by Stacy Gregg
This was what she always said. But she couldn’t say it was my fault about the horses.
In Florida we had a stables just down the road. I would park up my bike there after school on the way home and feed the horses over the fence. I had been begging Mom for lessons since I was really little and right before we left she had promised I could start.
“You did,” I said. “You promised.”
Mom sighed. “Sometimes things don’t work out the way we want…”
The thing is I have this whole plan where I become an amazing rider and go to the Olympics. Mom knows this because it is all I talk about.
“I am running out of time,” I told her. “Meredith Michaels-Beerbaum had already won her first Grand Prix by the time she was my age. How am I supposed to train for the Olympics when I’m stuck on a boat?”
Mom reached over with her spoon and helped herself to a chunk out of my key lime pie.
“Why don’t you train for the swim team instead?” she offered.
“Mom! You’re not taking me seriously,” I said. “I want to go back to Florida.”
“No.”
“You can’t just say no. I am a US citizen and I have rights.”
“You have the right to remain silent,” my mother said.
“How about if I lived with Dad? I could visit you in the school holidays…”
“Beatriz!” I cannot even mention Dad without her getting mad. “I have told you to drop it, OK? That’s not an option. You live with me. End of discussion.”
***
The following morning we set off at dawn, chugging out of the marina and heading South along the shoreline of Cherokee Sound where the tangerine, mint and lemon-sherbet-coloured beach cottages dotted the shore. By the time we reached the end of the Sound, the cottages with their bright colours and pretty gardens had disappeared and the coastline had become colourless and windswept. The white sand beaches were deserted, and instead of manicured flowerbeds there were nothing but tangles of sea grape, mangroves and cabbage trees.
This was the Great Abaco wilderness reserve. The whole southernmost end of the island was uninhabited, cloaked in jungles of Caribbean pine, snakewood and pigeon berry. From the bow of the boat the jungle seemed to sit like a black cloud across the land as we moved by.
“We’re going to anchor here.” Mom throttled back the engine.
“Where is here?” I asked, peering out suspiciously at the desolate shoreline.
Mom kept her eyes down on the scanner as she steered the Phaedra.
“Shipwreck Bay,” she said.
She handed me the map, her eyes still glued to the scanner and I could see now why she was steering so carefully. There was a hidden reef at the entrance to the bay, so close to the surface that it was almost impossible to navigate your way through.
I went to the side of the Phaedra and stared down into the water. It kept changing colour as we passed over the reef, turning dark indigo where the water was deepest. I could see shadows moving beneath the waves. Reef sharks, big ones by the look of it. And then another shadow, deeper down below, which looked like the outline of a ship. I lay down on the deck of the Phaedra and hung my head over the side so that I could get a better look, staring down into the dark water. It was a ship all right. As we motored over it I could make out the shape of the mast.
“Bee?” Mom called out to me. “Go drop the anchor for me, will you?”
Mom kept the engines of the Phaedra running as she turned into the wind and I ran downstairs, going through our room and into the jellyfish quarters to engage the anchor winch. I pressed down hard on the button and the motor began to grind, unravelling the chain link and lowering the anchor into the sea. I watched it unravel until the marker hit twelve metres and stopped. The anchor had struck the seabed.
By the time I got back up on deck Mom had already started work. She had her laptop out and various sea charts were spread over the kitchen table.
“What are you doing today, Bee?” she asked me.
Sometimes when Mom is working, I stay onboard and lie on the deck and read books. I am brown as a berry from all that reading. Mom says it’s our Spanish blood – we tan easy. She is dark like me with the same black hair, except mine is long, hers is short.
The problem with staying onboard is that Mom says she doesn’t like to see “idle hands”. There is always a list of chores that she is keen to dish out to me.
“I’m going ashore,” I said.
“Have you done your school work?” She didn’t look up at me.
“Yes.” I lied. I had a Spanish vocab test on Friday and I hadn’t studied for it, but I could do that later. Being home-schooled, you can kind of keep your own timetable.
I stood on the deck of The Phaedra and looked at the island. I didn’t need to take the Zodiac. It was only forty metres to shore and I could swim that far easy.
Mom wasn’t totally joking when she said about me making the swim team. If I trained I could probably go to the Olympics. I can swim like a fish. Maybe better than some fishes. So Mom never worries about me.
I stepped out of my shorts and pulled off my T-shirt and stood on the edge of the boat in my bikini, staring down at the deep blue water. Then I raised my hands above my head and I dived.
The water was cooler than I expected. It shocked me and left me gasping a little as I broke the surface and began to swim for shore. Every ten or so strokes I raised my head right up to see how much further I had to swim. As I got nearer to the island, the jungle loomed dark and silent on the horizon. I was in mid-stroke when there was a violent eruption from the treetops. A flock of scarlet parrots suddenly took flight, flapping their lime-green wings, cawing and complaining loudly.
I stopped and trod water, listening to their cries echo through the bay. I couldn’t see what had spooked them. I shielded my eyes with my hand against the glare of the sun on the water and peered out into the jungle. There! A shadow flickering through the trees. I felt a shiver down the back of my neck. I hesitated, and then put my head down and started swimming again.
