Finding Kerra Read online

  As we mounted in unison, I could hear the words of the poem in my head: There was movement at the station...and felt the anticipation that riders must feel before a run. Blake turned Cador back to me. ‘If it ever gets too rough, or you can’t keep up, don’t worry. Kerra will keep you company.’

  Concern filled his eyes, assurance that I’d manage too. I was about to thank him, say I’d keep up no matter what, when Richelle called to him. The moment passed and he rode after her. Then everyone was off.

  Kerra and I remained near the rear. There were times we lagged behind and I’d say, ‘Let’s catch up.’ She’d grin and look as she does when listening to stories, before nudging her horse, Gypsy, with her knee and off we’d canter again. I didn’t want to miss anything, nor did I want to hold anyone up. It wasn’t long before my butt hurt but I tried to ignore it. Who’d own up about that when no one else seemed to have a problem?

  Finally we reached wooden yards with a bottle-neck entrance. ‘For the brumbies when they catch them,’ Kerra said as we rode in. A truck stood nearby and Matt was riding his bike off it, down a ramp amid romping blue heelers.

  ‘This is the camp where we’ll sleep and eat,’ Kerra informed me. I slipped down from Rainmaker and hoped no one was watching as I couldn’t stand straight, let alone walk, and that was only from riding to the camp. The brumbies still had to be found, chased and caught! How would I last the distance?

  Blake walked over with instructions and I put in extra effort to stand normally, like Richelle. He rested an arm around my shoulders. He was doing that a lot lately and I was wondering what he meant by it—just mates? Or more? I never saw him touch Richelle, except to tip her hat back in a joke. ‘When we come onto the mob, don’t try and follow us. Those horses can be fast and mean. Just watch from a rise and if one comes near you, just head him off.’

  ‘How do I do that?’

  ‘Don’t worry. Rainmaker’s been in musters before, she’ll know what to do. Just hang on and go with her.’ I nodded. It seemed a simple thing to do. I held down the sudden panic threatening to wash over me. Blake didn’t leave and I looked up. He was watching me, but I couldn’t tell why. I didn’t want him to see my fear, so I smiled brightly, stretching my aching back straight.

  ‘You’re some girl, Jaime.’ His voice caressed me; it was a tone I hadn’t heard him use before. ‘Coming up here like this, willing to go on a muster—’

  I didn’t feel so special. ‘What about Richelle?’ She was handling things much better than me.

  ‘Richelle was bringing in horses from the home paddock when she was five. This is her life but it isn’t yours and yet you’re willing to try. That’s respected up here.’ He turned to go then. ‘By the way, don’t worry about the aches and pains. It gets better.’

  ‘How did—?’

  ‘I started sometime too, you know.’ He laughed. ‘You’re doing great.’

  With lunch behind us, we were on the trail of the brumbies. The truck had been driven down by a Nunga guy, who was excellent at tracking. He was in the lead, riding Matt’s horse. When Blake had said the tracker was part-Afghan my eyes must have shone. Anything South Asian never failed to move me.

  ‘Steady,’ was all Blake said. ‘Zack wouldn’t remember much about his ancestry. He’s not Muslim or anything.’

  All the same, I couldn’t keep my eyes off Zack—fancy finding a guy with Afghan heritage in the Australian Outback. Just thinking about him took my mind off my own pains, and it seemed like only minutes before he suddenly yelled, ‘The mob’s ahead, Tom.’

  Mr Townsend gave a few quick orders before Matt sped off on the bike with Richelle and Blake following, but not before Blake turned to give me a wave. The expression on his face kept me musing while Kerra and I brought up the rear. By then I didn’t feel so bad about Kerra staying behind with me; if she had my mother, she wouldn’t have been in the muster at all.

  ‘Listen!’ Kerra held my reins so that Rainmaker stopped and pawed the ground. ‘Hear that?’

  The sounds of thunder underfoot, the crack of a whip, the barks and yells, the roaring of the bike. At that moment, I wished I was there; it felt as though I was grounded, missing out on a party. The noise grew louder and Kerra pulled my reins.

