The Island Horse

by Susan Hughes

  He blinked, and his long black eyelashes waved. Ellie held her breath. She was awestruck, captivated.

  For a long moment, Ellie stared into the horse’s soft, curious eyes. Then she thought, He’s so close, I could touch him. He would feel warm, soft. As velvety as orchid petals. He seems so calm, so tame. He wouldn’t hurt me. Should I? Should I reach out and …

  Ellie lifted her hand. She was still only thinking about touching the horse. But he understood her instantly, before she even knew her own mind.

  The wild horse jerked his head up and whirled. He would not be touched!

  He was so close to her that she felt the stir of the air as he pirouetted. She felt the sand from his hooves spray her bare shins.

  The stallion pounded away over the dune, knees high and sand flying. Then he was gone.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning while they ate, Ellie’s father described Cora to her. “Our horse is very gentle and sweet, Ellie. She’s also very patient. She’s a fine little horse” — he chuckled — “which is lucky because it’s up to her to teach me how to ride! I bet she could teach you, too.” He looked at her tentatively. “If you’d like to try her sometime, on one of my days off maybe …?”

  Ellie shook her head. “No.” She could not imagine it. “No, thank you, Pa.”

  “Ellie, she’s from here, the island. She was once wild.”

  She shook her head again.

  Ellie knew wild. She had seen wild yesterday, the horse on the dunes. What was “once wild” compared to that?

  When they were finished eating, her father drew her a map on her slate.

  “This is Sable Island,” he said, drawing a crescent moon, thin at the ends, slightly thicker in the middle. “It’s about twenty-five miles from tip to tip, and only one mile wide at its widest point.” He made an N above the middle of the moon’s smile. “That’s north, and here we are.” He put an X between the middle of the moon and the western end.

  “And here,” he marked an X on the north shore at the western end, “is the Main Station, where we landed and slept on our first night.” He moved his finger back to the X that was their station. He ran it a little farther along the coast and then down, inland. “The salty lake, Lake Wallace, stretches from here,” he ran his finger eastward, “to here. It’s long and skinny like the island itself.”

  Ellie was interested, trying to calculate the place on this map where she had seen the horse.

  “Ellie.” Her father spoke sternly, waiting to get her attention. “It’s a small island, but in a fog or a storm you could get lost. If you ever do,” he said firmly, “stay in one place. Don’t move, and I’ll come and find you.”

  He waited.

  “All right, Pa,” Ellie agreed.

  And suddenly sadness swept over her, because she felt lost now, here. In this new place.

  Her father left for his beach patrol, and Ellie remained at the kitchen table, still feeling adrift and alone.

  Then into her imagination, behind her closed eyes, came the wild horses. They found her!

  Ellie erased the map on her slate and drew them: the stallion standing on a dune, its mane long and flowing. Then one mare pawing in the sand for water. Then the little ones. Then, after one more erasing, the rest of the herd so close they were overlapping, no space between them.

  A ray of sunlight slanted across the wooden tabletop, rested on the orchid petals. Ellie put more water into the jug. Gently, she touched her fingertip to the pink and white blooms, to the magenta.

  She thought of the stallion, real and wild. He might be there! And she hurried to get dressed.

  Just as she was leaving, she remembered her chores. Quickly, Ellie washed the dishes and dried them. She laced up her boots, hurried to the barn, milked the cow and took it out to pasture. She threw handfuls of grain to the fowl. She ducked into the hutch, ignoring the clucking and the ruffling of indignant feathers. One egg. No, two, three. She cradled them in her skirt, grabbed the pailful of milk and returned to the house. She placed the eggs in a bowl on the wooden table and covered them with a wet cloth. The milk, too.

  Now Ellie was ready. She grabbed up her bonnet and walked out. She moved quickly eastward across the sand. The wind was whooshing, pushing the waves into frothy tips, dashing them against the beach, as regular as breathing. In and out, in and out.

