The horse, the snake, the terror

There is something very important that I forgot to mention in last night’s post. That is that, if you have ever seen Faces in the Mob, which you really ought to if you are to call yourself a true Australian, the white horse seen below is the very same white horse featured in that movie. (Is it still “name dropping” if I am referring to animals?) The sequence below was actually taken at Wallaby Creek, the site of the data collection for my Honours project. Wallaby Creek is a reknowned macropod study site, if you move in zoological circles. When I arrived at James Cook University, Townsville, to do research after university, my introduction to people went something like this “This is Alison – she’s one of Peter Jarman’s Wallaby Creekers” and people would nod and say “arrgghhh”. The shot below, which was the beginning of the horse-riding sequence, shows the hut that was home for my time there. It had no power, no water, no actual doors or windows. One evening one of life’s nightmares was realised in this hut. I had come in from a dusk search, plotting the location of the kangaroos, and went round the small piece of wall that existed inside, and saw something inexplicable in the fading light under my makeshift bunk. I said to myself ‘I wonder what that is?’ and bent down for a closer look, when it reared up and came at me. Then I think I said something like “it’s a SNAKE!” as I all but fell backwards out of the hut. Thankfully at this time there was another fellow from the university there doing a mammal survey, who was just au fait, apparently, with snakes under beds. He pinned it’s head under a broom handle, while I held the light from a distance, and removed it. It was actually only a python, but there’s no discriminating when it comes to snakes under beds (and it was behaving in a strangely aggressive fashion such that we weren’t sure till we could get a good look at it). The old adage goes that you have to take a carpet python three miles to get rid of it, which proved true because the next morning python was back asleep under the floor boards in the corner. And for the remainder of the time there it went out, via the window, every evening, on its nightly forage, and returned in the small hours of the morning and just became part of life. We’d say things like “have a good night Horatio” as it slithered out the window.

I wasn’t entirely happy about being in this hut in the middle of nowhere with one other guy. But there wasn’t much to be done about it at the time, and so I strung tarps up down the middle of the hut and marked out my territory. I soon discovered, also, that it was a good deal preferable to being there on my own. I spent one week alone in that hut, during Autumn when the dingoes howl, and I have to confess that for that week I walked a fine line between sanity and hysteria. Every evening as darkness crept down the valley I had to steel myself against the rising terror (it was before the days when mobile phones were in common use, and uni students certainly didn't own one, and I doubt they would have worked there at any rate, so I had no contact with the “outside world”). I made sure there would be no reason for me to trudge down the paddock to the outhouse any time during the night, out of fear and dread that something unknown might enter the hut while I was gone and ambush me on my return. The morning that my week was over, and I could respectably leave, I got up at the crack of dawn, seized with a totally irrational panic to get out of there as soon as possible. I had finally let go of the mental fortitude that had held me there all week and was shaking with the relief that I had survived and could now go home. The whole “into the wild” experience, heading off into the woods to “live deliberately” (as Thoreau put it) and commune with nature (and I really did! – I could get within five metres of every kangaroo in the valley, I knew them by name based on natural markings only – all this owing to the work of those who had gone before me – and I talked to them!) is just a little over-rated.

I also perhaps didn’t adequately set up the scenario below. I was back in the hut for lunch one day, when the fellow mentioned above, who clearly didn’t have enough work to do, said to me “I’ll give you a leg-up”, with a nod outside. I looked in the direction of his nod and said “I’m not much of a horse rider”. He said “so?”. And I thought, “so indeed! – allright then!”. So, this challenge and this leg-up is how I came to be astride that horse (if any of you spared a thought as to how one gets on a horse that is not fitted with a saddle, well I, disappointingly, didn’t run up behind it and leap on like John Wayne). He then got the camera ready to capture the moment. (Yes, I am wondering what this guy really thought of me too – inciting me to such idiocy. If you are not at all familiar with horses, a person shouldn’t just get on a horse they know nothing about, when they can’t even actually ride one, without a bridle, saddle or a helmet. Even an experienced horse rider would take care getting on an unfamiliar horse, with all the necessary gear in place!)