It wasn’t that I was lonely; I had company enough. There was Old Sam beyond the fence, working in his garden, and sometimes he’d hold a carrot out over the fence. There was Mrs Sam hanging out the washing too, and the people passing, just as they’d done before.
No, I wasn’t lonely. It was the work I missed. What is a horse worth when the heart of his life has gone?
I’d been in that paddock two weeks, munching grass and staring at the air, when I met Susan.
She hadn’t been among the children tramping home from school before. (I found out later her family had only just moved to our street.) She was carrying a school bag, and she saw me standing there. She stopped and stared across the fence.
‘Hey, horse!’ she called.
One of the other girls came up beside her. ‘That’s the baker’s horse,’ she said. ‘They used to do deliveries up our street.’
Susan held out her hand. There was nothing in it, but I wandered up anyway. I had nothing else to do.
‘Look out,’ said the friend. ‘He might bite.’
‘No, he won’t,’ said Susan confidently.
I mumbled at her empty hand, just to be polite, and also to show the other girl that though some horses might bite, I didn’t — not Susan, at any rate.
Susan laughed. ‘His mouth feels soft! Wait a minute.’
She reached down and unclicked the fastenings of her school bag. It looked like brown cardboard, all worn at the corners. There was a book in there, and something wrapped up in greaseproof paper, and a round thing, orange, like a ball.
Susan held the orange ball thing out to me. ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Do horses like oranges?’
I sniffed at the ball, just in case it smelt more interesting close up, then dropped it at her feet. I knickered softly, just to tell her no hard feelings, but horses didn’t like oranges very much.
Susan bent down again, and unwrapped the greaseproof paper. ‘There’s just crusts left,’ she apologised. She held them out to me. ‘How about bread and honey, horse?’
It was sweet and it was wonderful. I ate them from her hand, then mumbled round her fingers just to see if any more was left, then swished my nose around the ground in case I’d dropped some crumbs.
I’ve never seen a girl smile so wide. ‘Isn’t he beautiful?’ she said to her friend.
Her friend shrugged. ‘He’s alright,’ she said.
So that was the start of it.
Susan came the next afternoon, with a whole honey sandwich for me this time.
I munched it and then I grinned at her. She thought that I was laughing, but I wasn’t — the honey had made my teeth ache, though it was worth it. But she laughed right back and Old Sam looked up at the noise from where he was mending the chicken run, and came on over.
‘You like horses, missy?’ he asked.
Susan nodded. ‘I’ve never seen a white one before though,’ she said. ‘Is he yours?’
Old Sam nodded. ‘Me and Snowy go way back,’ he said, stroking my side. A thought seemed to strike him. ‘Would you like a ride on him?’
‘On Snowy? Really?’ Susan danced up on tiptoes like she was trying to reach the moon. ‘Really? Really?’
‘You stay there a minute,’ said Old Sam, and he hopped over the fence again and came back with my bridle.
You know, it had been ten years or so since I’d had someone on my back — not since Young Sam was a little boy. But I suppose you don’t forget. It’s a different weight from pulling a cart, and Susan — why she was no weight at all.
There was no saddle, of course. Old Sam had never had one. But there was no need. Like Old Sam said, my back was as solid and broad as Susan’s bed at home.
She held on to my mane while Old Sam led me round and round the paddock. Two or three of her friends passed too and they stopped to watch, and Susan waved at them as proud as a queen.
There were four children waiting for a ride next afternoon.
I grew to know them all: Joy from down the road and Sharon from the market gardens and Cheryl-Anne, and there were others too. But Susan was my favourite.
I think she was Old Sam’s favourite as well. Susan had the first ride every day, no matter how many of the others were waiting. It was only right, as she’d been the first one to say hello.
And as for me, I was working again. It’s a great responsibility having children on your back, as important as delivering the bread. I was steady. I did it well.
