JESS WAITED ON HER front verandah with her duffle bag stuffed full and her swag rolled up. Nerves flitted about in her stomach. God, how many times had she felt like this?
Lawson’s truck finally swung into her driveway. It stopped by the house, motor running.
She’d only had two other phone calls from Luke over the past three weeks. Both times they had been cut short. Nothing was said about colleges and there was no mention of him staying or leaving. The subject was left dangling in the air, unacknowledged.
Which was good, she told herself. It allowed her to concentrate on school and get really good marks. She came home triumphantly with her exam results, knowing they would give her strong leverage should she need to negotiate holidays with her parents. Craig and Caroline agreed to let her go back to Mathews’ Flat, to help resettle the brumby mares.
When Luke jumped out of the truck, there was no big swirling hug. Just a quick, awkward embrace. ‘Hey,’ he said.
‘Hey,’ she said back.
Grace’s head poked out the window. ‘Hurry up and get in, Jessy. We gotta make dinner time at the Matty’s Flat Hotel!’
The thought of Kitty’s roast dinner made Jess’s spirits lift a little.
Luke took her swag and swung it up into the back of the truck through a small side door. She pushed her duffle bag in after it and, through a gap in the side boards, she saw the hooves of the brumby mares.
‘Are you going to let them go?’ she asked.
‘It’s private land,’ said Luke. ‘No one can stop me.’
Jess climbed up next to Grace.
Luke barely had time to close the door before Lawson rolled back down the driveway. From the packing shed, Craig waved and Jess watched in the truck’s side mirror as the house disappeared behind her.
Hours later, the truck’s engine groaned as it climbed ever upward into the tablelands country. The headlights made a tunnel of grey and soft blue before them. Light bounced off the silvery uprights of gum trees, and reflectors lit the side of the road like fairy lights. On the back the two mares and the yearling foal clattered about as they tried to keep their footing.
When they pulled to a stop outside the Matty’s Flat Hotel it was nine-thirty and all Jess could think about was roast beef and veggies swimming in Kitty’s homemade gravy.
She helped Luke check the horses before dinner. They spread out straw, lugged buckets of water and broke open a bale of hay. The mares began eating immediately.
‘They look happier than they did this afternoon,’ said Luke, sounding surprised. ‘More content. Maybe they like the truck or something.’ He shrugged. ‘Or maybe they’re just tired.’
‘Maybe they know they’re going home,’ said Jess, as she watched the tired buckskin foal nuzzle down into a bed of straw. ‘They can smell the mountains.’
‘I can’t wait to release them in the morning,’ said Luke, ‘and watch them gallop back into the wild.’
‘Same.’
Inside the pub, the fire was roaring around a huge stack of sawn logs. Barker and Steve were standing by the fireplace and Kitty was behind the bar. Luke made a big deal of introducing Lawson as his brother, and much hand-shaking and jocularity followed. They’d barely had time to get a drink when Rosie and Mrs Arnold walked in, followed by Tom and Corey.
For a moment, Jess felt she had been transported back to Coachwood Crossing. ‘There’s only one person missing,’ she said.
‘No, there’s not,’ grinned Corey.
Jess felt two slim hands wrap over her eyes. She would know them anywhere. ‘Sharsy!’ She spun around to find her bestie grinning at her. ‘How did you get here?’ she squeaked.
‘Canningdale is only an hour’s drive away. Corey picked me up,’ said Shara. ‘I heard there was a big housewarming party on, and a brumby release!’
‘I can’t wait to see those mares gallop back into the mountain,’ said Grace excitedly. ‘There was no way I was going to miss that.’
They ordered meals and pushed several tables together, rearranging the tiny pub lounge until it resembled a private function room. Barker joined them and, as the meals were the last ones to be served in the pub for the night, so did Kitty and Steve.
Kitty shared more memories of her friendship with Matilda, or Matty, as she called her. Their times together sounded so much like the adventures Jess had shared with her girlfriends: long trail rides and cattle drives, brumby-spotting and birthing foals. Luke listened quietly and intently.
Jess watched her three best girlfriends, all laughing around the table together in their riding jeans and woolly jumpers. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it would be like to ever lose one of them as Kitty had lost Matty.
Kitty told Luke about his parents’ wedding, at the small timber church with the four square windows. They hadn’t been able to squeeze everyone in. She told them how Matilda had met Jack, a logger from Dorrigo, in this very pub. After that, Jack came back every Friday night to see the band that used to play in the beer garden and Matilda would turn herself inside out trying to find the right dress to wear. ‘She was so crazy about this Jack fella.’
He was a charmer, a larrikin, and would dance Matilda from one end of the beer garden to the other, nearly knocking people’s plates from their tables, and upsetting the old cockies who had come for a quiet beer.
The forty hectares on the river was their wedding present from Matilda’s parents, who cut it off their own land. ‘Cut off the bit with the crappy old house on it and went and built a nice new one for themselves,’ said Kitty.
