Mountain Tails

Being the only human resident of a wildlife refuge, on the edge of a national park that is far from any town, I see lots of creatures behaving ‘wildly'. They can be so natural because they ignore me, as they should.

After all, I'm obviously of an inferior and inadequate species: no tail, only two legs, pathetic hearing, poor vision that's shockingly so at night, no built-in insulation of fur or feathers, and an apparent inability to survive on the local abundance of grass, leaves and roots—or other creatures.

To that general picture of modern white Australians, my neighbours might add other deficiencies peculiar to me: knees that can't be relied on to bend, as knees must, to climb up and down slopes; inappropriate Celtic skin that burns to cancerous spots under our sunshine; and a lack of any singing talent.

I love where I live, high on my forested mountain, surrounded by even higher, wilder mountains, but I admit to being the least well-adapted to my surroundings, because still dependent to some extent on the outside world.

But not for entertainment! My fellow wild residents, and their relatives from the national park next door, are always up to new tricks. These may well frustrate my own activities and infuriate me with the apparent perversity of their choice and timing, but they never fail to interest, surprise and cause me to seek further information.

Such tales usually amuse other people—and me, once I've calmed down. I mean how would you like it if your neighbours ate your roses, solicited for sex in your front yard, or commandeered your shed?

Many people say they like animals, but they really only mean domesticated animals, or the cute and cuddly semi-tame native ones kept in tourist parks. Being genuinely wild creatures, none of my neighbours is cuddly; they wouldn't allow such liberties even if I wanted to. But many are very cute, like the joeys—the baby wallabies and kangaroos and wallaroos.

Beauty is another matter. While I acknowledge snakes can be beautiful, there is always a big ‘BUT' clouding my attempts at objective judgement. They do provide a few scary tales, because I'm alone, and not the calmest where creatures like snakes or spiders or leeches are concerned. Other people may even laugh at these tales, but it's a nervous, skittery kind of laughter, usually accompanied by a shiver and a ‘Rather you than me!'

If ‘cute' and ‘beautiful' and even ‘scary' sometimes apply, ‘amazing' often does.

I am astonished at the diversity of ways in which these creatures have adapted to their environment, evolved over thousands of years, and are still evolving. They have truly earned their places here; they belong.

When I studied biology in high school and learnt about the internal processes of the human body, I was struck with wonder at the intricate design of it all. My wonder was no less when we looked into the pinned-back frog or rat we had dissected—that is, a less squeamish classmate had—and it was enhanced by the fact that their insides looked just like the diagrams in our textbooks!

But we didn't even consider our native animals then, let alone their unique and clever features: how a kangaroo can delay the growth of a foetus; how a koala can survive on a diet of gum leaves that would be toxic to other animals; how a wombat's pouch opens backwards so the baby doesn't get buried in dirt when the mother digs; how an echidna has one extra-long claw for scratching amongst its spines ... the list of things to wonder at is endless.

In any association with living creatures, there will also be sad or painful tales. Many readers of my first book,
The Woman on the Mountain,
say they found the animal stories some of the most moving. Over the 30 years since I found this place, and came to belong to it, many incidents were experienced and creatures met that didn't find their way into that book. And of course our wild life together has continued since.

So that new readers will be able to follow me and my animal encounters over those decades, here's a potted history. I first moved here in 1978 with my husband and our two children, Sam, five, and Lucy, three. That early bush life—living in a tent while we built a little mud-brick cabin, fencing, setting up watering systems, planting fruit trees and vegetable gardens—was idyllic, but the marriage splintered into very nasty shards after too few years. Then came too many years in Sydney as a sole parent, working and renting and always broke, returning to our Mountain home whenever we could.

In 1994, when the kids were off living their own lives, I resumed my full-time bush lifestyle, with my new partner, having installed solar power so we could work from here. The cabin grew a little bigger; its surrounding yard was fenced off from the forest, and from its inhabitants—theoretically.

Since I ended that relationship in early 2003, I have lived here alone—except of course for the animals. These solitary six years have allowed me to observe and share more of their lives than ever before, but surviving here wasn't, isn't, always easy for me, as
The Woman on the Mountain
tells!

