Dealing with a dog who rolls in a fish kill

 About two weeks ago it was raining hard. We had about 60 ml in a week. The inlet swelled with river-brown water from the massive system fed by three rivers. I was running out of firewood. This time of year always presents me with a sense of lack: crouching over a fire that will not thrive, like an animal trying to stay warm. Not enough sun to power the internet and my single lamp for more than an hour per day. As a casual worker, I'm out of a job for most of June and July, so when the income runs out, gas bottle runs out, my gas fridge stops and so does the hot water.

It sounds grim but it's a reality of living off grid in a remote location. 'I should organise myself for this time of year,' I think every year. This year I lined up a few writing jobs which are tiding me over for the moment. Anyway, with the fresh water pouring into the inlet over the last few weeks, regular visitors have noticed an anomaly.

The sudden influx created a mass fish kill event. At least I'm better off than your average herring. Brownie and Co were filletting mullet on an ironing board down on the beach. They'd set nets the previous night and not caught a single herring. 'They're all dead,' Brownie said, pointing to the dead fish lining the beach.

I walked along the beach for a few hundred metres and found 30 or 40 more dead herring. Shit. Later, other boaters told me there were dead fish on every beach on the inlet, stinking up the reed beds and the sandbars. I could only find herring on the beach, large, almost bull herring. 

So I reported the fish kill to the authorities and warned Brownie to put his nets away. For the next 24 hours I stressed about Fisheries coming out to inspect our nets and hanging about the place. The main thing was that I thought it needed to be flagged. Water authorities got back to me to say it was a fresh water deoxygenation event.

So my issue now is my dog. 

On the first day, I washed her in warm soapy water after she'd rolled in rotting fish, rubbed her dry with an old towel. She immediately went down to the beach and had another roll. I washed her with warm soapy water again. 

Next time, she's getting the hose.

Theseus' Car

 Wow ... March 8th was my last post. Well it's fitting that it is now April 8th. Do any of you other bloggers have that sick sense in the stomach for not fulfilling everyone else's requirements? I do, but hell, I've been busy.

Here is me in my rabbit coat with another mammal friend Harry. Harry is one of those friends who I don't see often these days. He waits until the initial excitement and greetings are over, then jumps into my lap for a personal gidday. My dog is thirty times his size but Harry has swag and has always held it over the rottweiler cross. He no cute lapdog, this one is the Black Prince.

In other news, I'm still replacing parts of my car, hence this post's title. The car is now at least twenty years old and I'm coming to the space where I have regular conversations with my mechanic on the Greek Myths. Like, if I replace every part of this car, is it still the same car? Should I replace it with a new car? Covid made prices for new or second hand four wheel drives go through the roof. To maintain an old four wheel drive means pretty much replacing everything. My mechanic is remaining stoic on the subject of Theseus. I did notice however, that his wife keeps a ball of string behind the counter.

This week is the end of fire season for me, so all those kilometres of driving summer gravel roads are coming to pay me back re the yearly fuel allowance. A new turbo charger (the seals were damaged due to corrugations and it's now leaking oil) plus some new shockies (obvs!). In previous years, I've replaced the head, the gearbox, the tyres, a few panels and a roo bar.

Anyway, enough about the car and fuck Theseus' boat. Here's some photos of eagles. Terribly sorry if you associate with Prometheus. You know, livers etc etc.

Swing Saws and the Queen

So this post is about swing saws. Have any of you heard about them? Swing saws are pretty much the most dangerous pieces of farming equipment I ever come across. Forget about tractor fatalities or deaths/dismemberments/injuries caused by post hole drillers, let alone those ATV bike rollovers. Swing saws are part of an archive of 1920s new chums (immigrants) turning up to buy and clear land in a country that delights in the mythology of the hard-working land clearer, and part of the mythology when bits of wood or the saw itself turns on the operator in a kind of karmic deliverance.

I'll get back to swing saws in a moment. For now, here is a photo of my dog. 

