Drew cantered towards the mob of horses and raised his rifle. A shot punched the frosty air, then another. The herd turned tail and galloped for the ridge line. He glimpsed a flash of hides through the branches: buckskin, grey and the usual bays and browns, perfectly camouflaged, blending with the trees. He’d been right. There was a mob of brumbies roaming Maroong Mountain.
Drew urged Clancy across the creek. Man and horse trotted alongside the rusted barbed wire that marked the boundary between Kilmarnock Station and Balleroo National Park. He spotted the big blue gum on its side, toppled in last week’s storm. It had lain low ten metres of fence line, and hoof marks churned up the ground on both sides of the breach. Too late to do much tonight. Best come back on a bike in the morning.
Drew toyed with the idea of telling his father about the mob, but it would just stir up trouble. He and Bill were at odds when it came to the brumbies. To his father they were nothing but pests, eating good grass that should be saved for fattening cattle. Things would be different if Gramps was still alive. He’d called the wild horses the spirits of the high country – beautiful, independent, uncivilised. Gramps scoffed at Bill for his hostility, said he had no heart, no feeling for the land. Drew had always marvelled at his grandfather’s courage. Nobody else had ever dared stand up to his father.
Drew peered through the darkening bush, but the horses were long gone, back up the mountain. Feed was scarce on the higher slopes in summer. They’d be back. But there’d be no more brumby running for Drew, no matter what Bill said. He’d joined his dad on a run last summer. Never again. For years he’d longed to go along, but had stayed away out of deference to his mother’s wishes. It was only after she left that he’d joined Bill and the boys on a weekend trip up the mountain.
Mum had always called it cruel, and she was right. Drew hadn’t understood, had thought her too sentimental. It wasn’t as if they were shooting horses from helicopters, like they did in some parts. His father and the other brumby runners were financial members of the Alpine Feral Horse Management Association. They had permits to remove brumbies from the park. It was all above board, but for them, it was just a sport – a true test of horsemanship, and from all accounts, exciting as all hell to boot.
Drew didn’t like to think back on the experience. The first unsettling thing had been the dogs. Two of Dad’s loudmouthed kelpies came along, as he’d expected. But the other blokes, four contract brumby runners he’d never met before, had brought monsters. Bull Arab hunting dogs, at fifty kilos each, with heavy heads and muscled bodies, trained to hold hundred-kilo boars for the bullet. Permits called for the dogs to be muzzled, but who was to see, that high up on the range?
The six of them had headed out from Kilmarnock Station, setting an easy pace up to base camp. They climbed spurs, framed by stringybarks and peppermint gums, stairways to alpine flats where cattle and horses had grazed for generations. The herds of red and white Herefords and black and white baldies were gone now – driven off the mountain by reluctant cattlemen when concerns were raised about high-country damage from hard-hoofed animals. A few mobs of scrubbers evaded the musterers and lived on in this wild place. And so, of course, did the brumbies.
They’d risen at dawn to a cold fire and skins of ice on the water in the billies. Drew watched the men fit heavy-duty motorbike knee-pads beneath their jeans. His dad had thrown him some gear, and he’d copied the others. Leather chaps strapped from crotch to ankle and synthetic rubber gloves completed the outfits. He could barely clamber onto Clancy, stiff-legged and weighed down by his modern brumby runner’s armour. Perversely, they wore no protection at all on their heads – just their customary akubras. With ropes slung over shoulders, and spurs gleaming, the riders were ready.
The dogs ranged ahead of the horses. ‘Your horse is everything in this game,’ his father had told him. ‘It needs to stay level-headed, and be able to look after itself as well as its rider. It needs disc brakes, power steering. And it needs to jump like a kangaroo.’ The other men rode rangy thoroughbred types with hogged manes – fit and lean and just a bit mad. Their saddles were specially designed with extra-large knee pads, grooved at the base. To hold a plunging wild horse, the rider had to loop the rope around this groove to stop it slipping.
Drew had played with his catching rope while they searched for the brumbies. The aim was to unsling it from shoulder to hand in about two seconds. It needed to be strong enough to snub a wild stallion to a tree; stiff enough to hold the noose in shape; fine as a lady’s finger. Bill had indicated a white and brindle dog, nose to the ground, leading the pack. ‘That’s Bess,’ he’d said. ‘She’s our finder.’ Even the other dogs seemed to be watching her. If she took off, so would the riders.
Without warning, Bess flushed a small mob of brumbies, and the riders went after them at full gallop, tearing over logs and through trees. Hoofs flung out stones as the horses scattered into the tangled forest. The dogs soon caught up with a small, fat mare – obviously lame, obviously pregnant. She stumbled. A black dog latched onto her head and brought her down. A man leapt from the saddle and snatched a homemade headstall from the bundle on his pommel. The plaited hay band was cheap and hard to break. But it was also thin, like wire, and cut into the mare’s skin when she struggled. The man kicked the dog and made it let go of the mare.
She struggled to her feet. Her left ear was bleeding, almost torn in two. She turned to flee, but was pulled up short, snubbed by the halter to the ghost-white trunk of a twisted candle bark. Fear and pain transformed her into a writhing, rearing, raving thing. The man mounted and waved for Drew to ride on, leaving the horrified mare to fight her invisible demons alone.
