The Girl from Snowy River

by Jackie French

  It was terrifying. It was beyond any dream of wonderful. She was scared, exultant, wishing she was safe back in her chair, wishing this would never end, frightened that she would be forever crippled, elated that she’d had this last ride, at least. She was the eagle flying; a small child wanting to cry for help. She was horse and rider, one instead of two. She was the land, the breath of mountains, the beat of kangaroos. And then she was a girl again, with a desperate job to do.

  The creek glinted to her left, snaking its way through the rocks, quartz winking at the sun. It was already twice as big as usual. But anyone seeing how it had risen would just think there’d been rain up top and this was the worst it would be. The true flood would come quickly, a wall of water as high as the half-grown she-oaks, powerful enough to lift boulders and uproot trees.

  Snow King leaped again. Flinty tried not to think what the impacts would be doing to his still-growing leg bones. Bad enough to gallop him at all, so young, so long, without taking him on rough ground like this. Another leap, landing awkwardly this time. She grabbed his mane even harder, trying to keep her body moving with the rhythm of his.

  If she fell now the hooves might crush her. If she fell now…

  No. She would not fall. She couldn’t.

  Snow King soared again. But this jump took him across the final hop bush onto the track again. It was muddy, rutted, but clear of wombat holes. At least here the young horse could see where he was going, as long as he kept clear of puddles; the muddy water was deceptively deep.

  Round one bend…and another…and there was old Dusty Jim’s shack. Please, she prayed, don’t let him be asleep with his rum bottle. If she had to get down to find him she might never get up again. Old Dusty only had a dozen sheep he kept for meat and the few quid he got for the fleeces, but they too would be on the creek flats now.

  There he was, on the verandah. He was asleep, and there was an empty rum bottle on the floor under his chair. But he woke when she pulled at Snow King’s lead rope and shouted, ‘Flash flood coming! Snow melt on the mountain!’

  ‘What? When?’ He stared at her blearily from age-clouded eyes.

  ‘Get your sheep in! Now!’ she yelled.

  Was he too drunk to understand? But he took off at a shambling jog towards the creek flats, shouting for his dogs. Rum or not, he knew what flash flood meant.

  Snow King’s sides heaved, and he gasped for air. But he surged forwards down the track again, as soon as she shook the lead rope and clicked her tongue. He was born to race, thought Flinty, trying to erase her promise never to ride another horse this hard from her memory. The king horse, just like in her book, proud of his strength, determined to outrun even a flood.

  And she might cripple him, she who knew all too well what it was to be a cripple.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered as they pounded on. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  He couldn’t hear. He couldn’t understand. And suddenly she realised that this was a horse who was born for more than simply racing. His great-grandmother may have been Regret, the greatest racehorse of them all. But his ancestors had been bred to be partners with humans too. Snow King had been born to run with her today, to break his heart, his legs, just like the poor horse who’d belonged to the real man from Snowy River. He’d do what his rider wanted even if he died in the attempt. She had created the king of horses in her book. Was she destroying a king horse too?

  The Mullinses’ next. She’d hoped to see Andy — if he was already mounted he could take over the run. But instead there was old Vati Green, steering the plough behind his big Clydesdale. He and his sons must have come up to help with the ploughing, not knowing this field would be under water in an hour. She pulled Snow King back to a jog and waved frantically. ‘Mr Green!’

  ‘Felicity, mein Gott —’

  ‘Flash flood coming!’ She pointed to the creek, then up to the ceiling of cloud. ‘Blizzard up there last night — and now the snow is melting! It’ll be the biggest flood ever. Get the animals out of the lower paddocks, and people too. You understand?’

  ‘I understand!’ He slapped the Clydesdale on the rump to turn the plough, taking them uphill. ‘Heinrich!’ he yelled. Flinty heard the answer: ‘Ja, Papa?’

  She jerked the lead rope to head down the track again. The swerve jolted her back so badly she felt not pain, just sweat, springing from every pore, prickling her scalp, a wave of blackness that tried to take her into unconsciousness. She had to wrap her mind around Snow King, the smell of him, the rhythm of his hooves. Slowly her vision cleared again, though the world still spun. Snow King was wet with sweat too, his back and neck slippery.

  The Macks’ next. She pulled the colt’s head towards the gate. He responded at once, hopping across the cattle ramp, cantering up the road towards the house.

