by Bob Irwin
Of course, when we’d told Stephen and Danny the day we met that we’d be self-sufficient, we hadn’t meant it. There was no way known to man that we were going to be able to do that kind of physical work without occasional help from local people, particularly when it came to capturing some of the larger crocodiles. When Steve was up there by himself, he relied on Stephen and Danny’s help with the larger crocs. And the largest of them all was the mighty king of Cattle Creek.
The day Steve called me at the park to say he’d finally captured the grand old fourteen-foot crocodile, he was both elated to have finally outsmarted such a wise old crocodile, and also devastated to remove what he knew was the king of the river. After Steve relayed all the details of the adrenaline-filled capture we made arrangements to transport the croc back to the park by rail.
But first Steve would need help. ‘I need a lot of people and I need them fast,’ Steve said, and then hung up to call Stephen and Danny, and to rally help from other farmers in the area.
We’d been trying to catch this particular crocodile from day one. This big black crocodile was notorious for attacking and killing cattle. The four-metre giant was known to surface next to small three-metre dinghies and frighten the life out of fishermen. Many of those fishermen of Cattle Creek carried high-powered rifles in their boats specifically in case they encountered him. So there was a fairly high chance that this crocodile was going to get shot at some point.
In fact, this particular croc was the very reason for our permit. Local farmers had complained about him to Queensland Parks and Wildlife Services for years. But he remained elusive. Then one day while out scanning the banks, I caught sight of a belly slide that simply had to belong to this crocodile; it was almost as wide as my dinghy itself. Just from that, I knew Steve would have his work cut out for him the day he eventually caught this enormous croc.
After I had returned to the park, Steve set two traps just upstream from this belly slide. It was an area teeming with all kinds of easy prey for the croc: wallabies, fish and feral pigs. When, after a few days of checking the traps, he saw that his lead-in bait was gone, Steve knew he was in the right vicinity. Four days later, he was lured out in the early hours of the morning by the sound of the mangroves erupting with the thrashing of a large crocodile. When he approached, he realised that the crocodile was bigger than the trap itself, with his tail and back legs hanging out of it. He also realised he didn’t have a lot of time; the tide was coming in and he was worried the croc was going to drown.
‘We’ve got to do this. We’ve got to get it safely out of the trap,’ he said to Stephen and Danny in a panic, asking them to gather up farmers in the local area who’d help.
People came from all over, despite having no previous experience with a crocodile. Steve directed all the activity with a series of rapid-fire instructions: ‘Get in here,’ ‘Tie that up’ and ‘Put your hands here.’ He suggested that they tie dinghies together to create a makeshift barge.
Once there, with its jaw tied, they managed to collectively manhandle the crocodile onto the makeshift raft—which immediately sank. So they rebalanced it, running ropes around the crocodile and two other boats. The dinghies were only an inch or so above the water. The dinghy the crocodile was actually on was twelve feet long, the crocodile was fourteen feet long. There were legs and tail all over the place.
Stephen and Danny were standing chest-deep in water on either side of the crocodile, which was tied into the boat, and Steve stood in the middle of the boat with the croc, holding a knife. This wasn’t for his or anybody else’s protection. If the boat went down, Steve would cut the crocodile loose to make sure it didn’t drown. They were so low in the water that if the croc had started thrashing about, they would have sunk. It was a slow trip back. He really cared about the well-being of that crocodile. He already felt guilty about removing the king from his domain and his number one priority was that crocodile’s safety.
Meanwhile, the farmers wondered how they would get back now that the croc was taking up all of the room in their dinghies.
‘You can all swim. He’s tied up!’ Steve joked.
‘But we’ve just manhandled him for two hours. If he gets free he’ll be well pissed off with us!’
‘Well, then, you’ll just have to swim faster,’ came the reply.
Eventually, they managed to get the crocodile back to land and load it into a custom-made crate. They used a tractor to get the crate onto the back of a truck and then drove it to a train for the trip back to the park by rail, which was our only option for such a big fella.
