The Island of Lost Horses

I stopped and trod water, listening to their cries echo through the bay. I couldn’t see what had spooked them. I shielded my eyes with my hand against the glare of the sun on the water and peered out into the jungle. There! A shadow flickering through the trees. I felt a shiver down the back of my neck. I hesitated, and then put my head down and started swimming again.

Shipwreck Bay was shaped like a horseshoe and I swam my way right into the middle of the curve. In both directions white sand stretched on for about a hundred metres or so. My plan was to walk along the beach to the next bay and then all the way to the headland, which I figured would take about two hours – I would be back in time for dinner.

I set off, enjoying how my reef boots made alien footprints in the sand – with circles like octopus suckers on the soles and no toes. The parrots had gone silent, but I kept an eye on the trees all the same.

As I rounded the rocks to the next bay, I could see that my plan of walking to the headland wasn’t going to work out. The bay ahead was sandy, the same as the one where we’d moored the Phaedra, but at the southern end there was a cliff-face that jutted all the way into the sea, too sheer to climb. If I wanted to keep going then I needed to turn inland.

As I pushed my way through black mangroves and waist-high marsh grass, the ground became squelchy underfoot. I hadn’t gone far when I noticed an itching on my ankle and I looked down and saw this big, black leech stuck to my leg just above the rim of my reef boot.

If you ever need to pull a leech off, the thing you mustn’t do is panic. If you rip them off, they will vomit into the wound and cause an infection. You need to use your fingernail to detach the sucker and ease the leech off.

I tried to use my fingernails, but I kept getting grossed out and pulling my hand away. I had finally got up the nerve to do it when the leech got so full and plump that it just plopped off of its own accord. I stomped down on it and felt sick as I watched my own blood oozing back out.

After that, every blade of grass against my shin made me jump. I kept imagining shiny black leeches attaching themselves to my flesh, looking for a warm pulse to plunge their teeth into.

As I got closer to the jungle the parrots started up again. They were shrieking from the tops of the Caribbean pines. Look out! their cries seemed to say. Dangerous, dangerous!

And then, another sound. Louder than the cries of the parrots. A crashing and crunching, the sound of something moving through the scrubby undergrowth beneath the pines.

I stood very still and listened hard. Whatever was in there, it was big and it was coming my way, moving fast.

From the sounds it made as it thundered towards me, I figured it had to be a wild boar! They live in the jungles on most islands in the Bahamas and the islanders hunt them for meat. If you’re hunting them, you have to make sure your aim is good because you don’t want to wound them and make them angry. Boars can attack. They’ve got these long tusks that can kill you on the spot.

I looked around me for a tree to shimmy up, but it was all snakewood and pigeon berry, too spindly to take my weight. My heart was hammering at my chest. The boar must be close now, but there was nowhere to run. I scrambled around, trying to find a stick, something big and solid. The crashing was deafening, so near…

And then she appeared in the clearing in front of me.

It hurt me afterwards to think that the first time I ever saw her my reaction was to shrink back in fear. But like I said, I thought she was a boar. The last thing you ever expect to see in the jungle is a horse.

She had this stark white face, pale as bone, with these blue eyes staring out like sapphires set into china. Above her wild blue eyes her forelock was tangled with burrs and bits of twig so that it resembled those religious paintings of Jesus with a crown of thorns, and along her neck the mane had become so matted and tangled it had turned into dreadlocks.

Strange brown markings covered her ears, as if she was wearing a hat, and there were more brown splotches over her withers, chest and rump. The effect was like camouflage so that she blended into the trees and this made her white face appear even more ghoulish, as if it just floated there all on its own with those weird blue eyes. She was like some voodoo queen who had taken on animal form.

She didn’t turn and run at the sight of me. It was as if she expected to find me there in the middle of the jungle.

She stood there for a minute, her nostrils flared, taking in my scent on the air. And then she took a step forward, moving towards me. I stepped backwards. I mean, I wasn’t scared. It was just that she was nothing like those horses down the road back home in Florida. I had never seen a horse like this before. The way she held her head up high, imperious and proud, as if she owned the jungle.

