The Killer Koala

By Kenneth Cook

Humorous Australian bush stories

Dedication

For Stuart Littlemore, barrister-at-law nonpareil

THE KILLER KOALA

By Kenneth Cook

Tortoiseshell Press

First published in 1986 by

Tortoiseshell Press

Suite 221, Wingello House

1-12 Angel Place, Sydney, NSW 2000

AUSTRALIA

Telephone (02) 221 1846

Reprinted 1986

©Kenneth Cook 1986

Design/Art by Ken Gilroy

Photography by Robbi Newman

Edited by Jacqueline Kent

Cover illustrations by Patrick Cook

Additional illustrations by Ken Gilroy

Typography by Dova Typesetting and Beagle Pty. Ltd.

Printed in Australia by Globe Press Pty. Ltd.

ISBN 0 947 063 00 5

All rights reserved. This book or parts thereof

cannot be published without the express

permission of the publisher.

Distributed by Gordon and Gotch

(Australia) Ltd., Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane,

Perth, Adelaide, Launceston.

Sincere thanks to the Koala Park Sanctuary

at West Pennant Hills NSW

Contents:

Snakes and Alcohol

Crocodiles and Sex

The Killer Koala

One Hundred Stubbies

Vic the Snake Man

Liquid Assets

A Couple of Interesting Specimens

Camel Rides: Five Dollars

Cedric the Cat

The Very Angry Pig

Black Gold

The Dog who Loved Animals

The Mad Miner

Reef Encounter

Six Taipans

Snakes and Alcohol

'There's two things that don't mix,' said Blackie slowly and pompously, 'snakes and alcohol.'

It would never have occurred to me to mix them but I nodded solemnly. Nod solemnly is pretty well all you do when you're talking to a snake man because they never actually converse — they just tell you things about snakes.

Blackie was a travelling snake man. He travelled in a huge pantechnicon which had wooden covers on the sides. Whenever he found a paying audience—a school or a tourist centre—he would drop the wooden covers and reveal a glass-walled box the size of a large room. This was his snake house, inhabited by a hundred or so snakes ranging from the deadly taipans and browns to the harmless tree snakes.

Blackie was like all the snake men I've ever met—cadaverously thin, very dirty, extremely shabby and he didn't have a second name. I think he was called Blackie because of his fondness for black snakes, or perhaps because his eyes were jet black—he had the only eyes I've seen that were black. He looked as though his enormous pupils had supplanted his irises, but if you looked closely you could see the faint outline of the black pupils inside them. I tended to feel uncomfortable looking into those two round patches of black and the suffused and bloodshot eyes (all snake men have suffused and bloodshot eyes—I think it's because snakes bite them so often).

I met Blackie just north of Mackay in Queensland where we were both camping on a little known beach named Macka's Mistake; I don't know why it's named that.

I was trying to finish a novel and Blackie was doing something complicated with the airconditioning of his pantechnicon, so we were thrown together for about a fortnight and became firm friends.

Blackie was so good and confident with snakes that he imbued me with much of his own attitude. I would often go into his snake house, sit on a log and talk to him while lethal reptiles regarded us torpidly within striking distance, or slid gracefully and slowly away from the smell of our tobacco smoke.

Now and then a black, brown or green snake would slide softly past my foot and Blackie would say, 'Just sit there and don't move. It won't bite you if you don't move.' I wouldn't move and the snake wouldn't bite me. So, after a time, I became more or less relaxed with the snakes, provided Blackie was there.

Nothing would have induced me to go into the snake cage without Blackie, but I was convinced he could actually talk to the things, or at any rate communicate with them in some way which both he and they understood. It seemed to me at times fancifully possible that Blackie might have some drops of snake blood in his veins. Or perhaps the venom he had absorbed made him somehow simpatico with the creatures. Mind you, I did notice that the snakes had black eyes too, and that made me wonder.

There was only one other camper at Macka's beach, Alan Roberts, a fat and friendly little photographer who had set up a tent and was making a study of seabirds. He, Blackie and I would usually meet in my campervan for drinks in the evening.

Only the previous night, Blackie had been expounding to me and Alan the dangers of mixing alcohol and snakes. Of course, this took place over a bottle of whisky and I was considerably disconcerted when I called on him in the morning to find him unconscious in his own snake house, two empty whisky bottles by his side and his body festooned with deadly snakes.

The snakes were lying quite still, apparently enjoying the warmth of Blackie's motionless body. I assumed he was alive because of the snores that shook the glass windows of the snake house. But I had no idea whether he had been bitten and was in a coma, or had simply drunk himself insensible, or both.

The snakes resting on Blackie were, as far as I could make out: one taipan (absolutely deadly) two king browns (almost as deadly) a death adder (very deadly) three black snakes (deadly) and one diamond snake (harmless).

My first impulse was to run screaming for help, but there was nobody in sight, and if Blackie jerked or turned in his drunken or moribund torpor, at least seven deadly snakes would probably sink their fangs into him simultaneously. Then, no doubt, the other eighty or ninety variably venomous snakes would stop lying peacefully round the snake house and join the fray. Blackie's chances of survival would be slight.

I knew the snake house door did not lock. Normally when not in use it was covered by a wooden shutter, so I knew I could get in. But did I want to?

I didn't consider that in his present state Blackie would be able to provide his normal protection against snakes. Going in with Blackie like this would be worse than going in alone. A treacherous voice within me whispered that it would be better to run away and let Blackie wake up naturally. The snakes were used to him and he would probably instinctively act in the proper way with them.

Sadly, the treacherous voice wasn't convincing. Besides, I didn't know whether Blackie had already been bitten and needed medical help urgently.

I looked around for a weapon. Under the pantechnicon I saw a rake that Blackie used for clearing his snake house. I picked it up and cautiously and very slowly opened the door. There were several snakes between me and Blackie and I wasn't sure of their species. They all looked lethal. I poked at them gently with the rake and all of them, except one, resentfully slithered off to the other side of the snake house with no apparent intention except of going back to sleep. The one, a big king brown, raised itself on its coils and began hissing, throwing its head back to strike. I knew enough about snakes now to know that as long as I stayed the length of the snake's body away from its fangs, they couldn't touch me. Equally I knew that if I tried to pass this snake to get at Blackie, it could get to me.

I poked at it with the rake again and it struck, its fangs making a tiny ringing sound against the iron prongs. Blackie had told me that this sort of thing was bad for a snake's fangs. I didn't care. I poked at it again and it sank to the ground, wriggled over to Blackie, worked its way onto his back, then coiled again and began looking at me threateningly. It seemed much more agitated than before; no doubt its teeth hurt. The snakes already using Blackie as a mattress stirred fitfully, but didn't go anywhere.

A black snake detached itself from a group near the wall and came towards me. I banged it with the rake and it retired, probably mortally hurt. Again, I didn't care.

The king brown was hissing like a leaking steam pipe and the death adder appeared to dislike this. It made its way off, taking a path over Blackie's motionless head. There were still eight snakes on Blackie, seven of which were deadly.

I pushed tentatively at the king brown and it reared back, but didn't strike again. The movement disturbed the diamond snake and it went off to a quieter place. But that wasn't any real advantage as it was harmless anyway.

A couple more black snakes started circling the walls and I remembered that the door behind me was open. There was a reasonable chance that within minutes the population of the snake house would be ravening around Macka's Mistake beach. I preferred they should escape rather than remain in the snake house with me, but I didn't want them waiting just outside when, if ever, I managed to drag Blackie through the door. I banged the rake on the floor in front of them. They stopped, considered this phenomenon, then retreated. I went back and pushed the door almost to.

What was Blackie's great maxim about snakes? Handle them very gently and slowly and they'll never bite you. I eyed the waving, hissing, tongue-flicking king brown on Blackie's back and decided I didn't believe this. Possibly if this king brown would just vacate Blackie's back I might be able to prod the rest away, gently and slowly.

However, the king brown showed no inclination to move and it was so angry now I felt that if Blackie so much as twitched an ear it would have him. I was sweating with terror and the rake handle was slippery in my grasp. The tension in my body was so great I knew that if I didn't solve this quickly I would collapse or run weeping from the snake house.

The devil with treating snakes slowly and gently, I thought; you can also treat them quickly and violently. I swung the rake at the weaving king brown with every intention of decapitating it if possible. It ducked. The rake missed. The snake struck. It became entangled with the prongs and I was holding the rake in the air with the king brown on the end of it.

It sorted itself out quickly, coiled itself around the handle of the rake and began moving towards my hands. Convulsively I flung the rake away. It fell flat on Blackie's body, stirring the current inhabitants into a frenzy.

Fortunately, they all seemed to think they were being attacked by other snakes. They whipped up onto their coils and began threatening each other. Then, presumably trying for more advantageous positions, they all slipped off Blackie and began retreating towards the walls. Only one, the taipan, came near me.

All I could do was try the standard procedure of not moving and hope it would not notice that I was trembling uncontrollably. It went past and took up a position near the door.

Blackie was clear of snakes for the moment. He still hadn't moved. But now it seemed safe to try to wake him.

'Blackie!' I screamed and prodded him with my foot. He didn't stir. 'Blackie!' I screamed again and kicked him hard in the ribs. He still didn't stir.

All the snakes were awake and active now, but inclined to stay near the walls. The only immediate problem was the taipan against the almost-closed door. Obviously there was no chance of rousing Blackie, so I leaned down and grabbed him by the shoulders. He half turned and belched.

The alcohol-loaded gust of breath was the only thing I have ever encountered to approach a camel's breath for sheer noxiousness. The rake was still across Blackie's back. I grabbed it with one hand and grabbed him by the collar with the other.

The collar came away in my hand. I grabbed him by his sparse hair, but there wasn't enough of it to get a good hold. I grabbed him by the back of his shirt. A great patch of it came away, revealing a bony, dirty yellow back. There was not much left to grab him by, so I took him by the hand and began hauling. Fortunately the hand held together.

Blackie was no great weight and I began inching him across the floor, brandishing the rake at the taipan guarding the door and desperately aware of the sea of serpents to my right and left and behind me.

A carpet snake, quite harmless, wriggled within a handspan of my right foot and I hit it with the rake out of sheer spite. I was close to the door, just out of range of the taipan, which showed no sign of moving. I pushed at it with the rake but it ducked disdainfully and stayed where it was, weaving slowly and keeping its evil eyes fixed, I was sure, on my bare, exposed and palpitating throat.

I was desperately tempted to throw Blackie at the taipan and probably would have done, except that it's hard to throw a man anywhere when you've only got him by the hand.

I had, of course, been bellowing my head off for help for some minutes now and it came in the form of Alan Roberts, the photographer who, seeing through the plate glass what was happening, gallantly flung open the door to come to my help.

The violently pushed door caught the taipan fair in the back of the neck and squashed it against the wall. I went through the door, hauling Blackie after me.

'What the bloody hell . . .?' Alan was saying.

Blackie had somehow stuck on the steps of the snake house. The taipan, apparently undamaged by the door, was very close to his exposed ankle, which it was inspecting curiously. The other snakes were mercifully milling some distance away, hissing among themselves.

'Help me get him out!' I gasped. Alan went through my routine of trying to grab Blackie by the collar, hair and back of shirt and ended up with handfuls of collar, hair and shirt before he grabbed Blackie's other hand. Together we hauled him through the door and slammed it in the face of the taipan, which seemed anxious to follow.

