Quiet as a ghost, he moved among the rocks, always being careful to leave a way of escape behind as well as in front. Then he stood, trembling with excitement, his beautiful silver-cream hide streaked darkly with sweat. The Brolga was near the top. There was quiet for a minute, perhaps for two minutes, and Thowra did not dare move over to see where The Brolga was.
Something that was half a sound, or a sound he half heard, seemed to be very near him. Then all of a sudden he was staring into The Brolga’s fierce eyes from behind the rock. He just had time to notice the red, fiery flesh inside the dilated grey nostrils before he had sprung backwards into thick heather scrub, swung round and away. Only his speed could save him now.
The Brolga was right behind him. Throwra felt his breath, hot, scorching like a north wind, but he also felt his own strength surge through him.
To the windhover that had returned and was hanging in the air above the ridge it might have seemed a flashing second in which either horse could have won the desperate race — either the enormous, powerful grey, or the silver-cream, so lithe and swift. That second, though, which flashed past the hawk, was one of wild effort to the two horses. The Brolga was straining every ounce of his great strength to get close enough to Thowra to bite or strike: Thowra was calling up reserves of energy that he had never used before, trying, trying, to leap away down the rocky slope — to leap away and live. To each horse perhaps that second seemed an hour, or a day, or a lifetime.
Suddenly Thowra felt himself as one steel ball, his legs beneath him filled with an immeasurable power. He sprang, cleaving the air, almost from underneath the bounding grey, gathered himself together as he landed on a rock and sprang again. He was out of reach. A snowgum branch whipped him across the flanks, he smelt the tang of the leaves. Just behind he could hear The Brolga’s breath, but each leap took him farther out of reach.
It was no use getting too far ahead, he knew. Soon would come the moment to stop and offer fight, to keep drawing The Brolga farther and farther away from the herd’s tracks, lower and lower down the steep slope so that it would take him hours to climb back.
The Brolga was too angry to stop and think that it was really Golden he was after — or perhaps he felt in all his pounding blood that it was better to kill Thowra now. The screams of jays in a snowgum only made him angrier. He went plunging down, after Thowra, crashing and stumbling over the boulders.
Thowra, nimble and swift, kept ahead, just ahead.
Right down to the Crackenback they went, Thowra in the heat of the chase forgetting all about his first and oldest enemy — Man. And there, on the opposite bank, listening and watching, alert and on fairly fresh horses, were two men.
Thowra had seen the shining water and felt his body long to be in it. He had seen white sand stretching to the water at the crossing, and heather and the big white-flowered pimelia bush dipping to the water from the banks, but as he saw them he saw the men, and everything was instantly blurred by the horror of the situation. All he knew was that it would be better to go down-stream for a while, rather than try to get back uphill where the fresh horses would undoubtedly catch them very quickly. This all happened in one second — he saw the river, he saw the men, he forgot The Brolga, and he turned and fled.
The Brolga saw the men, and he turned, too, and followed Thowra as fast as he could go.
Clouds of white spray splashed up in the sunlight, as the men forced their horses fast through the river. Then there was a most fantastic chase, a chase that became a legend among men, with many of the other tales of Thowra’s doings.
Thowra knew the country along the river well, and knew, too, many of the little valleys that stretched back into the hills where he and his herd had tried to find grass early in the spring. He thought he would keep to these valleys where tree ferns and logs had fallen, where teatree grew, covered with hanging moss and creepers, and the creeks wound invisible through this tangle of dead and living bush. He felt certain that he, so surefooted and without a heavy man on his back, should be able to race even the far fresher horses through that leg-breaking, neck-breaking country.
When he was hard-pressed by The Brolga he had not thought about the men, and now, hard-pressed by men, he forgot about The Brolga. He went at truly breakneck speed along the banks of the Crackenback, waiting till he found the particular creek and fern-filled valley up which he intended to turn.
