'It's deep all right,' he said.

For some reason I realised that the civilians hadn't spoken since we started out, except to answer Jack's query about the guns. Now they stood at one side of the clearing, holding their weapons with the muzzles conscientiously towards the ground, quietly watching.

The four of us gathered on the edge of the clearing well back from the pool and Jack set off the charge.

The explosion was not nearly as loud as the first, even though the charge was much bigger, because the water was so much deeper. The spout of water was very broad, but didn't rise much higher than a man's height. The whole surface of the pool erupted into small choppy waves. The green slimy weed broke up, and injured and dead fish mixed and swirled with the vegetable debris.

We walked to the bank and stared down as the water settled.

A vast reptile shape appeared in the murk, first as just something with a huge head, four outstretched legs and a strangely misshapen tail. It was visible only as a ghostly form just below the surface of the muddy disturbed water. I heard three rifles being cocked.

'Wait for it,' said Jack. 'Wait till he's right up.'

The thing seemed to be about to break the surface when a huge bubble erupted on the water to the sound of a horrendous belch. A gust of stinking crocodile breath hit us with such force we all stepped back. Then Jack moved right to the water's edge with his rifle ready. The shape was disappearing. Jack began to fire. The two civilians joined him and twenty or so shots were fired at the slowly fading shape.

'No good,' said Jack, 'the bullets won't carry through water.'

'Christ, he's a big bastard,' said one of the civilians. 'Twenty foot at least.' Which since I have at last been converted to the metric system, translated at around six metres.

'Bloody hide's worth a fortune.'

'Was he alive?' I asked.

'Wouldn't have thought so,' said Jack. 'Not after that lot of geli. But he shouldn't have sunk. He must be nearly dead anyway. Some of those shots might have got him, too.'

'What are you going to do, blast again?'

'Would if I had any more geli ... but I shoved the last of it into that one. Stupid, really, but I thought he was probably there and wanted to make sure of him.'

'Think those shots would have buggered the hide?' one civilian asked the other.

'Mine didn't—I aimed at the head.'

'Me, too. That soft-nosed slug of his wouldn't have hurt it much,' he nodded at Jack. The conversation took place as though Jack and I were either not there or couldn't hear it.

'Well, if he's not dead, he could stay down there for a hell of a long time and he might wedge himself into some roots or something and just die and never come up,' mused Jack. 'I'd better get back to Weipa and get some more geli.'

'No point in waiting around for a while to see if he comes up?' I asked.

'He might, of course,' said Jack thoughtfully. 'But then he might not. We could wait here all night, but I can get to Weipa and back in a couple or three hours, and we'll certainly get him up with more geli. No,' he said decisively, 'I'll go back.'

He turned to the two civilians.

'Now listen, you two, I'm going back to Weipa to get some more geli.' Just as they had talked to each other as though he didn't exist, he was now assuming they hadn't understood the words just spoken virtually in their ears. They nodded as though it was new intelligence. 'I want you to wait here and if he comes up, haul him onto the bank. Shoot him if you think he might be alive. Got it?'

'Sure,' said one civilian.

'And listen,' said Jack grimly, 'don't open him up. If your mate's inside him I've got to be here when he's opened up. Do you understand?'

'Sure.'

'Well, make sure you are sure,' said Jack, slightly threateningly. 'If that croc comes up, don't open him till I get back, or there'll be hell to pay.'

'Sure.'

Jack nodded to me and we set off back along the creek. I thought it was sensitive of him to suppose that I would rather go with him than wait for a couple of hours with the civilians. He was right, too.

I stopped off at my camp and waited until Jack reappeared in the middle of the afternoon.

'I got a double load,' he said, 'to make sure. You wouldn't mind carrying a pack in?'

'Not at all.'

At the civilians' camp we loaded ourselves with the packs of gelignite, which weren't particularly heavy, and then Jack took from the back of the truck a large, heavy plastic bag and draped it over his shoulders. I didn't ask what it was for. He took up his rifle and we marched briskly into the bush, knowing exactly where we were going now.

My writer's instinct was definitely on the wane now. I still wanted to see the crocodile, but nothing more. My troubled imagination was causing me enough discomfort, but it did not anticipate the peculiar horror of the shock awaiting us in the clearing around the pool.

The crocodile was on the bank with its skin off.

The enormous, evil, ancient head was intact, with the grinning teeth and half-shut malicious eyes, but the rest of its six-metre length was naked white and glistening fat. Half the tail was missing, lost years before in some reptilian battle. The creature would have been grotesque if it had been intact. Stripped of its armour, it was obscene. The greatest obscenity was the spreading white bulge of its belly. The skin was pegged out on the ground nearby, looking twice as large as the body it had come from.

The civilians were sitting near the crocodile's head, smoking, regarding Jack with overacted nonchalance.

'You bloody pair of bastards,' he said softly. 'I told you not to touch it, didn't I?'

'You said not to open it,' said one civilian defensively.

'We didn't open it,' said the other. 'Just took the skin off.'

'Skin's worth a lot of money,' said the first one.

'Nothing illegal about taking the skin from a dead croc. We didn't kill it, you did.'

Jack glared at them, obviously for once shocked out of his professional detachment.

'Your mate's probably inside that bloody thing,' he said.

The civilians shrugged.

'We didn't open it, like you said. We didn't open it.'

Jack stared at them for a while, but he had no words for them. There weren't any words for them.

'All right,' said Jack. 'Let's get on with it.' And drawing out a sheath knife, he advanced on the corpse of the crocodile.

It is sufficient to say that the 'mate' was inside.

Camel Rides: Five Dollars

 

It is commonly supposed that there are no dangerous creatures in Australia apart from crocodiles, snakes and spiders. This is wrong. There are Aborigines and camels. Individually they are formidable. Combined they are almost lethal.

They have two qualities in common; an ineffable awareness of their own superiority, which is unfortunately justified, and a total disregard for my personal welfare.

I was wandering around for some obscure purpose I have long since forgotten in the Great Sandy Desert in northwest Western Australia when I met Namitiji. He was camped alongside the track with three women, seven dogs and two camels. The dogs were all scratching themselves, the women were minding their own business and the camels were looking haughty.

Namitiji, a slight, quizzical-looking man of about thirty, with a mass of curly hair, a beardless, flat-nosed wide-mouthed face, and wearing only a pair of ragged trousers, was sitting beside the track next to a handwritten sign that read: CAMEL RIDES — FIVE DOLLARS.

It was irresistible. The nearest white habitation was at least 150 kilometres away at Port Hedland and the traffic along this track would have been something like one vehicle every month or so, and here was a man offering camel rides to passers-by.

Obviously he'd seen the dust of my van a long way off, set up his sign and sat down to wait for me.

I had to stop.

It was September and very hot, and the flies were very thick so I didn't intend to stop for long. Namitiji and I introduced ourselves. The women went on minding their own business, all sitting around a cooking fire in their floral dresses, the dogs went on scratching and the camels went on looking haughty.

After a few minutes' desultory conversation I gestured at the camels.

'Do you make a living out of this?' I asked.

'Yeah,' said Namitiji with a bit of a quizzical grin. 'Yeah, I make a living.'

'But you can't get many customers out here.'

'I get enough.'

I supposed that the wants of a primitive nomad were few and simple and $5 every month or so was enough to supply them.

'Would you mind if I took a photograph of your camels?' I said, with the idea of getting an article out of the situation at some time. I also wanted to photograph Namitiji and his women and dogs but I knew that many Aborigines objected to cameras, believing as they did that if you captured their image you captured their spirit.

Namitiji had no such notions.

'Five dollars for the camels and another five for one of me and the girls,' he said promptly.

That was fair enough, I thought, and spent several minutes taking shots of the group of people before turning my attention to the camels.

I thought first of a nice close-up of a camel's face, so I walked up to the nearest one.

It burped at me.

That was the first time I had encountered what must be the most fearsome thing on God's earth — a camel's breath.

Imagine the odour of the contents of a vulture's stomach, a dreary long-dead cat in a cesspit and a decaying Indian curry four days after somebody's eaten it. Combine these odours and you have something that would smell like Chanel No. 5 by comparison with a camel's breath.

I reeled back and choked and coughed and wondered whether I really was going to die. Namitiji looked politely the other way until I recovered. Then I contented myself with taking a few medium shots of the camels, keeping myself away from their heads.

'Thanks very much,' I said to Namitiji, and gave him a $10 note.

'Don't you want a ride on a camel?' he asked.

I looked up at the enormous beasts and imagined myself, plump, soft and unagile, perched on top of a hump that seemed at least twice my own height off the ground. Imagine being up there. Imagine being up there if the beast turned and breathed on you.

'No, thanks,' I said.

Namitiji looked slightly downcast and thoughtful.

'Wouldn't you like a photograph of yourself on a camel?' he asked.

Now, that hadn't occurred to me. As is the case with most writers, the cowardice of my nature is tempered by avarice. A photograph of me on a camel would help sell the story I planned.

Even so, looking at those haughty evil faces and their uncomfortable looking humps so high in the air, I demurred.

'I couldn't get up there,' I said to Namitiji.

'Oh, they'll get down for you,' he answered, and barked an order in some strange tongue, probably camel language.

The nearest camel immediately folded its front legs and sank to its knees, then bent its back legs and lowered its rump. The hump was still as high as my head and I didn't see how I could get up there.

'I'll give you a leg up,' said Namitiji. He grabbed a blanket that had been lying by the fire and laid it across the camel's hump. 'That'll make it more comfortable for you,' he said.

I doubted it.

'Let's have your camera,' said Namitiji.

'Do you know how to use it?' I asked.

'Sure,' he said.

It seemed churlish to refuse. I handed over the camera.

'Perhaps just a shot of me alongside the camel?' I suggested.

'Nah,' said Namitiji. 'Not nearly so good. Just step on me back and hop on. It's easy.'

He went down on his hands and knees beside the camel.

Again, it would have been churlish to refuse, although I very much feared that my ponderous, flabby bulk would crush the fellow.

It didn't.

As soon as I was standing on his back he straightened his arms and legs and I was raised to the point where I could clamber on to the camel's hump.

It was peculiarly uncomfortable and I seemed a very long way from the ground.

Namitiji handed me the rope attached to the camel's neck.

'Just pull that one way or the other to steer him,' he said.

'Hey!' I was alarmed. 'I don't want to go anywhere — just photograph me.'

Namitiji grinned and said something in camel language.

The camel's back legs straightened. I teetered and was about to roll over its head when its front legs straightened too. Then I teetered the other way and nearly went over its rump.

I saved myself by hanging on to the rope. The beast's head came around and it breathed on me.

There I was, swaying an unthinkable distance above my native soil, poised painfully on the hump of a camel, enveloped in a cloud of noxious gases that would have killed a healthy elephant at five paces.

'Get me off!' I bleated to Namitiji.

Namitiji snapped an order in camel language.

The camel bolted.

Straight out into the treacherous desert it went with me rolling around on its hump, hauling its neck rope for all I was worth and bellowing with fear.

It was an appalling experience. The wretched beast was going faster than I would have dared drive a car on that sandy, stone-studded desert. I was so far off the ground I felt as though I was a low-flying aircraft. The actual motion itself was rather like being at the top of a mast in a ship riding a heavy sea.

I desperately wanted to fling myself off, but the prospect of hitting the distant ground from the back of a beast travelling at what seemed like fifty kilometres an hour was too daunting for my soft, indulged, shrinking, precious flesh. I just held on to the rope and roared.

Out towards the horizon I flew, across the trackless desert under the blazing blue sky leading directly to the coast a thousand kilometres away.

'Help!' I yelled fruitlessly and screwed my head around to see whether any help was offering.

There was Namitiji, already diminutive in the distance, standing by my car with his women and his dogs, now no larger than the fleas they constantly scratched. He was waving.

