‘Darling, you cannot stay.’ Lorna pulled dry clothes out of the saddlebag. ‘Here, put these on. You are a ten-year-old girl and I can’t leave you here alone. Come on, I’ll help you out of all that wet stuff, and tell you about Taffy. You know the story. He didn’t drown. He came home.’
It was like undressing a doll. Biddy was so stunned and cold that she just stared dumbly at Bella and listened to the story as her mother peeled off the sodden, sandy clothes.
‘Taffy was a buckskin horse that Grandpa had when Dad was about your age. He was enormous; wide as well as tall. Your grandma used to say you could eat dinner off his back. I think he might have had one blue eye, but I’m not sure. I only know the story as your dad has told me. He was so quiet and kind that sometimes, just for fun, Dad and Grandma and Grandpa would all ride him together.’
‘Triple-dinking,’ Biddy said in a flat voice.
‘What?’
‘Triple-dinking. Like double-dinking, but with three.’
‘Oh, yeah.’ Lorna was relieved that Biddy was listening, was at least interested in the story. ‘Anyway, one day Grandpa was bringing cattle home along the beach. Your dad wasn’t with him. He was still too little to go. A man called Steve Begg was helping, riding Taffy, and just like you they got stuck in the quicksand. They had to leave him, just like we’re leaving Bella, and Steve rode the packhorse home, just like you’re going to ride Blue.
‘Well, they got home very late, and your dad and grandmother were terribly upset to hear that Taffy was bogged. They really loved that horse. They sat in the kitchen weeping and remembering what a good horse he had been, but not mentioning the tide creeping in around Taffy, all alone there on the beach. But Grandpa told them not to give up hope. Perhaps, he said, perhaps when the tide comes in, the sand will loosen its hold, will get more watery, and he’ll be able to haul himself out and come home.
‘That cheered them a bit, but they were a sad lot going to bed that night, and your dad even said a prayer for Taffy. And in the morning, sure enough, there was Taffy, standing at the garden gate. He’d struggled out, and come home the fifteen miles by himself, in the dark.’ She gave Biddy a hug, and pulled a dry beanie onto her head. ‘And that’s what Bella will do, too.’
Biddy couldn’t bear to look at Bella as she climbed onto Blue and made herself a seat between the saddlebags.
‘Off you go, Bid. Go up along the side of the mob and tell Dad what’s happened.’ Lorna’s voice had a catch in it. ‘And stay up there with him. I’ll bring the tail along.’
The quicker Biddy gets away from Bella the better, she thought. It was awful leaving her, half buried. She had stopped struggling now, and lay exhausted, her eyes dull, breathing in sighs. Despite the story of Taffy, Lorna knew there was a good chance Bella would drown.
Biddy booted Blue into a canter, and they splashed along the beach with the saddlebags thudding up and down. Bella whinnied desperately as they rode away, but when Biddy looked back her eyes were too blurred with tears to see anything more than a grey shape on the sand. Nearing her father she reined Blue in and wiped her eyes to look back again, but the sea-mist had swallowed the pony, and her cries grew fainter and fainter until they were lost in the crash of surf and keening bird calls.
Grandpa rocked Biddy gently with one arm and held a cup of hot chocolate to her lips with the other. The fire lit their faces, both stained with tears, as she told him what had happened.
That evening he had waited and waited. He knew she would be bursting with things to tell him. But as the night wore on it was clear some disaster must have befallen them. When finally the barking dogs told him the drovers had returned, he went out with the lantern and brought Biddy inside while her parents put away the horses and cattle.
Her face was grim. She wasn’t sobbing, but the tears would not stop rolling down her face, so he wrapped her in a blanket and sat with her in front of the fire. Tigger landed lightly on her lap but she pushed him away.
‘I’ve killed her. It’s my fault. You told me to look out for the quicksand and I didn’t, and now Bella will drown.’
‘Hey, girl,’ Grandpa patted her hair. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’re not the first to go into the quicksand, and you won’t be the last. She still might come home. Did Mum tell you about Taffy?’
