Chapter 29

3 June 1920

Dear Diary,

I dreamed I could run last night. Not walk, just run across the mountains, faster than I ever have before. I kept trying to get back to the dream even after my body began to wake up.

The others were still asleep. I can’t do much, of course, till someone helps me, so I just lay there, thinking. Nicholas had told me how he had a bar rigged up so he could haul himself in and out of his chair from and to his bed. But he could move his hips. It hurts so much when I try.

I wonder if Nicholas is able to walk on his new legs yet? I suppose you need to learn to balance, like on a bicycle. I’ve never ridden a bicycle, but I saw them down in Gibber’s Creek. Even women ride them. I’ll never ride a bicycle now. Sob sob. Get a hold of yourself, Flinty McAlpine. You never even wanted to ride a bicycle anyhow.

The chooks have stopped laying. I’ve told Kirsty to give them more corn and a hot bran mash each morning. I should have told her before.

Sandy came up yesterday afternoon. He and Andy played checkers, and Sandy won three times. He’s going to bring up their draught horse so Andy can plough the corn and potato fields, and oats too, and later cut the hay. Andy wants to use some of my fifty pounds to buy a draught horse of our own. I’d rather buy a good mare, for breeding. But there’s no need to do either this year, not with the Macks so kind and Snow King too young.

‘It’s a long, long way to Tipperary,’ sang Kirsty as she scrubbed the kitchen floor.

Flinty watched from her bed, her fingers clicking her knitting needles, trying to remember the pattern. These were to be gloves for Mrs Mack, to thank her, just a little.

It was as though a small sun shone over Rock Farm, now Andy was home. Even the weather changed: the sky was blue, the days warm and each night cloudy like a blanket holding in the day’s warmth.

Kirsty seemed happy. Among Andy’s presents for his family were green gumboots for her (‘Green,’ said Kirsty blissfully. ‘Green!’). She wore them even indoors now, with three pairs of socks because Andy had bought them big for her to grow into.

Somehow most days Mrs Mullins or Mrs Mack or one of the Colours women made ‘a little bit extra’ — a billy of soup or stew for dinner, or syrup dumplings or a plate of pumpkin fritters for Andy to bring home, acknowledging without saying anything that a nine-year-old girl wouldn’t have the cooking skills to feed a family easily, even with her older sister’s direction.

Meanwhile Empress carried Joey down to the Macks’ to go to school and back, while Snow King paced his paddock alone, except for the days that Andy rode him up and down to the Mullinses’, leaving Lord George to crop the grass instead. Next summer, said Andy, he’d take the young horse down to the valley flats, give him his head and start racing him against the valley horses. There were no locals with Snow King’s potential, but he needed to learn to want to win, as well as be guided by a jockey in a race.

‘And then we’ll see,’ Andy had said, which meant taking him to a race in Gibber’s Creek perhaps, or even Goulburn, where a proper trainer might agree to take him on.

Kirsty carried the bucket of dirty water outside and threw it on the rhubarb patch. Flinty breathed in the sharp winter air. ‘Leave the door open,’ she said as Kirsty came back in, eggs in her apron now. ‘The floor will dry faster. There’s no wind today. How many eggs?’ The hot bran mash had worked.

‘Five.’

Not bad for mid-winter, thought Flinty. ‘What’s it like outside?’ She tried not to make her voice wistful.

‘Not a cloud anywhere, except for the mist on the Rock.’

For a moment she longed for Nicholas. He would understand what it was like to be crippled. At least she was still whole. But it might be months before Nicholas was back, and even then she couldn’t reach him, not down on the Rock.

Was he still writing his book, wherever he was now?

‘Will I make scones for lunch?’ Kirsty was proud of her scones. The first ones had been small and black as sheep pellets, but she had the knack now.

Flinty nodded. ‘Kirsty — do you miss school?’

Kirsty carefully looked at the mixing bowl, not her sister. ‘No.’

‘Really?’

Kirsty shrugged. ‘Well, Enid and Meg.’ Enid Brown was just her age, Meg Green a year older. Rocky Valley school still had far more boys than girls. ‘Andy said he’ll invite them to come up here for a few days in the school holidays.’

‘Good,’ said Flinty absently. But a few days with her friends wouldn’t make up for months of learning. ‘Kirsty, how about I give you lessons?’

Kirsty looked so horrified that Flinty laughed. ‘Spelling and things?’ Kirsty made it sound like her sister was offering her green slugs.

‘Spelling’s useful,’ said Flinty.