  ‘C’mon. We’ve got to ride to higher ground.’ I wasn’t sure what the problem was but I managed to urge Rainmaker to where Kerra led above the track.

  Then I saw them: a mass of swirling brown and black bodies, amid dust and flying tails. Mr Townsend was twirling his whip above his head and we could hear the crack even above the thunder of the hooves. Blake was on the other side, Cador twisting and turning to keep the wild horses within the mob. I saw some animals break away and there was Matt on his Yamaha, chasing them as if he was riding a circuit. Three disappeared into the scrub, two he managed to bring back into the herd.

  The mob was being driven down to the yards, but that was kilometres away and I wondered how they’d keep them all together. That must be the challenge which bush men like Mr Townsend and Matt enjoyed.

  ‘Here they come.’ Kerra’s voice was higher pitched than usual and I turned to look at her, just as she pulled Gypsy back further. Was she actually excited? There wasn’t time to marvel, because I realised we were too close. The mob was thundering past us and my hair blew just with the force of their passing. Gypsy broke into a gallop alongside and Rainmaker shifted on her feet—was it from nervousness or itchy hooves?

  A brumby broke away from the mob, then another followed, quite near me. Whether I wanted to give chase or not, I had no choice as Rainmaker took off, straining and galloping after them. I remembered Blake’s words: Stay with her. And I tried.

  The rogue brumbies were heading away from the mob towards the denser salt bush. Rainmaker followed them at a full gallop. Even though I’d ridden in Afghanistan, it had been nothing like this. Rainmaker twisted and turned, shook her head. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have sworn she was trying to be rid of me so she could chase the brumbies at a speed she was used to. Instantly the wild horses twisted to the right and almost turned back on themselves. And that was when Rainmaker and I parted company. There was no way I could hold on with her spiralling around to follow them under the low mulga trees.

  My backside was sliding off one side of the saddle. Then my foot slipped out of the stirrup. I should have hung on, but dropping off seemed a better option than being thrown. The first thump on the ground knocked all the wind out of my lungs, as if I’d been hit on the back with a cricket bat. Then I rolled. I thought I’d never stop and when finally I was flat on my back, I could barely breathe, nor did I dare move. Thoughts of wheelchairs and disability parking lots filled my mind until I found the courage to start moving fingers and toes.

  It was ages before I managed to sit up. Nothing felt broken, not even a rib, but I knew I’d be sore. Even then I had no idea how lucky I was, how I could’ve been dragged or knocked out by one of the rocky outcrops. It was getting late and no horse in sight. We must have travelled quite a distance; there was Buckley’s (as Dad would say) of me finding a way back to camp. I crawled to a mulga tree and sat against one of the trunks; at least I’d have a bit of shelter.

  It was eerie being in an expanse of dark land and sky, like the scrub was waiting to see how I’d respond. A wind had sprung up; it was close on dusk and getting colder when I heard the howls of dingoes. There was a rustle in the grass behind me. I turned my head and winced. Everything felt sore. It wasn’t Rainmaker as I’d hoped. Only a few metres away stood a red kangaroo and it knew I was there. I managed to pull myself up, holding onto small branches. The kangaroo stood higher too. It was huge. Would it attack me? I’d heard gruesome stories about men being slit from top to bottom by their claws. It dropped to its haunches again and moved away, grazing.

  Another howl, closer this time. Should I try to climb? The mulga didn’t look as if it would hold me. And I couldn’t
run: everything hurt. A chorus of howls started up. I was determined not to cry, but every sound echoing in the bush around me was amplified by my fear.

  Then came a snort. I called, ‘Rainmaker!’ But it wasn’t. Not a brumby either.

  It was Matt. He had Kerra with him. ‘You or'right?’ was his offhand comment as if he regularly found people who fell off horses.

  ‘Yeah.’ What a relief. ‘How did you find me?’

  ‘Rainmaker.’ Like Mr Townsend, it seemed Matt didn’t say much. I prompted him. ‘What did she do?’

  ‘Zack saw her chasing her tail in the bush. Without you. So we knew you’d be around.’

  I grimaced. ‘Yeah.’ I’d never felt more like the ‘new chum’ as I did then, and I decided a little defence was in order. ‘She tried to chase a brumby.’

