A job for road shepherd

A LOT of traffic on the 3km stretch from the Gundy store to Elmswood. First, a hare skitters over the road.

A LOT of traffic on the 3km stretch from the Gundy store to Elmswood. First, a hare skitters over the road. Closely followed, scout's honour, by a tortoise. And spare me more pedantic e-mails insisting that the correct term is turtle. In honour of Aesop and common usage, it's a tortoise.

Haven’t seen one on the hoof for ages. And a few yards on, another! As they were heading in opposite directions it was hard to know which one was trouncing the hare.

Passers-by in utes with loud exhausts have three nasty habits. They shoot at road signs until they resemble their own acned faces. They toss their empties, bottles and cans out the window. And they deliberately run over tortoises. Which undermines my opposition to capital punishment, as there cannot be a less harmful creature on the planet. Seeing a few hoons in the distance and closing, I stop the truck twice to collect both tortoises, plonking them upside down on the truck’s floor. Whereupon they show their gratitude by peeing.

If skunks stink more than a tortoise, let alone two, I’d be very surprised and possibly asphyxiated. The truck’ll smell of tortoise for weeks, the cologne a cross between bad BO and a long-neglected public urinal. But poor personal hygiene doesn’t warrant death. So I head for home, and their new home (in a dam full for the first time in damn near a decade and now decorated with water lilies and ducks) only to spot another small creature risking the road. An echidna.

If a tortoise’s carapace ill-equips it for the pace of cars, an echidna would be hard pressed to keep pace with a glacier. Four thin little legs holding up a crown of thorns. Reminiscent of two removalists lugging an awkward load, like a grand piano. Though it’s unlikely to make it to safety I’m not picking up the little prick. That would define the thankless task. Instead, I stop the truck for the third time in a hundred metres and wave down two approaching cars.

Coming upon a lollipop man, minus lollipops, in the middle of nowhere they wind their windows down in puzzlement. I gesture feebly at the echidna. This is, for a long echidna moment, a pedestrian crossing. The little legs continue to lug the load at the breakneck pace of 0.005 kilometres an hour, heading due east, and the motorists simmer down. Trouble is, the echidna then changes its mind, chucks a U-ey and heads west.

For tortoises and echidnas, this is mating season. Tortoises move from dam to dam, from pool to pool in the river, seeking love. Soon the air will ring to the rapturous rasping sound of shell on shell. Echidnas? A very rare sight – you might see one or two a year. But a neighbour spots a dozen – all chasing the same seductive strumpet. In the slowest of slow motion.

It’s all symptomatic of an early spring. After an alarmingly mild winter, the wattle is out and our bees are busy in the blossom. Then there’s the lambs. Lots of twins and one set of triplets, impossibly cute with their black faces. We’re not convinced the drought has broken but it’s certainly cracked. The creek, dry for six years, is flowing, the baked dams are brimming, and the feral pigs are pigging out on-the river flats. Bulldozing with their snouts.

Between the flats and the high country, Elmswood is rolling hills. Between droughts they look plump and feminine. Giant breasts, thighs and buttocks. On a drought diet they lose weight dramatically and become shockingly naked. Not the eroticism of Modigliani, more Lucian Freud. Then the sun does X-rays and you see through the thin skin to the bones of rock. So you stop your weekly rides around the place because you feel depressed and guilty, as if you should apologise to the dying trees, as though you’re personally responsible for climate change. Which, of course, you are.

But now, at least for the time being, at least until the hot winds blow and burn everything off, the hills are alive to the sound of cockatoos, galahs and crows. The landscape is neither stark naked nor naughtily nude à la Renoir. The hills are ladylike, demurely dressed in green velvet.

So I’m riding again, checking the tracks through our wilderness, lugging a chainsaw to remove the trees that invariably fall across them at right angles, hearing the creeks gurgle and, for the first time in a long time, the sounds of small waterfalls. I’ll report back to Pat on the number of calves while marvelling at the bounce-back of the kangaroo population. Forgive that pun but roos breed like rabbits, only better. A female will have a foetal joey, peanut size, on one nipple and a fully formed baby on another. And a third at her side.

Birds are nesting, bees abuzz. Life and love are in the air.