The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  Good breeding stock would replace the horses gone to war. Rock Farm could breed and train horses again. Andy might come home if he had horses to break in…

  ‘Please, Flinty,’ said Joey.

  He was right. The muster could solve all their problems. But she couldn’t let Joey do it. She knew her brother all too well. If there was hard riding he wouldn’t hold back. He was a good rider, but not that good. Not nearly as good as you are, said a whisper in her mind.

  ‘No,’ she said. It broke her heart to say it. ‘I’m sorry, Joey. The risk is too great. To you, to Empress.’

  ‘But I’ve mustered brumbies with Dad, just like you —’

  ‘No! That was just round here, and anyway, Dad did most of the mustering.’

  ‘You’re not my boss,’ he said sullenly. ‘You’re just my sister. Andy’s our guardian now.’

  And Andy isn’t here, she thought, not with his brother and sisters, not with the farm he’d inherited. ‘Empress is my horse —’

  ‘Pony.’

  She sighed. Small horse, big pony, what did it matter? Except to Joey’s pride, maybe. ‘Pony,’ she agreed. ‘Joey, it was a wonderful idea. I’m grateful, truly. But we need you too much.’ We need Empress too, she thought. And I’ve lost two brothers. I can’t lose a third.

  She got them into bed at last. Joey had the boys’ bedroom to himself now Andy was gone with cattle. She could have moved into Mum and Dad’s room, but that seemed wrong somehow, and anyway, there was something comforting about Kirsty’s soft snuffling in the night.

  Flinty would have liked to read: something where the hero clasped the heroine in his arms, like Persuasion, which was one of her favourite books, or the wonderful Jane Eyre. Dad had ordered new books every month, to read out on the verandah. Mum and Flinty took it in turn to read to each other in the kitchen, while the other shelled peas or did the ironing. Things ended just as they should in books. But it had been weeks since she’d even opened one. There was no time, except at the end of the day. Lamp oil for reading in bed was a luxury.

  Flinty stared at the stars out the window instead. Impossible to sleep. There was too much to think about.

  A ghost on the Rock.

  A ride that might make a hundred pounds, or even more, and bring her brother back.

  A man from the future called Nicholas.

  What was it like for him, legless, in the future? Was he lying in bed thinking about her too? How did a legless man even get into bed?

  Maybe he had a nurse…or a wife. No, she thought. He had seemed the loneliest man in the world, hiding from his family, cast away by those of his own age for what he’d done, and because of what he’d lost.

  And he’d liked her. He’d been rude at first, but then he’d really talked to her. He’d called her ‘the girl from Snowy River’. She’d been too overwhelmed by his very existence to think about it then, but now the words came whispering back.

  The girl from Snowy River. But it was ‘The Man from Snowy River’. That was the poem people knew. She reckoned they’d still recite that poem fifty years in the future too, like the song about Miss Matilda’s father that everyone still sang.

  It was ‘The Man from Snowy River’…unless a girl someday did a ride like that too. An extraordinary ride, like the one in the poem, down steep slopes and up the crags, chasing brumbies through the scrub, so that people still spoke of it fifty years later.

  Joey couldn’t do it. He was a good rider. But she was, well, much more than good. And Empress could outrun on rough ground any horse Flinty had met.

  She’d told Joey the truth. They couldn’t risk losing him, or injuring Empress. But if there was a ghost from the future who knew about a ‘girl from Snowy River’, he might know if she made the ride safely, if her horse had made it back too.

  Hadn’t he said he’d seen a photo of her when she was ‘a few years older than you are now’?

  A hundred pounds. Horses in the paddock. Andy back home again. And a ghost who would know if it could be done, because if it had been done it would be history, unchangeable, the past.

  Suddenly she knew she longed for him to be real almost as much as she had longed for Sandy to be safe.

  She slept at last, the starlight on her face. She slept restlessly, dreaming of ghosts. The stars were fading when she opened her eyes again.

