Girl & the Ghost-Grey Mare Read online

  RACHAEL TREASURE

  The Girl and the Ghost-Grey Mare

  MICHAEL JOSEPH

  an imprint of

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Contents

  Introduction

  The Girl and the Ghost-Grey Mare

  Gentleman Required

  The Apple, the Pony and the Snake

  True Hands

  Dangerous Goods

  The Mysterious Handbag

  Eliza’s Cards

  Feathers and Fast Horses

  Preserves

  Grandma’s Gift

  The Tractor Factor

  Mr Foosheng’s Carpet

  The Evolution of Sadie Smith

  McCubbin’s Lost Child

  Mother Nature

  The Wife

  The Way of Things

  The Handy Man

  Evie’s Garden Dreaming

  The Girl and the Ghost-Grey Mare

  Rachael Treasure lives on a heavenly hill in rural Tasmania with her two cherub children and an extended family of kelpies, chooks, horses, sheep and a time-share Jack Russell. When not at her desk she is trialling the latest sustainable farming methods using no-till cropping, holistic grazing management and native pasture rejuvenation.

  She has worked as a jillaroo, rural journalist, wool classer, part-time vet nurse, drover and stock-camp cook. Her first novel Jillaroo, published in 2002, has grown to become one of Australia’s iconic works of fiction.

  Rachael is proud patron of Agfest, Tasmania’s world-class agricultural field day run by Rural Youth volunteers. Join her on facebook or go to www.rachaeltreasure.com

  PRAISE FOR RACHAEL TREASURE’S BESTSELLERS

  Jillaroo

  ‘Rebecca is a wonderful character being both feisty and fallible … The author’s solid and believable characters and plot … make Jillaroo a widely appealing read. In short, a real treasure.’

  AUSTRALIAN BOOKSELLER & PUBLISHER

  The Stockmen

  ‘I loved this honest and heartfelt tale of life on the land – it captures the very essence of being Australian.’

  TANIA KERNAGHAN

  ‘This is a terrific book – compelling, gritty, sexy, moving and funny – with some vibrant characters, set against heart-stoppingly beautiful Australian countryside. It’s so well depicted you’ll want to flee the city and find your very own stockman…’

  AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY

  The Rouseabout

  ‘A heartwarming look at women on the land.’

  WHO WEEKLY

  ‘A rollicking good read.’

  COURIER-MAIL

  The Cattleman’s Daughter

  ‘A moving Australian story of landscape, love and forgiveness.’

  WEEKEND GOLD COAST BULLETIN

  ‘Treasure writes with true grit, wit and warmth.’

  AUSTRALIAN WOMEN’S WEEKLY

  Introduction

  Dearest reader,

  I love stories, no matter what the form. Stories inspire us. Whether it’s sipping a chardy while engrossed in an arthouse movie, or hearing a tale while drinking beer on the lanolin-coated boards of a shearing shed, stories are what keep us going. They can help us heal and they can be a compass as we try to make sense of the joys and messes of our lives. Or stories can simply make us laugh.

  It’s a delight and an honour to be able to share with you my most personal and varied writings, in the form of these short stories, and I hope this collection gives you all of the above and more.

  The creation of stories is my breath. I cannot exist without them. Within these pages you’ll find the genesis of some of the characters you may have come to know in my novels. You’ll also be taken to the weird and wonderful places of my imagination, which sometimes leads me far away from paddocks and country roads.

  The stories are peppered with realities drawn from my very varied life and there’s a good dose of my humour within the pages. There’s darkness and there’s light.

  I’m so lucky I was the kind of kid who got to tack rabbit skins on rough-sawn walls and play with frogs in creeks. As an adult, I’ve been blessed to have been both a dairy reporter and a dunny cleaner. It is this range of experience that feeds my stories and allows me to be an observer of life. A life I am truly lucky to live.

