She placed a halter on Snow King that afternoon, slipping it over his nose and up behind his ears, the lead rope attached. He resisted only briefly, tossing his head and then considering her, before allowing her to put it in place. He was surprisingly easy to teach to lead too.
‘Maybe Empress has convinced him to trust me,’ she told Sandy when he arrived with Toby and the extra horse the next day. Empress had been grazing next to the colt’s pen all night. Flinty had heard them whinnying to each other as she sat by the fire, glad of its light as the dingoes howled in the hills.
‘Nah. Reckon he loves you,’ said Sandy shortly, as Toby took their horses down to the creek.
Can a horse love? thought Flinty, and then, Of course they can.
It took them till late afternoon to lead the horses back, going slowly for Empress’s sake, eating the mutton and chutney sandwiches, the pikelets and fruitcake Mrs Mack had packed for them, with jars of cold sweet tea.
For a while they walked along the river flats beside the Snowy, the sand freshly swept clear by spring’s thaw, dappled with wombat and roo prints, and the longer trails left by horses and their riders. The debris was piled high and dry up in the trees.
Flinty wished she could carry some back — driftwood was the best tinder of all. Rock Farm was too high on the mountain for their trees along the creek to collect much, even after the spring thaws.
Toby talked of the lambing, which floodgates had been destroyed in the rush of the spring melt. He seemed to have forgiven her. She was glad. There was no awkward silence now, as they rode along the sand. But she still wished that she was alone with Sandy.
At last they reached Rocky Creek. They followed it, ambling up into the valley along the shade-dappled creek flats rather than heading over to the road. The hills on either side closer now, the mountains high and clear in the distance, a plume of blue smoke coming from the Whites’ place, the sound of wood chopping from the Browns’, a cow calling her calf from the Greens’. Only the smoke and fences showed that the valley was inhabited by humans, until they came in sight of the Macks’ farm, sitting in its tiny garden of roses and camellias between the paddocks of corn and potatoes.
‘Flinty!’ Kirsty ran down the road, her plaits flying. Flinty put her hand up quickly, gesturing for her to stop and wait. She didn’t want Snow King to pull back and reef the rope from her hand this close to the end of the journey.
Kirsty stopped, jigging from one leg to the other as the horses and people came abreast of her. Then she could hold back the torrent of words no longer. ‘You’ve been so long! I’ve got eleven new freckles and lost a tooth and Mrs Mack made me a new dress out of your old green one. It’s got lace around the collar from one of her shawls. Real lace! And —’
Flinty dismounted and hugged her. It felt like Kirsty had grown, even in the few days she’d been away. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.
‘Mr Mack brought us down here. We had plum pie last night! Did you know Mrs Mack has a sapphire ring? It doesn’t fit her finger any more. She says she’s keeping it for the next girl who marries one of her boys. Joey’s out with Mr Mack and the boys,’ she added, ‘dagging the sheep. He says he wants to be a shearer now.’
The month before he’d wanted to be an engine driver. Flinty suspected that Dad and Mum had hoped for something different for their youngest son, but a shearer might be the best he could do now. Though could Joey ever be satisfied with the world of sheds and sheep? Joey with his million questions?
She felt a stab of guilt that she had taken her brother’s adventure for herself. She’d made the right decision — Mr Sampson would have left Joey at Drinkwater like he’d wanted to leave her. But even getting that far would have meant a lot to Joey.
She took Kirsty’s hand, holding the colt’s lead rope in the other, as Sandy wordlessly took Sally’s reins and led her behind the house.
Kirsty seemed to take in the young horse for the first time. ‘Is that your new horse? Sandy said you rounded up a whole mob of brumbies. And you made a hundred pounds! Does the King of England have a hundred pounds?’
Flinty gently stroked Snow King’s neck. The colt allowed it. He didn’t even seem rattled by the small prattling girl, though he sniffed the scents around him, ears alert.
‘I think King Edward has a bit more than that. I made ninety pounds.’ Enough to pay the rates, she thought. To buy stores; for Joey and Kirsty to go to school again.