Queen. She was early-morning sunning when I took this pic.

The inlet is about to bust its bar. I've never seen the water sitting so patiently on the banks and I've been here for a few years now ... but it's full and ready to split, ready to spill out into the sea. I'll post this photo and then when the bar breaks, I'll post another photo from the same spot. Stay tuned.

Back to the swing saw. They are pretty much a petrol engine driving a circular saw blade attached to a rotary hoe set up where you can turn the blade from vertical to horizontal. During the farm sale and the assorted paraphernalia that went with it, the swing saw sold to a local farmer who promised me he would never, ever work the thing. He bought it as an article of interest and it was to be hung in his shed for perpetuity. He promised me that.

Others had expressed interest in the swing saw because old WW2 motorcycle engines had been repurposed into these land-clearing, sleeper-making, personal decapitation machines. I'm not kidding you. Have a look at this puppy and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Boomer meets Selkie

 In the gloaming hours, those hours between dog and wolf, I was woken by my dog. She was barking, howling, at an ageing kangaroo kicked out by his mob and condemned to a life ending by the inlet. They both stared at each other, an old boy roo and my dog. After hours, indeed years, the boomer took off and chased the dog along the track.

#offgrid compared to #vanlife

After a ten day stint on fire tower and radio support in the office, I've just had a joyous few days off. I did my washing:

I did the dishes and just hung out at my place. Kyabla sent me a box of honey from our last hive rob at Kundip. My colleague on the tower recorded his lowest relative humidity and highest temp ever today.He's been doing this for decades so it's a precedent. No more bits of kangaroo turning up via Selkie from the beach, although there were two tusks and a hind leg on my doorstep this morning. I've been busy prepping my lunches for the next swing ... safely stashed in a gas fridge that is on the blink. 

#offgridliving is the very opposite of #vanlife. Perhaps I should link up my life to their Insta account.

Bin fire grass fire

Today on the fire tower was more anxiety than boredom. Once again it was a sched 5 and I was up there earlier than usual. Lots of tourists. High winds meant that small kids were freaking out when they got to the peak, scared of being blown off the mountain. The mesh fences to stop this occasioning didn't seem to make them feel any better. Parents talking 'face your fears' didn't help. The only thing that worked was someone taking their child's hand and talking them beyond how scared they were.

There's thunder tonight and no rain which means dry lightning across the southern forests region. Wheee!  Today I called in a smoke out Rocky Gully way. It was out of our district and there were all sorts of hectic happenings in our own but still, the spotter pilot radioed me for coordinates and passed it onto the neighbouring spotter. It turned out to be a few hectares of paddock going up. Grass fire. Must have been a decent one because I could see it from fifty kilometres away. Soon after I called it in, the radios went crazy.

On another note, Selkie was terribly happy when I returned home. She sleeps on my bed whenever I leave the house because she's a stinky, passive aggressive bitch. I returned to a house smelling of passive aggressive bitch. As soon as I turned up she headed down to the beach to retrieve the treasure she's been sniffing at all day. Turns out there's another kangaroo carcass down there.

 

I think what is in the photo is part of a spine and rib cage (including said dog). She's very pleased with herself. I'm really not sure what's going on at home any more.

I did find a bird's nest. Check this out:

 

I found it under a tree outside the local day care centre. When I brought it into work, the ranger said, 'That's the string and felt we use in the day care centre!' She has kids who go there. The nest is also threaded with parrot feathers and bits of serviettes from the cafe. This pretty much my best find all year.

Finally, these two ... just because they are pretty bloody funny:

 

 

If I don't get to post beforehand ... Happy New Year Bloggers. I just love you mob and think you are all awesome. Thanks for being around this year and ones past. I really appreciate it.