  I hope you enjoy this collection and I am grateful you have chosen to step for a time into my world of writing …

  With thanks,

  Rachael

  The Girl and the Ghost-Grey Mare

  ‘Hang on,’ the young woman said over her shoulder as she urged the silver-dapple mare down the mountainside. The park ranger’s arms tightened about her waist as the horse slipped over the dry shale. The girl and the ranger looked from beneath their hat brims towards the gully below, where the red hides of the cows and calves bustled through the flint-grey bush. Unsettled and alert, the cows sniffed at the smoke-scented air. Above them, through the treetops, the sun hung like a giant orange ball in the dull choking haze. A fervent gust of wind stole the ranger’s hat and flung it away into the thick dogwoods. He gestured to it, but the girl rode on.

  The smell of smoke became a taste. It wrapped itself around their tongues so that it was hard to swallow. The mare had blood in her nostrils from exertion and the ranger could feel the horse’s strained lungs pushing hotly, in and out, against his legs. He felt his own heart bang loudly in his rib cage. Yes, he was afraid of the hurtling fire behind them, but also giddy at being pressed so close to the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen.

  He’d felt that same hurried knock of his heart just an hour ago when he’d first seen her. He’d caught her with her mob of stray cattle in the national park. She’d nonchalantly waved a pair of old wire cutters in his direction as his four-wheel drive lumped its way over the ridged track towards her. She was standing by the new fence that had until a moment ago divided the park from her family’s cattle run. Now the gleaming wires were flung back against the grass. Six strands of silver, like broken guitar strings. The girl’s gentle smile was hidden beneath the shadow of her hat. The filtered sunlight caught the perfect lushness of her lips as she let rip a piercing whistle to her kelpie dog.

  As the ranger switched off the engine, he took in her angular, slender body and the way her long dark hair was tied with a crimson ribbon wound several times around her thick ponytail. Her tanned hands loosely held the reins of her ghost-grey horse. The mare danced nervously in the smoke haze, flicking her charcoal tail against her snowdrift-white flanks. In the stuffy four-wheel drive cab the ranger jabbed the CB radio silent. Reports had said the fire was 100 kilometres to the east, then fifty, then thirty. Until he’d seen the girl, he’d been on his way out of the mountains, gunning it in search of the main gravel road, too proud to admit he was lost. But there she was in the middle of the smoke-hazed snow gums. A stunning girl in jeans and a sweat-soaked, pale-blue shirt and a big Akubra hat. A girl who was breaking the law by putting cattle into the park. He looked at the glossy mud-fat cows and their white-faced elfin calves that bunched nervously on the snowgrass that covered the cattlemen’s side of the run. As he reefed the door open and got out, the girl looked down to her boots, kicked at a tuft of poa grass. Then she watched as the ranger’s long, strong legs ate up the tussocked plain between them. His shoulders were set wide, like he’d swing an axe well.

  She kept smiling.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘You okay?’ the ranger replied with a quizzical tilt of his head. He found the girl’s calmness unsettling given her circumstances. Here she was, not just caught with cattle on the park but with a fierce fire racing across the range towards them.

  ‘You know that’s a Parks fence,’ he said, pointing at t
he cut wires.

  She nodded.

  ‘You know that’s a cattlemen’s track,’ she said gesturing to the vehicle on the road. The pristine expanse of sub-alpine snow gum plains had been in the cattlemen’s care for 170 years. But a few years before, with the stroke of a pen in a far-away city parliament and a line drawn on a map, everything had changed for the cattlemen and the land. A fence had been put up, and on the northern side the thick rank grasses and weeds were now whispering in the gusty wind, calling forth the fire. The ranger knew the girl must have been one of the cattlemen families fenced out of the mountain spurs and gullies she lived for. He felt sorry for her, but he had to go by the rules. He cast a sympathetic look at her.

  ‘You know you could be up for prosecution, damaging Parks property and bringing livestock into this area.’

  The girl shrugged. She nodded towards the Blue Rag Range and the towering column of smoke that rose from it.

  ‘When the fellas in the city made that rule, and strung the fence up, they weren’t looking into the face of that.’