The horse stretched out her neck, lowering her white face towards me and I held my ground. I could feel her warm, misty breath on my skin. She was no ghost. She was flesh and blood like me. Slowly, I raised my hand so that the tips of my fingers brushed against the velvet of her muzzle and that was when I felt it. I know it made no sense but right there and then I knew that it was real and powerful and true. That this bold, beautiful arrogant creature was somehow mine.

And then the stupid parrots ruined everything. I don’t know what startled them but suddenly the trees around us shook as they took flight, screeching.

I put out a hand to grasp her mane but it was too late. She surged forward, cutting so close to me that I could have almost flung my arms around her as she swept by, taking the path back the way I had just come through the mangroves.

Her legs were invisible beneath the thick waves of marsh grass, so that as she cantered away from me with her tail sweeping in her wake she looked like a ship ploughing through rough ocean, rising and cresting with each canter stride. And then she was free of the grass and galloping along the beach. I could see her pale limbs gathering up beneath her and plunging deep down into the sand. She held her head high as she ran and didn’t look back. Her hoofbeats pounded out a rhythm as she rounded the curve at the other end of the cove. And then she was gone.

Voodoo Queen

There was no way. I could catch her, but I ran after her all the same. I slogged through the mangroves and then back on to the beach.

By the time I reached our bay where the Phaedra was anchored she had disappeared. No hoofprints and no sign of her anywhere. The birds, who had been so full of noise, had gone eerily quiet.

I crouched with my hands on my knees to get my breath back, then I stood up and scanned the sand dunes for my horse. When I couldn’t see her, I waded straight out into the sea. My strokes cut the water fast and clean all the way back to the Phaedra.

“Mom?”

She wasn’t on deck.

“Mom!”

Mom ran up from below deck. “What’s wrong? What is it?”

“I saw a horse.”

The look of concern turned to annoyance. “Beatriz, this isn’t funny. I am working.”

“I’m not trying to be funny!” My chest was still heaving from the effort of my run and swim. I was having trouble getting the words out. “I saw a horse… just now.”

“Being ridden on the beach?”

“No.” I was still trying to breathe. “It was alone in the jungle and it was wild, but I patted it and then the birds scared it away.”

Mom frowned. “You met a wild horse in the jungle that let you get close enough to pat it.”

“Yes, well, almost.”

“And what did this horse look like?”

“It had blue eyes and a white face and dreadlocks and this marking on its head like a hat…”

Mom looked hard at me.

“Mom, I’m not making it up… I can show you.”

“The horse?”

“No,” I shook my head. “She ran away but I can show you the hoofprints. Not here. They washed away. But in the next bay there will be some.”

“I really don’t have time for this.”

“It won’t take long,” I pleaded. “Come and see!”

“Beatriz,” Mom’s voice was firm, “I don’t know where you think you are going with this horse business, but if this is part of your campaign to convince me to go back to Florida, I can tell you now that interrupting my work is going the wrong way about it.”

“I’m not lying!”

“I never said you were lying, Beatriz…”

“Yes, you did!” I was furious now. Mom is always saying I have an overactive imagination – which is true, but that is totally different from telling lies. Also, people are always telling you to have big dreams – like going to the Olympics – and then they tell you off for being a dreamer. So which one is it?

“I tell you what,” Mom said, “how about if I come and look for the hoofprints later, OK? We can go before dinner and have a walk on the beach and you can show me then.”

“It’ll be too late by dinner,” I insisted. “The waves will have washed them away.”

“Just give me an hour then,” Mom said. “Once I’ve done this migration chart we can go, OK? We’ll take the Zodiac to the next bay and you can show me.”

“OK…” I gave in. “One hour.”

I stayed on deck staring out at the island while Mom worked downstairs, watching in case the horse reappeared.