  Sandpipers scurried along before her. Plovers with a band of black feathers around their necks fished in the shallows. Ellie found part of an oar washed up on the shore and, farther along, a coconut, bald and foreign. She walked around them, warily.

  Just as her legs were getting weary, Ellie reached the dunes. There was no sign of the horse. So she sat and waited.

  Ellie looked out at the blue ocean, the diving terns. She waited there, and the wind blew gently. The sand wafted between the grass, over her, about her, into her hair, her eyes. She could taste it on her lips. Sand and the saltiness of the sea that the wind shared as well.

  She gazed sleepily at the sand at the base of the dunes. There were tiny circles in the sand, perfect circles, millions of them.

  The fairies have come, she thought. The fairies have danced here in tiny circles. The idea slipped in and out of her imagination. So did the memory of Sarah, pirouetting, twirling. Suddenly Ellie longed to tell someone about the fairy circles, but there was no one to tell.

  A sparrow flitted through the grasses, then took flight. The sun was high now. The clouds that had been far off were closer. Ellie tilted the brow of her bonnet to keep the heat from her face. She took out an apple from her pocket.

  Then Ellie caught her breath. It was the stallion. He came over the dune, and here he was, so close to her, only a few pirouettes away.

  When he saw her, he stopped, but he did not seem afraid. He tossed his head and snorted, his nostrils flaring, and Ellie held in a giggle.

  The stallion bent his long neck. His black forelock fell over one eye. He grazed, tugging at the marram grass, yanking it up, chewing it, swallowing. He pawed at the sand, and ate more grass.

  She gazed at him, letting her eyes rest gently here, there. The muscles in his shoulder rippled as he stepped closer, grazing. His black tail twitched. His mane lifted in a sudden gust.

  Without thinking, Ellie lifted her hand, palm out. She presented the apple to the horse.

  He lifted his head. He stepped forward, stepped again. Gently he breathed on her hand, nostrils flaring. Then delicately, he took the apple, his velvety lips brushing her skin. He crunched, jaws grinding.

  When he was done, he looked at her, and Ellie held her breath. She dared to meet his gaze. Stared into his brown-black wild eyes.

  Neither of them moved. Ellie did not even blink.

  They looked at one another, and Ellie knew he saw her. Saw her here, in this place, in this very moment.

  And she had never felt so alive, with her feet on the sand, and the wind in her hair, and the sun on her skin. She was alive, here and now. And so was the horse. They were here together.

  Chapter Ten

  Ellie sat with the horse, watching him, memorizing him. While he ate, while he dozed, while he ate again, she decided on a name for him: Orchid. The hours passed. And still she sat and watched.

  Then something shifted. She felt the air change and get cooler. She shivered. And she saw the horse had wisps of mist snaking through his legs, over his withers, under his belly.

  Is it fog? she wondered, and almost as she thought it, the horse seemed to vanish.

  Ellie could not see a thing. She could not tell if the horse was still there. She waited, hoping he might come close, press his muzzle against her. She did not want to be without him.

  But he was wild, and he had gone. And when she finally got up and stood, wanting to leave, even the dunes were gone, and the sea. The fog was all aro
und her.

  Ellie shivered again in the damp air. The wind had picked up.

  How will I find my way? she wondered.

  Ellie felt a flash of fear. She stood uncertainly. She tried to remember what her father had told her, just that morning. If you get lost … but her thoughts were skittery, scattering. She had that underwater feeling, like she could not see, could not breathe.

  Just then, it seemed to her that suddenly something was near. Not the horse. Something else. A fairy perhaps?

  No, something much larger. And there it was. A huge, dark shape, moving in the fog, quite close, uttering a reedy “Hullo.” But what could be so big and have such a high, sweet voice?

  “Hello,” Ellie replied, startled.

  The shape came closer, and then the bridled head of a horse emerged from the fog. A hand reached down, a person — of course! — atop.

  “Come on. I’ll take you home. Here, use my stirrup.” Scrambling up onto the back of the horse, she knew it was Sarah. The girl’s hair was braided, and she wore a blue dress, and that was all Ellie could see through the fog, even though they were now front to back on the horse. “Right. Here we go.”

