Brumby Mountain

by Karen Wood

  Jess nodded.

  Craig let out a deep sigh and put his hand on Jess’s. ‘I think it’s great that he’s so passionate about something. But don’t throw your own dreams away for the sake of someone else’s, honey. Someone who loves you would never ask you to do that.’

  ‘But Luke’s dreams are my dreams too.’

  ‘Are you sure about that? Because once you throw your education away, your goals will be so much harder to reach. Think about your whole life, Jess. Not just about tomorrow. Not just about Luke.’

  ‘You guys always criticise Luke.’

  ‘We do not,’ said her dad defensively. ‘We like Luke a lot. But he is who he is.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  ‘It means just that. He has his plans and you have yours. If they go hand-in-hand that’s great.’ He gave her arm a pat. ‘Build your own dreams, Jess. Don’t just ride on the tails of someone else’s.’

  That night Jess slept restlessly. Outside, the wind shook the leathery leaves of the coachwood trees and scraped their branches across the roof. Her dreams were filled with the sound of hooves stampeding over darkened mountains. She woke, her mind unsettled by images of Luke standing on a mountain property in another state.

  A soft tapping noise broke through the sound of the trees. She sat up and squinted into the darkness. Someone was at her window.

  ‘Luke?’ Jess hurriedly undid the catch at the top of the window and slid it up. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I couldn’t sleep,’ he whispered, leaning into the window and climbing in headfirst.

  Jess grabbed him by the waist and hauled him in, giggling and shushing. He landed like a lump, on top of her. His clothes were damp and grimy. ‘Shhhhhhh!’ She shoved him off her.

  ‘Turn the light on,’ he whispered.

  ‘No, it’ll wake my parents!’ Instead, she groped around for a small torch in her bedside drawer. She pulled the doona over both their heads and switched the torch on. They huddled together, the covers like a little teepee, with streaks and shadows making their faces look distorted.

  He chuckled. ‘You look funny.’

  ‘You look like a homeless person. You smell like one too.’

  ‘Kiss me anyway.’

  ‘No,’ she laughed and shoved him off. He toppled over backwards and landed on the wooden floorboards with a thump.

  She heard a light click on down the hallway and her mother’s voice. ‘Jessica?’

  Luke looked at her, terror-stricken, and commando-crawled under her bed.

  ‘It’s only me, Mum, I fell out of bed,’ she called back, barely managing to suppress her laughter.

  ‘You okay?’ asked her mum in a sleepy voice.

  ‘Yeah,’ she called back.

  Then she hung her head upside-down and peered under the bed, shining the torchlight onto Luke’s face. He looked ready to explode with laughter.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I needed a therapy pet.’

  ‘You need therapy full stop,’ she said. ‘You’re crazy.’

  ‘I’m crazy about you.’ He wriggled towards her. ‘Just one kiss,’ he said, twisting his head sideways and pressing his lips to hers. ‘One kiss and I’ll go away.’

  She kissed him upside-down, her lips and chin and nose all not where they were supposed to be. But she liked the weirdness of it. ‘Where will you go?’

  ‘Oh, I’ll just curl up under a tree somewhere, I suppose. In the cold. And the rain. I’ll just pretend that somebody . . . somewhere . . . loves me.’

  ‘Nawww . . . ’

  Luke pulled a sad face and she slithered off the bed. He rolled out from under it and Jess pulled him onto the small woollen rug, wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him properly. He put his arms around her and hugged her, burying his face in her neck and exhaling.

  ‘I can’t leave school,’ she whispered.

  ‘I know,’ he whispered back.

  ‘Are you going to move away?’

  He didn’t answer, but something about the way he held her made her fears grow. This place, this property, was really tugging at him.

  She held him like that for ages, until she heard the breezy whistle of pre-snores.

  ‘Don’t fall asleep here,’ she whispered. ‘You can sleep on the balcony, on the big futon. Mum and Dad won’t mind.’

  She found him some blankets, helped him back out the window and heard him tiptoe around the balcony to the front verandah. She rolled back into bed, wrapping her arms tightly around herself, and listened to the wind outside. Beneath its creaks and moans she sensed the almost whispered rhythm of galloping hooves, far, far away, belonging almost to another time.

