Some of My Friends Have Tails

by Sara Henderson

  It was now quite hot, and sweat was dripping freely from my nose and elbows. If I didn’t find a solution quickly, the bat wouldn’t need rescuing. I remembered reading that if you wanted to handle a frightened or wild animal you should cover its eyes. Back to the house I raced, dogs at my heels, for a few large towels. We certainly used this method successfully with horses, so I was hoping for the same results with the bat.

  I returned with the towels, lots of safety pins and a pair of pliers. It would be easier to free the wing if I cut the spikes off the barb, if I could find them. I wrapped the towel around the bat’s body and a double layer around its head, and pinned everything securely in place. Then I quickly took the weight in my hand, as everything was now hanging on the injured wing joint.

  Covering the eyes had a miraculous effect. The bat stayed completely still as I went about my task. Without the distractions of the pain-filled eyes and predatory teeth, I was able to study the wing closely for the first time. The joint seemed okay, certainly stretched to its limit, but not broken. I carefully rotated my towel-clad bundle around the wire. Even one rotation helped immensely. The joint now had some slack, the towel stopped wriggling and squeaking, and I could see the end of one of the barbs.

  Carefully and gently pushing the tangled wing down the barb as far as I could, I snipped off the point. This allowed another rotation, and I moved my bundle once again around the fence wire. Sweat was running into my eyes at such a rate I had to blink rapidly to keep my vision clear—I had no free hands. My shirt was saturated, and sweat was running down my legs so fast that it was hard to move without slipping in my thongs. I worked as fast as possible, worried I might be suffocating the poor thing in the towels. I still could not see the ends of the other barbs. I marvelled at how many times the wing was wrapped around the wire, yet not broken. My back was aching as I stooped over the wire, left hand supporting the bundled bat while the right hand tried to free the wing.

  Finally I decided there was only one thing left to do. The bat was caught on the wire a few feet from a picket with the longest expanse of wire, about eight feet to the next picket, on the right. Crouching low and still supporting my bundle, I cut the fence wire a few inches to the right of the wing. The taut wire made a loud twang and catapulted into a twisted heap near the far picket. I quickly snapped the wire on the other side of the wing and the short piece of wire just fell against the picket.

  Carefully cradling the injured wing, I carried the very still bundle of towel and bat back to the welcome cool of the homestead. Took the extra towel from around the head, giving the poor creature some air, but left one towel in place; I still had to untangle and clean the wound, so I couldn’t let the teeth free yet. With only a few inches of wire to contend with, I had the wing free in no time at all. I quickly washed the wound with antiseptic and the job was done.

  What to do now? The poor thing would need rest; it could have been hanging there all night. I found a box with a lid, put in a dish of water and some cut-up apple, then lowered in the bundle of towels, undid the pins and peeled back the towel carefully. It did not look well: its little hands were tightly clenched, its eyes were closed and there was no movement. I closed the lid and left it in peace; I had done all I could. I put the box in a cool spot and went into the bathroom, stripped off all my sweat-dripping clothes and took a cold shower.

  With clean clothes and washed hair I felt refreshed, so I again sat down to drink that quiet, first of the morning, cup of coffee. Only now it was mid-morning and I had done nothing except save a bat from dying, impaled on barbed wire. It still might die in the box, but even though that was my entire morning’s effort, I felt the satisfaction of having accomplished something. Sitting with my feet up on the table, sipping coffee, I felt good inside and all my frantic worries had gone. By the time I organised myself and got through the basics, lunch would have to be cold meat and salad.

  I checked the bat regularly; by the afternoon most of the apple was gone, so I dropped more in through the little peephole. I thought it best to put the bat back into its natural environment, so the next morning just before sunrise I opened the box and again carefully covered the bat with a towel, lifted it out of the box and carried it out to the nearest tree. I opened the towel and lifted the bundle up to a low branch, hoping the little feet would close over it. They did! Gradually I moved my hands and the towel away, letting the bat take its own weight. It hung there upside down, eyes on me, no sign of teeth, and slowly adjusting its wings and flexing the injured joint carefully. It seemed to be doing very well. Then it decided the branch was too low and it started to crawl along to the tree trunk to climb higher. I held up the towel to catch it if it slipped.