Every day Susan had a honey sandwich for me. The others had offerings too sometimes: carrots and apples and Vegemite crusts, or long tender grass they’d pulled up over the fence line where I couldn’t reach, but I liked Susan’s sandwiches best.
School holidays and weekends she took to coming down in the early afternoons, and Old Sam would show her how to brush me down. She’d hold me and watch while the farrier trimmed my hooves as well. My feet needed trimming often now that they were no longer worn down on the road. Sometimes she’d plait my mane, a silly job, I thought. What was the point of it? But I stood it patiently, for Susan.
Susan got taller and I got slower, and Old Sam grew slower too. It was Susan, now, who led me round and round the paddock in the afternoons, and when she couldn’t come the children had to do without their ride, and they fed and patted me instead.
Ten more years I lived in that paddock. One morning I heard an engine mutter in the early morning instead of the clip-clop of the milkman’s cart. The milkman’s horse was the last of us delivery horses; I don’t know where they put him out to grass.
A few years after Young Sam came home, they built houses on the market gardens then on the paddock where the Mortimers had kept their sheep. One afternoon I saw Young Sam standing with a smart man in a suit and briefcase. They were staring at my paddock, as though wondering how many houses they’d fit there.
Then Young Sam shook his head. The smart man shrugged, and drove away.
Young Sam brought me out a carrot that night. A few weeks later he brought a baby to meet me, wrapped up in a blanket. He had three children by the end. On Saturday afternoons he’d lead me round and round the paddock with all three of them on my back.
They put black stuff down on the road one week, a noisy beast of a machine rolling it over and over till it was flat. The road wasn’t rutted any more now, and the rain ran off the road into the gutter instead of carving channels down the middle, and there were concrete gutters soon too. It wasn’t my road after that, not the dusty or muddy or frosty road I’d travelled up and down.
Things change as you get older. I overheard Old Sam tell someone that.
It was Susan who found me that Christmas morning, lying by the fence. I’d been watching for her, dozing on and off before she came, and I suppose one doze grew longer than the rest.
She’d brought me a honey sandwich for my Christmas dinner, and she cried, and Old Sam cried as well, but kept his face straight so Susan wouldn’t notice, and Young Sam fetched Johnny Rogers and his tractor over, and he dug a good deep hole.
It took Johnny two hours to dig the hole and then to fill it in, but he said he didn’t mind, even though it was Christmas Day. I’d given his children rides, and he remembered. They buried me there in that paddock where I’d lived the last years of my life, and Susan and Old Sam and Mrs Sam and Young Sam and his children watched it all, but it was Susan who cried the most.
I wanted to say, ‘Don’t cry, Susan. I’m still here.’ When the body dies, the heart stays with what it loves.
Look down the streets in the early morning, Susan, when the world is grey and only the stars are bright. Listen and you’ll hear the clip-clop of my hooves, and sometimes the dogs will bark. The dogs hear me, even if their owners can’t.
I am the horse that pulled the baker’s cart. I am the horse that brought the mail. I carried shearers and drove cattle through the dust.
Where trucks and cars now drive, I bore my loads with love and duty. Trucks are more powerful than I was, but you won’t get love from motors. I was humankin
d’s partner for six thousand years.
Look along the roads I travelled, where trucks and cars rush now. My heart is with you, Susan. Wherever you go from here, I’m with you still.
Notes on the stories
The Golden Pony
The first people to tame horses (instead of just spearing them and roasting them then chewing the bones) may have been the ancient Ukranians, about 4,000 BCE.
Horses and humans have been partners, then, for about 6,000 years. It’s unlikely that we could have been as successful a species, and wandered so fast or achieved so much so quickly without them.
In this story, Sunlight the Golden Pony is a cross between a Tarpan or ‘wild horse’, and an Asiatic Wild Horse, sometimes called Przewalski’s horse. These wild horse types are probably the ancestors of modern horses in Northern Europe and Asia.
