The Woman on the Mountain

by Sharyn Munro

  Do as you would be done by.

  Coming back to live here second time around, my first snake encounter was of course when my partner was away for a few days. I’d found snakeskins, but that afternoon I spotted the first snake of the summer. I’d just moved the sprinkler, and as I turned the water back on, a black snake slid into visibility and under a very small ring of grass-clipping mulch around a Native Frangipani tree, where it became immediately invisible. It hadn’t liked the water. I had dozens of small mulch piles like that and was often plunging my hands in to weed them. Now they would all harbour possible snakes.

  I seized the hose and turned a full jet onto the mulch. Nothing emerged. I watched for an hour, wanting to know where it went, as my shower was outdoors then and on that side of the house. No sign of it. I gave up, went to bed unshowered and, despite the heat, slept with all the low windows shut.

  Next day there was still no sign of it and hosing again flushed out nothing from the mulch. It must have gone. After lunch, as a reward to myself for completing two copywriting jobs plus having a story read on Newcastle ABC radio that day, I lay down on my cool bed for the indulgence of a daytime read. All the casement windows were wide open, as it was 35 degrees.

  I heard a rustle just outside my bedroom windows and, curious, I peeped over the sill. There was a long black snake, a mere foot below me, in the dry leaves on the gravel, edging against the rock base of the tank, less than a metre away—and heading for my low, low windows.

  Banging the immediate windows shut, I raced around both bedrooms, shutting all low windows before the snake could slither in. Then I ran to the verandah and looked back along the wall. The snake was moving downhill. I began clapping and throwing odd items in its wake—thongs, gumboots, a candle, a dustpan, lumps of wood—to keep it moving, out, out through the fence. Please just be visiting!

  I was stamping on the verandah, thumping on the railing, calling, ‘Go, go, go!’ The snake went though the fence and headed for the tussocks with me yelling louder and keener than any racegoer to help it keep up the pace. Noise was the trick, I decided, feeling victorious, and hoarse, but nevertheless I wasn’t game to collect the thrown items until the next day.

  It had been a handsome young Red-bellied Black, neat small head, glossy skin. So long as I knew where it was I was unafraid, I told myself, but as I couldn’t watch the fence lines all day, my imagination had slender black shapes gliding gracefully up and over the windowsills whenever I turned my back.

  Since then I have often seen black snakes in the garden or heading uphill across the ‘lawn’ and either clap them along from a safe distance or, if they are in my vegetable garden, encourage them out with the hose. They do seem to be just visiting. And I have at last made a few mesh screens to clip on the inside of the awkward casements for summer nights, to permit the entry of breezes but not wildlife—I don’t like to sleep with my neighbours. The screens can only be attached with the windows at the narrowest opening, as otherwise the casement stays would poke through the mesh.

  I take them off in the daytime as my theory is that flies are best given through passage in and out of the house. I don’t know why I no longer fear snakes entering that way by day, but it’s more convenient if I don’t, so I’d best not think about it! Rationality is overrated.

  The only brown snake I have seen since the gun days was far from the house, in the bush, when walking the regeneration area fence line with my would-be fencers. I was striding down the mountain, trying to measure in metres as I stepped, which is quite difficult on rocky, steep and tussocky slopes without going head over heels. As my right boot extended for the next stride downhill, I saw a brown snake coiled in the ring of tussocks beneath it. Fear sent the message to my right foot to remain airborne, and I landed a few levels down instead, not even twisting an ankle, and not stopping to look back.

  Re-reading Miles Franklin’s Childhood at Brindabella, I was struck by a passage about a childhood experience of hers, when she’d seen a black snake lying by the creek, perfectly at home in its surroundings. Its majesty and beauty so impressed her that she did not, as she was supposed to, report the sighting to her uncles so they could shoot it. Then many years later she saw a black snake at the same spot, occupying that same role, and felt pleased that perhaps she had made this continuity, this rightness, possible.

  Now I try to take the same approach to snakes here as I do to all the animals. I only want the house yard; they can have the rest. To that end—and to deter the bush rats—I keep the yard fairly clear at ground level.