Blackie folded into a grubby heap on the ground and I leant against the glass and tried to start breathing, which I had apparently stopped doing some time before.

'Has he been bitten?' said Alan.

'I don't know,' I croaked. 'Get an ambulance.'

Alan, a competent man who was not about to ask foolish questions, turned to go. Blackie jackknifed to his feet, opened the door of the snake house and tried to go back in.

Alan and I grabbed him by the shoulders and slammed the door.

'Blackie!' shouted Alan. 'What's wrong with you?'

Blackie, immobilised, stared at the closed door bemusedly.

'He's very drunk,' I said. I don't know whether he's been bitten or not.' I was beginning to doubt it. I didn't think people came out of snake poison comas quite so abruptly. If he was out of a coma.

'Blackie,' I said, 'are you awake? Has a snake bitten you?'

Blackie started to turn around, so we let him go. He stared at each of us in turn as though he was trying to work out who we were.

'Blackie,' I said again, 'has a snake bitten you?'

Blackie focused on me and said disdainfully, 'Snakes don't bite me.'

'I think he's just drunk,' I said quietly to Alan, and then to Blackie, 'better come up to my campervan and lie down for a while, Blackie.'

'Sure,' said Blackie, 'just lie down in here.' And he turned and tried to get in with the snakes again. Alan and I grabbed him.

'Come on, Blackie, come up to the van and have a sleep.'

But Blackie had looked through the plate glass and seen his beloved snakes rushing backwards and forwards or coiled and waving and hissing.

'Something's wrong with my snakes!' he roared, and began to struggle with us to get free.

'Blackie, Blackie,' said Alan, 'take it easy. You've had a few drinks.'

' 'Course I've had a few drinks,' said Blackie. 'Can't a man have a few drinks?'

'Of course you can, Blackie,' I said soothingly, 'but you were passed out with snakes all over you. We just hauled you out.'

Blackie looked at me closely. 'So that's why my snakes are all upset,' he said.

'That's right, Blackie.'

Blackie thought about that. 'Ah well,' he said after a while, 'I suppose you meant no harm. Don't do it again, though.'

And the wretched man pulled away and tried to get in the door again. Alan and I could hold him easily, but we weren't prepared to do it indefinitely.

'Now listen, Blackie,' I said firmly, 'just come over to my van and have a few hours' sleep and you can come back to your snakes.'

'I'm going back to my snakes now,' said Blackie. 'Get your hands off me.'

We let him go, but Alan slipped between him and the door. Blackie considered this new problem.

'I'm going in there,' he said quietly and threateningly.

'Calm down, Blackie,' said Alan reasonably.

Blackie took a wild and ineffectual swipe at him. Alan and I looked at each other helplessly. I mouthed the word 'Police?' behind Blackie's back and Alan nodded regretfully.

'Can you keep him out of there?' I asked.

'Yes,' said Alan confidently. I thought he could, too; Blackie was far too drunk to put up much of a fight.

The trouble was I didn't know where the nearest telephone was. As far as I knew I might have to go into Mackay, eighty kilometres away.

I drove at incredible speed down to the highway and was delighted to see a police patrol car go past at the junction of the roads. I sped after it with my hand on the horn and it stopped. I leaped out of my van and ran to the police car. Two solemn Queensland policemen, both fat, redfaced, without humour, eternally middle-aged, looked at me expressionlessly.

'I wonder, would you follow me?' I said breathlessly. 'I've got a friend who's very drunk who wants to sleep with his snakes.'

There was a long pause.

'What?' said the two policemen eventually, simultaneously.

'I've got a friend who's very drunk who wants to sleep with his snakes,' I said again, but this time I could hear my own words.

There was another long pause.

'Could you explain a bit more, sir?' said the driver policeman. Even then I could wonder at the talent of policemen for using the word 'sir' as an insult.

'Oh the hell with it, it's too difficult to explain. Just follow me, will you? It's urgent.'

I thought they probably would follow me, if not necessarily for the reason I wanted them to. I was right. They did and we arrived back at Macka's Mistake to find Blackie pinned to the ground with Alan Roberts kneeling on his shoulders. The snake house was still a whirl of activity. Blackie was shouting obscenities with considerable eloquence.

I don't say the policemen put their hands on their guns, but they looked as though they might any minute.

It was all too difficult to explain, so I just gestured at the strange tableau of Blackie and Alan in front of the snake house.

'What seems to be the problem?' said one of the policemen.

Blackie stopped shouting when he saw the uniforms. Alan let him go and he stood up, stared for a moment then looked reproachfully and unbelievingly at me. 'You called the cops,' he accused.

'What is all this?' said the policeman.

Blackie saved the necessity for an explanation by feebly trying to punch the policeman's nose. They took him off to Mackay and charged him with being drunk and disorderly.

Alan and I waited through the day until we felt he must be reasonably sober and then went down and bailed him out.

Blackie was silent until halfway through the journey back when he suddenly and tearfully asked, 'How could you do this to me?'

Alan and I explained the sequence of events to him.

'Is that true?' he said.

'Perfectly true, Blackie. We had to do it.'

'I can see that. Funny, I don't remember any of it.'

I tactfully made no reference to the two empty bottles of whisky.

'I'm really sorry,' Blackie said. 'Just goes to show, though—snakes and alcohol don't mix.'

Crocodiles and Sex

There are many phenomena in Nature for which I am grateful, but the strangest is that the sex life of a crocodile is exhausting.

I discovered this on a trip up the East Alligator River, which runs along the border of Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory. I had been lured there by Roger Huntingdon, a lecturer in one of the natural sciences at Sydney University. He had obtained a grant to study the great estuarine crocodiles that inhabit the coastline of northern Australia and he invited me to go with him. I had some passing acquaintance with crocodiles, but only the freshwater type, except for one salt water fellow I encountered in distressing circumstances after he was dead. Roger's offer sounded interesting, so I went along.

Roger was a slight, bushy-haired, bearded little man of about forty. He had very bright intelligent eyes and a large hooked nose. He looked somewhat like a bearded parrot—a likeness enhanced by his habit of wearing very bright floral shirts. He also had a high-pitched, chirpy voice and was rather excitable. Nevertheless, he was a very engaging and informative travelling companion.

He didn't take up much room in the boat, which was just as well, because I did—some call me obese but I think of myself as stout, say, a hundred kilograms—and we were carrying all sorts of radio gear designed to be clipped to the heads of co-operating crocodiles so that we could follow their movements. We also had a lot of nets and ropes with which to capture and tie up crocodiles with the help of bands of Aborigines whom we were to hire as required. There was also half a tonne or so of food and liquor and on the whole we were pretty low in the water.

It all seemed great fun as we puttered down the Alligator, through the petals of the wild frangipanni floating on the blue-green-brown surface, under the eyes of the dingo and buffalo on the escarpment.

Roger was passionate about crocodiles and bewailed the fact that until a few years before they had been hunted relentlessly for their hides. Fortunately, it seemed, they had been declared an endangered species and heavy fines had been imposed on people guilty of killing them. Their numbers had begun to rise and there were increasing reports of their taking cattle and Aborigines.

'Even two white truck drivers over near Broome,' Roger said brightly. 'They were sleeping by their truck and all that was found was the marks they'd made clawing the ground as they were dragged into the water. It was almost certainly a giant crocodile that got them.'

'Of course,' he added soberly, 'it's hard luck for the people involved, but it's encouraging to think the crocodile is on the increase up here.'

Enthusiasts are different from other people. Not better or worse, just different.

We had only been travelling a couple of hours when Roger spotted a likely place to find estuarine crocodiles. It was a gap in the cliff face of the escarpment which seemed to lead into a small lagoon.

'It's the sort of place they like for mating,' said Roger as he steered for the gap.

'Shouldn't we hire bands of Aborigines before we go chasing crocodiles?' I asked mildly. After all, Roger was the crocodile expert and no doubt he knew what he was doing.

'Might as well locate the crocodiles before we spend money,' replied Roger, reasonably enough, I thought at the time.

We went through the gap in the cliff. The water was very shallow at first, barely knee-deep, but then it fell away into black unguessable depths. We found ourselves in a backwater as big as a football field surrounded by high, sheer cliffs. There was one small beach area and, sure enough, on it was a large crocodile—about three metres long.

'Lovely! What luck,' said Roger as the creature slid quickly into the water. 'That's a nice female. Means the bull is almost sure to be here.'

I uncertainly eyed the black water and the meagre freeboard of our vessel and wondered whether the luck wasn't just a shade mixed.

'Well, now,' I said stoutly, 'off to get the band of stalwart Aborigines, eh?'

'I just want to look at that beach,' said Roger. 'There should be tracks on it that'll tell me what's in here.'

I looked again at the black water. Then I reached into my personal gear and took out my automatic shotgun.

'You won't need that,' said Roger impatiently. 'Besides, it's illegal to shoot crocodiles.'

'I'll just keep it as a security blanket,' I answered, checking the magazine to make sure the gun was loaded.

Roger ran the boat up onto the little beach and we stood up and studied the sand. It was covered with tracks which consisted of long shallow troughs made by crocodile tails with footmarks on either side.

'By jove, there's at least four females here,' said Roger enthusiastically. And you can see how big the bull must be.' He pointed at a couple of tracks made up of much bigger troughs and footmarks than the others. 'He could be six or seven metres long.'

'Well, a few Aborigines and on with the job, eh?' I fiddled with my gun.

'No hurry,' said Roger. 'You see, what happens is that the bull finds place like this and then waits until females come past. When one does, he forces it in here and keeps it here. By the time the mating season's over he might have eight or ten females penned up.'

'So what's he doing now—waiting on the bottom looking at us?'

'No, I shouldn't think so,' said Roger. 'He's probably out in the main stream waiting for another female.'

'Why do you say that?'

'Well, if he was in here he would probably have made his presence felt. Bulls tend to be a bit aggressive in the mating season.'

I thought for a moment. 'Roger,' I said very clearly, 'in view of the fact that we are in a very small, grossly overloaded boat, surrounded by cliffs a lizard couldn't climb, in a lagoon infested with female crocodiles, with a sex-mad bull about to return in a moment—in view of all that, don't you think it's time to get the bloody hell out of here?'

Roger looked at me, frowning. 'You know, you could be right,' he said. 'It could be quite dangerous in here.' So to my great relief we pushed the boat off the sand and headed for the gap leading back to the river.

'But what a find!' Roger was saying. 'We'll get back here with some helpers and net the whole place . . .'

We were almost at the entrance to the lagoon when it seemed to blow up in our faces. Great spurts of water rose high in the air. Vast clouds of spray swept across us. Small waves perilously rocked our boat. Strange black shapes were writhing in the watery turmoil ahead and there was a succession of mind-shattering bellows of such force and ferocity that they seemed to come from a creature not of this earth.

Roger turned the boat around, which was the only thing to do, because a battleship would have hesitated to sail through that maelstrom.

'What the hell?' I said, although I had a pretty good idea.

'Crocodiles mating,' said Roger excitedly. 'He's just caught a new one and he's breaking her in. He needs that shallow water in the entrance for that.'

Roger stopped the boat in the middle of the lagoon and we looked back at the watery love nest. You couldn't see much except vast volumes of water splashing up from the surface. It was as though somebody had plunged a huge kitchen mixer into the entrance to the lagoon and turned it on. The only evidence of crocodile was the occasional glimpse of a huge black shape flailing away. They were obviously at it hammer and tongs.