  From where they stood, the tumble of smoke belied the hunger and speed of the fire that had been burning for weeks now. Over the past few mild-weathered days it had dawdled, slowly chewing up the long kangaroo grasses and gnawing on the bleached skeletons of snow-felled trees. But now, with the temperature rising into the forties and the wind madly whipping across the crusted earth towards them, they both knew it would not be long before the fire from hell arrived, burning more fiercely than they could imagine.

  ‘I reckon we’ve got half an hour, if that,’ she said. ‘I’ve been waiting for you. You’d better come with me.’

  ‘Waiting for me?’

  ‘I heard you,’ she said, nodding towards the vehicle. ‘We’d better hurry.’

  The ranger looked at her pretty hazel eyes. He felt an odd pull from her. Something he couldn’t explain. He tore his gaze away just as an angry hot gust hurled itself against them.

  ‘I can’t consent to you taking cattle into a national park.’

  ‘It’s only a national park on paper. To me it’s land. And a way out. Should I just leave them here to die?’

  The ranger cast his eyes over the cows. They were now panting, not just from the heat, but also from the stress of the approaching fire.

  ‘Where are you taking them?’

  ‘Down our old tracks … into Mayden. There’s a place there in the Little Dingo River. The fire might just jump it and we’ll be right.’ The girl gathered her reins and swung up onto the grey. The mare swished her tail and bowed her head, keen to move on, away from the onslaught of the furnace-like wind.

  ‘You coming?’ She held out her hand. ‘Safer to go this way than the ridge line.’

  The girl looked down at the ranger and saw that his eyes were as rich and dark as chocolate, and his kind, handsome face was framed by dark curls.

  ‘Coming?’ she said again, but the ranger shook his head.

  ‘I’ll get out by the road. It should be you coming with me, but I can’t force you.’ The girl frowned at him.

  ‘No, you can’t. And I’m not leaving my girls,’ she said, raising her hand towards the cattle, mobbed up by her quick-footed dog. ‘I know we’ll be right – once we get through the worst of the overgrown country.’ She collected her reins and her mare danced on black hooves marked like frozen river ripples. ‘It’s you I’m worried about,’ she said. ‘Main road’s that way,’ she said, nodding towards the fringe of trees on the plain.

  As he watched her spin the mare around, the ranger called out, ‘I can’t force you to come in the vehicle, can I?’

  A gentle look of amusement from the girl.

  ‘No, you can‘t.’

  ‘I’ll let the authorities know where you’ve gone. But it’s your choice to stay,’ he said.

  She cast him that spellbinding smile again and he watched as she and the dog pushed the cows into the dense grasses that had reached their seed-filled fronds higher than the cows. He strode back towards his vehicle, feeling suddenly frighteningly alone. When he turned and looked over the wavering hot-as-hell plain towards the old stock route, the girl and the grey-flecked horse were gone. But he could still hear her piercing whistle rising up from the blustering treetops.

  He turned the ignition. The vehicle gave one lethargic chug and then died. He heard the tick of small twigs and bark falling on the roof, drifting down in warm thermal eddies. The bush around him eerily silent now. Calm before the storm. He tried the radio. Dead. Sweat dripped down from his brow. He got out, rolled his sleeves higher, and heaved the bonnet up. Fear began to rumble in him. A furious wind roared through the treetops, hitting him full force, taking his breath. The first fireballs of bark landed and exploded on the tinder-dry ground. Fine black slivers of ash drifted down and landed on the white bonnet of the vehicle. He thought of the girl and spun round to scan the treeline in the hope of following her.

  And there she was, just metres away, galloping towards him, then sliding her horse to a halt as if she had flown to him.

  ‘You coming now?’ she said, breathing hard, holding out her hand. ‘Get on.’

  When he fitted his palm into hers he felt an energy like never before and a strength as she pulled him onto the back of her horse. As he gingerly put his arms around her, relief and comfort washed over him. She set the mare at a loping canter back towards the treeline and the cattle below. By now smoke was draping itself in the treetops and settling over the landscape like a sinister mountain mist. Small splashes of fire began to spread and the wind gave the flame wings.

