The Explorers (54 page)

When I was safely in the branches, however, I called out to her (her tree was only a few yards away), ‘What is the matter?'

She did not reply, but pointed to a vast stretch of undulating country over which we had just come; it was fairly well wooded. It lingers in my mind as a region in which one was able to see a fairly long way in every direction—a very unusual feature in the land of ‘Never Never.'

I looked, but at first could see nothing. Presently, however, it seemed to me that the whole country in the far distance was covered with a black mantle,
which appeared to be made up of living creatures
.

Steadily and rapidly this great mysterious wave swept along towards us and, seeing that I was both puzzled and alarmed, Yamba gave me to understand that
we should presently be surrounded by myriads of rats
, stretching away in every direction like a living sea. The phenomenon was evidently known to Yamba and she went on to explain that these creatures were migrating from the lowlands to the mountains, knowing by instinct that the season of the great floods was at hand. That weird and extraordinary sight will live in my memory for ever. I question whether a spectacle so fantastic and awe-inspiring was ever dealt with, even in the pages of quasi-scientific fiction.

It was impossible for me to observe in what order the rats were advancing, on account of the great stretch of country which they covered. Soon, however, their shrill squeals were distinctly heard, and a few minutes later the edge of that strange tide struck our tree and swept past us with a force impossible to realise. No living thing was spared. Snakes, lizards—ay, even the biggest kangaroos—succumbed after an ineffectual struggle. The rats actually ate those of their fellows who seemed to hesitate or stumble. The curious thing was that the great army never seemed to stand still. It appeared to me that each rat simply took a bite at whatever prey came his way, and then passed on with the rest.

I am unable to say how long the rats were in passing—it might have been an hour. Yamba told me that there would have been no help for us had we been overtaken on foot by these migratory rodents. It is my opinion that no creature in nature, from the elephant downwards, could have lived in that sea of rats. I could not see the ground between them, so closely were they packed. The only creatures that escaped them were birds.

The incessant squealing and the patter of their little feet made an extraordinary sound, comparable only to the sighing of the wind or the beat of a great rainstorm. I ought to mention, though, that I was unable accurately to determine the sound made by the advancing rats owing to my partial deafness, which you will remember was caused by the great wave which dashed me on to the deck of the
Veielland
, just before landing on the sand-spit in the Sea of Timor. I often found this deafness a very serious drawback, especially when hunting. I was sometimes at a loss to hear the ‘cooee' or call of my natives. Fortunate men!
They
did not even understand what deafness meant.

Lunacy also was unknown among them, and such a thing as suicide no native can possibly grasp or understand. In all my wanderings I only met one idiot or demented person. He had been struck by a falling tree, and was worshipped as a demigod!

When the rats had passed by, we watched them enter a large creek and swim across, after which they disappeared in the direction of some ranges which were not very far away. They never seemed to break their ranks; even when swimming, one beheld the same level brownish mass on the surface of the water. Yamba told me that this migration of rats was not at all uncommon, but that the creatures rarely moved about in such vast armies as the one that had just passed.

I also learned that isolated parties of migrating rats were responsible for the horrible deaths of many native children, who had, perhaps, been left behind in camp by their parents, who had gone in search of water.

H
EDLEY
H
ERBERT
F
INLAYSON

Oolacunta, 1931

In December 1931 Hedley Herbert Finlayson made an extraordinary discovery. A chemist with a passion for the mammals of his native South Australia, Finlayson had heard rumours that a kind of rat-kangaroo, known to the Aborigines as oolacunta, existed in the far north of the state. He undertook an 1100-kilometre trek from Adelaide to investigate. Upon arriving at Appamunna station, among the gibber plains and sand ridges, he found that the oolacunta was no other than the Desert rat kangaroo, a species described by John Gould in 1843 but never recorded again until Finlayson's rediscovery. Remarkably, although Finlayson found the species to be common in northern South Australia and south-western Queensland between 1931 and 1935, this mysterious animal has never been heard of since.

We ‘pulled off' finally on a little stony plain with scattered saltbush, and made our depot camp under some corkwoods. We were five miles from water, but the boys seemed so assured that the country was ‘right', that we decided to endure the discomforts of a waterless camp for the benefit of being near the coveted
Caloprymnus
. But I had grave misgivings. All the five bettongs that are the nearest allies of the oolacunta, I have seen in the country of their choice, and anything less promising than this stony, shelterless plain in the blaze of midsummer would be difficult to imagine. But the blacks were right.

The plan of campaign had been anxiously debated all the way in from Appamunna. The great open sweep of the country is so immense that all methods of procedure partook somewhat of hunting for a needle in a haystack. Snaring and trapping were out of the question, shooting was too damaging to skeletons, and the most practicable method (while the horses lasted) seemed to be for the whole party to beat up the country mounted, and gallop anything which was put up.

