Leslie Scott had heard rumours of wild horses living near her home in the central Victorian town of Clunes. She’d been tracking their manure and hoof prints for weeks.
But actually seeing them while photographing birds one day felt like a myth come to life.
“My heart was racing,” she recalls.
Milo (lying down) and Lucy, captured when Leslie Scott first spotted them through her camera lens.Credit:Leslie Scott
“My camera focused and I couldn’t stop the small shout of delight.”
In a new memoir of her personal quest to bring the animals to safety, Scott documents how, over the next six months, she gained the horses’ trust and started a one-woman mission to give them a new home.
Milo the brumby, whose trust Leslie Scott won, over six months on Mount Beckworth.Credit:Leslie Scott
Mount Beckworth is a state park surrounded by farms, hundreds of kilometres from Victoria’s High Country.
The animals – a small, wary dark-grey mare and a sweet-natured bay colt – bolted when Scott and her Jack Russell terrier Gizmo first crept towards them.
When she followed, the colt, which she later named Milo due to his milky-brown muzzle, stopped and stared at her.
It was “love at first sight,” she later wrote. “I felt I’d known and met this horse before.”
Scott feared hunters would shoot them, or that farmers or bushwalkers would report them to authorities who might have culled them as feral animals, or caught them and sold them to an uncertain future.
By the summer of 2020, the park’s water springs were drying up. Logging in a nearby pine plantation was about to resume, which Scott feared would make the horses flee.
By February last year, the thirsty horses broke into a nearby farm to drink from a trough, and with the help of friends and the farmer, Scott fenced them in. It was Valentine’s Day.
Leslie Scott with former brumbies Milo, left, and Lucy, right, and their offspring, Quincy, centre.Credit:Eddie Jim
Eight months later, at Scott’s property, Lucy gave birth to a foal, Quincy. The three horses now live with Scott and her policeman husband, David — and with Scott’s four other horses, on the outskirts of Clunes.
Not long before she found the brumbies, during COVID-19 lockdowns, Scott had quit her job at a medical clinic and was at a loose end.
Caring for the brumbies gave her purpose.
“I had something to focus on. I was able to be out in nature and be with horses, which I love,” she said.
Asked whether she became obsessed with the horses, Scott says, “yes, absolutely”.
The dream to save them was precarious because it could be taken away at any stage. Once, she couldn’t find them for a week and broke down in tears, but didn’t give up.
“I’m determined. Once I set my mind to something, I usually see it through, no matter what it is.”
Leslie Scott and her horse Milo have a special bond.Credit:Eddie Jim
Now working as a photographer and in retail, Scott is training Milo and Quincy. She feels that Lucy finally trusts her, however the mare recently had to have an eye removed due to an old injury, and won’t be ridden.
“She’ll just get to be a horse in my herd and enjoy the rest of her life,” Scott says.
Scott never found out where the horses came from. One theory is that a “brumby runner” caught them in the High Country and brought them to the area to break them in and sell them.
She suspects Lucy was set free because she was too untrusting to be domesticated. But it’s a mystery why Milo would be dumped. “He’s the sweetest horse. He could be any little girl’s dream pony,” Scott says.
Scott hopes her book spurs awareness of the plight of brumbies and animal welfare. And that it inspires people.
“At the start I never thought I’d be able to get two horses off a mountain, but it’s happened, and it’s been wonderful,” she says.
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