  What time was it? Mid-morning, she supposed. There was no one working in the paddocks nearby. She pulled at the rope as Mrs Mack hurried out of the front door.

  ‘Flinty love! What on earth —’

  ‘Flash flood coming. Snow melting! Got to warn them, move the stock —’

  ‘The boys are down on the river flats —’

  ‘I’ve got to find them. Got to warn them.’

  ‘You’ll do no such thing. You bide there.’ She reached up to the bell outside the front door. The jangle filled the valley. Clang, clang, clang… Snow King skittered sideways, Flinty clinging on grimly. She heard a far-off answering whistle from beyond the trees.

  ‘They’ve heard,’ said Mrs Mack, wiping her hands on her old sacking apron. ‘Someone will be down in half a jiffy.’

  ‘I can’t wait! I’ve got to warn the others —’ She stopped as a horse broke through the trees, its rider urging it forwards, and then another. Toby, she thought, and Sandy.

  ‘Ma! What is it?’ yelled Toby. ‘You ain’t been bitten by a snake?’

  ‘Pa’s just coming,’ panted Sandy. He reined his horse as he saw Flinty. ‘What the flaming hell —’

  ‘Language,’ said Mrs Mack. ‘Flood’s coming. Snowstorm melting up above.’

  ‘A big one,’ gasped Flinty. ‘It’ll cover the lower paddocks. It’s going to come fast too.’

  Sandy slid from his horse and ran to Flinty. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll help you down.’

  ‘No! I have to warn the others…’ All the Colours of the Valley, she thought. She had to warn them as well.

  ‘I can do that,’ said Toby, then as she opened her mouth again, ‘I’ll warn the school too, make sure everyone is up safe.’ She realised with desperate relief he was right. She had done all she need to.

  Toby dug his heels into his mare. She sprang to a gallop, fresher than Snow King, whose sides were still heaving and running with sweat.

  ‘What’s all the fuss, Ma?’ Mr Mack drew his horse to a standstill too. ‘Thought the house must be on fire, all that clanging.’

  ‘Flash flood’s coming. Big one, and fast. Snow melt,’ said Sandy shortly. ‘Flinty, slide off this way. I’ll catch you. Dad will see to Snow King.’

  ‘Cold poultices, for his legs,’ panted Flinty. If they could stop them swelling it might limit the damage. Oh, you poor horse. You darling horse, she thought. What have I done to you? Taken a king from the brumbies and then destroyed him…

  ‘Dad knows what to do,’ said Sandy. ‘Don’t worry, love. We’ll do our best for him.’

  Suddenly Mr Mack was barking orders. ‘Bernie, you come with me; Sam, you take the dogs down to the lower paddock…’

  Hands covered hers on the sweaty rope now, unwrapped her fist from the hank of Snow King’s mane. Sandy’s hands. ‘Come on, Flinty darling,’ he said quietly. ‘You can let go now.’

  ‘I…I can’t get off.’ Her back seemed frozen. Perhaps it would be frozen forever, the broken bones jolted so much that maybe even more were broken now. Darling, she thought. He called me darling. Now, when I may never move again.

  ‘It’s all right, love,’ said Sandy. He tugged at her gently and she slid into h
is arms. Warm, safe arms that carried her up the stairs and into the sitting room, and placed her softly down onto the sofa, as though she was as light as a feather pillow.

  ‘Hot bran poultice for her back,’ he said to Mrs Mack, who had followed them in. ‘And blankets too.’

  Mrs Mack vanished. Flinty tried to focus through the pain and growing fear.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Sandy said. ‘Leave it to Toby and Dad. Toby will have told Mr Ross already. They’ll bring everyone’s sheep up. And as long as the paddock gates are open, any they can’t round up will hear the water and run.’

  She nodded, trying not to cry. Mrs Mack was back, tucking the poultice behind her. It helped, but only a little.

  ‘I can’t feel my legs,’ she whispered. ‘Not even my toes. Even when it was worst I could still feel my toes.’

  ‘You’ll feel them again,’ said Sandy. His eyes looked like he would tear mountains down if that could help.

  ‘Tea,’ said Mrs Mack, in the tone of someone who knew that anything was better with hot tea. She disappeared towards the kitchen again.