Steve gave Stephen and Danny naming rights in gratitude for the incredible help they gave that day.
‘Let’s call it Acco, after the Accornero family,’ they replied. And they always kept in touch with Acco and all of the Cattle Creek crocodiles whenever they visited the park thereafter.
Once Acco’s train arrived at Beerwah, there was one drama after another. His crate was just so monstrous and weighed a tonne. The challenge was to get the crate from the train wagon onto the platform and from there onto my truck. A lot of people gathered around to watch, because it was a really interesting sight to see in the middle of Beerwah. But that raised the stakes because now people were getting in the way left, right and centre.
I thought it would be smooth sailing once I got him back to the park. All I’d have to do was open the front of the crate and release him into his enclosure and let him settle in. But then I realised he had a rope around his jaw. I’ll admit that at the time I was slightly pissed off with Steve for sending the croc down to the Sunshine Coast with the rope on but I also knew that he had his reasons. I couldn’t let him out of that crate without getting the rope off. So I cut a hole in the crate itself near Acco’s head so I could use a little knife to saw the rope off. The entire time Acco was looking at me and I was looking at him. And I just thought that at any moment I was going to wear it through the side of that crate. But thankfully it all worked out okay in the end, and he was finally in his new enclosure.
But like Steve I felt it was a shame to have to pull the king out of his kingdom. Acco had undoubtedly been the largest, strongest and most dominant male in the area. The CEO of Cattle Creek. He would have decided who was allowed into the area he controlled. If another male crocodile had come along, they would have fought fiercely, to the point of pulling legs off each other, and whichever croc had won would have claimed that territory. Smaller males seeking a territory may well have seen Acco’s size and decided to just quietly move on.
So Acco would actually have been doing a very good job of keeping that whole system in check. With him gone, younger crocodiles would come in and run riot. And another system in balance would now be out of whack, because humans had got involved. We’d decided at some point that we couldn’t all live together.
The ideal, of course, would be to educate people living in close proximity with crocodiles about crocodile safety. But that’ll never be perfect either: there’ll always be that minority who won’t learn, who’ll still clean their fish around boat ramps and swim with their dogs. And sooner or later one of those people will pay the ultimate price for their stupidity, and then so will the crocodile. It was certainly heartbreaking to take such a dominant animal out of his home. That never made us feel any good.
***
As we realised that there were more crocs in Cattle Creek than anyone had imagined, and our short croc-catching contract turned into an ongoing project, we bunkered down for the long haul. Steve and I built a temporary lean-to, mainly for Steve to live in when I had to travel back to the park. Stephen and Danny let me use some scrap materials lying around to build Steve a shelter. It was pretty basic—no walls, just four wooden posts and a flimsy roof to keep out the famous far north rain. We slept in swags and washed in the creek. Most of the campsite was taken up with crocodile-catching equipment, ropes, nets and crocodile crates strewn all over the place next to Steve’s canary-yellow Toyota Landcruiser. Tidiness was not
Steve’s forte. He had seven saucepans, which he named for every night of the week. He didn’t wash them, he’d just let his dog Chilli lick them all clean.
The Accorneros looked after Steve, giving him a good feed every now and then. They certainly weren’t game enough to eat at his campsite. Covered in mangrove mud, he’d jump straight in his vehicle with Chilli and drive up to their house. He wasn’t precious about the interior of his truck. But Mrs Accornero was certainly precious about her house. Before he was allowed anywhere near her clean carpet, she’d send him to the bathroom for a shower.
And in the Accorneros, Steve found a keen audience for his videos. Once a week, he’d go up to charge the battery for his video camera and share the videos of the greatest captures. There wasn’t one they watched without being shocked or in fits of laughter at his one-of-a-kind antics. His sense of humour was certainly unique.