Roger was rummaging in his gear for a camera. 'Oh, what luck, what luck!' he was chirruping. 'I don't think anyone's seen this before—not in Australia.'

'How long do they take?' I said practically.

'I don't know,' said Roger happily. 'That's the point—we'll find out.'

'I mean, does it take minutes, or half an hour, or what?'

Roger was clicking away with his camera. 'I just don't know. Lots of animals couple for an hour or more.'

A terrible bellow rolled over the lagoon, rebounding off the cliff walls.

'The tape recorder,' muttered Roger. 'Where did I pack the tape recorder?'

'Roger,' I said gently, 'how do you propose to get us out of here?'

'We couldn't possibly go before they finish. We have to photograph what we can, and record it. It's a most brilliant stroke of luck,' he said.

'Roger,' I said, with a great effort keeping my voice low and level, 'we couldn't possibly go anyway. Nothing could get through that storm of reptilian frenzy and I at least can't climb those bloody cliffs.'

Roger, realising at last that I was genuinely disturbed, stopped fiddling with his tape recorder and stared at me with his bright bird eyes. 'You're not nervous, are you?'

I was standing in the stern clutching my shotgun to my breast, my ample flesh shaking with fear. 'Nervous? I'm bloody terrified!'

Roger contemplated me quietly, then shook his head regretfully. 'Well, that's hard luck,' he said, 'but we can't get out of here anyway, so we may as well enjoy it and learn what we can.' And he turned back to his recorder. As I said, enthusiasts are different from other people.

'Roger,' I said, 'don't you think we should at least get up on the beach? I mean, if those bloody things get any more passionate the waves will swamp us, quite apart from what will happen if they come this way.'

This made sense to Roger and, after taking a few more pictures and recording a few minutes of bellowing and splashing, he took the boat onto the beach.

At my insistence we dragged it up almost to the cliff face.

'Why?' asked Roger.

'So we can get behind it if the crocs feel like joining us on the beach.'

'That's not very likely,' said Roger. 'Still, I suppose it's a reasonable precaution.'

So we squatted behind the boat under the blue, hot, northern winter sky, me clutching my shotgun and Roger clicking his camera while the crocodiles kept at it enthusiastically. At least they'd need a sleep after this, I thought.

'What's all the fuss about?' I asked Roger. 'I wouldn't think either of them was enjoying it much.'

'No,' said Roger, lapsing into a pedantic style of speech. 'The female crocodile is seemingly very reluctant to mate. The male has to force her and she fights every inch of the way. It's probably some natural selection process whereby only the biggest and strongest males get to fertilise the female. In effect, crocodile copulation is straight-out rape.'

There was a quick succession of even-louder-than-usual bellows from the mating site. I thought the bull may have achieved his end or else the female had discouraged him forcibly. Either had happened, because the water suddenly became quite still.

'Now, I wonder where he'll go?' mused Roger.

He didn't have to wonder long. The thing emerged from the water thirty metres from where we squatted. It was enormous. At first we saw only the head, mottled black and brown, wet and gleaming in the sunlight, uncannily evil eyes peering remorselessly at me, vast teeth just visible under the rubbery lips, black nostrils seeking the scent of blood. Slowly the short stumpy forelegs appeared, hauling the rest of the wide scaly mass clear of the water. It just kept coming out. Metre after metre of lethal crocodile. It must have been eight or nine metres long.

'What a beauty,' breathed Roger.

I slipped the safety catch off my shotgun.

Roger grabbed my arm. 'Hey,' he said, 'that's a protected species.'

'So am I,' I replied shortly.

'But he's not hurting us,' said Roger.

'No, but he doesn't look friendly.'

'I positively forbid you to shoot,' said Roger severely.

He needn't have worried; I wasn't going to. A 12-gauge shotgun would kill a dinosaur a metre away, but our crocodile was twenty metres away and the shot would be as damaging to his scaly hide as a handful of dried peas. I had brought the gun in case it was needed in the boat when the range would be point blank. Here I would have to wait until the creature's breath was stirring my hair.

'I don't think he's necessarily going to charge us,' said Roger, whose voice had unaccountably dropped to a whisper.

As though confirming Roger's thoughts, the crocodile sank onto its belly with a great sigh of repletion and lay still on the sand. So it wasn't a case of bed to board, or not immediately, anyway.

'There, we'd better go now,' said Roger.

I was fast losing my respect for experts. The beach was very narrow. To drag the boat out, we would have to go within spitting distance of the crocodile. Even if I'd had the spitting talents of a llama I wasn't going that close.

'Listen, Roger,' I said, 'I suggest I fire a shot over his head to see if I can get him to go away.'

Roger considered this with his head on one side, like a parrot contemplating an unusual seed. 'Yes,' he said at last, 'crocodiles aren't sensitive creatures. You wouldn't shock him too much. But make sure you don't hit him.'

I pulled the trigger.

The sound in that rock-walled canyon was mind-destroying, and the echoes rocketed backwards and forwards for seconds. The crocodile didn't move. It didn't even blink.

'I think it's gone to sleep,' said Roger. 'We'll be able to get past it.'

'Roger,' I said, 'can those things move fast on land?'

'Oh, yes, very fast, for short distances.'

'Well, we'd only be a short distance from it.'

'Yes, I see your point,' said Roger petulantly. 'Then there's nothing to do except wait until it goes away.'

He began taking pictures of the crocodile.

'Roger,' I said, and I was whispering now, 'I suggest I fire a shot into that animal's body.'

'Oh, no!' Roger was horrified. 'You mustn't.'

'Roger, at this distance buckshot will hardly sting an animal that's draped with the equivalent of armour plate, but it might make him move far enough away for us to get out of here.'

'No,' said Roger firmly. 'I absolutely forbid it.'

'You might forbid it, Roger, but I am a free agent and I am going to do it.'

'It's against the law!'

'I am prepared to act criminally in the circumstances.'

'I will report you to the authorities.'

'Report away, Roger, but block your ears now.'

'I want it noted that I object strongly to this course of action.'

'Noted,' I said, aimed and fired.

Smitten by the full blast of 12-gauge pellets on its side, I won't say the crocodile merely raised a laconic eyebrow, but it gave that impression. However, it did lumber to its feet and ponderously waddle over to the far side of the beach where it subsided quietly again.

'I believe you have mortally wounded it,' said Roger.

'I hope so, but I doubt I've even scratched it,' I said testily. I was almost as weary of crocodile experts as I was of crocodiles.

'So what do you propose to do now?'

'If we go down the far side of the beach we wouldn't have to go within forty metres of that beast. How fast can it cover forty metres?'

'I don't really know,' said Roger, intrigued by scientific speculation. 'I imagine he'd be slowing down at the end of it. It'd be fascinating to see.' I was getting even wearier of crocodile experts.

We dragged the boat to within five metres of the water before the crocodile began to charge.

It was indeed a fascinating sight. It seemed to jack itself quite high in the air on its stumpy legs and raced across the sand like a lizard.

I dropped my hold on the boat and grabbed the shotgun.

Roger dropped his hold on the boat and grabbed his camera.

He stood squarely in front of me, clicking away at that charging mass of primeval ferocity—quite prepared to die to get the world's first front-on picture of a charging crocodile.

I wasn't. I moved to one side and started shooting.

'Stop! Stop! You'll hurt it!' screamed Roger.

The crocodile, racing through a hail of pellets, looked singularly unhurt.

I kept firing. I had plenty of cartridges in the magazine, more than I would have time to use.

I suppose the crocodile's charge lasted mere seconds, but they were the sort of seconds that seem an hour long and I was actually aware of the clicking of Roger's camera, the rushing sound of the crocodile's claws on the sand, even through the deafening, repeated blasts of the shotgun I could hear Roger screaming all the time, 'Stop! Stop! It's a protected species!'

The shotgun pellets must have started to take effect when the crocodile was almost on us, because he abruptly stopped and rose onto his hind legs, towering far above us, a horrifying spectacle, and let loose a terrible bellow.

Bloody Roger walked two steps forward to get a close-up and stood directly between me and the crocodile.

I had three choices. I could shoot Roger out of the way so I could get a clear shot at the crocodile. (Most attractive.) I could stun Roger with the shotgun so I could get a clear shot of the crocodile. (Too tame, considering.) I could throw down the gun and run screaming. (Most likely.)

I dithered. Roger took some more photographs. The crocodile bellowed a few more times. It did not seem a situation that would solve itself.

Suddenly Roger turned his back on that towering, raucous, evil mass of armour and teeth and began walking towards the boat.

'Come on,' he said, 'I've finished the roll.'

I walked backwards after him, finger on the trigger. The crocodile went on posturing for a while, then sank to the ground and seemed to go to sleep.

'You needn't have worried,' said Roger as we motored out of the lagoon. 'It's most unlikely a crocodile will really go through with an attack just after mating. He's far too tired, you see.'

I rapidly developed an indisposition that forced me to leave the expedition before we had any more encounters with crocodiles.

The Killer Koala

I do not like koalas. They are nasty, cross, stupid creatures without a friendly bone in their bodies. Their social habits are appalling—the males are always beating their fellows up and stealing their females. They have disgusting defensive mechanisms. Lice infest their fur. They snore. Their resemblance to cuddly toys is a base deceit. There is nothing to commend them.

On top of all that, a koala once tried to do me a very nasty mischief.

A small island named Kudulana about ten kilometres off the coast of Tasmania used to maintain a large population of koalas. Then somebody introduced sheep to the island, cleared too many trees, and suddenly there weren't enough of the right sort of gum leaves and the koalas were in danger of dying out.

A National Parks and Wildlife field officer named Mary Anne Locher was appointed to the task of rounding up the koalas and shipping them to greener pastures on the mainland. She invited me to help her, and on the grounds that there is a story in everything, I accepted.

Mary Anne Locher was rather like a koala herself in appearance. She was short, fat and round and had fluffy brown hair which she wore quite short, and her ears stuck out through it. I suppose she was about fifty at the time, a little older than I.

She always wore brown overalls and these, aided by the effect of her button nose and bright brown eyes, increased her similarity to a koala. Her voice was soft and slightly sibilant and she gave the impression that if you poked her tummy she would squeak. Unlike a koala, she was very pleasant and gentle.

At that stage I was not as corpulent as I am now, but nevertheless I was a well-fleshed man. That is to say, I could tie up my own shoelaces without much difficulty, but I was not athletic.

The unkind might have thought that Mary Anne and I were a slightly comical-looking pair as we left the ferry at Kudulana, one tall and round and bearded, the other short and round and fluffy-haired, each carrying a large, long-handled net and wearing identical brown overalls, for I had borrowed a departmental pair to wear on the job. As the ferry driver unloaded the wooden slatted cages that were to hold our catch, he went so far as to suggest that our task would be made easy because the koalas would fall out of the trees laughing.

To catch a koala, all you do is startle it so that it jumps or falls off its branch, and then you entrap it in your net. At any rate that's what Mary Anne told me. She didn't mention that it only works with co-operative koalas.

We stacked our gear, camping equipment, medical kit and the cages near the wharf and went koala hunting.