  I look long and hard at magazine pictures of charming cottage gardens surrounding Australian rural homesteads. I scour the text beside them, but nowhere, ever, have I found reference to how they manage to tend these prettily prolific gardens without coming across dozens of snakes. Don’t they realise yet that Australia’s not really England downunder?

  Their garden paths are narrow and overgrown, the beds of tall plants tumble over one another above dense ground covers, the irisedged dams almost writhe before my eyes, and as for the knee-high wildflower meadows—snake heaven! How do these chatelaines/gardeners, pictured in elegant hats and spotless gardening gloves as they cut roses for the dining table, avoid the snakes?

  Perhaps, like dogs only attacking people who are scared of dogs, it is only the snake-nervous like my mother and I who see snakes?

  CHAPTER 19

  CASUAL RELATIONSHIPS

  It’s not only snakes who pass through my yard. Other wild neighbours invite themselves in, and some of these camp for a week or two, always without notice. When I haven’t seen them for a while, I invariably get a shock when I come upon them.

  Like a few months ago, when I went to pick some lemon balm to spice up my breakfast herbal tea, which is basically a digestive mix of peppermint, sage and meadowsweet, all of which I grow, although not yet in the quantities I consume. My lemon balm grows in the rockery herb garden just in front of the house. On this particular morning I had to go without, for that bed was occupied by an echidna, startling me with the sudden glimpse of wrongness of texture, of bristling brown quills instead of leaves and flowers.

  I tiptoed away to get the camera; when I returned, the echidna was still busily snuffling amongst the herbs. Crouching about a metre away, I clicked. It lifted its pointed, hairless snout at once, turning its head towards the sound, its small dark eyes apparently not seeing me. The snout was covered with dirt, as you’d expect, given what it does with it, but I could see the two nostrils on top. Echidnas don’t have a mouth, just a hole at the end of the snout, from which they shoot a long sticky tongue to catch ants or termites. They must catch a lot of dirt at the same time.

  While their vision is poor, their sense of smell is excellent, and their hearing very sensitive. So I froze until it went back to ant-hunting. I inched closer, hoping to get a shot when it looked up again. Which I did, but the click was too close for comfort and it immediately became an immobile ball of spines without a visible head. From past experience I knew its cautious nature would keep it like that for a long time, so I went back to my breakfast, sans lemon balm.

  When I came out half an hour later, I saw from the verandah that it had unrolled and was heading in my direction, with its funny sideways rocking gait. I grabbed the camera and knelt on the verandah steps. When it was sniffing at the bottom step, its small face blindly uplifted, I clicked. It vanished under the steps at once.

  My five-year-old granddaughter came later that day and I told her about the echidna being right here near the house; she’d never seen one, she said. A few hours later, as if to order, the echidna re-appeared, waddling downhill across the short grass towards the bottom gate. We hurried ahead and crouched, waiting for it to emerge underneath the gate. As it did, she got a close-up look at the snout, eyes, fur and spines, and the short, clawed feet, the hind legs looking like they’d been stuck on backwards.

  Echidnas were now real to my granddaughter. At her age, from books, I’d known porcupines a
nd hedgehogs, but not echidnas. Feral grandmas have their uses.

  Once an echidna stayed in the yard long enough to get used to me being near as it went about its business, scratching itself, digging, sniffing. Echidnas stay on the move except when a female makes a burrow for the post-natal stage. In case mine decided it was safe to do that here, I kept an eye on her. An echidna lays a rubbery-shelled egg, like a reptile’s, but she lays it into her own pouch. The echidna isn’t related to the porcupine or the hedgehog at all, but to the platypus, the world’s only other egg-laying mammal, or monotreme.

  Like the rest of us mammals, the echidna is warm-blooded and suckles her young, but she doesn’t have teats or nipples. She just sort of oozes milk through the pores of her belly skin for the baby to suck. If you find that odd, wait till you hear what she does with the baby!