  She glanced across the room. It was still too dark to make out more than a bump under the quilt, but she could hear Kirsty’s sleepy snuffling. She slipped out of bed and into one of Mum’s cut-down dresses — no riding today and a dress was quieter to put on than Dad’s trousers, shirt and belt.

  She picked up her shoes and tiptoed out, through the kitchen onto the back verandah, with its neatly stacked firewood. She automatically carried in a couple of pieces and shoved them on the coals in the wood stove and in the fireplace, then slid outside again, the boots on her feet.

  It was lighter out here, the sun shoving light into the world from down under the mountains where it had sunk last night. She could just make out the dark of the ridges against the greyer sky. Empress whinnied from the back paddock. Flinty shook her head at her and ran down the road.

  Chapter 7

  23 November 1919

  Dear Diary,

  Collected ten eggs today — the hens are laying again. Swept the kitchen chimney — the last thing we need is a chimney fire now — Joey poking the brush down from the roof while Kirsty and I pulled below, then scrubbed the floor to clean up the mess. Baked more bread, made pancakes for lunch, stuffed a shoulder of mutton for dinner, put on a big pot of rabbit and potato stew, enough for three days at least, and darned three socks in the firelight after dinner.

  And talked to the ghost. To Nicholas.

  Because he isn’t a ghost.

  He’s real.

  The mist drifted down the gullies again, wisping through the soft dawn light, more mist than yesterday, resting in a puddle around the Rock. But it was thin enough to see that there was no one there.

  Disappointment slapped her. But Nicholas hadn’t said when he’d be on the Rock. If he really was somehow in 1969 maybe he couldn’t appear to her again even if he was sitting on the Rock in his own time now. Maybe their times had just slipped together once, and never would again.

  If Nicholas never came back she’d never know if it had all been real or not.

  She turned to go back to the house, then stopped. She hadn’t seen him yesterday until she and Empress had been actually in the mist.

  Suddenly the whiteness seemed alien, not the fog she’d known all her life. She took a breath, then stepped into it, feeling something more than the early morning chill. ‘Hello?’ she whispered.

  All at once the fog around her thinned. He was there, sitting in the damp white air in his bathchair, holding something square and yellow on his lap, but this time he was staring towards the house, not over the valley. Her heart thumped like a cartwheel rolling over a stone, a rush of emotions too mixed up to sort out: relief, wonder, anticipation, all with a breath of fear that impossible things were still happening to her, Flinty McAlpine, even if life was going back to normal for her neighbours… He turned and looked at her. She saw a brief flash of pleasure on his face before a bright light shone from the yellow thing, blinding her. She put her hand up to shield her eyes from the glare.

  ‘Sorry.’ The light vanished.

  ‘What’s that?’ she whispered.

  ‘A torch. It was still dark when I set out.’ He looked glad to see her; as excited as she was.

  She looked down at his torch. It was even stranger than his bathchair, his hair. His clothes looked odd today too. She felt a giggle bubble up through the fear and strangeness.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Your shirt has flowers on it!’ But at least it was normal strangeness, something that a man from the future might have, a new invention like the wireless players Joey talked about, not something weird from the world of ghosts.

  ‘It’s psychedelic, not floral
. I’m not a hippy.’ He looked at her, assessing. ‘You don’t know either of those words, do you?’

  Psychedelic? Hippy? Nonsense. She shook her head.

  ‘Then you really are in the past. I couldn’t sleep last night. Thought the people up here were playing a trick on me. Or maybe I was seeing things.’

  ‘Me too,’ she whispered.

  ‘Got up an hour ago, decided I’d wait here all day, just to see if you came back.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘One second there was no one there. Then suddenly you were here. No tricks. No delusions.’

  ‘It was like that for me too. I could see the Rock as I walked down from the house. It was empty till I stepped into the mist.’ She tried a smile. It worked. ‘Maybe we’re both ghosts.’

  ‘Or both real.’

  They stared at each other. I should be frightened, thought Flinty. Instead it felt like she’d tried to stuff her excitement into a bag, and now it was seeping out.

