The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  Jess, the aged buckskin mare, likes to munch the new leaves on the citrus trees, so they remain dwarfed and unproductive. I’ve put netting guards around the skinnier ones—more fences within fences—but am in a quandary about the others. I’ll have to do something as my knees won’t stand the jarring of my angry rush across the paddock when I see she is back over there, ripping and stripping away. She does not desist until I am almost there.

  I feel she is ungrateful—I never try to catch her or ride her and I always ensure she gets her share of carrots—but, because she was my daughter’s very first and much beloved horse, no ill can be said of her.

  However I do recall some ill being said, if fleetingly, on our weekend visits from Sydney. My daughter would spend hours coaxing the almost uncatchable Jess to come close enough to be caught, a difficult job even in a corral. She’d squat beside a feed bucket, one hand hiding the halter behind her back, speaking softly, patient for a long time, losing it as Jess yet again shied away just as the halter rope went over her neck. Storming off, giving up, quite a few angry words scorched the mountain air. But she always found replenished patience and tried again, saying it wasn’t Jess’ fault, since she’d obviously been frightened in the past.

  Shari, the barrel-shaped miniature pony, is a skewbald, white with splashes of chestnut. She likes to straddle small trees or shrubs and scratch her tummy by rubbing back and forth, or back up to bigger shrubs and scratch her fat rump. Consequently she breaks many twigs and branches, so the shrubs are lopsided, and she snaps small trees in half. She finds my metre-high sprinklers handy to scratch her face on, and breaks their moving parts. If I put stakes around anything, she rubs against those and breaks them.

  The little wretch also gets through my regeneration area fence. She puts her front feet over the bottom wire and then wriggles and pushes her fat body through, spreading the wires and loosening the posts to the point of eventually lifting them clear out of the ground.

  Recently I tried to give her away to a home with better fences and less for her to damage. This family had small boys to love her and a pony her size to be her friend. They led her home on the Friday, then spent the better part of the weekend retrieving her after she escaped twice, through electric fences, and wire fences far more tightly and closely strung than mine. The last time they caught her she was halfway back here.

  I returned late that Sunday night from a weekend camp, helping to survey Aboriginal artefacts near Anvil Hill, proposed site for another monster open-cut coal mine in the Hunter. We’d found tools as old as 4000-5000 years, our archaeologists estimated. Holding a stone tool where my fingers fitted perfectly, as other fingers had done so very long ago, was overwhelming.

  We’d also seen that rare thing in the long-grazed Hunter: an uncleared central valley floor, rich in unique woodland vegetation. It was incredible that anyone would contemplate the total destruction of this, called the Ark of the Hunter because of its biodiversity treasures, but they were—2000 hectares of it! In a sane world, that area would be declared ‘of state significance’, to be protected rather than disembowelled. The weekend had been both inspiring and depressing, and I was physically and emotionally exhausted.

  Next morning I dragged myself out of bed late, and far from alert. From the verandah I could see the three horses patiently waiting at the gate. Then I literally rubbed my eyes, for I could also see a low splash of brown and white through the netting. Bloody Shari!

  Then I spotted the halter and lead rope on a verandah chair. I rang. They were very sorry she hadn’t stayed; the little boys had cried; they’d all fallen for her cute looks. Their mother said, ‘She’s the sort of animal Walt Disney would make a movie about. I kept waiting for her to say something!’

  I was stuck with her. No fence could keep her in. And no amount of appeals from her big brown eyes, peeping up at me through her long lashes and thick chestnut fringe, would make me think she was anything other than a pain.

  To fence off the orchard section from the horses would be a lot of work—and then I’d have to mow it. A moveable electric fence would be fine, and there are the makings of one in the shed from an early attempt by my ex-partner at keeping possums out of the house yard, only I don’t know how to do it.

  I remember the first night the electrified yard fence was activated. It was a last resort, as we’d tried all suggestions—chilli spray, quassia chip spray, garlic chive surrounds—and still the possums were stripping the roses and the citrus trees. That night we watched as a bevy of possums conferred just outside the bottom corner. It appeared as if they were drawing straws, after a heated discussion—‘You go!’ ‘No, you go!’—had proved fruitless. But none of them was game to try it and the disgruntled group broke up and waddled off into the trees.