Inasmuch as thoughts flitted through my fearful brain, they consisted of wondering whether I would fall off and die, be carried forever into these waterless wastes and die, or be breathed on by the camel and die.

The camel was dreadfully energetic and showed no signs of slackening its pace. The next time I looked around, Namitiji and his people had disappeared below the horizon. There was nothing in sight but the sparse desert grass and the sand and stones, all contained under the pitiless basin of the sky.

It became terribly obvious to me that, unless the camel took me back, there was no way I would be able to return to my car. Even if I took the risk of falling to the ground I would be stranded and lost in the empty desert.

I tried hauling with all my weight on the neck rope. There was no break in the camel's stride, but the evil head came round and it breathed on me. I didn't try that again.

I don't know how long that lunatic ride lasted. It seemed like weeks. I was hoarse from bellowing, my crutch felt as though somebody had been pounding it with an axe and I was sick with terror and the traces of camel's breath.

Then the camel stopped. Stopped dead. So suddenly that I shot forward, bumped into its head and flopped to the ground like a great bag of blubber.

All the air was knocked from my lungs and I lay there gasping, trying to get it back. The camel lowered its head and breathed on me.

My lungs filled with those abominable, intolerable gases.

I rolled over, gagging and choking and would have undoubtedly started sobbing if I'd been able to.

Death didn't come, although it would have been mildly welcome, and eventually I found myself sitting up on the sand looking at the camel, now thankfully some distance away, standing still, looking haughty.

It was very hot and flies were descending on me by the thousands. I was terribly thirsty. There was no water. God knew how far I was from my car or in which direction it was. In any case, I was too far from it to walk back in this heat without water.

You could die in a few hours out there without shade or water. The only shade was under the camel and not easily accessible. I had read in some book of travellers' tales that if you ran out of water in a desert the thing to do was find a dead camel. Somewhere in the recesses of its body you would find a membrane sac containing seven or eight litres of water.

I had a camel in sight, but it wasn't dead. The only method I could think of to make it that way was to strangle it. That didn't seem practical.

It occurred to me that I might be better off getting on to the camel and hoping it would eventually take me back. I took out a handkerchief, covered my nose and mouth and slowly walked up to the beast. It didn't move, but it did bat its eyelids. I gazed up at its hump so high in the air, and wondered how on earth I was supposed to get up there. Presumably the camel would kneel if I gave the right order.

'Kneel!' I barked.

The camel looked at me disdainfully.

'Kneel!' I cried again. Same reaction.

'Please kneel,' I pleaded.

The camel looked haughty. I knew already that they were very good at that.

I felt fairly hopeless because even if I did get back on the camel there was no guarantee that it wouldn't simply carry me off further into the desert. But at least there would be a chance, and there was none if I stayed here.

Desperate means were called for. I backed off several metres, brushed a couple of hundred flies out of my eyes, dashed the sweat from my brow and went at the camel on the run. I am not an athletic man.

Hurling myself as high as I could into the air, I clawed for the top of the hump. I hit the camel's iron-hard side with a monumental thump, stunned myself and slid limply down its reeking body to end up flat on the hot sand.

'Having a bit of trouble?' said Namitiji's voice.

I took my face out of the sand and there was Namitiji, who had obviously ridden up while I was fooling about with the camel.

Never in my life before or since have I been so glad to see an Aborigine on a camel. In fact I had never seen one before and hope never to see one again, but that is beside the point.

I practically went and slobbered over the fellow's bare and dusty feet, but then I realised he was saying something else.

'You owe me five bucks for that ride,' he said accusingly.

'No problem,' I babbled. 'None at all. Just get me out of here.'

'How about the money?'

I dragged out my wallet and held out a $5 note.

He leaned down and took it and slipped it into his back pocket.

'All right,' he said. 'Now do you want another ride?'

I just didn't believe this. The man was going to charge for recovering me after I'd been kidnapped by his blasted camel. However, I was in no position to argue.

'You mean you want another five dollars,' I said, not particularly graciously.

'No,' said Namitiji. The man was a gentleman after all. 'The second ride costs a hundred bucks.' No, he wasn't.

'A hundred?' I yelped.

'A hundred,' said Namitiji implacably.

I looked at his guileless, primitive Aboriginal face. I looked at the camels; I looked at the desert and the blue, blue sky, and I knew I'd been done.

I counted out $100; he got down from his own camel, snapped an order to my camel that made it kneel and hoisted me on to its back.

It finally sank into my feeble mind that this was one very well-trained camel. The bloody thing was an active accomplice in crime.

It took only half an hour to get back to the camp. It was just over the horizon. The camel must have been running in circles before. That figured.

I slid off the hump, stalked to my car and drove away without exchanging a word with the detestable Namitiji. He just grinned at me in a superior fashion.

I was 200 kilometres along the track before I realised he hadn't returned my camera.

I didn't bother to go back for it.

Cedric the Cat

 

'The point you've got to understand about the Birdsville Track,' my friend Bill explained to me, 'is that it's not the same as other places.'

It's true.

I was helping my friend Bill bring a mob of cattle down the Birdsville Track to the railhead at Marree.

Bill, who was quite mad, lived on a property that covered sixteen thousand square kilometres of Queensland and South Australia. Ninety-eight per cent of this property was pure desert—either sand or gibber stone—and my friend Bill cherished the theory that the best way to patrol it was on camels. When he invited me to help drove a mob of cattle down to Marree, I thought it might be an interesting and enjoyable experience.

It was interesting, but it was not enjoyable.

Camels have the foulest breath in creation. It smells like a mixture of vultures' droppings and very dead ferrets, if you've ever smelt that. The camel has a strange capacity to breathe in your face even when you're on its back. It is also extremely bad-tempered, intractable and it bites. Moreover one, aided by an evil Aboriginal, once tried to kidnap me. But that is another story.

We encountered another mob of cattle near nightfall, about a day's journey out of Marree. I left my friend Bill with his half-dozen dogs to mind our mob and rode over on my camel to the other drover's camp.

As I neared it, an extraordinary phenomenon manifested itself on the face of the desert. Some sort of animal was approaching me at great speed in a cloud of sand. Whatever it was was coming so fast that it was stirring up the desert like a whirly-whirly.

My camel propped and began to belch, as camels do when they're alarmed. The resultant cloud of foul air was disconcerting.

The whirly-whirly sped up to within spitting distance, stopped and started to spit. The sand cloud dropped away revealing the biggest, ugliest and angriest cat I have ever seen. Its body was the height of a man's knee and this was topped by a huge square head. Thick ginger, black and multishaded fur stuck out spikily all over it and its tail, which was lashing like a stockwhip, resembled a disintegrating wire hawser—the type you see holding big ships to wharves.

This creature was growling and spitting, exposing sabre-like teeth and glaring from one very bright orange eye and one very bright blue eye. Its extraordinary appearance was not lessened by the fact that it had only one ear.

I would have been alarmed had I not been high above the ground on top of a camel. My camel, who was on the ground below me, was alarmed. He started forward well to one side of the cat.

The cat sprang at him with a savage growl and bit him on the foreleg.

The camel roared and tried to bolt. The cat retreated a little way and snarled. I hauled on the reins for dear life and the camel started to have hysterics. Camels are prone to hysterics.

Then the drover rode up—on a motorcycle, sensible fellow—and things quietened down. He was a little old man with a nutcracker face, bright blue eyes and a huge shock of sunbleached hair. He was wearing a shirt that must have been white some years before, and blue jeans.

He cut the motor of his machine and in a voice that sounded like marbles in a glass jar shouted, 'Shut up, Cedric, get up!'

The cat immediately started to purr and sprang lightly onto the pillion seat of the motorcycle, whence it inspected me and my camel quite benignly.

The drover addressed himself to the social decencies.

'G'day.'

'G'day,' I replied ceremonially.

'Cedric bloody near made your camel drop his guts,' the old man cackled.

'It's certainly a remarkable animal.'

'Eh?'

'My bloody oath.'

'Yeah, well come on over to the camp and have a drink.'

His 'camp' was a fire and a bedroll.

He poured me a mug of rum. A full mug. Then he poured himself one. Of course, rum is what you drink on the Track because there's no way of keeping beer cold. I hate rum. Still, I took it and sipped it.

The old man told me his name was Henry Gibbs and he was a neighbour of my friend Bill's; 'neighbour' out there is anybody who lives less than a day's hard drive away.

Naturally the conversation turned to Cedric, who was lying stretched out by the fire purring like a buzzsaw and eyeing my tethered camel as though he were considering it for supper.

'Had Cedric five years,' Henry told me. 'Found him on the track when he was a kitten. Had a dead dingo pup in his teeth. Don't know where he came from. His trouble is he's never seen another cat and thinks he's a dog.' I thought Cedric had more grounds for believing himself to be a cross between a jackal and a jaguar, which is what he looked like.

'Best watchdog a man ever had,' continued Henry. 'I can leave me camp for days on end and know it'll be safe. No one gets past Cedric.'

Cedric twitched his single ear on hearing his name. He grinned, I swear he grinned (perhaps it was a snarl), and the firelight glinted on one long white fang.

'Have another drink,' said Henry, brandishing the rum.

'Not yet, thanks.' I still had almost one-third of a bottle in my mug. Henry refilled his own mug.

'You know,' said Henry reflectively, 'I've seen that cat run down an old man kangaroo—a real boomer—pull him down by the neck and tear his throat out.' I didn't doubt it, very much.

'Have another rum,' said Henry.

I had tried to choke down as much of the putrid stuff as I could, but I had made very little impression on the contents of my mug.

'Bit slow, arncha?' said Henry, a trifle surlily, I thought. I knew Track people regarded slow drinkers as the social equivalent of cane toads, but I wasn't prepared to die of alcoholic poisoning to observe a social convention.

Henry emptied the bottle into his own mug, then uncorked another bottle—just to have it ready, I suppose, lest the gap between drinks should induce withdrawal symptoms.

'You know,' said Henry, 'that cat saved my life twice.'

'Really?'

'Don't you believe what I'm saying?' said Henry sharply.

'Yes, yes, of course I do.' I was beginning to wish my friend Bill would turn up.

The bright blue eyes in the old weatherbeaten face stared at me speculatively, but then he relaxed and went on with his yarn. 'Yeah. The first time was just outside Birdsville. I'd yarded a bloody great brumby stallion—big black bastard—biggest brumby I've ever seen, and a vicious brute he was.' I wondered why anybody would want to yard a brumby stallion, which is about the most dangerous and domestically useless animal in Australia, but Henry explained. 'Wanted to keep him alive until the pet food truck came through, y'see. Well, no sooner do I drop the rail on him when this bloody brumby smashes down the fence and comes charging at me, screamin' his head off and gnashing 'is teeth.

'I nearly dropped me guts.' Henry swallowed a lot of rum.

'I was on foot by then, you see,' he added in explanation.

'Well, I couldn't run and I didn't have a gun and this bastard brumby was almost on me and I reckoned I was a dead man.' Henry leaned forward, eyes glinting in the firelight, waving his mug at me.

'Then do you know what happened? Cedric comes charging out of nowhere, throws himself at that brumby's head and sinks his teeth into the bastard's nose.

'Well, the brumby went mad. He reared and he backed and he screamed and he bloody near turned somersaults and there was Cedric, clingin' on to his nose, being tossed around like a teatowel in a sandstorm, but still hangin' on like grim death.

'Eventually the brumby couldn't take it any longer and he lit out into the desert like a streak of lightnin', with old Cedric still clingin' to his nose.'

Henry finished his rum and paused with his hand on the second bottle. 'You know, I didn't see Cedric for four days, and when he came back he was as fat and fit as ever. I reckon he might have rode that brumby into the ground and then et 'im.'