She was real, I whispered, trying to convince myself. But she hadn’t seemed real at first, had she? Did I actually touch her? My horse was like a ghost, a voodoo queen, and now she was disappearing, fading like a vapour as I waited for Mom and the next sixty minutes to tick past. And then another sixty. She was still working.

“I have about another half an hour to go,” she insisted when I went downstairs.

And another half an hour after that.

“We’ll go in the morning, OK?” Mom said as she served up dinner. She had made curried fish with coconut cream and rice – which is usually my favourite, but I wasn’t eating, just poking it around the plate.

“Sure,” I said in a flat voice. “Great, Mom.”

I lay in bed that night and looked up at the horse posters on my wall. I guess it is true that I have a vivid imagination. When I lived in Florida I had lots of imaginary horses. I made them all bridles out of rope with their names on bits of cardboard and I hung them up in the garden shed and pretended that was my tack room.

This was back when I was friends with Kristen. She was a horsey girl too. She would come over after school and we would showjump. We’d leap over fences made out of broomsticks and paint cans in the backyard. We didn’t always go clear – sometimes our horses would refuse, or knock a rail down and get faults. But I knew all the time that those horses weren’t real. And I could never have made up a horse like the one that I had seen in the jungle. I had never seen a horse like that in my life.

Well, if Mom wanted proof then she would get it.

Looking back, I guess I should have left a note. At the time I thought it would only make Mom angry if I told her what I was doing. I would have acted differently if I had only known what lay ahead.

The Mudpit

I’d got my clothes ready before I went to bed so that I could sneak out of the bunk room early the next morning and get dressed on deck without waking Mom. I’d already loaded my supplies – a bottle of water, a knife, some rope, a cheese sandwich (for me) and an apple (for the horse) – into my backpack and I threw the pack in first then climbed down the ladder and into the Zodiac.

I didn’t want to make a noise with the outboard motor so I rowed the Zodiac to shore. I’m OK at rowing, but I do end up going in circles sometimes. Luckily it was an incoming tide so that made it easier. When I reached the beach, I had to drag the inflatable all the way above the high tidemark so that the waves couldn’t pick it up and wash it away. I made sure Mom could see it from the Phaedra – I figured she could always swim over if she needed it while I was gone. Then I strapped on my backpack and headed inland, walking in the direction that the horse had gone, tracing her path from yesterday, following her into the jungle.

Beneath the dark canopy of the trees, the jungle floor was a tangle of snakewood and sea grape. I was looking for signs that the horse had been this way. You know, like they always do in movies, where they find a broken branch and then they know that the fugitive they are tracking has been there? Only I couldn’t see any broken branches, so I just kept walking.

As I pushed my way through the undergrowth, I thought about the horse, the way her mane had been tangled with burrs. If she really belonged to someone then you’d think they would have brushed her. The way I figured it, she must have been roaming loose for a long time. Maybe she didn’t even have an owner at all. I remembered that feeling I had when our eyes met, like we were bonded together somehow. My horse.

“You have an overactive imagination, Beatriz,” I muttered.

What I didn’t have was much sense of direction. As I walked deeper into the jungle I was beginning to wonder if I would be able to find my way back to the Phaedra again. When I had looked on the map, the island hadn’t seemed that big. I thought it would have taken me maybe half an hour to walk all the way across. But I had been walking that long already and I was still in dense jungle.

All the time as I walked, I had been listening to the birdsong, but now I heard another noise. In the trees to the left of me – the sound of branches snapping and crackling underfoot. I couldn’t see anything, but I had this feeling – like I was being stalked. Something or someone was in the trees with me, watching me, keeping their movements in step with my own. If I stopped walking, then it was quiet, but then when I set off again, I could have sworn I heard something.

“Who’s there?”

There was no reply.

I changed direction, heading away from the noises, walking faster, pushing my way through the trees.