And Snow King will bring our Andy home too.
Chapter 15
29 November 1919
Dear Diary,
I put a saddle on Snow King today. Didn’t fasten it, just let him feel the weight. He seemed curious, not frightened at all. I don’t think anything frightens Snow King. He canters up when he sees me coming now. I don’t think it’s just for his apple. Maybe he does love me, like Sandy says.
No mist on the Rock today. I don’t think ghosts come unless there’s mist, otherwise everyone would see them. I wonder if there are other ghosts sometimes, not just me and Nicholas. I think there must be, because of the stories. But one ghost is enough for me.
I hope the mist is there tomorrow. I know I said I wouldn’t be there for a few more days. I wish I hadn’t. I wish I’d said it might be that long, but I’d try to be there earlier. I want to see him! It would be good to just know that Nicholas was there too, that I have a friend so close, even if he is a ghost.
The Rock was smooth and bare and mistless as Mr Mack’s cart jolted up the track the next day, with Flinty leading Empress and Snow King.
She wanted to tell Nicholas about her ride so badly that she thought she might have to tie herself to the kitchen table to stop herself running back to the Rock, sitting there in case he came again. But of course she couldn’t. There was the kitchen fire to light, the hens to feed and water, the swallows who were trying to build a nest over the front door to discourage.
Her brother and sister had needed reassuring too that she’d never leave them like that again. She’d had to coax Joey out of his sulks at being left out of the hunt by promising him the book on electrical engineering he’d read about in one of Mr Mack’s old newspapers. There was money for a few luxuries like books now, new boots, material for clothes.
Of course Nicholas already knew that it had happened, that the girl from Snowy River had done her ride. But she wanted to tell him everything: how it had felt to soar down the hillside, she and Empress working as one; how Mr Clancy had both praised and told her off, and about Mrs Clancy too. Everything; but mostly to thank him, because without the words of a ghost she might never have gone at all.
She ran down to the Rock as soon as Joey and Kirsty were asleep. But the ledge was still resolutely mistless, in this first dry heat of approaching summer, even though she sat there while the stars wheeled overhead, until the Southern Cross ‘turned over’, just as it had when she’d sat here with Dad and Jeff and Andy to watch it.
At last she hauled herself back up the track to home, so tired she could almost have curled up on the tussocks. Of course Nicholas hadn’t been there. She’d told him she wouldn’t be back for ten days. She wondered if that was really why the mist wasn’t there — not because of summer’s dryness, but because he didn’t expect her, wasn’t there waiting for her.
The next days were too full to think too much of Nicholas, or even to spend more than ten minutes every hour admiring Snow King. There was bread to bake, kindling to chop, so many rabbits in the traps she had to spend an afternoon helping Joey skin them, and hang the skins to dry.
There was the letter to write to Andy, care of Drinkwater (they’d send the letter on), to tell him about Snow King waiting for him to train. There was so much ‘now’ there wasn’t time to meet a ghost from the future.
There was the trip they all took to town with Mr and Mrs Mack in their cart, to get some of the ninety pounds Miss Matilda would have wired into the bank, staying overnight at a boarding house so Flinty could take out the money for the rates, buy supplies for the
year ahead: sacks of flour, salt and sugar, tins of treacle, baking soda and cocoa, boxes of dried fruit, tea and soap, real soap, not home-made slush.
They ate ice cream at the café, three scoops with chocolate sauce each in a metal dish all frosted from the cold, and then another three scoops with strawberry sauce because it tasted so good.
They walked up and down the main street four times, just for the fun of seeing so many shops all together, and so many people. Kirsty commented on every woman’s dress, and a car drove up the road, the horses skittering to one side, and Joey ran after it till it stopped outside the butcher’s and even managed to convince the driver to show him and Kirsty how the engine worked.