  Matt grunted as he dismounted. ‘Spooked, more likely.’

  Kerra piped up then. ‘We found you first.’ She sang the words like any other ten-year-old and she jumped off Gypsy to skip around Matt as he took two blankets from his horse.

  ‘C’mon, Kerra, help me find some kindling for a fire.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we go back?’ I watched Kerra, absorbed in her task. I hadn’t seen her look that happy at the homestead.

  ‘No need. Zack’s still catching Rainmaker, and if he doesn’t, she might come back to where she dropped you. Then we’ll return.’

  ‘Won’t the others be worried?’

  ‘Nah. I know this part of the country real well. They know that too. I’m often out here to check the waterholes for campers.’

  I didn’t understand what he was talking about and it must have shown as he added, ‘Sheep won’t drink where there’s people camped. They’ll die of thirst within metres of the dam.’

  ‘Oh.’ I digested this startling piece of bush lore. At least he didn’t talk to me like Kerra did as though I should’ve known.

  Soon Matt had the fire burning (it was a five-dog night, he said) and I sat there almost mesmerised as I stared into the different colours fanning against the dark sky, my back aching and my mind blank. Kerra sat in my lap and I put the blanket Matt had handed me round us both. Matt stayed on the other side of the fire. He had that aura of ‘outback mateship’ stamped all over him. It made me feel safe. I wanted to ask him lots of questions, about Blake, Kerra, the Townsends; I knew he’d give me an honest answer. But I couldn’t, not with Kerra there, leaning against me, hanging onto all that was going on.

  ‘Jaime, tell us a story.’

  Matt tuned in then. ‘Story?’

  ‘She tells stories. She’s as good as someone on TV.’ I hoped she wasn’t thinking of Playschool.

  ‘That’d be nice.’ Matt actually sounded interested. ‘Nungas told stories round the campfire. It’s the way they passed stuff on, the way they taught the mob.’ He made it sound like an important art that was dying.

  ‘C’mon, Jaime. You said you knew lots of stories.’

  I sighed at Kerra’s bossy tone. ‘What sort of story?’

  ‘One where a hero saves someone.’ I regarded the top of her head, wondering if she did care and if stories could truly heal the hurt.

  Even Matt was looking expectant through the smoke of the fire.

  So I told them about Queen Scheherazade and how she made up stories for 1001 nights to stay alive.

  ‘Why would she have to stay alive?’ Kerra asked.

  I took a deep breath. ‘The king’s wife left him and he was so sad and angry that he married a girl each day and had her beheaded the next morning.’

  ‘That’s random.’ Matt looked appalled, but Kerra was quiet.

  ‘Yes, but Scheherazade was the vizier’s daughter and she had a plan to save the girls who were left. She offered to marry the king. The first night he came to her tent she asked if she could tell a story. The king liked stories so he agreed. Scheherazade was so good at telling stories that she had the king enthralled all night and when the sky lightened in the east, he said, “Quickly, finish it off, it’s time for your beheading.”

  ‘“Sire,” she said, “the story will be ruined if I rush the ending. Please may I finish it when you come tonight? Just one more day.”

  ‘The king finally agreed, so that night she finished the story and started another—’

  ‘And the king wanted to hear the ending of that one too?’ Kerra asked.

  ‘Absolutely. Finally after 1001 nights of telling stories, Scheherazade had had enough.

  ‘“Sire, I am your wife, I have born you two sons, surely you can lift this threat of death from me?”

  “My piari,” the king replied, “don’t you know I have grown to love you? No longer do I want to kill anyone. Your stories have healed my mind and my heart.”’

  At the end, Kerra did something I’d never noticed her do before: she gasped.

  9

  After the storytelling I felt like packing it in for the night, but Kerra decided to fill Matt in on some details of my life.

  ‘Jaime was a hostage twice. Once in Pakistan when she was younger. There was an attack on her school. And again this year, she was kidnapped, weren’t you, Jaime?’ She said it as if she’d done high school history and knew all about sub-continent wars.

  I nodded dumbly under Matt’s respectful gaze.