‘So Jack Ernest Matheson was never a local,’ said Jess. ‘He was a blow-in.’
‘That’s right,’ said Kitty. ‘It was Matty’s family who were the locals, not Jack’s.’
Jess sighed. There went her theory of the name Matheson somehow being linked to the original settlers of this mountain range.
The subject came back around to the brumbies and the wild horses. Rambo was a wedding gift from Matty to Jack. She had trapped him as a yearling colt with salt and lucerne at the back of her parents’ property. They had broken him in together, as well as several others.
‘They loved riding through those mountains,’ said Kitty. ‘They would disappear nearly every weekend. Matty used to tell stories, about secret glades and special places. She wanted to write books about them.’
‘I remember her stories,’ said Luke. ‘You used to read them to me.’
Kitty looked delighted. ‘You remember!’
‘It’s like being in a storybook when you’re up there,’ agreed Jess. ‘It’s so beautiful.’
‘Especially when it snows,’ said Grace.
‘You were lucky to see that,’ said Steve. ‘It doesn’t snow up there every year.’
‘Here’s to the brumbies,’ said Mrs Arnold, raising a schooner of port, ‘and their little part of the world. May they run free for years to come.’
Jess noticed that Barker was the only one not to raise his glass. She looked at him questioningly.
‘What’s up, Barky?’ said Steve, still jovial.
The sergeant exhaled and his face seemed grim. He looked around at all of them, as though he was about to deliver bad news.
‘What?’ said Kitty, smiling.
‘They won’t be up there for years to come. Haven’t you heard?’ he said in a quiet voice.
‘Heard what?’
‘The council have put out public notices. If that land’s not claimed by next month, the brumbies will be culled and the land will be auctioned off.’
Everyone looked at Barker, aghast. ‘Hey?’
He gave a helpless shrug. ‘There’s more than five thousand hectares of unclaimed private title up there. It’s been vacant for nearly fifty years. Everyone wants a piece of it. The national parks want the feral horses culled and the land returned to wilderness. The forestry department wants to log it. The police want to stop all the illegal shooting that goes on up there. The farmers all want to see it subdivided and turned into grazing properties. It’s such fertile country and it’s being taken over by feral horses, rednecks and weeds.’
Barker looked from face to face and shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, but the days of those wild horses up there are seriously numbered.’
Everyone at the table stopped talking and the celebratory atmosphere took a sharp dive. Mrs Arnold muttered something profoundly rude.
Jess’s thoughts went immediately to the small pond at the bottom of the big granite cliffs. The place, on the tablelands, where the boundaries met. She had seen it with her own eyes. The unclaimed place, where Saladin’s spirit was born to the blue-eyed brumbies . . .
The place, so exquisitely special . . .
It was about to be destroyed.
Later that night, Jess found Luke outside in the cabin of the truck. On the back, the brumbies munched noisily. ‘Hey,’ she said softly.
‘Hey,’ he said, and held out a hand to her.
She climbed up and sat on the bench seat next to him. ‘We can’t just let them shoot all the brumbies and auction off their home like that.’
‘I don’t know how we can stop them,’ said Luke. ‘I can’t take on that many horses, Jess. I can’t save them all. There are too many of them up there. What would I do with them? I don’t even know what to do with these mares on the back now.’
‘You have forty hectares.’
‘But how would I keep them in? The fences on my place are so old they’ve nearly all fallen over.’
Jess was quiet for a while, and they both sat there, adrift in their own thoughts.
‘The secret place, the one your mum talked about. I’ve seen it,’ she finally whispered. ‘Rambo took me there. It’s a foaling place.’
‘I know.’ Luke nodded solemnly. ‘I’ve seen it too.’
Kitty fussed around in the bunkhouse, billowing fresh white sheets over the beds. ‘Wasn’t expecting so many of you,’ she chirped.
Jess took the other side of the sheet and helped her tuck it in.
‘Some sneaky backpacker stole one of my chenille bedspreads,’ Kitty said, as she ripped a brand-new quilt from its packaging. ‘It was nearly fifty years old, retro.’ She looked suspiciously at Mrs Arnold.
‘Probably time to replace them anyway,’ mumbled Mrs Arnold, shooting a threatening look at Jess and Grace.
The thick padded quilt was a welcome upgrade from the flimsy chenille, but Jess’s thoughts were not so comfortable. In only a few weeks Brumby Mountain would be auctioned off. The unclaimed pocket of land with the breakaway herd of brumbies would be claimed. And, most likely, the horses would be trapped, shot, or run off the land.
‘How could so much land just be forgotten?’ she wondered out loud. ‘Has anyone even tried to track down the original Mathews family?’
‘Why would they?’ said Mrs Arnold, as she pulled the quilt over her shoulders and snapped off the light.
Jess lay in the darkness, trying to put the pieces of Luke’s history together. She couldn’t let go of the idea that, somehow, he was connected to that land and the horses up there. But she couldn’t quite work out how.