The Killer Koala (11 page)

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.