  The bat paused, looked at me again with eyes calm and free of pain, and then before I realised what was happening, one of the little black hand-like feet came out of the voluminous folds of wings, and with the gentleness of a flutter of silk, it was laid on my hand. It was the strangest moment. I didn’t recoil in horror, but immediately realised I wasn’t frightened; transfixed would be more like it. I had a clear sensation that something wonderful was happening.

  The hand stayed there and I didn’t move a muscle. Those amazingly soulful eyes looked into mine and I know they said ‘thank you’. The little hand moved back and I could clearly see the claws extend, which were not visible seconds before, to grip the bark. I watched mesmerised as the bat climbed slowly up the trunk, favouring the injured wing. It reached a branch halfway up the tree, moved along to a position of its liking, and spread its amazing wings of skin. I still watched. The sun flooded the valley for a new day, and illuminated the fine network of blood vessels coursing through the wing. I could clearly see the congestion, an inflammation in the joint of the injured wing. As the sun’s rays increased in warmth, the bat moved to a position in the shade cast by the trunk. It folded, moved and positioned its wing until it resembled a cocoon, the eyes touched mine once more, then the head disappeared into the cocoon.

  I checked during the day as it moved to different positions in the tree, avoiding the direct sun. The next morning it was gone. When I close my eyes I can still see that soft little hand resting on mine, and those big soulful eyes saying ‘thank you’.

  Charlie resumed his terrorising of the Department of Civil Aviation on our return to Australia in January 1970. His reputation had certainly become established in the previous eighteen months we had been on the station, but on our return he proceeded to enhance it. Many of his escapades were recorded as ‘225’, the flying world’s absolute no-no’s, but there was one particularly outrageous adventure that did not appear on the official record.

  Charlie and Gus had bought Montejinni Station and Charlie flew back and forth regularly in the Super-cub. Unfortunately the direction was south-east from Bullo and he would always encounter a headwind on the way there and most of the time coming home, making the two-hour trip anything up to three and a half hours. So to pass the time, Charlie would read or work on business papers, his briefcase a virtual travelling, portable office.

  On this particular trip he had flown from Bullo to Darwin to Montejinni, and was on the last leg home to Bullo. The Super-cub is only a two-seater, with the second seat in tandem, behind the pilot’s. Charlie had supplies on the back seat of the plane, piled high, and on top were his requirements for a long trip: cold beer, a block of cheese, packets of crackers, a paperback book, reading glasses, notebook and briefcase. The little plane was slogging it out with a strong headwind, and was barely winning. Charlie was flying into the western sunset, the sky was a golden red glow and the sun was close to the horizon; he admitted to himself it would be a ‘last light’ landing … way after last light if he had to be truthful. He glanced down at the position of a landmark he had picked out five minutes before and gauged the headwind was even stronger than he had originally thought. He sighed deeply and reached back for yet another liquid refreshment. He had been in the air so long, even the beer was losing its chill. As his hand emerg
ed from the beer carton behind his back with another can, the can hit the door handle. The Super-cub’s door opens half up and half down; the halves meet and are locked together in the middle by turning the handle. When the beer can hooked the handle, the two halves of the door flew open. Cheese, crackers, beer and briefcase, one by one, slipped silently off the top of the pile and cascaded, tumbling over and over through the sky towards earth.

  Charlie snapped into action and was in hot pursuit, kamikaze-diving after his belongings. But it was a futile gesture; by the time he had recovered from the shock and snapped into action, quick as he was, the lost articles had almost reached the ground, helped along by their landing on a high, flat plateau of around one thousand feet. Charlie circled the spot, and swooped low to pinpoint his briefcase, now burst open, the contents strewn over the plateau; in the last rays of the setting sun he could see money fluttering everywhere, the four thousand dollars in payroll wages he had drawn out of the bank that day.

