Free Moonstone Promise by Karen Wood Page B

paddock, look!’
    He wished he could climb to the top of a nearby mountain, look out across the country and find her. If he could, he would wave madly and yell, ‘Hi, Jessy!’
    But he couldn’t. He had crossed the point of no return, crossed the Rubicon, like Bob had said. Perhaps one day he would run into her again, at a campdraft, or an ag show.
    Then he laughed at himself. What campdrafts? The horses were never his. They were gone.

11
    IT WAS BARELY MORNING. The air was still and the sky was beginning to change colour to the east, silhouetting the low hills. The distant scream of a horse rang in his ears, unsettling him.
    He rose, stretched, and headed out towards the grassland, away from the river. Out in the open savannah he stood and gazed at the billions of stars, glittering against the fading blue velvet. He could clearly see the Saucepan and the Seven Sisters. Between them was another constellation that looked a bit like a man. The rest, the smaller ones, were being pulled back into the cosmos to wait for another night.
    Luke began to walk. The exercise felt good and before long he was jogging, the steady thump of his feet matching the beat from his dreams, lifting his arms above the long grass as he swished through. By the time he got to the foot of the hills he was drenched with sweat and gasping for breath.
    He made his way upward and the country around him changed again, from dry, golden grass to grey-green mounds of needle-tipped spinifex with occasional shrubs and small trees. His boots crunched over the stones.
    A terrible scream made him stop in his tracks. It was real this time. No dream or ghost, not a nightmare; somewhere, there was a very real and very distressed horse. There was another sound, like a branch being shaken but more . . . metallic. It jangled erratically and then was silent.
    Luke stopped and listened: nothing but twittering birds, whirring insects and the sound of his own lungs, panting.
    He began walking again, stepping carefully around the spinifex.
    There was a throaty, wheezing noise and then another rustling for a few seconds. Luke stopped. An exhausted groan, more rustling and a thud.
    He knew the sound. It was a horse, fighting against wire. But where? Out here? Tyson had said there were brumbies. He looked around. The country was rough, a sea of jagged red rocks, no matter which way he looked. A dry, hot wind blew.
    Then he saw it: a makeshift yard. A trap.
    It was barely visible behind stunted shrubs and scrawny trees and it was only because the horizontal branches of the gate were out of place that he even spotted it. Barbed wire gleamed silvery new in the sunlight. It ran about four feet high and looped around some saplings. Hand-sawn tree branches had been wired up to form an arrow-shaped gate, designed to let something in but not out.
    Luke walked closer, homing his sights in on the scene. There was another explosion of movement and he saw the bony curve of a horse’s back rise above the spinifex and wire. It thrashed wildly and then disappeared with another groan and a thud.
    His first instinct was to run and help it, untangle it. He wanted to hold it still and calm it so it didn’t hurt itself any more. But it was a wild animal, it would be terrified of him.
    He stopped and squatted low, making himself invisible. There was a rustling sound beside him and he turned to see a shape disappear behind a clump of rocks. A dingo, perhaps? He crept forwards on his hands and knees for some way to get a good look at the horse. Like an insect caught in a huge spiderweb, a mare lay on its side, her head and two front legs tangled in wire.
    It was a sickening sight. A whole ear hung by a flap of skin off the side of the animal’s head and one eye was a mass of dried blood. Her two front legs were stripped of flesh, down to the bone. There were flies all over her. She must have been stuck there for days.
    Luke felt for the pocketknife in his back pocket. It had a