The trees on Kudulana are all very small and spindly and we had no trouble locating the koalas. There were only twelve, and they were in a grove of eucalypts around a large deep pool surrounded by ferns. They were all nestled in forked branches at the tops of the trees. But the trees were only three or four metres high, so the koalas were well within reach of our long-handled nets.

All Mary Anne and I had to do was get them loose, catch them in our nets, then transfer them to the wooden-slatted cages. In theory.

The koalas, furry balls with their heads tucked into their stomachs, didn't seem remotely interested in our presence.

'OK, we'll try that fellow first,' said Mary Anne briskly, pointing to a largeish koala nestling in a fork not much higher than I could reach. 'You frighten him and I'll catch him.'

She raised her net so that the mouth was just under the koala and stood poised, waiting to see which way the koala would jump. I held my net ready as a backup.

The koala seemed to be asleep, and I wondered for the first time just how one went about startling such a lethargic creature.

'Should I poke it with my net?' I asked Mary Anne.

'No, that'll just make it hang on. Shout.'

I had no idea in what terms one shouted at koalas, but I did my best.

'Boo!' I cried.

The koala didn't stir.

'Boo! Boo!' I shouted, as loudly as I could.

The koala opened one eye. Surprisingly, it was bloodshot. It looked at me for a long level moment, then wearily closed its eye again.

'It doesn't startle easily,' I said.

'No,' said Mary Anne. 'Try shaking the tree.'

I laid down my net, grasped the tree—which was very slender, no more than a sapling, really—and shook it violently.

The koala opened both its red-rimmed eyes and looked down on me malevolently. Then it applied a defensive device common to most arboreal marsupials. My hair, beard, face and shoulders were drenched with foully acrid fluid.

'Oh, sorry,' said Mary Anne, 'I should have warned you about that.'

I did my best with a handkerchief while the koala, apparently satisfied with its work, closed its eyes and went back to sleep.

'Why don't we push the bloody thing off the branch with our nets and catch it on the ground?' I said when I was more or less dry, but still smelling vile.

'You can't dislodge a koala once it's got a hold on something. They've got a grip of iron.'

'Well, what are we going to do? Nothing short of a bomb is going to startle that creature.'

Mary Anne thought. 'Could you climb that tree?'

I looked at the tree. It wasn't very big, but it would hold my weight and the koala wasn't far up.

'Yes,' I said, 'I think so.'

'Then go up and shout in its ear. Don't touch it. It'll probably jump when you get near.'

With considerable effort I hauled myself to the base of the branch in which the koala was snuggling. I wasn't much more than my own height above the ground, and I could have reached out and touched the koala, which was not far from my head. I kept my head carefully away from the little beast.

'Boo!' I shouted.

The koala took no notice. I edged closer along the branch.

The branch broke. Branch, koala and I dropped abruptly into the thick ferns below.

The koala landed on its back. I landed spreadeagled on the koala. The koala was out of sight beneath my considerable bulk, but I knew it was there because it was growling and snorting and trying to dig its way to freedom through my yielding flesh.

It was an extraordinary experience—down in those ferns, winded, able to see nothing but fern fronds, half-stunned so that I couldn't co-ordinate myself, with that hard-muscled, surprisingly large fur-covered length of malevolence trying to disembowel me.

Where the hell was Mary Anne?

In fact she was running around to the other side of the patch of ferns to catch the koala when it came out.

Now, koalas have another protective device, apart from the one they use on you from a great height. They cling to the belly of their oppressor and simply hang on with tooth and claw. It's a mechanism probably designed to work on dingoes. Once the koala is clinging to the dog's underside, the dog can't get at it with its jaws. I gather that in these circumstances the koala is quite prepared to hang on until the dingo collapses.

I didn't know this at the time. It wouldn't have helped if I had.

The koala evidently gave up all hope of escape and decided on the anti-dingo defence. It was upside down in relation to me and its back claws grasped my chest and dug in. Its front claws grasped my thighs and dug in. Its head went between my legs and its teeth dug into my crotch.

Fortunately a koala's mouth isn't very big. But it's big enough.

I screamed.

'What's happened?' called Mary Anne, out of sight.

'It's got me!' I bellowed, rolling over on my back and clawing at the koala with both hands. It rolled with me and clamped its hold tighter—all its holds.

I screamed again and started pummelling the brute with my fists. It was like pummelling fur-covered wood and made as much impression. The thing had muscles fashioned from some substance far harder than any animal tissue ought to be.

Again I screamed and I could hear Mary Anne crashing through the ferns towards me.

The koala, presumably thinking I had reinforcements coming, gripped harder still at all points.

It was growling like something demented, which it was, of course, and its backside was almost in my face—even my peril in no way diminished the frightful stench of the creature.

Mary Anne's head came in sight over the ferns. I was thrashing and clawing in a tangle of fern fronds and she couldn't see exactly what was going on beyond the fact that I had the koala and the koala had me.

'Careful you don't hurt it,' she called. I would have laughed in different circumstances.

'Get it off!' I gasped.

'Never get him off now,' she said vexedly, 'I'll have to sedate him.' And the bloody woman trotted off to the wharf to get her medical kit.

'Won't be a minute,' I heard her call as she disappeared through the ferns. 'Just lie still—don't worry, he won't let go now.'

That wasn't my worry at all. 'Mary Anne!' I roared, 'The brute has got me by the . . .' but she didn't hear me.

There was no way I could lie there until she came back, with that creature vigorously trying to desex me.

I struggled to my feet complete with koala and tried to run after her.

Ever tried to run with a koala's claws in your chest and thighs and its teeth in your crotch? It's not possible.

I was very close to tears of rage, pain and frustration. I floundered through the ferns and tried barging into a tree, koala first. All I did was drive tooth and claw further in. I tried falling on the damned thing. I winded myself.

On all fours now and near collapse, my disintegrating mind suddenly grasped the fact that I was on the edge of the pool in the centre of the koala-haunted grove of trees.

With a manic cry of hope I scuttled forward, took a deep breath and flung myself in, complete with koala.

The water was blessedly deep and we went down like stones.

I didn't know how long a koala could hold its breath but as far as I was concerned we were both staying down until the koala let go or we both drowned.

Unfortunately, it seems that koalas can hold their breath indefinitely.

The koala was a dead weight holding me down and we stayed in those brown dark depths for what seemed like half an eternity. The pain in my bursting lungs began to equal my other pains.

Eventually, I realised that there was no need for me to have my head under water. It may seem I was slow in reaching an obvious conclusion but if you've never been submerged in a bush pool in the clutches of a furious koala, you can't appreciate how difficult it is to think clearly in the circumstances.

I struck for the surface, got my head out, breathed deeply and gratefully and set about trying to throttle the koala.

Koalas are very hard to throttle, particularly when they have the sort of grip on you this one had on me. But I tried hard, completely disregarding the fact that it was a member of a protected species.

The koala seemed determined to die under water with my fingers around its neck. That was all right by me, as long as it died quickly.

Then, even through my pain, I had the terrible worry that a dead koala might not loosen its grip. Would I need surgery to detach me from this malign beast?

Then the beast gave up—a good twenty minutes, I swear, after it was first submerged, although Mary Anne has claimed she was away less than a minute. Time is, of course, relative.

The koala let go and surfaced near my face. Its toy features were expressionless, but it coughed and growled viciously and I backed away fearfully.

A gleam of contempt seemed to appear in its bloodshot eyes and it turned and swam expertly to the edge of the pool, clambered out, trundled across to a tree, climbed it, looked down at me bleakly, and went to sleep, dripping water.

I climbed out of the pool.

Mary Anne came back and expressed surprise that the koala had let go and asked why I was all wet.

I said I would explain later and went off into the bush to examine my person.

The overalls I was wearing were of very thick cloth and no serious damage had been done. No thanks to the koala.

Mary Anne and I eventually caught all the koalas on the island and set them free on the mainland, but I didn't carry out the task with good grace. I'll never go to the aid of the brutes again.

I do not like koalas.

One Hundred Stubbies

To understand how this could happen, you have to know something about where it happened—Coober Pedy, an almost impossible town in the arid centre. Coober Pedy is an opal mining town. The name is Aboriginal for 'white man in a hole'. The 'hole' refers to the mines and to the houses, which are caves dug into the sides of low hills. In the summer the temperature averages around 50 degrees Celsius. You spend most of your time underground or in a pub, or you die.

I had driven up from Adelaide in an airconditioned car and I thought I was going to die.

I saw Coober Pedy in the distance as thousands of tiny round bubbles in the shimmering desert heat haze. Soon these bubbles resolved themselves into the waste piles from the opal mines that stretch endlessly out from the town in all directions.

The whole area looks as though it is infested by the termites that build those huge nests of mud. Many of the mines are deserted and local legend has it that they contain the bones of reckless men who have welshed on gambling debts or tried robbing mines. I never actually heard of a skeleton being found.

The sight of the pub in Coober Pedy automatically brought my car to a halt. I needed cold beer and lots of it. The heat out there is almost solid and you can feel it dropping on your head when you step out of the car. I trotted across to the pub, my whole being yearning for beer, totally unaware that I was about to witness an event that would put me off beer drinking for months.

The pub was moderately full of pink men. Almost all the men in Coober Pedy are pink because they are opal miners and the pink dust of the mines becomes ingrained in their skins. Or perhaps they never wash, because the water there is pretty foul stuff.

I ordered beer, found it deliciously cold as beer always is in outback Australia—often the only evidence of any form of civilised living—and began tuning in to the talk around me, as is my habit.

Two pink men quite near me were having a conversation which was absurd, like most conversations in outback pubs by the time everyone has had five beers. The two of them were leaning on the bar peering earnestly into each other's deep-etched faces. Like two grotesque dolls, they carried on a nonsensical argument.

'He can.'

'It'd kill him.'

'It'd take four hours.'

'It wouldn't kill him. Nothing would.'

I leaned closer. Their voices were beginning to hit an hysterical note. Like buzzsaws, their shouts rose above the hubbub of the other drinkers. They were obviously used to yelling at one another fifteen metres underground with jackhammers going full blast.

'A hundred stubbies in four hours. Do you reckon that would kill him?'

'It'll kill anybody.'

'He's not anybody.'

They stared into each other's faces, the importance of the topic growing in their minds as the beer ran down their throats.

'Why are you so bloody sure?'

'Because I'm bloody sure.'

One of them was almost middle-aged, with grey hair all over his exposed shoulders. At least, it would have been grey if he had washed off the pink dust. His face was dulled and brutalised by years of grubbing away in the ground all morning and drinking beer all afternoon. Or perhaps he had been born with a dull and brutal face.

His companion was younger, probably not thirty, a little fat but with the heavy shoulders and arm muscles of the opal digger. If men keep on digging in the ground for opal for a few generations, they will probably develop forequarters and arms like wombats. This younger man looked like a hairy-nosed wombat because of the three-day growth on his face. Not exactly like a wombat, though, because a wombat has some expression on its face if you look hard enough, while this character's face was just a blob of pendulous blankness. With its pink dusted stubble, it looked like a discarded serving of blancmange growing a strange mould.

'Well, if you're sure, will you bet on it?'

'Sure I'll bet on it.'

You couldn't tell who was speaking because their voices sounded identical, like knives scraping on plates at an unbearably high volume. But you could tell the sound was coming from them and gradually a pool of silence was forming around them as the rest of the bar tuned into their conversation.

'What do you reckon, Ivan?'