  He called on the radio to see if there were any helicopters in the vicinity. A guy he knew answered; he was on his way to Kununurra, a little to the south-west. Charlie asked him to detour to the plateau, land, and pick up the four thousand dollars. The pilot declined this suggestion and Charlie’s offer of a small reward for the deed; he explained he was low on fuel, had just enough to make Kununurra on the straight course he was on. It was now dark and he didn’t relish landing on some plateau in the dark even if Charlie gave him the whole four thousand, which he knew he wouldn’t. Any way he looked at it, if he could see to land safely he would have to spend the night there or somewhere along the track home, as he would run out of fuel. Charlie’s requests would certainly not make his boss happy or comply with insurance criteria, he explained, declining the offer. Charlie was still furious when he landed at Bullo in the pitch dark, aided by the lights of several torches and two Toyotas.

  To this day, as far as I know, the cheese, crackers, beer, briefcase and money are still on top of the plateau … unless the helicopter pilot went back the next day with plenty of fuel and time to collect the four thousand—and the beer. If he didn’t, most of it would not have survived to this day, but somewhere out there, on the track from Montejinni to Bullo, the remains of the beer cans and briefcase, and maybe some money, are still sitting on a thousand-foot plateau, waiting for some bushwalker or cliff-climber to stumble over it.

  The part of the story that was repeated around Darwin for many moons was when Charlie went into the bank the next day and told the bank manager that the four thousand dollars he had given him was very definitely out of circulation, and it was all right for him to record the money as lost and give Charlie another four thousand to replace it! Charlie thought the manager was decidedly narrow-minded when he laughed at Charlie’s suggestion and failed to see his reasoning.

  The stock camp was twenty-two miles from the homestead. Musters, in the days before helicopters, were done on horseback. On some musters the stockmen could be away for weeks at a time. Charlie communicated with them in regular radio sessions, but this wasn’t good enough for Charlie; he had to be there to ‘command his troops’, but always in maximum comfort. To get out to the camp by road took a good hour each way, too much of his precious time, so he’d have the men clear an area near the camp for a bush landing strip; then he could fly out in fifteen minutes. That suited Charlie ideally as he could pop out to the camp to give new orders (definitely his favourite pastime) many times a day. But it didn’t suit the stock camp at all; the poor head stockman could not get through a day without three or four visits from Charlie with revised plans. Luckily for the men, not all the camp sites were situated to allow for a bush strip to be cleared, which meant Charlie could only fly over the camp and drop messages. Which was okay from the head stockman’s point of view, but not satisfactory for Charlie because he couldn’t get any update or progress reports. He would fly around in circles dropping notes with instructions and then a follow-up note asking a question and telling the head stockman to stand out in a clearing and nod ‘yes’ or shake his head for ‘no’.

  The mode of message dropping was uniquely, distinctively Charlie! He would stuff the written note inside a full roll of toilet paper and throw it out of the plane. The toilet paper would unravel as the roll plummeted to earth, leaving a long streamer of white paper to mark where it fell, making it easy for a stockman to lope across the paddock and retrieve the message. By the end of the season, most of the station trees looked like Chinese New Year, all festooned with paper decorations. The yearly toilet paper purchases were staggering, and people constantly asked Charlie why he carried a carton of toilet paper in the aircraft. Of course anyone remotely connected with the station in the early 1970s would be well acquainted with Charlie’s communication system. Transport drivers would be bombarded with toilet roll messages all the way along our road. New drivers sometimes had problems; one chap finally made it to the station, marched into the kitchen and wanted to know who the crazy weirdo was that flew up and down our road pelting trucks with toilet rolls (he didn’t look for any message). Charlie was standing there, arms folded, eyes glaring and foot tapping. By the time that driver departed, he was fully au fait with Bullo River, Charlie, and the communication system, and would dutifully leap out of his truck and reply with the obligatory nod or shake of the head to pertinent questions like, ‘How’s it going?’ or the thumbs-up message that warned him about a bad ‘jump-up’ (a steep ascent or descent) ahead. Most drivers would head for the front gate at all possible speed hoping to escape to the sane world outside, away from Charlie and the bombarding toilet rolls.

