The Killer Koala (13 page)

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?'