Mountain Tails (13 page)

My daughter keeps her horses up here because she lives in town. Lucy's always had horses here, and when her babies are older she might find time to ride again.

In the meantime they have become a problem. I've already complained about the pesky little Shari, but in the last few years, since I wrote about them in
The Woman on the Mountain,
the two geldings, Sabbath and Zack, have aged enough to need supplementary feeding; they cannot keep in good condition despite all the green grass and seeding tussocks on the 30 or so acres of their fenced area. We had them checked for parasites, poor teeth and liver damage, but in the end the vet decided it was due to their inappropriate breeding.

They simply aren't Mountain horses.

Over our three decades here, other, more suitably bred horses were tougher, never needing extra feeding, even in winter. Grain or hay was kept only as a treat or as bribery in catching them. Lucy's first horse, her beloved buckskin pony, Jess, thrived on the paddocks here for sixteen years and died of old age.

I'd always said I did not want domestic animals such as chooks or milking cows, because it would restrict my time away, tie me down, and it's too remote to ask anyone to come and feed them. Dogs and cats are out because they'd harass, hunt, wound or kill the animals who are the primary inhabitants of this wildlife refuge. But the horses seemed to manage on their own, with Lucy coming as needed to worm them and trim their feet, which are unshod.

Originally I hadn't considered issues like the damage hard-hoofed large animals do to the ground, and I've justified their continued presence by their role in fire hazard reduction because they eat the flammable blady grass. Which is still true, but I wonder if it's worth it, as now I feel guilty if I'm away for a few days, let alone a whole week.

Each morning, from their positions along the fence line, with a good view of the verandah, they start neighing for breakfast from first light if they spot me, so I have to sneak out to the toilet or shower. The house yard is the easiest place to feed them twice daily, letting them graze my kikuyu ‘lawn' menace in between.

Of course they eat more than the kikuyu, but not every day, since they know that would cruel their chances of coming in at all. No, they do it erratically in both timing and choice: one day Sabbath will fancy a munch of citrus leaves, just enough to keep the tree bonsai'd, and then be good for weeks; or Zack a mouthful or two of Chinese Star Jasmine, just enough to wrench it off the support and set it back a season, and then ignore it.

This may not be as perverse as it strikes me; I was told that horses can tell when the plants have a mineral they need, or when the sap is rising—or
something else that doesn't excuse them in my books. They know very well what's against the rules of entering these premises, because only the guilty one starts slinking off when my yell of indignation is heard. The other looks smug and gets on with eating imported grass.

But when it's raining, I can't let them in because they make the ground too boggy. I don Driza-Bone, hat and gumboots, grit my teeth and do my duty.

It will be boggy and slippery outside the fence, and getting amongst three pushy horses out there is neither appealing nor safe, so I lower the rubber buckets over the fence on my hoe: two big ones and a small token one for Shari. Then I venture gingerly out while they're all busy, sneak a halter on Shari and tie her up, otherwise she will stick her head in Sabbath's bucket and not remove it, even to take turns, until it's empty. He's the biggest horse but he can't budge the fat little piglet.

If displaced, he'll move over to Zack's bucket and try to pull it away by seizing the rim in his teeth. As Zack is the boss, theoretically, this is not allowed, so then there's a flurry of nipping and backing up and flying hooves and skidding in mud and the last of the feed spilling.

It's all
much
easier if Shari's not about, off feeding somewhere illegal, like in my regeneration area or out along the track, on the wrong side of the fences that are supposed to keep horses out.

This country will support only a tougher type of horse, bred for the bush, like stock horses; not part-Arabs or thoroughbreds, bred to be spoilt by or at least part-dependent on man. The feed costs a fortune! We share the expense, and when Lucy gets her dream of a few acres near town, she will take the horses and care for them and maybe her three daughters can learn to ride on the old fellows. Shari will be kept busy finding new ways of causing havoc.

I used to dream of Haflingers, the blond-maned Austrian horses that are beautiful in appearance and temperament, and could double as carriage horses when the world's oil runs out or gets too expensive. That was considered an extremist idea, back in the 1970s: it's looking very
realistic now, isn't it? But then, just a few years ago, man-made global warming was generally placed in the same crazy category. My ‘greenie' ideas are almost mainstream now that the chickens are flying home to roost, tragically even faster than we'd ever predicted.

But Haflingers are expensive, and soft-hoofed animals that ate blady grass would be better, if such a creature exists. Alpacas have been suggested, but I suspect they'd need netting fences to hold them. And being smaller, they might be susceptible to the paralysis ticks we have here in abundance. There'd surely be an attendant problem: there always is, but we don't always know its nature in advance.

Whatever the solution, I know that responsibilities come with keeping domestic animals of any sort. We have bred them to be dependent, taken them generations and continents away from their original ecosystem of survival.

But some, like dogs and cats, survive only too well in our native environments when their owners lose control of them, or choose to let them loose: they turn feral; breed bigger, fiercer offspring; and destroy the native fauna, the animals that belong there and that have no designed mechanism of defence against these alien creatures. Others, like rabbits, goats, wild pigs and deer, destroy the vegetation, and thus often the native animals that depend on it for habitat and food.

