It was a long time before they thought of looking at the ground.
‘Look!’ cried Storm. ‘It is even making the ground white. We should go home. Perhaps it will be difficult to find our way.’ It was all right while they were in amongst the tall trees and had the trunks to guide them, but out in the open valley all was a blinding whirl of blown whiteness. The shape of tracks could still be seen, and Thowra jogged along one, his nose to the ground. Storm ran right beside him, almost bumping into him.
‘You will tread on me,’ Thowra complained. ‘What is the matter?’
‘I can hardly see you in this queer white stuff,’ said Storm, and he sounded afraid. His own dark coat showed up clearly, but Thowra was almost invisible.
Thowra looked around him then and felt half-afraid too. Nothing could be seen except the swirling, whirling flakes; no contours of hill or ridge, not even the loops of the streams, but the hollow of track still showed just at his feet.
‘Quick, we must follow it before it gets buried,’ he said. ‘By then we should be at the creek.’
When they reached the stream they stopped to watch the strange white flakes which almost hissed as they touched the water — and then vanished.
They waded through the ice-cold water and followed the stream on the other bank, knowing they should soon come to the little creek that flowed down from the herd’s camping valley.
They kept shaking their heads to try and free their eyelashes and nostrils of the queer white stuff. Their forelocks, solid and wet, hit their eyes with each shake.
When they had gone a little way Thowra suddenly stopped, raised his head and neighed loudly. He could see nothing at all but the white storm, but ahead came answering neighs and he broke into a canter. Bel Bel and Mirri had come down to the junction of the valley to wait for them.
They could see Mirri from several yards off, but were almost on top of Bel Bel before they saw her.
‘What’s happening to the world, Mother?’ asked Thowra, feeling very glad to be safely with her.
“Why, this is a snowstorm, Son. It’s heavy for early in the winter,’ she said, her voice worried, ‘and it’s heavy for down here. We may go hungry before the spring.’
The two mares led their foals back to the herd who were huddled together in the shelter of some trees. There they spent the cold, stormy night, with the wind howling and the snow lying thick on their warm coats.
By morning the snow had stopped falling but it lay nearly a foot deep on the ground. Trees were bowed down with it, each leaf coated in white crystals. There was no grass to eat unless one scratched away the snow with a hoof.
Disconsolately, the herd wandered down into the main valley.
‘The sun will come out soon,’ said Bel Bel, ‘and then the snow will thaw and we will have grass to eat again.’
When the sun did come out and warm them, all the foals soon found that they could have great fun chasing each other up and down the glittering white hills.
Thowra was no longer invisible, now that the air was clear of the wind-swivelled flakes, but somehow the snow seemed to be his kingdom, and the other foals soon saw that he was swifter and more sure-footed in it than Arrow. Of course if one knew where every hole or little watercourse was, one did not make any stupid mistakes. Arrow forgot that there was a little tiny stream at the foot of one ridge. He went galloping down, chasing Thowra and never noticed Thowra’s flying leap at the bottom. His forefeet broke through the snow into the creek and, in a wild flurry of snow, he turned a complete somersault, finishing up almost buried.
Thowra saw exactly what happened, and by the time Arrow had got to his feet, shaken all the snow out of his eyes and ears, and gingerly tested his legs, Thowra was rearing and neighing on top of a high rock on the next ridge.
If Arrow had had any sense, he would have taken no notice, but he got in a fury of anger at the sight of the beautiful creamy, who was almost white now, in his thick winter coat, his silver mane and tail gleaming and glittering in the sun, as he pranced and reared.
Arrow made after him, with all the watching foals, neighing and snorting, kicking and pawing up the snow.
Thowra waited until the chestnut was three strides away from the back of the rock, then he reared up and pirouetted on his hind legs, gave a squeal of joy, and leapt off the steep side of the rocks on to the soft snow, then away down the ridge, bucking and snorting.
Bel Bel and Mirri were at the bottom.