  She stood there, the too-long dress clinging damply to her ankles, not knowing what to ask first. She had to ask about the brumby muster, but there was so much else she wanted to know too. About him, where he came from, who his family was. The whole incredible thought of fifty years to come… ‘What’s it like, in the future? You said there’s war again. But they say now there won’t be — that ours was the war to end all wars.’ It had been a crumb of comfort to think Jeff had died so there’d be no more war again.

  ‘Well, they’re wrong.’ Some of the harshness was back in his voice.

  I’m glad Mum never knew, she thought. ‘When will the next war be?’

  He inhaled, then looked at her consideringly. ‘I don’t know how much to tell you. I’ve been thinking about it, you see. Just in case you really were real. You might ask me what happens in your life, maybe your brothers’ lives, your children’s lives.’

  ‘Then I’m going to have children!’

  He laughed, a real laugh but with regret too. ‘See how easy it is, Flinty McAlpine? I decided not to tell you anything that matters, and now I’ve told you that.’

  ‘Why can’t you tell me?’

  ‘In case I change the past.’

  ‘But if the past has already happened in your time then it can’t be changed.’

  ‘Or maybe I’ll go out of this mist to find it’s a different world because I’ve changed it.’

  ‘Is yours a good world?’ Maybe knowing another war might happen would stop it, she thought. But one girl on a mountain couldn’t stop a war, especially if she told people that a ghost told her it was coming.

  ‘It’s better than in your time,’ he said frankly. ‘Except in places where there’s war, but that’s not in Australia. There aren’t even many Australians involved in Vietnam, not compared to the hundreds of thousands in your World War I.’

  She blinked, the implications sinking in. ‘World War I? That was our war? So there’s another really big war? Not just like the Boer Wars in South Africa?’

  ‘I’m going to shut up about the future,’ he said. He grinned suddenly, cockily, so she had a glimpse of what he must have been like before he lost his legs, before he got the war shadows like Andy and Toby and Sandy. ‘I’m not even going to tell you that men walked on the moon.’

  She glanced up automatically, even though the moon was long set. ‘I don’t believe you.’

  ‘But it’s true. When you’re sixty-six — if you’re ever sixty-six: I’m not saying you’re going to be — you can bet a hundred dollars that man will have walked on the moon by the end of 1969. And that won’t change the past,’ he added.

  ‘All right. I will.’

  He nodded, still smiling. His face looked so different with a smile. Suddenly she thought: fifty years. I might still be alive in 1969. ‘Have you met me?’ she asked sharply.

  ‘No more answers.’

  ‘I can’t be a ghost in your time if I’m still alive!’

  He hesitated. ‘You’re still alive. I don’t think either of us are ghosts like that.’

  She sat down on the Rock. It was cold under her thin dress, but her body felt too heavy for her legs. Somehow talking about her own death had been more real than anything that had gone before. ‘Is Sandy still alive?’ she whispered. ‘And Kirsty and —’

  ‘Flinty, hush. Please. I don’t know what’s happening here.’ He hesitated. ‘The people I’m staying with told me I might see a ghost down here — the ghost of Flinty McAlpine. That’s how I knew your name yesterday.’

  ‘They sent you to see me?’

  ‘I don’t know! I thought they were joking. Maybe they were joking. But now…’

  ‘Maybe they weren’t.’

  ‘And maybe I can cause a lot of problems if I say too much. I need to talk to them again. Need to think this through.’

  ‘Who are they?’ she demanded.

  He just shook his head.

  She tried to take it all in, the reality of it, the feeling that somewhere just out of sight there were people from another time, talking about her, knowing what had happened in her life.

  And he wasn’t going to tell her anything more. Not today, at least. But she couldn’t wait even another day or two to know if she should go on the muster — if she had done it, in the past.

  I have to get him talking, she thought. If he talks about other things he might make a mistake, like he did talking about my children. ‘Please. I need to know one more thing.’

  ‘Only one thing?’ He was almost teasing.