Lyn worried a lot about Steve in those days of contract catching. Of course, it was only natural for a mother to worry about her son spending so many months at a time living primitively and alone in the bush. Added to that was the very sobering risk of challenging himself against a predatory amimal in its own environment. Most parents worry when their children reach young adulthood and travel overseas, and here was our son spending months at a time away from home in an isolated environment catching some of the biggest apex predators out there all alone.
But I knew he’d be all right, because this was what Steve was good at. I had had the chance to see that firsthand, having worked so closely with him. That’s not to say I didn’t worry: I worried most of all while he was out on the water, because that was where the real danger was, where you had to play the crocodile’s game. But I knew that once Steve had a crocodile in the trap, he had the upper hand, and although he’d still need to exercise great caution, he could carefully work things out.
Steve was very practical like that. He would sit down, with Chilli, his dog, there beside him, talking her through the whole thing until he’d worked out exactly how he would do something. It might take him an hour to figure it out, but I was always confident that in the end he could.
But the most worrying time came when a few days had passed without Steve making any contact with Lyn or me back at the park. Although he had no phone of his own, he’d often drive up to Stephen and Danny’s house or to other friends’ places to phone home. This silence told me something was up. I decided to make a trip to Cattle Creek to check everything was okay. I also had a feeling that I might need to drive Steve’s truck home and so although I hated catching public transport, I had to cave in and catch the damn bus. Lyn hurriedly packed a first-aid kit, and I booked a ticket and was on my way.
After almost twenty gruelling hours confined to a seat, I persuaded the bus driver to stop on the main highway in front of the dirt track that led into Cattle Creek. Just as I started the three-kilometre walk up to Steve’s campsite, I ran into Stephen and Danny, who told me that Steve had been seriously injured and that they’d tried to get him to hospital, to no avail. I just rolled my eyes.
‘I’ll take it from here, fellas,’ I said, as they dropped me at Steve’s camp. I could see him staggering up to me with a dirty, rotten piece of rag around his ankle. It was completely soaked with blood and mud, and covered with all kinds of things he’d collected in his barefoot travels. He was surprised to see me there. And as he told me what had happened, I shook my head in disapproval.
He had been in a hurry to get a nine-foot female called Cookie into the transport crate, ready to call me to come up and take her back to the park. A nine-foot female weighs upwards of two hundred kilograms, and that’s about the upper limit for a bloke attempting anything on his own. It was the largest crocodile he had ever caught by himself, and I was buggered if I knew how he’d managed to do that.
But he got it sorted without any assistance whatsoever. He’d tied both ends of the boat to the trees along the riverbank so it was stable, and then worked with ropes to restrain the crocodile until he could grab hold of her safely, dipping the boat on its side and lifting the croc over the side of the boat. He motored her back to camp in his dinghy with Chilli, unloaded her from the dinghy to the truck, and then drove to the camp just a little way up from the creek.
His next task was to get her out of the truck and into her transport crate, a rectangular box made of strong marine ply. I knew he was as strong as an ox, but I never really figured out how he managed some of those tasks. What I did know for certain was that he was absolutely nuts for even attempting it by himself. The crate’s two ends could be removed so he could pull the crocodile through one open end with a rope and then secure the rear end so she couldn’t slide backwards. But as soon as Steve had Cookie on the ground, he realised that the crate was too long for him to reach the end of the rope. Instead of walking around to feed the rope through, which was the sensible thing to do, he decided to wriggle three-quarters of the way inside the box himself, to reach the rope and pull it back out.
Prior to doing that, he’d taken the rope off Cookie’s jaws. She was half-wrapped in a big tarpaulin and had a calico bag over her head acting as a blindfold to keep her calm. She had nothing at all restraining her incredibly powerful jaws and she was positioned right at the bottom of the crate. As he propelled himself into the box, legs flicking from side to side, he inadvertently clubbed Cookie on the side of the head with his foot.