Shipwreck Bay was shaped like a horseshoe and I swam my way right into the middle of the curve. In both directions white sand stretched on for about a hundred metres or so. My plan was to walk along the beach to the next bay and then all the way to the headland, which I figured would take about two hours – I would be back in time for dinner.
I set off, enjoying how my reef boots made alien footprints in the sand – with circles like octopus suckers on the soles and no toes. The parrots had gone silent, but I kept an eye on the trees all the same.
As I rounded the rocks to the next bay, I could see that my plan of walking to the headland wasn’t going to work out. The bay ahead was sandy, the same as the one where we’d moored the Phaedra, but at the southern end there was a cliff-face that jutted all the way into the sea, too sheer to climb. If I wanted to keep going then I needed to turn inland.
As I pushed my way through black mangroves and waist-high marsh grass, the ground became squelchy underfoot. I hadn’t gone far when I noticed an itching on my ankle and I looked down and saw this big, black leech stuck to my leg just above the rim of my reef boot.
If you ever need to pull a leech off, the thing you mustn’t do is panic. If you rip them off, they will vomit into the wound and cause an infection. You need to use your fingernail to detach the sucker and ease the leech off.
I tried to use my fingernails, but I kept getting grossed out and pulling my hand away. I had finally got up the nerve to do it when the leech got so full and plump that it just plopped off of its own accord. I stomped down on it and felt sick as I watched my own blood oozing back out.
After that, every blade of grass against my shin made me jump. I kept imagining shiny black leeches attaching themselves to my flesh, looking for a warm pulse to plunge their teeth into.
As I got closer to the jungle the parrots started up again. They were shrieking from the tops of the Caribbean pines. Look out! their cries seemed
to say. Dangerous, dangerous!
And then, another sound. Louder than the cries of the parrots. A crashing and crunching, the sound of something moving through the scrubby undergrowth beneath the pines.
I stood very still and listened hard. Whatever was in there, it was big and it was coming my way, moving fast.
From the sounds it made as it thundered towards me, I figured it had to be a wild boar! They live in the jungles on most islands in the Bahamas and the islanders hunt them for meat. If you’re hunting them, you have to make sure your aim is good because you don’t want to wound them and make them angry. Boars can attack. They’ve got these long tusks that can kill you on the spot.
I looked around me for a tree to shimmy up, but it was all snakewood and pigeon berry, too spindly to take my weight. My heart was hammering at my chest. The boar must be close now, but there was nowhere to run. I scrambled around, trying to find a stick, something big and solid. The crashing was deafening, so near…
And then she appeared in the clearing in front of me.
It hurt me afterwards to think that the first time I ever saw her my reaction was to shrink back in fear. But like I said, I thought she was a boar. The last thing you ever expect to see in the jungle is a horse.
She had this stark white face, pale as bone, with these blue eyes staring out like sapphires set into china. Above her wild blue eyes her forelock was tangled with burrs and bits of twig so that it resembled those religious paintings of Jesus with a crown of thorns, and along her neck the mane had become so matted and tangled it had turned into dreadlocks.
Strange brown markings covered her ears, as if she was wearing a hat, and there were more brown splotches over her withers, chest and rump. The effect was like camouflage so that she blended into the trees and this made her white face appear even more ghoulish, as if it just floated there all on its own with those weird blue eyes. She was like some voodoo queen who had taken on animal form.
She didn’t turn and run at the sight of me. It was as if she expected to find me there in the middle of the jungle.
She stood there for a minute, her nostrils flared, taking in my scent on the air. And then she took a step forward, moving towards me. I stepped backwards. I mean, I wasn’t scared. It was just that she was nothing like those horses down the road back home in Florida. I had never seen a horse like this before. The way she held her head up high, imperious and proud, as if she owned the jungle.
The horse stretched out her neck, lowering her white face towards me and I held my ground. I could feel her warm, misty breath on my skin. She was no ghost. She was flesh and blood like me. Slowly, I raised my hand so that the tips of my fingers brushed against the velvet of her muzzle and that was when I felt it. I know it made no sense but right there and then I knew that it was real and powerful and true. That this bold, beautiful arrogant creature was somehow mine.
And then the stupid parrots ruined everything. I don’t know what startled them but suddenly the trees around us shook as they took flight, screeching.
I put out a hand to grasp her mane but it was too late. She surged forward, cutting so close to me that I could have almost flung my arms around her as she swept by, taking the path back the way I had just come through the mangroves.
Her legs were invisible beneath the thick waves of marsh grass, so that as she cantered away from me with her tail sweeping in her wake she looked like a ship ploughing through rough ocean, rising and cresting with each canter stride. And then she was free of the grass and galloping along the beach. I could see her pale limbs gathering up beneath her and plunging deep down into the sand. She held her head high as she ran and didn’t look back. Her hoofbeats pounded out a rhythm as she rounded the curve at the other end of the cove. And then she was gone.
Voodoo Queen
There was no way. I could catch her, but I ran after her all the same. I slogged through the mangroves and then back on to the beach.