Biddy nodded. ‘She’ll be so frightened. I just wish I hadn’t ridden out after those steers, so it didn’t happen. Maybe if I’d been wider awake—’
Grandpa sighed. ‘What’s done is done. There’s no turning back the clock. There’s plenty of things I’d like to be able to do again, but that’s not life. Come on, hop into bed and go to sleep. Your pony will more than likely be here when you wake up in the morning.’
Tigger jumped onto the bed and this time she let him stay, purring and pedalling into the blankets. Mum had brought her a hot water bottle when she came to say goodnight, and she held it against her stomach. The warmth seeped through her, but it didn’t get to that cold patch in her heart. Losing Bella, losing Bella . . .
The wind was blowing from the east again. She could hear it groaning in the trees. It would be whipping the sand along the beach. She imagined the pony struggling as the cold waves beat against her, then pushed the picture from her mind.
A shadow fell across the floor as her father came to sit on the side of the bed. ‘Goodnight, mate,’ he kissed her hair gently. ‘You did well. Really. You were a big help. And don’t punish yourself. She’ll be here in the morning. Wait on, I’ll get something to cheer you up.’
He walked out into the passage and returned with Grandpa’s bronze horse and set it on Biddy’s chest of drawers. ‘There. Look at him as you go off to sleep. That’s what Bella will do. Goodnight, sweetheart.’
Biddy lay in bed, exhausted but not sleepy. Her body felt as if it was made of stone. She could hear snatches of conversation from the kitchen. Their voices were subdued, dull. Even the eight big bullocks, safely home and worth so much, weren’t enough to change the mood.
‘They’ve been lying to me,’ Biddy said to Tigger. ‘They don’t really think she’ll come home.’
Just then Grandpa turned on the light in his room and it shone across the passage and lit the bronze horse. He galloped up the beach in a blaze of light.
Something was dragging Biddy out of a long tunnel. She was so tired, dead tired, but something was insisting that she wake up. And then she remembered. Bella. She opened her eyes. The sun hadn’t come up yet, but it was light enough to see.
She flew out of bed, dumping Tigger onto the floor, raced down the passage and out the back door, and there at the garden gate was . . . nothing. Maybe the pony was at the shed, or the yards. She ran, hobbling on the gravel track in her bare feet, not feeling the freezing wind, calling, calling, ‘Bella! Bellaaaa!’
She looked behind the shed, the cypress trees, the chook house. Last year she had found Bella in the chook house, eating pellets, and Dad had joked that she might start laying eggs. She kept picturing the white pony, bedraggled and exhausted, but she was not there. Bella had not come home.
She walked back down the track to the house, not crying silent tears now but howling in despair. She slammed the back door and burst into her parents’ bedroom. ‘Bella hasn’t come home! She’s not here! I knew I should have stayed with her!’ She kicked the wardrobe door. ‘You knew she wouldn’t be able to get out, didn’t you? You told me bullshit so I’d come home, but you knew. I hate you both. All you care about are your cattle!’
She stayed in her room all morning, cursing and sobbing. She could hear her parents moving about the house and talking in the kitchen with Grandpa, but they left her alone.
At lunch time her father came in. Biddy looked up from the bed, her eyes red and swollen. ‘I’m sorry, Dad. Sorry for saying that this morning.’
He stroked her hot head. ‘Don’t worry, mate
. Listen, Bid, the tide will be out again now and your mother and I are going to drive back down the beach and have a look, just in case she managed to get free. Do you want to come? I’ll understand if you don’t.’
‘Do you think there’s still some hope?’ Biddy’s teary face showed a glimmer of excitement.
‘No, I don’t, to be straight with you. Not now. But I want to know for sure.’ Her father always told the plain truth. ‘I suppose we’re looking for her body. That’s why I said you might not want to come.’
‘No, I’ll come!’ Biddy started to get dressed. Any chance was better than none.
The utility rolled smoothly along the beach. Normally Biddy stood up in the back, looking for shells, but she had no heart for it, even when her father stopped to collect a paper nautilus perched delicately on the sand. She wondered if she would feel like this for the rest of her life, as if nothing mattered.
‘We should be there soon.’ Dad patted her knee. ‘That big piece of driftwood was just after you caught up with me.’ Biddy strained her eyes now, even though she was afraid of what she might see. In her mind there was a body half buried in the sand, or perhaps being buffeted around by the waves, but as they got closer there was nothing. No sign of a pony.