  She shuddered and shook it off. Weird what wind could bring, or make you imagine.

  ‘Look what the cat dragged in,’ said Craig when Jess walked into the kitchen the next morning. Luke sat across from him at the table, his hair wet from the shower. ‘I found him on the futon out the front. Thought he was some old dero.’

  Luke grinned up at her from an overflowing bowl of Weet-Bix.

  ‘Morning,’ Jess smiled, not bothering to conjure up surprise. She liked the way Luke looked in her kitchen. She ignored her dad’s suspicious eyes darting between the two of them and walked over to Luke, put her arms around his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek.

  ‘Hi, gorgeous,’ Luke mumbled through his breakfast.

  Craig frowned. Jess gave him a hug too.

  Luke finished his cereal and took the bowl to the sink. ‘See you at Harry’s?’

  She nodded. Within moments the front door clicked and he was gone.

  Jess smiled to herself. It would take more than some patch of dirt in New South Wales to come between her and Luke Matheson. She’d been demented to even imagine it.

  She noticed her dad staring at her with a worried frown.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m not going to run away with him,’ she said, emptying the last of the Weet-Bix crumbs into a bowl. ‘You don’t have to worry.’

  Her dad looked relieved.

  ‘I do want to work with the brumbies, though.’

  ‘I wish school rated as highly as the brumbies,’ said Craig.

  ‘It does, Dad. I want to do both.’

  ‘You can do both,’ said Caroline, entering the kitchen in a batik robe. ‘But school has to come first. Once homework’s done, you can use all your spare time to work with Luke.’ She took the kettle from the stove and began filling it at the sink.

  ‘All of it?’

  Her mum replaced the kettle and lit the stove. ‘How much of all of it do you mean?’

  ‘I mean all of it,’ said Jess. ‘Stay there on weekends. So I can start really early in the mornings.’

  Caroline paused. ‘What do you think, Craig?’

  ‘I would stay at the house, with Annie,’ Jess added.

  ‘So, you wouldn’t want to move in with Luke or anything?’ asked her dad.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Good, because I don’t think . . . ’

  Jess held up her hand. She hated those talks. ‘It’s okay, guys. We’re not . . . you know . . . ’

  Both Caroline and Craig looked relieved.

  Jess blushed. Gawd. How embarrassing. As if she wanted her parents to know about that.

  ‘If your school work is done, to a high standard – to your best – then you can stay there as much as you genuinely need to,’ said Caroline. She gave a small sniff, putting one hand on Jess’s shoulder. ‘You’re just . . . growing up so much.’

  ‘You’re gonna come and see them, aren’t you?’

  ‘The brumbies? Of course.’

  ‘I’ll be busy,’ said Jess, scooping the last of breakfast out of her bowl. ‘I’ll be needing power food.’

  ‘Well, that I can help you with!’ said Caroline, sounding pleased.

  Jess was relieved. It was a great arrangement, one that would help Luke and his wild horses but also help her follow her own destiny. She couldn’t wa
it to get to work. She couldn’t wait to tell Luke!

  5

  WHEN JESS RODE through Harry’s front gate later that morning, Lawson’s brumbies seemed to be settling well. Jess stabled Dodger and Opal and joined her friends at the yards. She took a moment to watch how the wildies interacted with each other, so unlike the domestic horses. They moved about the yards as one, a mob. Some were shorter, some taller, but they were all cut from the same stuff, with identical white-striped faces, and behaved as though they had the same thoughts pulsing through their minds. If one startled, they all startled. If one looked to the left, the others did likewise. They all stood facing the road, or they all stood facing the stables. One might wander a short distance away and get a drink from the trough but it would then return to the mob and face the same direction as the others.

  Grace was in the round yard, working with the bay colt. She walked behind, driving him forward with a gentle flick of her rope. The horse stopped and swung his tail at her, ears flat back, and she calmly drove him on again. Every time the horse stopped and swung his tail, Grace clicked him up again.