At this juncture Butcher created a sensation by announcing that he could catch oolacuntas by hand. When questioned, he explained that many years ago when ‘big mob jump up alonga Barcoo', the blacks used to locate the grass nests and then, determining the direction in which the opening lay, would, if the wind were right, sneak up behind and, silently slipping a coolamon or their hands over the top, bag the occupant! Some jealousy existed between Butcher and Jimmy, and Reese and I were inclined to attribute this account to a desire to shine. Moreover, there was a certain Alice-in-Wonderlandish touch about this method of capture by the ‘laying on of hands'. So much so that Reese, on reflection, was constrained to administer a grave rebuke to Butcher, suggesting indeed that he was a sanguinary liar. But in this we wronged him.

Seldom do the things one keenly desires come easily. But on our very first cast we got a prize. The six of us rode east in the early morning, and on a sandhill picked up fresh oolacunta tracks crossing to a flat on the far side. We followed them out till we lost them in the gibbers; then we opened out to a half-mile front and rode slowly south, each man scanning every lump and tussock for a possible nest. We had ridden less than half an hour when there came a shrill excited ‘
Yuchai
' from the horse-boy farthest out, and the chase was on. The pre-arranged plan was for each of us to take up the galloping in turn, the rat being headed whenever possible and turned in towards the rest of the party who remained in a group. When the first horse showed signs of losing heart, the next man took the first opportunity of replacing him, and so on.

Following the yell, Tommy came heading back down the line towards the sandhill, but it was only after much straining of eyes that the oolacunta could be distinguished—a mere speck, thirty or forty yards ahead. At that distance it seemed scarcely to touch the ground; it almost floated ahead in an eerie, effortless way that made the thundering horse behind seem, by comparison, like a coal hulk wallowing in a heavy sea.

They were great moments as it came nearer; moments filled with curiosity and excitement, but with a steady undercurrent of relief and satisfaction. It was here!

Caloprymnus
bears a strong external resemblance to five or six other related species and from a distance there was little to distinguish that which was approaching from either of two other marsupials known to occur in adjoining tracts. But as it came down the flat towards me, a little pale ghost from the 1840s, all doubt fled. The thing was holding itself very differently from the bettongs. As I watched it through the shimmering heat haze, some sense of the incongruous brought back a vivid memory of a very different scene, two years before, when I had sought the nearest living relative of
Caloprymnus
, above the snowline on a Tasmanian range.

Imagine a little animal about the bulk of a rabbit, but built like a kangaroo, with long spindly hind legs, tiny forelegs folded tight on its chest, and a tail half as long again as the body but not much thicker than a lead pencil, and you have it in the rough. But its head, short and blunt and wide, is very different from that of any kangaroo or wallaby, and its coat is uniformly coloured a clear pale yellowish ochre—exactly like the great clay-pans and floodplains.

As it came up to us I galloped alongside to keep it under observation as long as possible. Its speed, for such an atom, was wonderful, and its endurance amazing. We had considerable difficulty in heading it with fresh horses. When we finally got it, it had taken the starch out of three mounts and run us twelve miles; all under such adverse conditions of heat and rough going, as to make it almost incredible that so small a frame should be capable of such an immense output of energy. All examples obtained subsequently by this method behaved similarly; they persisted to the very limit of their strength, and quite literally, they paused only to die.

Back at the camp all was jubilation. The afternoon and most of the next day were spent in examining, sketching, photographing, measuring, dissecting, and preserving—for luck is not to be trusted. And I wanted to make the very most of the first specimen lest it be also the last. We rode out each day, sometimes to success, sometimes not. In the afternoons we worked on the rats which the ‘rat boss
⁵
had dug, while the heat under the corkwoods grew ever worse and worse. Even the old hands, reared under the grim old tradition of ‘salt beef, damper, and constipation', who love to hark back to the summers when it really
was
hot, admitted subsequently that it had been bad. I had thought the still days bad, but when the hot winds came I thought again. When the flies and ants and heat and sand could be endured no longer, we left the skinning and spelled. And while we gazed out over the white-hot flats and sandhills, we sipped boiling tea, and had torturing visions of iced Quellthaler in an old-time shady garden.

On the day before we broke camp to start on the long ride to Cordilla and the Innamincka track, Butcher quashed for ever the soft impeachment which Reese had made on his veracity and covered himself with glory.

It was usual for two of the boys to take the horses to water each evening near sundown, and fill the canteens at the hole five miles away. On this afternoon they had been gone no more than half an hour when Butcher rode back into camp alone. With impassive face and in dignified silence, he handed over a bag tied at the mouth. Very cautious investigation showed it to contain a beautiful fully adult oolacunta and a half-grown joey—both alive and undamaged. Those we had run down were too exhausted to make good life-studies for a camera, but here were fitting subjects at last.

In riding over the country, we had had ample confirmation of Butcher's statement about the nest-building habit of
Caloprymnus
. In a fiery land, where a burrowing habit is the chief factor in the survival of most species, the oolacunta clings pathetically to a flimsy shelter of grass and leaves, which it makes in a shallow depression scratched out of the loam. And now, here was a splendid proof of his second claim. The Yalliyanda boy had, while riding with the others, spotted a nest and noted the head of the occupant in the opening, watching the party. He rode on without pause for a quarter of a mile, then, leaving his horse, made a rapid stalk up the wind and grabbed both mother and babe from behind.

The laying on of hands was no myth!

M
ICHAEL
T
ERRY

Like a Gun Going Off, 1932