Page 101 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
Hannah took a head torch from the sergeant. Excellent. It would be way more useful than the baton torch she had stuffed in her pocket. She slipped it over her helmet and fumbled the switch with her gloved hands until it shot out a thin white beam.
‘Okay, Skippy,’ she said, clicking her tongue and giving him a nudge with her heels. ‘Let’s go be heroes.’
The bridle trail up the mountain was wide enough to still be visible despite the leaf litter blown all over it, and within a few seconds the flickering lights from the sergeant’s patrol truck had disappeared.
Her head torch threw a thin, chalky beam ahead of her and the deeper they went into the forest, the louder the growl of wind and rain became. ‘Not creeped out at all,’ she said.
She’d ridden this trail a hundred times back when Skipjack was stabled at Ironbark Station, but never in the dark. Never in the rain. Never when the wind howling through the forest sounded like the souls of the damned clawing their way out of the earth.
Skipjack tossed his head and gave a loud snort as she nudged him into a quicker trot.
‘We are totally fine,’ she told him.
He blew a plume of frosty breath back at her.
‘Yes, I know I’m overlooking the hazards of falling trees and getting lost and hypothermia, but if I don’t reassure myself that this mad ride isn’t one headless ghost away from a horror movie, I’ll freak out. And where would that get us?’
Static burst from the radio in her pocket and she pulled it out. ‘Sergeant?’
Words were crackling from the speaker, but the wind ripped them away before Hannah could hear them. She pressed the buzzer and spoke. ‘I can’t hear you, but we’re okay. I’ll check in again in five minutes.’ She shoved the radio halfway into her pocket then reconsidered. ‘Over,’ she said into the mouthpiece. That’s what the movie cops said, right?
A limb of a forest giant lay across the path in front of her and she edged Skipjack over it. ‘Third of the way,’ she told the horse. And when she got the whole way, Tom bloody Krauss better have a fire waiting. And a glass of wine big enough to have a bath in. An apology and an admission of being a heartless moron wouldn’t hurt, either.
She huffed out a frosty breath of her own. The weather must have shoved her brain cells into cold storage. Nothing was going to change Tom’s mind about her, he’d made that as crystal clear as his icy, cut-glass eyes.
Skipjack shied on a curve in the track and she felt her backside slip on the rain-soaked saddle. ‘Whoa, pal. What’s up?’
Not a bunyip, please, god. Not in this weather. Not this close to winter.
‘Don’t be a scaredy-cat, Skip,’ she told her horse. ‘Bunyips aren’t real.’ She hoped.
She cast a look over her shoulder and her mind revisited every scary movie she’d ever watched on those sleepover parties she’d had with her girlfriends in high school. Red eyes blinking, chainsaws whirring, tree roots growing long clawed hands that stretched up to wrap arou—
‘Stop it, Hannah Cody.’
Skip tossed his head at the sound of her voice and came to a standstill. She nudged, but he wouldn’t budge.
‘What is it? What can you see that I can’t?’
She pulled her baton torch from her pocket and shone it ahead up the track. Oh, crap. Water, a whole river of it by the looks, cut the path. One of the streams that ran down from the mountain must have broken its banks.
She reached a hand back to the ice-cold steel of the oxygen tube they carried. There was no turning around. There was only forward. Thank god she’d remembered to put sugar lumps in her pocket. Skipjack hated water, but he loved sugar lumps.
‘Together, Skip. You and me.’
She eased a boot from its stirrup and swung to the ground, keeping the reins wrapped twice about her fist. Skippy had never run away from her before but she’d never asked him to face his greatest fear in a raging storm. Now wasn’t the time to be taking a chance on trust.
Using both torches, she mapped the amount of water crossing the path. Stay high, she thought. The lower edge of the track would be more likely to have washed away and have hidden holes. Water over her boots? Horrid, but nothing she hadn’t coped with a thousand times before. A thigh-high pothole with floodwater strong enough to wash her down the mountain? No, thank you.
‘One step at a time, buddy,’ she said, planting her foot squarely in the onrush of water. The cold was so fierce it felt like it was bruising the bones in her feet.
‘Now it’s your turn. Come on.’ She gave the reins a tug and the massive horse whinnied in as clear a tone as though he’d actually saidNot a chance in hell, lady.
She took another step and put her weight into it, hauling on his bridle like a tug-of-war rope. ‘Come on, Skip.’
He didn’t budge.
‘Flipping heck.’ Both her feet were in the water now, the chill making her teeth chatter. She burrowed one hand in beneath the layers of jackets and jumpers and scarf to the top pocket of her shirt. The sugar in there was probably a sodden mess by now, but it was all she had. Her gloved fingers were clumsy, but she found a cube.