  Yet the next night, and every night after for a few years, one battered old warrior climbed the fence without visible reaction. He had tattered ears and tufts of fur missing from fights past—and an addiction to roses. Knowing what the ‘Zap!’ feels like, I deemed such effort heroic; the garden could cope with one possum having a well-earned rose munch.

  He’s gone, but the local possums must have passed on the word about the ‘Zap!’ because I don’t see many in here, even though the fence hasn’t been electrified since the last fires. Or maybe my resident carnivorous quoll deters them.

  So what the horses deliver is a grazed, semi-razed garden rather than the cropped lawn I ordered. And while they do a lot of unauthorised pruning, on the other hand they don’t fancy eating tussocks or weeds, so I still have to do some sporadic mowing if I want to stop the house yard regressing to a wild paddock where bush rats would tunnel and nest, and snakes lurk.

  In the year after I was hit with arthritis that’s how it was, since I couldn’t mow it, my partner couldn’t find the time, and I hadn’t yet resigned myself to sacrificing my garden. The bush rats ate through the bird netting we put over the fruit trees, not to mention invading the house and shed. I want to keep my patch unappealing to them.

  Now, instead of collecting lawn clippings, I shovel up horse manure for compost and for mulch around the chewed fruit trees. I’ve been given a wonderful self-propelled mower that even I can start, so in the warmer months, before the sun hits the orchard, I occasionally do a little bit of easy mowing, but only where needed as anti-rat precautions. I don’t mow the native grasses when they’re seeding, for the next season’s growth, and because the Crimson Rosellas like to poke about in them, sampling the crop one-legged, one-handed, each stem bent double and nibbled along, much as we do a cob of corn.

  Most mornings the horses turn up at one of the gates into the house yard. I hear them from my bed, stamping to shoo flies, maybe a bit of a scuffle as they jockey for position. To keep them domesticated I try to give them something when they turn up. For up to an hour they’ll wait to be let in or offered carrots, before Zack decides I’m not home or I’m being mean today and leads them off elsewhere.

  To get them out of the house paddock is a matter of bribery. It’s my last daily task and I can’t relax with a glass of home-brew on the verandah until I’ve completed it. I wait until they’re all near each other, and walk towards them bearing carrots, two each, calling ‘Feedo!’

  Sabbath, being the greediest, neighs eagerly and starts trotting after me as I walk briskly to the nearest gate. Once he neighs, they all take notice. I must get there first and open the gate so they can push past instead of treading on my heels. It’s quite an adrenaline rush to distribute the carrots fairly for them and safely for me as they jostle and snort around me, and then to nick back through the gate and close it.

  Once the whole gang refused to fall for the carrot trick, and after cajoling, and then cursing, at different gates, I gave up, though worried about what they might eat when they got bored during the night. At about 2a.m. Zack began neighing loudly and racing round the yard at full pelt, demanding to be let out—NOW! Sabbath followed his lead, as did Shari, who has a chip on her shoulder about being so
small and likes to throw in a bucking or two in her mad gallops, as if to say, ‘Look at me, see, I’m a real horse!’ I had no choice but to get up, take the torch and do as I was told, in nightie and gumboots, before their skidding hooves had carved trenches everywhere.

  Due to the drought, for the first time ever, this past winter I’ve had to supplement their grazing with feed, hay one day, a special feed mix the next. I catch and tie up the two greedy males outside the fence before even showing the buckets, or there’s pandemonium.

  Annoying and unpredictable as they can be, the horses are company of a sort. And we’ve been through a few dramas together. In the 2002 fires, there was only Jess and a plump grey mare called Jasmine here. How they survived is a tale in itself, but it belongs in the bigger story of those catastrophic fires.

