Authors: Kenneth Cook
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.