The Golden Pony would have looked different from most modern horses. He was much smaller for a start, about 1.3 metres high, which was why Zushan’s feet touched the ground when she rode him. His mane would have stood straight up, his back would have been straight, and his ears dropped, instead of upright. He would also have had stripes when he was young that faded as he grew older. Like many wild animals, he would have grown a white coat in winter.
Strangers on Horseback
This story is set in ancient Greece, about 600 BCE. Early Greek horses were small — in Homer’s time battles were fought in two-horse chariots, and the horses were probably too small for men to ride in battle. At the time this story is set, small ponies were still common, and large horses like Simon comparatively rare and valuable.
The strangers
Zanna and her family were either Scythians or Sauromatians from around the Black Sea. According to legend — and the ancient Greek historian Herodotus — the Scythians intermarried with the Amazons, a fierce tribe of warrior women. It is difficult to know how much of that legend is true, but there is archaeological evidence that at the time this story is set, the Scythians had women warriors who rode horses.
The family’s trade goods came from China. Although what we now know as ‘the Silk Road’ was only established in Roman times (long after this story is set), gold, cloth, fruits and herbs were traded from east to west and back again for hundreds, if not thousands, of years before that.
Half a Million Horses
Many years ago an elderly woman told me how she and her younger sister stood without moving or speaking for three days inside the paper walls of their house in China, as the soldiers of the Boxer rebellion marched through their garden. If either child spoke or moved the soldiers would find them and kill them … and also kill the loyal servants who had hidden them.
I’ve taken that story and moved it 700 years into the past to about 1215, when Genghis Khan led his army in a vicious, pitiless sweep across most of Asia and parts of Europe, conquering and killing as he went. He even conquered China, the most advanced and wealthy nation in the world at that time. By the end of the thirteenth century the Mongol empire stretched from Hong Kong to southern Russia and the Danube, up to the Arctic circle and as far west as Persia and Turkey.
Every soldier in the Mongol army was a horseman and each had at least two, and often up to five, horses. The army travelled up to 124 kilometres a day and lived on what they could capture, and the meat, milk and blood their horses provided.
Half a million horses
Neither Timur nor the family at the farm would probably have been able to count to ‘half a million’. They’d have used a phrase that meant ‘an incredibly large number’, but I have used the term ‘half a million’ because it sounds more familiar to us today.
Sir Grey Nose
Glossary
Hauberk: a metal neck and torso that protects a knight from sword blows.
Hearth brother: Younger sons did not inherit family property. A younger son could either take arms with another lord, and hope to win reputation and fortune in battle or in tournaments, or he might become a ‘hearth son’ of his older brother, renouncing any claim to inheritance. Most hearth sons never married. A few did marry, however, usually to women far below them in rank. Daughters inherited only if there were no sons or other male heirs. This usually needed the king’s consent.
The Black Kid
Aboriginal words in ‘The Black Kid’
These words are all from the Wiradjuri language, which was one of the largest language groupings over central and southern New South Wales.
By 1900 most Aboriginal kids in the Wiradjuri area had learnt English as their first language, and theirs was probably the last generation to speak the language every day.
Sometimes whole Aboriginal communities were killed or died of new diseases, or were moved many miles away to new reserves with people who spoke other languages and so they had only English in common. Children in government settlements were separated from their parents, and put into dormitories, and only allowed to see their parents at weekends. If the children were heard to speak anything but English they were punished. But even today many Wiradjuri people still use Wiradjuri words in everyday speech.
When white people came here there were about 250 languages spoken in Australia, but for many years most Europeans either paid no attention at all to Aboriginal languages (even white people who worked with Aboriginal people every day expected them to learn English, while the white people didn’t learn even basic Aboriginal terms) or assumed there was only one Aboriginal language — the one spoken around Sydney where most of the early translations were made.
This is a bit like thinking that all white people speak ‘European’, a mix of every language in Europe: Good tag, haben vous uno bon giorno?
Some Wiradjuri words from the text
Dhadi?: Where’s it from?