  The echidna still holds mystery for zoologists, and I’ve read varying opinions about the weaning and childrearing process. One said that at some stage, when it’s still a naked, grey–blue, blind, earless, helpless little thing, perhaps only 75 millimetres long, the mother evicts it from her pouch and buries it in a hole or under a log or debris. Apparently it emits a dreadful smell, which is its only protection, and may be how the mother finds it again, for she is said to return every few days to feed it until it has grown quills and can head out to fend for itself. If that’s so, not much of a childhood, is it? But whatever it does, given that it’s one of the oldest mammal species, it’s clearly successful.

  That echidna left the yard, but I know one is visiting now, because of the snout-shaped holes in the leaf litter and exposed dirt, and the bark pushed off posts as it forages for termites. I’ve only recently read that an echidna’s sex can be determined from the rear legs; while both males and females have enlarged second claws for scratching amongst their own spines—rather like those pointy ‘teasing combs’ used for 1960s bouffant hairdos—the male’s claw is greatly enlarged and very obvious.

  If I see this current visiting echidna I’ll put my sexing skills to the test, but what I’d really like is to see is their mating. No one seems to know much about this, but it must be an awkward and prickly process. Like the wallabies, the lead-up can involve six males following one female, but for one to six weeks, in a ‘courtship train’, which is a sight in itself. I saw a photo of one online, in an issue of The Puggle Post, the Echidna Care newsletter from the Pelican Lagoon Research Centre on Kangaroo Island, where Dr Peggy Rismiller is working to dispel some of that mystery about echidnas.

  Only last week I saw another gang of wallaby males, five of them, grunting along in pursuit of a female, those thin pink crescent dicks pathetically out and eager. Later a large splash made me look to the little dam. I was surprised to see a wallaby waist-high in the water, since I didn’t realise they did anything more than put their toes in when drinking at the edge. I grabbed the binoculars in case something was amiss. There were actually two females in the dam, and they seemed fine.

  I heard the grunting before I saw the randy wave of males come over the top of the dam wall. No wonder the girls had gone in. They clearly preferred being wet to being wooed. It made me think that teenage girls have it easy—most adolescent human males just hang about outside milk bars or out of the windows of cruising cars and do their grunting. And they keep their dicks in their trousers.

  In the house at present I have more mysterious visitors. I had been using cotton buds—those plastic sticks with cotton wool on the ends—for dabbing Hypericum oil (St John’s Wort) on itchy hives. As I was only using one end at a time, I would lay the cotton bud in the saucer beside the little brown bottle of oil. This sat on my high chest of drawers in the bedroom. For about a week I kept going to use the other end of the half-used cotton bud that I thought I’d left in the saucer, but since none was there I clearly hadn’t. Senility was approaching faster than I’d expected. Then I began saying to myself, ‘But I’m sure ... well, almost sure ... I left one there!’ Had it been bumped off, blown off? But to where? I began to suspect theft, but by what, for what purpose??

  Agatha Christie’s Poirot would have been proud of me: I moved the saucer and bottle to the kitchen, to a lower, more watchable bench; I made a note whenever I left a half-used cotton bud there. They kept disappearing. Whew! I was no more senile than I’d been a few weeks ago.

  I placed an unused cotton bud there instead. It was still there in the morning. So it was the oil that was the attraction, but why not just suck it or eat the cotton wool off the stick? Why take the stick away, and to where?

  Thinking of the tooth fairy’s palace of baby teeth, I began imagining a delicate white edifice of crisscrossed plastic sticks, a summerhouse for some small creature. But what was it and where did it live? Surely my cabin had no cracks big enough for a creature lugging cotton buds to squeeze through?

  Nothing was being caught in the live trap, although the cheese was taken every night, so it must be something so small, so light, that it didn’t set off the spring under the cheese platform. Antechinus are heavy enough to spring the trap. The other odd thing was that something was also dragging my little yellow pear tomatoes from their dish, and eating them. Antechinus are carnivores.