If we want to use animals, be it for producing food, mowing grass or keeping us company, we have to accept those responsibilities.

It's why I prefer the wild animals. They inhabit and run their own world independently in a sustainable balance, feed themselves, sort out their own squabbles, cost me nothing—and they let me live alongside them, hopefully causing no harm.

The only problem is that they don't eat blady grass!

We humans think we're pretty clever, that we are the highest of the animals, often citing our degree of culture, our appreciation of the arts, as the justification.

But when you look at nature, there are so-called minor creatures who embody in their very selves several of the artistic techniques or ‘movements' we thought we invented. There are Day-Glo lizards, Rococo frogs, the Surrealist platypus, the Art Nouveau lyrebird, the Pointillist goanna—to name but a few.

The stick insect is the epitome of
trompe l'oeil,
a term used in the decorative arts that literally means ‘deception of the eye', a technique giving a convincing illusion of reality. You may have seen this used as a
painting on a blank wall, creating a fake window or door with a view beyond.

Stick insects are often missed because of their intricate deceptive details. I only spotted this one because it had alighted, or fallen, onto the back of the truck, probably overnight when it was climbing the nearby tree. My brain wasn't deceived here because the fake stick was out of place against flat metal. Once carefully relocated with a real stick to a young birch tree, silhouetted, it would have easily deceived a fresh eye.

Closer inspection showed tiny bumps, as if a twig had snapped off here and there, and shades and patterns of bark-like colour. As delicate an art as any miniaturist's, as clever as any sculptor's, as fanciful an extension of natural forms as any Art Nouveau practitioner—or perhaps Art Deco, it being more geometric of line. The folded wings I could see might cover softer bigger wings, but mostly only males get to fly; the females usually just glide.

Such creatures were once lumped into the same family as grasshoppers and crickets and cockroaches, but now they have their own order,
Phasmida.
Also called Walking Sticks—meaning sticks that walk rather than props for the infirm—Phasmids are vegetarian.

I was astonished to learn that they are now popular as pets! Why? Unusual, harmless, quiet, cheap to feed? But not much action, and awfully fragile!

And, given that their whole being is dedicated to the art of
trompe l'oeil,
I imagine they'd feel exposed in a glass cage with a token stick or two. Perhaps that's part of the fun for the owner—creating an equally
trompe l'oeil
environment so visitors can play ‘spot the stick insect'?

Speaking of art, some of the most magnificent creations here are the Yellow-tailed Black Cockatoos—living sculptures of ebony.

Impressive at about 60 centimetres tall, Australia's biggest cockatoo, they seem oversized for the branches they perch on, regally deliberate in their movements, blackish-brown feathers stiffly carved and defined, the ebony relieved only by pale yellow dabs on their cheeks and yellow bands across the tails.

Farthest down the line when the singing talents were handed out, they don't seem to care, for they're uninhibitedly raucous. When a small group flies over or sits in my nearby trees for a spell, usually when it's wet and misty, all else gets drowned out. They sound like something
mechanical that's rusting up and badly needs oiling. There's often about six of them, and they don't perch long, but while they do they sort of creak loudly at each other; it's hard to describe it as ‘calling' to each other.

Then one will take off and gradually the others follow. To watch them fly through the dense forest here is an aviation spectacle, for they seem too large to make their way between the trees as easily as they do. Their mode of flying is unmistakable: deep wing movements, grand and deliberate, with nothing ‘flappy' about them. The wings hang heavy and straight on the down strokes, like the caped arms of a kid playing Superman.

Once I came across two of them sitting in a low branch of a battered and twisty old forest she-oak, neatly cracking open the woody ‘nuts'. They took no notice of me standing only metres away, but continued calmly with their feast, each with one claw clamped to the branch, the other claw manipulating one nut after another up to the hooked beak to break the hard seed-pod compartments open and prise out the small seeds. Low squawks every now and then expressed approval of the quality of this year's crop. These cockatoos like the bigger and harder cones of introduced pine plantations too.

My closer view on that occasion let me see why the feathers appear to be carved: they are each edged with a very fine line of pale yellow. While these cockatoos can't raise a high and showy crest, the way some of their longer-crested relatives can, the thick badge or tuft of feathers above the beak does ripple forward and back, like raising an eyebrow, in punctuation of their conversation. In side silhouette they can look as if they have a rather unruly mohawk ‘headstyle'.

They reminded me that day of two formidable elderly Victorian widows in black bombazine dresses, tut-tutting aristocratically over high tea. When I think of the whalebone corsetry that went under those costumes, the high brooched collars, the stiff necks, stiff upper lips and hair tightly drawn into buns under black top combs and short black veils—perhaps
that impression is not so far removed from my earlier one of the carved images, only less exotic. In fact, they are sometimes called the Funeral Cockatoo, with
‘funereus'
as part of their proper name.

I am always grateful when they visit: cuteness I get lots of, but magnificence is rare, even if incongruously rusty.