Henry poured his rum.

'You're a great old cat, aren't you, Cedric?'

Cedric stood up and stretched and his great claws stood out for a moment like rows of knives. He walked around the fire looking at Henry, at me and then at the camel as though making some inner decision. Then, looking in the firelight like a strange carnivorous mutant thrown off by some cataclysmic turn in Australian evolution, he walked over and stared my camel in the eye.

My camel shuffled its feet nervously and breathed on Cedric, who took no notice. Which shows how tough that cat was.

Henry chuckled. 'Ah, I see he's getting hungry. I'd better feed 'im soon. Have a drink.'

But I still had plenty of rum in my mug. 'Draggin' the chain, arncha?' Henry was distinctly truculent.

'I'll catch up,' I said placatingly, and took a swig.

'Yeah, well,' growled Henry, looking as though he were about to be seriously offended. But he decided against it and filled his own mug again.

'Anyhow,' said Henry, half emptying his mug, 'I suppose you're wondering how he lost his ear.'

'Yes, yes, I was,' I said eagerly.

'Well, that's part of the story of the second time Cedric saved my life.'

A strangled belch from my camel brought my head around and I saw Cedric still staring into the poor brute's eyes. But now Cedric's tail was up, lashing, his fur erect and spiky and he was growling softly. I didn't blame my camel for belching.

Henry saw my worried look. 'Don't worry—I'll feed him in a minute and he'll quieten down.'

On the edge of the ring of firelight, in the dark, Cedric no longer looked remotely feline, more like some unlikely creature conceived for a horror movie. He turned and glanced at me and his eyes flashed blue and orange.

'Anyhow,' said Henry, 'I was camped up the Track a bit one night a couple of years back when this bad bastard comes into me camp.

'I knew he was a bad bastard because he was black.

'Not that all blacks are bad bastards,' Henry added fairly, 'but this was a bad black bastard.

'But I'll say this for him, he would have a drink with a man.' Henry looked pointedly at me and refilled his own mug. He didn't offer me a drink this time.

I hastily swigged at my rum, but I was already half drunk and I just couldn't get the stuff down. If only Henry would take his piercing eyes off me for a second, I thought, I'd pour it out on the sand. Hut his gaze never left me. I realised for the first time that Henry's two blue eyes were the same shade as the cat's one blue eye.

'So we have a few drinks together,' continued Henry, 'quite a few drinks we had, because he was a good drinker even if he was a bad bastard.' A few drinks to Henry probably meant a couple of barrels of rum.

'Well, we got to arguin' a bit about something—I forget what it was, you know how it is when you're having a few drinks—and the argument gets a bit heated.

'Next thing I know this black bastard is coming at me with an axe—my own axe,' he added aggrievedly, as if that somehow made things worse.

Henry finished his rum and poured another, again ostentatiously not offering me one. 'Well, by now, you see, I know how good Cedric is and I know all I've got to do is shout and he'll be at this black bastard in a second.

'So I shouts, see—out comes Cedric and goes for the bastard's throat.

'Well, the bastard gets the shock of his life when he sees Cedric comin' at him and he takes a mighty swipe at him with the axe—my axe—and takes his ear clean off.

'But that doesn't stop Cedric. No bloody fear. He's into that black bastard and has 'im by the throat in no time at all.'

Henry drank some more rum and paused. His eyes left my face but he seemed to be staring into the region of my navel, so I still couldn't empty my mug.

The pause continued. The story seemed to have petered out.

'And what happened to the . . . er . . . bastard?' I asked.

Henry raised his head.

'Oh, he's buried back along the Track there.'

You don't believe everything you hear along the Birdsville Track, but you'd be surprised how much of what you don't believe is cold hard truth.

I stood up. 'Well, I suppose I'd better be getting back to camp,' I said.

Henry stood up. His face was bulging and writhing with fury. 'So you're not gonna drink with a man, you bastard!'

I've seen it before, time and time again, and I never learn. Anywhere in Australia west of the Bogan, you can cheat a man, run off with his wife, despoil his daughter, debauch his sons, even steal his dog and it's possible for him to forgive you, but refuse to drink with him and you're dingo class, outcast forever, beyond redemption, not worth the bullet he'd cheerfully use on you otherwise.

'Listen, Henry . . .' I started.

'You bastard!' he shouted.

And that, of course, activated Cedric. The great misbegotten cat glared at me, then at Henry, no doubt, looking for instructions, then back at the camel.

'You bastard!' bellowed Henry.

Cedric sprang. At the camel.

The camel roared and reared, breaking its tether. Cedric landed on its rump and dug in.

The camel took off into the desert with Cedric on its rump, apparently gnawing it.

Henry was looking around wildly. Seeking his axe, I supposed. I turned and ran, making for the distant yellow glow I knew was my friend Bill's campfire. 'You bastard! You bastard! You bastard!' followed me, growing blessedly fainter as I sprinted across the sand and stones.

I arrived gasping at the camp. My friend Bill received me with some expression of concern and alarm at first, but when I told him what had happened, he lost interest.

'Oh, yes,' he said, 'old Henry and his cat. I should have warned you about him. Don't worry, he'll be all right in the morning.'

'But. . . but the camel . . .'

'We'll find it tomorrow.'

We did, too. It was a bit tattered around the rump, but not seriously injured.

Bill was right. The Track is not like other places.

The Very Angry Pig

 

Australian wild pigs have the ugliest faces in the world. They have characters to match. I know, because one recently made a very serious attempt to eat me. It had right on its side because I had been making an equally serious attempt to shoot it. However, at the time of the encounter I wasn't interested in the moral issue, merely in surviving.

I had just written a novel called Pig and the firm of C.C. and P. Pty Ltd, film producers, had taken an option on the film rights. In researching the material for the book, I had spent a lot of time hunting pigs in various parts of Australia and considered myself something of an amateur expert on the subject of feral pigs. They are very nasty creatures that are destroying much of the wilderness in Australia. I was expounding my views on the generally pestilential nature of pigs to the film company's producer, John Crew, when he asked me whether I would go out west and secure a suitable specimen of feral pig that the model makers could use as the basis for the mechanical pig that had to be created for the film. I readily agreed because the fee he was offering was considerably more than the job was worth. Or so I thought. I knew where there were plenty of pigs and I was quite experienced in the technique of shooting them.

I made plans to drive in my Honda Civic out to the Macquarie Marshes in central western New South Wales where I knew there were thousands of feral pigs. Moreover, there have been pigs in the marshes for more than one hundred years and they have reverted to the classic ridgebacked, black, huge and vicious creature of porcine legend.

A couple of days before I set out, I bumped my right eye on the catch of a window. It was a very minor matter, but I had to have four stitches in my right eyelid.

In due course I drove out to the marshes and obtained permission from a local farmer to go and shoot myself a pig.

I was looking for the biggest and nastiest feral pig I could find, because the plot of my novel deals with such a creature. The idea was that as soon as I shot the pig I would load it into my car and rush it back to Sydney, where the model maker would stuff it. I was armed with an old army .303 which I had owned for some years and with which I am reasonably proficient.

I drove into a paddock and parked the car about two hundred metres from the rushes that mark the beginning of the marshes and then decided I had better clean my rifle, which I hadn't used for some time. I completed this simple task quite quickly, made sure that I had a full magazine of six cartridges and a pocketful of spares and strolled off towards the marshes.

It is necessary to understand that I am a middle-aged man of generally sedentary habits, given to the avoidance of exercise and to overindulgence in food and alcohol. In other words, I am fat and out of condition. If I were unarmed I would never venture near a wild pig, but with a .303 in his hands the most effete of men is a match for any pig.

I was barely a hundred metres from my car when I saw the biggest, ugliest, blackest and most vicious-looking wild boar I have ever seen in my life. It was standing just outside the rushes gazing at me speculatively.

This was good fortune beyond belief; my only doubt was whether I would be able to get the beast into the back of my car.

I raised the rifle, sighted carefully and fired, confidently expecting the boar to decently drop dead.

It didn't. It squealed with rage and charged me.

I was surprised because I was reasonably sure I had hit the creature and most pigs hit by a .303 bullet lie down quietly. But I was not disconcerted because I had been charged by pigs before. All you do is keep firing at them until they fall over. The only difference about this fellow was that he was bigger than any pig that had charged me before, but that meant he was a better-than-usual target.

I lined him up in my sights as he hurtled towards me and then, as one does, brushed my right eye with my hand to clear it.

I had forgotten the stitches in my eyelid. One of them tore loose and my eyelid started to bleed, effectively blinding me. It would have been trivial if an enraged boar had not been bearing down on me with mayhem in its heart.

I tried to sight the rifle with my left eye, but this is almost impossible unless you are used to it. I wasn't. I could vaguely line the boar up, but only vaguely. But there was nothing I could do except start shooting. I started shooting. I fired five times and unless that boar was wearing armour-plating, I missed every time.

Then my rifle was empty and the boar was about five metres away.

Now there was only one thing I could do, and I did it.

I panicked, dropped the rifle and ran.

With the little reasoning capacity that was left to me, I realised that my car was one hundred metres away and I wouldn't reach it before the boar reached me. I am far too old and fat for a hundred-metre sprint.

There was however, just a few metres away, a sapling gum about three metres high. I got to this and went up it like a goanna, a feat I could never have achieved except under the impulse of pure terror.

The trouble was that there were no substantial branches on the sapling and the only way I could stay the necessary couple of metres above the ground was to wrap my arms and legs around the slender trunk and support my own weight with the strength of my muscles. I weighed about one hundred kilograms. My muscles aren't in very good condition.

I looked down and there was the boar glaring up at me, grinding its tusks and foaming slightly at the jaws.

Already my arms and legs were aching with the effort of holding myself I in the tree and I knew it was only a matter of minutes before I fell to the ground. Whereupon the boar, I was sure, would gore, bite and trample me to death with considerable expertise and enthusiasm. Just one glance into the hideous face eliminated any possibility of negotiation. Besides, I had been trying to kill him—he was only reciprocating.

These were not thoughts that occurred to me at the time. The only cerebral activity that could be described as thought was the realisation that my best bet was to try to get back my rifle and reload it.

The boar was circling the tree, looking as though he was considering climbing up after me. I hung on until he was on the opposite side from the rifle, then dropped to the ground and ran for my weapon. I don't know how close the boar was behind me because I didn't look, but he was squealing again, I could hear his hooves on the hard baked ground, and no doubt I imagined it, but I swear I could feel his hot breath on my neck.

I reached the rifle, picked it up by the muzzle, and swung around with some vague idea of trying to get back up the tree and reloading the rifle. Just how I proposed to climb the tree with a rifle in one hand I didn't know. I wasn't really acting terribly rationally at the time. Anyhow, it was irrelevant. The boar was upon us. Head down and tail up, he was homing in on my legs with lethal intensity.

I did what I should have done in the first place. Used the rifle as a club. Clutching the barrel in both hands I made an almighty swipe at the boar's head.

I missed.

I not only missed, I fell over backwards and lost hold of the rifle. It went sailing off into the grass several metres away and the boar moved in and proceeded to eat me.

It had torn my trousers half off and was making considerable inroads in my legs (I still have the scars) when I decided that I was not too old and fat to run one hundred metres to my motor car.

I kicked the boar in the snout, scrambled to my feet and ran that hundred metres, I am sure, faster than any athlete in living history.

I made it a fraction of a second ahead of the boar (I think; I didn't look but I could hear those pounding trotters on my heels).

The car door was locked.

At this stage, because I was incapable of breathing and my middle-aged heart was threatening to stop, I was inclined to just lie down and let the boar have its will. But with one last drop of adrenalin squeezing itself into my system, I clambered on to the bonnet and thence to the roof of my Honda. The boar crashed into the car so hard the door buckled. The pig suffered no apparent damage.