As a child I couldn't decide if I wanted to be an artist or an author or a ballerina when I grew up. Whilst I might still risk an occasional pirouette across the paddock or a grand jeté over a puddle when the wallabies aren't watching, the ballerina dream ended early. But I do like to draw my neighbours as well as write about them, so to indulge two of my dreams, I offer my readers, old and new, this illustrated collection of ‘Mountain tails'. Mostly short, a few tall, mostly new, a few classics—to make you smile, chuckle or sniffle, say ‘Oo-oh!', ‘Aha!' or, better still, ‘A-a-ah!'

Come take a walk in my gumboots and meet my neighbours.

A Spotted-tailed Quoll has bred in my big shed for most of the last ten years. She mates and gives birth in the cooler months, which means that by mid-spring the shed is almost unusable, so pungent is the stench of her carnivore's combined nursery, larder and toilet.

By summer she and the kids are a
very
strong presence. I enter only under dire necessity, holding my nose and calling out my credentials and apologies as I go. I should be less sensitive, having plenty of past experience of what a teenage boy's long-worn socks and sneakers, finally removed, can do to a room.

Since she's a threatened species, classed as ‘Vulnerable', I don't mind, even if I do whinge sometimes, as I feel privileged to be able to offer her shelter.

Usually she's seen outside the shed only at night, quite often on my verandah, but very occasionally I see her at dawn or twilight, hurrying across the paddock, looking purposeful. She makes me think of the time-pressed White Rabbit in
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

However, while they do have daily routines, my wild neighbours like to keep me on my toes with occasional flashes of unpredictable behaviour.

One fine autumn day, I was sitting at my desk. On my right the door to the verandah was held wide open with one of the heavy black flat irons which, pre-solar power, I had to heat on the fuel stove for ironing. Low sunlight was streaming across the floorboards, throwing into relief the curving sweeps of the original rough saw cuts, bare-feet-polished smooth over the years. Secondhand, like my windows and doors, which, when we acquired them 30 years ago, were already old and weathered—although back then
I
wasn't!

I should explain that my mud-brick cabin is tiny. Its one main room houses my study, living, dining and kitchen areas, so continuous that it's hard to say where one starts and the other ends. Perfect for one person, and occasionally two, and causing little housework. So my one external door doesn't open into a specific room and I can see into all the main ‘rooms'. Two small sleeping areas and a pantry, tacked onto the back of the original cabin at a later date, and an extended verandah at the front, and that's it. My home. Don't ask about a bathroom—it sets me off—and this tale's not about my goosebumps of a windy winter morning as I brave the outside shower.

The phone rang and I quickly turned from contemplating the floorboards to answer it, as it was almost time for the radio interview arranged with Charles Wooley about my book,
The Woman on the Mountain.
He's in Tasmania, but his radio show goes out to 50 regional stations across Australia.

Clearly a discerning and intelligent man—since he loved the book!—he proved to be warm, funny and empathetic as well. He especially
loved the stories about the quoll, perhaps because she's related to the Tasmanian Devil. When I put the phone down I was still chuckling at his offer to play the quoll in the unlikely event of a TV show of the book.

I made myself a coffee (the non-instant, volcanic way: strong, flat white, one sugar, in case you're curious), taking it back to the desk, where I re-booted my Mac and soon lost myself in the current short-story-in-progress.

Not two hours later, I was still staring at the screen, pondering on the best word to replace a repetition I'd just spotted, when the corner of my right eye detected a movement. I turned my head, and there she was, as boldly reddish-brown and spotty as you please, walking into my kitchen in the middle of the day!

I uttered a small squeal—not the clichéd mouse-sighting kind, just a shocked involuntary ‘What the...!' She looked at me, about-turned, and unhurriedly waddled back to the doorway, her long spotted tail held straight out behind. I got up from the desk and followed her, grabbing my camera as I went.

She hadn't gone far. From the doorway I watched as she jumped into my ‘burnables' bin, only half a metre away at most, on the verandah. It's an open plastic cube, a cut-down 10-litre vinegar container, and she's about the size of a large cat. It wasn't exactly a tight fit but neither did it look comfortable, bent double as she was, tail hanging over the edge. It occurred to me that she wouldn't have put herself in such a vulnerable position if she had considered me any sort of threat.

She fossicked noisily around in the paper and cardboard, then leapt back out on to the verandah with a piece of scrunched-up printer paper. I'd been having trouble with this story for a few days.