I fought my way through the snakewood and pigeon berry and suddenly found myself in this vast clearing. I felt like I’d stumbled into a magical realm. The undergrowth disappeared completely, and there was a perfect circle of bare earth. At the centre of the circle was a massive tree. Its branches spread out in all directions, with sturdy limbs that were the perfect cradle for a secret tree house. The trunk was broad, with deep crevices, like folds in a curtain that you could have hidden yourself inside, and the roots stretched out like gnarled hands clawing into the earth.

I sat down on one of those roots, leant against the trunk and opened my backpack. I took out the sandwich and ate that and drank about half of the water in my bottle. Then I pulled out the rope and made a horse’s halter. I hadn’t ever used a real halter so I just fashioned it like the ones for my imaginary horses back in Florida, with a piece to go over the nose and another piece behind the ears – but big enough for a real horse obviously. I am good at sailor’s knots from being on the Phaedra so it looked quite sturdy once I was done.

I slung the halter over my shoulder and then I closed my eyes and I listened. I could hear the birdcalls, I could hear the leaves rustling above me, but there was also another sound – gentle, persistent, pounding in my head.

I could hear the sea.

I knew where to go now. The jungle began to thin out as the sea sound grew closer. On the other side of the island, the beach was quite different from Shipwreck Bay. The coast was one vast expanse of mudflats. Forests of mangroves sprouted up out of murky, shallow seawater pools, the remnants of the last tide that had been trapped and left behind.

I pushed my way through the tangles of mangroves and then stopped dead. Right in front of me in the middle of the mudflats, grazing on the marsh grass, was my horse.

She was real. And she was just as strange-looking as I’d remembered. With her crazy dreadlocked mane and her weird markings – the white face with the brown sunhat over her ears. But she was beautiful too. She had a pretty dish to her nose and a crest to her neck that made her look refined and elegant despite her bedraggled state. I thought about the way she had looked at me, when she first saw me in the forest, like she was queen of the island. There was that same nobility about her, even now as she stood fetlock-deep in the muddy waters, ripping up mouthfuls of the unappetising marsh tussock.

All the time I was walking, I had been planning what I’d do when I found her. My idea was to use the apple in my backpack to tempt her and then I would put the halter on. No, I am not joking – that was my plan. I can see how mad it was now, but the first time I met her, I had been so near, I figured I could easily get that close again and then the apple would do all the work.

Some plan. At the sound of me splashing and stumbling my way towards her through the mud she startled like a gazelle.

“No – don’t go!”

I wrestled frantically with my backpack, yanking it open to pull out the apple, but it was useless. She was gone already – galloping off across the mudflats, her tail held up high like a banner behind her, great splashes of seawater flinging up beneath her belly as she thundered across the mud.

I didn’t even try to run after her this time. She was way ahead of me, and she was so fast! I watched her, marvelling at her beauty, the way her legs gathered up and then drove back to earth again all at once, working like pistons powering her on.

And then, halfway across the mudflats, for some reason her strides slowed. She began to lumber along, her legs moving in an ungainly way, and then suddenly, out of nowhere, she fell. She went down hard and the way she lurched so violently reminded me of a zebra being taken down by a lion in a nature documentary.

As she struggled to right herself and get back up on her feet, I noticed that her hindquarters had almost completely disappeared into the mud. And that was when I realised. She hadn’t been taken down. The ground beneath had given way.

I thought she would fight her way free and get back to her feet. But she couldn’t seem to get out of the mud. She was flailing about, thrashing with her front legs. She got herself right up on her haunches, rearing up out of the sand, but then plunged back down again, rolling and twisting to one side as she fell.

I ran out on to the mudflats, dropping my backpack halfway across. It was like those dreams you have where your legs are stuck in glue and you can’t lift them and everything goes into slow motion. The mud suctioned at my feet, dragging at my legs. I was fighting for every stride. My breath came in panicked, desperate gasps.

My poor horse was going totally crazy. She lurched and faltered so that her neck swung like a pendulum, her head smacking down hard into the mud with a sickening thud. She was trapped, and struggling was only making it worse.

I kept running to her until I felt the ground beneath my feet go really soft. From here on in I had to test the ground with each step. I circled right round the horse, padding as I stepped, trying to find the best spot to approach from, where the ground was more solid.