By the time I reached our bay where the Phaedra was anchored she had disappeared. No hoofprints and no sign of her anywhere. The birds, who had been so full of noise, had gone eerily quiet.
I crouched with my hands on my knees to get my breath back, then I stood up and scanned the sand dunes for my horse. When I couldn’t see her, I waded straight out into the sea. My strokes cut the water fast and clean all the way back to the Phaedra.
“Mom?”
She wasn’t on deck.
“Mom!”
Mom ran up from below deck. “What’s wrong? What is it?”
“I saw a horse.”
The look of concern turned to annoyance. “Beatriz, this isn’t funny. I am working.”
“I’m not trying to be funny!” My chest was still heaving from the effort of my run and swim. I was having trouble getting the words out. “I saw a horse… just now.”
“Being ridden on the beach?”
“No.” I was still trying to breathe. “It was alone in the jungle and it was wild, but I patted it and then the birds scared it away.”
Mom frowned. “You met a wild horse in the jungle that let you get close enough to pat it.”
“Yes, well, almost.”
“And what did this horse look like?”
“It had blue eyes and a white face and dreadlocks and this marking on its head like a hat…”
Mom looked hard at me.
“Mom, I’m not making it up… I can show you.”
“The horse?”
“No,” I shook my head. “She ran away but I can show you the hoofprints. Not here. They washed away. But in the next bay there will be some.”
“I really don’t have time for this.”
“It won’t take long,” I pleaded. “Come and see!”
“Beatriz,” Mom’s voice was firm, “I don’t know where you think you are going with this horse business, but if this is part of your campaign to convince me to go back to Florida, I can tell you now that interrupting my work is going the wrong way about it.”
“I’m not lying!”
“I never said you were lying, Beatriz…”
“Yes, you did!” I was furious now. Mom is always saying I have an overactive imagination – which is true, but that is totally different from telling lies. Also, people are always telling you to have big dreams – like going to the Olympics – and then they tell you off for being a dreamer. So which one is it?
“I tell you what,” Mom said, “how about if I come and look for the hoofprints later, OK? We can go before dinner and have a walk on the beach and you can show me then.”
“It’ll be too late by dinner,” I insisted. “The waves will have washed them away.”
“Just give me an hour then,” Mom said. “Once I’ve done this migration chart we can go, OK? We’ll take the Zodiac to the next bay and you can show me.”
“OK…” I gave in. “One hour.”
I stayed on deck staring out at the island while Mom worked downstairs, watching in case the horse reappeared.
She was real, I whispered, trying to convince myself. But she hadn’t seemed real at first, had she? Did I actually touch her? My horse was like a ghost, a voodoo queen, and now she was disappearing, fading like a vapour as I waited for Mom and the next sixty minutes to tick past. And then another sixty. She was still working.
“I have about another half an hour to go,” she insisted when I went downstairs.
And another half an hour after that.
“We’ll go in the morning, OK?” Mom said as she served up dinner. She had made curried fish with coconut cream and rice – which is usually my favourite, but I wasn’t eating, just poking it around the plate.
“Sure,” I said in a flat voice. “Great, Mom.”
I lay in bed that night and looked up at the horse posters on my wall. I guess it is true that I have a vivid imagination. When I lived in Florida I had lots of imaginary horses. I made them all bridles out of rope with their names on bits of cardboard and I hung them up in the garden shed and pretended that was m
y tack room.
This was back when I was friends with Kristen. She was a horsey girl too. She would come over after school and we would showjump. We’d leap over fences made out of broomsticks and paint cans in the backyard. We didn’t always go clear – sometimes our horses would refuse, or knock a rail down and get faults. But I knew all the time that those horses weren’t real. And I could never have made up a horse like the one that I had seen in the jungle. I had never seen a horse like that in my life.
Well, if Mom wanted proof then she would get it.
Looking back, I guess I should have left a note. At the time I thought it would only make Mom angry if I told her what I was doing. I would have acted differently if I had only known what lay ahead.
The Mudpit
I’d got my clothes ready before I went to bed so that I could sneak out of the bunk room early the next morning and get dressed on deck without waking Mom. I’d already loaded my supplies – a bottle of water, a knife, some rope, a cheese sandwich (for me) and an apple (for the horse) – into my backpack and I threw the pack in first then climbed down the ladder and into the Zodiac.
I didn’t want to make a noise with the outboard motor so I rowed the Zodiac to shore. I’m OK at rowing, but I do end up going in circles sometimes. Luckily it was an incoming tide so that made it easier. When I reached the beach, I had to drag the inflatable all the way above the high tidemark so that the waves couldn’t pick it up and wash it away. I made sure Mom could see it from the Phaedra – I figured she could always swim over if she needed it while I was gone. Then I strapped on my backpack and headed inland, walking in the direction that the horse had gone, tracing her path from yesterday, following her into the jungle.
Beneath the dark canopy of the trees, the jungle floor was a tangle of snakewood and sea grape. I was looking for signs that the horse had been this way. You know, like they always do in movies, where they find a broken branch and then they know that the fugitive they are tracking has been there? Only I couldn’t see any broken branches, so I just kept walking.
