The Woman on the Mountain (12 page)

Although the wind was from the west, in my clearing it gets thrown into turbulence, sent off course by the tree rim over which it must first pass. That would have been how sparks had blown back downhill to set this tree alight; if its leaves caught, a similar gust could take them down onto my house and shed. I knew I could not protect both on my own. And there were other unburnt eucalypts nearby in the yard. This could start a bigger fire than I could save the house from.

White mahogany bark is rough, deeply interlaced and furrowed, so the fire in its depths was hard to extinguish. Despite my furious hosing, it was still smouldering in there. I hacked at the thick bark with the hoe, dragging it apart; flames leapt up anew as oxygen fed them, but the water soon put them out. I waited. It seemed OK. I hosed again.

But how was I to trust it, to go back to bed and sleep? I stomped about in the semi-dark for a while longer, hosing the trunk and all the ground around the tree yet again. Finally I turned off the water. The ensuing relative silence quickly became the sounds of a still-feeding fire on the move—the loud crackling, the long whooshes and brief roars. The distinctive smell of water on burnt vegetation, on charcoal and ash, filled the immediate air, but as I walked back down to the house it was overpowered by the active bushfire smell. Dry, sickly-sweet, pungent, it permeated the whole range, ridges and slopes, creeks and gullies, and far beyond. It was inescapable, even inside the house. It weighed me down with knowledge, with speculation, with fear. Only now did I remember the horses. I knew the whole block was burnt; the dam would have been their only hope. I did not sleep.

At dawn I walked to the dam with a bucket of grain, calling them. A neigh answered me as I got closer. On the small island in the middle of the two interconnected dams stood the horses. The reeds that choked the shallower dam on the western side had burnt to the water line, and had led the fire onto the short grass of the island. I don’t know why it had stopped where it did, but the horses were standing on unburnt grass. Could they have stamped it out? There was also a narrow unburnt area on the flat eastern shore of the dam, where the roos and wallabies always keep the fine native grass cropped very short. That was the closest shore to the island, and quite shallow to cross as it was where the dams met.

I stood there, called, shook the bucket. Jasmine splashed into the dam and walked to me, the water only up to her shoulders. I tipped some grain out for her, patted her. She seemed fine. I called Jess. Called again, banged the bucket. She neighed, but did not move. The grass left on that tiny island was already eaten right down. She’d starve if she didn’t come over.

I went back and rang my daughter, who reminded me that Jess hated water, wouldn’t step through even a shallow creek if she could avoid it. Only her strong survival instincts could have made her go over there yesterday. My daughter couldn’t come up to try to coax Jess off until the weekend, two days away. I’d need to get feed to her until then.

We had a very tippy old aluminium canoe. The little jetty was burnt, so were the plastic-bladed paddles, but the canoe itself was fine. I found a flat piece of wood to use as a paddle and for the next two days I ferried buckets of feed over to Jess three times a day. Nevertheless she grew visibly thinner, and the ground was covered in her manure. I couldn’t understand why her good sense didn’t bring her back through the water to join Jasmine on the shore. She refused to be led across by me.

I was cranky with her because there was so much else to do after the fire that I didn’t need canoe trips. Luckily the wind dropped a day later and we had a storm, bringing enough rain to halt the fires and save the valley behind me. The pressure was off. And that weekend my daughter coaxed Jess back through the water. We could marvel then at the horses’ intuitive flight to the island, and wonder at how even Jasmine had remained there after the fire had passed. Waiting for us to assure them it was safe?

All the house gates were left open, as my yard and around my son’s cabin were the only oases of green to be seen anywhere on the ridge. Not only the horses but also any surviving wallabies or other animals would need that feed. They came, and ate just about everything down, but I was glad to have some green to offer them.

They came also to die.

After a few days, I began to smell death. I stood on the verandah, scanning the forest edge, thinking it must be coming from there. Turning to go inside, I happened to glance down, and through the gaps between the decking boards I saw greyish-brown fur. Kneeling, I peered closer. Black paws, limp head—a wallaby. I moved along the crack; more fur, grey, fluffy, pale belly—a possum? And I could see more bundles of fur. There were probably five dead animals under there. I didn’t want to go closer.

By next morning the smell was bad. My son had returned to town to work. I didn’t think I could cope with the task ahead of me, but I knew the smell would get worse as the bodies rotted. Then the deputy fire captain came by to see how things were, and whether I needed help. The smell was obvious so, feeling like a typical female wimp, I asked if he’d mind removing the creatures who’d chosen under my verandah as their last refuge. He said not, as men are expected to. I fetched him the shovel and the wheelbarrow and took myself well away while he did it. I was very grateful.