He clattered perilously around a rocky outcrop that overhung the foaming water, he forced a way through and over a mass of fallen trees and driftwood left by floods, and all the time he could hear the crashing and clattering behind him of the chase. Not much farther, and he could turn away from the river and into the dark cleft of the valley where the Christmas bush and teatree were flowering and where there was the hot, steamy smell of rotting fern, and wood, and leaves in the unmoving air.
His heart was thundering. How long it was that he had been galloping he did not know: he was tired, tired, tired, but at least Golden should be safely away by now, and Boon Boon and the other mares and foals.
The men were very close as he turned into the valley. He heard a rope whistle, and leapt into a great thicket of tree ferns.
In all the layers of rotten logs and the old fern trunks that were interlaced, to and fro, over the creek and across the valley floor, even Thowra stumbled and crashed, but he knew the men, with their tame horses, would never get through it as fast as he. There was hope now. He looked back once, just before he plunged into a tangle of the dark-barked swamp gum that was hung with green vines, laced with blanket-wood and bracken, and he saw the men, on two bay horses, saw the vivid colour of their check shirts — and then he saw The Brolga. What, oh what, was going to be the finish of this? If he got away from the men, could he ever get away from The Brolga? Would he escape only to be killed?
It was impossible to go very fast. Often he had to leap from one log to another; often he broke through rotting timbers into water or squelching black soil and steaming leaf mould. The heat was oppressive in this valley where no wind stirred, and Thowra had been forced to gallop twice for his life; first last night, when he had, too, the terror of being roped, and now, almost all the day, and he could feel his strength ebbing. Always there was the sound behind of the men and The Brolga.
The sweat streamed off him. He knew he must drink soon. He made an enormous effort to get ahead enough to have time to stop and drink. He looked back and could see only one man behind The Brolga and both he and The Brolga were sufficiently far behind to give him a moment at a deep, dark pool. As he drank he wondered where the other man was. If he had tried going higher up, in the hope that the country would be so much clearer that he could race ahead and get right around the two brumbies, Thowra knew he was going to be disappointed; the sides of the valley were all deeply cut by tiny gorges and creeks, each one filled with a tangle of fallen timber or with rock rubble and creepers.
Thowra drank with gasping gulps and then went on and on, and anyone watching him — seeing the lovely cream stallion leap on to a log, change feet and leap again, dance through a trap of branches lying this way and that — would hardly have known how exhausted he was. But, though he gained on his pursuers, they still kept on coming. The chase was like a fantastic nightmare, slow-moving because none of the horses could go fast through the immense tangle.
At last he realized that there was much less noise behind him. He looked around, standing for a moment with heaving flanks, nostrils dilating with every shattering breath. There was only The Brolga to be seen, The Brolga following, following.
Half a mile further on, Thowra knew another valley that came in from the south. If he followed that it would give him a good short cut on the way back towards Golden and his herd on the Brindle Bull — but he was not going to let The Brolga follow him for ever. Exhaustion rose in waves through him, and anger at The Brolga for having kept up the chase for so long a time.
He came to a small, peaty clearing: there he stopped and waited, his head thrown up
proudly, even though he gasped for breath — at least snatching a few minutes’ rest while The Brolga plunged on up the valley through all the entanglement on the ground. As he stood waiting, the last glittering gleam reflected from the sunset died out of the valley.
Then a strange green glow began to flow through the deep valley; only the tall, slender ribbon gums stood out of the greenness in white majesty. Thowra looked around him, aware of the strange light, not knowing that he, too, stood out in pale splendour like the ribbon gums — the silver stallion indeed, as the men who had first seen him at night, by the light of the campfire, had named him.
There he stood, in the little clear patch of ground by the creek, surrounded by the interwoven green bush, with the tall white pillars of trees, and the green light. There he stood, waiting for The Brolga.
The Brolga came, striving to gallop towards his enemy, but slowed down by all the tangle on the valley floor. His breath was rasping in and out, and Thowra had had time for his own breathing to have lessened to deep, pounding breaths. He was exhausted and so was Thowra, but here, below the white ribbon gum pillars, with the flowing green light becoming deeper and deeper as evening approached, they must fight.