X Sarah

The Dogs are in the Senate

 

Christmas night was spent on the beach just down from my house, with way too many dogs who worked their political hustles like pros in the senate. Dog politics, whoo boy. Sister set up the gazebo with fairy lights, Dad and I ambled around the beach looking for driftwood. Someone managed a potato bake. Someone else organised a salad and I roasted a chook with the plastic blood bag intact beneath it on the tray. When realising what I'd done, I watched everyone closely but no adverse reactions. The chook was splendid and so, with full bellies and dodgey director chairs thrown on the fire lest there be a worse incident, we whiled away the night. It was windy and quite chilly for a Christmas Day but this is the south coast we are talking about here.

Happy Christmas Bloggers! I hope you've had a few lovely days, whether it be with family, your friends or lying in bed reading a book. XXX Sarah Toa

In the warm dusk water

 

 I love the sound of kids playing, that rising and falling cadence of a dance, like faux brawling puppies. Sometimes when families come to stay at the AirBNB nearby, the parents apologise for the intrusion on my solitude and all I can say is ... 'that sound of kids playing is just the best.' It's so quiet here, most of the year. During the winter double grey months on the inlet, the silence is so absolute that I can hear the old tinnitus in my ears. The sound of children reminds me that it was once peopled extensively pre-colonisation ... that the sound of children is nothing new and also a kind of loss.

My dog Selkie loves it too when kids come to play. Selkie is a great healing dog for anyone, child or adult, who is afraid of big dogs. She looks scary initially, being a big rotti cross, but all she wants is to be loved/patted/sit on the lap of a homo sapien.

This evening a mob from the city turned up to stay at the AirBNB. Their son fell in love with Selkie on the beach and I had to cut a phone call short to make sure he got his cricket ball back. Selkie doesn't give up her trophies easily. She claims ownership over every spherical object on the beach. 'It's a bit slimy,' I explained to the boy, after I'd extracted said ball from the dog's jaws. 'Take care and don't tease her.' Selkie has a squeaky ball that looks ominously similar to the COVID19 virus, so I gave it to him to do a bait and switch with his own cricket ball.

Naked babies wallowing in the shallows at sunset. Their parents told me this is heaven. I tend to agree with them. Selkie had a ball, pun intended.

 

A dog in space

'An easy life does not make for good copy'

The inlet vibe has turned pretty gothic lately. Mid winter, winter solstice, all that. I'm always coming back to Nora Ephraim's 'everything is copy' and so now I'm going to subject you all to my version of 'everything'.

You know that feeling when you look at your dog a bit differently and think, 'She's actually a wild animal. She's descended from wolves and I forgot all about that while she was sitting on my lap.' Anyway when all the fishing shacks were broken into, a few people expressed concern for me because I live in the bush on my own. I can't see people coming in and out from the shacks and felt a bit bad that I hadn't clocked the thieves. But I felt pretty safe 'cos my dog kills cats!' (More about this incident later.)

My sister came to stay after the borders opened. While I pursued my Sunday afternoon pastime of newspaper and wine on the back veranda, she took Selkie for a walk along the beach just down the hill from the house. 

A few minutes late I could hear, 'Selkie! Selkie! No No! Come here. Oh my God Selkie come here!' I put on my boots and headed for the beach. Sister's yelling changed from commanding to cajoling and then back to screaming, 'Sarah! Get down here. Selkie! Please. Oh Fuck.'

I could hear splashing around in the water and thought maybe the dog had caught a pelican. Negligible chances but anyway. By the time I found my sister along the beach, she was taking off her boots and getting ready to go into the water. 'She's got a roo out there,' she said. 

I called the dog, who was swimming around the kangaroo, and she started coming back but then would turn back to finish the roo off. They were fighting each other in the water. Three times she turned back. Sister was still intent on going after her and I told her to stay on shore. 'You can't wade into an underwater dog fight,' I said. All we could do was watch as the kangaroo's head sank beneath the waves and Selkie returned to shore. 

Kangaroos will lead a dog chasing them into deep water in order to drown or disembowel the dog. Friends have given me anecdotes that have gone one way or the other. Sister and I both knew this, hence our panic. When she finally got to shore, I turned over the dog on the beach sand to inspect her belly and saw ... not a scratch on her. We went back to the house with a totally hyped dog who was wired for at least the next few hours.