  They moved through the fog, traveling along the shore, only seeing where they were just as they got there. Ellie caught another glimpse of Sarah and discovered that she wasn’t wearing a blue dress, but rather a blue shirt and brown breeches, and she sighed aloud, longingly, “Oh, breeches. You’re lucky.”

  “I guess,” Sarah agreed, then gave a delighted laugh, as if just realizing that other girls might not be allowed this freedom.

  Riding in the fog felt like floating. Like bobbing along on a boat at night. Like swaying amid a cloud, out of time. Like living on this island.

  Sarah tipped her head back toward her. Ellie saw a flash of her pixie-sharp chin. “My horse’s name is Shannon,” she said.

  The fog began to lift from below, so that beneath their thighs the island was reappearing. Ellie saw Sarah’s feet, bare in the stirrups. She saw the horse’s hooves. A chain of wildflowers around Shannon’s right front fetlock. Tiny petals, glistening with fog droplets.

  “How did you happen to come upon me? In all that fog?” Ellie asked.

  “I was coming to visit you,” Sarah replied easily. “I came yesterday morning, but you weren’t at the house. So I rode up the beach, but by the time I spotted you by the dunes, the sun was high and Ma needed me back home to help out. And to work on my lessons. Today I came again. I rode up the coast for a while and looked for seals. Saw lots on the beach!” she said enthusiastically. “I was coming to visit you when the fog came in. I thought you might be there again, by the dunes, and not find your way back. I wasn’t far away, so I came.”

  Sarah came yesterday and was watching me? And again today? Ellie gasped. Oh, no! Did she see my horse? My secret island horse?

  “You’ve been spying on me!” Ellie burst out angrily. “Spying!”

  Sarah’s back stiffened. Her chin rose. She didn’t speak.

  The girls rode on in silence.

  When they got to the station, Ellie slid down until her feet touched the ground. She knew she must say thank-you. She thought she could manage it once there was more space between her and the wild spying girl. But once Ellie was off the horse, Sarah and Shannon were gone, vanished into the fog, into the wind, into the air.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next day, the morning sky was dark and cloudy. The wind was high.

  Ellie was slow getting up. It seemed like night. She yawned, stretched and dozed.

  Her father knocked gently on her bedroom door. He poked his head in. “It’s a fierce day,” he warned her. “Stay inside.”

  She wanted to roll over. She wanted to pull up the bedcovers and go back to sleep where everything could be as she wished. But something pulled at her. Something would not let her fall back into that deep place.

  Ellie got up. She dressed and ate, listening to the wind rattle the windows. She did her chores. Found four eggs. Swept the kitchen floor. Made the beds. Even baked a simple cake for supper, remembering to keep the fire low and even, like her father had shown her. Then, the kitchen warm with the smell of cooked apples, she knew she should sit and draw, or talk to the cow in the barn, or look out to sea from her bedroom window. After all, her father had told her to stay indoors. But it was also her father who had brought her to this nowhere island in the first place. Her thoughts kept returning to the dunes. Orchid might be there!

  She remembered to close the shutters. She put on her sweater, her waterproof slicker over top and her boots. Then she set out along the beach.

  The ocean waves were high and rolling. They broke on the shore wildly. Her hair whipped her face. She was nervous.

  She kept walking. Once she turned, feeling as if perhaps she was being followed. But there was nothing behind her. No one.

  She thought about Sarah. Ellie had been so upset imagining that Sarah was spying on her. She wanted Orchid to be her secret, her one good thing in this empty place. But maybe I was too harsh, she thought. If Sarah did see me with Orchid, maybe she didn’t tell anyone. Maybe she understands. Maybe she just wants to be friends, after all.

  Ellie reached the place where the dunes came right to the edge of the beach. Orchid was not there.

  She waited, crouching, then sitting. Knees pulled up to her chin. The grass bent around her. The sand was damp. The sky was threatening. The horse was not there.