  After several minutes, more stops and more flicks of the rope, the colt turned its face towards Grace. Jess smiled. She had watched this process dozens of times with Biyanga’s youngsters. ‘Joining up’, ‘hooking up’, ‘latching on’, ‘shadowing’ – different trainers called it different things, but it was always magic to watch. Jess stood there, entranced, watching for the signs, waiting for the magic to happen. Grace turned her shoulder to the colt.

  ‘He’s coming,’ Jess mouthed. Grace winked while the horse walked cautiously towards her with an outstretched nose. She stood dead still. The horse took another tentative step and placed its nose on her shoulder, then snuffled up and knocked her cap off, eyeing it curiously as it fell to the ground. Grace was trying to hold back a chuckle.

  Jess left her with the colt and found Luke in the arena with the pale chestnut, Buddy. He slid his hand down behind the back of the little horse’s fetlock and picked up its foot. He held it for a moment and then placed it back on the ground, running his hand back up the horse’s leg and patting him on the shoulder.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to mind that,’ she said.

  Luke left the rope dangling from Buddy’s halter and walked over to Jess.

  ‘So how are your brumbies going?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to start handling them too?’

  ‘The stallion’s not too good. Nor are his mares. I need to move them out to clean the yards, but they go nuts every time I go near the gate.’

  ‘Are they eating? Drinking?’

  He shrugged. ‘Not really.’

  ‘Do you want some help from Opal?’

  ‘That’d be good.’

  Jess went and got her from the stables while Luke finished with Buddy.

  ‘See if you can get her to lead them into another yard while I clean out the old one,’ said Luke.

  Jess led Opal in and out of the yards and the injured brumbies followed tentatively behind.

  ‘She’s a natural at coaching,’ said Luke from the sidelines. ‘She really seems to understand the job.’

  Jess smiled and nodded as she tied Opal by the gate. The filly just had a way about her that seemed to calm and reassure their flighty nerves. ‘I think she’s enjoying it too.’

  She helped Luke muck out the yard. When it was clean, Opal brought the brumbies back in, introduced them to biscuits of fresh grassy hay and showed them that the dry, wispy stems were good to eat. The two mares and the buckskin foal nibbled tentatively, but the stallion stood, tight-lipped, with his ears back, still refusing to eat. His blue eyes darted nervously at every small noise or movement. He looked gaunt, hollow-flanked, with sunken eyes. But his head was still high, tense, and braced against this new world.

  ‘Sapphire’s going to take more time than the others,’ said Luke.

  ‘Getting the mares to eat is a start,’ Jess answered. ‘Hopefully he’ll follow their lead.’

  Jess watched the two mares, standing with their sides touching, then looked proudly at Opal. What her secret was Jess didn’t know, but having Opal around somehow gave Jess hope that with persistence and patience, maybe these wildies could form a bond with humans.

  By Friday afternoon, Jess was well on top of her study and ready to work the entire weekend with the brumbies. Grace and Rosie would both come and help too. The three of them planned to sleep in the spare room at Annie’s.

  Jess spent the afternoon grooming Buddy while Luke tried to catch and halter some of the others. But his mind didn’t seem to be on the job. He appeared to be lost in his own thoughts.

  That night, as she drifted towards sleep, Jess was stirred by a hissing sound.

  ‘Jessy, psst. Jess!’ Luke peered through the bedroom door. ‘Jess,’ he whispered again.

  ‘Go away,’ Grace grumbled at him. ‘Or I’ll tell Annie you’re in here.’

  ‘Shut up, Grace,’ he shot back at her. ‘I’ll tell Annie you snuck out with Elliot last night.’

  Grace sat bolt upright. ‘I did not!’

  ‘I didn’t know you snuck out with Elliot.’ Jess squinted into the dark room.

  ‘That’s because I didn’t!’ hissed Grace.

  ‘It’ll be your word against mine,’ chuckled Luke.

  ‘Get out of here!’ Grace hurled her pillow at the door.

  Jess flipped her quilt off. ‘What’s the matter?’ She stumbled into the hallway and closed the door behind her.

  Luke was already sitting at the dining-room table in front of a laptop. ‘I just got an email from a lady at a brumby rescue group and she said there’ve been more.’