She'd chased the roo through shallow water and then they'd both fallen into a hole, which is where they both started fighting. Anyway the carcass washed up a few days later. Sister took Selkie for another walk. 'Don't find any roos!' I said jokingly and she came home with, 'Found that roo.' 

Bugger. Now I have a carcass right next to my home, I was thinking. I tried to keep the dog away from it but she'd take off to inspect her kill. The other day the carcass was on the beach in front of my house. She'd dragged it along the beach and was dragging it closer to the house every day. I could see the marks in the sand where she'd moved it. I mean, this is where the gothic comes in. a dead kangaroo steadily advancing towards my home.

A decision had to be made. I have a dead kangaroo on the shore, disintegrating by the minute that I'm pretty sure Selkie is going to be rolling in soon. She was also guarding the carcass: every time she heard a crow or sea eagle, she'd bolt down to the beach to see it off. This was her kill.

Should I bury it on the beach and cover the grave in corrugated iron and stones, so she couldn't dig it up? Should I shovel the body onto the back of my ute and dump it into the bush several kilometres away? (I've done this one before) But I couldn't stomach either of these options. It was a dilemma. The carcass was too far gone for any respectful treatment. Knowing I come from a black powder family, a friend suggested this:

That's not quite adequate either, really.
In the end I gathered some rope and a house brick today, put on my covid mask and trudged resolutely down to the beach in my gum boots. Selkie followed, watching bemused, as I towed the fifty kilogram dead kangaroo out to sea and set it, like a net, where my dog had drowned it.

'Why can't my life be easy?' I emailed (wailed) my friend last night, as I was trying to nut this whole thing out.
'An easy life does not make for good copy,' she replied.

Working (vulnerably) From Home

So I have the inverter, humming like a tuned-up tractor, beside me. Actually it sounds like a suburban neighbour's leaf blower on a Sunday morning, but who am I to complain about having internet at home?

Today I'd like to talk about iso injuries, that is, the injuries sustained by a planet of humanoids isolating in their homes for a sustained period. No, not really, just little ol' me confined to work from home, or the local laundromat, or Flame's back veranda. Wherever there is internet anyway. I'll list this litany of personal injuries not in chronological order but based on the fact that they are all related to my own state of mind due to lockdown.

Nora Ephram once wrote that she was raised to understand that "all painful things eventually turn into funny stories." I can't agree more with the woman who was once married to Watergate journalist Carl Bernstein and who also said "everything is copy." She went on to write a savage take-down of the end of their marriage in novel form. Like she said, everything is copy and pain, on later reflection, can be pretty bloody funny.

I was watching my dog limp. Selkie is one of those unber-healthy dogs with a glossy coat and bounces around like Tigger. Seeing her in pain was awful and it looked like she'd broken a bone in her foot. She has a round, every morning in the place that is dog heaven. Just before dawn she takes herself off for a run along the beach, heads into the bush and returns forty minutes later, panting and chuffed, often with a kangaroo bone. She is a dog without fences or roads. Imagine that life for a dog. This particular morning she returned a bit subdued and limping badly. It was in the first week or so of our Australian lockdown. I had the sniffles and decided not to travel 200km to video conference a Noongar elder for my teaching job.

Instead, after 24 hours of spinning out about my injured dog and how far we were from the nearest vet (100km), I went all Dr Quinn Medicine woman on her and administered comfrey to her foot and bound it up. By the time I got her to a vet, he took one look at her, rotated her back knee and said, 'Well I won't do that again. It's obviously causing her pain. It's her cruciate ligament. Here's some anti inflammatories. If she's not better in a week, it's surgery.' He threw my bandages and unguents aside. My brain bled, with dollar signs leaking out my ears, as I lifted the 40 kg rottweiler cross back into the car.

