The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  They had to return home, leaving the roof to me. Cutting tin was too hard, so I was using ferro-cement—cement over chickenwire and hessian. Dad would shake his head, but it would be watertight.

  Then came the hard part. All the roofing materials ready, I went to get Dad. He had to move in now, because neither door nor window of this cabin would open: my roof would close it forever. As I carried the grey plastic sealed box I could hear small shifting gritty sounds—tiny bits of Dad, more real than ashes.

  He fitted snugly in his cabin. I draped the hessian over the wire. I couldn’t see the box any more. He was gone. I hated doing this. ‘Sorry, ’ I sobbed, as I worked the cement into the hessian.

  Interment is so ... final.

  When it was done, I sank onto the rock nearby, relief filming over the hole in my heart as the clearing echoed to what is known as ‘a good cry’.

  Rest in peace, Dad.

  I walk by Dad’s place almost every day Hey Dad.

  When my granddaughter visits, she picks flowers and arranges them on his verandah and tidies up the pebbles in his garden. She has a special fondness for her Poppy. Although she was only two when he died, she was extraordinarily empathetic at his bedside in those last hours.

  Dad would much prefer his cabin in my horse-cropped pasture to being one in a row of metal plaques in a neat memorial rose garden. The only complaint he might have is the lack of a few beefy Herefords in the landscape ...

  ‘S’pose she’s still one of them vegetarians; glad the younger two got over that stage! Dunno how a man could make a living out of cattle if even his own daughters weren’t eating meat!’

  Yep, I’m still a weirdo, Dad.

  CHAPTER 7

  KEEPING UP WITH THE QUOLLS

  While certain people might consider me weird, I pale in comparison with some of my neighbours, who also fail to observe the proprieties. They’re rather lax about boundaries too.

  My house yard’s netting fence was intended to keep the larger native animals out of my garden, not to provide the smaller ones with a playpen for their young, as it does. One of these smaller animals—although not exactly small, being large-cat sized—is my co-tenant, a female Spotted-tailed Quoll. She has lived and bred in my shed for about eight years. Quolls climb, dig, tear and pull, so no fence would have kept her out of anywhere she’d chosen to live.

  I’d never heard of quolls until I came here. Everyone knows about the threatened Tasmanian Devil and the presumed extinct Tasmanian Tiger, but the Spotted-tailed Quoll hasn’t made it into the popular press, despite being a member of the same family as the Devil, far more distinctive with its spotted coat, and a much fiercer carnivore.

  There are four types of quoll, two of which are extinct over much of their previous range. We’re so good at this extinction business that Australia holds the world record for wiping out the most mammal species. And we’ve done it in only 200 years.

  The Western Quoll once roamed over a vast area of inland Australia but is now only found in Western Australia’s south-western tip. The Northern Quoll seems to be still doing well in the Top End, perhaps because of its ‘pugnacious disposition’. The Eastern Quoll is thought to have disappeared from the mainland states, but it survives in Tasmania. Sightings are occasionally reported in remote places like my mountains; I was sure I’d seen one myself years ago, on the edge of this clearing. It sat up on its hind legs and looked at me—it was smaller and daintier than my shed tenant, and had no spots on its tail. If I saw it now I’d be better informed to identify it.

  In wild-edge areas like this it wouldn’t be surprising to find supposedly extinct creatures surviving here. A few locals insist they’ve seen a Yowie.

  If I have anything to do with it, the fourth type of quoll will not become extinct, since that’s my quoll, the Spotted-tailed Quoll, also called the Tiger Quoll or Tiger Cat—which is rather silly, since it’s leopard-spotted, not tiger-striped. Described as ‘the most combative creature of the Australian bush’, you’d think it would capture the public’s imagination, wouldn’t you?

  These quolls have no natural predators; they are bold and smart. They’re still seen in the mainland’s eastern rim and Tasmania, but with competition from foxes and feral cats, and with logging and clearing reducing their forest habitats, their populations have been greatly reduced and ‘may become so thinly distributed as to be unable to survive’, warns my Australian Museum Complete Book of Australian Mammals.

