Bushfire Rescue Page 7

  In total, Vin and his helicopter had dropped 2000 litres of water on the trees and bracken at the gully entrance. He had slowed the fire down, but he hadn’t stopped it altogether. It was moving up the gully floor as the bracken ahead dried, advancing towards us in a wide yellow wave. Soon it would reach the bracken that hadn’t been touched by Vin’s bombing runs. It was brown and tinder-dry, and it came up to the top of the gully. The horses and I would be caught in a firestorm. Our only hope was to get out of the gully before the flames reached the dry bracken. And there was only one way out – through the fire.

  My broken foot was too sore to put in the stirrup, but that was hardly a handicap to someone who had ridden bareback on a bull. I wheeled Susie around behind the brumbies and tried to push them down the gully. They didn’t want to go. After only a few metres, they broke ranks and rushed back past us on both sides. I didn’t blame them. Between us and the gully entrance was a sea of flames. Soon that sea would become a tsunami, and then there would be no escape.

  I tried again. I shouted and waved and wheeled Susie back and forth behind the nervous, flighty brumbies. Slowly they began to edge towards the fire. I was just beginning to think we were getting somewhere when the first of the dry bracken fronds near the gully wall suddenly flared up, sending a tower of crackling flame three metres into the air. One or two of the brumbies whinnied, then the whole herd turned and galloped past Susie deeper into the gully. There was nothing we could do to stop them.

  I glanced anxiously at the fire. A second flare-up had occurred in the dry bracken on the other side of the gully. The flames jumped and crackled as the two arms of the fire moved towards each other. We had about a minute, I estimated, before they joined and became an impenetrable conflagration.

  One more try, I thought, riding back towards the brumbies. If they broke away again, Susie and I would have to leave them to their fiery fate and save ourselves.

  Make your surroundings work for you, I remembered.

  Trailing down over the rocks at the head of the gully were several long tendrils of vine. I leaned out of the saddle and yanked one free. Using my teeth, I stripped off the leaves. Twirling the four-metre vine over my head, then swinging it in a wide loop, I flicked it with my forearm and wrist. Crack! As loud as a gunshot. I tried it again, this time aiming the makeshift whip above the head of the nearest wild horse. Crack!

  The terrified brumbies bunched close together and looked at me with nervous eyes. I whooped loudly, cracked the vine again and they were off.

  Thirteen horses running full tilt, we charged through the burning bracken like a single, many-hoofed animal. The flames seemed to part ahead of the great galloping beast, the air filled with spinning sparks and clods of flying earth. I cracked my whip again as we burst out the other side. We flew between the steaming trunks of two trees Vin Alison had doused, swooped through a tunnel of black eucalypts whose crowns still flared and smouldered, then shot out into the smoky, burned-out landscape beyond.

  We had made it!

  25

  THE BOY FROM SNOWY RIVER

  Before too long, we came to a road and the tired brumbies stopped galloping. I kept them bunched together. The wild horses were black with soot but none seemed burned or injured. One or two of them looked at me sitting on Susie’s back. They seemed lost and uncertain in this strange, blackened countryside that before the fire had been their home range. Now not a speck of green showed anywhere. There was nothing for them to eat, nowhere for them to hide.

  I cracked the whip and moved the herd steadily along the road between the smoking trees. I was taking them somewhere green.

  The wind had changed from a northerly to an easterly in the last hour. No smoke was blowing over from the far side of Copperhead Spur. I reckoned Nan and Pop’s farm had escaped the fire.

  We passed a turn-off and a badly burnt sign. All I could read was PLATYP. It was enough to tell me where we were. Through the skeletal forest on my left, I glimpsed the distant shine of water. Chainsaw would be safe until Pop came to collect him in the truck. The other truck, the one Adam and Pig-eyes had used, would be destroyed by now. As would Adam’s mobile phone.

  I still remembered Mr Campbell’s number and the name of his farm. The Jindabyne Rustlers would soon be getting a visit from the police.

  I had been right about the fire. The wind change had pushed it down off Copperhead Spur. It had burned across the path of the main firefront, creating a natural firebreak.

  In the late afternoon I herded the brumbies around the foot of the spur and into green farmland.

  Far ahead, I saw a familiar four-wheel drive approaching along the dusty road. I stood high on one stirrup and waved it back. Nan, who was driving, got the idea. She did a U-turn and stayed a couple of hundred metres ahead of the brumbies all the way back to the farm. I slowed the herd down while Pop opened the gate. He climbed back in and Nan drove around behind the cattle yards where the vehicle wouldn’t spook the brumbies.

  I knew they had a hundred questions to ask me – and I had a thousand things to tell them – but the talking could wait.

  Susie and I had a job to finish.

  Nan and Pop stood behind the rails and watched. I must have looked a sight in my burned and tattered clothes, with my bare, black-and-blue feet and my frizzy scorched hair. I was bone tired, every part of me felt scraped or battered or burned or bruised, but I sat tall in the saddle on Susie’s back. Swinging the whip in a high wide arc, I cracked it loudly and sent the twelve wild horses trotting ahead of us into the bull paddock.

  I felt like the man from Snowy River.

  About the author

  Born in New Zealand, Justin D’Ath is one of twelve children. He came to Australia in 1971 to study for missionary priesthood. After three years, he left the seminary in the dead of night and spent two years roaming Australia on a motorbike. While doing that he began writing for motorbike magazines. He published his first novel for adults in 1989. This was followed by numerous award-winning short stories, also for adults. Justin has worked in a sugar mill, on a cattle station, in a mine, on an island, in a laboratory, built cars, picked fruit, driven forklifts and taught writing for twelve years. He wrote his first children’s book in 1996. To date he has published twenty-three. He has two children, two grandchildren, and one dog.

  www.justindath.com