This is obviously not an iso injury but it made me feel really vulnerable. I sent messages to my son who by then lived across a closed border from me. 'Let me look after her, I'm closer to the vet' he replied. 'There must be a way to get a dog across the Frankland river. I'm about to kill a sheep, so I can get some chops and potatoes to you at the same time.' Blessed Stormboy.

At around the same time, some friends went picking field mushrooms and gave me a mass of them chopped and wrapped up in a happy christmas tea towel. Any of you who know me well know that I love eating mushrooms and I do know a bit about which ones to eat. So I set about making a cream of mushroom soup and that night I ate the lot. So yummy!

The next morning I woke up with a fever, I was shaky and then I started vomiting. I felt like I'd been poisoned and poisoned I was. Once again I felt terribly vulnerable. I was 100km from the nearest hospital. Could I drive there? Would I have to park my car on the highway ten km off the dirt track, put on my hazard lights and hope for a passerby to help me out? The roads were so quiet. Normally I'm quite the mountain woman but times like these make me feel inconsequential. My nearest neighbour is 25 km away.

I cured myself with red gum resin made into a tea. Worked a treat. Then I swallowed half a cup of petrol due to an unfortunate and aborted internet installation. Then I rolled an ankle wading through the water to pick up a net full of mullet. Then I sprained a thumb on the next week's mullet set. "What the fuck is that Brown Thing in the net Boo?" "It's your Croc Sarah. It seems to have come loose from your foot." "Oh ... good. Whoops!"

Sprained thumb.

You'll be happy to know that my lungs (from breathing in petrol), my stomache (from ingesting petrol and poisonous mushrooms) and my dog are much better now. My rolled ankle and my thumb still hurt a little bit. However I think that, while I'm normally pretty good at looking after myself, especially in the isolated areas where I often live and work alone, I've been a bit slap dash on the personal safety front lately. My next post will be about the pig hunters and their dogs who upended my zoom meeting with my boss.

Hope you are all well bloggers. Stay sexy x

Off the grid

It's so pretty at the inlet today, chilled sun in the morning. The professional fisherfolk motored back to shore an hour after dawn and Ms Mer gave me a mullet all shiny like a new coin.

I've been pretending to be a bear over the last week, sleeping, reading and sleeping again. I haven't been paying attention to the minutae recently and was wondering why the laptop was only half charged before the inverter conked out. Poor ol' Mr Panel had been in complete shade for nearly a month, so this morning I moved him to a happier place.

Sylvestris - living in the forest

 Just wait around for a short while and nature will throw on an event for you. I didn't have a camera the day this lady's lover arrived but I did see him and he was dapper. Cryptostylus ovata, or the Slipper Orchid, has a wasp for a lover. There are small forests of the orchids over near the burn.

Billardiera or what Noongar call Cummock are a tasty little bush food, that is glorious this year, straight outside the front door.

I know when the sea eagle is about: the seagulls start carrying on. There was a herring frame down on the beach and everyone wanted a piece of it. Seagulls out my way have probably never seen a hot chip. Their diet is pure bush food. Seagulls harried the eagle who swooped around for half an hour and then the crows joined in. Cawk ... cawk!

Finally Selkie joined the fray. She hates anyone who is after her fish, even if she's not interested in eating it herself. I think the rest felt the same but I was all good, cooking up herring fillets in a fry pan.

Day Off

I woke to the house shaking, dishes rattling on the sink, a low rumbling beneath me, all around me. The dog came to my bedside, her tail swaying doubtfully. She was not afraid. Rather, she seemed to be checking with me if she should be afraid. The sound was like a truck laden with rocks on a gravel track, just like last time but this morning the vibrations were more intense and lasted longer. There’s been a bit of earthquake activity going on lately. Its epicentre is sixty kilometres to the north and seven kilometres below the ground. Usually the quakes are light enough to be an interesting, surreal event, not alarming. Exciting but not too exciting, if you know what I mean. In town, after the last one, people reported experiencing the tremors at different times, or not at all, and I can imagine the earth cracking the fissures and seams, heaving like a great beast through subterranean pathways. I checked the clock. It was six am. I turned over, the dog left my bedside, and we both went back to sleep.

