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at the clump of mud and rubbing the blood off his lip. He towelled off his hair and stared back at the boy in the mirror, stringy and lean with lumpy ribs.
    He searched through the cupboard and found a small pair of hair-trimming clippers. Holding his fringe off his forehead, he began to cut with long, slow strokes, letting the thick clumps of hair fall down onto his feet.
    Back in his room, he towelled off and got dressed. In the old Queen Anne dresser, he searched for his pocketknife, wallet, some matches, an aluminium water bottle, and a spare shirt. He found a scrap of paper and wrote a quick note.
    Annie. I’ll be in touch, Luke.
    There was so much more he wanted to say to her, so many reasons to say thanks and sorry . But he couldn’t begin to put it into words. For the moment, he hoped she would understand and not be hurt.
    Luke didn’t know where he would go, exactly. But he did know that he wasn’t going to hang around and be assessed and re-homed like a lost dog. The only true family he had was horses, and he was going to find them, find some brumbies. Brumbies were wild and free and owned by no one.
    He could go south, down to the Snowies; he knew there were plenty down there. Lawson’s first horse, Dusty, had been a brumby foal from down that way, and he reckoned it was the toughest and most honest horse he had ever owned. Its feet were like iron, he said, and never needed shoeing, even for rocky ground. Brumbies had bred by natural selection in some of the toughest country in Australia.
    But that cold mountain country didn’t call to Luke the way outback Queensland did. Queensland had brumbies too, plenty of them. Lawson reckoned he’d seen thousands of them, roaming free in big mobs in and out of the stations. He said the station owners heli-mustered them sometimes – many of them never recovered from the long hot gallop and died days later, but the ones that did made good honest horses.
    Luke threw his things into a backpack and as he went to close the dresser drawer, he saw a photo of his mother. He held the photo to his face for a moment, then placed it carefully back in the drawer. Shoving the wallet into his back pocket, he stuffed a small blanket into the pack, slung it over his shoulders and slid open the sash window.

    Jess was in the mares’ paddock, a curled-up figure sitting against a fence post in the dark.
    â€˜How come you’re not at the wake?’ Luke asked, letting himself through the gate.
    She didn’t answer him.
    He sat down next to her and although she didn’t speak, he could feel her, the warmth that flowed out of her. She was loved, loveable. She came from a different world to him. ‘Sorry,’ he whispered.
    But still Jess didn’t answer him. She sat with her arms wrapped around her knees, rocking. He could tell she was crying and he wanted to hug her, soothe her, the way he did with young horses.
    Luke sat watching the black outline of a mare in the paddock, and felt suddenly exhausted. He could have lain down right there and fallen asleep under the shattered glass of the stars, with no need to talk.
    Instead, he put his arms around his knees and stared up into the sky, wondering how he could have stuffed up so much in such a short time. A cloud floated away from the big silvery moon, and as though someone had pulled a cloth from over a lamp, light ran over him.
    â€˜What did you do to your face?’ asked Jess suddenly.
    Luke’s hand flew to his cheek. It was puffy and his lip was swollen, but he was surprised that she could see it in the dark. Curse the moon. ‘Umm . . .’
    He couldn’t bring himself to say it out loud, so he sat there in silence, feeling a wave of shame wash over him.
    â€˜Something’s really wrong, isn’t it? What happened? Did someone get drunk and hit you?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜Who did that to you?’
    â€˜I did it to myself.’
    And with that, the questions