Clutching Colleen to her hip Sarah remembered other Christmas Eves. How her life had changed! From maid in Ireland to wife and mother in a eucalypt forest.
Barney the wombat, who treated the slab hut as part of his burrow, snuffled at her feet while from behind her came the crack of trees exploding as the fire rushed towards them.
Praying for her man, who was somewhere desperately fanning a back burn, Sarah with reins in one hand and Colleen tucked under her arm spurred towards safety. Into a tunnel of smoke and heat she thundered with spot fires bursting all around her.
When suddenly the undergrowth exploded the mare reared high, flinging Sarah and the toddler into her mane. The mare then crashed back to earth in a tangle of limbs and leather.
Well beyond any human control the horse scrambled upright and charged. Knowing not where; it just stormed forward, desperately seeking escape. Dislodged from the saddle and with one foot snared in a twisted stirrup Sarah was dragged back towards the hut.
Swung wide as the horse rounded a tree Sarah was slammed into a stump bursting the child from her grasp. The mare paused at the hut allowing Sarah time to grab the girth before the panic-struck animal again blundered on with the hapless woman bouncing at her side.
With tail and mane alight the horse charged head on into the encircling fire. Her lungs torn by smoke and cinders Sarah hung clung to the heaving flanks.
The heat and pain were so intense that she ceased to feel them; seeing in her delirium nothing other than the time when she presented their new born daughter to her husband. She saw Patrick cradle them in his arms and heard him repeat again and again “Colleen my Colleen”.
Slowly she realized that the violent movement had stopped, the flames and the roaring were no more and that she could hear Patrick’s voice as her seizured fingers were prised from the girth. Scarcely trusting her eyes Sarah found herself wrapped in caring arms in the middle of a burnt out clearing behind the fire.
On Christmas morning Patrick began his mournful search. Red eyed he slumped over his fork and surveyed the shadow of his home on the blackened earth.
Expecting to deliver a coup de grace he scratched a smoking pile from the mouth of Barney's burrow. Seemingly none for the worse for wear the wombat shuffled out and pressed his head into Patrick’s legs.
Patrick crouched down, wrapped the animal in his arms and cried.
From deep within the burrow came an answering “Daddy”.
So ends the first of the many sagas of she we know and love as Riverland Nana.