No one was there to see this odd-looking herd, except a few kangaroos that were hopping through the snow, and a flock of currawongs that flew overhead.
Burra knew he would get all his herd down to the Cascades or the head of the Ingegoodbee, but he felt a tremendous urge to be a long way down the mountains before dark came again. He remembered the previous winter’s huge amount of snow. The whole feel of it was invading him, and the memory of flooded rivers gave a fearsome dread.
Coolawyn had been in snow every winter of her short life, and she was strong. She plodded on, and kept repeating her little wuffling sounds of encouragement to Yarra, and constantly turned her head to touch him on the nose.
She had known instinctively for some time that Yarra, though he could gallop as swiftly as the flight of a hawk, had something wrong; perhaps he did not see very well.
Once or twice she called a little louder, so that the white mare and her foal would hurry, but they were keeping close. Already she and Yarra had saved these two, so that a bond was forming between them, in spite of the enmity which the white mare felt.
The snow had stopped falling and it melted off their eyelashes. Coolawyn could see more easily, but the other three still had their eyes closed.
The herd stopped to rest, quite often, so the foals could drink from their mothers and feel renewed. Occasionally, the tracks made by the white herd were not covered by snow. Sometimes they were just indentations. Sometimes the white herd had veered from the right direction. Burra’s elderly mares led like homing pigeons.
After dropping down off the Brindle Bull, they crossed the Big Boggy, and were soon in quite thick trees. It was clear from the markings in the snow that the white stallion had let his herd rest there.
Burra had no wish to get embroiled with those midnight gallopers just now, so he let his herd rest there, too, and knew the other herd would keep going.
Midnight gallopers, and in his herd was one of the mares … and was it just one foal? Yarra and that foal were so amazingly alike.
Ringa, the Red
Once upon a time, the men and women of the snow country would say: ‘Thunder in winter means snow.’
Thunderstorms are things of spring and summer, but there had been so much thunder all through spring, summer, and even in the autumn. Now it was winter.
Ringa, the white stallion with the strange eyes, began to feel that he must try to find his mare. He missed her dearly. Even the two fears of brilliant lightning and the dazzling light of sunshine reflected off snow, could not stop him.
A thunderstorm rolled up and crashed. On the highest mountains snow fell, but Ringa was fairly certain that Burra’s herd would be well below the heaviest fall.
So he went.
It was a dark winter’s night. Clouds covered the sky, and no stars shone. Even he, Ringa the red, found it difficult to see the track. It was a track that had first been made by bare, black feet, and by kangaroos and dingoes. Cattle had widened it. It was still there, although now no cattle went up and down it.
Never had Ringa found the trees loom so close and so menacing. Never before had it seemed as if the icy night was warning him.
He had a long way to go, and nothing seemed to tell him exactly where Burra’s herd would be, or how low they had come down out of the snow. He felt almost sure that his mare would be with them, unless Coolawyn, that lovely grey mare, had driven her off.
Ringa trotted on and on, through forests and low scrub, over ridges where the warmer air enfolded him comfortingly and into gullies where the icy cold was like needles driven into his white hide.
He started upwards just as the rain began, but the track was wide and well defined. The spur itself forced him to keep on the track.
The whole world of steeply rising spur, ribbon gums and messmates, was utterly silent.
Ringa was glad when he had climbed high enough to be among the giant alpine ash, where the streamers of bark were sighing and creaking with every movement of air. Even though he was no longer enfolded in that utter silence, the whispering streamers were even more mysterious and eerie than the silence.
Suddenly, a long streamer of bark swung and cracked, broke from the tree, and fell on to Ringa’s back.
He plunged forward; loose stones rattled. The white stallion stopped still and listened.
Then it happened — the soft sound came rising from the gully on the south side of the spur. That was where they had come from before … Pinpoint red eyes, glittering … those moths … they should have laid their eggs well before winter and died, melted into the earth …
They fluttered and floated in front of him, soft and ghostly, a barely visible cloud.
He stood quite still. He could not even try to go through that cloud of wings. There were moths in the very air he breathed. Choking, he began to back slowly. He could not tell whether the cloud of soft, paperbark wings were angrily stopping him from going further, or warning him against some danger. Surely nothing that lived in the night would ever harm him — he, Ringaroo, who galloped in darkness. Then he began to feel certain that these red-eyed moths, flying desperately at him, were friendly.
He backed a little further. The moths renewed their efforts to drive him faster, down the wide track between the alpine ash. Sometimes it was as though they were like a soft covering all over him; sometimes they were flying against his face, forcing him down the spur.
The red eyes got brighter as he tried to resist the pressure. He kept seeing a vision, coming and going in front of him — that beautiful mare whom he had left behind in the high mountains, and her foal. How could he leave her? Surely she was with that other herd who travelled and grazed by day. Yet she could be all alone and lost. Somehow he seemed to see her foal and that other absolutely similar foal, Yarra, together. But where was the mare? Where were the foals?