  So my quoll needs my refuge. The quoll family stink out my shed, pee on my step, and nightly leave their distinctive droppings, often full of undigested fur, on my verandah. They’re not the nicest of neighbours. As the song says, ‘I don’t eat animals and they don’t eat me’—but I’m glad my meat-eating quoll is smaller than I am.

  These quolls have been described as ‘very ferocious’ and have a bite grip second only to that of the Tasmanian Devil—they can bring down a wallaby, I heard on the radio. The first time my small granddaughter saw our quoll, I was taking her outside for the ritual pee on the grass before she went to bed. From the steps she caught the quoll in the torch beam. ‘Grandma!’ She drew back, clutched me. The quoll bared her teeth at us. ‘What is it? Will it hurt us?’

  I assured her it wouldn’t, and the quoll disappeared into her halfway house—a tin-covered stack of timber near my house, but my granddaughter was rather nervous as she bared her plump and vulnerable little bottom. I must say it occurs to me too, in similar situations, since I learnt about the wallaby. Chomp!

  The quoll and I respect each other. Like me, she’s a compromising creature. It’s not that she’s becoming tame—far from it! But she does tolerate me and my pitiful scratches of civilisation in her extended territory. She lets me into the shed to fetch things, stays out of sight as I hold my nose and forage about. I usually call out ‘Coming through! It’s only me!’ as I enter. If we surprise each other, she silently shows her teeth and disappears. I acknowledge this as her claimed space; I don’t want her to move elsewhere and be at risk.

  She renders my shed almost unusable during her breeding season, since quolls don’t separate their sanitary and living arrangements, and like their food best when stored long enough to be putrid. Unfortunately she has chosen my horizontal stockpile of second-hand doors as the centre of her domestic arrangements. I don’t know what I’ll do if I ever get round to more building—buy more doors I suppose. I expect they’d be ruined by now anyway, sandwiching as they do small bones and scraps of furry skin and less identifiable remnants of meals past.

  Her moving in here was the result of false advertising, as she came in response to my ex-partner’s attempt to keep ducks. She got the lot, mother and six ducklings, despite a fortress-like netted run. But pickings for her since from my vegetarian household have been extremely lean.

  Yet she never gives up hope. On the verandah is my old garbage ‘bin’, a simple metal holder for a supermarket bag. She jumps in, scrabbles around, selects, and jumps out. I hear her every night, and if I shine the torch on her through the window above, she takes no notice. Her boisterous kids make so much noise they often don’t hear me open the door, so sometimes I surprise two pink-nosed little faces peering in astonishment over the edge of the suspended plastic bag, followed by an explosion of spots as they make their getaway, gambolling off like runaway rocking horses.

  The quolls prefer strong cheeses like Blue Castello, and even though I think I’ve scraped the wrappers clean, they find them worthwhile. Anything dairy-based will do, or even substitute-dairy, like tofu. Spinach and ricotta lasagne, dropped on the floor and dumped on the compost, was popular, but bliss is an oily tuna tin when I’ve had visitors. It gets passionately and noisily licked from one end of the verandah to the other.

  Normally all wildlife sightings are a source of pleasure, but in summer, which is bringing-up-baby time here, I get a bit overrun with the patter, or clatter, of little paws. I always thought my quoll had twins, as each summer, from dusk till dawn, I’d seen ju
st two spotted bundles of mischief cavorting about the house and yard while she went hunting. They’re fully furred, although less spotty than their mother, old enough to be left unattended—in the playpen.

  She pushes the boundaries a bit, since I was supposed to have the house. The line around my territory has retreated to the inside of the house. The verandah is definitely quoll country. This last generation is far less wary of me—the quoll kids have darted under my chair as I sat on the verandah after dinner, even with the fairy lights on above me.