I lay curled up on the roof of the car, trying to draw breath, devoid of fear now because I was so close to expiring that I was incapable of emotion, just wondering whether the pig could climb up the bonnet and onto the roof and get at me.

It couldn't, or at least it didn't know how. It went around and around the car glaring at me and foaming at the mouth.

The keys to the car were in my pocket and gradually I realised that all I had to do was wait until the pig was on one side of the car, slip down on the other side, open the door, hop in and drive safely away.

However the pig seemed to recognise this possibility too, and it kept patrolling around the car, waiting for me to offer an arm or a leg so that it could tear it off. There was no way it would give me time to get down and open the door.

Then I noticed on the bonnet of the car the ramrod I had used to clean my rifle. Without quite realising why, I reached down and grabbed it. I suppose there was some thought in my poor fear-ridden mind that it could constitute a form of weapon. It was of course about as useful as a walking stick against an enraged elephant, but I was well beyond reason at this point. I clenched the ramrod in my hand and brandished it at the pig. The pig looked back at me balefully, unimpressed.

My memory of this standoff situation was that it lasted several days, but reason tells me that it only lasted a few minutes before a plan emerged in my tattered brain.

It is an eccentricity of my car that it has a very loud horn and I realised that I could reach the horn button with the ramrod. I waited until the pig was near the front of the car where the effect of the horn would be at its greatest, then slid the ramrod in through the slightly open window and pressed the button.

The horn blared. The pig leaped about sixty centimetres off the ground, squealed, turned and ran.

I slid off the roof, opened the door, slammed in and lay back in the seat, panting. Man, after all, was greater than pig.

But this was a very determined pig. It kept running until it was almost at the edge of the marsh, then paused and seemed to change its mind. It turned around and looked back at me and my car.

At this stage I was willing to call it quits and go home. All I wanted to do was retrieve my .303 and spend a quiet night at the motel at Quambone, drinking whisky.

But the pig was not interested in ending hostilities. It came charging across the plain, with what in mind I do not know. It was obviously and not unreasonably very angry.

I started the car and began to drive away at right angles to the pig towards the paddock gates. I had closed them after me, and if this damned pig was intent on pursuing the encounter there would be no way I could get out of the car to open the gates.

But the pig was on a kamikaze kick. It came straight at the car as fast as it could run, and that was very fast. The car was doing about thirty kilometres an hour at this point.

The pig and the Honda collided.

The Honda suffered a buckled bumper bar and a shattered radiator. The pig succumbed entirely.

I sat in the car for ten minutes before I warily opened the door and inspected the corpse of my adversary.

It was a very big pig.

I tried to get it into the back of the Honda, but had no hope. I couldn't budge it.

The Honda managed to limp into Quambone and a clever local amateur mechanic organised it well enough to let me drive into Warren where I hired a utility and a strong young man. We went back and got the pig into the utility and I drove it back to Sydney.

It weighed in at one hundred and forty-seven kilograms and made a perfect model for the feral pig that was the subject of my novel.

I presented John Crew with a bill for the damage to my Honda and the cost of the utility, my torn trousers, and the loss of my .303, which I never found. In all, the bill came to much more than the fee he had originally offered me.

He declined to pay on the grounds that there was nothing in the film budget to cope with such circumstances. In fact, he suggested, the story was so outrageous that I ought to write it. I made the obvious reply that, like so many utterly truthful stories, it was completely unbelievable.

But I do have the pig's mounted head and I sometimes look into the false beady eyes of my late adversary and wonder what he would have done with me if the battle had gone the other way.

Black Gold

 

Defrauding Aborigines is one of the main industries on the goldfields north of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia. The Aborigines come in from the desert, often bearing large nuggets of gold that they find in strange places where few white men have been. The local people buy these nuggets at a fraction of their true value. The Aborigines don't mind, say the miners, because to them the gold is worth nothing anyway.

'You look at it,' one totally implausible rogue of a prospector explained to me, 'a black fellow finds a lump of gold worth, say, ten thousand dollars at today's prices. To him it's only a gold-coloured stone. You give him five hundred bucks for it and he thinks it's Christmas.' The prospector, who had a face like a bandicoot's — wary and cunning and stupid — added, 'They only spend it on booze, anyway.'

'What do you do with the gold?' I asked. 'Ship it to the mint?'

The prospector, whose name was Jim, gave a little rodent grin. 'Nah!' he said, 'You get a better price in the pubs.'

'But surely there's a fixed price for gold at any particular time?'

' 'Course there is.'

'Then why should people pay more in pubs?'

Jim looked at me as though he thought I was joking or else extremely obtuse. 'Well, they got to get rid of dirty money, haven't they?' he said.

I looked bewildered, which I was.

'You see,' said Jim patiently, 'suppose you've got a few million in dirty money — drugs, robbery, crime of some sort, or maybe even money you just didn't want the tax department to know about — what do you do with it?'

I hadn't the faintest idea.

'Well, you come out here with a suitcase full of the stuff and you take a mining lease, you see?'

'No,' I said.

Jim seemed to accept the fact that I was just dumb, and spelled it out for me. 'Well, you go and sit in the pub and let it be known that you want to buy gold, and you buy everything that's going at say, ten per cent more than the market price. All cash. No receipts, no records. Then you ship that gold off to the mint and say you found it on your lease. You get a nice cheque and clean money that you don't pay tax on.'

'It's as simple as that?' I asked.

'As simple as that,' said Jim.

'And do you buy much gold from the Aborigines?'

'Sure. It's the best supply — beats looking for the stuff.'

'And you buy it for ten per cent of its value and sell it for ten per cent more than its value?'

'Yeah,' Jim grinned gleefully. 'Neat, isn't it? A man makes a buck and no one gets hurt.'

That was when I began to suspect that gold prospecting was not a business to be in if you had a suggestion of an honest bone in your body. But I had a lot to learn.

I had just arrived at Elanora out from Kalgoorlie on my first gold prospecting adventure. I had set up camp half an hour's drive out of town and started to search for gold. I searched hard for half an hour, but didn't find any. I looked around at the flat brown red and grey desert trapped under the blue bowl of the sky. It was vast. No doubt there was a lot of gold out here, but there was a lot of desert too. I decided that gold prospecting was not my line, so I drove into town to a pub. That was where I met Jim.

He wasn't very entertaining company and when I'd learned all I could about the gold business, I headed back to my camp even more convinced that I was not cut out to be a prospector.

However, as I drove along the very faint track through the desert, I did wonder just how I would react if an Aborigine offered to sell me a lump of gold at a fraction of its value.

I felt something of a guilty shock when I arrived back at my camp and found an Aborigine offering to sell me a lump of gold at a fraction of its value.

I saw him standing near my tent when I was still five minutes away and at first I thought he was a bull standing on its hind legs. As I came closer the apparition resolved itself into a black man with the shoulders and chest of a very large bull, a head the size of a very large bull and an extraordinarily large hat with a high, deeply cleft crown that had given the impression of horns at a distance. Apart from the hat, he wore a pair of tattered trousers and nothing else.

His massive chest and wide, flat-nosed face was grey with dust, but you could tell his skin was very black indeed. I suppose he was about forty, but a white stubble on his face made him look older.

He walked towards the car as I stopped and I saw on the other side of my tent two Aboriginal women in ragged dresses sitting on the ground surrounded by dogs. One had a small, partly skinned kangaroo on her lap and neither looked at me. All the dogs were scratching themselves vigorously.

I was a little nervous as the vast, half-naked, absurdly hatted man approached. He looked as though he could flatten my car with one blow of either huge fist. I remembered vague stories of wild Aborigines in the desert.

But he proved himself civilised by saying, as I got out of the car, 'G'd day, mate. Name's Bulbul.'

He had a strange thick accent and gave the impression that English was not his first language.

I told him my name and shook his hand and he got right down to business. 'Just come in from bush,' he said. 'Maybe you like to buy bit gold?'

I experienced guilt and avarice at once, then pulled myself together. 'Well, I'd like to look at what you've got,' I said non-committally. After all, there'd be nothing wrong with buying a souvenir nugget at a fair price.

Bulbul reached in his back pocket and came up with a huge gold nugget bigger than my clenched fist.

He held it out to me on the flat of his palm and wonderingly I reached out and took it, nearly dropping it because of its extraordinary weight. It was a very irregular knobby lump of gold that must have weighed at least 800 grams. At the price of gold in those days it would have been worth $30000, but because it was such a magnificent nugget it would have been worth more than that as a specimen.

'You like it?' asked Bulbul, staring directly into my eyes.

'Well, yes,' I said. 'It's superb, but . . .'

'You buy it?'

'I'm sorry, I couldn't possibly afford . . .' I had $3000 with me.

'How much you give me?' pressed Bulbul.

'Look, I'm sorry, but I . . .'

'You give me thousand dollars.'

For a moment I hesitated.

'One thousand dollars?' I said.

'That right. You give me one thousand dollar.'

I swallowed. I haven't got many honest bones in my body, and seldom get the chance to pick up $30000 perfectly legally.

'Come on,' said Bulbul, who seemed very anxious to get the deal done. 'You want?'

Slightly sadly I realised that robbing simple natives was just not possible.

'Bulbul, old mate,' I said, 'that nugget is worth at least thirty thousand dollars.'

Bulbul looked at me as though he thought I was a lunatic.

'Eh?' he said.

'That nugget is worth thirty thousand dollars.'

Bulbul looked blank and puzzled. 'I give you for one thousand dollar,' he said at last.

'No, Bulbul, you don't understand. It's worth thirty thousand dollars. I couldn't possibly afford to buy it at its right price.'

It occurred to me that, like many native people, Bulbul didn't really understand figures.

'It's worth much, much more than one thousand dollars,' I said. 'You lake it into town — into the pub, someone there'll give you thirty thousand dollars for it.'

Bulbul was looking at me thoughtfully.

'Give me a lift into town?' he asked suddenly.

I sensed trouble. From what I knew of local customs, no one was likely to give Bulbul $30000 unless he held out for it. I could see myself being hauled into dispute between this enormous primitive and hordes of rapacious miners. Still, it seemed churlish to refuse and anyway I was interested to see what would happen.

'All right,' I said. 'Hop in!' then hesitated and gestured towards the two Aboriginal women, who were still not looking at me. 'What about the ladies?'

'They wait,' said Bulbul, and climbed into the ear.

There wasn't much room for me with Bulbul in the front seal, but I managed to squeeze in and drove back to Elanora.

Bulbul didn't speak during the drive. He seemed preoccupied, presumably wondering what he'd do with $30000.

The pub was crowded, as the pubs always are out there. I saw Jim the prospector still alone at the bar where I'd left him and thought I might as well apply to him for local knowledge.

'G'day, Jim,' I said, 'my mate here has got a nugget he wants to sell — who around here would be likely to buy it?'

Jim looked at me, then looked at Bulbul, then a slow grin broke over his bandicoot features.

'You told him what it's worth, have you?'

I gave an apologetic grin. 'Well, yeah, I did tell him what it was really worth — well, you know how it is.'

'There's one born every minute,' said Jim. 'Try that foreigner in the corner.'

The 'foreigner' was distinguished by the fact that he was very clean and well-dressed. He was wearing a safari jacket and shorts with long socks.

'No, I do it,' said Bulbul, and went across to the foreign chap. I drifted along with him and Jim drifted along with me.

'You want to buy gold,' said Bulbul directly.

'That's what I'm here for,' said the foreigner in what sounded to me to be a German accent.

Bulbul fished out the huge nugget.

'You like?' said Bulbul.

The foreigner took the nugget and examined it perfunctorily. 'How much?' he said.

'One thousand dollar,' said Bulbul.

'Hey wait a minute!' I yelped — I couldn't help it. The foreigner glared at me. I could feel Jim plucking at my sleeve.