Why were the moths warning him? Of what were they warning him? Then he heard the roll of thunder, just as another insubstantial vision floated in front of his mind. The distant thunder reverberated and his mind’s picture suddenly became a memory of that lovely mare desperately clinging with her hooves and front legs to a flooded bank — one foal scrambling up on to dry land, another foal being swept downstream.
The moths had forced him off the centre of the ridge and under a huge alpine ash, when the whole world shook with a crash of thunder and there was a wide sheet of lightning that lit up the forest of immensely tall trees.
Ringaroo closed his eyes against the glare. The moths must have known what was coming — felt its message in the vibrations of the air.
He stood, absolutely still, his eyes tightly closed. It was strange that those moths had survived the first onslaught of winter’s snows. They surely must have laid their eggs by this time, on the undersides of the tea tree leaves in the paperbark gullies.
Ringaroo opened his eyes. The moths began to fly at him even more desperately than before. He must do as they bid. Perhaps they were trying to force him out of the high country for all of the winter.
He kept on backing down the track … there was no mistaking that they meant him to go right down, so he turned around and began to trot. The moths continued to press him on.
There was a tea tree thicket in a small gully to one side of the ridge. The moths pushed him in there just as the rumbling thunder started again. Ringaroo could feel them on his back. Strangely their eyes did not seem so bright. He suddenly felt that they had made their last effort to get him to safety. The beautiful paperbark wings had no life left in them. Some of those wings were even folded over the red eyes.
The sheet lightning lit up the sky, and Ringa closed his eyes. When he opened them, he could see dead moths on the ground at his feet, dead moths festooning the tea tree branches, and he knew that some were still on his back.
No red eyes looked at him through the night, but the moths had given their message: ‘Peril for Ringaroo lurks in the high country, in winter. Go there if you dare.’
A mare who had always been b
eside him — till that enormous flood — was up there, possibly lost, beyond that barrier.
Higher up in the mountains, where the wind cried through twisted snow-gum limbs, snow had fallen earlier.
A mare with two foals had become filled with fear, and was desperately trying to find her way out of this terror that was all white … stumbling along.
One of the foals kept calling the other back.
Somewhere in that beating storm, another mare cried out in desperation. Somewhere a stallion called and searched, called and searched.
A Willy-willy Enveloped him and he Vanished
Thunder in winter means snow …
Softly down through the giant alpine ash the great flakes fell. Floating, too, in between the tea tree limbs, the star-shaped crystals drifted.
Ringaroo felt each feather-light and ice-cold touch on his back. All around him there was silence, except for the whisper of floating snow, but higher up there was a strong wind, and the snow blew in smaller, stinging, dancing dervish pellets.
Crimson and blue lowries flew through those swirling curtains, all tossed around. Coolawyn half-expected the chattering birds to give her some message. But when they were gone the only sounds were made by the wind and the beating snow.
Fear began to flow through snow gums and alpine ash. It whispered around Ringaroo.
It seemed, suddenly, to be whispering in the falling snow around Coolawyn. Fear; fear because Yarra had vanished, in the snow, with that white mare and her foal.
Coolawyn had no certainty which way, in all the wind-blown clouds of snow, they had gone. She called and called; fell through the thick-falling snow. She thought she heard Yarra call, but was he answering, or just neighing?
She raced off as fast as she could go on the already covered snowgrass and rocks, and logs, in the direction of the sound — or from whence she thought the sound had come through the storm. But where had it come from? Which direction? She stopped and listened. A currawong flew, without a cry, through the wild blowing blizzard. Perhaps that currawong was pointing the way? She could barely see through her snow-matted eyelashes. Yarra … Yarra? She stopped to call again. Did a neigh come? She gave another desperate call. There was nothing.
She went hurrying blindly in another direction, her breath sobbing with fear and effort. There was a faint track, just an indentation in the snow — but it was a track made by herself. She had gone in a circle. Coolawyn, the bush-wise, Coolawyn, the beloved of Burra, had never been lost before, even in wild, wild weather.
The snow poured down. The twisting wind blew hither and thither, taking Coolawyn around and around.
Down in the tall timber, voices were in the wind singing. Voices were calling Ringaroo, and he knew he must go. The moths’ message was not really in vain. He had to go back into the high country, but the moths’ warning had ended with great strength. In the drifting flakes the moths had died.
Ringaroo, Ringaroo, climbing up, one white leg after one white leg, eyelids half-closed over those sunset-coloured eyes, and the snow clinging to his lashes.
Ringaroo, Coolawyn, Wirralinga, Yarralala, and that unnamed foal, stumbled round and round in the twisting snow and the wind — and Burra, without scent or sign, tried to find Coolawyn. Wind crying through the rocks and trees … Burra searching and never finding a track.
Two mares, two foals going round and round, lost in the blizzard.
The wind became a gale. Nothing appeared to be real. Trees became looming monstrous horses. Rocks seemed to move, as though bewitched.
The wind twisted Coolawyn around, and blew stinging, blinding pellets of snow into her eyes; as she stumbled over a snow-masked rock, it grabbed at her and nearly blew her on to her side.