  I shut the front windows at night ever since two of them got inside into the sink (I admit it, I hadn’t washed up). They made a terrible racket cleaning up the dishes. When sprung by the torch, a flurry of spots leapt out the window, which I quickly shut before hopping back into bed. I soon realised that only one had got away, as an almighty din soon began; one had got confused and leapt down behind the fridge, where, once recovered from the shock, it was banging away at the coils trying to get out.

  Yet the lines are blurring. Apart from the rare days when I have to enter her shed, I’d only seen her gadding about at night or at its very edges. I knew my windowsills were part of her regular patrol, but one misty afternoon she appeared at the window in front of my desk. She was less than an arm’s length from me.

  I froze as her wet pink nose sniffed the glass, her dark eyes apparently scanning but not registering me. So close, I could see the fine raindrops glistening on her whiskers and rich reddish-brown fur, spotted with white to the tip of her tail; I could see the knuckly bends and sharp claws of her neat and clever paws as she clung to the window, and the deceptive daintiness of her pointed carnivorous face as she craned forward and up to investigate.

  She whirled away to leap to the top of the shower cubicle, where her spotted tail, which is as long as her body, hung down over the edge.

  ‘No, ’ I silently assured her, ‘I don’t need doors—or a shed really. Well, not all of it. But I do need more wonderful wild ones like you.’

  For although there are laws, there’s no practical way to protect the creatures in my refuge from unrestrained dogs, wild or weekender. One day my quoll came home late—midday—and along the track, which was unusual. She was moving slowly, awkwardly. Then I saw why. On her back she was carrying one of her offspring, who was far too old for that, almost as big as herself. But this was a rescue operation for, as she passed close by, I could see that the young one had a large area of raw flesh on its hind leg. Only a dog could have done that.

  Too exhausted to make it to the shed, she took it to her halfway house. I put a container of water at the entrance to it, and hoped for the best. I was very upset, as I’d found a young quoll drowned in the horses’ water tub a few days before. That had been bad enough—and I put a plank in there to make sure that any other creature that fell in from then on could climb out—but, if she only had two, this must be her last young one!

  Next day, I saw a patch of brown and white just outside the timber stack; it must be the injured one resting in the sun, I thought. I tiptoed round the back to see better. There were six of them! Sleeping, curled together like kittens, a spotted furry carpet. The mother must have brought them down from the shed to keep the sick one company. I was delighted that she felt so secure with me; they were only about 5 metres from the house, right next to my woodheap.

  I then read that the average litter size is five, but they play in pairs. And they are very playful, taking turns to keep me awake at night with their thumpings and crashings, chasing each other over my tin roof and along the windowsills. I grit my teeth and remind myself that all kids must grow up and leave home sometime.

  But having seen the result of a foray beyond the netting, I wish she could keep them in the playpen forever. Or that I could net the whole property. Quolls can climb, dogs can’t.

  So each morning, as I sidestep last night’s quoll contributions on the verandah or steps, or pick up the scattered garbage, I don’t complain. In fact, if I haven’t seen or heard from her for a night, I get worried. What is she up to? Is she OK?

  This summer, I’ve seen no young ones, and the shed is not as smelly as it should be with an entire family. I am beginning to think that one of last year’s young males may have taken over, ousted his mother from her shed and surrounding territory. They are mature at one year, and the males are more heavily built than the females. Without comparison, I can’t be sure, but the current garbage-raking quoll seems a bit boofier, less delicate of feature than mine.

  Late last winter I saw a big male sniffing through the orchard, in the middle of the day, which is very unusual. Whatever he was doing, he ignored me as he worked his way up the hill. I had assumed he was the male for the mating season, as each year one tracks down my female and creates a ruckus in the shed for weeks. But he may have been the usurper. I’d really prefer a female to share with, but I wasn’t asked. I found I missed the kids this summer, noise and all, so I hope she comes back.

  The quoll kids used to cover the night shift in the playpen until the baby magpie got dropped off. Each year I get at least one of these, and they’ve all been whingers. I don’t blame the mothers for dumping them here as soon as they can, but 6a.m.’s not fair.