‘It was right here, Dave,’ Lorna’s voice was sharp. ‘See the sandbar. That’s where she was. Stop and we’ll have a look around.’
They stepped onto the sand and Biddy stared at the ocean. Was she out there, drowned and then swept away?
‘Biddy! Lorna! Come up here!’ Dad was standing high on the beach, where all the driftwood and seaweed washed up. They ran to him, labouring through the heavy sand.
‘Look! Tracks!’
Biddy had to look at the sand for what seemed ages before the marks started to make any sense. She gasped aloud as she understood. There, coming out of the high tide mark, were Bella’s hoofprints, but beside them were two other sets of tracks!
Footprints, small human footprints, and the paw marks of a dog.
‘Well, I’ll be blowed . . . ’ began Biddy’s father.
‘Mum,’ whispered Biddy, ‘my horse has been rescued by fairies.’
‘Are you sure it was a footprint? A human footprint?’ asked Grandpa, going over the story yet again as they ate dinner. ‘There’s no one out there. Just the ranger down at the station, and he hasn’t got any kids. And old Dan. Are you sure it wasn’t a . . . ’
‘I saw the tracks, Dad. We all saw them. We followed them up into the dunes until they petered out in that shaly country.’ Biddy’s father was poring over a map of the headland as he spoke. ‘It’s going to be hard looking for them. It’s a mass of little gullies and paperbark swamps.’
‘Who could be with her, though?’ mused Lorna. ‘Who could be that small and be out there?’
Biddy had hardly spoken since they found the tracks on the beach. All the way back in the ute she had sat between her parents, buzzing with the thought: Bella’s alive, Bella’s alive! Now she looked up from her plate, still beaming, and shocked her family. ‘I know who’s rescued Bella. I bet it’s Joycie’s baby.’
Joe never went back to the secret valley, to his home. He found himself at Middle Spring the morning after Joycie died and he stayed there a long time. He played with the dingo pup, fished in the lake, built a rough shelter, walked to the ranger’s for supplies, and . . . waited for something to happen. He couldn’t just walk up to the ranger, or in to town, and say, ‘I’m Joe.’ What if Joycie was right? Maybe it was dangerous.
He missed Jozz most at night, and he imagined how the valley would be without them. The little birds would be missing their scraps. The rabbits would have eaten all the silverbeet, without him there to fix the fence. He looked up at the moon. It would be so quiet. He and Joycie used to lie on the valley floor and watch the sugar gliders flying across the moon. They’d be flying tonight.
Without the pup, Joe would have died of loneliness. He called him Devil, after the Phantom’s dog. The pup was a beautiful golden colour, paler at his throat, gangly and playful. He was learning to hunt already, patting fallen leaves with his paw to flush out lizards, then chasing them frantically through the long summer grass. He snuggled beside Joe at night, and sometimes woke him by gently brushing his whiskers on his face. He brought all his catches back to share—even though Joe didn’t fancy mangled lizard. He expected Joe to share his food, too. If Joe didn’t offer him some, even just a tiny piece, Devil would look at him, head tilted, as if to say, ‘Well, have you forgotten your manners? What about me?’ He didn’t bark or whine, but his eyes and facial expressions always told Joe exactly what he thought.
One of his favourite games was to sneak up and steal some little thing, then race around like a lunatic while Joe tried to catch him. One night, as Joe dozed before the fire, Devil pulled his slippers off, then stood on the other side of the fire, grinning. He was dainty, clever, and very funny.
Later that summer, Joe moved to the estuary behind the Red Bluff. The fish and oysters were easy to get there and the nights were warm enough to sleep without shelter. Every evening a straggle of pelicans flew in from the ocean. They looked like ships floating down through the coloured sky. It made Joe laugh to see them land, their webbed feet splayed out, splashing, then settling gently onto the water.
When the weather got colder, and the days shorter, Joe and Devil travelled through the paperbark forests looking for a new home. No one ever came into this part of the headland. The scrub was as thick and tangled as an old piece of fishing net. The tunnelled tracks that twisted through it were made by wombats and wallabies, and Joe had to bend double to pass along them. No bullock, horse or drover had ever been there.