I could have told her that version was no good, but it must have smelt of the buttered slice of pumpkin and walnut loaf that had sat on my desk papers at yesterday's morning tea. Butter's
almost
animal, for a
desperate quoll in a vegetarian garbage bin; she should be thankful that I'm not a vegan—yet. Holding the crumpled sheet in her paw, she gave it a thorough licking before abandoning it.

Then she walked at a leisurely pace to the steps, continuing to ignore me, and slipped through the side railings. I followed. On the stone path right next to the steps is a large green cement dish, about 45 millimetres in diameter, its pedestal long broken, so it's a grounded bird bath, still vaguely intended for birds to drink from. It now held brackish rainwater, over soggy leaves fallen from the ornamental grapevine above, which it also trapped in reflection.

As she drank from it, I stood on the adjacent steps and clicked several pictures of her. She didn't blink or deign to look around until she'd drunk her fill. One brief blank stare over her shoulder at me—‘Haven't you got anything better to do with your time?'—and she ambled off to her halfway house, a tin-covered pile of timber, plopping down beside it for a sun soak before entering.

No thought of flight. Or fight, thank goodness, since another common name for this sort of quoll is the Tiger Quoll. Not because she looks like one—she's spotted, not striped—but because she's a fierce and aggressive carnivore with an extremely strong jaw, able to bring down, and more importantly, hold down, a hefty possum or even an animal much larger than herself, like a wallaby.

The Spotted-tailed Quoll is the biggest carnivorous marsupial left on mainland Australia. The Tassie Devil is the biggest overall, but they're in real trouble, with those new and contagious facial tumours that have almost halved their population since 1995. Let's hope a way to stop it is found before the Devil joins the Tasmanian Tiger, the Thylacine, to become mere legend.

My quoll's cousin, the Eastern Quoll, who's smaller and doesn't have spots on her tail, appears to be gone from the mainland now, surviving only in Tasmania. I wish I'd had a shed to offer as refuge when I saw one here, as I'm sure I did, in the '70s.

As happens so often with my wild neighbours, once again my quoll's behaviour had let me know quite plainly that I don't count. I'm not prey—although I'm always glad she's much smaller than I am; I'm not predator—she knows I'm a wussy vegetarian pacifist; and I'm certainly not a potential male partner or a competing female.

I've told her I think male quolls are too boofy-looking for my tastes, with their blunter faces and big raw pink noses that make me envisage them snuffling about in bloody carcasses. But I don't think she has much choice when it comes to mating, which is the only time I have ever heard quolls make vocal sounds.

Once a year, when she has a male visitor in the shed, there's a prolonged and fierce carry-on, with growls and hisses that don't sound very loving. I've read that the females often get badly bitten during the process, which can last up to eight hours. I bet she's pleased he doesn't stay around or ask to move in: male quolls are clearly only bearable as one-night stands.

I'd said to Charles W. that my quoll had been pushing the boundaries of her/my territory, taking over my verandah as well as the shed. She ensures I know it by leaving her curled and fur-filled droppings there for me to avoid each morning. Now it looks like she has designs on the interior of the cabin as well.

Checking out my larder? She'd be disappointed in its totally fleshless contents, but if she worked out how to open the little 24-volt refrigerator, the size used in caravans, and easily within her height's reach, she'd find cheese, and I know she eats that.

Anything smelly is her preference, but I always at least stock a wedge of Parmesan or Romano, a large tub of fetta and a block of the driest matured cheddar I can find amongst the non-fancy cheap range, so I'm sure they'd do. She'd like it when my Tasmanian friend and webmaster, Fred, sends me a double treat: a postbox of books, the space around them packed with wonderful Tassie cheeses like washed rind and aged blue, all loudly announcing their ripeness by
the time they arrive. The post office probably wonders why anyone would send me dirty socks.

I no longer put the wrappers of such treats in the garbage, but lay them face up on the verandah for her. I hope that will keep her happy, or entice her back, as this summer she seems to have been off on holiday. Quolls are strong and clever; deservedly top of the food chain here, apart from introduced species like dogs and humans. It wouldn't surprise me in the least if she could master a fridge door.

I obviously need to think about how to mark my territory better.

And thank you, yes, I've had
that
suggestion and I don't fancy it. Primitive though adequate my sanitary arrangements may be, with a ‘long drop' pit toilet, but I draw the line at
that.