Welcome to Gaia! ::

From 'The Silver Brumby' by Elyne Mitchell.
I love they was she wrote, she had a true vision of the Autralian bush.

" ... Once there was a dark, stromy night in spring, when deep down in their holes, the wombats knew no to come out, when the possums stayed quiet in their hollow limbs, when the great black flying phallangers that livei n the mountain forests never stirred. On this night, Bel-Bel, the cream brumby mare, gave birth to a colt, pale like herself, or paler, in that wild, black storm ..."

" ... 'I will call you Thowra,' she said, waking hm with her nose, 'because that means wind. In wind were you born, and fleet as the wind you must be if you will live.' ... "

" ... Thowra did not know what made him feel excited and yet afraid. he did not realize that his mother's anxiety since the first heavy snowfall had been communicating itself to him, or that the strange heavy feeling which all the grown horses had slowly begun to get - that a hard winter was coming - had somehow made everyone touchy, apt to gallop, kick, or bite. He only knew that the howl of the wind and the cold lash of the snow made him want to gallop now, even in the pitch darkness, and leap on to a high rock, rear and neigh loudly to the sky. He could imagine the wild neigh ringing out and the thought of it sent shivers down his backbone. ..."

" ... Spring was coming to all this mountain kingdom. Foals would be born, young kangaroos, possums, and wombats would be snugly in their mother's pouches, the hawks and great wedge-tail eagles would hatch their young, fat dingo pups would roll in the sunshine, and the wild horses would fight for their mares and gallop over the hills in all the glory of their strength. ..."

" ... Golden's master looked for her all through that summer, and even the summers that followed, but not a sign of her did he see. And though, time and again, he told how the silver stallion had hurtled over the cliff, ther grew up around the campfires stories of a great silver stakkion seen galloping over wind-packed snow way up on the Ramshead /range; of a ghost horse tht drank at the Crackenback River; of a horse all men thought dead appearing in a blizzard at Dead Horse hut and vanishing agian; of the wild stallion cry that could only be Thowra's. But no man knw where the son of Bel-Bel roamed. .."

There - a look at the best loved book of my girl-hood.