Mountain Tails (8 page)

Many groups of wallabies graze around the clearing in which my house yard is sited. It's rare not to see several wallabies at any given time, at the very least a mum with an older joey in tow. As they appear quite uninhibited by my presence, I am given the opportunity to be a fascinated voyeur of macropod social and family lives, which are very busy indeed.

Like that of all macropods, a wallaby's birth and child-care system is incredibly complex. Wallabies have four teats inside their pouch, but only give birth to one young at a time. The females must be quite keen on this courtship business, despite their nonchalant demeanour, because they are ready for sex soon after the birth, and the mating usually leads to a fertilised egg.

The newborn's suckling sends a pause signal to that new egg, in which state it remains until a few weeks before the suckling joey is ready to vacate the pouch for good, which is after about ten months of joyriding.

Rather like a full city car park, where the entry gate doesn't open until a space is newly vacant, only then does the egg resume its development. Pregnancy lasts three to five weeks, and while that one's growing, the evicted joey is being weaned, at arm's length, so to speak.

It's a miracle how the newborn gets to the pouch: only about 25 millimetres long, it looks as unformed as the very early human embryos we see in ultrasound pictures. This naked pink ‘grub' has nubs of forelimbs, and a sense of smell apparently, and somehow works it way up the mother's tummy fur and into the pouch, where it latches on to a teat and doesn't let go for six months. The teat functions rather like an umbilical cord, because from its sustenance the baby continues to develop as if it were in a womb.

Even with a new one in the pouch, the mother still lets the older joey stick its head in and suckle until it's over a year old. It uses its own special teat, since new and old joeys receive custom-designed milk from their individual teats. As I said, cute, and beyond clever—an extraordinary animal!

The mothers' club members meet on the north-facing grassy slope. In the morning sessions they sunbake without a care for danger or dignity, their legs sprawled apart, leaning right back on their tails to expose their pale furry tummies to the warmth of the early sun. In the hotter afternoon sessions they take to the shade of the edging trees, stretch out wearily, lolling sideways, yet with heads erect to keep an eye on their restless young who catapult about like overwound clockwork toys.

These toddler joeys are always on the verge of tipping over; they leap about way too fast for their ability to manage their disproportionately long tails. In mad circles, they race into clumps of bracken, disappear, then spring out again further along, wide-eyed and bursting with energy.

As the pouch-bound joey grows, it's not unusual to see mother and joey eating in tandem, the baby practise-grazing on what it can reach from the safety of the low-slung pouch as the mother slowly levers her way across the grass. If she stops and sits erect to check me out, the baby might withdraw until all I can see poking out are its black nose and eyes, ears hidden inside the furry parka hood of its mother's pouch.

Bigger joeys, spending more and more time out of the pouch, each try their mother's patience by interrupting her grazing to demand a drink of milk. When she decides that it's had enough, she pushes it aside and resumes grazing. At other times I see a mother holding her wriggling joey still with one dainty black paw while searching for fleas in the soft baby fur with the other. The joey cringes exactly like a child does when you want to wipe its face or comb its hair.

When the alarm goes up for the group to take flight, which they do in a very helter-skelter, every-wallaby-for-itself kind of way, these toddlers often rush to get back into the safety of their respective pouches, but it's a terrible headfirst scramble and squeeze, and usually the mother takes off with a tangle of tail and long black feet and paws still hanging out. At this size they have to do a sort of somersault in there to fit and to get their heads back around to face the pouch opening.

Or else the joey doesn't notice her leaving, since she doesn't call him; he's supposed to stick close by her and pay attention to what's going on. When he suddenly becomes aware that he's alone, he goes hurtling off in any direction. Pure panic—just like any toddler in a shop who looks around and can't see Mum.

Except for the vocal carry-on, which we humans do best from the earliest age. As I currently have three granddaughters under two—Ruby, Layla and Matilda—I can vouch for the freshness of my experience in saying so.

Being hopeless with machinery, and living a long way from town, I treat any mechanically minded visitor, male or female, as a precious opportunity. There's always some collection of moving metal parts that's refusing to function. This time, and unfortunately too many other times, it was my pump.