  After the fires, since all the fences in the area were burnt, we’d sent the horses elsewhere. When our fencing was complete again, we brought all my daughter’s horses over here. She didn’t have Zack then, just Jasmine, Jess, Shari and Sabbath, who was thus the only male.

  One day when I called the horses to the gate for carrots, Sabbath didn’t come to get his share, but pranced about at a distance. This being most unlike him, I was puzzled. Later that day I saw what seemed to be two Sabbaths—two chestnut horses with white forehead stars and white socks—racing flat out across the far paddock, one chasing the other.

  The chaser returned alone and joined the mares. He was not Sabbath—more robustly built, slightly different markings—and from the way he was keeping Sabbath away from the mares, I guessed he was probably a stallion. A few phone calls confirmed that an unbroken chestnut stallion had been bothering other properties; the reputed owner, whose fences were all down, wasn’t interested. ‘Shoot it, ’ I was told, by all and sundry, as if this was no big deal.

  My daughter came up on the weekend. We found where the stallion had broken the newly repaired fence to get to our mares, and we fixed it in our less-than-professional fashion. He was seen mounting Jasmine, and we worried about too-small Shari and too-old Jess. Poor Sabbath was hunted and bitten whenever he appeared. We had to get this vicious intruder out. With difficulty we enticed our horses into the house yard, Sabbath first, and then the mares.

  The stallion raced round and round the fence, neighing so frantically, at such a high pitch, that he was literally screaming. This state of siege continued while I tried to get various authorities to help. It appeared I had to catch this uncatchable creature first and take it to town where they would shoot it. My house yard wasn’t big enough to feed four horses for long. We had to deal with him ourselves, get him off the property.

  The following weekend my daughter returned, resolute. Taking a whip as protection, she caught Shari and ran with her up the track to the main gate, with the stallion following slightly higher up the hill, galloping and neighing. He was fiercely possessive, and my daughter, while scared of him, was very brave. I followed in the car. Once we, and the stallion, were outside the gate, she ran back inside with Shari and tied her to a tree, while I slammed the gate shut.

  She chased the stallion along the track, cracking the whip and yelling, while I followed in the Suzuki, blowing the horn and generally trying to scare him far away. He was having none of that idea, and veered off the track at the end of my 30-acre fenced-in section. That fence comes very close to the house at one corner, where my yard fence forms part of it.

  Now the stallion was galloping all round that 30 acres, wearing a deep track, crashing through my regeneration area, screaming for the mares. We weren’t game to let them out of the netted house yard, in case he got at them through the plain wire fence with his teeth or hooves, and in any case Shari would go through it.

  Hoping he’d give up and go find some mares elsewhere, as there were brumbies out in the national park, my daughter returned to home and work. Each night I’d be woken by his piercing calls, only 50 metres away, setting the mares whinnying and panicking. It was truly frightening, as I imagined him breaking down the fence. For days this went on. I was afraid he’d skid into the fence or down the slope and break a leg as he continually raced around the perimeter, wearing a track into the mud. So much stamping and wheeling went on in that corner closest to the house that three years later the ground is still bare.

  National Parks had recommended a professional shooter who would come up here, do the deed humanely and take the body away—for dog meat. I hated the idea, but finally I rang him. He came with a large covered trailer and a winch, was extremely sensitive about where he did it, and took his time so as to be sure that his first shot would be the final one. I heard the shot; saw nothing. I felt deeply sorry for this animal that had paid for its owner’s irresponsibility, but I’d had no choice.

  Letting our horses out of the yard, I tried not to think of what plants I’d lost over the time it had been their intensive feedlot. Sometimes a garden seems a futile thing to persevere with, an unwinnable battle between me and the creatures, both wild and domestic, with whom I live. I am often tempted to give it up, as it’s our only cause of conflict, but I’m stubborn enough to think I’ll eventually win.

  I am also foolish, as I keep forgetting that finding a solution to any problem here is only an invitation for my neighbours to come up with a fresh challenge.