Now you could see who was speaking because the older man turned and addressed himself to the drinker alongside him.

Ivan turned slowly and I realised I was looking at a monster. He stood barely a metre and a half high and was almost as wide across the shoulders.

His chest, black-singleted and covered with dust, stood out like a giant cockerel's, a vast billow of muscles with dark streaks running over the pink dust as the sweat made its own little rivers. One great arm hung disproportionately low by his side, the other rested on the bar with an enormous pink hand almost totally concealing a glass of beer. His hair was short and closely cropped and he carried a comb of bristles over a face that for one mad moment made me wonder whether it is possible to cross a crocodile with a hippopotamus.

This was a face that displayed complete lack of interest and malice, with a blank complacency that made it obvious no thought had ever disturbed the brain that nestled just under that absurd cockscomb of hair.

He was wearing shorts, and two massive legs, not unlike those of a hippopotamus except that they were pink and hairy instead of grey and wrinkly, propped up his body. It was as though the body was resting on the legs rather than being joined to them, because he seemed to have no waist; he was tree trunk-thick all the way down until suddenly he had legs. The junction was concealed by the baggy shorts, but I got the impression that the legs might walk away at any moment, leaving the body standing there.

'What do you reckon, Ivan? I reckon you could drink a hundred stubbies in four hours.'

' 'Course I could,' said Ivan. His voice was flat and deep, almost pleasant by comparison with those of the other two, but only by comparison.

'There,' said the older man, turning to his companion as though everything had been proven.

'Bet you he couldn't.'

'Bet then. Go on, bet!'

'What do you mean, bet?'

'I mean what I say. What'll you bet he can't drink a hundred stubbies in four hours?'

'Bet you five hundred bucks.'

The older man thrust his hand into his hip pocket and brought out a wad of notes. He counted ten fifties on to the counter. The younger man looked on impassively, while Ivan, losing interest, turned back to his pint.

'Match that.'

The younger man, having waited until the last fifty was laid down, dived into his own pocket and counted out his bundle of fifties. He paused before laying down the tenth.

'Who's paying for the beer?' he asked cunningly.

There was a long pause while this was pondered.

'Take it out of the centre,' said the older man at last.

'All right, Ivan. Here's the biggest beer-up of your life, and on me,' said the older man, grabbing Ivan by the shoulder.

'Come on, Bill,' he said to the barman, 'set up ten stubbies. Ivan's gonna sink a hundred.'

Bill didn't react, just reached into the refrigerator and lined ten stubbies up on the counter.

'Off you go, Ivan. Remember, I'm betting on you.'

'He's gotta be standing at the end,' said the younger man, sullenly, now sounding worried.

'He'll be standing. Come on, Ivan. Sink 'em.'

Ivan was looking at the ten stubbies. You could see he was thinking by the contortions of his face. You could almost hear him. The three men were now the centre of a large circle that had formed as the concept of the bizarre bet was grasped by the other drinkers. Money was appearing from dusty pockets as side bets were laid. Ivan was still thinking.

'Come on, Ivan.' 'I want a hundred bucks,' said Ivan.

The older man was shocked. 'What do you mean, you want a hundred bucks?'

'I mean I want a hundred bucks.'

'Whaffor?'

'Drinking the beer.'

'But you're getting the beer free.'

'I want a hundred bucks.'

Conversations tend to be limited on the opal fields.

'You can go to hell.' 'Right.'

Ivan turned back to the bar and ordered another beer. The older man looked at this disbelievingly. Ivan downed his beer. Obviously he intended to stand by his position.

'All right then,' said the older man desperately, 'if you drink all of the hundred stubbies, I'll give you a hundred bucks.'

'A hundred for trying,' returned Ivan, without even turning around.

'God Almighty. What happens if you drink fifty beers and pack it in? Do I still give you a hundred dollars?'

'A hundred for trying,' said Ivan.

The older man stared at the impossibly broad and unyielding back. You could tell that he was thinking, struggling for a solution. 'Tell you what,' he said finally, 'a hundred and fifty if you make it, nothing if you don't. How's that?'

Ivan was thinking. A long pause. 'All right,' he said, and reached for the first stubby.

'Take if off the top,' said the older man to his companion, which presumably meant that the winner would have to pay Ivan's fee.

This seemed reasonable to the younger man, but he was slow to make up his mind. By the time he had nodded assent, Ivan had already drunk six stubbies.

His technique was impressive. He picked up one of the little squat bottles in each hand and flicked the tops off with his thumbs. Most men need a metal implement for this, but not Ivan—he had thumbnails he could use as chisels. Then he raised his right hand, threw back his head and poured the beer into his gaping mouth all at once, the whole bottleful, one continuous little jet of beer until the bottle was empty. Then he did the same with the bottle in his left hand. Both bottles empty, he put them down neatly on the counter and reached for two more.

There are 375 millilitres of beer in each of these bottles. Legally, if you drink three in an hour, you are too drunk to drive a motor car. One hundred bottles would be 37 500 millilitres. The mathematics are beyond me, but it must be a monumental weight of beer. I timed him. It took just on eight seconds to empty a bottle, one second to put the two bottles on the counter, one second to pick up two more, one second to flip off the tops. He was swallowing a stubbie every eleven seconds.

Swallowing's not the word. There was no movement in his throat. He was just pouring it straight down into his stomach. A stubbie every eleven seconds. At that rate, he would be able to drink 100 in 1100 seconds—that's less than an hour. But he couldn't keep that up. For obvious reasons; he'd burst, for one.

I wasn't the only man in the bar making these calculations. In the great circle that now surrounded Ivan, men were looking at their watches and counting. To save time the barman had put twenty cold stubbies on the counter just as Ivan downed the tenth. Ivan didn't pause. He was drinking, or working, as rhythmically as though he were on an assembly line: pour down one bottle, pour down the next, both bottles on the counter, pick up the next two, flip off the tops, pour down one bottle, pour down the next.

The only sound in the bar was the slap of the bottles on the counter and the metallic rattle of the bottle tops hitting the floor. All the drinkers were silent, watching in an almost religious awe, their own glasses held unnoticed.

I realised for the first time that the clock hanging above the bottles at the back of the bar had a chime. It chimed six o'clock just as Ivan finished his fortieth bottle of beer. As if it were a signal, he slammed the two bottles on the bar and paused. The silence became intense as everybody started leaning forward slightly, wondering. I was convinced Ivan would drop dead.

Ivan stood motionless, his hands on the bar, his body inclined slightly forward. The pause lengthened, the silence deepened, if silence can deepen. I could even hear the clock ticking. Suddenly, Ivan's back muscles convulsed and a monumental belch erupted through the bar, breaking the silence like a violent crack of thunder. I swear the front rank of spectators reeled back. There was a burst of cheering and laughing and clapping.

Ivan reached for the next two bottles and was back to his rhythm again. Forty-five bottles, fifty, fifty-five, sixty. The impossible was being translated into reality in front of our eyes. Then came a piece of virtuosity: Ivan flipped the tops off two bottles but instead of raising his right hand, he raised both hands and poured the contents of two bottles down his throat simultaneously. It took just eight seconds. Seven hundred and fifty milligrams of beer in eight seconds to join the flood that was already coursing through his stomach, intestines, bloodstream.

Technically he had to be dead. No human tissue could withstand an assault of alcohol like that. Perhaps Ivan wasn't human; perhaps he had never been alive. He had stopped again. He glanced around the circle of spectators.

'Had it, Ivan?' said one hopefully.

Ivan ignored him.

He looked to his principal, the older drinker. There was something he'd forgotten, a condition in the contract that hadn't been spelled out.

'Time out to leak?' he said, a little plaintively.

'Sure, get going,' said his backer.

Ivan was away from the bar for five minutes, which wasn't surprising. I wondered whether he had regurgitated some of the beer, but this didn't seem to occur to anybody else.

At eighty bottles, Ivan stopped again. We waited expectantly for the mighty belch, but it didn't come. He paused for about fifteen seconds and then reached for two new bottles. But there was a change of pace. The mighty fingernails fumbled slightly before the bottle tops flew off. His movements were deliberate and ponderous. Once he missed his aim and a jet of beer splashed on to his chin. I wondered whether this counted as a whole bottle but nobody raised the point. He was pausing each time he set down the bottles.

I was aware that gently, almost whispering, the whole bar was counting: 'Eighty-five, eighty-six, eighty-seven, eighty-eight.' The count was slowing as Ivan's drinking rate slowed. By now he was taking fifteen seconds a bottle, then eighteen, nineteen. At ninety-five bottles, Ivan stopped again, one half-full bottle in his left hand. He leaned forward. We waited again for the belch, but there was no sound.

Ivan shook his head from side to side. I saw his eyes. They had gone completely white, like a blind man's.

Ivan started to sway.

'Come on, Ivan, into 'em, boy!'

Ivan's massive body swung around in a slow circle, his feet still firmly on the floor. But then he steadied himself and the giant hand was raised. But this time he put the bottle to his lips. It did not go down in one unbroken stream. He swallowed many times with great effort. He put the bottle on the counter and reached for two more. He couldn't get the tops off; the barman whipped them off for him. Slowly, painfully, his eyeballs rolled deep into his head, his body swaying in ever-increasing circles, Ivan drank each bottle.

'Ninety-nine!' It was a roar.

Then Ivan drank the ninety-ninth bottle. By then he was spinning quickly, inclining his body at an impossible angle. Only the weight and size of his legs can have kept him upright.

Somebody had to put the hundredth bottle into his hand. Obviously he couldn't see it, or anything else for that matter, but somehow his hand found his gyrating head and he got the bottle to his lips.

Down went the beer, slowly, terribly slowly. But down it went, all of it.

'One hundred!' It was a mighty animal scream. The empty bottle crashed to the floor. Ivan had drunk one hundred stubbies in just under an hour.

Three or four men tried to stop Ivan spinning and there was a general hubbub as bets were settled and fresh drinks ordered. Then Ivan brought instant silence with a vast bellow.

'Vodka!' he shouted.

The word, as much as the level of Ivan's thunderous voice, brought the silence.

He turned to the bar and thumped it.

'Vodka!'

Dazed, the barman poured him a nip of vodka.

Ivan brushed the glass off the bar with a sweep of his hand that demolished half a dozen other drinkers' glasses as well.

'The bottle!' he roared.

There was silence.

Then timidly, terrified in the presence of mystical greatness, the barman put a bottle of vodka on the counter. It was open, but Ivan broke its neck on the bar in a ritual gesture. Apparently he could see again, although his eyes were still just blank white.

He raised the vodka bottle until the jagged neck was a handspan from his mouth, then poured a gush of the clear spirit down his throat. Half the bottle gone, he slapped it down on the counter; it rolled on its side and the vodka slopped onto the floor. Nobody noticed.

Arms by his side, eyes pure white, body rigid, Ivan made for the door of the bar. A quick passage cleared for him and he went through in a stumbling rush, like a train through a forest. He crashed into the swinging door, the bright flash of late sunlight illuminating his huge frame, and plunged headfirst out into the street, hitting the dust with a thud that seemed to shake the building. Just once his head moved, and then he was a motionless heap of sweat-sodden humanity in the dust.

'We' d better get a truck to take the poor bastard home,' said somebody.

'Yeah.' And two of the drinkers, kindly men, wandered off to organise the truck.

'He's forgotten his money,' said someone else.