My horse was foaming with sweat and shaking all over. She didn’t seem scared of me though; she was too focused on fighting her way out of the mud. I could see the whites of her eyes showing at the edges, making her blue eyes look even wilder. I could feel my heart hammering, but I had to get closer if I was going to help her, so I kept edging forward. I’d only taken a couple of steps when I felt the mud beneath me give way. I let out a squeal and the horse stopped thrashing and looked at me. Stay calm, I told myself, you can do this. I was almost close enough to reach her.

I ploughed on and felt the ground devouring me with each step. Then my foot got stuck and I collapsed hard against her.

The horse swung her neck as I fell, trying to move away from me, but she had nowhere to go. I grasped her soaking wet mane and clung on to it.

“I’m sorry,” I said. I tried to push myself back off her but I was stuck. Her shoulder was pressed up hard against my thigh and I sank further into the mud.

“Easy, girl. Stay calm. I’m going to get you out.”

I still had the rope halter slung over my shoulder. With fumbling hands I tried to slip the loop over her nose and then I lifted the earpiece over her head. She didn’t flinch from my touch. It was like she knew I was trying to help her.

Once I got the halter on, the hard work really began. It took me ages to pull myself back out of the mud. I would work one leg free only to have it suctioned back down as I fought to loosen the other limb. In the end I managed to crawl free by clawing my way out with my hands, using my fingers like grappling hooks to pull myself out. At least I knew that I could get free again if I needed to. But while I was light enough to get out of the mud hole, my horse wasn’t. And the more she struggled, the deeper she sank.

I moved round so that I was facing her, and then, grasping on with one hand each side of the rope halter, I leant back with all my weight, dug in my heels and I pulled. I pulled with all my strength, as hard as I could.

And… Nothing. The only thing that happened was I began sinking faster than before back into the mud.

I tried again, really yanking at the halter so that the ropes dug into the horse’s face. But even as I tried again I knew it wasn’t going to work. The horse must have weighed at least ten times as much as me and she was stuck deep.

I looked around me for something I could use – a stick or a branch. But there was nothing except marsh grass and tidal pools. And the sea. The sea, which, as I now noticed, was getting closer. The tide was coming in.

This whole mudflat must end up underwater when the tide was high. My horse would end up underwater. I searched more desperately for something to pull her out with. And then, when I couldn’t find anything, I began to dig. Maybe I could make a channel through the mud so that she could fight her way back to the surface again.

I used both hands, scooping up the sand through my legs like a dog. There was a frenzy to my digging as I shovelled the mud up and threw it aside, and I flung myself into the task, digging the channel as fast as I could. With every handful of mud that I dug up, more mud oozed in to take its place. All I was doing was making the hole more and more squishy and unstable.

I tried to dig closer to the horse, and felt the mud cave away completely so that I was up to my thighs once more.

It was futile to try and get her out. So instead, I made up my mind that I would stay with her for as long as possible. She struggled less if I stayed close and stroked her, spoke soothing words to her. I could drag myself out when the time came, but until that moment I would not abandon her.

“It’s OK.” I cradled her head. “It’s going to be OK.” But I believed this less and less. She was exhausted and so was I. The sun was right overhead and it was hot, really hot. My head was throbbing, and I felt prickly all over, like my skin had hot needles pressing into it.

I became mesmerised by the lapping of the sea, the way it kept creeping forward, slowly but surely. We had another hour left at most before it reached us.

“I’m sorry,” I kept saying to my horse. Because I knew now that I couldn’t save her. But I couldn’t leave her. Not yet.

Maybe it was the sun that made me dizzy, I don’t know, but at some point I must have begun slipping in and out of consciousness. I would wake up with a jolt and then sink back into a dream.

Get up, I told myself. Things have gone too far now. It was time to get myself out of the mud. It probably sounds weird to say I was freezing, because the sun was right up overhead, but suddenly I felt chilled to the bone.