In the past, operator ignorance and/or weakness—mine—has mainly been to blame, and I'd excused my old Ajax pump for slowing down a bit, given that it and its partner, the Lister diesel engine, were getting on. For 30 years they've squatted over by my big dam, ready to be cranked into action at approximately three-monthly intervals, and pump steadily up to my cement tanks on the ridge. The faithful pair
would work continuously for 24 hours or more without complaint.

The Lister had been overhauled once, and the Ajax had its leather seals replaced once—but not by me. All I knew was what I now saw when it was in operation, that the float in the dam was barely moving, when it used to bounce at each tug of the suction from the pump, and that it took
three days
to fill the tanks last time. Given that I had to keep walking up the hill to check the levels in the tanks, my arthritic knees were not happy.

So the pump needed attention and was finally about to get it. I had the kit of new seals ready; my son-in-law Joe had brought his toolbox, his male muscles and his mechanic's mind—and his/my family.

I rather boldly suggested spraying some WD40 on the parts to be parted, as they'd doubtless be most reluctant after such a long time. Being an easygoing sort of bloke, he agreed, and walked over to do that and generally reconnoitre the day's project, while I made coffee. I cut the specially made lemon semolina cake into hefty wedges—I believe in feeding my workers well—and put the coffee on to do its volcano act.

My granddaughter Jessie took orders and made mud pies and silty coffee in her well-equipped play kitchen on the verandah; I minded baby Ruby while my daughter Lucy set about filing the horses' feet.

Joe came back. ‘I don't think I'll be working on the pump today,' he said. ‘A big black snake—six footer at least—just went under it.'

‘Oh, it won't be there long,' I assured him. ‘It'd just be hiding from you. It'll be gone by the time we've had morning tea.'

Only it wasn't. We all drove over to see. It had wedged itself very discreetly under the steel angle strips on to which the pump and engine were bolted. As these were almost embedded in the dirt, I wouldn't have known it was there. There was just the slightest line of shiny black where there shouldn't be. We tried stamping on the ground, slooshing buckets of water from afar. From the safety of the car, Jessie's squeals punctuated each effort and provided heart-stopping false alarms.

But the snake didn't move. Perhaps it thought it was invisible to us.

‘Maybe it lives there,' Joe suggested.

‘Oh no, it can't! This engine makes a hell of a racket. And besides, I kneel down right beside it to start it—surely I'd have seen it—wouldn't I?'

The thought of past or future secret snakey proximity gave me the shivers. It had never occurred to me to check for snakes there before.

‘We'll have lunch. It'd be too scared to come out now after all our racket. Once it's all quiet again, it'll take off. It'll be gone by then, surely.'

We had lunch on the sunny verandah. I'd made several salads—a mixed and mysterious green one of leaves and herbs gathered from the garden and tossed with roasted pine nuts in a raspberry vinaigrette; a red medley of kidney beans, onion, diced baked pumpkin and grated raw beetroot in a sesame and ginger dressing; my favourite cucumber and yoghurt cream salad version, the Armenian one,
Jajoukh,
which is made with fresh dill—and chickpea patties with a special tamarind and raisin sauce. The less adventurous Miss Jessica had an egg and salad lavash bread wrap; Ruby was still only up to milk.

Seconds were taken, plates emptied, tummies expanded, topped up with a cup of tea. The lunch had been leisurely, a good hour had passed. Joe and I set off to walk over to the dam, considerably more slowly than we had pre-lunch. I was confident that the snake would be gone by now.

Only it wasn't. Nor by afternoon tea time either.

It was only after he drove out, taking the family, his toolbox, his male muscles and his mechanic's mind with him, that I saw that the snake had departed. Talk about perversity!

Of the marsupials who live here, my least favourite neighbours are the Common Brushtail Possums, who trespass in my garden and eat my plants, especially my roses. They demolish the leaves and buds and flowers, and don't give a damn about thorns, chomping and snapping stems into grotesque prunings as they blunder heedlessly up my heritage roses, both shrub and climbing types.

In the past I had tried chilli spray, quassia chip spray, garlic chive surrounds, planting extra rose bushes near the fences—here, eat these!—and still the possums were stripping the main garden roses and the citrus trees. As a last resort my partner had electrified the house yard fence.