He found a perfect spot, a gully deep in the marshes. Slightly higher than the surrounding wetland, like Joycie’s valley, it caught all the northern sun. It was encircled by a sea of swordgrass so ancient that it had matted together, then grown up through itself. Joe had to clamber over the bottom layer, almost as tall as himself, and push through the thick secondary growth that towered above him. He hated going through it. The leaves cut his clothes and hands, and he knew it was full of snakes—tiger snakes probably—and they were the one thing on the headland that he was truly afraid of.
He built a wonderful thatched house there. Sheer granite boulders made two sides of it, and one of the rocks even had a trickle of water feeding into a natural basin at its base. Joycie would have thought that was pretty flash, having running water in the house. He jammed paperbark branches between the rocks, and wove swordgrass and smaller sticks through the branches. Then he dragged up mud from the swamp on a sheet of bark and pushed handfuls of it between the sticks and branches. When it dried, not a whisper of wind could get in. For the roof he laid more branches on top of the walls, then tied swordgrass and bark over the branches. The roof tilted slightly so the rain ran off and not many drops came through. He hung a bag in the doorway, weighing the bottom down with stones so that it wouldn’t flap in the wind, and that was it. He had made his home.
There was just enough room inside for his bed, a table, and a small fireplace for the coming winter. He found a kerosene tin washed up on the beach and cut the front of it open to take small pieces of wood. It made the hut very warm, but the smoke nearly smothered him. The next time he walked to the store for supplies, he took an old bit of spouting from behind the ranger’s hut and made a crooked chimney to carry the smoke away.
His bed was made of thick paperbark poles sitting on rocks with branches and grass on top of the poles. The big patchwork rabbit-skin rug Joycie sewed when he was little went doubled on top, and it was heaven to climb into at night. It still smelt of Joycie. When the house was finished he spent days slashing and burning a path so he didn’t have to climb through the swordgrass all the time.
Devil was always beside Joe. Some nights they heard dingoes howling in the distance, and Devil would pac
e about the camp, but he never responded. He had become an excellent hunter, so they had meat to roast nearly every day. He didn’t stalk his prey, but he was always on the lookout, and when he spotted something he was after it like a flash. Joe loved the sudden burst of speed he could put on, and if the rabbit or wallaby got away, Devil bounced on all fours to try and spot it. He looked so funny, flying up into the air, looking around everywhere. He carried his catch back to camp in his powerful jaws, presenting it to Joe like a gift.
But with every day Joe grew more and more curious about the other world. He read and re-read his battered books and comics. Without Joycie telling him all the time about the wickedness of men, the fear began to fade and curiosity took over. He wasn’t scared any more, only wary. Joycie had talked of Mick and her dad with such love that he knew they’d welcome him.
The ranger didn’t interest him. Joycie and he had shadowed the man and laughed at his ways so often that he seemed ridiculous. The people Joe was really interested in were the musterers, the drovers. In the autumn, when they brought the cattle to the headland again, he followed their every move. He listened to their conversations, patted their beautiful horses as they grazed at night, and imagined walking up to their campfire.
He made friends with the dogs, but his own dog, his dingo, vanished while the drovers were there. Even if he had felt brave enough to talk to them, he couldn’t just leave Devil. He stole an oilskin coat. As he took it, he could hear Joycie telling him not to, but he had to have it. Winter was on its way, and his clothes were very thin. Besides, he heard the woman, Lorna, saying that it was a spare one, that it was Biddy’s. He knew that name. Joycie had told him the story of old Biddy, and shown him the cave she had sheltered in, but that was a long time ago. This must be a different Biddy.
Winter seemed to last forever. Every day was cold, and when the sun did shine it was too feeble to warm anything. The rain never let up. Joe lived in the oilskin coat. The nights seemed endless, and when dawn finally came, often he couldn’t be bothered getting up. Everything was hard. Hunting was hard, cooking was hard, having a wash was hard. Going to the store, which was always such an adventure with Joycie, was now simply a necessity. Sometimes he lingered in the building and imagined not having to leave, just staying beside the warm stove.
The Quicksand Pony Page 5