There were more in my yard, under my son’s cabin, under my pump’s tin cover—whatever had seemed like shelter. Too late. I let them desiccate where they were. Elsewhere, clusters of slender white bones became commonplace.

Since those fires I have not heard even one koala grunting or roaring for a mate in the trees of the gully below me, when I used to hear them frequently, often close by, although I saw them rarely.

All my young paperbarks were burnt to crisp sticks that snapped all the way down. Dead. Yet six months later, about a third of them sent new stems of leaves up from below the ground, where the roots had survived. Magic.

I was to discover that my Everlast cement tanks had cracked under the intense heat. They had survived several fires in their twenty years and probably would have everlasted but this had been exceptional. It turned out that my NRMA home insurance covered replacement tanks and fences. There were no dramas or delays; they were very helpful, and I will never again wonder whether it’s worth paying those premiums. Unfortunately the dramas and delays came from the fencing contractor. I picked the wrong one, and afterwards wondered whether the job would have been as slackly done if their client had been a bloke.

Everywhere I looked in those black mopping-up days I saw possibilities for better fire protection and precautionary measures, despite having had better-than-average awareness previously. While the experience was fresh, I acted. Less for me to worry about in the next big fire.

For my fledgling forest’s sake, I hope that’s not for another twenty years, but with the warming, drying climate, that’s unlikely.

In 2005 I went away again, but only for a month.

It was early September, when the wisteria and the ornamental grape on the western verandah were still brown sticks, their leaf buds small blind nubs, barely a hint of green showing. Here in the mountains the seasons seem to become evident about six weeks after they do in the valleys.

I am rarely away for more than a few days, but this time I didn’t return until mid October. Being so far from main roads anyway, every trip is a long one for me, and as petrol is so expensive, I try to combine them. Since I wanted to attend Watermark, a week-long nature writers’ conference on the north coast, I found a few interesting owner-built houses up that way as article subjects for the magazine and then I went a bit further to visit family. Hence the month.

A month is too long to be away from my wildlife refuge. Too long for me and too long for the wildlife.

For a start I get too used to the company of creatures who answer with words when I talk to them, and to being able to press a button, flick a switch or turn a knob to fulfil all my needs. I welcome these comforts for a while, and then all that hard-edged man-made environment starts to get me down, as does the awareness that its inhabitants, be they dogs, cats or people, are all man-made too in a sense. I begin to miss the softer, wilder, natural world, and to hanker after my solitary hermitage back in the bush.

As for the wildlife, well, being an opportunistic lot—I suppose I should say ‘adaptable’—they get too used to my territory being unmarked. They start to move in.

When I got home from my month away, before I even opened the yard gate I could see that spring had arrived with great flamboyancy The ornamental grapevine and the wisteria had exploded into such vigorous greenery that they had twined together to completely barricade the verandah, and I had to push my way through at the top of the steps. The Crépuscule climbing rose on the eastern side had also gone into overdrive, draping the verandah posts and rafters with swags and tails of raggedy apricot blossoms.

Naturally, confronted with all this profuse growth, before I unpacked the car I just had to walk around the garden to see what other delights spring had brought. The air was full of perfume—the honeyed white cloud of the May bush, the exotic intensity of the jasmine smothering a stump nearby, the innocence of the old-fashioned pink sweetpeas in front of the verandah, and the faint almond scent of the Banksia Rose that has turned my clothesline post into a fountain of foaming white. But the Banksia Rose didn’t look right. The lower parts of its drooping stems were all bare.

So, I realised, looking about in dismay, were those of all my newly leafed and very young European trees—and the rose bushes were totally denuded.

‘The possums are back!’ I groaned aloud.

But no twigs were broken, as possums inevitably do when they climb over them. And there remained one high topknot of leaves on the big Autumnalis old shrub rose. I noticed too that only the lower parts of the climbing roses, the Crépuscule, the Madame Carrière and the Graham Thomas, were stripped. The upper stems were fully leafed. Whatever was devastating my roses, it could not climb.

I walked round the back of the Banksia Rose, and there was a small wallaby, caught in the act. It bolted, propped a little distance away and turned to see what I was up to. Well, I was laughing, for clenched between its teeth was a stem with several tiny roses bobbing at the end—a coy marsupial Carmen.

But I stopped laughing as I spotted eight more wallabies, of varying sizes and sexes. I stared, and they stared back, in a single frozen instant of mutual shock before they took off,
through
the hingelock fence, above the lower additional chickenwire. They exited at many different spots.