The first night it was activated, we watched as a bevy of possums conferred just outside the bottom corner. It appeared as if they were drawing straws, after a heated discussion—‘You go!' ‘No, you go!'—had proved fruitless. But none of them was game to try it and the disgruntled group broke up and waddled off into the trees.

Yet the next night, and every night after for a few years, one battered old warrior climbed the fence without visible reaction. He had tattered ears and tufts of fur missing from fights past—and an addiction to roses. Knowing what the ‘Zap!' feels like, I deemed such effort heroic; the garden could cope with one possum having a well-earned rose munch.

That fence hasn't been electrified since the 2002 fires, but in any case, once the quoll had moved into the shed and taken over my yard as her territory, all possums moved out. Quolls eat possums. But this past summer no quoll came to breed in my shed, and a brushtail possum moved back in.

It has thick fur, fluffy almost, but is
not
cute. I assume its eating habits have removed my capacity for objectivity, but I don't like its staring eyes, the shifty way it scurries along the verandah railings and up the eave rafters as soon as I appear, the heavy-footed way it walks on the roof, always
after
I've gone to bed, or the pellets it drops on the tank lid.

I pity New Zealand, where they have become a major pest since they were introduced, reaching population densities
six
times what we have to cope with here! Such an opportunistic creature, which cohabits so well with humans in suburbs and towns as well as rural areas, will be hard to beat.

One morning lately, inside the vegie garden I discovered that it had pulled down, broken off and eaten my tall snowpea plants and munched flat what had been my thriving parsley mounds. I'd have to put a netting roof over there if it had begun climbing the fence, the netting of which I'd deliberately left floppy to deter possums. I indulged in a fleeting moment of spiteful consolation—‘Serve you right!'—when I saw that
it had also eaten the leaves of the rhubarb, which I'd always thought to be poisonous. But I didn't mean it—not
really.

And I realised that it had gone
under
the fence, which was in a temporarily vulnerable state, as it awaited the addition of finer netting to keep the snakes out. I could more easily put a stop to crawling than climbing.

I'd love to see the less common possums that have been noted in these forests, like the Mountain Brushtail Possum, the huge Greater Glider, and the rare Yellow-bellied Glider, now a threatened species, listed as Vulnerable, like my quoll. Since I don't walk around in the forest at night, I don't give myself much of a chance. I should get a decent torch and go spotlighting, but admit to being a bit nervous of going by myself. No real reason, just a feeling that I shouldn't intrude. Still, Greater Gliders can make 100 metres in a single horizontal glide, which would be a sight indeed.

But I like smaller creatures best, and top of my wish-to-see list would be the Feather-tail Glider, smallest of all gliders at about 75 millimetres long, a cute brown and white creature with a wonderful fringed tail, who feeds on nectar and blossoms. I have had a quick glimpse of the mid-sized Sugar Glider in ‘flight'. The furry membrane that joins their hands and feet, much paler underneath, opened out flat like a parachute or a sail, with the tail steering, as it glided from a tall tree to a lower one. I was alerted to its presence by its warning call, a ‘shrill yapping', that really did sound like a small dog barking. Having heard that before, but not seen the creature that made it, it was a treat to have the mystery solved.

Long ago, in my weekender time, I considered brushtail possums cute, but I didn't have roses then. Or a house fence. The kids and I even used to spotlight and feed any possum that dropped by the verandah, to amuse visitors. Fruit mostly, but once my daughter insisted on giving it some of her birthday cake. That possum would never have tasted cake or icing before but there was no hesitation in scoffing the lot.

I stopped feeding them when one seized my hand instead of the apple I was holding. I didn't take this as a personal attack, since it was probably blinded by the torchlight. When it dug its sharp little claws into my fingers, I knew not to pull back, but I squealed as it brought them up to its mouth. It bit down, but not hard and not for long: my flesh was not fruity or sweet enough and it dropped my hand in disgust. I didn't take that personally either.

All I can hope is that the quoll comes back this season. She doesn't eat roses—but she'd eat my fingers if she got the chance.