‘I despise spelling,’ said Kirsty. ‘I despise the little Red Maths Book too. And I despise my copybook.’

Mr Ross might be able to get Kirsty to do her spelling and sums when she didn’t want to, backed up by the school inspector and the truant officer. But Flinty doubted that she’d be able to.

What did a girl need to learn at school? How to read and write and do her sums, and what the world was like beyond the valley? I can teach her reading and writing and sums, thought Flinty, as well as Mr Ross can. But only if Kirsty wants to learn.

She looked at her sister, carefully shaping her scones, humming ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ again under her breath. ‘How about you write something now?’

Kirsty wrinkled her nose. ‘It’s lunchtime.’

‘After lunch?’

‘Don’t want to.’

‘Please. For me.’

Kirsty poked her lip out stubbornly. ‘I’ve got to…’ She stopped while she tried to think of an urgent job.

Flinty grinned. Joey brought up the water from the well every morning before he left for school and Andy made sure the horses were fed. There wasn’t anything urgent left this afternoon. ‘You’ve got to learn to write, Kirsty.’

‘I can write.’

‘Write better then. More words. Neat ones that people can read.’

‘Tomorrow.’ Kirsty bent to put the tin of scones in the oven.

And tomorrow she’d decide to clean out the henhouse — wearing Joey’s shirt and trousers so she wouldn’t get hers mucky. Then Joey would yell at the pong when he got home. Flinty reckoned in Kirsty’s mind even shovelling chook poo was better than her copybook. But once you left school there were so many other things to write — letters and diaries. A world to read in books. ‘With a shelf of books I can have a universe in my lap,’ Dad used to say, ‘and still sit here on my mountains.’ She had a sudden image of Nicholas’s hands, with his strange pen, writing in the notebook on his lap. She wished he’d read some of it out to her, but he’d always refused, saying his novel was still coming together in his mind. Suddenly she had an idea.

‘How about I tell you a story,’ she said, ‘and you write it down?’

Kirsty looked cautiously interested. ‘A story? Like the bedtime ones you used to tell us before Mum died?’

Flinty stared at her sister. She’d forgotten about the stories she used to tell. They’d vanished at Mum’s death, she realised. Maybe her brain had tried to shrink into the smallest corner it could. But Kirsty didn’t seem to notice the impact of her words.

‘Tell me a story then,’ the little girl ordered, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing a smudge off her gumboots.

Flinty came back to the present. ‘This is a story for writing down.’

Kirsty looked at her stubbornly. ‘You write it down. You write in your diary all the time.’

‘You need to write it so you get the writing practice. I’ll talk and you write.’

Kirsty looked at her consideringly. Kirsty knew all about negotiating a bribe. ‘Maybe,’ she said at last. ‘But only if it’s a really good story. A really, really good one.’ She got up to take out the scones and get the plum jam from the larder.

A really, really good story, thought Flinty, as they ate their scones, as she washed up in the bowl of water on the bedside table while Kirsty dried and put away, then peeled the potatoes and chopped up cabbage and swedes for dinner. Where was she going to find a really, really good story?

Kirsty and Joey — and even Jeff, though he’d never have admitted it — had liked the stories she used to tell, but that was because they were bedtime stories, an excuse not to go to sleep till they were done. Where was her brain going to find new stories anyway?

It was all right for Nicholas. He’d done exciting things. The only exciting thing she had ever done was run the mob of brumbies.

She could make up a story about that ride, but Kirsty had already heard the best bits.

A ghost story? Like the one she’d told once about the ghost who turned out to be a goat eating a sheet from the washing line?

No, not when real apparitions haunted the Rock below the house. If there were ghosts other than Nicholas she didn’t want Kirsty even thinking about them. Books were about fascinating things, orphans, like Jane Eyre, who was sent off to an orphanage and met a romantic rich man with a mad wife, or about heroes like Rob Roy. The only heroes she knew were in books. Or just possibly her brother, and Sandy and Toby and maybe even Snowy White, but if they’d been heroic they wouldn’t tell her.

Maybe she could make up a story about a king or a prince; but the only one she could remember from school was King Henry the Eighth with his six wives, or was it eight? Anyway, she couldn’t tell Kirsty a story about a king chopping off his wives’ heads. And Napoleon, but she hadn’t been paying attention when Mr Ross had taught them about him…

There were the stories in the books she’d read, but she instinctively rejected those. They’d been told already; and anyhow, none of them interested Kirsty enough to read them. Shoes, she thought. Kirsty would love a story about shoes…magic shoes that tapped along the mountain road. That would fascinate Kirsty…and might give her nightmares too.

