In the lower country, the pod-bearing bushes were stronger and taller, and not covered over by snow. Dandaloo and Wingilla found plenty to eat, so that there was milk for their foals. Bri Bri grew a little, in spite of the hard, cold winter season. Choopa remained as small as ever, but he did not become thin and weak.
On the slopes that faced the sun, the snow was thinner and melted between falls. The bushes quickly shook themselves free. As the year turned towards spring, streams began to break free, or bubble and gurgle beneath the ice.
The foals were filled with excitement in this, the first spring since the one in which they were born. They would race over the patches of snow, rear and plunge. Other young animals came out of burrows to play. Soon they, too, were forming a circle around Choopa while he romped and danced.
The snow became crystalline, like sugar, having been melted and frozen over and over again. It was Choopa who was the first one to learn the joy of rolling in it. Down he would go, legs in the air, his whole body wriggling in the coarse, slippery snow. Then, one time, as he wriggled, he began to slide, his head pointed downhill and then he slid quite fast on his back. The first time he found himself slithering head first, he felt rather unsure as to what would happen when he reached the fringe of ice at the bottom of the drift, and the wet grass, but it was all so splendidly upside down that nothing mattered, and when he reached the grass there was no jolt and he simply swung his short, stocky legs over and leapt to his feet.
Suddenly, from somewhere high up, there was the sweet music of a western warbler. He did a few waltzing steps on his strange legs, dancing to the warbler’s song as he went upwards towards the tall messmate in whose high branches the tiny bird was whistling.
Choopa had begun to lose his winter coat, and a more pronounced pattern of strange markings had appeared, particularly on his head, where one white blotch crossed over his offside eye, and seemed to have splashed down from his ear. The nearside eye had a deep blue patch above the white-encircled eye, making an enquiring expression. His belly was white and his back seemed to have blue stripes. His blue roan rump had a shining white circle right at the butt of his tail.
Dandaloo watched him going over to the source of the music, and she thought — with a great swelling pride — how lovely he was. It was only once — that moment after he was born — that she had thought him terribly ugly.
The heat of the sun became stronger. The snow melted all through the lower country. It ran in rivulets into the sunset valley. Far above and far away, the high, snow-covered peaks glittered.
Dandaloo and Son of Storm began to feel a great restlessness and longing for the high country — the longing to be on the move. Quambat Flat, the Cascades, Dead Horse Gap, the Ramshead — all that world called them insistently. Dandaloo also felt a nagging certainty that men lived very close to this lower country. It must be time to go. The snow would be melting everywhere, leaving long roadways of grass, all the way to the Limestone, to the Cascades. They should start to graze their way to their home.
Once the idea of home, and the high mountains above it, got into their minds, the insistent longing became a clamour, and Son of Storm and Dandaloo gathered the others together, and they started off. The young wombats trundled after them for a while, but soon went home to their mothers and their warm burrows. Choopa looked back sadly at them, but ahead were all the friends who had stayed at Quambat. There were the two young wombats who had kept him warm when he fell in the snow, unconscious. They were brothers for ever. He was eagerly looking forward to finding them again.
Very soon, even though the foals had been quite well fed in the sunset valley and were strong, they began to tire, because Son of Storm, longing for home, set a faster pace than usual. Choopa was tired before the others, and after a few miles of pushing himself on and on, exhausted dreams began to take possession of him.
The snowy, shaded side of ridge and hill, the long strips of grass between snowdrifts, all began to merge into an ever-changing pattern moving hither and thither in front of his eyes. Shadows were black and deep blue, snow was glittering white, and, in his dreams, he was leaping and bounding on soft drifts of snow and he was dancing … some steps and movements which he did not know. He was moving in time to a birdsong he had never heard, and he was dancing as though his life and Dandaloo’s depended on him performing such intricate movements as he had never seen. Somehow, if his dance was perfection, he would be rewarded. A great bare hill, high, high up in the sky, such as they had seen above the beautiful mountain lakes, would be his, to give to Dandaloo so that she could graze there, all the days of her life.
And he would be tall, and strong.
The ugly dwarf foal stumbled on and on, while the strange dreams were pictures in his head. There seemed, in those dreams, to be some big stallions staring at him — horses that could hurt him. Surely it was his galloping and falling and somersaulting that had made the stallions and mares accept him in that Quambat Flat area, when Dandaloo first took him there.
Little, exhausted, dreaming dwarf, he stumbled beyond recovery and fell, managed to tuck his head under, and half-somersault, but was too tired to get up. Dandaloo stopped immediately, stood over him till his flanks were not heaving so desperately as he gasped for breath. Presently she nudged him to get up and drink.
Son of Storm, too gentle to force them all to go on, began to graze until every foal was rested.
So the trek homewards began. They were not driven, now, by the terror of being caught in the deep snow, but drawn by the magnetism of home and the high mountains further up.
They met a few strange horses — horses who had come from places which even Dandaloo did not know. A black mare shied with fright when she saw Choopa — shied, then stood with spread legs, and stared, before she tossed her head and mane, and galloped away.
Choopa watched as she returned cautiously — ears laid back — but she went away without coming close. He suddenly felt crestfallen — hurt. None of the Quambat Flat horses had ever shied away from him in fright. He knew he was much smaller than the other foals, but nothing had ever made him feel as though he really looked queer. Was he so ridiculous? Was he so ugly that a mare would shy away from him?
He tried to draw himself up taller and taller, as that mare kept stopping and looking back at him — occasionally snorting.
Then a few other mares and yearlings that were with her began to come closer around him. One yearling even took a little nip at his rump.
Choopa squealed with anger, and Dandaloo, already angry, swung round and kicked at the yearling. Choopa, frightened and offended, rose up in a rear, dancing around in sudden anger, creating, without thinking, his only form of self-protection — his comic tricks.
As the mares and yearlings stood back, a flash of pride came to the little dwarf. He could play and dance, in a way that no one else seemed able to do, and that was what the other young animals enjoyed and that was what made them love him.
High above, a magpie sang and Choopa romped and reared. Finally he did a few galloping strides, stumbled, fell and somersaulted, then he tucked that strange blue and white head under and somersaulted again, leapt up and went round and round on one spot in the centre of the circle that the strangers had made.
Dandaloo’s anger at the unkind fear and curiosity had quietened down, and she lay in the centre of the magic circle — an old mare who had seen so much, and now, because of this unusual foal she had borne, was not going to be able to live in peace.
When, at last, Choopa grew tired and lay down beside her, the mob of stranger horses melted away, leaving them both to sleep. Son of Storm, Wingilla, and the rest of the herd grazed nearby.
Dandaloo and Choopa were both half-sleeping, half-waking. The rhythm within the dance had woven a sort of calm around Dandaloo, but she knew that Choopa had been made unhappy by the black mare’s behaviour.
Choopa had suddenly been forced to realise that he looked ridiculous. Aware that he was small, he was unable to see the odd markings on his head and body which, along with his unusual size, made other horses wary of him. He pushed himself closer to his mother and hid his strange blue and white head behind her shoulder. When he fell into a sound sleep, he dreamed of the soft, warm fur of the two little wombats who had kept him warm in the snow.
Dandaloo had seen the misery in his eyes, but, except to love and protect him, there was nothing she could do for him. Maybe that love would be his armour and his own sense of fun be his protection, too.