‘That’s enough, my son. You are making a bad enemy for yourself,’ said Bel Bel, but she had enjoyed Thowra’s pranks, and there was a gleam of pleasure in her eyes. Her cream colt had looked so joyously beautiful rearing up on the snow-covered rock. ‘Come now,’ she went on, ‘we will go down the mountainside a little way and see if we can find some food.’
Mirri called Storm and off the four of them went, down the valley and into the tall timber where Storm and Thowra had watched the start of the snowfall the day before. Here Thowra suddenly stopped dead, snorting at the ground. Right at his nose was a set of fresh tracks in the snow, little tracks just like a child’s bare feet, but the foals did not know that. Where the snow was very soft and deep, there was a gutter in between the feetmarks.
Bel Bel and Mirri said nothing when the foals began following the trail, noses down. Suddenly Thowra, who was leading, stopped and nearly sat back on his haunches with fright. Only a yard or two ahead of him was the round, furry back of a wombat who was grubbing for food. The wombat took no notice whatever but just went on grubbing through snow and mud with his sharp little nose. Bel Bel and Mirri watched, their muzzles twitching a little.
Thowra stood up and stretched out his neck to sniff the thick fur. The wombat turned round surprisingly fast, his beady eyes angry. Thowra nearly sat down again, as the wombat waddled on, his round, fat middle making the gutter in the snow.
The horses kept jogging on downwards, nibbling at wattles and odd shrubs. At last, when the snow got thinner, they turned off the spur on to the northern slope where, as the mare well knew they would, they found tussocks of snowgrass.
That night as they camped by a clear singing stream, Bel Bel sniffed the air and looked at the sky.
‘There’ll be a frost tonight,’ she said, ‘and another fine day, but I can’t help feeling there’s going to be a lot of snow, and we’ll have to find somewhere else to winter, lower than the Cascades.’
‘Well, the nearest lower country with good grass belongs to The Brolga,’ said Mirri.
Storm and Thowra both pricked up their ears.
Seeking grass
Heavy frosts made ice on the creeks and froze small, still pools quite solid. In the wonderful bright days that came after each frost, though some of the more weather-wise mares might be worrying about the hard winter that was coming, the foals played and had mock fights with wild exuberance. The biting cold and the bright sun, as Mirri said, had put the devil into them.
Then one day, after an iron-hard frost, clouds came up before the dawn and a moaning, icy wind came from the north. Just as the grey light crept over the valley a flock of black cockatoos flew screaming, crying, to the south, borne on the wind.
‘Hmph,’ said Bel Bel to Yarraman. ‘I don’t like it.’
Yarraman looked as if he had not heard her, but as the light grew stronger he started grazing his way into the main valley and then south-east — just steadily south-east all day, without haste, but never turning back.
The clouds grew heavier and darker, the wind colder. No ice melted that day.
‘We haven’t seen any other horses,’ Thowra heard his mother whisper to Mirri. ‘The Brolga must have already decided to go to his lower pastures.’
That night they sheltered in an unaccustomed valley and just at nightfall the snow started to beat down in the wind.
The herd moved around under the trees all night, stamping and whinnying softly. Sometimes a foal dropped down on the hard, cold ground and slept; mostly the sense of disquiet throughout the who
le herd kept even the young ones from sleeping soundly.
Thowra did not know what made him feel excited and yet afraid. He did not realize that his mother’s anxiety since the first heavy snowfall had been communicating itself to him, or that the strange feeling which all the grown horses had slowly begun to get — that a hard winter was coming — had somehow made everyone touchy, apt to gallop, kick, or bite. He only knew that the howl of the wind and the cold lash of the snow made him want to gallop now, even in the pitch darkness, and leap on to a high rock, rear and neigh loudly to the sky. He could imagine the wild neigh ringing out and the thought of it sent cold shivers down his backbone.
Suddenly he realized that Arrow was passing him and he lashed out with his heels. Arrow gave a squeal of rage and pain but Thowra had cantered off into the storm and the nigh; Unable to bear his own feelings any longer, he lifted his head to the falling snow and neighed with all his strength. There was a sudden hushed silence in the herd, and then from far to the south-east came an answering, distant neigh.
