A very strange sequence of events. Three days, three injured animals.
Two days ago I’m entering the shower early in the morning and I see a composite shape stumbling through the small park beside our house – a small brown deer struggling to escape from large kelpie. The deer appears to have a badly injured hind leg and the dog is biting at its leg and neck. I jump out of the shower and nudge Deborah. While I struggle to get dressed, she rushes outside, grabs a shove and chases the dog off.
She cautiously approaches the prostrate deer – a young doe, which leaps up, bellows, rushes a few metres into the lightly running creek and then, after a small pause, creeps up on the steep muddy bank on the opposite side with its legs buckled beneath it.
I come out to keep watch over the deer while Deborah goes back inside to call the widldlife rescue service (WIRES). They tell her that nothing can be done. They have no remit to treat vermin. Meanwhile the deer is looking about uncertainly, its ears soft and upright. It has a large, bloody wound on its neck.
Deborah tries the local Council. They suggest the police and the RSPCA. She tries the latter, only to encounter a recorded message service. They don’t open until 9am.
By now the deer has mustered the energy to make its way up the creek slope to a sunny patch of lantana.
We decide that I’ll call the RSPCA at 9am. Best that the deer remain where it is for now. I’ll keep an eye on it and make sure the dog doesn’t return. I go outside every so often and check that the deer is ok. It is lying in the lantana, but with its head up attentively looking about.
Anyway, I call the RSPCA and they finally arrive at 11:30am. The officer is dressed in a very neat uniform and is wearing dark sunglasses. We head down to the creek to look for the deer, but all of sudden it is no longer there. The officer assures me that deer often survive with only three functioning legs. It is very standard for them to lay low in bushes after a traumatic experience, recollect themselves and then make their way back up towards the escarpment. If the deer was going to die, she tells me, then it would just lie down in the open, impassive to its surroundings. She would have had to shoot it anyway. Deer, as we know, are vermin.
Vermin. The strangeness of this status. To be alive but to have no right to existence, no right to protection, scarcely even any right to have suffering addressed. I understand the damage deer do to the local environment, but they are still living creatures who demand, in these moments of awkward, inevitable contact, some level of care.
That should have been enough, but, no, the very next day, yesterday, I back my motorbike into the garage to discover a young diamond python poised to strike my right leg. It is coiled up in the geared complexity of my mountain bike. Not really liking snakes much, I jump off my bike and hurry out of the garage as quickly as possible. Go away snake, I think; I shall not disturb you, but please go away. A bit later I show Axel. The snake is still there. Then I show Deborah, who more attentively notices that a portion of the snakes tail seems to be caught up in the rear gearing. She rings WIRES. This time they can do something. Diamond pythons are native animals.
Three people arrive early evening with snake catching gear. The snake now appears very subdued. The rescuers have great trouble disentangling the tail from the gears. There are maggots in the wound. The snake seems to have partly disembowelled itself. They suggest that it may be preferable to put the snake down. I’m sent for an axe. Deborah is very distressed.
When I get back with a shovel (not an axe) I discover that they have managed to free the snake. It is weak but still manages to rise up and bite one of the rescuers on the hand. Eventually it is caught and placed in a bag. They assure us that they will take the snake to a vet. It may have to be euthenased, but just possibly it may be saved.
Before the three amateur snake handlers leave, the bitten rescuer goes into our house to wash his wound.
That’s two animals. Superstition leads me to expect three. Perhaps an injured Yeti softly moaning in our front yard.
But instead it is a cat. The next morning (today), Deborah is driving us all to school and work when a cat rushes across our path. We hear something like a bump, pull over quickly and jump out of the car to see what we have done. A kid on his way to school tells us the cat is ok. Apparently, it ran off through a fence.
Deborah knocks at the relevant door and warns them that we may have hit their cat. They thank her for stopping. She leaves her number. Later she gets a call. The cat is ok, only a few bruises.
That has to count as three.