__________The terror loomed before her: big, black and with a foul stench that she felt could suffocate her. The great mass of noise, pollution and traffic jams lay at the other end of the long highway, growing bigger... bigger... until it towered over her head. She paled. A tear trickled down her cheek. Another had run down that same track, many hours ago, when the same car she was then in, drove out of a little township in a place of no matter in the world?except to those who had been born there, grown up there, and then had to leave it. Without any hope of going back there. Not soon anyway. But even then she longed for it: some day.
__________She blinked back her tears, and shifted her position so that she fully faced the direction she had come. In the far distance the trees disappeared; around her were open plains, smeared by industrial structures puffing smoke from their tall chimneys. And she was heading straight for its heart: the big city.
__________She dreaded the city. Since she had been twelve years old, she had had to go there every term for that dreaded place called school. Out in the country, school had been fun, with lots of outside activities. But boarding school! The thought of it made her cringe. It was terrible. No-one wanted to be friends with a bush-kid ?a “bush-pig?as they called her. And to be honest, she wanted nothing to do with them. They laughed at her knowledge of livestock and production; they mocked her “bush-accent? they thought she knew nothing. They thought they knew everything. She had no friends. And now she had to live there.
__________Permanently.
__________It was drought season, and her father’s farm had been one of the worst hit. He said the horses were the most important thing in the world to him. He said that not one horse that lived on his land would ever live off it again. He said he’d rather die than lose one of his horses. He said that he would never give one of them up. And she hated him.
__________But she couldn’t ?not really. She might say that she did, but in her heart she had to understand. They needed the money. They couldn’t survive out in the dry any more. They had no water, and none was at hand. They just had to give it up. Everything. The paddocks, the barn, the sheds, the house. The whole farm! And the horses. Even the horses.