Then, one night, far heavier clouds gathered — ominous clouds with dark centres and edges frayed by wind. Burra could not settle down, but paced around his sleeping herd. Thunder was coming, and more heavy snow, but there was something else. A vibration in the air? Distant galloping hooves? A shiver went along his back. Suddenly, Coolawyn was standing close beside him. He felt a shiver run along her hide, too. The sound became closer. It was that drumming sound of horses.
Those galloping hooves seemed to stop on a hill above the bend in the creek. Then both Coolawyn and Burra noticed the first rumble of thunder. It took their attention for a moment and they failed to see, or hear, a movement made by the unnamed foal.
A neigh blended in with the thunder.
Then that foal was just a slip of a white wraith blown along the valley.
Burra and Coolawyn knew that the neigh in the night was Wirrilinga calling her foal. A huge sheet of lightning in the east lit up the marble-white stallion who was standing on a knoll, Wirrilinga beside him, and the ghost foal galloping towards them.
Then the lightning faded away and the drumming of hooves started again. Another sheet of light showed the last glimpse of white horses galloping away and propping to a blinded standstill. Then, as the darkness came again, there came the drumbeat, and they were gone.
Burra shook his head as though to drive the sound away. No filly had been stolen this time. Coolawyn was warm and safe beside him. Only Wirrilinga’s foal had been reclaimed.
Yarra had woken and seemed to know what had happened. Distressed, he went quickly to Coolawyn for her comforting milk.
Time had passed. Only a few more months and he should be weaned — as would Wirrilinga’s foal — and in the natural course of things, both mares would have another foal.
The only one who would miss Wirrilinga’s foal would be Yarra. Yarra who had always searched, and only briefly found.
By morning, the snow promised by the thunder was falling so thickly that it was really time for Burra to urge his herd lower.
He did not take them by way of the Cascade Spur, the route which he thought — and hoped — Ringaroo had taken. Burra’s herd made their way south on the track above the giant alpine ash, high above the river, over Packsaddle Gap, into the lower, gentler valleys, and arrived at the head of the Ingegoodbee River just as night was falling.
The ground was already dark, but the faint light in the sky was reflected in those still, calm, lovely pools where the Ingegoodbee heads.
Ever since he was a foal, Burra had seen his own face mirrored in them. He had seen his mother’s face pictured there, too, and understood that the pools reflected them as they drank. Now he saw Yarra go to drink and spring backwards in surprise, and Burra knew that the foal saw his own image and thought that it was that unnamed foal. He saw Yarra look around swiftly, then paw the water in a sort of desperation. There was no other, identical foal.
What strange secrets were being whispered in the moving candlebark leaves? Only Coolawyn would know that Yarra had been carried to her by the waters of that raging flood. Only the whispering leaves of the trees on the riverbanks, and the half-submerged tea trees, could tell where that foal had come from.
Several mares in Ringaroo’s herd had known and more than half forgotten that Wirrilinga had given birth to twins — white, because she and Ringaroo were both albinos — and one had been swept away in the roaring water. No-one had remembered, because they had not seen Yarra. The sight of him and the unnamed foal together would have reminded them, and a mystery would have had an explanation.
Thunder in winter means snow …
There were no great rock tors, just there near the Ingegoodbee pools, around which the thunder would roll and reverberate, but clouds were gathering in. Heavy clouds pressed down and then snow began to fall, and soon lay quite thickly on the ground. The herd would get hungry. Even Yarra could not wander far. Burra knew that the white herd would not risk coming through the snow again, to try to steal Coolawyn.
Spring had to come, but of course spring would bring more thunderstorms. Already thunder and lightning were becoming even more frequent.
And, after a while, spring rain did fall. Grass began to grow slowly on the hillsides that face east and north, and shrubs put out fresh leaves. Hovea flowered, its purple flowers even showing above the snow, vivid and thrilling.
Burra had to make a move before Ringaroo did. He heard a kookaburra laughing, heard and saw a huge flock of currawongs high in the sky, circling, carolling: heard a thrush heralding the spring.
Thunder came again without snow falling. It was springtime, with warm wind and torrential rain.
Burra left his herd safely on the divide above the Ingegoodbee pools, and set out to find Ringaroo before the rivers rose too high, intending to drive him far away down the Indi and force him to stay in his own territory.
Like the previous year, spring was late arriving, and several foals were already on the ground, but the herd was safe. Burra went back through the alpine ash. He turned down on the big Cascade Spur.
Night was not far off. A wombat was already out, nosing around for tucker before the storm came. An echidna hurrying home down the shaley track, lifted his long, enquiring snout as Burra passed him. Darkness closed in, and heavy clouds gathered. Soon one of the mopokes who lived on the spur called another. Through the interlaced branches, Burra could see the clouds gathering fast. All the animals whom he had seen were hurrying … Every hair of his grey coat, and those long, dark, sensitive hairs in his ears, told him that a vast storm was coming. Already he could hear water rushing down the Cascade creek. He hurried.
Something told him that he would find Ringaroo in a storm.