I walked up closer; the hingelock netting, or pigwire, as some call it, was recycled, old and rusty, but unbroken, although some of its rectangles were bent out of shape. It had never been tested by pigs, so far as I knew, but for eight years this fence had kept wallabies out of the house yard, as it should. Why the change?

Here I admit that for months I’d known that one rogue wallaby had been breaking the rule of staying on the wild side of the house yard fence. A big male: darker and more evenly red on the back and whiter on the front than is usual, and with a distinctively kinked tuft of fur at the base of his tail. When I first spotted him in my orchard I’d gone around looking for breaks in the fence, but there were none. He must be an especially good jumper, I’d thought. Not even the kangaroos had ever jumped this fence.

Then I saw him get through it. Hingelock netting is composed of 320-millimetre-wide rectangles—that’s just over a ruler length—that gradually increase in height. Mine has 600-millimetre-high chickenwire clipped over it at the base. Above that the openings are only a large hand’s span high. It had occurred to me that a joey might get through those top ones, but only if it could jump high and aim well at the same time, which would be unlikely given how scatterbrained and uncoordinated they are.

But a hefty muscular male? He had to be double-jointed!

He became a regular visitor and I saw him come and go at many different spots with ease—definitely double-jointed, I decided. I also concluded that he was a loner, out of place in the busy social scene beyond the fence. Much like me, really. And, since in those days I never saw him eating anything but grass, I didn’t mind him visiting.

I began to say hello and have a bit of a chat when I saw him. Not that he contributed much, but he’d look up and acknowledge me before resuming grazing. I could use the excuse that I like to use my voice around the wild creatures so they get to know my ‘call’—and that’s true—but the fact is that, living in this isolated place by myself, I have started talking to my wild neighbours. Nothing too deep, just passing pleasantries. It’s not talking to myself, not a sign of going crazy, although it probably is a sign of being ‘too long in the bush’, as I’ve heard it said of others.

I’d thought my rogue wallaby might be a youngish male since the time I’d caught him eating the small rose bushes on the bank and angrily reprimanded him—‘Why must you do that? Why can’t you just eat grass!’ The look he’d given me was very reminiscent of one my son used to bestow on me in his late teens. It clearly said, ‘Settle, Gretel!’

But in between my small explosions of outrage we were quite comfortable in each other’s presence. He began to take his midday nap in the shade of the trees uphill from the toilet, or under the cherry tree. He might lift his head if I appeared—‘Oh, it’s only you’—then resume dozing.

Then I started to worry. What if it was genetic? A tribe of double-jointed wallabies would be quite another matter!

I watched him carefully when he was outside the fence, but he was always alone. Whatever made him an outcast, it put him off the ladies. Not once did I see him chase a female. Nor did he hang around with the males—something else we had in common at present. Perhaps he was asexual, a neuter? The reason remained a mystery, but it seemed I was safe from being overrun by his offspring.

I hadn’t reckoned on him passing on his strange ability by example. I’d underestimated the wallabies. In my month-long absence the others must have figured that if he could do it, so could they; and since I wasn’t here marking my territory, it was theirs for the taking.

Now I’d have to clip chickenwire to the upper section as well. That would be an expenditure of money and time that I certainly didn’t need—thanks a lot, guys!

But right now rain was threatening, so I rushed to grab some dry wood and unpack a few essentials. I lit the slow combustion stove so I’d have hot water in the morning. It was growing dark, and my cabin is only lit in strategic pools by 20-watt halogen bulbs; it is mostly shadow. I like it that way, but it did mean that I couldn’t be sure if the shadows seemed to be moving a bit, nor that those tiny black pellets on the far bench weren’t really old toast crumbs.

Any doubts that the wildlife had extended their territory inside the house as well were dispelled at 2a.m., when a familiar hissed ‘Chee! Chee!’ in the ceiling woke me, even over the continual clatter of the rain on my low tin roof. It was confirmed the next night by the mini ‘mice’, Brown Antechinus, that would suddenly dart onto the sink or the bench, stare at me with their big black eyes, then disappear.

I had thought I’d found and filled every crack where they could enter. They can flatten their little bodies to fit through amazingly narrow crevices, and if I’d known that when building this place I’d have made sure it was critter-proof But I didn’t, and near enough was good enough then.

Doing it afterwards was laborious and not as effective, yet patching and poking with mud and plaster and slivers of wood, and just once—never again—with that revolting and probably toxic expanding foam, had seemed to keep them out for the last two years. Until now. ‘While the cat’s away...’ They must have been chiselling an entry with their teeth for the past month. But where?