'I'll keep it for him,' said the barman. 'He'll be back in the morning. Probably have a head.'

Vic the Snake Man

Vic the Snake Man is probably the only man ever to survive being attacked by a python and a taipan in rapid succession.

I met him on the Butterfly Farm, a family picnic entertainment centre on the banks of the Hawkesbury near Windsor, just out of Sydney. His job was to look after the snakes on display and give lectures on them to the farm patrons. I was doing some publicity work for the farm and found both Vic and his snakes intriguing.

Vic (I never did know his other name) was very tall, very thin and very dirty. He had spare yellow hair and two or three yellow teeth that, possibly by association, looked like fangs. He possessed only one pair of trousers, which were very tattered, and allowed it to be apparent that he wore no underwear. He also had a shirt with no buttons and several holes, and the remnants of a pair of sandshoes which he wore without socks.

He seemed to eat nothing except patent headache powders and the handmade cigarettes he held between two of his fangs until they disintegrated or were swallowed. His voice was very nasal and he spoke very slowly. His opaque yellow eyes were sunk deeply into his head, peering like little animals from the grime-laden crevasses of his thin, craggy face. He was never seen without a snake, usually poisonous, around his neck and another two or three in his pockets, poking their heads timidly out of the holes.

He was so unprepossessing that he was fascinating, and his knowledge of reptiles was formidable. His enthusiasm was so great that he unaffectedly transmitted it to his audience. His strength was that if you saw him you couldn't help staring at him and if you stared at him you were captivated by the slow, drawling stream of information that poured from him. Your attention was usually concentrated by the fact that he was always brandishing some particularly deadly creature. Vic loved snakes—deeply, purely and passionately. I thought snakes loved him until the taipan bit him. And that was just after the python tried to strangle him. Perhaps it was just an off day for Vic.

He had started his morning lecture session on a large wooden-railed platform used for various demonstrations. As usual, scattered around the platform were cloth bags of various sizes that wriggled and bulged excitingly. Vic reached down into one large bag and pulled out a huge North Queensland forest python. The thing was about six metres long and had a heavy blunt black head as big as a large dog's. The five hundred or so people in his audience sighed as metre after metre of snake as thick as a man's thigh emerged from the bag and began winding itself around Vic's legs.

'Many people think . . .' Vic's monologue was proceeding; '. . . that a snake is a slimy thing that is not pleasant to touch. Now this is Very Wrong.' Just about everything people thought about snakes was 'Very Wrong' according to Vic, who used the phrase dozens of times in every lecture. 'In fact, the skin of a snake is smooth, dry, cool and pleasant to the touch and does not feel scaly.'

By now the snake had made its way up to Vic's chest and was wrapped around him so that he looked as though he was wearing a pneumatic grey-green rubber wetsuit of extraordinary thickness. There must have been four coils of snake around him, but half the brute was still on the platform, waving slowly.

'It is also commonly thought that the python strangles its prey. This is Very Wrong. What it does once it has enmeshed some creature is to tighten its coils and so prevent its victim from breathing.'

'Does it bite?' called somebody in the audience.

'The python bites for two reasons,' said Vic, as the snake's coils moved up to his throat and the head, almost as big as his, peered over his shoulder. 'One is to defend itself against attack, and…'

Vic was now enveloped in snake from thighs to head. You could only see little bits of his face between the coils. But he never faltered in his monologue and his hands were waving in the air as usual, not, as one might have expected, clawing at the snake.

'Once the victim has stopped breathing the snake will lick the body to make it easy to swallow . . .'

Vic's voice was growing fainter, but we all assumed it was because it was being muted by the folds of snake around his mouth. You could still distinguish most of the words.

'Aborigines find the meat of this forest python very good to eat . . .' By now his voice was little more than a breathless mutter but everybody, including myself, assumed that it was only part of the act. 'No doubt this is due to its deep forest habitat, and possibly because . . .'

Vic's voice cut out altogether and his hands stopped making illustrative gestures and began dragging at the section of snake around his neck. He staggered backwards towards the rail and the people near him scattered.

This was too much realism, so I leapt onto the stage, followed by a couple of hardy spectators, grabbed the snake's tail and began to unwind it. The snake didn't particularly care for this and began hissing and darting its heavy black head towards us. I knew enough about snakes by now to know that its bite wouldn't be particularly harmful; but this was a purely intellectual attitude and my emotions as the thing flickered its tongue, hissed and waved its head threateningly, were those of substantial terror.

Nevertheless I could not let Vic be strangled in full view of the public, even though he had recently told that public that pythons didn't strangle their victims.

We got enough of the snake away to enable us to see Vic's face, which had gone vermillion. Streaked with sweat cutting through the dirt on his face, he looked like a strawberry recently plucked from a muddy garden. As soon as he could speak he said, 'It is commonly thought that snakes, particularly pythons, are very hardy creatures, but this is Very Wrong.'

Vic, totally unabashed, went on talking as he stuffed the snake back into its bag. The crowd thought it was sheer showmanship and cheered mightily.

Perhaps the unusually loud applause exhilarated Vic. Instead of taking a slight rest by exhibiting an assortment of some of the less lethal reptiles, he opened a small, violently squirming bag and pulled out an overexcited taipan.

The taipan is not only a very deadly snake, it looks like a very deadly snake. Slender as a whip and fast-moving, this brown, metre-long specimen wound itself around Vic's arms, darted furious glances at the crowd from its sharp killer's head and flickered its tongue towards Vic's face.

'Now it is commonly thought that the taipan is a very vicious snake which will attack without provocation,' said Vic. 'This is Very Wrong.' Vic unwound the snake from his arm and held it up before the audience.

'You will note that my method of handling this snake is very slow and calm. This is to make sure it is not alarmed. Now this snake, although used to crowds and noise, is very excited today and moving around rapidly. That means it is at its most dangerous, and unless handled in the calm professional manner I am using, would undoubtedly bite.'

At this point the taipan sank its fangs into Vic's neck.

A taipan is so fast that nothing within striking range could possibly avoid it. Vic's neck had been barely a handspan from the snake's fangs. At one instant the taipan was waving from side to side, then it flashed forwards, bit Vic and withdrew, but so quickly it seemed it hadn't happened, couldn't have happened. The strike, the bite and the withdrawal all happened in less time than a mousetrap takes to snap down.

Vic raised his hand to his bitten neck and looked at the snake reprovingly. 'Now, that was most unusual,' he said calmly. 'That is the first time I have been bitten by a snake that I was handling.'

The crowd was awed and silent, not sure whether it was witnessing a planned act or whether Vic had genuinely been bitten by a deadly snake. I knew he had and I was horrified. Horrified and very reluctant to go and relieve Vic of the taipan, which seemed much happier and relaxed now.

But Vic seemed unperturbed.

'That bite would have been very dangerous, probably fatal, if it had happened to one of you . . .'

Abruptly a blob of foam exploded from his mouth, his eyes rolled up in his head so they were only white bulbs and his body went rigid. A strange inhuman squawk burst from his chest and fought its way out of his mouth in a splatter of froth. His hands went straight above his head in a convulsive gesture. The taipan went flying through the air above the panicking crowd. Vic fell flat on his back, quite stiff, the only sign of life the bubbling foam at his mouth.

The snake took a long time to fall and when it did, it landed in the lap of a quadraplegic youth in a wheelchair. This was probably just as well because if it had to land on somebody, it was best for it to land on somebody who couldn't move. It slipped off the youth's lap and wriggled swiftly away into a patch of scrub.

I was on the platform by now, screaming for somebody to call an ambulance and for somebody else to kill the wretched taipan, totally disregarding Vic's position on preserving native reptiles.

By the time we got Vic to hospital he had gone quite black. Every vein in his body seemed to have collapsed and he looked as though he hail been brutally beaten and bruised all over. He was just breathing and still frothing at the mouth and emitting these hideous animal sounds. He was in an iron lung for a week and spent three months in hospital. He never touched a snake again.

We organised a search for the taipan, but never did find it. For all I know, it's still roaming around the banks of the Hawkesbury River.

Liquid Assets

I think I can safely claim to be the only writer in Australia ever to have given an enema to an elephant—quite possibly the only writer in the world.

The elephant was named Annie, and she was on a farm owned by a friend of mine, Alan Trevor, in northern New South Wales. Alan was minding her for a travelling circus which was in recess.

She was a medium-sized, very gentle, tractable elephant who spent her time doing nothing except eating vast quantities of hay and slightly rotten fruit. She had a grey and wrinkled face and soft brown eyes with long lashes.

Alan had made a small business of selling her droppings as particularly effective fertiliser. He showed me with some pride several bags of elephant dung ready for sale. 'She supplies tons of the stuff,' he told me. 'So much I'm going to have to put it in the book as assets.' Thereafter, he kept referring to elephant dung as 'assets'.

Then one day the dung stopped dropping.

'Nothing's happened for two days,' said Alan. 'There's about a tonne of assets blocked in the pipeline.'

We put in an urgent call for a veterinary surgeon to come and inspect Annie.

By the time the vet arrived, she had given up trying to eat and was standing looking uncomfortably at the world and visibly swelling. Her shape gave her a comical appearance; she looked for all the world like a giant elephant balloon about to go floating off into the air. Alan, who has a fondness for black humour, speculated on the possibility of her actually doing this and wondering whether we could somehow utilise the condition as a means of disposing of her corpse.

'I suppose the authorities might object,' he added. 'I mean, a couple of tonnes of dead elephant floating around the sky might be considered a health hazard.'

Annie's mournful eyes turned on Alan and even he had the grace to abandon that line of conversation.

The vet, whom Alan knew quite well, was a squat, vigorous, thick-bodied and bearded man in his fifties.

He looked at Annie cautiously. 'No droppings for two days?' he said.

Possibly longer, we said; we'd only checked two days before.

The vet thought for a few moments. 'I've never treated an elephant,' he said,' but I suppose they're not very different from any of the bovines.'

He moved over to Annie and began pressing his hands hard against her distended stomach. Annie gently touched him on the shoulder with her trunk.

'It's like trying to palpate a dirigible,' said the vet. 'Anybody know how many stomachs an elephant's got?' Nobody did.

'Well, it's fairly obvious there's a bowel blockage,' said the vet. 'But God knows what it is. It could be a kink in the intestines, or a tumour, or a straight-out case of oldfashioned constipation. There's no way of telling for sure.'

'Do you think she's dangerously ill?' said Alan.

'She looks to me as though she's going to blow apart at any minute,' said the vet. 'If she was a cow I'd assume it was the bloat and try to let the air out by puncturing her stomach, but...' he gestured at the huge inflated bulk towering over us, and shrugged.

'So you think she's in danger?' asked Alan again.

'My guess is she could well be dead in half an hour,' said the vet. 'You see, what's happening—she's got a lot of vegetable matter inside her and nothing getting out. It's fermenting and producing gas. Her intestinal track is one great balloon pressing against her vital organs. Eventually something will break, or she won't be able to breathe. If we could get her to belch it might help—obviously nothing's coming out the other way, but how the hell do you get an elephant to belch?'

We considered the question, but unprofitably.

'I'll go and ring someone I know at the zoo,' said the vet. 'Might be able to get some help.'

He hurried off to a phone and Alan and I stood silently, sadly considering Annie, who was so blown up now that she didn't seem able to move, and who looked more than ever like a huge balloon or a stuffed toy of gigantic proportions. She distinctly conveyed the impression of being about to burst, and we instinctively moved back from what would be a cataclysmic explosion.

