Country Wildlife

[18/12/06]

A black snake slithers across the road, lightning fast, the sun lightly bouncing off its dark scales.

Water Closet Adventures: a window by the toilet - a pheasant takes fright as I come in, flying a few feet away to perch in a banana tree.

A fly buzzing, minutes stretching. And then, silence - a spider caught hold of it. We watch as the spider wraps it up neatly in a silky coccoon of death, long legs deftly weaving the web.

A frog sits and thinks on the veranda at night. E. scoops it up the floor and hands it to me. I let it jump on my knee, climb up my arm to the shoulder. Cute little guy.

Water Closet Adventures II: later that night, we come home to the dairy to find a small scorpion in the toilet. It now rests in peace beneath the cast-iron saucepan that ended its life with a bang.

In the morning, we wake to a scraping sound in the roof above. In between ill-adjusted planks, we catch glimpse of a possum.

Next door, our friendliest neighbor: Sam the Lonely Horse, standing by the barb-wire fence, eager to nuzzle against my chest, to try to gobble up my watch.

We get up early one morning to help Bob give the calves a little hard love, feeding them off artificial milk in a plastic bottle. Eager to swallow it all to the last drop, they greedily flock to us, jostling each other. A bit later, we go to another pasture to fix up an older calf - no, no milk this time. Castration. Though the tool Bob produces is as impressive as it is repulsive, the practice is not as barbaric as I first feared. The calf merely shivers for a second, the tool simply severing a blood vessel. Though somewhat weirded out, the little guy quickly gets back up on its feet to resume mowing the lawn.

Still, there's nothing quite like having your love-making come to an abrupt end with the extraction of a tic burrowed in your neck...