Clancy trembled beneath him. Drew hadn’t signed up for this. He bit his lip, soothed his horse with uncertain words, and cantered after the others. Similar scenes repeated themselves, all that dreadful day, up and down the mountain. The contract runners were suicidal in their determined pursuit of their sport, chasing at breakneck speed through bogs, over rocks, between trees. Never had the old saying A rider’s grave is ever open made more sense, but adrenaline had got the better of them all. Drew smashed his knees against trees, and didn’t even feel it. Only later at home, looking at his purple, swollen legs, had he appreciated the true value of those knee pads.
Drew had finally roped a swift bay colt, elated at first by the capture. The hard nylon catching rope locked onto a large leather eye to prevent the horse from choking, but still the colt laboured to breathe, and struck out with wild, panicked forefeet. It reared over backwards and lay still. One of the other men jumped down, haltered the prone youngster and secured him to a tree. ‘He’ll be on his feet by the time we get back,’ he told Drew. Drew wasn’t so sure.
By dusk, six brumbies stood tied to trees. Bill shot dead a young foal, injured by the dogs as it returned again and again to its captured mother. His father also shot dead the mob stallion. The big black had turned on Bess and snapped her front leg in a rage as it tried to protect a roped mare. Drew leapt from the saddle and knelt to comfort the whimpering dog. For all he knew, they’d shoot her too. Normal bush rules about fair treatment of animals had for some reason been suspended on this gloomy mountainside.
‘I’ll take Bess back, if you like,’ Drew had offered. ‘If you don’t need me,’ he’d added, trying not to sound too keen. There’d been a brief discussion between the men. Finally his father had nodded assent, and helped haul the bitch astride Clancy’s saddle. She’d whined and wagged her whip of a tail in thanks. Drew had stroked her head, grateful to the dog for giving him an excuse to escape. On the way down the mountain he passed the bay colt he’d caught. It was standing now, sweating and shivering, forefeet splayed and hanging back on the taut tie rope. Not a bad sort. Maybe Bill would give him a go at breaking it in. Further on, Drew passed the pregnant mare with the ripped ear. She lay dead, head at an impossible angle, neck broken in her furious attempts to free herself.
Drew hadn’t stopped when he reached the camp, as his father expected him to. He’d kept right on down the mountain. How naive he’d been, how foolish. It wasn’t like Bill to pull any punches, and he hadn’t. Drew just didn’t think brumby running would have turned out to be so brutal a process. He had a better idea of how the rest of the trip would go now, the idealised scenes wiped from his imagination. Bill and the other men would pick up the haltered brumbies and chase them ahead on ropes back to the camp site. The wild horses would think they were running away. At base camp they’d be tied to trees, while the men went and caught more brumbies over the next few days. Bill had said the brumbies were offered food and water, but Drew couldn’t imagine those traumatised animals eating or drinking anything. At the end of the weekend, the men would retrieve their Toyotas, fitted with stock crates. They’d use a boat winch to drag the frightened horses onto the trucks, and take them to the stockyards at the showgrounds in town.
When Drew finally caught up with Bill after the weekend, the news was worse than he’d imagined. It turned out that the whole group of brumbies had gone to the doggers, even the swift bay colt Drew had his eye on. No, he wouldn’t tell his father about the brumbies on Maroong Mountain. Good luck to them. He whistled up Bess and they headed for home, south across Snake Creek. The dog trotted on ahead of Clancy, nose to the ground. Her lame leg made her useless as a hunting dog, so the contractors had let Drew keep her. Bess was loyal, with a surprisingly gentle nature, and she made a nice change from Dad’s hyperactive kelpies and heelers.
Drew passed a sagging bush gate, the back track into Charlie’s place. For a moment he contemplated making the trip down to the house, to see if she was home.
He missed Charlie. She was a headstrong, faithless pain in the arse, but she was also a lot of fun. He missed their bush races, Charlie always cheating, cutting corners to win. He missed her dropping by to demand help with a fence or a calving cow. Missed how she always somehow turned everything into Bill’s fault. She wasn’t far wrong there. Truth was, Drew was still half in love with Charlie. They’d gone out for a while last year until he’d discovered the hard way that Charlie preferred rodeo cowboys.
Her mother, Mary, ran a motley, inbred herd of crossbred Angus breeders on Brumby’s Run, but her heart had never been in it. And now Charlie and Mary had been gone for weeks. Mysterious, how they’d just taken off like that, without a word. Max, one of Mary’s dodgy mates, had apparently been looking after the place for a while. Max owned the second-hand dealer’s yard at Tallangala, and Drew had seen his wreck of a truck coming and going a few times. But not lately.
Come to think of it, Charlie had been avoiding Drew even before she left, keeping to herself. Maybe Mary was in some sort of trouble with the law? She’d struggled more than once to stay on the right side of it. Bill called her trash. There’d been convictions for drunk driving, some petty fraud, a drug charge. Charlie might come to Drew for help around the farm, but she would never have come to him if her mum was in some kind of a mess. She was too damned proud. If he didn’t hear something soon, he’d ride on over to the house. Take a look, keep an eye on things for Charlie till she got back. After all, wasn’t that what neighbours were for?