Thowra stiffened, tingling with a mad excitement, but Bel Bel came up at his side then, and she nipped him on the wither.
‘Be quiet, silly one,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘Yarraman will punish you if you make too much noise. Don’t you realize we are no longer in our own country, and that he may have to fight for our food?’
‘Are we in The Brolga’s country?’ Thowra was quivering with nervousness.
‘Yes, we are, and we will have to go further into it yet, to get out of the heavy snow.’
‘I wish daylight would come.’
‘The winter nights are long,’ said Bel Bel. ‘Sleep while I stand beside you. Tomorrow you may have to fight Arrow for that kick you gave him. We may travel a long way too. You will need your strength.’
When the dawn came, grey and beating with hard, wind-driven snow, Yarraman led off immediately, still south-east, but upwards, over a gap in the hills.
There were strange horse tracks at the mouth of a small valley. Yarraman sniffed them curiously but went on his own way. Bel Bel and Mirri both branched off up the little valley for a few yards, looking carefully at the tracks.
‘No more than four young horses, I should think,’ Bel Bel said. ‘Certainly The Brolga is not with them.’
Just in the few minutes while they looked at the tracks, the herd had vanished into the storm and their tracks were fast getting covered. Thowra and Storm were both quite bothered, but Bel Bel and Mirri trotted upwards, and kept trotting till the herd came into sight, shadow horses behind a dense curtain of flying snow.
All day long the wind howled and drove the snow in this impenetrable curtain. Often the horses were almost carried along by the wind.
They were getting hungry now, and the only water they had was when they broke the ice on a pool. The foals demanded, and got, milk from their mothers, but there would not be much milk if they had to keep going like this, driven on the storm, and never finding grass. Even the mares were tiring, perhaps because the cold was so intense, and if they stopped they got colder still.
At last, when they had gone a long way down the other side of the gap, Yarraman turned into a side valley that ran across the wind and had plenty of trees for shelter, and there they spent another restless, anxious night.
At dawn the storm still swirled and beat around them. They set off again, cold, tired, and hungry, and filled with a dread of staying still in one place. They were still steadily losing height and both the ground and the air must have been warmer than it was in the Cascades because the snow was wetter and not as thick on the ground.
They came, at last, to flatter ground in what seemed to be a basin into which flowed quite a number of streams. Yarraman went several miles downstream and then he started fossicking around for shrubs to eat and the odd patch of grass that might be sticking out of the snow underneath a tree.
‘It looks as if this is where we’re going to stop,’ Mirri said to Bel Bel. Bel Bel was staring at the bank of the stream: snow lay right to the water’s edge, but just where there was a crossing there were still the shapes of hoof-marks half-filled with snow.
‘Hmn!’ she said, peering more closely and then crossing over and looking at the other side. ‘Hmn! Quite a few horses have crossed fairly recently I think.’ She scratched away some snow from the bank and found muddied, tracked snow underneath.
‘Well, what of it?’ asked Mirri. ‘We’ve got to eat, and we may eat better here than higher up.’
‘Looks as if it will be a quarrelsome winter,’ Bel Bel said, and she turned her head towards Yarraman. A hard winter would not worry a horse approaching his prime, like The Brolga, but Yarraman would feel it. The Brolga would not have attained full strength yet, but he must be getting very near it. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘nothing is likely to happen during such a blizzard. Everyone will be too taken up with finding food.’
The blizzard continued for days. Sometimes, down in the low valley, the snow turned to rain, then it would snow again. The horses managed to find bushes which they could eat, and, though they were hungry, they were not desperate.
Now that they were no longer travelling, but wandering around trying to find food, Thowra thought he would be able to have some fun, particularly annoying Arrow, since he himself would be almost invisible in the flying snow, but he found it so difficult to see his own mother that he never liked to get far away from her in case he lost her in the blizzard and in the unknown country.