Which left only one thing she knew about. Horses. A magic flying horse? But where would it fly to? Gibber’s Creek?

And then she had it. She’d tell a story about Snow King. No, not Snow King. Lamentation! The great racehorse who had escaped from men’s fences, and led his brumbies up in the high country. But she would call him Mountain King.

In her story no man from Snowy River would catch him — and no girl either. Mountain King would stay free.

Yet he was still the horse who had won every race on every track, who had known what it was like to lead the field, hearing the pants of lesser horses far behind, the cheers of the crowd as once more he galloped past the winning post.

Great horses don’t forget.

She caught her breath. It was suddenly so clear that she could see it. The country race track, out of town below the hillside where the brumbies had camped the night before, the men spreading the blankets on the grass, the women with their picnic baskets, the girls in hats with ribbons, the boys brushed up and at their best.

Mountain King had led the mob away from the noise. But the sounds and smells had lured him back, leaving his mob with the lead mare. Now he stood among the trees, above the race track.

The horses lined up at the starting gate. The crowd gathered at the rail. And on the hillside the great stallion watched. He heard the starter’s pistol…

The horses surged along the track. Suddenly the great brown stallion leaped the fence, behind them at first, then slowly gaining, hooves thundering and tearing up the grass, riderless, knowing he had to win. And then the cheers, as the stallion passed the winning post.

Hands tried to catch him. But Mountain King reared, so they all stood back in fear. He bent his head and charged, out of the crowd, over the fence again, and up into the mountains with his mares.

Until the next race. The brown stallion would become a legend, the wild horse who could not be beaten. Time after time the men would try to catch him. But every time he’d beat them, and run free.

It was so real she felt tears of excitement on her cheeks, a longing to know what happened next. She’d call it The Dance of the Mountain King.

‘Kirsty?’

Kirsty looked back from stirring the rabbit stew. ‘What? I’m not letting it burn, Flinty. I’m stirring it right to the bottom, like you said.’

‘What do you think about a story called The Dance of the Mountain King?’

Kirsty considered. Flinty could see the interest in her eyes. ‘I don’t know,’ she said warily. ‘What’s it about? What mountain is he king of? Why does he want to dance?’

‘I’m not going to tell you anything till you’ve got paper and pencil. You have to write the story down.’

‘What if it’s boring?’

‘It won’t be.’

‘But if it’s boring I can stop?’ bargained Kirsty.

Flinty nodded, trying to think. It was a good story, but if Kirsty didn’t like the first sentence she’d refuse to write.

She reached under her pillow and pulled out the exercise book that held her diary. Blank paper was precious, and empty books even more so. But there were no slates up here in the mountains. This was all she had. She tried to think of the most non-boring sentence to start the story with.

And then suddenly the words came, as though the mountains had whispered them, as if a ghost was dictating from down in the mist.

‘Turn the book upside down and start from the back, where the pages are still blank,’ she said, and now she longed to have the words secured on paper before they could float away. ‘Do it in pencil first, so you can rub it out if you make a mistake. Then go over the words in ink when you’ve got them right.’

If this worked she was going to have to tear out her diary pages before Kirsty read them. But she could do that tonight.

For a moment she thought Kirsty was going to say no. But she was bored too — bored enough even to write a story down. She took the book, turned to a blank page, then picked up the pencil. ‘The,’ she said, writing laboriously. ‘How do you spell “dance”, Flinty?’

‘D–a–n–c–e,’ said Flinty, hoping she had it right and it shouldn’t have an ‘s’ in it somewhere too. She’d hated spelling as much as Kirsty had, at school. She’d have to be careful not to use words she couldn’t spell. Andy’s spelling was even worse than hers.

‘He was the king of the mountain,’ she began softly. ‘Brown as the sunlight on the autumn creek, glossy as an apple.’ Flinty could almost hear her father’s voice. He’d talked like that sometimes too. ‘Once Mountain King had won the greatest horse races in the land. But no man can own a king. No paddock fence can hold him.

‘Now Mountain King looked down at the horses and riders gathering at the starting gate. He reared up, his front hooves pawing at the air, and whinnied a challenge.

‘He would join this race. And he would win. He had to win. He was the king! The strongest and tallest horse who had ever galloped across the ridges.

‘He reared again, in scorn. No man alive could catch Mountain King.’

Kirsty looked up, her mouth open, the pencil in her hand. ‘Does he win?’ she whispered. ‘Please, Flinty. Do they catch him again? Tell me what happens next. Then I promise I’ll write it down.’