She stood still for a moment, shaking with fear and misery. She knew she must stop going in circles. A big rock seemed to stay still while she stared at it, and there was a tree leaning over it. She thought she remembered them both. Though both tree and rock looked enormous one minute and small the next, they seemed to be quite close by. She fought her way across the wind towards them, thinking to shelter there. They got further and further away, but at last she reached them.
When she had regained her breath, and her heart had stopped pounding, she peered through the streaming flakes to find another landmark that would not keep fading away, so that she could go towards it, and she would not walk in circles again. Once she thought Yarra was at her side, but no foal was there.
She had to find him, however far she might have to go.
With snow beating against her, swirling into her eyes, she slipped, stumbled and pushed her legs through the snow that had already blown into drifts.
She had had other foals before the flood took that last one and never before had she felt that something, someone else, might take a foal from her. Never had she felt so anxious for a foal as she did for Yarra — so possessive. The flood had taken, and the flood had given. Yarra was hers.
Burra, whom she loved so dearly, could not be the father of Yarra, for that white foal was really not part of his herd. Yarra seemed like a changeling, and, indeed, he was.
A neigh kept ringing out and she answered it, and then called Yarra at the same time, flinging the call into the distance. From Yarra there was no answer, but Burra’s call came from closer and closer, till suddenly he was there beside her.
There was hope. Burra had come. Together they could find Yarra, but then fear flowed around her again, in the pellets of wind-driven snow.
All at once she was sure she heard Yarra call — a frightened call. Perhaps he was not with that white mare, or perhaps the white mare was lost.
Coolawyn had a queer feeling of responsibility for that mare and foal, because she and Yarra had saved them in the first snowfall that winter, but she also felt fear and dislike. There was something at the back of her head which she would not let come to the surface — something about that mare and about that foal — something that she would not acknowledge.
Burra had a feeling about them too. He was sure that Yarra would lead them into danger because of his obsession with that unnamed foal. Burra had lived for long enough to know that brumbies could not just let days and nights, life, slide by in winter. They had to make their own survival. They had to get down out of the snow — not go chasing after an identical foal. That foal and its mother seemed unable to find their way through the snow. If Yarra kept following them, and Coolawyn kept following Yarra, they would all die.
Coolawyn had gone from his side. Burra could see her like a shadow. He sprang after her, calling her insistently. If she wouldn’t come, he would be forced to get around her and drive her. Each time he began to try to swing her in the direction he knew they should go, that forlorn neigh would sound from far away, and she would switch direction towards the area from which it had seemed to come. Even Burra began to be afraid they would be lost.
Fear crept through the snow gums and the tall ash. It whispered around Ringaroo.
It seemed suddenly to be haunting the blizzard that beat around Coolawyn and Burra.
Yarra’s cry kept wavering through the blizzard, and at last they saw him. He was standing swathed around in the curtains of snow, all alone. Then out of the blizzard came a sound that was fragmented by distance.
Yarra seemed to spin around, as if that distant sound were closer to him. Snow flew up around him, a tremendous willy-willy enveloped him and he was gone.
Coolawyn gave a loud, wild neigh and began to struggle through the snow and the wind to the place where they had seen Yarra standing. She kept calling whenever she could get her breath. Both she and Burra heard a much more distant neigh which Coolawyn was sure was still Yarra’s. Burra stayed close to Coolawyn. Even he, who had found Yarra a nuisance and a puzzle, had become anxious about him.
Then, from far lower down the mountains there came another, wind-borne neigh. Both of them knew it was that of Ringaroo, the splendid stallion with the sunset eyes.
Burra and Coolawyn reached th
e place where Yarra had been standing when he called, before he vanished in the vortex of snow. There were still indented hoofmarks, even in the blinding snowfall.
It was then — or there — that the wind began a weird howling, eerie and frightening. With each howling, great spirals of snow rose up from somewhere just near them. Coolawyn shied away from an immense willy-willy that went rising round and round, seeming to be coming straight for her. As she tried to get out of the way, it followed her. She began to be really frightened. She felt that the willy-willy was alive. It was Burra who realised that that spiral began in some big hollow close beside them. Burra walked forward carefully, and Coolawyn crept up behind him, as the weird wind howl got louder, and an even bigger willy-willy spun round them both.
Burra took two more steps. Perhaps he knew he was on an edge: perhaps he did not. When he brought his four feet close together, the edge began to slide, and Burra went with it.
Coolawyn sprang forward as though to save him — and felt the snow begin to slide beneath her hooves.
For one minute the falling snow seemed to clear, and she saw Burra sliding down a steep slope — steep like a cliff, or more like a chute. It was serious — he was sliding quite fast, sitting with his dignity all intact. Then the snow on which she stood gave way and she was sliding at a great pace herself. Enveloped in freezing cold, it felt as if nothing could possibly stop them.
She heard Yarra neigh, down below. At that moment both Burra and Coolawyn knew where they were. They must have travelled quite a distance in their search for Yarra. They must be in a steep ravine which they had seen one summer when exploring, but it still seemed much steeper than anything they had seen before.
Burra was trying to get his feet underneath him, then he made a huge effort to get to one side. Coolawyn struggled with all her strength, but everything she did only made her slide faster.