Crunch! She grabbed him. The most powerful jaws of any animal—beating even great white sharks—crushed down into his bone. She had him by the ankle and gave him a shake before fortunately releasing him and wandering off, still covered in all of the gear. He reversed out of the box quick smart. A glance at his foot told him she’d done some pretty serious damage, but first he had to catch the crocodile all over again and secure her in the crate, and then manoeuvre the crate into the shade, before he could finally tend to his injuries. For Steve, tending to his injuries just meant wrapping his foot up in a calico bag and getting on with things. He told me the whole story with great gusto, but I was distinctly unimpressed. ‘Steve, do you realise that this could have gone really, really badly for you? That croc could have taken your leg clean off!’ I said, pointing out to him that if the crocodile had done a death-roll while he was caught in the wooden crate, she’d have taken his foot back to the water as a souvenir without much effort at all. ‘Obviously you’re not going to go to the hospital to get stitches?’ I continued, already knowing the answer.
‘Nah. She’ll be right,’ he said stubbornly. But the real reason was that he was concerned about leaving the traps he’d already set out on the creek. He’d obviously weighed it all up. He knew that if he’d left a crocodile in a trap exposed to the sun, chances are it’d kill the croc. And we both knew that there was nobody to relieve him. It’s not like you can say to the neighbour up the road, ‘Hey, I’ve got to get to hospital, do you mind checking my crocodile traps when I’m gone? If there’s a ten-foot crocodile in one, just drag it into the boat by hand and I’ll deal with it when I’m back. Thanks, I really appreciate it.’
‘Well, that foot of yours won’t come good in this environment,’ I said, looking around at the mud and mangroves, just about the worst kind of bacterial cocktail you could ask for with open wounds. ‘The way that’s looking, you’ll be coming home in one of those wooden crates yourself. Dead. I’m going to get the first-aid kit, and I don’t care what you say, I’m going to patch it up.’
He didn’t argue, just replied, ‘That’d be great, Dad.’
I sat him down, boiled some water in the billy on the campfire and set about cleaning his wounds. They were nasty. Really, really nasty. His foot was covered in deep, purple holes that were pits of rotting flesh. It didn’t take a doctor to work out that he’d need more than a few stitches. So I got all of the equipment ready from the first-aid kit and explained exactly what I planned to do. ‘This is going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me.’
‘Get on with it then,’ he said, and after that he
didn’t utter another sound. Not one, as I poked and prodded at these holes, digging out all of the embedded dirt and bits of gravel that had settled into them and washing out the whole thing with effervescing disinfectant. I cut out putrefied flesh with a scalpel, all the while thinking what a state he had let himself get in without doing anything about it.
I don’t have an iron stomach for the sight of blood and guts. And I could see what he was going through, but he was prepared to do whatever it took to allow him back out on the water to keep catching crocodiles. Finally I latched on plastic staples that pulled the skin taut to close the freshly cleaned wounds and wrapped up the bottom half of his leg to keep the whole foot uncontaminated. I made it as watertight as I could manage and then I hoped like hell it’d be enough, because that’s all I could do.
‘It’s no good me telling you to stay out of the water, is it?’
He shook his head. I’m convinced he thought he was part crocodile, because crocodiles heal pretty well even after serious injury. They’re known to be able to shut off their own blood supply to injured areas in order to stop bleeding and have an incredibly sophisticated immune system, able to fight off the most serious infections. I’d seen many crocodiles minus a leg or with part of their tail missing. In fact, you’ll seldom see a fifteen-foot crocodile that’s whole. Nine times out of ten an old crocodile will have sustained some pretty substantial injuries. They are remarkable survivors.
But I had to remind Steve that he wasn’t a crocodile, that he was a lot more mortal than that, and it wasn’t the last time I had to say it either. That bloke certainly put Lyn and me through our paces.
I spent the next day out on the water with him dismantling the traps, and then we loaded Cookie onto the back of his truck and drove her home to the reptile park. Thankfully, that foot healed up magically. And I say magically because that’s the only term I can use to describe an injury of that severity healing itself without any intervention but rudimentary first aid.