Two Plastic Containers

Gary had told us about the quolls. We had met him at Lake Barrington months earlier and he had described a camp in the north-east forests where eastern quolls came out at night and could be found if you were prepared to walk around in the dark with a torch. We had been carrying that piece of information ever since.

So we went east into the forestry country past Evercreech, which we knew from an earlier stay, heading for a camp at Griffith. The obvious route was the long way round. The GPS offered a shortcut, and we took it, which is where the day began to go wrong.

The shortcut dropped steeply almost immediately. The gradient itself was not the problem; the bus has an exhaust brake and we run downhill on that as a matter of course, letting the engine hold it back rather than cooking the brakes. What the exhaust brake does not do is widen the track. Anth drove it down with both hands, checking the mirrors, not for what was behind but for whether there was anywhere to turn around if it got worse. There was not, for most of it. Seven metres of vehicle with everything we own inside it, committed to a descent with no exit.

A wombat came out onto the track partway down and stood in it, then went into the undergrowth, unhurried, entirely indifferent to the vehicle.

And then, near the bottom, an old dirt mound across the road. Somebody had put it there years ago to close the track and time and traffic had worn it down, and a four-wheel drive would have gone over it without dropping a gear. For us it was the end of the road. There was nothing for it but to turn seven metres of bus around on a forestry track, which is a slow, awkward, multi-stage operation involving a lot of reversing toward vegetation you cannot see behind, and then drive back up everything we had just come down.

By the time we got back to the main trail it had started raining and the light was going.

That is the combination you do not want. Wet gravel goes slippery in a way that dry gravel does not, the trees close in and drop branches onto the track, and every corner arrives sooner than you expect because you cannot see far enough ahead. We slowed right down. We should have slowed down further.

On one of the sharper bends the back end let go and the rear wheels went off the edge of the road.

For a moment one corner of the bus was in the air. Everything not secured came off the shelves at once, a noise like a cupboard falling over, and then it came down and the wheels found the road again and we were still on it and still going.

We stopped. Sat there for a bit. Then got out in the rain and looked at the edge we had gone over and at the drop below it, which was not enormous, and was enough.

Inside, the damage was two plastic containers. That is all. Everything else had landed on something soft or landed and survived. The bus itself had taken it without complaint, which says something about how it was built and something about luck, and we were not sure that day which of those we had been relying on.

We drove the rest of it very slowly and got to Griffith in full dark, and added proper driving lights to the wish list, immediately below the e-bikes, with rather more urgency attached.

Dinner went in the instant pot. And while it cooked, we took the torch and went out into the forest, which after the afternoon we had just had was either brave or stupid.

Pademelons first, at the edge of the beam, the way they always are. Then, further out, something moving differently: lower, faster, with a rolling gait, and when the torch found it there were the white spots on dark fur. An eastern quoll, working the ground, hunting.

We followed it. Slowly, and badly, because two people in boots cannot move quietly on forest floor, but the quoll tolerated us for a surprisingly long time and let us get within a few metres before it decided it had had enough and went into the scrub.

Gary had been right. We had gone looking for a specific animal on a stranger's word and found it.

Back at the bus the food was ready and the rain had stopped and the whole afternoon had rearranged itself into something we would tell people about rather than something that had frightened us.

In the morning the camp looked worse than it had in the dark. Rubbish in the fire pits, the usual: bottles, cans, half-burnt packaging that somebody had decided the fire would deal with and it had not. We packed up and moved on.Read more