'I'll buy it at a thousand dollars,' said the foreigner, reaching in to his jacket pocket.

'Now hold on,' I said, but I was in a dilemma. There was no reason on God's earth why a man shouldn't sell his gold at any price he chose. It was nothing to do with me, and I'd done my best for Bulbul.

I was aware that there was a hush in the bar and a number of interested eyes were watching. In that moment what seemed a splendid solution occurred to me.

'Bulbul, I'll buy the nugget. I'll give you three thousand dollars for it.'

Jim was hauling on my arm now. 'Come out of it, you fool — you'll get yourself killed.'

But I was adamant. If Bulbul insisted on selling his nugget dirt cheap, he might as well sell it to me; at least he'd be getting a couple of thousand dollars more. The foreigner looked as though he might at any moment draw a long-bladed knife from his long socks and slit my throat.

'I have agreed to buy,' he said very coldly. 'One thousand dollars.'

I pulled out my wallet. I knew it contained exactly $3000. 'Here you are, Bulbul,' I said.

That left me broke and I'd have to resell the nugget immediately. I'd make an adjustment with Bulbul, but I'd leave myself a sizable commission on the deal after all this trauma.

Bulbul looked from me to the foreigner with a baffled expression. Slowly his hand moved towards the wad of notes I was thrusting at him.

'I'll pay you three thousand five hundred,' snapped the foreigner.

Bulbul's hand moved away from my wad. 'All right,' he said.

Quickly the foreigner pulled out his wallet and counted out $3500. I literally beat the bar with my fists in exasperation. 'Bulbul, that nugget's worth ten times that!'

Bulbul looked at me blankly and counted his money.

The foreigner packed the nugget into a bag he had at his feet, then turned and left the bar.

'You should mind you own bloody business!' he hissed at me as he went.

'You surely should,' said Jim. 'Here, I'll buy you a drink.' He turned to the barman. 'Two beers, Charlie.' Then to my considerable astonishment he said to Bulbul, 'What are you having, Bulbul?'

To my more considerable astonishment Bulbul said, 'Vodka and orange.'

'You'd better down that quick and get out of here before that bloke comes back. There's not much he can do, but he looked a bit dangerous to me.'

'What the hell's going on here?' I was almost squeaking in confusion.

'Bulbul just sold that bloke a lump of iron coated with gold,' said Jim.

'What?'

'That's his racket. He makes nuggets out of iron and dips 'em in gold. He only gets away with it with strangers — we all know him here.'

I was very confused.

'But how does he . . . I mean . . .' I was trying to say this was not my vision of a simple native, but even as I formulated the words I knew what a fatuous fool I was being.

'He melts the gold down and dips the nuggets in it. It's easy. White men can't get away with it, but no one suspects a blackfella of a trick like that, particularly when he's selling so cheap.'

'But . . . but that buyer . . .'

Jim grinned. 'You pushed the price up to three and a half thousand for Bulbul. Nice piece of work.'

'Yes, thanks for that,' said Bulbul, whose accent had noticeably changed. 'I'd buy you a drink, but I think we ought to get going.'

On the way back to my camp I said to Bulbul, 'Listen, as I'm leaving this part of the world forever at dawn tomorrow, just tell me one thing — where do you find the gold you use to plate the iron?'

Bulbul turned and looked at me. 'I buy it at the pub, of course.'

The Dog Who Loved Animals

 

I have acquired several stray dogs in my life, but only one ever made a deliberate attempt on my life. To be fair, it might not have been deliberate; the dog could have been deranged. But that was little comfort to me and the half a dozen other men whose lives he threatened.

I called him George. He was a long-haired English retriever. A huge golden ball of a dog with tearful eyes, a soft sad mouth and a constant pose of unquenchable nobility—his head up, gaze fixed on the horizon and one paw pointing towards some imaginary game animal.

I found George in the Great Sandy Desert of northwest Western Australia, one hundred kilometres from any human habitation.

God knows what he was doing out there. Possibly he had fallen from a passing truck, but he had no identification tag. More likely he had been driven out there by somebody who knew better than I and who had ruthlessly abandoned him. I adopted him and took him travelling with me.

He turned out to be an indefatigable retriever of small game. Every time I camped, as I travelled across the northwest, down through the Northern Territory and over into Queensland, George would bound off into the scrub, grass, desert, forest or swamp and come back with some specimen of local fauna.

In three weeks of travelling he brought me four bandicoots, two tortoises, one emu chick, several lizards, one feral kitten, numerous rabbits and one python. This last came wrapped around his neck and I had some trouble unwinding it before George should expire. None of the captives was injured. George's mouth was so soft he could and often did carry a raw egg around for an hour without breaking it. I don't know how he caught all these creatures. I suppose he was so transparently harmless they just waited for him to pick them up. More fool them. This went on for three weeks, a constant succession of bewildered creatures being dropped gently at my feet and usually staying there in a dazed sort of way until I could urge them to push off and go back to their homes.

Still, it was a harmless enough eccentricity and I quite enjoyed George's company. Until he brought the deadly king brown snake into the pub where I was drinking.

It was west of Rockhampton in central Queensland. I had left George in the car with the windows open (he would have suffocated in the heat otherwise), pushed through the batwing doors (they still have them in Queensland), said the obligatory 'G'day' to the barman (a tall, cadaverous man who looked like an amiable but underfed dingo) and the half-dozen other drinkers (all for some reason fat, bearded men wearing dark blue singlets, looking like overfed wombats), and I ordered a beer.

Sleeping on the bar was a huge, black, shabby tomcat, whose only sign of life was to open one eye and glare at me as I raised my beer to my lips. Then suddenly he opened both eyes, sprang to his feet, arched his back, stood all his patchy fur on end, inflated his tail and started spitting furiously. I turned to see what had disturbed him.

George was standing in the doorway holding in his mouth, his jaws softly clamped just behind its head, the biggest king brown snake I have ever seen. Its mouth was open, fangs clearly visible, its evil eyes were glinting and its metre-and-a-half long thick brown body was thrashing wildly in the air. It was an angry snake.

The king brown is one of the deadliest snakes in the world. Naturalists will tell you it carries enough venom to decimate an army; certainly more than enough to deal with the inhabitants of that bar.

George advanced towards me composedly and I knew exactly what he was going to do: lay that writhing, furious reptile gently at my feet.

I am not an agile man. In fact, I am one hundred kilos of middle-aged flab. But I made it onto the bar with one standing jump. So did the other six drinkers.

It says much for Australian fortitude that four of them got there with full glasses of beer still in their hands. They even had the foresight to drain the glasses before throwing them at George.

Seven of us danced on the bar in terror, screaming at George while the barman selected near-empty bottles from his shelves and flung them at him.

George stood stoically among the showers of broken glass, looking reproachful. The snake thrashed about and looked vicious.

'George,' I pleaded, 'go away!'

George raised his head and looked noble, then lowered it and dropped the snake softly on the floor.

That, I thought, was the end of George. But the king brown, like all the creatures George caught, seemed dazed. Instead of behaving like a normal snake (sinking its fangs into George and clearing out quickly) it began wriggling towards the bar.

'Get a bloody gun!' shouted one of the drinkers, and the barman whipped out the back and reappeared immediately with an ancient double-barrelled shotgun. He was very excited and as he fumbled to load it I began to fear buckshot in the back as much as fangs in the front.

The first shot rocked the bar and dug a huge hole in the floorboards a metre away from the snake, which was not deflected from its inexorable wriggle towards the bar.

This was when I first learned that George was gunshy. At the report he gave an anguished howl, bounded across the room and leaped onto the bar to cower at my feet. I swear he even tried to put his paws around my legs.

Seven of us stood on the bar with a cowering dog and a spitting, arching cat, staring down at the length of brown and evil death slithering towards us while the barman tried for another shot. He got one in but inexplicably only succeeded in blowing out the bar window. Not a good marksman.

The snake reached the bottom of the bar, raised itself on its tail and showed every sign of being about to climb up after us.

Then the cat jumped on it.

The cat was obviously an experienced snake handler. It grabbed the king brown by the tail and began hauling it towards the door. The snake tried to strike, but the cat had a trick of twisting its head, and the snake's tail, so that the snake was temporarily powerless. (This always works with snakes. Hold one by the tail and as its head comes up to strike your hand, twist your wrist away from it. The snake is rendered powerless for that particular strike. When it strikes again, twist again. Try it sometime.)

We were all enthusiastically encouraging the cat as it made for the door. The bartender let off another shot, but fortunately missed again. The cat was almost out the door when George had to intervene. After all, it was his snake.

He jumped off the bar, streaked across the room and grabbed the snake just behind the head. Then he started to drag the snake and the cat back to the bar and, presumably, me.

The snake stretched taut between them, the cat's claws dug in and furrowing the floorboards, George hauling with all his considerable strength, the trio inched across to the bar. (It was a bad day for the snake when you come to think of it, but nobody did think of it then.)

All of us were throwing bottles and glasses now. Some hit the snake, some the cat and some George. Neither the cat nor George took the slightest notice and the snake was probably past caring.

The bartender fired again. A tuft of fur flew off the cat's rump and it shot into the air screaming, spun around and fled out the door. This left George unhampered in his task of delivering the king brown to the top of the bar.

So he did. He stood up on his hind legs, rested his forepaws on the bar and offered me the king brown with every sign of devotion.

I leaped off the bar like a young fawn, as did the other six men with me. We landed with a thud that shook the building and became hopelessly entangled with each other as we struggled to get through the narrow rear door. The bartender tried to blow George's head and the snake to pieces at point blank range. He missed again.

Seven men struggling and howling with fear, a feeble-minded dog with a deadly snake in its mouth, an overexcited barman with an unlimited supply of ammunition. It was not a happy situation.

Then the little old lady came in.

She was about a head taller than the bar and wore a filthy pair of jeans and a grubby shirt. She had a face the colour of smoked eel and a nose that touched her chin. She carried a stick.

'What's all this?' Her voice resembled a high-pitched peacock's scream, than which there is nothing more penetrating. A dead silence fell. Even George turned to look around.

The little old lady saw the snake in George's mouth. 'Good heavens!' came the peacock voice.

She strode across the room, raised her free hand and whacked George on the head.

He dropped the snake and cowered against the bar.

Neatly the little old lady reversed her stick, hooked the handle under the snake's belly, lifted it and walked firmly across the bar, through the door and out into the sunlight.

We all watched through the shattered window as she marched across the road and deposited the no doubt relieved snake in a vacant paddock.

Then she came back into the bar. 'Tea will be at six o'clock!' she screamed at the barman.

'All right, Mum,' he said, sheepishly trying to hide the shotgun.

She stumped away and we all sorted ourselves out.

A few soothing beers later the cat came back, apparently not badly wounded. He stalked across to George, glared into his noble face, then gave him one almighty swipe on the nose.

George fled to the car.

I agreed with the cat.

The Mad Miner

 

One of my many personal failings is that I find great difficulty in distinguishing sane people from raving maniacs. Perhaps this is because the distinction is slight, or perhaps it's because I am slightly retarded myself.

In either case, this failing led me to find myself twenty metres below the sunblasted surface of the centre of Australia on the point of being blown apart or buried alive or both.

It all began, as do so many of my misadventures, in a pub. I had reached Coober Pedy in the course of my travels and because the temperature was fifty degrees Celsius in the shade, I made straight for the nearest bar.

There I met Bert. Bert was about two metres tall, incredibly skinny and very furry. His feet, arms, chest and back, all of which were bare, as well as his face and head, were all covered with fine pink furlike hair. The pinkness was the ingrained dust that marked him as an opal miner. He had protruding yellow teeth and looked exactly like a very long, pink, furry ferret standing on its hind legs.

