noses into ant heaps now that the ants had gone to bed, even though they had foraged during the daytime. Wombats moved ponderously, inspecting tucker; ’roos and wallabies hopped quietly through the trees.

  A white stallion shook himself and stretched every muscle. The mopoke called again, and the denizens of the dark forest started to life for the night.

  There was a restless white mare and her white foal, moving about at the foot of the track up the spur. The stars appeared, one by one, in the sky and faintly glowed, barely illuminating the track that led to ‘the tops’.

  The whole night was waiting for the white herd. For the white foal, at the foot of the track, there was this magical night, and no one to tell him not to disturb any sleepers. There was star-glow, and there were dreams, dreams and desires calling him, calling them all.

  The wind sighed through the ribbon gums.

  The river sang over pebbles and boulders.

  Whispering wind and singing stream, star-glow and old, old stories, all drifted around the beautiful herd of white horses. Only some of them had the ears to hear those ancient stories that were in the whisper of the wind and the rustle of leaves.

  High above, in the wide valley of the Cascades, stars and their reflections twinkled and shone at each other, the reflections becoming streaks of light in the swift waters of the creek. Burra and his herd lay sleeping, or were asleep on their feet, secure and at peace: Burra was back, all manner of things was well.

  The white horses made very little sound as they climbed up the spur. The faintly moving strips of bark on the alpine ash were almost silent that night, for there was no wind to sway them. The night wore on, and the stars grew brighter.

  Even Coolawyn was sleeping, now that Burra was home.

  A mopoke called.

  Suddenly she woke. A sound? Was it distant thunder? There were very few clouds this night. Indeed, it was a season full of thunder, but surely not tonight.

  Far down the valley where the creek turned down between hills … were there horses?

  Burra woke, too. He came and stood beside her.

  She was on her feet now, and Yarra also was disturbed.

  Ghostly horses … insubstantial … but those thudding hooves? What could be happening? They were getting closer. They must be real … the midnight gallopers … the midnight gallopers. Coolawyn felt a stab of fear, then throbbing, wild excitement. Yarra felt his skin prickling.

  Did the stars shine brighter?

  In star-glow, those shadow horses were only ghosts, but somehow both Coolawyn and Burra realised that the stallion had come up from the rear of his herd and was leading them. They were getting closer.

  Quickly Burra gathered his herd together, getting them like a fence around Coolawyn whom he watched all the time. Coolawyn could not bear to be hidden in the middle of the herd. All of a sudden, she wanted to see what was happening — to be able to see and to be seen — if it was possible for any one of them to see anything.

  In this clear, open valley, the white herd was not galloping through trees and over logs … anyone who went with them might not be hurt … what would it be like to run with them? Coolawyn could feel a current of excitement flowing through her, as if she were galloping through the night beside that white stallion.

  The white herd’s galloping, drumming beat became louder till the throb of it seemed to fill the air, and was drumming in Coolawyn’s ears. Then, without warning, there was a rushing, breathing, sweating mob all around and among them, ghostly, almost invisible — stallion, mares, foals, two year olds, yearlings. Burra had leapt out to meet them, trying to force them to change direction.

  Quickly, quickly, everything was happening … the stallion trying to cut Coolawyn out of her own herd, Yarra dashing from her side to find that other foal, who really had to be among the gallopers, then desperately trying to find Coolawyn again, for, even though he felt that he and that other foal belonged together, Coolawyn meant all love to him.

  All was a confusion of horses in the darkness — two herds, the greys almost invisible in the night, and the whites showing up spectrally in the starlight. Mares were calling their foals. Yarra was still torn between that other foal and Coolawyn, and she was searching wildly for Yarra, and all the time the white stallion was trying to force her away from the herd.

  Burra sprang out of the night at that white stallion and took that horse’s whole attention, making him leave Coolawyn alone.

  Coolawyn could only think of finding Yarra, and there was that other mare kicking and biting at her, trying to take Yarra as well as her own foal, and Yarra racing indecisively between Coolawyn and the other foal … or calling it away from its mother.

  That white stallion did not shut his eyes and simply stand still, as he had done on the night of the thunder and lightning. Burra found that he could not drive him away, not easily as he had expected. That white horse did not go, and he gave Burra some very hard blows.

  In that night, faintly lit by star-glow, Burra and the white stallion were very evenly matched. The disturbing element in their struggle was Coolawyn and her foal, and the other mare and the foal that was so like Yarra. The foals were under foot, at first, and then they went off while the two mares kicked and bit each other, and called their young. Then the stallions could see the mares trying to take a foal each and get away from the battle, but the foals refused to be parted. The white mare then tried again to take them both, and Coolawyn became desperate.

  Both stallions lost concentration on the fight. Both rushed after Coolawyn. Burra became very angry — Coolawyn was his favourite mare. He began to realise that the white stallion was trying to drive both mares and their foals down the valley. He crashed into the white horse and got around the mares, himself, calling to Coolawyn as he galloped.

  A faint lightning had come to the sky in the east — a rift between advancing clouds. Dawn would come, and the weather was changing. Burra knew by the rising hair of his coat, by the tingling of soft hairs in his ears, by something inside himself, that wild wind, and perhaps thunder, were coming. There had been so much thunder this summer, and thunder made the world dangerous.