  CHAPTER 10

  BITTER SWEET BIRRARUNG

  In 2002 I went away from my mountain for an entire spring. For family reasons, my partner had been living in town that year, in a cottage we’d mortgaged this place to buy New partners over 40 usually come with ‘baggage’, which can drastically re-route your shared plans, sometimes fatally I’d been dividing my week between the two places, but his work didn’t permit that.

  Firewise, it was a bad time for me to go away, since there’d be nobody here to keep the yard grass short and watered green, the gutters clear of leaves. But I had to go. Opportunity was knocking loudly.

  The Alan Marshall Award gave me a financial boost, but even more importantly it gave me national validation as a writer, and priceless encouragement in the praise from judge Gillian Mears, who’d won the award herself the year before. Being an admirer of Gillian’s writing, I could hardly credit what I was hearing when her comments were read out at the award presentation, since they began with ‘It was a rare privilege to read “Traces of Life”. There was never any doubt that this was the winning story...’

  As if this wasn’t enough to send me soaring, I was then offered a paid three-month artist’s residency by the award funder, Nillumbik Shire, Victoria. This shire encompasses Eltham, where Alan Marshall lived, and the wonderfully faux-gothic Montsalvat, built by artists for artists.

  The residency was to be taken in Birrarung, an historic mudbrick house on a bushland property now owned by Parks Victoria, who jointly sponsor the residency. The house had been designed in the 1970s by Alistair Knox, the famous architect associated with mudbricks, heavy timbers and cathedral ceilings, for Gordon Ford, equally famous landscape designer and builder, associated with ‘natural’ gardens of native plantings, rocks and water flows. Temptingly, its address was Laughing Waters Road, being right by the Yarra River. Montsalvat was a ten-minute drive away.

  This was the first time a writer had been offered the residency; visual and installation artists had enjoyed it before. For me it meant three months of enforced break from daily duties and interruptions, apart from any copywriting work that came in by email, but otherwise with nothing to do but write. In return, only a day of workshops at the end of it. But it had to be taken that spring.

  My partner having reluctantly agreed it was an opportunity not to be missed, I took the plunge, said ‘Yes’, packed the car with the essentials—barely started novel manuscript, computer, printer, fax, desk chair, books, juicer, warm clothes—and went, fingers crossed that my partner’s spare but smoky old Peugeot would make it to Victoria and back.

  Birrarung proved to be a fantastic place in the true sense of the word, and a great experience, though
darkly transformed by the fatal illness of my father after I’d been there only a week. I flew back just in time to say goodbye.

  The novel was never the same after that. Nor was the world.

  Yet living in such a different environment was inspiring. Birrarung was no ordinary house; it had its own personality, and gave off emanations as mysterious as the bush that surrounded it.

  The feeling of Gordon’s house was older than its years. Minor manorial—with oddities. Like the glass-walled room, brick-floored, empty but for a tiny iron fireplace, scrolled and fanciful, in one corner. Inches away from the glass walls, at floor level, there was a pond, but looming just beyond it, filling the view, was a rock wall higher than the roof. One glass wall thus framed a picture of giant granite boulders, while the other two walls of glazed doors overlooked and accessed the garden and bush.

  It was built onto the house as an afterthought, for up close waterfall viewing and nature watching, no matter what the weather. Only I couldn’t make Gordon’s waterfall work. Despite the ‘natural’ magic it would effect, it was man-made, dependent on machinery, with which I have a long history of bad communication. The water wouldn’t pump up, so wouldn’t fall for me.

  Apart from rock watching, the room’s other function seemed to be stunning and killing birds. The large expanses of glass in the doors fooled many, who tried to fly through them. I’d hear a ‘thunk’ of varying loudness from my desk, and leap up to see what had been hurt now, anxious to see how badly. I became a voyeur of the flightless, temporary or final. Small thunks: a Welcome Swallow, a Little Weebill. A big thunk—so big and so hard that tufts of soft grey underfeathers were left on the glass: a Little Cuckoo-shrike.

  It was in Victoria that I saw an effective remedy for this problem: a cork with a feather stuck in it, suspended outside each window. They twirl and sway and behave like birds, and thus warn the kamikaze birds away.