Dhaguu?: Where to?
Gaja!: Get away!
Garria!: Don’t!
Minyang?: What?
Muurruubarraay: Thunder
Wallaamaala: A boy’s name
The Baker’s Horse
There really was a baker’s horse when I was young. His paddock was four houses down from ours.
I never knew the baker’s horse in the days when he pulled the baker’s cart, but every afternoon as I passed his paddock on my way home from school, I fed him my lunch crusts or the soft grass from my side of the fence and he mumbled at my hands and sometimes his owner gave us rides.
I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s when, one by one, the last of the work horses were retired. When I was a baby, horses still pulled the milkman’s cart and the dunny cart, the water cart and the fruitman’s wagon. There were no supermarkets in those days. The baker came every day and so did the milkman; the dunny man emptied out the smelly cans under the dunny twice a week; the iceman brought ice for the ice chest in the days before refrigerators (he came on Tuesdays, I think), and the butcher and grocer delivered too.
The first story I ever wrote was about a horse called Tresses, who was haunted by a ghost. Tresses was based on the baker’s horse. I was six years old when I wrote that story, and forty-two years later I am finally writing about him again, with love and with gratitude.
The Book of Unicorns
Dedication
To Noel and Fabia and their horses (and to Geoff, too) with love
Warts
It was a bad summer the Christmas the unicorn was born. The grasshoppers leapt across the hills, the trees drooped hot and limp. The creek was dry and Sam’s warts had spread all down his thumbs.
Mum turned the steering wheel too sharply onto the gravel drive that led to Gramma’s. The car lurched, then bounced on the stones.
‘Watch out!’ cried Dad. ‘At least I know how to drive on gravel roads.’
‘I am watching,’ muttered Mum. ‘What there is to watch for I don’t know. Dry stones and dry hills. They look like skulls all gathered together.’
‘Only a week,’ said Dad. ‘Just one week in the whole year, that’s all I ask.’
‘I agreed to come, didn’t I?’ aske
d Mum. ‘So stop complaining.’
‘You’re the one that’s complaining,’ argued Dad. ‘You’re the one who …’
Sam looked out the window and scratched his warts. It all looked the same as last year. Just drier, and the fences drooped a little more, and the creek was bald white rocks instead of water. Last year Gramma had taken him eeling, just like Dad used to do, said Gramma. Gramma’s knee had hurt too much for her to leap across the rocks, but she sat on the bank and told him where to throw the line and how to stop the eels snapping at his fingers …
The car lurched into a pothole. ‘You should have let me drive,’ said Dad.
‘It’s impossible to avoid every pothole on this road,’ said Mum.
‘All right, all right. I’ll put the blade on the tractor tomorrow and give it a grade.’
‘And half a million other things your mother’s got for you to do. Which leaves me in the kitchen and Sam …’
‘You leave Sam out of it. Sam likes it here.’
‘You’d rather have gone to the beach, wouldn’t you, Sam?’
‘I …’ said Sam. The car bounced round the final corner. ‘Hey, there’s Gramma!’
Gramma was sitting on the verandah. She looked like she’d been sitting there for a while. She looked up in surprise at the car and its attendant dust.
‘Gramma!’ yelled Sam.
‘Why … Sam,’ said Gramma. She looked like she was pleased to have the name right. ‘What a lovely surprise.’
‘It’s not a surprise, Gramma! You knew we were coming!’
‘Yes. Of course,’ said Gramma. She stepped down the stairs carefully, holding onto the rail. ‘It’s lovely to see you. Lovely.’
‘Mother, I rang last night. Don’t you remember?’
‘Of course I remember,’ said Gramma, holding up her cheek for a kiss. ‘You come on in. I’ll get some lunch ready.’
‘I’ll get some lunch ready,’ said Gramma for the fourth time, as they wandered round the dusty garden.
Mum sighed and cast Dad a look. ‘I’ll get it,’ she said.
The Book of Horses and Unicorns Page 14
