The Sign Had Been Right

A sign at the boundary of Bago State Forest said there were brumbies about. We had come an hour northeast of Mannus on the bitumen before turning left onto the dirt, and the sign was the first thing the forest gave us.

It had been harvested not long before and it looked it, the ground opened up and the stumps still pale. Work trucks and utes came past us the whole way in, men with somewhere to be on a Sunday. Blowering Reservoir lay down in the valley, a long way down, and somewhere in the folds of country between us and the water were the forestry roads we hoped would let us reach it. We had one night in there. After it came Canberra, and after Canberra came weeks of not moving at all.

Of the brumbies there was no sign but the evidence, horse manure in the middle of the road, dropped by animals long gone. What we got instead was three emus at the edge of the cleared ground. We slowed right down and watched them watch us, and then one of them broke and ran across in front of the bus, all knees and indecision.

Google Maps sent us right, onto a track that did not exist. This has stopped being remarkable. We carried on until we found a road that was actually a road and took it down in first gear with the exhaust brake working harder than it has worked in a long while, the corners tight enough and steep enough that we went at them one at a time. Grammy came down behind us at her own pace. Neither of us said anything about the climb back out, though we were both doing the arithmetic.

The prime position at the water was taken. A crew of workmen had been camped there across the weekend and were packing as we came in, Sunday afternoon, work in the morning. We took what was left and did not mind. One night does not need the best spot.

We set up the Pomoly and fed it the timber we had cut at Mannus, which had ridden two days with us to get here, and huddled in around the heat while the valley went dark.

Anth walked the shore before the light went and found the other sites, several of them better than the one the workmen were leaving, tucked closer to the water with the hill at their backs. He noted where they were. There would be another time, presumably. That is the thing we tell ourselves about places we like and leave, and often enough it turns out to be true.

Grammy did not sleep. Not a minute of it, she told us in the morning. She had lain in the van running the descent backwards in her head, every switchback of it, unable to see how the van was going to get up.

We were packed early, which is easy when almost nothing came out in the first place. Sal took the driver's seat of the bus and led off. Anth drove Grammy's van. There are years of four-wheel driving behind him and none of it suggested the hill would be a problem, and it was not. Both vehicles walked up without complaint. The thing Grammy had been awake all night for was over before she had finished being frightened of it.

At the top we stopped to work out the best way on, backtracked a short distance, and then stopped again in the middle of the road, because there they were. Five or six of them out in the cleared ground where the forest had been taken off, heads up, watching us watch them. Brumbies. The sign had been right the whole time, just not on our schedule. We sat in the road and looked at them for as long as they would allow it.

Then Batlow, which grows apples, and north through Tumut, and out onto the highway at Gundagai for the last of it.

The northern edge of Canberra is an odd piece of country. You are in rolling farmland with sheep on it and cattle on it, New South Wales doing what New South Wales does, and then you cross a line on a map and it is suburbia, immediately, with nothing in between to warn you it is coming. Ten minutes after the last paddock we turned into Jan's street and parked the bus outside a house.Read more