It was not the fight Bel Bel had prophesied — that was still to come: it was a weird fight between two horses that were too tired to hurt each other, a fight that went on, in silence, till they both dropped down at the farthest corners of the clearing, unable to move. Night came then, and the green light became grey, and then darkness covered the two stallions where they lay.
A fox barked nervously, and suddenly, from above, there was the chattering bark of a great, black flying phallanger silhouetted high up on the white trunk of a ribbon gum. The phallanger took off and went gliding right across the exhausted stallions. A mopoke, disturbed by his noise, gave his first call of the night: ‘Mopoke, Mopoke’ echoing in the dark-enclosed valley.
Gradually, there came all the creeping, rustling sounds that are heard in the stillness of the night, as wombats climbed out of their holes and padded softly along a tree-trunk that formed a bridge across the creek, as possums climbed among leafy branches, as the snakes — the evil ones — wriggled along the ground.
Thowra lay so still that a possum passed quite close as it went from tree to tree. Presently the exhaustion of the horses changed into deep sleep and they lay there, their feet still gathered underneath them, as they had dropped.
The slow hours of the night passed, the stars moved across the sky above the net of leaf and branch that was the ceiling of the valley, and even in such profound sleep Bel Bel’s training, the birthright of cunning she had given Thowra, did not leave him. Before too many stars had slipped through the net above him, Thowra woke and got stiffly to his feet.
He looked over towards the heap in the darkness which was The Brolga, then moved silently away, turning up the southward valley that would take him on the first part of his journey towards the Brindle Bull and his herd. Like a pale, floating will-o’-the-wisp he went on and on through the night.
In the first grey dawn The Brolga woke and found himself alone, with no track to show him whither Thowra had gone; alone, and far, far from his own country.
Now Golden was the prize
Slowly, through the bright, hot summer, yet another legend began to grow up round Thowra, a legend the men started to feel was true — and one that the horses believed absolutely.
Bad luck, it was said, came to everyone, either man or horse, who chased the silver bruruby stallion. Had not men been hurt and their horses lamed? Had they not lost the beautiful filly, Golden? And Arrow, the horses said, Arrow had been killed. Surely this Thowra had a magic quality. Not only had he, when exhausted, got right away from two men on fresh horses, but he had vanished, simply vanished.
And just like the wind in a blizzard can twist and turn even wild horses until they are almost lost in the swirling snow, Thowra had twisted and turned The Brolga as they galloped, and The Brolga had woken in the weird first dawning, quite uncertain where he was.
Every horse was sure that Thowra, though a horse, was, in some magic way, the wind for which his mother had named him.
The men felt that something would surely happen to them if they chased him, but they could not resist the longing to try to catch him. The Brolga felt that Thowra would defeat him, in some very unusual manner, but he longed for revenge — and he longed to make Golden the pride of his herd.
All summer the stockmen and The Brolga sought for Thowra and, if they saw him, they chased him. All summer Thowra and his mares and foals were chased, but they always vanished. Sometimes they were heard, and yet not seen. If they left some tracks, these tracks would abruptly cease, as though they had all melted into the air. It was the mysteriousness of Thowra that made each stockman feel as if he must catch him.
Of all the horses running in the mountains, Bel Bel alone thought she knew the secret hiding-place that enabled Thowra and his herd to disappear from all their hunters. When she heard how Thowra and his mares vanished, she wondered if he had found again the deep valley that was like a cleft in the hills at the back of Paddy Rush’s Bogong, the valley with the grassy Hidden Flat that could not be seen from the top. The valley where Yarraman and his herd had hidden after the men’s brumby drive so many summers ago when Thowra and Storm were foals.
Old as she was, she decided to go off and see for herself if this was where he was hiding.