Once, Bel Bel left him with Mirri while she went off scouting further down the stream, and, by the importance of her behaviour, Tbowra felt sure Yarraman had asked her to go and see what she could see. In that time, he sneaked away from Mirri, crept up on Arrow and gave him a playful nip, but he could not help feeling afraid of the rough weather and the constantly falling snow, and he was glad when his mother came home, even though she had absolutely nothing interesting to tell them.
At last there came a day when the snow stopped falling, and the following night, close on midnight, the wind dropped. Thowra woke because of the sudden silence when there was no longer the howl of the wind, and in that silence he heard, far away but echoing, the shrill trumpeting neigh of a stallion.
He scrambled to his feet and was just going to neigh in tremulous answer when Bel Bel gave him a swift nip.
‘Why, oh why, have I got such an excitable son?’ she said, half in anger, half in pride. ‘It is not your place to answer that call,’ and just then Yarraman’s wild cry rang out.
There was an instant’s electric silence; not one of the herd moved or let go a breath. Then, faraway again, but shrill with anger, came the stallion cry.
‘Tomorrow will start the fights for the grass that we haven’t found yet,’ said Mirri acidly.
‘And the youngest, lightest horse will have an advantage in this snow,’ Bel Bel added.
The foals dropped off to sleep again, but there was a restless lack of ease among the mares and young colts and fillies.
Not long after the grey dawn, The Brolga and some of his mares appeared out of the mist and clouds.
Yarraman pranced forward out from his herd, stepping high, head up imperiously, tail held high and free.
Along came The Brolga, rearing and screaming.
A shock of excitement ran through the herd. The Brolga was growing into a noble horse; yet their own Yarraman was superb — like a sun god against the grey clouds and white snow.
Thowra shivered. The Brolga, like his mother and himself, had that queer quality of merging with snow and cloud. In a real fight that might prove an advantage over the bright chestnut.
He could smell the two stallions’ anger and excitement as they went to meet each other; there was a roar from both horses as they reached within striking distance. Then the snow was flying from their hooves as they circled each other, striking, biting, screaming. Thowra saw blood staining the snow, and the mud and the snow and the blood churned underfoot.
Yarraman had The Brolga in a
terrific grip with his teeth, but suddenly the older horse’s hooves slipped in the snow and he was forced to let go. Round and round they circled again. The nimbler, lighter Brolga could certainly keep his feet better and when Yarraman slipped again, he managed to get a cruel hold just above the chestnut’s wither. Screaming with rage and pain, Yarraman lashed out and missed him, and then with a tremendous effort shook himself free and planted both heels in The Brolga’s chest, almost winding him.
The Brolga had a gash above one eye, too, where Yarraman had struck. It half-blinded him, but he could still move more lightly and surely than the heavier horse. Now, each was trying for the deadly grip on the wither. Yarraman succeeded, but now he was so breathless that the watching herd could see that, even if he defeated the younger horse this time, he would not have the wind to give him a real beating.
Thowra looked with horror at all the blood on the snow, and at the two exhausted horses, and when Yarraman let go, for want of strength to hold on any longer, he found himself hoping and hoping that The Brolga would have no fighting strength left either.
With relief he saw the great grey horse backing off, every muscle trembling with exhaustion, backing, backing, his one good eye never leaving Yarraman who stood, a huge, bleeding statue, in front of his mares.
New wisdom
Yarraman had won the right for himself and his herd to eat what food they could find when the snow melted, but each mare knew that they could peacefully graze only just as long as they did not trespass on any territory on which The Brolga and his herd were grazing.
Throughout the winter there were several fights between the young colts that ran with each herd, but the two stallions kept away from each other, and let their wounds heal.
Yarraman’s took a long time to heal up. Perhaps the food was not good enough to keep his blood strong; perhaps it was just that the snow had got into the wounds. No one knew how soon The Brolga had recovered, only Thowra saw him once, standing high upon a rock, looking out over a snowy landscape — and, to Thowra, he looked vital, and strong, and terrifying.