The vet came hurrying back, looking positively gleeful. 'Right,' he said, 'we're going to give her an enema!'

This statement was not met with absolute joy by either of us. There was a short silence broken by Alan, who said, 'How?'

The vet rubbed his hands together and looked at Annie speculatively. 'Get me the biggest water container you've got—a forty-four-gallon drum would be ideal—make sure it's clean, fill it with water, and get me four gallons of detergent, biodegradable.

'And,' he continued, 'I want a hand or foot pump and twenty or thirty metres of hose that can be attached to it. Can you do that?'

We stood rapt in the implications of what he was saying and then Alan broke the spell again. 'Yes, I can organise that.' He went off and organised it.

Four neighbouring farmers who had heard about the problem turned up to laugh. Soon they were standing ten metres away looking on interestedly and safely, while Alan, the vet and I stood behind Annie with a forty-four-gallon drum full of water and detergent, a foot pump and a length of plastic hose rigged so that the pump's contents could be pumped out efficiently.

I was delegated to do the pumping, which unfortunately necessitated my standing more or less directly behind Annie and not far away. I pumped on order in a test run and the hose produced a satisfactory jet of water.

'All right,' said the vet. 'So I'll feed it in. This animal is quite docile, isn't she?'

'I'll stand and hold her head,' said Alan promptly, 'just to make sure.'

'Well,' said the vet, 'here goes. You're quite sure she'll put up with this?'

'It's never been done before,' said Alan, putting his hand on Annie's trunk. 'But don't worry, I've got her.' If she decided to object, Alan would be as much use as a minnow trying to stay the progress of a whale.

'Here goes then,' said the vet.

Annie turned her head around once with a gaze of infinite reproach as the operation started, but then she turned it back again and let it droop until her trunk was lying on the ground. A most dejected elephant.

'Trouble is,' said the vet, 'I've really no idea of the length of an elephant's large intestine. All I can do is keep feeding this in until it stops and hope I don't do any damage. Still, the guts should be pretty tough.'

He fed the hose in vigorously. Vast lengths disappeared. I pumped. Annie swelled. The level of water in the drum fell rapidly. My leg began to ache.

When about ten metres of hose had disappeared, the vet paused. 'Nothing so far,' he said. 'Just keep pumping and we'll see if we can swill it out with water.'

I pumped. Annie continued to swell. Alarmingly. The drum was half empty. There was a lot of water in Annie.

'What exactly do you expect to happen?' I said belatedly.

'The obvious,' said the vet. 'Get ready to duck.'

I had been ready to duck for some time. I glanced enviously at the neighbouring four farmers, who were laughing their heads off a good five metres back.

'OK,' said the vet. 'We'll try a bit further.'

More of the pipe disappeared. I pumped. Annie swelled. The drum was almost three-quarters empty. My right leg was aching severely.

'Trouble is,' said the vet, 'I could be wrong. If it's not a soluble blockage, I'm only making things worse. But there's nothing else to do; keep pumping.'

I kept pumping. Annie continued to swell. The tension was increasing dangerously. Surely something had to happen.

It happened.

There was a sound like tearing canvas, unbearably amplified, impossibly close, continuous, like the furious rumble of heavy artillery. I flung myself to one side and landed on my back. The very sky above me darkened and a black cloud blotted out the sun. I rolled over and scrambled away and then turned on my hands and knees and looked.

A black thunderstorm ten metres long and five wide obscured most of my vision and the thunder of its passing deafened my ears. It was astonishing, and even more astonishing when four blackened and dripping figures emerged from it and staggered towards me, all with their hands to their faces and rubbing their eyes. The four laughing farmers had not been far enough away.

The vet was jubilant. 'We've done it! We've done it!' he shouted through the thunder. I couldn't see anything but his legs. He was on the other side of the black cloud.

The whole thing lasted the better part of two minutes. By the end of it, Annie—considerably reduced in bulk and looking very relieved—had already started eating. The hose had been automatically detached.

The farmers were rolling on the grass trying to clean themselves. Alan was laughing himself silly. The vet was explaining proudly that he had fixed it. It had only been a simple blockage. Nothing to worry about at all, now.

Alan was becoming hysterical and he kept on repeating two words endlessly. I picked myself up and concentrated on what he was saying.

'Liquid assets!' he was saying. 'Liquid assets!'

A Couple of Interesting Specimens

I was hunting butterflies in Cape York Peninsula when I came as near as I ever want to come to the violent death of a human being.

The butterflies and any other insects I could find were for a friend of mine who collected them commercially. I was paid a small sum for the specimens I sent south, so small that I calculated that if I charged my running expenses against the project, each specimen would be costing me about $20.

But it gave me an excuse for wandering around the bush. As the first question everyone asks you up north is, 'What do you do?', it was more acceptable to say, 'Collect insects', than, 'Write books'. Not much more respectable, just slightly more.

I was camped in a clump of pandanus about fifty kilometres out of Weipa one morning when I heard the sound of a motor.

About a quarter of an hour later, a four-wheel-drive police vehicle came down the track. The driver swung over towards me as soon as he saw my camp. There was nothing remarkable in that—everybody stops to talk to everybody on the Peninsula.

Three men climbed out of the police vehicle. The first was a tall, good-looking policeman aged about thirty, neatly dressed in his bush uniform of shorts and shirt and wide-brimmed hat; the other two were about the same age but dressed in rough bush clothes and looking shifty. One of these was very well built and tough-looking with black bushy hair, a black beard and brutal brown eyes. The other was thin, almost bald, more or less clean-shaven, with brutal watery blue eyes.

'G'day,' said the policeman.

'G'day,' I said.

'G'day, g'day,' said the two civilians.

'G'day,' I said.

There followed the inevitable long, contemplative pause.

'Warm,' said the policeman.

'Yes,' I said. Then added hastily, 'Yeah.'

'For this time of the year,' added the policeman in explanation.

'Yeah,' I said.

Another quite long pause.

Then the policeman got down to business, obviously embarrassed by his own unseemly haste.

'Seen a fellow around on foot the last couple of days?'

'Saw a Murri[*] over the beach the day before yesterday.' I regretted this as soon as I said it because it then occurred to me that the policeman was on a manhunt and I didn't want to be an informer, at least until I knew what the man was being hunted for.

'No,' said the policeman, 'a white bloke.'

'On foot?' I said. You never saw a white man on foot there.

'Yeah,' said the policeman, 'probably.'

'No. I haven't seen any whites, on foot or otherwise. What's he done?'

'Nothing. Just lost. What you doing up here?'

'Catching insects.'

'Oh.' (Long pause.) 'Getting plenty?'

'Yeah.'

'Good.'

Another pause. 'Seen any crocodiles?'

'Yeah. Quite a few.'

'In the creeks, you mean? Little fellas?'

'Well, one was about six feet long,' I said defensively.

'Yeah, but freshwater. Haven't seen a big estuarine croc?'

'No. But I haven't been near the sea much.'

'Oh, they go overland. You want to watch it while you're camping.'

'They ever grab anybody?'

The policeman plucked a straw of grass and began chewing it. 'We think this bloke we're looking for might have been taken by one,' he said. ' He was camped with his mates here,' he nodded towards the two civilians, 'and went off for a stroll by himself. Didn't come back. No sign of him since.'

'Where was all this?'

'About half an hour up the track from here. Anyway, if you see him, let him know we were looking for him, will you?'

'Sure.'

They drove off and I continued hunting insects, keeping a wary eye out for crocodiles. I had always thought they stuck to the water or very close to it, and only attacked swimmers or drinking cattle. The idea of a crocodile roaming around in the scrub seemed as unlikely as it was disturbing. I thought the policeman might have been pulling my leg. Queenslanders are like that.

Late that afternoon the policeman, whose name was Jack, called at my camp again. The civilians weren't with him.

'Did you find him?' I asked.

'No. You seen anyone?'

'No.'

Jack squatted on one haunch in the manner of those who live north of the Tropic of Capricorn. I tried to imitate him but found it very uncomfortable and settled for sitting on the ground.

'Found his clothes,' said Jack.

'His clothes?'

'Yeah. Shoes, socks, shirt, pants and hat, all neatly stacked against a tree. Must have taken them off and put them there himself.'

'Why?'

'Probably wanted to cool off in a creek. There's a bit of a creek there. Enough water to sit in.'

'What do you think then?'

'Croc might have got him.'

The thought lay heavily between us for a few moments.

' 'Course, it might not have,' added Jack.

'What else, then?'

Jack thought. 'He might have wanted to blow through. Disappear. Make people think a croc had got him, or he had got lost or something.'

'Why would he want to do that?'

Jack shrugged. 'People often do. Might have been on the run, or just wanted to get away from a wife or something. Happens a lot. Bloke always seems to turn up, though. Get charged if they do.'

'What with?'

'Public nuisance. Can't have blokes like meself tearing around looking for people if they're not lost or dead.'

'No. I suppose not.'

' 'Course,' said Jack reflectively, 'he might've been knocked off. Thought that yesterday. Not so sure now.'

'Who might have knocked him off?'

'His mates,' said Jack, looking surprised that I would ask so obvious a question. I thought about the 'mates" brutal eyes.

'Why?'

He shrugged again. 'People do. Might have had a row over money, or a woman or something. It happens.'

'What are they doing up here?'

Jack shrugged again. 'They reckon they're fishing. I think they're probably poaching.'

'Poaching what?'

'Crocs. Protected, you know. Skins worth a hell of a lot of money.'

'But you don't think they . . . knocked off . . . their mate now, eh?'

'No. Clothes were too neatly stacked. Those two wouldn't have got them off him as neatly as that if he was dead. Anyway, they're not bright enough to lay a false trail like that. No, I reckon a croc got him.'

'Well there's not much you can do about that, is there?'

'Probably have to get the croc.'

'How?'

'Oh, trail around until I find it. It'd be a pretty big one.'

'But what's the point?'

'Get the body back. If it's not digested. Besides, have to kill the croc.'

'Why? Particularly if they're protected? I mean, any big crocodile is dangerous, isn't it? This one's not more dangerous because it's killed a man.'

'No. But we always kill 'em if they take somebody. If we can.'

That seemed to me like killing a tree because it dropped a branch on somebody, but I didn't pursue the argument.

'Anyway,' said Jack, 'he might have just got himself lost and be still wandering around, or he might have shot through.'

'So what are your plans?'

'Going back to get instructions from the boss,' he said, standing up. 'Be seeing you. If you happen to see him, don't forget to tell him I'm looking for him. You'll know him because he'll have no clothes on, probably. Be seeing you.'

'See you.'

He dropped in again next morning, ostensibly to ask again whether I had seen the missing man, but really because he just liked dropping in.

I had more or less worked the area dry for specimens, but I was interested in hanging around to find out what had happened.

'My boss reckons the setup's a bit crook,' he said. 'I've got to keep nosing about until I find out what did happen to the bastard.'

'Does your . . . boss . . . think it was a crocodile?'

'Should be more signs if it was, he says. Fair enough. You see, the creek near where his clothes were was pretty small—you could step over it. If he was sitting in there and the croc got him, you'd expect to find some blood and stuff on the banks—but it might have all been washed away. Then if the croc got him on dry land, there should be some traces around— until the ants clean it up, of course. It's a pity he wasn't wearing his clothes. Always something left when a stiff's been wearing clothes.'