  It was better with tea, well sweetened. She sipped and the nausea slowly eased. The shock of the pain ebbed, even if the pain did not.

  Her legs were still numb, but faintly, very faintly, she felt pins and needles in her toes. Outside she could hear barking and the annoyed baaing of sheep. A smell of pikelets cooking and hot butter came from the kitchen — another of Mrs Mack’s remedies for the woes of the world.

  ‘I used to dream of Mum’s pikelets,’ said Sandy. He sat on the rag rug on the floor next to the sofa. Somehow he was still holding her hand, the one that didn’t hold the teacup.

  ‘You told me. That’s about all you ever have told me about the war,’ said Flinty.

  He shrugged. ‘Not much to tell, except what I put in postcards. No,’ as she began to protest, ‘it’s the truth.’

  ‘But the danger…people being blown up and the rats…’

  ‘Most days were pretty much the same,’ said Sandy. ‘Seen one trench rat you’ve seen them all.’ He gazed at her. Time seemed to stretch, years in a few seconds.

  At last she said, ‘Snow King…do you think he’ll be all right?’

  He didn’t try to reassure her, to tell her not to worry. Sandy would never do that. ‘We won’t know for a few days.’

  ‘I’ll sit up with him tonight, keep changing the poultices…’

  ‘You’ll be resting that back of yours, in this house,’ said Sandy.

  ‘But it’s my fault! If Snow King ends up a useless cripple it’ll be because of me. I…I can’t bear it, Sandy.’

  ‘Yes, you can,’ he said softly. ‘You’ll bear it because you have to, Flinty McAlpine. You did what you had to. Remember that.’ He looked at her steadily. ‘I had a horse killed under me once. I had to watch him die. Black Thunder, you remember him? It was my fault he died, my fault that he was in the war at all. But I was doing what I had to, Flinty. Just like you.’

  It helped, a bit.

  ‘Flinty.’ He was clearly hunting for words now. ‘It was my fault Jeff died too. It was twice my fault.’

  ‘What? I don’t understand.’

  ‘I dared him to join the march with me that day. Dared him to say he was eighteen. I’m sorry, Flinty. I’ve been trying to bring myself to tell you since I got back.’

  Sister Burrows was wrong, he wasn’t keen on her. It was just guilt… She wanted to cry: cry with pain, with shock, the relief that she’d been in time to warn the downstream families, weep for Snow King, for Jeff and for herself. But tears seemed locked away in a cold dark place she couldn’t find.

  ‘You said it was twice your fault?’

  He nodded, his gaze still caught on hers. ‘He saved my life, Flinty. At Bullecourt. They ordered us out of the trenches — a full moon, they could mow us down like shooting skittles, but we had to go. I was halfway through the barbed wire of no-man’s-land, between our trenches and the Huns’, when a shell burst in front of me. Don’t know what happened for a while. But when I woke I was trapped there, in the wire. Cold, I’ve never known such cold; I was too weak to move.

  ‘Our blokes had fallen back then. The only ones around me were dead. I knew when dawn came the Huns would have me. I was like a rat caught in a trap. One shot and I’d be dead.

  ‘But Jeff came after me. I swore at him, told him to go back. But you know Jeff. He cut the wire, bit by bit. It took forever, but he kept on going. He pulled me out, dragged me through that mud. He was lifting me when the next shot came, the one that had been meant for me.’

  He stopped, as though his own small flood had died down. She said softly, ‘That’s when he died?’

  ‘Yes. It wasn’t quick, Flinty. I lied. We all lied, time after time, about things like that. He screamed for hours, growing weaker all the time. And I just lay there helpless, listening to my best mate die.’

  The teacup was on the table. Somehow her arms had gone around his shoulders; his head was pressed into her. ‘Sandy… Sandy, it’s all right. What…what happened to you then?’

  ‘I lay there,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t tell Mum, will you? Don’t want her to know. I lay there for three days. I think that’s what saved me, Flinty. That’s what Sister Burrows said.’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I had shrapnel cuts from my chest right down to my legs. That mud — it was half blood. I should have died of gangrene. But then the maggots found me —’

  ‘Sandy, no…’

  ‘The maggots saved me. They ate the dead flesh. After Sister Burrows sewed me up she said the wounds were clean, and that I’d live, if I wanted to. She said that it was up to me.