  An island of sand. What if the wind blew it all away? What if we’re left without anything? Ellie wondered.

  The storm hit. The rain came suddenly, and the wind drowned out all other sounds.

  Ellie sprang up, covering her head with her hood. Discouraged and disappointed, she peered into the distance, inland. No horses were there. She looked along the shore. No horses here either, although there were seals. They had hauled out along the beach. Gray seals. Dozens of them. They lay on the sand as if they had always been there and would never move. As gray as the air, as the rain-filled skies.

  Hunched, holding her elbows, Ellie turned quickly back toward the station. She walked briskly along the dunes, drenched. She kept her head down, the rain blowing at her from the ocean side. She thought about her father’s warning with a flush of shame. Thunder made her jump. Her heart was pounding.

  The wind picked up even more, and the rain fell harder, pocking the sand. She felt the whole island shudder, as if it might simply dissolve into grains and vanish.

  There were no trees, nothing to protect her from the opening skies. And then a lightning bolt lit up the horizon. Instantly she saw it, in the sea, as she turned to sweep the wet hair from her face. A ship! It was offshore and tilting at an impossible angle. Its sails flapped uselessly.

  It wasn’t moving. It had hit ground, slammed into a sandbar. Ellie imagined the sailor with the snaking fingers, remembered his frightening words.

  She heard cries carried in the wind. Is it the crew? she wondered. The passengers? How many are on board? She watched in horror as the waves crashed up and onto the ship’s deck.

  Ellie saw two figures on horseback. They were riding along the shore, galloping from the west toward the ship. They skidded to a halt and gestured to one another. She could hear them shouting. Is one my pa? she wondered, but they were too far away to see, and the rain was like a curtain.

  One rider lit his lantern, waving it toward the ship. It would tell the passengers that help was on its way. It would bring hope to the shipwrecked.

  The other rider had spun about, galloping along the beach and then turning, veering inland. He must be going to get the others, Ellie decided, heart pounding. The rider bent forward, low over the horse’s neck, lifting in his stirrups as the horse’s pumping legs drove them up the side of the dune. The horse and rider crested, and then they were gone.

 
Was that my pa? Or is this him on the shore?

  Ellie stood waiting, watching, as the ship tipped and tilted. Maybe it would ride out the storm. Maybe it would not sink further.

  Minutes passed. Her knees gave out, weary with terror, and she sank down on the wet sand. She clutched the hood at her neck, shivering in the rain, and waited for help to come.

  What was taking so long? Where were the men, the lifesavers?

  The man waiting on the shore sat astride his horse, huddled, a wet sentinel.

  The sea was alive, the waves beating the shore so that the island shook again and again. The ship rocked dreadfully. The waves continued to crash over the ship’s deck.

  More lightning, and now Ellie thought she could see people on board — the crew? passengers? — clinging to the rail. The ship was not far away, but the water looked deep. No one could get to shore from there without knowing how to swim, and even then … She remembered the waves hurling them from the Eagle to shore, and she shuddered.

  Ellie swept her hair back. Water ran down her face as if she were weeping. She put her hands over her ears. The sound of the wind was too much. The sight of the ship was too much.

  I should leave here. I don’t want to be here. The words pounded in her head.

  But then, suddenly, there was someone beside her. A small shape in a wet raincoat, with braids poking out the front of the hood. Sarah had come over the dunes. In the raging wind, Ellie had not heard her. Ellie saw Sarah’s horse, Shannon. The horse waited, head bowed in the rain, reins dangling in the sand.

  “A rescue,” Sarah cried, raising her voice to be heard. She was not making silly faces now. Her brow was furrowed, her eyes worried. Ellie nodded back. Sarah sank to her knees in the wet sand beside her, and Ellie felt good not to be alone.

  There were two horses coming along the shore, shoulder to shoulder, their heads bobbing, their knees high. They were pulling something that Ellie couldn’t see through the pounding rain. There was a man beside them, gripping the bridle of one. He was bent forward, leaning, as if pulling the horses.