I still can’t decide whether it was the rough tongue on my cheek, the slobber or the halitosis that woke me. Maybe it was some sixth sense, warning me of a ‘presence’. I turned over and cracked an eyelid. I was looking into a huge set of snotty nostrils: I managed a strangled call to John, my travelling companion.
A second, slightly louder call woke him. I heard John gasp and then his whispered advice: ‘Don’t move!’
I was inches away from a huge set of horns and eight hundred kilos of meat. Just one more step and I would be wearing a hoof through my chest. Maybe not a calculated move, but John leapt from his swag, and in a death-defying motion, waved and yelled wildly. The animal fortunately stepped backwards!
It had taken us most of the previous day to drive from Maningrida, on the central Arnhem Land coast, down to the Bulman, where David and Lyn were managing our fledgling buffalo domestication program. We were bringing their monthly perishable supplies. It was only a couple of hundred kilometres but wet-season erosion, buffalo wallowing and fallen trees across the track made for a slow trip.
There were thousands of animals, feral: the residual from a small herd originally imported from South East Asia to support the mid-nineteenth century establishment of European settlement at Port Victoria. They were now spread widely across Arnhem Land and had become a favoured meat supply for the Aboriginal community and outstation populations.
But the animals were causing huge environmental damage. Their wet-season wallowing had turned our network of bush tracks into obstacle courses, mile upon mile of deep, wide holes. Their cloven hooves were compacting delicate soils, undergrowth was broken and trampled, and their intrusions into exposed rock art sites were causing extensive damage to a thousand generations of traditional lore.
The previous evening it had been suggested that we throw our swags just off the verandah onto the lawn, a pin cushion-sized square of grass. We had been reassured that the yard was secure, a stout fence separating us from the grazing herd. Hundreds of multicoloured gladioli traced the cabin garden’s perimeter and provided a quite bizarre counterpoint to the rough tropical savannah.
We shooed the bloody animals out of the yard and securely closed the gate. What remained of the night was fitfully passed. We moved our swags up onto the verandah, but neither of us slept very well. The unanswered question was the open gate: when we collected our swags after dinner. Who didn’t close it properly?
Dawn illuminated new horrors. The beasties had wandered widely during the night, they had shat everywhere, and the gladioli, Lyn’s pride and joy were trampled, broken, nibbled, just bloomless stalks at every turn. The buffalo skewering might have been less painful than facing her shortly.
Lyn was remarkably philosophical about her loss, but over the next twenty years, as our paths occasionally crossed, she would gleefully remind me to “shut the bloody gate!”