  Then one night I heard the trapdoor snap shut, but none of the usual noisy scrabblings followed. In the morning I carried the trap down to the forest to release whatever it was. I turned it up towards me, so my captive could slip to the bottom, and opened the door for a peek first. There were two very small critters in there; two slim, sleek grey animals with pale tummies, pointy noses, pink ears and delicate legs that seemed longer than those on any antechinus I’d seen. They leapt up at me—or freedom—which was not antechinus behaviour either. I quickly tipped them into the tussocks and they disappeared.

  Were these my cotton bud thieves? Or were the two events unrelated? Poirot, where are you when I need you?

  Despite looking through my books and asking friends at another wildlife refuge, I still don’t know what they were, nor if they took the cotton buds, or where to. A Dunnart? A New Holland Mouse? Or a House Mouse, at which I should go ‘E-eek!’? But I am still hoping to find that fanciful white structure; after all, if a bowerbird has an aesthetic sense, why can’t a mini marsupial?

  There are unexplained visits as well as unexplained visitors. The strangest was the frog in the food processer. You may have heard that awful joke, beloved by little boys:

  Q: What’s red and green and goes round and round?

  A: A frog in a blender.

  This story is not so gory, but it’s definitely weird. I lifted the food processor from its home on top of my little fridge to use it on the bench; I was going to chop parsley and mint for tabbouli. The pusher part was hollow, quite deep, and beige, not transparent like the container itself. I don’t even know why I looked into the pusher as I removed it to put the parsley in the chute; I don’t think I usually did. But sitting cramped down there at the bottom of the pusher was what looked like a large, fat cream-coloured blob, looking up at me with two big dark eyes.

  I didn’t have my glasses on, but squealed anyway. Whatever it was shouldn’t be in this indoor thing, this clean, kitchen-type non-animal-habitat plastic thing! Rushing it out to the brighter light of the verandah, I tipped it up. Nothing emerged. I tapped the base firmly and out plopped the occupant—a frog. A big one for here, sort of putty-coloured, with two fine black stripes running backwards from its eyes.

  ‘How the hell did you get in there?’ I asked. ‘And why?’

  Possibly a little shaken by its experience, the frog said nothing, took a few plops to the verandah edge and disappeared into the greenery.

  From the photos and known distributions in my frog book, I think it may have been a Whistling Tree Frog. The description said that the call is ‘a loud whirring’. The fanciful idea occurred to me that my frog was a female who’d heard my food processor whirring and, thinking it was a very virile male, hopped in one day to see. She waited until all was quiet again, hopped up,
sought her ideal mate in the now-dormant food processor—and got stuck.

  It seems nowhere is out of bounds for wildlife here.

  These casual wildlife interactions are at much the same frequency as my human ones. It can be months between visitors, and it’s usually weeks between my trips out, so weeks without seeing another human face. Will I be branded as misanthropic if I say I don’t miss that?

  Once I managed to stay up here for three months, but my then partner was going to Sydney for business occasionally, so he could top up supplies—cheese and red wine being the main consumables we’d run short of. They still are. If I got my act together to make them, as the youthful I had intended, I’d be able to stay here for six months. If petrol gets much dearer I may have to.

  Even going to my rural town doesn’t stop me losing touch, since it’s a world apart from Sydney, which I visit once a year at most. The last time was for my second ever demonstration. It was against the Anvil Hill coalmine I mentioned previously, and so against yet more climate chaos. We waited outside a city building for Mr Beazley, as head of the Labor Party, to arrive to launch the Opposition’s Climate Change policy, and then we waited for him to leave, to maximise our press opportunities.

  While waiting, I stood in my sensible shoes, black jeans and Anvil Hill T-shirt, and from behind my pleading placard, ‘Stop Climate Change—Stop Anvil Hill Coal Mine’, I goggled at the well-dressed business women coming and going from the building. Not a pair of trackpants or a ‘peasant’ skirt in sight; no bare flesh bulging over hipsters; no slides or thongs. It seemed to me that they all wore simple and smart dresses or suits, and elegant high-heeled proper shoes.