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.
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