  This summer’s magpie junior was no exception.

  ‘Wah! Wah! Wah!’ he whined, nonstop, as he waddled about the lawn. He’d be momentarily distracted by a piece of hose or agricultural pipe that he’d try to extract from the ground, but then the whining would resume. She’d drop in often to check on him and shut him up with a worm or two, then fly off, with him clumsily trying to follow, and whingeing even louder.

  When he outgrew his mother, he followed her in short bursts of flight round the yard, but on the ground he loomed over her, looking cocky, and ever asking ‘What’s for dinner? When’s dinner ready?’ How well I remember that hollow-legged teenage stage.

  Then the Crimson Rosellas turned up and for a week the lawn and lower branches were full of young ones, still green-backed for camouflage and still totally ignorant of the musical whistles of their parents. With heads bobbing and beaks open, all they produced was a constant rusty chorus of ‘N-y-air, n-y-air, n-y-air!’ Their nasal tones kept me expecting the Bugs Bunny follow-up of‘ What’s up, Doc?’

  But without doubt the slowest developers are the kookaburra kids. My place has many older trees and good nesting holes—I have lots of kookaburras. In the breeding season, there are dozens of young ones about, sitting in groups from three to six, turning every raised object in the garden into totem poles, and all muttering. They have a totally flat delivery and are hopeless at learning the words, as all they have is a creaky ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah...’ ad nauseam.

  Listening to their progress is more painful to the ear than violin practice, for they saw away relentlessly throughout the next trainee stage, ‘Oo-wah, oo-wah, oo-wah! Oo-wah, oo-wah, oo-wah!’ It seems to last a month, despite plentiful demonstrations from parents and relatives of how to get all the rises and falls of the proper song right.

  This was the first year I’ve been aware of the King Parrots using the facilities, but, seeking the source of a single scratchy repeated note, like a stuck machine that needed oiling, I found a mother and baby in a small tree in the yard. The young one’s head was still green, not yet the vivid scarlet of his mother’s; he was leaning forward with his beak open, emitting that one note, without a break. Perhaps they were just visiting, but I suspect she was trying to get rid of the kid, drop him off so she could have a brief respite from his relentless demands. Only he wasn’t having any of that and kept following her from branch to branch. She gave up; some kids just don’t take to day care.

  I heard him continuing the carry-on further up the hill. Not that the adult call is at all musical, but at least it’s more varied.

  Perhaps the different species are checking out the playpen for next season, since, also for the first time, I had a visit from a Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoo mother and child. I get groups of these big cockatoos in d
amp weather, but this time there were just two of them, sitting in the branches of the big stringy-bark uphill from the toilet.

  Set amongst the rocks at the foot of this stringy-bark I keep an upturned triple-decker old ceramic insulator full of water, so thirsty birds often provide a little entertainment and aid contemplation. The toilet deliberately has no door; it is open on its eastern face, as little weather comes from that direction, and the morning sun is pleasant on bare knees in winter.

  The two cockatoos didn’t look much different from each other, dark brownish-black, with lemon cheek patches and tail bands, but I recognised that forward lean of the body, that whining tone. One of them was a young one, and it sounded like he was sawing down the tree without taking a breath.

  I’ve just realised that I keep assuming these demanding young birds are masculine. Funny, that.

  While the baby boom lasts, the oft-given comment of how peaceful it must be up here in the bush is met with a short and bitter laugh. ‘Huh!’ I say, quoll spots passing before my eyes, and outside the juveniles start again, ‘Hah, hah, hah, hah...’

  Even when the babies have grown up and been shooed off to find their own territories, it’s never silent here. At night the orchestrated cacophony of frog voices, high and low, long and short, in the small dam down the front, merely provides a continuous background chorus for the hoarse, prolonged gruntings of koalas and the boomings and mournful calls of night birds.

  When we first put this dam in, to have ‘water views’ from the verandah as much as for bushfires, my then partner decided to bring some tadpoles over from the big dam, which is out of sight. And earshot.