We made an odd contrast standing at the bar because I, while not much shorter than Bert, am of substantial proportions. The kindly would describe me as portly. My doctor says I am grossly overweight. To Bert I was as the walrus is to the eel.

Nevertheless Bert and I soon became firm bar friends in the way one does in Coober Pedy through the customary channels of Western conversation.

'G'day.'

'G'day.'

'Hot.'

'Hot.'

'Bloody hot.'

'Mighty bloody hot.'

'Yeah.'

'Yeah.'

Intimacy thus established, I confided in Bert my ambition to explore an opal mine, which was one of the reasons I was in Coober Pedy. As I expected, after a few more beers Bert drove me out to his mine some fifteen kilometres from town.

I was considerably disconcerted when I discovered I was to descend into the mine by standing on the rim of a large iron bucket, grasping a cable and being lowered by a winch operated by a petrol motor. My ageing body is quite precious to me and the type of athletics involved in this descent are not my scene.

But it wasn't too bad. The shaft was so narrow that you couldn't fall past the bucket. In fact it was so narrow, obviously built for Bert, that I was afraid I might get stuck. It was close, but I made it, and found myself in a large, blessedly cool underground cavern illuminated by electric light generated by the same motor that worked the winch.

The bucket went up to collect Bert and I felt lonely twenty metres below the desert face in this large vault with rough-hewn walls, floor and roof in the lovely yellow, brown, red and white colours of an opal mine.

At one side of the vault was a tunnel, rather a narrow one about a metre long, leading to another vault.

Then Bert was beside me.

'In here, mate,' he said and slipped through the tunnel like a ferret into the next vault. I followed with some difficulty because the tunnel was barely wide enough to encompass my girth, but I managed to wriggle through, damaging my shorts and shirt slightly in the process.

The second vault was a replica of the first, except that there was a lot of rubble on the floor and the beginning of a horizontal shaft. Obviously work was in progress there.

Tools and boxes littered the floor and there was a small refrigerator from which Bert promptly produced cans of icy cold beer. We sat down, leaned against the walls of the mine and consumed one or two, probably several, cans while Bert explained opal mining to me.

I don't really like being underground, in caves or tunnels or mines, because I'm neurotically afraid they are about to collapse on me. But I have many neuroses and this one faded under the consoling effects of the coolness, the beer and Bert's rather sibilant voice. He spoke, I mused, as one imagined a ferret might speak, with a husky, hissing breathlessness.

'Anyhow I've got to do one now, so I'll show you,' said Bert. As I didn't know what he was talking about, I assumed I must have dozed off.

He took a pick and dug a small hole in the far end of the new shaft. Then he took from a box a package of what looked like a cube of greasy brown paper tightly bound with wire. It was about as big as a large rockmelon. From it protruded what seemed to be a long wick of the sort used in fireworks.

I watched, puzzled and slightly alarmed, as Bert shoved this object into the hole and packed it round with rubble.

I was substantially alarmed when he took out a match and lit the fuse which began to hiss and splutter threateningly.

'What the hell is that?' I said leaping (well, rising) to my feet.

'Just a charge,' said Bert. 'I told you. Gunpowder. I make 'em myself.'

'But you've lit it?' My voice, unaccountably, was a squeak.

'Course,' said Bert, 'that's what sets it off.'

'Well, damn it,' I cried, 'let's get the hell out of here!'

'Plenty of time,' said Bert. 'It's a long fuse.'

'But why did you light it?'

'Want to knock out some dirt,' said Bert reasonably.

'But why did you light it now?' I was squeaking again.

'Got to make sure it doesn't go out.' This was quite beyond my comprehension. 'Anyhow, plenty of time,' said Bert. 'Have another beer.'

And the wretched man actually bent down, took out more cans and offered me one. It was then I realised he was a maniac.

'To hell with that,' I said, staring horrified at the white spluttering spark moving—to my eyes—with appalling speed to the hidden and deadly charge. 'I'm getting out of here.' And I made for the tunnel.

'Hang on then,' said Bert resignedly. 'I've got to start the bucket.'

He slid through the narrow tunnel, doing his usual impersonation of a ferret. I dived after him, doing my usual impersonation of a terrified fat man.

I stuck in the middle of the tunnel. Just like too large a cork driven into too narrow a bottleneck, I stuck.

With my head and arms in one vault and my wildly waving legs in the other, I was trapped, a huge plug of palpitating living flesh jammed beyond redemption three metres from that bloody bomb.

I realised later that the beer I had drunk had bloated my girth with fluid and gas. I would eventually, in the course of nature, have been able to release myself. But nature was not going to be nearly as fast as that hissing spark shooting up the wick to the package of gunpowder.

'Get me out of this!' I howled to Bert, who was fiddling with the mechanism of the bucket.

'What's up?' said Bert mildly.

'I'm stuck!' I yelled.

'Oh,' said Bert interestedly, and he came over, grabbed my arms and gave a mighty heave. He was thin, but he was lithe and iron strong and all he succeeded in doing was almost dislocating my arms. If anything, he jammed me in tighter.

'You'd better get out of there, mate,' he said, still mildly. 'That's gonna go off behind you, y'know.'

'Of course I bloody well know!' I screamed. 'I can't move!'

'Maybe you'd better go back and pull out the fuse,' suggested Bert.

That made sense and I tried to wriggle backwards. Useless. My arms and legs were inoperative. All I had to work on were my abdominal muscles. In normal circumstances they are not particularly useful. In these circumstances, they were futile.

'Push!' I panted to Bert, who was observing my efforts with clinical detachment. He pushed at my head, and damned near broke my neck. I didn't budge an inch.

'Hey, listen,' he said, not exactly urgently but at least showing mild concern, 'you'd better come out of there; that thing's going to go off. It might bring the roof down.'

Ordinarily I would have raised a quelling eyebrow at the man for his idiocy. As it was, I yelled, 'What the hell do you think I'm doing, you imbecile?'

Offended, Bert turned away.

'Dig me out, you fool!' I bellowed.

Bert considered that for a moment and decided it was worth a try. He grabbed a pick and started laying about the tunnel within centimetres of my head.

I shut my eyes tightly and wondered whether death would come in the form of an explosion behind or a pickhead between the eyes.

'Bloody hard ground,' said Bert, taking a short rest to wipe the sweat from his brow. 'Doubt that I'll make it in time.'

'So?' I screamed.

Bert looked thoughtfully at me—or what he could see of me—a bearded, fearful head and two waving, frantic arms protruding from the earth.

'Well,' said Bert, 'it's a problem.' He thought a bit longer. 'But you see, mate, that blast is going off in a moment.'

'I know that—for God's sake get me out of this!'

'That's the point, mate, I can't. No sense in my hanging around, mate. Good luck!' And the bloody man walked over to the shaft bucket.

'You can't leave me here!' I screamed.

'No sense in our both being killed,' he said reasonably.

I gaped at him. Behind me a bomb about to explode, before me a Judas ferret of a man preparing to desert me. My carcase already enclosed in its own grave. In moments I would be a bloody mess buried forever deep below the desert. Whatever was left of me wouldn't be worth considering.

'Hey, Bert,' I pleaded.

'You don't want to live forever, do you?' he said philosophically, and put one foot on the edge of the bucket.

There was no time to explain to him that living forever was one of my great ambitions. 'Hey, Bert,' I bleated.

He paused again as though to console me. And that was his downfall.

The bomb went off with a dull 'whumph!'

I felt an immense pressure on my backside as though a brick wall had suddenly bounded forward and bumped into me.

Then everything went into intensely slow motion.

I flew out of the tunnel exactly like a circus performer shot from a cannon. Except that to me it was all happening very slowly.

Detachedly I heard an enormous belch, and I even had time to realise that it had been forced from my stomach by the pressure of the blast driving me through the tunnel.

I was flying through the air and Bert was directly ahead of me, cowering in fear as my immense bulk bore down on him. He was all that stood between me and the rock-hard wall of the cavern.

He raised his arms to ward me off. I, quite callously, impartially and with apparently all the time in the world, dropped my own arms and deliberately hit Bert directly in the middle with my right shoulder.

His anguished howl was pure music.

We ended in a tangled mass on the ground, in clouds of evil-smelling smoke and dust.

Bert was holding his stomach and gasping for air. I was fine, apart from a few grazes and some torn clothing. Bert's wiry frame had made an excellent protective padding between me and the unyielding wall. If Bert had been mortally injured, I didn't give a damn.

He wasn't. Only winded.

Eventually he recovered and reproachfully directed me into the bucket, organised my ascent, followed me a few moments later and drove me back to town. He dropped me outside the pub and drove away without saying a word.

But then, pub friendships are seldom lasting.

Reef Encounter

 

The main cause of trouble in my life is that I keep running into friendly people in bars. They not only encourage my natural tendency towards alcoholism but they lead me into all sorts of situations in which I would rather not be. Friendly people in bars have plagued me since I first started going into bars, which is a very long time ago.

But I have never met a friendly person in a bar who got me into more trouble than Bill. All in a matter of fifteen minutes.

I met Bill in a bar at Airlie in northern Queensland—an excellent starting-off point for the Barrier Reef. He was one of those huge young men you meet up there, all tan and muscles, with the clear blue gaze of the dedicated rum drinker. He was ugly but amiable, like a gorilla.

He had, he told me, recently arrived at Airlie to set up business as a scuba diving instructor. I expressed a polite and academic interest in scuba diving, which I had never tried and didn't particularly want to, because I can hardly swim, am grossly overweight and morbidly terrified of sharks. This fear of sharks is totally irrational and I don't attempt to justify it. I know that motor cars are much more dangerous than sharks, and motor cars don't frighten me at all. But I have been known to leap screaming from a freshwater stream five hundred kilometres inland at the totally imaginary shadow of a triangular fin cutting through the water towards me. I tried to explain this neurosis to Bill.

'Reef sharks don't bite,' he said briskly. 'Now, come on . . . come and have a go at diving. It's like falling off a log. Any fool can do it. Anyway, I'll look after you. Come and have a go.'

I have one great rule in life that has allowed me to survive for quite a long time: never accept a challenge. Unfortunately this commendable principle sometimes tends to dissolve in rum, particularly at ten o'clock in the morning.

After handing over a not particularly large sum of money to Bill (I suspect I was merely the latest victim in his standard method of touting for business) I found myself in a large, powerful motor boat speeding across the glassy waters of the Whitsunday Passage.

In considerably less than two hours I was eighty kilometres on the way to New Zealand and the boat was anchored just above a coral reef. The top of the reef was only about a metre below us, but six metres away was the edge where a coral cliff fell away some hundreds of metres to a dark and murky distant ocean bed. North, south, east and west there was nothing to be seen but the restless seabirds, waiting, I fancied, to pick dead men's bones.

On the way out, standing in the safe and powerful boat, my greying locks streaming in the wind of our passing, I had felt like a grand old man on the way to adventure. Perhaps it was the rum. Once the anchor dropped and I looked into those rich and colourful waters and thought what might be living in them, I became the coward I am by nature. Every vague shadow in the water was to me a ravenous, maneating, enormous shark.

'Oh dear,' I said self-consciously, 'I forgot to bring a costume. What a pity. Never mind, Bill—you go in and I'll watch.'

Bill looked at me. 'That'll hardly worry the fish. Here, strip off and I'll put you into your gear and show you how it works.'

It was a very difficult situation to get out of, short of a downright declaration that the notion of sinking into that foreign element terming with indubitably ferocious life terrified me.

So I said, 'I'm afraid the idea terrifies me, Bill. Sharks and all that, you know.'

'Reef sharks don't bite,' said Bill impatiently. 'Come on, get your gear off.'

I did. Soon I was standing naked in the boat, not a pretty sight, and Bill draped me with an inflatable vest, air tank with a breathing pipe, face mask, lead belt and flippers. The combined gear must have weighed half a ton.