  ‘Lots of things.’ All at once she knew what would get him talking. And it wouldn’t really be a trick, because it was what she wanted to know — needed to know — almost as badly as about the muster. She took a breath. ‘If you won’t tell me about my future tell me about the past.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘When I was at school Mr Ross taught us history. About the battles of Agincourt and Waterloo and the messenger who fell dead at Wellington’s feet. So do you know what the war was like — my brothers’ war? The one you call World War I?’

  ‘A bit,’ he admitted slowly.

  ‘I don’t,’ she said flatly. ‘I know the dates, the names of battles from the newspaper. That’s all. No one says anything. No one will tell me.’

  ‘In my time no one asks. The war in Vietnam…most of Australia thinks we shouldn’t be there. We didn’t come home as heroes, like your brother. Half the girls I know pity me. The other half think I’m a moral coward for going at all.’

  ‘But it’s brave to go and fight.’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s easier just to go when you’re told.’

  ‘But you were brave.’

  He was silent for a few moments. ‘You know, I think I was,’ he said. ‘For some reason I never really thought about it before.’ He gave her a cautious smile, the teasing over. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m on this Rock, Flinty McAlpine: to hear a girl say that I was brave. Yeah, we learned about Gallipoli in World War I, how we were heroes then. But I bet no one ever teaches kids in school about the Battle of Long Tan. There were a lot of blokes braver than me there. Still are, fighting over there.’

  ‘So your war wasn’t like Andy’s war?’

  He seemed to think about it. ‘I don’t know,’ he said at last. ‘Maybe all wars are much the same once you’re inside them. I’m not the one to ask.’

  A cuckoo began its soft descant below them. The east glowed grey above the ridges. It would turn red soon. Joey and Kirsty would be up, looking for her.

  If they came down here, would they find Nicholas too? Somehow she didn’t think so. But she didn’t want them to either. Life was confusing enough for two orphans without throwing in a ghost. ‘Please. Tell me what you do know about World War I.’ It seemed strange giving it a new name.

  ‘It was bad,’ he said slowly. ‘We didn’t learn a lot more than that. Rats as big as corgi dogs in the trenches, that kind of thing. Mostly it was just so big, went on for so long. The poor ba— blokes never got a decent break, just
English commanders ordering them out of the trenches into enemy fire to try to take a few yards of ground. Tens of thousands killed in a day. They had new weapons — machine guns and tanks and planes — but the commanders were still trying to fight the old way. I suppose it’s pretty crook if being in a muddy trench with rats and the dead around you is the good bit, better than being ordered over the top to fight.’ He paused, then said, ‘I’m sorry. I know less than I thought. All I can say is that it was bad. Very bad and very long.’

  Maybe that’s all I need to know, she thought. It was long and it was bad. Now they were home. Perhaps Toby was right, and she should let it go. And maybe, just maybe, if there were long enough good times they might feel better.

  A kookaburra yelled. Another echoed it, and another. The sky was pink and yellow above the black line of the ridges now, the cap of snow turning gold. There was no more time to hope he’d accidentally answer her now. She said quickly, ‘One more question. Please, just one. An important one.’

  ‘Maybe.’ His voice was cautious.

  ‘You called me the girl from Snowy River. Why? Did I…do I do a ride like in the poem?’

  He was silent.

  He’s not going to answer, she thought.

  All at once the realisation shook her. He had answered. And she hadn’t realised, and nor had he.

  He’d talked about when she was sixty-six. He wouldn’t do that if she wasn’t to be that old. He’d talked about her children!

  She was ‘the girl from Snowy River’. She’d get her ride.

  If she was going to live to be an old woman then it was safe to go on the muster. She tried to keep the knowledge from her face. She didn’t want him to worry about what he’d accidentally told her. And it couldn’t change the past, because he’d already known that she had done it.

  ‘It’s all right,’ she said abruptly. ‘You don’t have to answer.’

  She saw the relief in his face, and was glad of it — glad he had stopped worrying she’d demand too many answers, like she had with Andy. Glad that he was a man with a conscience, who cared about whether he should answer questions or not.