As she jogged along, purposefully through the bush, she came on fresh tracks and recognized the spoor as Storm’s, so she followed him and found him with his mares, grazing peacefully. She whinnied and he lifted his noble bay head with a swift movement that reminded her of Mirri. In a moment, the big stallion was rubbing his nose on her neck.
‘I go in search of Thowra,’ Bel Bel said.
‘I, too, came this way feeling that I might find him,’ said Storm, ‘and yet I don’t know why.’
‘If you come with me, I think you will remember why you have come this way.’ Bel Bel nodded her old head. ‘You have been here before, but you were very young, Mirri and I brought you here as two foals.’
Thus it was that Storm set off with the old creamy mare, carefully following her trackless way, because he knew they must not lead either The Brolga or any wandering stockmen to Thowra’s hiding-place.
Bel Bel scrambled down the cliff into the valley rather lower downstream than the grass flat, and she and Storm walked together up the rocky creekbed, or along narrow banks above the green water.
As she walked, Bel Bel was thinking that when autumn came she must go to the Ramshead Range, and there perhaps she would stay, for the time had come for the wild snow to cover her body. It was impossible that she should live as long as her cream and silver son. Perhaps, if she found him now, this would be the last time she would see him; perhaps they would meet again, high on the Range, before the snows came.
When they rounded a bend in the rocky, foaming river, just where there were great high cliffs, they came on the Hidden Flat, a long, quite wide, green valley. Above it were high, steep sides where the ribbon gums grew, white and slim, among the grey-green peppermints, the treeferns and the blanket-woods.
Bel Bel stopped and looked back at Storm. Storm was standing with one forefoot raised, his ears pricked, and a puzzled expression in his eyes.
‘I don’t remember it,’ he said, ‘but I know I’ve been here before.’
Then into view, between two white ribbon gum pillars, stepped Thowra, followed by his herd.
Bel Bel stood, arching her neck with pride, looking suddenly like a young mare with her first foal — so beautiful was Thowra, his feet stepping high and gracefully, his head held with such majesty as he led his herd to water.
‘It is no wonder,’ she murmured, ‘that man and horse are after him.’ Then she and Storm went forward to greet him.
Thowra threw his head right up, his nostrils and eyes wild, as he heard their steps, but when he saw them, he whinnied joyously,
and trotted towards them.
‘Well, little old mother,’ he said, rubbing her wither, ‘you knew my hiding-place?’ Then he exchanged nose rubs with Storm. ‘And you, brother of the wild wind, did you know it, or did Bel Bel bring you?’
‘I brought him,’ Bel Bel said. ‘But, like you, he would have known the way in memory: long ago Mirri and I brought you here to hide.’
She walked over to greet Golden, because once she, Bel Bel, had been the one cream mare in the mountains; she had been the one that was beautiful and sought after by stallions for their herds, and by men because of her colour and her strong, sure legs which would have carried a stockman many miles over the mountains — but which never did. Now Golden was the prize, the famous and glorious mare, and Bel Bel must greet her and be proud that her son had captured — and held — her.
Thus it was that Bel Bel and Storm alone knew how Thowra vanished from his hunters, and when they heard horses — or cattle — say: ‘He is like wind — he must be partly a child of the wind — he comes from nowhere, he vanishes into nowhere,’ they would smile to themselves. Yet they, too, half-believed that Thowra had become almost magic, even though Bel Bel knew that it was she who had woven a spell over him at birth, and given him his wisdom and his cunning, all that made him seem to have the wind’s mystery.
When Bel Bel and Storm at last left Thowra, at his Hidden Flat, she said something that stayed in Thowra’s memory:
‘Maybe,’ she said, ‘I will see you up on the Ramshead before the snows come.’
As the days grew shorter, with summer turning to autumn and then to winter, he kept thinking of what she had said, and at last he set off to the face of Paddy Rush’s Bogong that overlooked the range, and there he watched and watched to see if the cattle mobs had gone. When he saw no sign of man or beast, he collected his own herd and led them down, over the Crackenback and up on to the Range.