There were Christmas presents to buy too, while Mr and Mrs Mack took Kirsty and Joey to eat sandwiches in the park — real bought presents, not home-made ones, which was good because she hadn’t even had time to knit Andy a pair of socks. (She wondered briefly if the khaki ones knitted by her and Mum reminded him of the war too much, and promised herself she’d start knitting him some blue ones, even if not in time for Christmas.)
It was so good to have money for things they’d like for Christmas, not things they had to have. A jar of bullseyes (she’d have loved to buy chocolates in a silver box, but chocolate might melt on the way home), a box that played music when you opened it for Kirsty, a shotgun of his own for Joey, new boots for all of them — she wasn’t having her brother and sister going barefoot to school, even if most of the other children did all through winter when the wombat droppings froze and grew white frost whiskers and the snow cloaked the mountain tops all around. A ready-made pink dress for Kirsty too, and white stockings; and a new apron with ruffles for Mrs Mack, to thank her for all her kindness, and a pipe for Mr Mack.
She would have liked to buy a present for Sandy too, to thank him for taking her on the hunt, for his help with the colt, for, well, just for being Sandy, but she was afraid that he’d think she was trying to put her socks on his feet, like the girls had giggled about when she’d been at school. When a young man wore socks you’d knitted him it meant you were engaged, or as good as.
That tradition had vanished with the war — you knitted socks then for every soldier you knew, and many you didn’t, mates of Jeff’s or Andy’s who didn’t have mothers or sisters or lovers to knit for them or make them cakes or write them letters. But a special gift for Sandy now might look like she was still making sheep’s eyes at him.
In the end she decided to give the whole Mack family a giant Chinese-flowered porcelain jar of preserved ginger. Sandy loved ginger, and when the jar was empty Mrs Mack could use it as a vase.
She wished she could get Nicholas a Christmas present too. Would Nicholas spend Christmas in the mountains, or go back to his own home? She didn’t even know what his home was like, she realised, only that, like Andy, it wasn’t where he wanted to be now. But somehow she knew that any Christmas present to a ghost would stay here, in the past.
And then they were home: a home that smelled of cold ash in the kitchen stove, where swallows had built their nest (again!) over the front door, leaving bits of mud and grass they’d dropped all over the verandah — Dad had always laughed and said, ‘Leave them to their nesting,’ but it had been her and Mum who’d had to clean up the mess, and the bird droppings from the nestlings too.
She didn’t bother with lighting the kitchen fire tonight. Mrs Mack had given them a big egg and bacon pie to eat for dinner, made by her daughter-in-law and almost as good as hers. At last Joey was in bed, Kirsty giving a slight snicker in her sleep. At last she could close the front door quietly behind her, run down the starlit path and up onto the Rock.
It was still mistless, still hot from the day’s sun, its quartz crystals glowing slightly as if they saluted the stars. And there was still no Nicholas. The time wasn’t up until the next day.
She sat with her arms around her knees, looking out at the valley, the hills and ridges dark against the spangled sky, the soft glint of the creek. Slowly her eyes adapted to the dark, and there were trees; and she grew still enough to hear the soft whoosh of a bat, no more than a foot away from her hair, the boom of a powerful owl below.
It didn’t matter now if he came or not. It was just her, the valley and the stars. Then suddenly she felt the dampness of mist on her skin and heard the creak of wheels behind her. She turned.
He grinned, so obviously glad to see her that it soaked up some of the pain of Sandy’s rejection. ‘So, Flinty McAlpine, how did the muster go?’
She grinned back at him, feeling a gurgle of happiness spread through her. ‘I made ninety pounds. And brought home the best colt I’ve ever seen.’
‘Was there fire in the air, so that every gulp you breathed burned on the way down? Did Empress’s sweat foam like the muddy froth of a flood?’
She stared at him. ‘How do you know it was like that?’
‘That’s for you to find out.’ The grin was self-satisfied now. He was enjoying this, she saw; he had been waiting for this meeting as eagerly as she had been. ‘Maybe someone told me. Maybe I read it in a book. You’ll know one day.’
