ATV Camping Trip - Wild Animals in the Night
Some unknown wild animal had been within a metre of my head, while I was asleep
Wild Animals in the Night
Campfire to make some toast and a cuppa and brighten up the night
By the time I reached what looked to be a suitable camping spot, it was fairly dark, except for the moonlight.
For me, a suitable camping spot was somewhere where I might get some good wilderness landscape photos at sunrise, where I'd find a little firewood in this desert environment and where I could sleep reasonably flat without a rock in my back.
I parked the ATV just in front of the only flat piece of ground that wasn't too rocky and soon had a small fire blazing.
Between the moonlight, the fire light and the torch I managed to clear a smooth place to camp. As I kicked the loose stones aside, they sparked as I've never seen stones spark before. With every sideways push with my foot, a dozen sparks would glow momentarily on the rough ground.
Laying out the tarp, just in front of the bike I put the foam mattress down and folded the tarp upward and over, onto the handlebars of the ATV. That was my camp for the night.
Dingo hung on the fence by the kangaroo shooter
Some time between bed time and the glow of early dawn, I got up for a pee. As it happened, the head end of my makeshift camp was along side a large flat rock, more or less at ground level. So I clambered out of the sleeping bag and walked out in my socks, peeing off the edge of the rock.
Simple enough! But I noticed in the torch light that some wild animal had left it's calling card on the rock about a metre from my pillow and my head.
No, it hadn't been there all along. I'd have seen it when setting up my camp or at least stood on it. It was definitely fresh!
What animal? I shone the torch around with an uneasy feeling. Nothing, of course. What would you expect? Just the desert.
The kangaroo shooter had, only a week or so back, shot a dingo and hung it on the fence at the Bosworth Station gate. A short time before that another dingo had been shot at the homestead while on still another occasion, a dingo bitch with half a dozen pups had been killed over near the dam.
My ATV is a farm bike, previously owned by an aging farmer. He put a scabbard on the side for his thistle hoe. I use the scabbard for my dingo stick which is a good, solid, wooden tent pole a bit over a metre long. With the dingo stick beside the bed, I went back to sleep.
So in the light of day I examined the poo. Well, it sure wasn't cow or horse poo. Such a big animal would have woken me anyway. No, this poo was from a small animal.
Neither was it sheep or rabbit poo and it wasn't from a kangaroo.
Well, it didn't have the appearance of the dog poo that I'm used too so I discounted a dingo at my camp in the night. So what was this wild animal that had been sniffing around my head while I slept. I reckon it may have been a fox or a wild cat. I'll never know.