Bill's instructions were perfunctory.

'You turn this this way if you want to go down and that way if you want to go up,' he said, pointing to a valve on my inflatable vest. 'You'll be quite safe, I'll be with you all the time. There's only one thing to worry about—make sure you keep breathing.'

'I make a habit of breathing,' I said defensively.

'Yes,' said Bill, 'but sometimes when people get a fright they come up suddenly and hold their breath. The air in their lungs is compressed and it expands as they come up. If they don't keep breathing, their lungs rupture—messy business.'

'Why should I get a fright?' I said nervously.

'Oh, you never know,' said Bill vaguely. 'Oh, by the way, if you get a pain in the ears, just blow your nose, that'll clear it.'

'How do I blow my nose in a face mask?'

'Oh, you just blow,' said Bill. I was beginning to wonder about Bill.

There were a few more general instructions and he said, 'Now just hop over the side and we'll practise in shallow water.'

I am not given to hopping in any circumstances. With half a ton of gear draped around me, I was incapable of it. But I was managing to lower myself into the warm waters when Bill said, 'Mind you, don't tread on a stonefish. They're deadly.'

I stopped lowering myself.

'How do I know where one is?'

'That's the trouble,' said Bill, 'you can't see them.'

I was beginning to worry about Bill. I tried to raise myself from the water to discuss the matter further, but it just wasn't possible without Bill's help, and he was not helping me out. He was in the water helping me in.

I stood beside him, waist deep, feeling the crunch of coral under my feet and waiting for the deadly spike of the stonefish to pierce my shrinking, precious flesh.

'All right,' said Bill, 'now just sit down and breathe.'

Consigning my soul to God and my body to the deep, I sat down and breathed.

It was surprisingly easy and mind-blastingly beautiful. An amazing experience. The shock and wonder of being able to breathe under water was eclipsed by the shock and wonder of the world of the coral reef—the clouds of tiny glittering silver fish, the multitudinous-coloured fish of every conceivable shape gliding among the kaleidoscope of coral and the wonderful waving weeds and the great yellow starfish—you've seen it all on film.

But doing it, actually being down there among it all, breathing, is something else. I began to enjoy myself enormously. For five minutes I was a hell of a fellow, paddling about looking at things with my back warmed by the sun and my belly very nearly scraping the bottom. Scuba diving is great—in a metre of water.

After about five minutes of this bliss, Bill said, 'All right, we'll go down,' and headed off into the deep water over the edge of the reef.

I tried to protest that I was happy where I was, but Bill kept going. I looked around that great waste of water with nary a sight of land and decided I would sooner go with Bill than stay where I was, alone. Which was a mistake.

Bill waited for me a few metres out from the reef and then said, 'Make sure you don't touch any fire coral—the pain will send you mad.'

'What's fire coral?'

'You'll know it when you see it.' Bill stuck his mouthpiece between his huge white gorilla teeth, grinned at me cheerfully and manically, and submerged. I was beginning to dislike Bill.

I contemplated making my way back to the boat, but I knew I couldn't get on board without help and I didn't at all like being alone in this endless ocean with God knows what peering up at my defenceless body and those blasted sea birds hovering, I was sure, in hungry anticipation.

I turned my buoyancy knob and sank, breathing conscientiously and furiously.

Again, the wonder of it almost submerged my fear. There was the coral cliff, a mighty wall of waving, shifting colour. The clear, sunshot water around me was alive with fish. There were some darker moving shapes further away that terrified me, but then the world of flaming bubble-strewn colour and life captivated me as I slowly sank down the face of the cliff.

But where the hell was Bill?

The trouble with a face mask is you can only see straight ahead of you. Bill wasn't straight ahead of me. I tried twisting my head without much success, then managed to get my whole body to turn around. But I couldn't see Bill. Had something got him? I was suddenly terribly alone, sinking down, down, down towards the dark depths where nameless horrors undoubtedly lurked.

I decided I wanted to see the sun, and quickly. I turned my buoyancy knob violently and sank like a stone.

With the remnants of my reasoning power, I realised I had twisted the knob the wrong way. So I twisted it hard the other way and started to shoot towards the surface like a cork.

For a moment I was almost relieved, then I realised I was holding my breath. My lungs, I was sure from the pressure in my chest, were about to start pouring out of my mouth. I twisted the knob again to slow my ascent and began to breathe like a long-distance runner at the end of a marathon.

It took me a long time to achieve a relative degree of calm and when I did I realised I wasn't going up or down. I had accidentally achieved neutral buoyancy and was hanging perhaps ten metres below the surface and a couple of hundred metres above the bottom. But at least I had time to think. I thought. Where the hell was Bill? I did my turning trick, but there was no sign of him.

But what I did see, not three metres away in the direction in which I was slowly drifting, was a vast mass of blazing red coral which could only have been the fire coral that Bill had warned me about. He was right. I did know it when I saw it.

Almost in control now, I kicked with my flippers to take me away from that scarlet horror. I moved almost a metre towards it.

'Bill!' I screamed. Which had the obvious effect of blowing my mouthpiece out of my mouth. By the time I got it back and had gulped in some desperately needed air, I was a couple of metres away from and slightly below the fire coral which jutted out from the main coral cliff. If I tried to go up I would go straight into it.

I couldn't understand why I had lost control of directional movement and I tried again, kicking to the left with both legs. The thrust sent me directly into the coral wall. Little streams of blood from a dozen tiny coral cuts streamed from my naked belly and mingled with the splendour of riotous colour around me. I was rapidly losing interest in aesthetics.

I tried to fend myself off the coral with my hands and cut them too. The fire coral was above, the sharp standard coral was tearing me to pieces. I didn't seem to be able to move anywhere I wanted to go and my ears were beginning to hurt. I was not happy.

Then I saw Bill, gliding expertly towards me with a flipper in his hand. That was why I couldn't control my direction: I had lost my flipper. And that was why Bill hadn't been around: he'd been retrieving it. He slipped it onto my foot, pointed at the fire coral and shook his hand warningly, then drew me away from the coral cliff. A lot more fish were swimming around, apparently interested in my blood. Disgusting thought.

Bill put his face close to me. He was a bubble-shrouded gargoyle smiling insanely. I wanted to go home.

Bill raised his hand, thumb uppermost.

This was a prearranged signal to ask whether everything was all right, but I had forgotten it. I took it to mean did I want to go up. I raised my own thumb and jabbed it vigorously towards the surface.

Bill nodded, gave another lunatic grin, turned and went down, beckoning me to follow him.

I would have cried if it had been practical in a face mask.

I wanted two things desperately—to get to the surface and not to lose sight of Bill. The two ambitions were irreconcilable, so I chose Bill. I adjusted my buoyancy knob, put my head down and kicked and started to glide further into those strange and wonderful depths after the now relatively distant Bill.

Then I saw the shark.

It was a reef shark, a slim and lazily moving grey-black streak of streamlined power. My mind told me it would not attack. My heart told me that it was maddened by the blood still streaming thinly from the small wounds in my stomach and hand and would shortly tear me to pieces. This would have made me the first man in recorded history to be slaughtered by a reef shark. It was not what I wanted to be remembered for.

Keep breathing, I told myself. The caution was not necessary; I was panting with fear.

The shark slipped somewhere out of my range of vision. I was convinced that it was lurking just behind me. My nudity made things worse. A bare bottom presented to a reef shark feels acutely vulnerable.

I could still see Bill. He was not too far below me and was gesturing excitedly, waving me on down. My feelings for him were now distinctly ambivalent. On the one hand I wanted to kill him, on the other I wanted him to put his muscular arms around me and carry me swiftly back to the boat. I went down to him, determined to communicate my needs somehow.

I grabbed him by the shoulder and began making every gesture I could think of to let him know that I wanted him to take me up out of there, away from the many deaths that threatened me, including death from a terror-induced heart attack.

Bill grinned. God, how I hated that grin. He was pointing at something out near the edge of darkness that formed the bottom layer of our world.

It was a large goldfish.

Bill grabbed my arms and shook his head. He obviously wanted me to keep still. Convinced that this was because the shark was going to attack or that something equally dreadful was about to happen and Bill wanted to be free to protect me, I disengaged myself and kept still.

Bill went streaking off towards that bloody goldfish.

Why did he want to investigate a goldfish? The waters were full of fish of every colour God ever thought of, and a few more. But of course, it wasn't a goldfish. The thing must have been a long way off when I first saw it, but now Bill was shepherding it towards me. As it approached it became larger and larger until it assumed the proportions of a whale. It was an enormously fat fish with a face of ancient malevolent evil and a short thick stubby tail. It was like some gargantuan overweight carp moving slowly like a piscean blimp towards me, licking, I was sure, its thick blubbery lips.

Some memory fragment of natural history told me it was a giant groper, but I couldn't remember whether gropers ate people or not. It didn't matter. If no groper had ever eaten human flesh before, this one would still eat me. I wasn't even reassured by the fact that Bill was prodding it and I kicking it, urging it towards me.

Now the damned thing was so close it seemed as big as a ten-storey building. Once it opened its mouth and shut it again as fish do, and I had a terrifying glimpse of countless teeth and a dark enormous hole of a throat down which I must soon surely slide. Bill kicked it again and it rolled its great eyes to one side and looked extremely disgruntled.

Then, just off to my right, I saw that damned shark again, or one very like it. No doubt the waters were swarming with the brutes. This one was just hovering, slavering at the horrendous jaws presumably, obviously waiting to pick up any scraps of me the groper might miss. I was not happy.

I thought my fear all-consuming but then the most dreadful stab of pain through my head took my mind off even that. My ears had suddenly become acutely worse. My eardrums were about to burst. I drifted back towards the coral reef, forgetting whether or not I was breathing, demented by fear and pain and wanting to do no more than curse God and Bill and die quickly. I was in a mess.

Some last spark of self-preservation induced me to try blowing my nose to clear my ears. All I achieved was to spit out my mouthpiece.

I was really demoralised by now, and Bill, seeing me feebly groping for my mouthpiece, stopped playing with the groper, sped across and reconnected me with my air supply. I sucked hard. There was no air. My distress must have by now been obvious even to the insensitive Bill. He looked at my air gauge unbelievingly. Then looked at me penetratingly.

I looked at him hopelessly, and held my breath.

Unhesitatingly Bill swung back his mighty right arm and plunged his clenched fist with incredible violence into my soft and yielding solar plexus.

I remember seeing a great gout of air issue from my mouth and go rolling in a huge bubble towards the iridescent brilliance which was the surface of the sea twenty metres away. Then I think I half-fainted because all I can remember is a hazy breathless rush upwards in a daze of colour and silver bubbles.

By the time I was fully conscious, I was lying on my back in the water near the boat and Bill was holding my head out of the water.

I loved him dearly at that moment, but there was a great unanswered question.

'Why,' I said plaintively, 'did you hit me?'

'You'd run out of air,' he said reasonably. 'You must have been breathing at ten times the normal rate. I had to get you to the top. If I'd rushed you up with a lungful of air you'd have blown apart. So I had to knock it out of you. Standard procedure.'

'Oh,' I said.

'You're all right now,' said Bill cheerfully. 'I've got another tank in the boat. We'll try again.'

I hadn't thought it possible for me to get into the boat unaided, but I did then. And neither the powers of heaven and hell or even Bill could get me out of it again until we touched the home wharf.

I had a farewell drink with Bill the next day, anxious to discuss my adventure, but all he could talk about was the groper. It was the biggest one he'd ever seen. Three metres long at least. I swear it was fifteen.

My lesson learned, I now intend to pass on to my grandchildren the one piece of wisdom I have ever acquired: never drink rum in the morning at a pub in Airlie with a man named Bill.