In the early morning birdsong dozing, I dreamed the image of a woman with barbed wire wrapped all around her naked body. I woke with the picture still printed onto my mind and realised it was something that Stormboy had drawn. I’d sucked in a quick breath the day I looked at the picture, right before he handed it to his grandma. She’d asked if he had any artwork she could have for the grandkiddies’ archive and he gave her this picture.

‘Oh!’ Said Mum, examining the nude, who had barbed wire strapped between her hairless crotch and across her breasts, around her neck, traversing her thighs. ‘Is this for me?’

‘It’s about Mother Earth,’ I explained to Mum, reading out loud the lines from a Doors song that Stormboy had written below the image. The woman is way too sexy and the implications sadomasochistic, but The Doors’ lyrics gave the picture context, or at least a vague permission to be something other than torture p*rn. The other picture he gave his gran was his self-portrait: a grinning skull with his beanie and dreadlocks. There was no challenge in his gifts. Stormboy is rightly proud of his drawings.

I was musing about all this as I got up and put the coffee pot on the stove. It was going to be a warm day. We are in the magic hour of the year when the forests are partying with colourful wildflowers and insects, and constant smoke from the fires turn the light magenta through the trees. In the office where I worked a few days ago, they told me they’d be burning out my way. Back from the huts, they said, across the plains and into the karris. They were just waiting for the sou-easterly, supposedly coming in on Friday. But today is Friday and the wind feels a bit too north for burning.

Coffee and a couch facing the inlet, reading the London Review of Books. The dog wants to go for a walk but I’m reading about Count Dracula, Bram Stoker and Trump. I’m reading about AIDS in the early 80s and ancient Chinese imperialistic endeavours. Two robin red breasts buzz around the veranda, high and low, checking the cobwebs and leaf litter for bugs. I feel bloated, listless, on this couch, like a student using her brain but not her body during exam season. A kookaburra is hunting nearby. It sits on the tin roof of the shed and occasionally I hear a rustle in the bracken as it dives on a lizard or a small snake. Lots of thumping as the killing goes on down below. I throw down the paper and whistle up the dog.

We walk the inlet track and there are no fire trucks or crew, as I’d suspected. I held up a wet finger to the wind and it registered north west. No good for burning today, unless their burn would take out my place as well. I’m learning to trust their judgement. The slipper orchids are flowering, sexy red sheaths rising in delicate spikes from fat, slipper shaped leaves. ‘The slipper orchids are out. It must be your birthday,’ I think to my Scorpio friends. I didn’t say it out loud. There have been no people out here for days. I haven’t seen nor spoken to another soul except my dog and the odd bird for forty-eight hours now.

Along the track, yellow and blue tape is tied to trees. Parks and Wildlife are getting ready to burn. Yellow indicates a fire hazard, a dead tree that could turn into a chimney or fall onto the track during the burn. Blue is for ‘mop up’, or ‘put out any smokes past this point’. The peppermint trees are in full bloom. In another week or so, their petals will coat the ground like snow. The dog sniffed at a stump in the gutter and slowly, almost lovingly leans down, neck first, to roll in something disgusting. Across the track lie green honky nuts with the scars from cockatoo beaks. I was getting hot, my winter clothes and winter body not ready for this change in season. I wore boots and socks to lurch into the bush but the dugites are too doughy and quiet to get quickly out of my way this time of year. Despite being deadly, these snakes are sluggish to the point of being casual and it’s only when they are accidentally wrapped around your calves in an anxious figure of eight that they get cranky. So, I don’t go into the bush much in Kambarang season. On my way back along my driveway I see the track of a big kangaroo, dragging its tail, ambling along. I’m always looking for tracks these days.