‘It wasn’t really that great a ride,’ she admitted. ‘Not like “The Man from Snowy River”.’ Though the real man from Snowy River’s ride hadn’t been like the poem either, had it? ‘Not enough to call me the girl from Snowy River.’
He was silent, as though considering what to say. ‘That’s not why they call you that,’ he said at last.
She stared at him. ‘But I thought that was what you meant… Why else would they call me that?’
‘Something happens that you don’t know about yet. Something I shouldn’t tell you. I can’t go changing the past.’
You’ve already done that, she thought. If it hadn’t been for him she’d never have gone brumby mustering, never claimed Snow King. ‘But the past has already happened for you. So if you changed it, it’s always been like that.’
‘Now that makes sense, I don’t think,’ he said dryly. ‘You know, I don’t know all that much about you. Not the important things. The girl you are now, not the girl from Snowy River.’
‘I was just thinking that I didn’t know much about you.’
He shrugged. ‘The main thing about me is this.’ He gestured to his legless knees.
‘No, it isn’t,’ she said softly.
He nodded at that. ‘Maybe you’re right. It was a few weeks ago. But not now. What about you, Flinty McAlpine? Are you happy? You didn’t look happy when I first met you, but you do now.’
She considered that. ‘Yes,’ she said finally. ‘I’m happy. I didn’t even know till I thought about it now. After the boys enlisted we were just sort of waiting. Waiting for them to come back, for the war to end. Waiting for a telegram to say they’d been killed or injured; waiting for the lists in the newspaper. But since Jeff died, since Mum had her heart attack, since Dad got sick, well, that was just surviving. Getting through each day, doing as much as I could but knowing it was never really enough. But now…’
‘You won ninety pounds and got a horse.’
‘It’s not just that. It’s…it’s the first thing I’ve ever done on my own. Not just carried on doing the things that have to be done. And it was fun,’ she added honestly. ‘Not having to put dinner on and make the bread, just being out there finding what was over the next ridge and the next, and the dew on my face when I woke up each morning. It was fun down in town, buying things. I even had ice cream. It’s like snow but creamy and…’
‘I know what ice cream is.’ He sounded amused. ‘I think just about every house in Australia has ice cream in its freezer these days.’
‘Every house!’ It seemed impossible. She laughed. ‘You’ve just told me about the future.’
‘But not anything that affects you. You’re not going to change your life because there’s more ice cream in your future.’
‘Well.’ She tried to give the word as much importance as Mr Clancy did. ‘It might if it was really good ice
cream. I might change my life for really good ice cream.’
He laughed.
‘What about you?’ she asked. ‘What has the last week been like for you?’
He remained silent for a moment. ‘Better,’ he said. ‘I’m making friends up here. Didn’t think I would,’ he answered honestly. ‘I just came up here, well, to escape, and this seemed the furthest I was likely to get. I thought no one up here would have time for a bloke in a wheelchair, much less a Vietnam veteran — that if a bloke couldn’t ride he wouldn’t be any use. But it hasn’t been like that at all. You know, they even got me manning the telephone exchange three days ago, when there was a fire down the valley.’
‘A bad one?’ she asked anxiously.
‘No. The wind changed. We got it under control by morning.’ He shook his head. ‘There you are. I’m saying “we” and all I did was man the exchange, relay messages from house to house.’
‘You mean every house has a telephone too!’
‘Most of them.’
‘I’ve only ever seen pictures of telephones in the newspaper.’ She tried to imagine a future where everyone had a telephone, even up here, and everyone had ice cream too. But Nicholas was still speaking.
‘So, yes. It’s been good. Getting good, at any rate. Still miss riding though. More than walking, in a way.’
‘Why don’t you try?’ The words were out before she could stop them.
The laughter vanished. ‘You know damn well why I can’t.’
She’d never heard a man swear in front of a girl or woman before. ‘You don’t need feet to ride. Your knees work, don’t they?’ she added anxiously, suddenly afraid she may have underestimated his loss.
The Girl from Snowy River Page 10