  Suddenly, he stopped trying to fight the galloping white stallion, and simply swung around Coolawyn, blowing through his nostrils, ordering her to come with him.

  She gave a maddened kick at the white mare and then stopped dodging and attacking. It was Yarra who took her away again, and that other foal with him. This time Burra followed, went around them, and he neighed to Coolawyn — to Coolawyn alone.

  The other mare made her foal follow her and she strode off in a dignified way, towards the white stallion.

  Coolawyn watched the other foal, called Yarra to come back to her, and quickly checked him over to be sure he was hers. For one moment, the foal that had walked away in the faintly lightening night had given her a sudden stab of fear. Was Yarra going off with that white mare?

  She smelt the foal who was pressed against her. It was unmistakably Yarra.

  Burra’s nose touched her ears softly. A darkling dawn was coming, and in that faint light, those white horses could have been a dream … had never really been there … only phantoms.

  All the clouds had come; it became a very sombre dawn, dark with thunderclouds — so heavily clouded that the rising sun was completely obscured.

  A pair of plovers, down by the creek, cried and flew up towards the sky.

  Coolawyn shivered. The threnody of the plovers only told of sadness that was yet to come.

  Though the white horses may have brought great excitement into life — too much excitement — tragedy seemed to be lurking, too. Tragedy seemed always to be close. Exciting and yet fearful: it was like the dark and the light, night and day.

  The Foal of His Dreams

  As the warmer, lazier days of midsummer came, life for Burra’s herd became more p
eaceful, in spite of the fact that there were often thunderstorms. Burra took his herd back to the Ingegoodbee Valley after a while, because everything was so undisturbed. There was no sound of the gallopers by night.

  Coolawyn’s only worry was that Yarra loved to wander by night, and was always restless. She knew he would leave sometime — foals left their mothers about the time they became yearlings, but he should not leave yet, still needing his mother’s milk and nowhere near a year old. Most often the yearlings ran with the herd till they were another year older.

  Yarra seemed to slip away from her side, without really seeming to move, as though taken away by an eddy of air, called by a dream. Usually she found him quickly; he was always searching for something, and would seem quite bewildered.

  Sometimes Burra heard her go and he would follow, feeling strongly that Yarra would bring trouble to the herd.

  Then one night, after finding nothing night after night, something was there — not galloping, but creeping silently — almost unheard footfalls, as gentle as a drifting mist.

  Yarra knew there was someone, and quite some distance away. He got up, stretched his muscles, then touched his sleeping mother with his nose — softly so that he would not wake her — and went silently into the night. He set down each hoof with care, knowing that he must be as silent as that other white foal, whom he was sure he would find. He went on, listening, feeling, climbing upwards.

  At last he was quite certain that the other foal was coming towards him.

  Even with his breathless, silent creeping, he disturbed an owl. It seemed almost to drop from a tall snow gum, and its fine-feathered wings gently brushed Yarra’s ears with only the faintest whispering sound.

  Yarra paused for a moment. He knew well the heavy wingbeat of a currawong, knew the sound of an ibis in flight, the whirr of a mountain lowrie, even the flailing, enormous sound made by the wings of a black swan. This owl went with silent flight, and yet touched his ears with something of the night. Yarra stood still for a few seconds; the owl had given him a barely understandable secret. He went on, with sudden certainty speeding his steps.

  ‘Mopoke, mopoke’ sounded, soft and thrilling — the voice of the bird of the night, the bird of all wisdom, all secrets.

  Yarra dropped down off the timbered ridge dividing the head of the Ingegoodbee and the Tin Mine Creek, then walked down the gentle valley where, very soon, the golden podolepis would be flowering. Something moved. Yarra called and there was an answer. In a moment, would the secret unfold still further? That other foal would be with him.

  A strange, fluid picture rose up in his mind — a picture of that foal, much smaller, younger, but that same foal, scrambling up the riverbank, slipping back, almost drowning, water all over it, water streaming off it. The white mare was in the picture, too, being swept by the stream into an overhanging branch. That was all. The picture faded away then: there was only freezing, swirling water, carrying him.

  Quick, in the starlight … there was that foal now … that foal whom he had seen in the still, small pool … the same foal, but bigger, older … the foal with whom he had galloped when the two herds clashed together.

  Yarra was bemused by the pictures that had flashed up into his memory. The wild river faded into a vision of a small hollow encircled by ribbon gums and candlebarks, and he saw and felt his own desperate search for the foal whom he saw in the still, small pool.

  Now he kept walking slowly towards that other foal. One white leg after the other, slowly, towards the other foal, and that foal was walking slowly, too, one white leg after the other, slowly, slowly. Yarra knew now that it was the foal of his dreams, but real.

  Months had passed since the flood caused by the too-swift melting of the snow, and in that time, the foals had grown. In the warm days podolepis would flower, like a hundred suns all down the gentle valley. Time would roll on.