I make a tuna salad. It sounds so American, I think, as I chop up home grown spinach and cherry tomatoes, slide the lot into a noodle bowl and squeeze half a lime into the mix. Prominent media commentators seem so focussed on end times and social division at the moment. I’m not sure, I think as I fork spinach and fish into my mouth. I realise I’m hopping between past and present tense like the historian I am. It is an ecosystem waiting for another rise of the Klan: straightened economics, cultural shifts and another inevitable wave of immigration.

There should be some writing done today, I think. That journal article I’m supposed to write. The novel that was due a week ago. A blog post maybe, the one about that man going missing out here. As usual, I stalk around my laptop like it is a beast that will bite me if I get too close. To write is to fail. I’d just like to sit on the veranda and dream. Instead, I fill the laundry trough with cold water, add detergent and my smelly clothes. With no electricity here, the washing righteously takes precedence over any literary endeavour. Then I water the spinach and coriander growing in old metal suitcases outside my front door. Smoke is everywhere in the sky. The fire, started from the epicentre of the earthquake, has blown across the country, out to sea in the morning and washed up on my doorstep by the afternoon.

I drive up the track to see if there are any messages or emails to ping in at the ‘in range’ spot beneath a huge karri that always threatens to drop a limb on my car. Yowie has messaged me about the earthquake, and when I get onto the news app, everyone says the quake happened at five am, not six am. Maybe I got the time wrong, I think. It woke me up though and I looked at the clock. It said six am. Some of my students emailed, unsure about whether their marks will be up before they graduate. My boss emails to let me know what units I’m teaching next year. The karri tree looming over me creaks and groans in the wind. The caravan of migrants marches closer to the border.

So I get back home and start writing this, because the washing is soaking, the beetroot I’d grown is pickling and I’d untangled another fifteen metres of the three hundred metres of Japanese longline that Yowie and I found on the beach a month ago. I got a bit sick of myself, writing this, and went back out to wrangle some more rope. I hope the rope didn’t kill any whales on its way through Antarctic waters.

Then I went down to the shore. It may be only fifty metres away but I don’t visit every day. This evening I followed the tracks my dog made when she went for a snoop this morning. I know her tracks. I know everyone’s tracks. Cat tracks, crow tracks, roo tracks, snake tracks, Selkie tracks, man tracks, car tracks. I went down to the shore and the sunset was pretty spectacular because of the burning. Shepherd’s delight. I thought, ‘I live here. This is my place. I am indeed blessed.’ And then I walked back up to my house, the dog doing donuts ahead of me like the five-year-old pup she is, to finish writing this blog post.

Kambarang #2

The morning after the cat's cremation, Flame and I had planned to frock up, put on fishnet stockings and fox stoles to make the pilgrimage to the Rocky Gully pub. We were intent on taking the back roads through the forest. Apparently the Rocky Gully pub is exactly the same floor plan as the Franklin pub, so naturally I was curious to see how they could get a pub so wrong ... twice.

The sudden downpour of rain put an end to the fireplace I'd just raked with a stick, to pick out Ebony's bones and teeth. I found as many as I could and put them into a little grass tree bowl. 'Wow,' said Flame as she held up a femur. 'This one held her up!' It kept raining as we dressed into our glad rags, readying for the epic trip. Flame made a mix of gin in a plastic soft drink bottle. She took a sip.
'That's so not fair you bastard,' I said, thinking about the drive ahead. 'That's what I love about you,' Flame smirked, taking another sip/swig. 'You don't even ask me what time it is.'

Flame continued to work her way through the mix as we hit the gravel tracks, the dogs in the back seat and rain sleeting around us. The track was sodden and it looked like it would rain inches that day. My car began slewing around in the mud and I slowed down.

As we crawled down the hill towards Fernhook Falls, my dog began to lean on Flame's shoulder. I knew exactly what she was doing but hell, we were frocked up and heading for the Rocky Gully pub. One jealous dog wasn't going to stop us. She lay her head on Flame's shoulder and looked over at Flame's kelpie, Darren.

