Mountain Tails (14 page)

The Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo is a
little
less grating of voice than his big black cousin, but there's only one who ever passes over here and he appears not to like my place, since he never stops by.

Once or twice a day, early morning and/or towards sunset, he flies over, uttering no more than one or two squawks. Sometimes he's low enough for me to see the lemon-flushed feathers underneath, against all that snowy white. Mostly his ‘sulphur crest' is just a bright yellow Leunig curl at the back of his head, but occasionally I have seen him raise it like a tall Mardi Gras head-dress, almost interrogatively, it seems.

I wonder about him. The mundane theory is that he's a scout, checking my orchard and garden for readiness to call in the flock for a
feast. If so, he's a poor one, as for 30 years he's apparently been doing it without spotting, or reporting, anything worthwhile, since no flock has ever turned up here. But as he's away all day, every day, the journey must be long, the destination precise and regular.

My theory is that my cocky's a tragic figure, like the ancient mariner, not content to join the great white clamorous flocks eating farmers' corn and decorating dead gum trees, or getting their kicks destroying people's timber decking and windowsills.

Instead he's condemned to wing his lonely way over the remote mountain forests and valleys, searching for his soulmate, who, like himself, has the spirit, not of a white cockatoo, but of a poet, belonging to more ethereal realms than the paddocks. Shades of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, who also bucked his predetermined path and fate, but I'll be very disappointed—indeed, disillusioned—if I ever see him with more than one other cocky.

These cockatoos are highly intelligent, like some of us, can readily learn to talk like us, and can live for more than 70 years, like most of us in Australia—unless you're indigenous. Cockies aren't solitary creatures; the family groups tend to stay together indefinitely. So my cocky is very unusual in his solitude, and it's not unrealistic to think that he is the same one who's been on this quest for decades.

If courting he would raise his sulphur crest, so when I see him do that, does he think he's spotted a kindred spirit at last? Is the question he seems to be asking, ‘Are you The One?'

There is something about these mountains that draws eccentrics. Perhaps it's the rugged grandeur of their scale, the extent of their forested wilderness, where anything is possible and the civilised norm doesn't exist. They certainly drew me in.

One Sunday afternoon during our part-time years here, my daughter and her visiting schoolfriend came running down the track to the house. Red-faced, breathless, they insisted an emu was chasing them.

Naturally I scoffed at the idea and exhorted them to be sensible: there are no emus up here! Or ostriches—or elephants, I'd laughed.

Yet a few minutes later a very real emu did come loping over the last rise of the track. There was no house fence then, so as it drew closer we all hopped up on the verandah. Having visited the Koala Park Sanctuary in Sydney, we well remembered being harassed by emus booming at us as they demanded our playlunch or morning tea or lunch or snack pack—there was no denying the persistent power of a hungry emu. Greedy,
we'd thought at the time. We had all been shorter than the great gawky creatures, and quite frightened of their strong, sharp beaks, their imperious eyes under dark fluffy eyebrows, and their snaky, half-naked necks, stretched out low to reach our clutched food, as they chased us on those powerful long scaly legs. We squealed and ran for cover; some of us panicked and as we ran we threw the birds our potato crisps or whatever they seemed to desire so much.

Emus, we thus knew, were not like normal birds: they were bigger than any eagle, reaching up to 2 metres tall; they didn't fly; and they could be pushier than any schoolyard bully.

But this was mountain forest country, not the western plains. What was an emu doing here? Where on earth had it come from—and why come so far into these mountains?

As we fed it biscuits and set out water for it, we decided that it must have been a tame emu, a pet. We got up the nerve to descend from the verandah, as we had to pack the car for the trip back to Sydney. The emu followed us everywhere, with its splayfooted rocking bounce, its darting neck and plaintive booming. It seemed to like being near people.

I made a few phone calls around the region but no one had heard of any pet emus or seen any wandering ones. What could we do with this one? An emu is not like a budgie; you can't put it in a box and take it to a zoo or a farm. For the same reason, it wouldn't have been easy to dump it up here had it been someone's pesky pet.