  ‘More what?’

  ‘More tablelands brumbies put through the sales. Stallions, mostly. They’re always creamy and they’re always scarred. It’s been happening for months. Someone’s systematically running them, Jess.’

  ‘Isn’t that illegal?’

  ‘Totally,’ said Luke. ‘But no one seems able to stop them.’ He chewed at an already short fingernail.

  ‘Well, there’s nothing you can do about it now. Time to stop worrying – go and sit on the couch,’ Jess ordered, closing the laptop.

  She went to the linen cupboard and grabbed a blanket, then returned to find him lying on the couch with his hands behind his head. She threw the blanket over him and snuggled in alongside.

  He wrapped his arms around her. She could feel the cool moonstone that always hung around his neck on a worn leather strap that had been replaced several times.

  ‘These people are going to wipe them out if they keep catching all the stallions,’ mumbled Luke quietly.

  ‘They’ve already been wiped out,’ said Jess. ‘The national parks people have already massacred most of the herds in the tablelands. They shot them from helicopters.’ The Guy Fawkes massacre – when six hundred wild horses were shot in the middle of the foaling season, their carcasses left to rot – had been well publicised.

  ‘I reckon there are more, Jess. Ones they don’t know about.’ Luke paused. ‘When I was really little, I used to hear brumbies at night, their hoofbeats.’

  ‘Wow, that would have been cool.’

  ‘I’ve never forgotten them. My father reckoned they were ghosts. He called them Saladin’s spirits.’

  ‘I’ve heard of Saladin,’ said Jess. More than a hundred years ago, a creamy stallion of that name had been crossed with a thoroughbred. The descendants formed a foundation sire for the stockhorses, but many also ran wild in the gorge country of the New South Wales tablelands. They had creamy genes, and some had blue eyes.

  Luke was quiet for a while. ‘Mum called them the night raiders. The stallions would come at night for the mares. One took her best horse, Stormy-girl. She used to write stories about her, living with the wild horses. After mum died, her best friend used to read the stories to me.’

  Luke lingered on that thought a moment longer before continuing. ‘I remember seeing Stormy-girl and the wild stallion outside my
bedroom window. She was a coloured mare, you could see her white patches moving in the dark.’ Luke turned to Jess. ‘We lived at the bottom of a big mountain.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said, sounding suddenly muddled. ‘I don’t know if it was a dream or if it was real.’

  ‘You must have been pretty young.’

  ‘I was only four.’

  Jess lay in Luke’s arms, imagining a mare called Stormy-girl galloping through the trees with a wild brumby stallion. ‘Did she ever go looking for her? Try to get her back?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Luke quietly. ‘In Mum’s stories there was a place.’ His voice took on a story-telling tone. ‘There’s a place on the tablelands where all the boundaries meet, a no-man’s land where wild horses live.’ He smiled fondly, as though filled with good memories. ‘That’s how her stories always started.’

  ‘Go on,’ whispered Jess.

  ‘In a landlocked valley, wild and unclaimed, Saladin’s spirit is born to the blue-eyed brumbies. The place is so exquisitely special, it must be kept secret.’

  He laughed suddenly. ‘I’m being stupid.’

  ‘No, no, go on. It’s a good story.’

  ‘She called it Brumby Mountain,’ Luke continued. ‘She told me it was real. I can’t remember much more.’ He paused and his voice changed again. ‘I know it’s really stupid, but I’ve got it in my head that that’s where these brumbies are coming from. They’ve got the blue eyes. They’re creamy like Saladin. People wouldn’t get away with brumby-running in the national parks these days. So where are the runners catching these horses?’

  ‘So you think there might be a breakaway mob, hiding out somewhere, that the parks don’t know about?’

  ‘Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?’ said Luke.

  ‘Not really,’ Jess said. ‘If only they could tell us. If only Sapphire could talk.’

  Luke sighed. ‘Sapphire.’

  Jess didn’t answer. She didn’t need to point out what a mess the horse was.

  ‘I did the wrong thing, trying to save him. I’ve just made him suffer more.’

  Jess leaned over and flicked off the lamp. ‘Get some sleep.’