The Silver Brumby Read Online Free PDF Page A

are not following.’
    Thowra, who was blowing frightfully, slackened his pace and at last dropped to a walk.
    ‘We will have a little rest in that thick belt of snowgums,’ Bel Bel said, ‘and, from there, try and cut across to the ravine again.’ But the time had gone for escape. The men and their dogs were closing in.
    Bel Bel found herself and her foal driven relentlessly uphill. Each time she hoped to cut across she saw a man. Presently they came up with several trembling mares and foals, and they could hear others moving on ahead. Bel Bel made one more bid to break away south to the ravine, but just then she heard a whip crack, and another, from the direction of the ravine, and some more brumbies came galloping towards her.
    ‘Don’t try to go that way,’ they said. ‘Lots of men and dogs there. Quick, quick!’ and they galloped on in terror.
    Bel Bel realized that they were all being swung round in the direction of their main camping ground.
    ‘The men will have made a yard somewhere,’ she thought, because this was not the first time she had been caught up in a big hunt when the stockmen came after the brumbies. She wished Mirri was still with her. Mirri was a good friend, and she understood more about the habits of men. Mirri would know where they would build a yard in which to catch wild horses. As for Bel Bel she could think of no place more likely than in the narrow mouth of the valley at its farthest end.
    She tried to talk to Thowra before he got completely infected with the panic that was gripping all the other horses.
    ‘Son,’ she said, ‘you must stay absolutely beside me. Somewhere these men will have put up fences with which to stop us escaping. If you stay right with me, I may be able just to miss going into their yard and we might escape.’
    Thowra thought he would never forget all that happened after that. First he heard sticks and branches breaking as though hundreds of men and horses were chasing them, then he heard the unknown ring of a shod horse’s hoof on stone, and then whips cracking, many whips, cracking and cracking, right behind them.
    The brumbies really started to gallop, and he and his mother with them.
    The little foal stretched his legs out beside his mother, stretched his neck too. He could feel his heart thundering unevenly in his chest. They were right in the centre of the mob. It was Brownie’s shoulder that touched him on his near side, and he felt her hot breath. Everything was bound up with the tremendous pounding, thundering of hooves on hard ground, the pounding and thundering of his own heart, the blowing of breath, the gasping of all the horses.
    A snowgum branch whipped him across the eyes, and brought stinging tears. He could hear his own breath sob and felt as though his pounding heart would burst. His legs and hooves seemed no longer to belong to him.
    Then they were out of the trees and they spread apart a little in the open valley of the camping ground. The men forced them together again into a mob that moved almost as one horse, but, while they were spread out, Thowra had felt Bel Bel pushing him over to the left wing, not quite on the outside of the mob, because their colour would be too noticeable there, but just near the edge. He heard his mother give a gasping sort of whinny, and, through the tired haze that was over his eyes, recognized Mirri and Storm on the wing.
    The noise of whips never ceased now, as the men drove them faster and faster. The horses were in a frenzy of fear. Thowra wanted to cry out with the terror that seemed to run like a flame through the mob, but he had no breath for anything except to keep going. Bel Bel spoke to him several times and he hardly heard. Then he knew she was saying something that mattered.
    ‘In a second we will swing to the left,’ she said, ‘through the gap in the trees.’
    With a tremendous effort he focused his eyes on something other than the outstretched noses and heaving flanks beside him, and saw