It was getting late; we had a four and a half hour drive ahead. There was nothing for it but to leave and hope the emu found its way to a new home or back to its old one. Guilt set in as the emu followed us.

Have you ever tried to out-drive an emu over a rough road? They can sprint up to 50 kilometres per hour!

Finally the kids reported that they could no longer see it in our cloud of dust. We all felt sad and guilty, imagining its fretful slowing, its puzzled watching of our disappearance, our rejection. But none could think of what else we might have done.

I often wonder about the fate—and the history—of that lone and lonely emu. I knew the emu was our tallest bird, and that it was on our Australian coat of arms, along with the Red Kangaroo, but that was about all. I now know that they are nomadic, will travel hundreds of kilometres to a new territory, are good swimmers as well as runners, and that they eat a wide variety of plants and fruit and seeds and insects, so I'm hoping it would have made it to a suitable new home. But it ought to have been doing this in a flock, not on its own.

I had no idea that the males take over the incubating once the female has built the nest and laid the eggs. While the gadabout female heads off and finds herself a new bloke, or two, the male sits on the nest for about 55 days, not eating or drinking or defecating, standing only to turn the eggs, until they hatch. Now that's some father love.

In my grandparents' house in rural New South Wales, where I'd spend each September holidays in the 1950s, they had emu eggs, huge dark greenish-blue ovals, in a bowl. My Pop, a shearer and miner, said people in the country, especially the Kooris (we no longer use the word he employed), liked to carve them, because the shell had a thick white inner layer that showed up when you cut the dark top layer away. He himself carved and polished cow horns and made bird sculptures from them: there's one looking down at me now. I expect he got them from the abattoirs, but I tried not to think about that.

These days people farm emus, and, like the first people, use the lot: eggs, leather, oil, meat and feathers.

Nanna and Pop also had two whole emu plumage rugs, thick and fluffy, one dyed deep red, the other green, on the polished linoleum of the ‘best' room that nobody used much. I didn't like to stand on them, didn't like to imagine how they got the feathers off in one piece, nor what the emu looked like, skinned—but I couldn't help it.

I have often found my overactive imagination to be a double-edged gift.

At one stage I had a rogue wallaby who consistently broke the rule of staying on the wild side of the house yard netting fence. He was a male Eastern Red-necked Wallaby: darker and more evenly red on the back and whiter on the front than is usual, and with a distinctively kinked tuft of fur at the base of his tail. I'd looked up the mammal book in case he was a separate species but it seemed he was just a weird member of that family. The outcast, the black sheep.

When I first spotted him in my orchard I went looking for breaks in the fence, but there were none. He must be an especially good jumper, I'd thought. Not even the kangaroos had ever jumped this fence in the eight years since I built it.

Then I saw him get
through
it. Hingelock netting is composed of 320-millimetre-wide rectangles that gradually increase in height. Mine has 600-millimetre-high chickenwire clipped over it at the base. It had occurred to me that a joey might get through the top rectangles, but only if it could jump high and aim well at the same time, which would be unlikely given how scatterbrained and uncoordinated they are.

But a grown male? He had to be double-jointed!

He became a regular visitor and I saw him come and go at many different spots with ease—definitely double-jointed, I decided. I also concluded that he was a loner, out of place in the busy social scene beyond the fence. Much like me, really. And, since in those days I never saw him eating anything but grass, I didn't mind him visiting.

I began to say hello and have a bit of a chat when I saw him. Not that he contributed much, but he'd look up and acknowledge me before resuming grazing. I could use the excuse that I like to use my voice around the wild creatures so they get to know my ‘call'—and that's true—but the fact is that, living by myself, I have started talking to my wild neighbours. Nothing too deep, just passing pleasantries.

When I caught him eating the small rose bushes on the bank, I angrily reprimanded him—‘Why must you do that? Why can't you just eat grass!?' He just kept at it. But in between my small explosions of outrage we were quite comfortable in each other's presence. He began to take his midday nap in the shade of the trees uphill from the toilet, or under the cherry tree. He might lift his head if I appeared, then resume dozing.