It’s not that I don’t like them. In fact, the Brown Antechinus is one of the cutest of our small mammals, despite being related to the Tasmanian Devil. Similarly carnivorous, they have lots of sharp little teeth, but they have sweet rounded ears like pink flowers, a pointy pink nose and rather ‘poppy’ black eyes. They’re great climbers.

Being meat eaters, they don’t touch my fruit or vegetables—unlike the bush rats, for whom I have a strong dislike as housemates, but who, as they’re bigger, are easier to keep out. My antechinus do nibble or even steal soap, and they like cheese, which is what I put in the live trap.

They may look like a bit like mice, but you can’t use mean mousetraps to catch and kill them, because they’re protected. Although that was clearly irrelevant to the local, who, on being told that the endangered Hastings River Mouse had been found in this area, said, ‘I don’t care what sort of mouse it is, if it’s in my kitchen, it’s a dead one!’

My live trap is an aluminium folding tunnel with a spring-loaded platform inside, which, when stepped on, snaps the door shut. The trap has relocated many an antechinus, whom I tip into the tussocks outside the fence the next morning. There it races off, no doubt annoyed, but unharmed.

The memorable fact about them—to me anyway, but perhaps it’s my warped mind, or my current celibate state—is that the males not only mate themselves silly but they mate themselves to death. Before they are a year old, over a period of two weeks they race about seeking females, fighting each other for the ladies’ favours and, when they win them, mating for six hours at a time. They do it with more than one female if they can.

Not one male is left alive at the end of this frenzied mating season, which is usually in early spring. Not one male makes it to his first birthday. Apparently it’s the stress that does it. Talk about the pain of love!

It doesn’t sound like much fun being a female either, even if they do live longer, what with males jumping them at every turn. I mean, six hours does seem overcompensation for the ‘ten-minute wonder’ that we human females complain about. Not surprisingly after all that effort, pregnancy, which only lasts a month, is guaranteed.

These little marsupials don’t actually have a pouch; instead they have six to ten exposed nipples, which the young latch on to—and they don’t let go of them for the first five weeks, so poor mum has to get about with them dragging beneath her. Ouch!

At least she knows they’ll leave home by next winter, before the whole business starts again. I couldn’t wait till then. With all the males dead by now, my intruders had to be female; I didn’t want them raising babies in my roof.

I suppose they ate insects in the house, but they would mainly slip through their purpose made crack to feed outside—at night when they were wide awake, for they are nocturnal. I’m not. If I didn’t need sleep I wouldn’t have minded sharing the house with them. But I do, and between their scrabbling and hissing, and my nervous awareness of the high possibility of them running over my pillow, and thus my head, they stopped me getting enough of it.

So you understand why I felt rather as if the wildlife was taking over my little patch. I’d given them most of the property as their refuge—I’d only claimed 1 acre for myself. I’d drawn a line between me and the wild things, plants and animals, and they’d crossed it.

It was still raining days after I’d got home. Spring is a good time to get such a lot of rain, but I couldn’t enjoy it while under siege like that. From my windows I watched the many wallabies ease themselves through the fence, then lean back on their tails to balance as they stood tall and nibbled leafless the lower branches of every introduced tree and shrub. These were all deciduous, now desperately putting out new bright green leaves, which the wallabies immediately ate. They did this daintily, pulling each branch down to their mouths with their neat black forepaws, but for once I did not find their table manners a charming sight.

It was hard not to feel disappointed that, like resentful children, they’d played up when I was away. Rationally, I accepted that the garden was fair game after a month. Emotionally, I protested—it wasn’t fair!

Since I was cabin-bound by the rain, reading seemed the perfect activity to take my mind off my intruders. I have lots of books, and except for the odd gift, they are all second-hand, seized upon with delight in op-shops all over the country. Having grown up in an almost bookless home, to be surrounded by walls of books that I can read again whenever I want gives me a sense of great riches. Greater riches would be more walls for more bookshelves for more books.

Most of them are on open shelves. But the pleasure of withdrawing a book from the shelves is greatly diminished by being showered with dried mud, small spiders, and sometimes fat pink grubs when I do so. Which is what happened on that particular wet, besieged day. As if wallabies and antechinus weren’t enough, the wasps had really gone overboard while I’d been away.

For wasps like books too. Side-by-side books create ideal crevices for making mud nests for their eggs. They seal paralysed living spiders in with the eggs, for the larvae to eat when they hatch later on. The wasps cement the books to each other and to the shelf.