Wind was getting up. The usual sounds of an ash forest — the swaying and creaking of the bark streamers — grew louder and louder, so that all other sounds were obliterated, but Burra could feel that he was being followed. He was wondering so much about what was ahead that he did not think of being followed. He hurried down the aisles of giant alpine ash.
Lower down, lightning blazed on the tall white trunks of the ribbon gums.
More claps of thunder, more noise of wind in the treetops — he became almost desperate to find Ringaroo before that white stallion fled from the storm. He may already be too late.
At the foot of the spur there were hoofmarks. Burra dropped his nose down to them. He was sure they were Ringaroo’s, and made quite recently. Ringaroo had churned up the ground and then turned down the small, grassy flat.
There was the river … a dark ribbon. Snow melt had already made it into a banker — and it was rising. Burra stood looking at it for a moment. Then he heard that sound again, the drumming of hooves, not far downstream, the beat of it carried away occasionally by the pulse-beat of the rising water.
Burra saw a sudden vision of Coolawyn. Ringaroo had his own most-loved mare back, safely with him. If he really had come for Coolawyn — back in the first winter snow — and Burra felt sure he had, it was time for him to vanish. Burra had come all the way from the Ingegoodbee to drive him back to his own bimble. He would quite certainly give him such a beating that he would never come back.
Anger flowed through Burra: a red film seemed to fog his vision. He could hear Ringa galloping towards him, then just see the great white horse racing through the night — and he sprang at him.
They collided — the white horse and the grey — screaming with rage.
Burra was slightly the heavier, and his full weight came against Ringaroo’s near shoulder, spinning him around towards that dark river. Burra recoiled with the force of the impact, and sprang again quickly, before Ringa could turn around. Such was the force of Burra’s charge that he sent Ringa stumbling, and he was almost on the edge of the river.
Ringaroo gathered himself together, swung around, and reared to strike with both forefeet.
Burra hurled himself wildly at the white, misty horse — this stallion who dared to come by night to try to steal Coolawyn! The
y both heard the enormous rumbling of thunder as they crashed together.
They were swaying on the edge of that raging river, as sheet lightning filled the sky.
Burra saw Ringaroo poised for a moment, like a horse cast in pewter, then drop his head, as though blinded by the brilliant light. He saw, too, beyond him, that a huge tree had fallen into the river on the opposite side. He threw himself at Ringaroo, and realised in that same instant that the great white stallion could not see, but it was too late to stop in mid-charge.
Ringaroo lost his footing, and suddenly they were both flying through the flaring sky into that silver, rushing stream.
As the lightning faded, Burra saw Ringaroo’s body bob up in the water, then sink again and vanish below a big branch of the fallen tree — and get caught there.
Burra, striking out in the freezing water, did not even know if he were struggling to fight Ringaroo, or to save him from drowning. He grabbed at the branch and pulled.
The branch broke free. Both horses were rushed downstream by the current, both struck out with huge effort, but the current went on, taking them downstream with it.
Burra felt Ringaroo beside him in the flooded river, beside him on the side nearest the bank. He could keep pushing him over. After a frightening struggle, he felt earth under his hooves. Together both horses scrambled out, frozen, shaking and exhausted.
Burra had saved Ringaroo from drowning, and had no strength to do other than point him in the direction of his own territory.
They both stood, breathless, water pouring off them, trembling all over.
Burra had to get back across the Indi River before it rose higher and cut him off from his own country and his herd. He stood while he got some breath back, and stopped trembling, then he went up the riverbank quite a distance before he plunged in and aimed for the opposite side, finally scrambling out, just where he and Ringaroo had gone in first. Something told him that Ringaroo would never return.
Burra turned for home, making for the foot of the Cascade Spur. It was all lit up by lightning, but he did not see what it was that had been following him, for it was hidden in some bitter pea bushes.
As he started up the spur the whole scene was lit up again. The river, glittering platinum, was rising fast, and on the opposite side, one white foal, almost a yearling, stood alone, gazing across. The lightning faded to a faint glitter. Just then, out of the bitter pea, walked Yarra.
Yarra shied with fear away from the flooded river, but stood close enough to see the other foal.
Burra looked back before the lightning died completely and saw the two … They were too far away for him to see that their eyes were half-closed.
The twin brothers stood, divided by the river that had divided them before. When the snow-melt subsided, the twin brothers would cross the river, often, and run together for a year or so, or always. With sunset-coloured eyes, they would gallop through the forests of the night.
Burra, too tired to climb fast up the spur, dreamed he heard Coolawyn calling him. There was a hollow guarded by ribbon gums, the home of a black-shouldered kite. Would he find the entrance to it, through rocks? There was a still, round pool in the centre of that hollow.
Burra, half-asleep, went as though pulled by a spider’s gossamer thread till he walked through the passageway between the rocks. There was the round hollow and the guardian ribbon gums, like ghosts, tall and standing all around. There was the magic pool, not entirely visible, yet glowing deeply, the wraith of a grey mare beside it, and at her feet a newborn foal. The foal was too black to be seen in the dark of the night, but was not just a dreamed vision.
There was Coolawyn, herself, with her black foal at her feet, who would turn out to be grey like Burra.