Then I started to worry. What if it was genetic? A tribe of double-jointed wallabies would be quite another matter!

I watched him carefully when he was outside the fence, but he was always alone. Whatever made him an outcast, it put him off the ladies. Not once did I see him chase a female. Nor did he hang around with the males—something else we had in common, at the time. Perhaps he was asexual, a neuter? The reason remained a mystery, but it seemed I was safe from being overrun by his offspring.

I hadn't reckoned on him passing on his strange ability by example.

One spring, I'd had to go away for a month, and on my return, even from the gate I could see that the garden was newly green and blooming. I immediately walked around the yard to see what delights spring had brought.

The air was full of perfume—the honeyed white cloud of the May bush, the exotic intensity of the jasmine smothering a stump nearby, the innocence of the old-fashioned pink sweetpeas in front of the verandah, and the faint almond scent of the Banksia Rose that had turned my clothesline post into a fountain of foaming white. But the Banksia Rose didn't look right. The lower parts of its drooping stems were all bare.

So, I realised, looking about in dismay, were those of all my newly leafed and very young European trees—and the rose bushes were totally denuded.

‘The possums are back!' I groaned aloud.

But no twigs were broken, as the hefty possums do when they climb. And there remained one high topknot of leaves on the big Autumnalis old shrub rose. I noticed too that only the lower parts of the climbing roses, the Crépuscule, the Madame Carrière and the Graham Thomas, were stripped. The upper stems were fully leafed. Whatever was devastating my roses, it could not climb.

I walked round the back of the Banksia Rose, and there was a small wallaby, caught in the act. It bolted, propped a little distance away and turned. Clenched between its teeth was a stem with several tiny roses bobbing at the end—a coy marsupial Carmen.

I laughed, but stopped as I spotted eight more wallabies. I stared, and they stared back, in a single frozen instant of mutual shock before they took off, through the hingelock fence, above the lower chickenwire. They exited at many different spots.

I walked up closer; the hingelock netting was unbroken, although its rusty rectangles were bent out of shape. I'd underestimated the wallabies. In my month-long absence the others must have figured that
if my weird wallaby could do it, so could they; and since I wasn't here marking my territory, it was theirs for the taking.

So I had to clip chickenwire to the upper section as well, an expenditure of money and time that I certainly didn't need. But eventually I managed it. The wallabies gave up their acrobatic feats of invasion. Except for one.

I couldn't see how even a double-jointed wallaby could get through chickenwire. He looked at me most boldly when I threw up my hands and asked ‘HOW?', before resuming his nibbling of rose leaves.

Then I saw him make one exit and one entrance—by climbing up the netting, not by pushing through or jumping over. What on earth had he been genetically crossed with? Wallabies aren't supposed to climb; it isn't natural for wallabies to climb. But then, I suppose neither is it natural for humans to walk on tightropes. I guess he was just clever and keen—and weird.

For months I wasn't sure if he ever left the yard at all. He was so relaxed that I saw him drinking at the horse trough near my clothesline. It was an incongruously domesticated scene, because he
was
a wild animal.

I began to rather like his company, and wished I didn't like my heritage roses so much. I'd hoped the latter might get ahead of him and survive his indiscriminate pruning, but he was too conscientious for that.

The irony was that his favourite was the Autumnalis, an 1812 shrub rose that had been the only rose the possums didn't eat. So I'd propagated dozens of cuttings and planted them in various parts of the yard, in rows like hedges and in corners so they could spread. They should have been metres-high and-wide, bearing masses of bright green leaves and clusters of little pink buds and creamy-white roses. Perversely, he stripped them all, thorns notwithstanding.

But just as I'd given up, resigned myself to sharing the house garden with him and his unorthodox topiary forever, he disappeared. I worried
about what had happened to such an outsider, away from his particular refuge. And I missed him.

I still keep an eye out for him, look twice at any darker wallaby out there in the paddock, but whether he found a less demanding fence or a less crabby hostess, or met a tragic end, I don't think he's coming back.

And unfortunately my latest possum intruder eats the Autumnalis as well as all the other roses.