  I put my foot down when Charlie wanted the children to fill paper bags with flour so he could drop those to gauge his accuracy. I knew he just wanted to play games; and he knew I knew. I just said the budget couldn’t extend to flour, toilet paper was expensive enough. Charlie immediately went out and dropped a note on the stock camp to instruct them to retrieve the toilet paper and roll it up again to be used for its original purpose. But when he got some recycled paper that had landed in a prickle patch he wasn’t so keen on that idea, and it was re-used only to drop messages.

  He finally modified the system to a rock in an empty orange onion bag with long red ribbons, this was recyclable and didn’t have stockmen spending hours rolling toilet paper. Of course there had to be quite a few bags, because they had to be brought back to the homestead by Toyota only a few times a week. So there were times when the stock camp would be dropped a note saying ‘out of bags, drive them in to the homestead’, which of course completely defeated the time saving purpose of the message-dropping system. If the head stockman didn’t get in to the homestead in a few hours, Charlie would be up in the sky again dropping toilet rolls, requesting an ETA on bags.

  Charlie had never really got enough of the war, so he loved all these extra excuses to drop anything from the plane, reliving his bombing days. And he tried to drop almost anything. It got to the point where we almost had a full-time ‘air-drop’ packing department. Of course that consisted of the children and me! Every morning he would issue instructions on what he wanted packed that day for the dropping zone. Eventually I had to put my foot down and refuse or we would have spent the whole day in Charlie’s ‘drop zone’ packaging department. When we went on strike, he would roam around and find something he could drop that didn’t require much preparation.

  Charlie found out, the hard way, that you cannot drop beer just by the carton; or perhaps I should say the poor old stockmen, eagerly awaiting their evening beer, found out. The whole carton of beer cans split open on impact before their eyes. But Charlie wouldn’t give up; when it was reported back to him, he said he would drop the cans one at a time, and they could catch them. This practice was one of Charlie’s favourites as it really did test the accuracy of his spot bombing. However, it must have slipped since the war because the practice had to be stopped when stockmen ran into trees, or the backs of cattle, or barbed wire fences, or fell into the river, try
ing to catch the precious cargo. He found meat dropped well, but since the camp could mostly kill their own on site, requests for meat were few and far between. So he was constantly on the prowl looking for any excuse to bombard someone or something with the dreaded toilet roll or rock missile.

  One of his most famous drops was on a very new employee. The chap was driving out along the road; Charlie was prowling the skies for action, when he saw the cloud of dust rising from the road. On closer inspection he decided the driver was going too fast. He quickly wrote a note, stuffed it in the onion bag with the rock, banked the plane and started a strafing run. The poor driver was scared out of his wits as the truck came up over a rise, to see a plane in a kamikaze dive-run, coming straight at the truck. Charlie bombed him with the message bag and swooped into the sky, thoroughly pleased with his efforts. The poor driver, on the other hand, had unprintable opinions. With shaking hands he opened the bag to read a note telling him he was driving too fast and would damage the truck, to reduce speed immediately. Charlie’s message bag and rock had gone right through the windscreen, almost knocking him out; it had caused him to swerve off the road, and the truck had ended up hopelessly bogged in a rainwater ditch.

  Of course one day the unthinkable happened: he ran out of message bags after the first drop. The toilet paper box had been stolen out of the plane, put to better use, so Charlie’s communication system was ‘up the creek’. His only drop was off the mark, so he put his head out the window to shout his instructions as he swooped low over the camp, and his glasses blew off. Not to be defeated, he dropped a message tied to a set of the plane’s wheel-chocks, telling the men to find his glasses, dropped longitude such and such, latitude such and such, and not to forget to bring back the wheel-chocks! It is not hard to understand why we had a regular almost one hundred percent turnover of staff.