Six Taipans

 

It is my custom to wander around the countryside picking up stories that I later incorporate in or make the subject of novels. The situations that one observes almost invariably have to be changed radically, simply because they are unbelievable.

However, occasionally one encounters a true situation that cannot be changed because its value lies in its outrageousness, but that is so outrageous you can't reasonably expect anybody to believe it.

The case of the six taipans is one of these, and all I can do to defend it is to assert rather aggressively that if anyone cares to challenge its veracity, I am prepared to produce witnesses.

I was travelling around the Alligator River bordering Arnhem Land researching the spread of feral animals in Australia when, as I often do, I became lost one night.

Sighting a camp fire I drove up to it to ask where I was and met a German naturalist who was studying reptiles in the area. He was a great fat middle-aged man, rather of my own physical stature, and spoke excellent if rather formal English. His name was Hans and he had something to do with a zoo or a museum in Germany.

I spent the night at his camp and he told me of his ambition to take some taipans back home. For some reason or other the taipan is highly valued by Germans, who like to keep them in zoos. If you can land a taipan alive in Germany you can get one or two thousand dollars for it, I am told, but of course it is illegal to export them. They are a protected species.

This does not prevent unscrupulous dealers attempting to export them. I once knew a man who tried to sail to Germany in his own yacht with a cargo of one hundred taipans on board. He hoped to become a rich man on arrival, although personally I think he would have created a glut on the market. I never did find out what happened to him, and I tremble to speculate.

Hans had no such extravagant ambitions, but he did want a couple of taipans. He had tried all the normal avenues to get permission, but it just wasn't possible. No doubt if his zoo had written to an Australian zoo and gone through the proper channels something could have been arranged, but there wasn't time for that. Hans wanted the glory of taking back the taipans himself—no doubt his career would have prospered.

Now, getting a taipan in Australia isn't difficult. You simply go into a pub in taipan country and let it be known that you're willing to pay $100 or so for one. Next thing you know half a dozen men are slipping up to your hotel room and saying, 'Psst, want to buy a taipan, mate?'

I mentioned this to Hans, just as a matter of interest, and he seemed intrigued by the fact.

After that the conversation passed into more general areas and we discovered that we were both booked on the same flight out of Darwin for Bali a couple of weeks later.

Appropriately commenting on the coincidence, we agreed in meet in a Darwin hotel the night before the aircraft departed. The following day, we each went our separate ways.

I got lost again, naturally, but only temporarily, and in due course found myself back in Darwin for my flight to Denpasar. I remembered my engagement with Hans and called at his hotel that evening. He welcomed me with that enthusiasm that people demonstrate when they are reunited with a chance traveller they have met in the wilderness, sat me down with a scotch and excused himself for a few minutes while he completed some business he had with the reception desk of the hotel.

It is perhaps a perversion of mine to like lots of ice with my whisky, and while Hans was away I went to his refrigerator to get some ice. I opened I the freezer and, bless my soul, there were six taipans gazing at me torpidly and very slowly winding themselves around each other. I doubt that ever in the history of man has a refrigerator door been shut so rapidly.

I was so shocked that I sat down and drank my scotch without ice. Then Hans came back into the room.

'Do you know your refrigerator is full of deadly snakes?' I asked.

The poor man went rigid. He stood stock still and the colour drained from his face. I thought at first he must have seen it as an elaborate plot to murder him, but then I realised he was shocked for a quite different reason.

'How did you find out?' he asked in horrified tones.

'You mean you knew they were there?'

'Of course I knew they were there,' he said. 'I put them there. How else do you think they got there?'

Well, of course I couldn't answer that, so I just sat and gaped at him. He walked across the room and leaned down and looked earnestly into my face.

'I must take you into my confidence,' he said hoarsely. 'I must ask you to swear never to tell anybody about those snakes.'

Well, if a man wants to keep poisonous snakes in his refrigerator, I feel that it is entirely his own business, so I readily gave my word not to mention the snakes to anybody.

But then he went on to tell me how he had bought them and that he was going to freeze them so that he could smuggle them out of the country. It appears that, if you reduce a snake's body temperature enough and keep it down, it goes into a coma from which you can revive it simply by warming it up.

That didn't worry me unduly. If this lunatic Teuton wanted to ship a box full of frozen snakes out of the country, I suppose I disapproved on general conservationist principles, but I'm not overfond of taipans and half a dozen more or less on the Australian scene didn't matter too much to me. However, I did feel obliged to point out to the fellow that he would certainly have his luggage inspected at the airport and the customs people would take a dim view of six frozen taipans.

'That I know,' said the German. 'Do you think I am stupid?'

I did, but I wasn't going to say so. But what he said next took ten years off my life.

'I am going to carry them in my trouser legs,' he announced with a manic gleam of triumph in his eyes.

'Eh?' I said, which was really rather eloquent in the circumstances.

'In my trouser legs,' he said. 'You understand, trousers?' He patted his trousers.

'Yes,' I said, 'I understand trousers. Do you understand that taipans are deadly poisonous?'

'Of course,' he said. 'But when they are frozen they do not bite. Look, I'll show you.'

Then the bloody man went to the refrigerator and flung open the door, plunged his hand in and grabbed a snake. The thing made a sleepy sort of attempt to bite him and he said 'Ach' or 'Donner und Blitzen' or something and tossed it back and picked up another that had succumbed to the cold.

Then he pulled open the top of his trousers and slid the thing head first down his trouser leg. It was a bit too long to fit in so he curled the tail over and tucked that in against his tummy. He pulled down his shirt and looked at me with the happy expectation of a schoolboy who has just demonstrated a card trick.

'You see?' he said. 'Nobody would ever know it was there.'

It was quite true. He had baggy trousers on and you couldn't see any sign of the snake.

'But... six of them?' I gasped.

'It will be easy. Three in each leg. You want I should show you?'

'No! No!' I cried. 'Please put that blasted thing back in the refrigerator and get me some ice at the same time.'

He pulled the snake out of his trouser leg and casually stuffed it back with the others, considerately pushing one hissing reptile out of the way to get me the ice cubes.

'Now listen, friend,' I said firmly, when I had a lot more whisky dampening my ice cubes. 'If just one of those bloody snakes wakes up in the aeroplane, you're a dead man.'

'They will not wake up,' he said confidently. 'I will get off in Denpasar and ship them in an ordinary box to Germany. They do not have your ridiculous customs laws in Indonesia. It only takes a short time to fly from Darwin to Denpasar and they will stay asleep for at least three hours and more likely four.'

You can imagine how I felt at the prospect of getting into the same aeroplane as a man with six taipans packed into his trouser legs, but I was trapped. I had given my word not to mention those snakes to anybody, and I do not take my own word lightly. Besides, the wretched fellow was a scientist and presumably knew what he was talking about.

I hoped to dear God that some customs officer would give him a body search, although the effect on the officer of discovering six taipans concealed like that might well have been fatal.

So I just drank a lot more of the German's whisky and went off to bed.

Naturally I kept a sharp eye out for Hans when I was boarding the plane the next day, and I saw him sail through Customs and the security check with a fixed Teutonic smile on his face, but nothing else to distinguish him from the other passengers apart from the fact that, to my mind, he was walking rather stiffly. No doubt everybody else thought it was because of an old war wound.

He was wearing those German trousers that you tuck into your socks, so nothing could fall out. The snakes were presumably kept upright by having their tails held by his underpants, which, because of his paunch, would have been tight-fitting.

You can guess the inevitable—I found myself sitting next to the fellow. The aircraft was full and there was no way I could change seats. As I said, he was a big man; I am not small myself, and I kept finding my leg pressing against his.

I swear I lost a stone in a matter of minutes, expecting every second at least three sets of deadly fangs to pierce his trouser legs and mine and sink into my flinching, precious flesh.

He never said a word to me. He seemed a bit embarrassed by the fact that I was sitting next to him, but that was understandable enough, so I just sat through the first part of the flight in a state of mortal terror trying to squeeze away from him and quite unable to take my eyes off those trouser legs, which seemed to my anguished eyes to be constantly squirming and bulging.

Suddenly the German gave a grunt of pain and leaned forward, clutching his stomach.

'Oh, my God!' I thought. This was the time to break my word, and I started waving for a hostess, even in that moment of tension wondering in what terms I should inform her that my fellow passenger had been bitten by a taipan in his trousers.

But the German grabbed me by the arm. 'No,' he said, 'it is nothing. Something I ate. An internal disorder. I must go to the toilet.' He stood up and pressed past me and made his way down the length of the aircraft to the toilets. I watched him in utter horror, but I couldn't even bear to imagine how he was going to manage to use the toilet and cope with six snakes.

He stayed in the toilet for a good ten minutes, and then came out looking very ill. I could see that his face was quite white and he was staggering a little. He got about halfway down the aisle and fell flat on his face.

Naturally a couple of hostesses ran to help him, so I leaped out of my seat and rushed down the aisle shouting, 'No! No! Don't touch that man, he's full of taipans!'

Of course the hostesses found this a fairly incomprehensible statement, but by then I was standing over the fallen German anxiously waiting for taipans to pop out of the top of his pants and was waving everyone back shouting, 'He's got taipans in his trousers, I tell you! Taipans in his trousers!'

Then the German sat up and looked at me reproachfully. 'You gave me your word,' he said.

'I know I did,' I said. 'But, damn it, man, there comes a time. . .you've been bitten. The damn things are awake. They'll be all over the plane in a minute.'

'Nonsense,' said the German. 'I have diarrhoea, that is all.'

By now the hostesses had called the captain or the co-pilot or whoever it was and he was not unreasonably demanding to know what the hell was going on.

Trying to appear as sane as I could, I explained that this man had six taipans in his trousers and I had reason to suppose he had been bitten. The passengers within several rows heard all this, of course, and were looking on with considerable interest and some trepidation.

'Is this true?' the pilot asked the German.

Hans stood up, looked at me with utter contempt, whipped his belt undone and let his trousers slide around his ankles. There wasn't a sign of a snake, only rather grey-looking long underwear.

I am seldom put out of countenance, but there I was babbling about taipans, with the hostesses peering over the pilot's shoulder at this angry German with his trousers around his ankles and most of the passengers crowded into the aisles watching the whole performance. I was out of countenance.

I looked at Hans' underpants and they were so tight-fitting that there was no possibility of them concealing the snakes. Then it all became clear to me.

'He's hidden them in the toilet!' I shouted. 'That's what happened. He's let them go in the toilet. For God's sake, go and look!'

The pilot was of course convinced that I was mad, but still it takes a brave man to open a toilet door when there's even a rumour that the place is infested with taipans. However, he did just that, with me and the German a safeish distance behind him.

There wasn't a sign of a taipan in the toilet.

The pilot looked at me accusingly, Hans looked at me disdainfully, and the hostesses looked at me in fear and amazement.

'Perhaps he's flushed them down the toilet?' I said, doubtfully.

The pilot looked at the toilet. It just wasn't the sort that snakes could be flushed down. He shook his head and closed the door.

'Why don't we just go back to our seats and forget all about it?' he said, in a soothing voice.

I was only too glad to do so and Hans, who had now pulled his trousers up again, came back and sat beside me without a word, but I wasn't going to have that.

'What did you do with them?' I hissed.

'I will never accept the word of an Australian again,' he said with heavy Teutonic dignity.

'All right, don't. But what did you do with the snakes?'

'It is none of your business, but as it happens I underestimated the temperature in the refrigerator and they all froze to death. So there was no point in bringing them.' He then looked rigidly out the window and maintained an offended silence.

I collapsed back in my seat and started waving at the stewardess again. All I wanted was whisky, but she didn't know that and kept well away from me. The German only spoke six more words to me on the whole of the trip.

'I think you are a cad,' he said as we got off the plane at Denpasar.