  This darkness would turn to daylight soon, then night would come again. Over and over throughout the summer, thunder might come and lightning blaze. The flowers of the mountains would fade, grey days come and then the great white flakes would fall like petals from the sky; more and more snow till spring came, the time of the snow melt and perhaps another flood. Yarra and all the last spring’s foals — this other white foal, too — would grow and more foals would be born as the wattles were flowering, and the alpine grevilleas scented the air.

  There must come this future spring when more foals would be born, and lie in the snowgrass beside their mothers, but a whole winter of snow, and ice, and wind was between.

  The two white foals were close enough to touch nose to nose. The owl flew silently out of the trees that lined the valley. The secret was unfolding, and yet in no way explained. The remembered roar of the flood was in both foals’ ears, filling the quiet night.

  And the night was no longer quiet, because there was the sound of movement — of trotting hooves — from somewhere behind Yarra, and then more movement from the far end of the valley, where the white mother was seeking her foal, just as Coolawyn had followed Yarra’s wandering. Coolawyn, coming over the divide, was not alone.

  Two horses were coming, just as the moon rose above the timbered hills.

  Yarra tried to look in the direction from which the two lots of footfalls had come, but the light of the moon shone directly at him. He half-closed his eyes against the brilliance. Through his eyelashes, he saw Coolawyn, and he saw Burra following her.

  He took a step right up against the foal, rubbing his head against the other foal’s, realising that the scent was very similar to his own scent, noticing that the foal’s eyes were half-shut, too. Then he saw, over that white rump, the white mare coming — hurrying along the open valley.

  A wisp of cloud drifted across the moon, dimming its brilliance, and in that brief moment Yarra saw that his mother, coming towards him, had started to move more slowly, as though uncertain as to what she should do.

  Burra looked in no way indecisive, then all at once he looked confused.

  The cloud slid away from the face of the moon. The wide valley bordered by snow gums became black and white. Yarra’s eyes flickered half-shut again, and he put his head over the white neck of the other foal. With his eyes turned away from the blinding shaft of moonlight, he could see that white mare coming towards them even faster. Agitation was in every movement of her body. Obviously she knew that Coolawyn and Burra were coming. Obviously she was frightened of losing her foal.

  Yarra was frightened, too. That mare might try to take him. Who was he, Yarra? Who was this other foal whom he had sought ever since the flood — the one whom he had always been beside?

  The owl flew over with faintly whispering wings.

  Burra stopped, but seemed to make up his mind that there was only one answer to this extraordinary dilemma, and one only. He began to canter carefully through the moon-shadows and beams of light. Round the white mare he went — beautiful grey stallion, bathed in moonlight.

  There was no way that he, Burra, would stand any nonsense. He knew that Yarra totally differed from the other foals, had disrupted the herd; he knew that this white mare and her foal had already been a nuisance, but he would see that all the wandering away from the other mares and foals would end. Coolawyn was his favourite mare, and he would not allow her foal, or anyone else’s, to take her away from him.

  He began to drive the white mare up to the group — her own foal, Coolawyn and Yarra, and he called Coolawyn gently. Her gentle answer came. Just then the white mare burst into a furious gallop, and she charged the little group, calling her foal.

  Burra rounded them all up and began to drive them into the valley.

  The owl was silhouetted against the moonlight, on the branch of a ribbon gum. He was watching everything, and now he called, ‘Mopoke, mopoke.’

  Yarra listened, Coolawyn listened. Burra heard, but nothing was going to make him change his mind. If he collected this white mare and foal into his own herd, Yarra’s wandering should stop, and Coola
wyn should be happy again, as though there had never been that vast flood. He would take his herd up into the head of the Crackenback River where there were fewer trees … stay higher up in the mountains till snow came.

  ‘Mopoke, mopoke’ came through the night, and this time the sound was sad.

  Burra pushed his two mares and their foals onwards, but there was something wrong. The foals ran shoulder-to-shoulder, but the mares were snapping and kicking at each other. It was as though each one were desperately afraid.

  Perhaps this would not be an answer to the problem. Perhaps Coolawyn was always going to be upset by this white mare and this foal who was the exact copy of Yarra.

  Above them still, the mopoke called his words of love.

  Burra’s annoyance had faded away, leaving him with some absolute knowledge in his bones and veins, and his tingling nerves. He knew that Coolawyn must be made safe from that white stallion and Coolawyn was the most important thing in his life.

  He had to take his herd, with the two odd white foals and the white mare, to the high country where surely the night gallopers never came.

  Snow Floating Down Through the Dark Night

  All that summer the mountains echoed with the rolling and crashing of thunder, many more thunderstorms than usual. Sometimes they were storms without rain, and occasionally bushfires were started by lightning, for the forest country had become very dry.

  Burra had moved his herd up on to the Brindle Bull, feeling that it was better to be higher in the mountains. That white herd, the night gallopers, never went very high. If only he had not taken that white mare and her foal … She and her foal, and the thunder and lightning, had upset the herd. It was not being a peaceful summer.

  The white mare was very aggressive. At best, her kicking and biting at Coolawyn had made Coolawyn stay closer to him. It was not just the white mare who caused trouble. Those two foals would not be separated.