  And that’s how it had come to pass. Here was a girl with a park ranger on her horse, driving cattle down the steep mountain ridge, with a fire at their backs.

  ‘Are you sure we’ll be safe going this way?’

  The girl glanced over her shoulder at him.

  ‘My granddad always said fires burn more slowly downhill. If we’d gone via the road on the ridge, we’d be fried. Plus there’s water down here. And, what’s better, an old fire bunker. Dug out by my uncle Jack.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Over the roaring wind, the girl explained that she had been just six when her father had first taken her there. She’d trailed behind him on her skewbald pony. He had shown her the cavern, carved into the belly of the hillside, like a wombat burrow. Every year or so the family would come back to make sure the bunker was still sturdy.

  ‘Getting down there’s the trick – especially now the tracks are nearly overgrown. When I was little, I used to hold my breath down the steep pinches, the way you’re doing now,’ she said. ‘But I used to love this spur and the river below, where there’s a deep pool with a flat rock island at its heart.’

  ‘Are you sure this is the right way?’ The ranger squinted at the confusion of limbs and leaves and the thickets of tall grass ahead of them.

  ‘Sure as sure,’ she said. She took one hand from the reins and held it up in front of him.

  ‘The layout of this country is imprinted here. The mountains are the contours of my fingerprints. The rivers are the lines in my palms.’ The ranger took in the strangeness of the girl’s words and the way she spoke. Almost dreamily. He absorbed the delicacy of her hand despite it being hardened by work and smeared with sweat and dirt. He felt his body jolt against hers as they descended the steep zigzagging narrow track and he wondered whether he had made the right decision in coming with her. Suddenly the mare slipped and lurched sideways down the bank before righting herself. He wrapped his arms around the girl more tightly.

  ‘And if you’re wrong about the fire?’ he asked.

  That calm, angelic smile again.

  ‘We’ll become ash and be blown away in the wind. You could be a snow gum and I could be an orchid – part of this beauty. Not a bad way to go.’

  ‘You reckon?’ the ranger said. ‘I’m not sure I find your words that comforting. I’d sooner live to tell my grandchildren this story, years from now.’ He felt the girl la
ughing and he wondered at her absolute confidence. The smoke was so thick and the roar of the wind so loud and vicious that the ranger fell silent for a time

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked eventually, for the fire seemed further away even though a thick blanket of smoke wrapped the landscape.

  She paused for what seemed a long time. ‘I’m Emily-Claire.’

  ‘An unusual name, but a pretty one,’ he said. ‘Aren’t you going to ask my name?’

  ‘I know who you are,’ she said.

  To the left a large limb cracked as loud as a shotgun and fell to the ground. The mare leapt to one side, the riders only just hanging on. The trees whorled madly about and more ash showered down. They could hear a roaring behind them. Fire or wind, they weren’t sure. The mare called out in a shuddering whinny, her black eyes rimmed white with fear. A choking dryness in the smoke-filled air starved them of breath and their eyes stung and watered.

  Ahead of them the cows were trotting and half-sliding down the track. Bumbling through bushes, hot tongues hanging out so far they looked like a butcher’s shop display. The froth about their mouths trailed down to the dry ground. Behind their hocks trotted the kelpie. The dog glanced nervously back at the girl.

  At last the vegetation began to thicken and change. The greenness brought on by damper soil surrounded them. The slope levelled off, and soon the horse, cows and calves were pushing their way through thick ti-tree and the world felt slightly cooler. They ducked their heads to avoid the scratching fingers of trees, and the ranger felt Emily-Claire’s body hot against his. With relief they emerged on the other side into a clearing next to the river. Emily-Claire pulled up her horse and watched as the cows and calves splashed into the shallows and began to draw water in great lengthy draughts.

  ‘We’ll swim the cattle onto that rock island there and my dog will hold them. Okay?’