I once lived for three years on the edge of the Great
Sandy desert with my companion Kurnti. Our first camp was at the side
of a lake. The water lasted for a couple of months and then the lake
became a dry, cracked claypan, which did not fill with water again for
seven years.
Dingoes came to visit us , sniffing for scraps
around the fireplace at night. We used to see their tracks in the
mornings. Dingo tracks are different from those of domestic dogs, and
desert people like Kurnti can easily tell them apart. One night when
there was a full moon, I awakened to see two pale and silent ghosts
slinking quickly through the camp. After that we started to leave bones
for our dingo visitors.
When the lake ran dry, we shifted our
camp to an abandoned mining bore, and installed a hand pump. The
dingoes were not long in following us. Soon after we had settled into
our camp, articles began to disappear; a milk tin, an enamel mug,
toiletries. We recovered the missing items later from the surrounding
bush; soap partly eaten, a new toothpaste tube punctured. As the heat
increased we started leaving water for the dingoes in a bowl by the
pump. When we moved to our third camp, forty kilometers north of the
second, the dingoes found us again, visiting our fireside at night. Our
new pump stood at the foot of the sandhill on which we lived, and we
resumed leaving water.
One evening we cooked a bush turkey, and
left it buried in the coals when we went to bed. Kurnti got up in the
night to pull it out of the ground oven and stow it safely in a tree.
For a bad moment he thought it had vanished. One of the dingoes had
found and tugged at the head of the turkey, which, fortunately for us,
had detached itself from the overcooked neck.
The dingoes had an
uncanny way of knowing when we were absent during the day,and we often
found their tracks when we came home from hunting.
If we had
been careless in packing up before we left, they got into our food
supplies. More than one packet of Weetbix went missing, and we followed
the departing tracks to find its ripped remains amongst the spinifex.
Once
we cut up and salted a bullock’s leg, and stored the pieces on a shelf
of wire netting. We came home one day to find a hole ripped in the
netting from underneath, and all the salt meat gone.We were not
entirely sympathetic to the dingoes for the thirst they must have
suffered afterwards.
Dingoes mate early in the dry season.
Sometimes at night we would wake to hear them calling to each other,
the yearning cries carrying far across the desert sandhills. The pups
are born a couple of months later. One day we followed dingo tracks to
the crest of a sandhill, where Kurnti pointed out some tiny puppy
footprints.
The dingo’s den was concealed behind tussocks of
grass. Kurnti knelt down and put his arm into the deep cavity. He
pulled out three little female pups, all brown with white socks. Kurnti
wanted to keep one of them. Though wisdom told me to leave them where
they were, I allowed myself to be persuaded. We put two of the pups
back inside their den, and carried the third away with us to our camp.
I will not tell the story of our little dingo here. In her short life
we grew to love her like a child, but at the age of only five months we
lost her.
When we visited the dingo’s den a few days later, we
found it abandoned. The mother had moved the remaining pups to a safer
place a few sandhills away. During our second year in the desert we
acquired a dog, a Bull terrier cross from a community near Fitzroy
Crossing. Nip was a fat, round puppy, who soon grew into a stocky and
energetic young dog. When he smelt dingoes approaching the camp after
dark, he would stand up with hackles raised and bark hysterically, or
rush off into the darkness to challenge the intruder.
Sometimes
the visiting dingo stood his ground and there would be a brief
struggle, then Nip would come tearing back to the safety of the
fireside. One afternoon when we were walking down the sandhill to the
pump, Nip suddenly charged off ahead of us. We heard a dog fight, more
prolonged than the usual brief skirmish after dark. As we hurried to
Nip’s rescue the noise stopped, and moments later we met a wild eyed
Nip, racing full tilt back up the slope towards us, the big male dingo
hard on his heels. The dingo was so enraged that he almost bowled into
us, at the last moment veering off into the bush
Once, when we
were absent for a while during the hottest time of the year, we found
no dingo tracks when we returned. Kurnti concluded that the dingoes had
traveled north to the nearest water, a permanent stream at the foot of
a range of hills on a cattle station property. Station country is
dangerous territory for dingoes, where they risk being trapped or
poisoned. Happily, our dingoes came back safely.
After the first
couple of years of visiting us by night, the male dingo became bolder,
and no longer bothered to conceal himself. In the late afternoons we
would see him strolling along the top of the ridge above our camp, then
he’d settle himself amongst the spinifex to watch and wait. As soon as
we went to bed he’d come down to explore our living space. Eventually
we moved away from our desert camp to live in town. We left some of our
belongings there and went to visit now and then, but our full time
desert life was over.
Over the next few years we managed to keep
track of the dingo couple, who still ranged over the same territory.
Kurnti read their movements from the sand. The male had distinctive
tracks: a front paw had once been injured, and the claws were splayed.
They traveled sometimes as a pair, walking the road together. At other
times they split up for days or weeks at a time, the male going one
way, the female the other. Then they would find each other again. We
saw no evidence of new litters, and all their adult offspring had gone.
Following
good rain one year, we returned to camp for a while by the lakeside,
and the dingoes found us. But they had become wary of us again, and no
longer showed themselves during the day. Eight years after we first met
our dingo neighbours, they still traveled up and down the mining road,
but their steps were slowing down. Then last year we looked for their
familiar tracks in vain. They have vanished from the sandhills, and we
do not expect to see them anymore.=