'Do many people get taken by crocodiles, then?'

'Nah. Few of the Murri kids, old people. No, people die lots of ways out here and then the dogs and the birds and the ants and the pigs clean 'em up pretty quickly—often don't even find bones, but you usually get a bit of clothing. Now we got all this bloke's clothing, but it looks as though he took everything off himself. Even his wristwatch was in the pocket of his pants.'

'How exactly would a crocodile get him on dry land, or even in a little creek? Surely he'd hear it coming.'

'Nah. They can move like a galloping horse for a short distance. Seen one jump out of the water over on the coast once and run after a bloody great cow. She didn't have a chance. She caught wind of him all right and started to gallop away, but he ran her down, grabbed her by the back leg and dragged her into the water. Ever seen the big lizards run? Croc's as fast as that. Only for a short distance, though.'

He rolled himself a cigarette. 'Bloody awful animals, crocs. The big ones. I don't know why they're protected. I nearly walked into one last year. That's another way they get you—they just lie doggo and you walk into them and bang! you're gone. This one I struck wasn't hungry. He just stood up on his hind legs and bellowed at me, like a bull. Frightened buggery out of me.'

'What'd you do?'

'Blew his guts out. Makes 'em easy to kill when they rear up like that. Belly's the softest part. You can bounce a .303 off their backs if you hit 'em at any sort of angle.'

You never know how much to believe of what anybody tells you about animals up north. I've heard dozens of stories about snakes chasing and catching a man on a motorcycle, buffaloes that charged and wrecked cars, pigs of unbelievable size and ferocity disembowelling horses. However, my policeman seemed to know all about crocodiles.

'Should hear a bull croc when they 're mating. Horrible sound. He bellows all the time. It's not like an ordinary mating. The bull bails up a few females in a creek and just rapes 'em. Rough as buggery, they are. 'Course, the female's just as bad. They lay their eggs and then hang around for a long while and God help anything that goes near that nest. Then they just bugger off and leave 'em. The baby croc comes out of the shell snapping and growling and hissing like a young dragon. Nasty brutes. Anyhow . . .'

He stood up and tossed his cigarette butt into the ashes of the campfire.

'I suppose I'd better get along and see if I can find this one. "The body or the bloke," my boss said.'

He came back again about mid-afternoon and because I felt that I had got to know him well by then, I offered him a beer. He accepted and rolled a cigarette, lit it, drank some of his beer and squatted on his haunch.

'No luck?' I said.

'Yes, well, sort of.'

'Did you find him?'

'Found his legs.'

There seemed to be a sudden stillness in the pandanus clump as the three laconic words emerged with shocking force. It took me several moments to accept that this was reality and then all I managed to do was repeat his words.

'Found his legs?'

'Yeah. About five minutes' walk away from his clothes. In the scrub.'

'I see.' It was a subject simultaneously repulsive and intriguing. I felt a little ill, but I wanted to know more.

'What . . . I mean . . . how did you find the—ah—legs?'

'Heard the blowflies.' I wished I hadn't asked.

Jack puffed away at his cigarette.

'Wouldn't have thought we'd find anything,' he said thoughtfully. 'Usually a croc will take its kill off to its lair if it doesn't swallow it on the spot.'

'It was a crocodile, then,' I said foolishly.

'Oh yeah, thought of that. These legs weren't cut off. You can see the bite marks very clearly. Big bugger he must be.'

'Well, what do you think happened?'

'Oh, it's pretty obvious. The poor bastard was probably sitting in the creek cooling off and the croc grabbed him. There wasn't enough water to drown him—that's what crocs usually do, hold their catch under water until it drowns—so it went off with him, probably heading for a deep pool. Then it stopped on the way and ate him.'

The words were almost impossible to accept. It was difficult to realise that while I had been scouring the scrub for specimens this frightful drama had been enacted almost within shouting distance.

'But why leave the legs?'

'Dunno. That puzzles me a bit. Maybe it didn't eat him there. Maybe he was still kicking and it just took time off to kill him. Wouldn't think so—grass was all flattened and matted, but the ants and the birds had been there so you couldn't tell much.'

'So what do you do now?'

'Take the legs back to town.' He nodded at his vehicle and I realised for the first time that the gruesome relics would be in it. 'Pick up some geli and go and get the croc.'

I was taking rather long pauses between sentences, but that was all right because slow conversations are normal in the north.

'Will it be easy to find?'

'Should be. He wouldn't get far after a decent feed. He'll find a pool and lay up for a while until he digests it. Got to get him before that happens.'

I couldn't see this. It struck me as much more seemly to allow the crocodile to digest his kill rather than recover the awful remains for burial, but it wasn't my business.

'How will you go about looking for him?'

'Just follow the stream down and blow every deep pool we come to. Shouldn't take long. No point in trying for more than a week—there'd be nothing left to find inside the croc after that.'

'Are you going alone?'

'His mates are coming with me. Want to come along? Should be interesting.'

Whenever I do something I'm slightly ashamed of, I use the excuse of the writer's instinct, but it was probably only morbid interest that led me to accept.

Jack picked me up early next morning and we drove down the track in his vehicle.

The two civilians were waiting for us at their camp and I was surprised to find how cheerful they were. I hadn't even known the missing man, but I found his dismemberment a sobering event. Perhaps they were relieved that there was no longer any reasonable suggestion that they had disposed of him themselves. Jack made no attempt to introduce them. He obviously didn't think much of them. They seemed to accept this as natural and kept to themselves.

Jack took a pack, which he explained contained gelignite, and a heavy rifle from his vehicle. The civilians carried old army rifles and small packs. We all began walking into the scrub.

Jack and I went first and the two civilians followed some little way behind. This arrangement just happened, but I had the impression Jack wanted it that way. He was a man of considerable presence and he managed to convey the atmosphere that he was the professional, I was the welcome observer, and the other two were barely tolerated as interested parties.

'That's the tree where we found his clothes,' said Jack after we had walked for a few minutes. It was a large pandanus palm, but unremarkable. 'There's the creek.' He pointed to a trickle of water that emerged from the scrub and formed a very narrow small channel through a clearing. 'My guess is he just sat down in that to get wet. The croc probably shot out of the scrub and grabbed him. Or the croc might have been there first and the poor bastard just walked straight into it. Come on, I'll show you where we found the legs.'

We pushed our way into the scrub.

'You're not worried that the crocodile might be still close by? Or another one?' I asked.

'Wouldn't be another one. This fellow'll be a big bull. He'll have cleared out anything else. Wouldn't even let the females around this time of the year.'

We marched along for a few minutes. The flies were very bad and it was hot.

'That's where we found the legs,' said Jack eventually.

I saw a patch of grass that could have been disturbed recently, but it meant nothing.

'Now I reckon,' said Jack, 'that the croc got him back there either at the creek or somewhere between the creek and his clothes. Now, we found the legs here, so obviously the croc came this way. He'd be heading for a pool and a pool would be on the creek, so my guess is that the creek winds around and if we follow a line running from the clothes to here, we should hit the creek, and we follow that until we find some pools.'

He was not inviting comment, just telling me what he was doing.

We went on into the scrub. Jack pushed briskly and apparently unconcernedly forward, but he did unsling the rifle from his shoulder and carry it with his finger on the safety catch.

He was right, as such men usually are, and we soon struck the stream. We went on in single file, walking in the water with Jack in front—the rifle unashamedly held ready—then me, feeling nervous, then the two civilians following very closely behind. Once Jack turned sharply and said to them, 'Are those guns cocked?'

One admitted that his was.

'Well, uncock it and put the guns over your shoulders.' It hadn't occurred to me to worry about two men walking behind me with loaded rifles, but I realised I should have been worried and was glad of Jack's forethought.

In about twenty minutes the stream widened out into a large stagnant pool lined by pandanus palms and several large gums. The surface was covered with green weed which had been disturbed.

'Could well be in there,' said Jack, and made us all walk around the pool looking for crocodile tracks. There was a lot of grass which had been trodden down by something, but there was also buffalo and pig dung.

'If he's in there, he might have a cache under the bank,' said Jack. That's what they often do with cattle, take 'em into their hole and let 'em rot a bit. But this pool doesn't look big enough for a permanent nest to me. If he's in there, he's just slipped in when he heard us coming.'

I looked at the motionless surface of the pool and wondered whether just below the opaque surface lay a huge reptile with a man in its stomach.

'We'll blow it up anyway,' said Jack, and busied himself with his pack.

His technique was simple enough. He placed a few sticks of gelignite with a detonator in a container. Then he attached a length of wire through which he could send a charge from a small battery-powered plunger. He tossed the container into the centre of the pool and fed the wire out as it sank.

'You could almost stand up in there,' he said when the wire stopped running out. 'It's going to be a hell of a bang in water as shallow as that. We'd better keep back a bit.'

'Will the charge kill him?' I asked.

'Probably. It'll push him flat and wreck his guts. He'd be near enough to dead.'

'He's not likely to come rushing out?'

'No way. He might stick his head up after a while to have a look and see whether there's anything worth eating. But he probably won't be interested in more food at the moment. He'll just want to be left alone.'

At times I thought there was something terribly coldblooded about Jack's attitude, but I suppose it was the only way to go about the job.

We all went back a few paces from the bank and I set off the charge.

It was a hell of a bang.

A vast gout of muddy water and weed shot high into the air, one bank collapsed and a large gum toppled slowly over and fell into the pool. Two large catfish and a barramundi and an eel suddenly were flopping and wriggling on the grass at our feet and we were drenched by water with a vaguely rotten smell.

There was no sign of a crocodile.

'Thought that pool would be a bit shallow for him,' said Jack ' We'll try further down. Bit too much geli there too—you can't judge it unless you know how deep the pool is all over and it's no good probing because there's often holes or tunnels in the sides.'

'He couldn't be in there and dead?'

'Nah. If he was in the pool itself, he'd float up. If he was in a cave in the bank, the top would have blown off. The top of the cave's always above the surface of the water.'

It did strike me that tramping around the banks of a pool that might have contained earth caves sheltering crocodiles a hair's breadth from our feet was not exactly prudent, but Jack wasn't worried and he gave every indication of being careful and competent.

The next pool was only ten minutes' walk away. It was much larger, with only a couple of trees on the banks and a large clearing all around it. Again, there were all sorts of tracks and droppings and the pool had been disturbed by something.

'That looks more like it,' said Jack. 'It has to be pretty deep, too. We'll give it a hell of a blast.'

He began packing gelignite sticks into the metal container.

'Will that kill him if he's in a cave?' I asked.

'Oh, yeah. The pressure this sort of thing creates under water is unbelievable. Trouble is, you kill everything else in the pool too. Still, that can't be helped.'

He tossed the container into the centre of the pool and fed out a lot of wire while it sank.

'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.

*An Aboriginal word for 'mankind', used by whites to mean an Aborigine.

Table of Contents

Snakes and Alcohol

Crocodiles and Sex

The Killer Koala

One Hundred Stubbies

Vic the Snake Man

Liquid Assets

A Couple of Interesting Specimens

Camel Rides: Five Dollars

Cedric the Cat

The Very Angry Pig

Black Gold

The Dog who Loved Animals

The Mad Miner

Reef Encounter

Six Taipans

*