Page 102 of A Home Among the Snow Gums
‘Now, Skip. How about this, hey?’
The horse shook his head.
‘It’s delicious.’
She took a step backwards, deeper into the water, and let the horse taste the sugar lump before pulling it just out of reach.
He took a step.
‘That’s my brave, handsome boy. Come on. Another couple of steps and it’s all yours, buddy.’
Two steps, three, and then Skippy seemed to realise how totally unfun the temperature of the water around his hooves was, and he trotted the rest of the way so abruptly he yanked her off her feet and she fell. Freezing water engulfed her, sliding under the protection of her jacket. She shuddered with the shock of it and leapt up. She was colder than cold now, and saturated.
She’d lived in the mountains long enough to know that this was when the bad stuff happened: hikers lost their way, got exposed to the elements and were found dead ten yards from their tents; skiers, off piste and underdressed, lost their toes after a night on the slopes. People who were too cold made dumb decisions.
Her teeth chattering, she swung her frozen limbs back into the saddle and pulled the walkie-talkie from her pocket. ‘Sergeant, it’s Hannah. Do you copy?’
A crackle of sound, then, thankfully, the clear words of Sergeant King. ‘We copy. Are you there yet?’
‘Halfway, maybe a little more. I’ve fallen in floodwater and I’m very wet. We’re going to speed up. If you see a white flare in the next little while, it’s me, and it means I’m in deep trouble.’
Silence. Then, ‘Copy that.’
Okay, then. She shoved the radio back in the pocket and drove her heels into Skipjack’s sides. Her midnight rescue run had just turned into a race.
A figure, shrouded in oilskins and carrying a hurricane lantern, stood in the centre of the sweep of gravel. As mad as she was with the idiot she’d fallen in love with who’d flicked her off like she was a fly on his sausage sanger, she’d never been happier to see him.
She was cold. Deeply cold. The sort of cold that killed lovesick Snowy Mountains veterinarians who didn’t find their way into dry clothes by a fireside, stat.
‘Hannah?’
Tom’s voice was all but ripped from his mouth by the scream of wind and rain. She didn’t bother responding. Skipjack was as cold as she was and twice as valuable. She nudged his side as soon as they cleared the treeline and headed for the main stable at a gallop. Horse, oxygen, Hannah, that was the order of events that needed to unfold. And once her teeth had stopped chattering, she was going to use them to take a bite out of Tom Krauss’s idiot self.
Tom hurried over as she reached the stable and dragged back the huge sliding door. Dull lighting strips flickered at knee height and a gust of warmth formed a cloud about her as she trotted Skipjack inside. The horse came to a halt, his sides heaving, water and steam streaming from his neck. She tried to pull her boot from the stirrups, but there was no strength in her legs. The rumble of stable doors closing brought her head up, and there was Tom, throwing off his oilskins, hoisting the hurricane lantern onto a mounting block so a yellow glow filled the barn.
‘Hannah,’ he said. ‘My god, you’re soaking.’
‘A little help here,’ she managed through the tremor that had her in its grip.
He came forward and removed her feet from the stirrups, then bent her knee to get her leg over the horn of the saddle.
‘Slide between me and the horse,’ he said, and she literally did just that, because none of her muscles remembered how to work. She waited for his arms to grip her and they sort of did, but then she kept sliding and landed butt-first in the straw of the stable.
Tom hovered above her, his face pale. ‘Christ, I’m sorry. Are you okay?’
She gave him the look she usually reserved for Josh when she caught him pinching food from her fridge. ‘I’ll worry about me. If you want to be helpful, get that oxygen up to the house. I need to dry Skipjack.’
He handed her a blanket and heaven-oh-heaven, a hot water bottle, then wrestled the silver canister out from under the saddle straps. ‘Tuck the hot water bottle somewhere in your … somewhere. I’ll be right back to help.’
‘Wait!’
Tom turned to face her.
‘I’ve got to send up the flare so the sergeant and Lionel know I’ve made it. The walkie-talkie she gave me has lost its signal so I can’t radio down.’
‘Where’s the flare?’
She dug into the huge inner pockets of her police-issue jacket. ‘Here. The red one means I’m here safely. You know how to light it?’
