The Silver Brumby. Elyne Mitchell

       Chapter Severn 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 whole 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 realised 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 night. 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, Thowra 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.