  ‘I didn’t just dream of pikelets,’ said Sandy. ‘I dreamed of you. That’s what I wanted to come back to. It’s always been you, even at school. When things were at their worst I dreamed of you and me up on the mountain. I’d think: I only have to get through this and I’ll be there.’

  The cold dark place melted, leaving a glow instead. ‘I thought you’d changed your mind. You didn’t even kiss me when you got back. You’d seen so much. So many girls —’

  ‘No one but you,’ said Sandy.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ It couldn’t just have been guilt about Jeff’s death, she thought.

  Sandy glanced at the door, but there was no sign of Mrs Mack, just frypan noises from the kitchen. ‘I didn’t think I could marry anyone. Not and make them live with this.’

  He moved away from her and began to unbutton his shirt.

  Flinty gasped. The scars were purple, ridged and heavy lipped, like giant worms wriggling across his skin.

  ‘It’s like this all down my body. All the way, Flinty, down to my knees.’

  She saw what he meant. It wasn’t just the ugliness he was trying to show her now.

  ‘You mean you…you think you can’t have children?’

  ‘I think I can. Perhaps it’ll be all right. But you can’t ask a girl to marry you with a “perhaps”, Flinty. Not a girl like you.’

  Your children, Nicholas had said. What had he said about her children?

  It didn’t matter. When she had children they’d be with Sandy, because she wasn’t marrying anyone else ever, no matter what.

  ‘Perhaps is good enough,’ she said. She took his hand again. ‘But I reckon we can do better than perhaps.’

  ‘That’s what Sister Burrows told me. She said I should stop dilly-dallying and ask you.’

  Flinty could just imagine the way she’d said it too.

  ‘When I took her back to Gibber’s Creek to catch the train I bought this.’

  He felt in his pocket and pulled out a box. It was small and square, covered in fine brown leather. He opened it. The ring inside was a thin gold band, with a small row of blue stones, clear as the mountain sky. A betrothal ring, thought Flinty. The stones glowed against the deep blue velvet, even in the dimness of the room. ‘I’ve been carrying it in my pocket ever since. Didn’t want to let th
e boys see it, or Mum.’ He swallowed. ‘All right if I put it on you?’

  ‘Why?’ she said stupidly, then realised it was probably the most unromantic proposal and the silliest answer in the history of marriage.

  ‘So that every bloke who sees it on you knows you’re mine.’

  ‘Sandy…dear Sandy…are you sure you want a wife who can’t walk?’

  ‘You’ll walk again. And even if you don’t, we’ll manage. But like you said, I reckon we’ll do better than perhaps.’ He gazed at her steadily. ‘You saved every farm in the valley today. You’re a heroine, Flinty McAlpine. I reckon you can do anything you set your mind to.’

  It wasn’t a great speech, not like in books, but she was crying anyway. ‘All right,’ she said. She wanted to say, ‘With you beside me we can do anything,’ but she couldn’t quite say romantic words either. On paper, perhaps, where romantic things belonged. But not out loud.

  She held out her hand. He slipped on the ring.

  ‘Too big. I knew I should have got a size smaller.’

  ‘I’ve been wondering for two years when you were going to get around to that, Sandy lad.’ Mrs Mack stood in the doorway, holding a plate of pikelets. ‘And don’t think you hid that jeweller’s box from me, because you didn’t. Wrap a bit of rag around your finger, lovey,’ she added to Flinty. ‘That way you can wear it till he can get a jeweller to make it fit.’

  A rumble began to shake the valley, vibrating even through the sofa. The flood had hit the creek flats. Flinty heard the first crash of a fallen log bashing its way through the trees, the grind of boulders carried by the mountain tide.

  ‘Will Toby have got to everyone in time?’

  ‘Plenty of time,’ said Sandy, still gazing at her, both her hands in his. ‘All the time in the world.’

  ‘I’ll go and make some dumplings for the stew,’ said Mrs Mack. ‘They’ll be hungry when they come in. You can kiss her when I’m in the kitchen,’ she added.

  ‘All right,’ said Sandy. He grinned at Flinty, and moved towards her.

  His lips were warm. The taste of him, the strength of him, filled the world. He was the most real thing she had ever felt. She wanted to stay next to him for her whole life; she knew in all the ways that counted that she would.