  ‘Tell us what it was like being a hostage when you were little,’ Kerra urged.

  I looked up, surprised that she’d remembered that and embarrassed that Matt may be bored. But he was leaning forward.

  ‘It was years ago. I was in Year 8,’ I said, but both Matt and Kerra waited for me to keep going. I sighed. ‘We girls were kept in a dark little room in a Mughal caravanserai, like an ancient motel for travellers and their camels or horses. I climbed up the rough bricks to the barred window to get a look outside sometimes.’

  ‘What did you see?’ Matt asked.

  ‘Snow-topped mountains. There was a river that lapped up against the walls of the place. We only knew that because we could hear it at night. We could hear the men—’

  Kerra butted in. I’d never seen her do that before either. ‘But early this year her friend died in Afghanistan when they were kidnapped.’

  I flinched before I heard Matt’s indrawn breath. ‘Did that really happen? And your friend—’ He glanced at Kerra.

  I nodded.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Jaime’s had lots of adventures. Tell us some more.’

  Kerra made me feel like I’d betrayed a confidence.

  Matt came to my rescue. ‘Must be time for you to turn in, Kerra. Jaime will be tired from falling off Rainmaker.’

  Kerra closed her lips into a pout. At times I wondered if she couldn’t feel empathy for others. Surely she was tired too; I could feel her growing heavier as I talked, so I laid her by the fire with the blanket tucked round her.

  ‘You’ve been through a lot it sounds like.’ Matt paused. ‘Do you want to talk about your friend?’

  I bit my lip. It felt good to have someone ask that. And I began telling him everything: how I was kidnapped by accident in January and my friends—Jasper, Liana and Sonya—found me in a Peshawar carpet shop, and how we were taken into Afghanistan to keep us safe but finally got away.

  ‘Some of the freedom fighters were good guys looking after the people, some were just terrorists. We met both.’

  ‘Did the terrorists kill your friend?’ His voice was gentle.

  ‘We were escaping, holding hands. I don’t know if a guy was aiming at us or if it was a stray bullet.’

  Matt groaned softly. I looked up to find him regarding me from the other side of the fire. It was burning lower now and I edged closer to the warmth. ‘Must have been strange coming back from a place like that.’

  I nodded. ‘Pakistan was where I was brought up. I knew it, loved it.’ I remembered my speech
at a school dinner last year. ‘Back here it was like dropping my life in the dark and not being able to find it.’

  Matt nodded. ‘Lots of different ways of doing things in those countries. Cut your hands off for stealing, I heard.’

  ‘Sometimes.’ There was so much more I could have said about Pakistan: its ancient timelessness, its beauty and mystery, the generosity and hospitality of the people. But I’d learnt people here weren’t always interested in that face of Pakistan.

  ‘You used to Australia now?’ No one had asked me that for a long time either, and I had to think.

  ‘Yeah, I reckon. I’ve been here eighteen months. There’s still times when I do the wrong thing or moments when I feel like I can hear music other people can’t.’ I didn’t expect Matt to understand that but I underestimated the wisdom that comes to people who spent a lot of time on their own.

  ‘Know what you mean,’ was all he said.

  ‘Can I ask you something, Matt?’

  He shifted in his blanket. ‘Fire away.’

  ‘Do you know that Blake picks on Kerra?’

  ‘Is he still?’

  ‘He always did?’

  Matt didn’t answer that, instead, he said, ‘They’ve had a hard time of it, the Townsends. They’ve come out of it as good as can be expected, I reckon.’

  I wanted to talk about the rights and wrongs of bullying your little sister, but I sensed I wouldn’t get far. Instead, I asked, ‘What happened?’

  Maybe Matt was tired, but more likely it was tied up with not talking about a mate when he wasn’t there. Commendable, but annoying when I was desperate to know. He was quiet for ages so that I began to think he hadn’t heard me after all, until he stretched out by the fire and finally spoke.

  ‘You’ll have to ask Blake yourself. It’s to do with his mother. That’s only my opinion, mind you, but he is the one who needs to tell you. God knows he needs to tell someone; it may as well be you.’