See Darren? This is my human, my dog was communicating to Darren. Anyone who thinks dogs can't communicate non verbally are kidding themselves. Selkie's body language was a total raised middle finger to Darren the kelpie. See Darren? This is my human and so is that one, nodding to me. And this is my car too, Darren. Goddit punk?

Darren curled himself as far away from Selkie as he could. She leaned harder on his owner's shoulder. Flame leaned over to give Darren a placatory pat and maybe the gin made her heedless to the canine politics being played out because my dog was so consumed with possessiveness by then that she roared at Darren to keep his corner.

So, we continued for another few miles with dogs fighting in the back seat and lurching through the pouring rain on a track slippery with clay and mud and no idea of how far away this pub was, or if there was a fuel bowser there. The plan was falling apart. Flame was tipsy so she would have coped but another hour of this seemed like a special kind of hell to me. I pulled up at the T junction.
'Let's go to the herb farm for lunch,' I said and Flame cheered. We turned right instead of left and headed back to town.

Joey

This morning when I got out of bed, I opened the front door to empty the coffee pot into the poppy flower bed and found a dead kangaroo joey on the doorstep.

Late afternoon yesterday, I had walked along the driveway with my dog to visit Ms Mer and her deckie at one of the weatherboard huts halfway along the ‘main street’ of the squatter’s shacks. I stopped by the orchid garden on the driveway to have a wee (toilet’s blocked and I’m still waiting for the enzymes to do their work) and my dog ambled out of the bush track to the gravel road. After about an hour at Ms Mer’s hut, I realised my dog was nowhere to be seen. This was unusual. Selkie is normally right by my side and can’t bear to miss out on a social event. I opened Ms Mer’s fly screen door and called her. Nothing. No clicking of the medallion on her collar, no panting happy dog. Nothing. This was really weird. I put my empty wineglass on the sink and told my hosts that I was going to look for my dog.

It was getting dark as I walked past the abandoned shacks, calling her name. I passed the gateway guardian, a tree so disfigured by breast-like burls that Holy calls it the mammary tree. I heard a big kangaroo crash into the forest, then stop, waiting. In the darkening night I saw my dog crouched under the giant marri tree. I called her but she stayed there.

This morning I found the disembowelled carcass of a joey on my front doorstep and I did wonder at my dog. That crashing about on the hill that I heard was its mother seeking out her joey. Kangaroos don’t come down to my place often. They smell Selkie and stay away. ‘Well she’s a big dog and she’s fast,’ said my Mum when I expressed my dismay that Selkie may have actually killed the joey.

‘Well, it is all very well that your dog was a predator,’ I said, grumpily, referencing Wolf, that dog of Mum’s with one eye on his food bowl and another on the chickens/sheep/kangaroos available. At sixteen his teeth were blunt but his head still snapped sideways at a paddock full of prey as we flew past in the car. ‘But I feel very upset about my dog being a killer.’

‘She’s a dog.’ Said Mum.

This afternoon Pete came to stay and mentioned that he’d seen a doe hanging around on the track. In retrospect, after what you’ve told me, he said, she was probably looking for her child. When I looked at the dead animal’s munted body, I thought it had been hit by a car. Maybe my dog dragged it back to my place, to deliver it up like a roadkill gift for me. But she seemed spectacularly uninterested in the carcass this morning. Maybe when I’d stopped for a wee on the driveway, Selkie had gotten nose of some roadkill up on the Broke track. But there are no drag tracks on my driveway. This joey is heavy, I know this because I’d lifted it onto the back of the ute to dump it up the road. Selkie bringing it home would surely have left drag marks. The whole thing is very strange. If she’s killed it, she surely would have shown some ownership over her prize. I drove up the Broke track today and there were kangaroo tracks in the middle of the road just past my driveway. The tracks suddenly stopped, like the kangaroo had leapt straight into the sky.

I don’t know what to think. I look at my dog differently now.