Dancing Brumby’s Rainbow
Dedication
To Sue and John, with love and best wishes for happiness.
Epigraph
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
and feel the promise is not vain …
Life that shall endless be.
L. H. Heward 1897–1943
One
Choopa, the blue-roan brumby, was lying curled up against his mother, Dandaloo. Neither of them were really asleep. There was the sound of wind in the faraway treetops, but coming towards them. There was the moan of wind around granite rocks.
Choopa knew by the pulse beat in Dandaloo’s body that something strange and thrilling had entered into their world.
It seemed to him that, for days now, there had been the whispering wind, and a mist so faint — twisting and vanishing, as though it bore a message.
He kept half-dreaming of the lakes in the high country. He and Dandaloo had gone to those lakes with Son of Storm. Son of Storm — the big, gentle, brown stallion.
In fact, Choopa knew that it was Dandaloo who had taken them all to the high lakes. He had been sure at the time, and never really forgotten, that she hoped that his going into those dreamlike lakes might make him grow till he was the size of other foals of his age, give him strength and beautiful stature. He had walked far out into the lakes, even been forced to swim, but nothing had changed; he was still a dwarf. He did know, however, that there was some grace given him by those waters of the high country lakes.
In his memory music played over those waters, and the gift he had received was his wonderful sense of dance and it was as though that music played forever. In fact, the music had come up from that other valley on the far side of the Snowy River.
Choopa lay there, beside Dandaloo, almost hearing that music, dreaming of the swaying rhythm that he felt sure must always sound in the depth of the lakes.
He must go, he must really hear it, not just dream it.
The beat of Dandaloo’s heart was against his small body; the message in the wind grew more insistent. Music was calling him, and surely a dream was calling her.
In a quick movement Choopa leapt up, ready to go through the night. Dandaloo stood up beside him, shaking the stiffness out of her old muscles, shaking herself in the dark. Whatever might be ahead, whatever might be between them and those spellbound high lakes, they were going. There might be mysteries, up there, in the ice that had carved out the deep hollows where water now lay — mysteries of thousands of years before horses lived in the mountains.
Choopa led off, threading his way between tall, slender, white ribbon gums or the high, rough-barked messmates.
He heard Dandaloo’s hoof-fall behind him, and another sound. A wombat? He had many friends among the young animals and they would follow through the dark, but when dawn came they would probably lie down and sleep where they could.
A faint mist seemed to flow around Choopa’s legs. He looked back; that lissom mist was knee-high around Dandaloo, too, as though she were floating. Choopa felt strangely disembodied, out of touch with the world of solid granite and solid trees. He was living in a dream. Perhaps he was floating — and, floating, one might go anywhere.
All was utterly silent, till a mopoke called from a ribbon gum above. Choopa could just see him; then that owl took off, still calling ‘mopoke, mopoke’, as it vanished into the forest. Choopa felt that in each call there was a warning to all the creatures of the bush that brumbies were floating through the forest, floating in the mist.
He looked back at Dandaloo again, because things that float seem not quite real. He stopped so that he could touch her — feel her warm reality. She came gliding, floating towards him. One of her hooves, quite invisible, made a mist-muffled clink on a stone. Choopa extended his nose to hers. She rubbed her warm face against him.
There was no doubt of her reality.
It was time to go on, but the mopoke’s story had gone ahead of them: there was a dwarf brumby, maybe the one who danced, and his mother floating through the forest on a swirl of mist. Something strange must be going to happen.
Never before had a mist made a stream on which brumbies could float; never before had that stream of mist borne them ever higher into the mountains.
/> Choopa heard the mopoke, heard the whisperings of that wind in the eucalypt leaves. A leaf brushed his ear and it was almost as though a bird’s wing had brushed his ear with a message.
The mist felt damp on his legs — knee-high and no higher on the dwarf’s small legs and knee-high on his mother’s, too. A ribbon of mist simply swathing their legs as Dandaloo and Choopa made their way through the forest, as though it made a river in which they were flowing uphill.
Choopa was puzzled. The mist had barely been noticeable until he sprang up from his sleep and started to head towards Dead Horse Gap. Why had it suddenly flowed around them and not through the forest to either side? What had made him suddenly so sure that his mother was longing for the high country?
The mist seemed to rise, enclosing him for a moment. Everything became uncertain. Then Dandaloo moved closer and rubbed against him; certainty came back again — the absolute certainty that they must head on to the highest peaks. Up there they might be above the mist and that which they were seeking might suddenly become manifest.
Choopa was right, Dandaloo did have a dream in her mind; she was possessed absolutely by this dream, and the dream was something that was whispered in the wind. A tale that the water told as the great snowdrifts melted into streams. And because it was the wind and the rippling water that told the tale, Dandaloo knew that it must be true.
Truths of the world are sung in the music of the spheres. A tale sung in a snow-fed stream, or by the moving leaves of the mountain ash, is straight from the breath of God.
Dandaloo did not really know what it was that the wind and the streams were telling her. She thought — and hoped — that it was a promise for Choopa. Somehow, that wise old mother also knew that there was a presence of danger. Had there perhaps been the form of an enormous stallion in among the rocks?