WHEN DOLLY DIED
“…wherever camels go in the great hereafter…”
When Dolly died, she did it right in the main homestead gateway on the old Carnarvon Road.
The old girl was a walking history book in her day. She used to belong to an Afghan hawker, pulling his squeaky old wagon all around the Gascoyne (W.A.) country in the early times.
But when she got a bit long in the tooth, he bushed her, hunted her into the scrub country to retire among the pretty wildflowers on the sandhills.
As you probably know, camels are ostropulous animals in their best moments. They snarl, growl, spit, fart, kick and grumble, walk straight through bloody fences, gates or stockyards without blinking an eye, and treat human beings with contempt.
Dolly was no different. She was a pest, a nuisance, an eyesore, a bloody embarrassment to God’s creatures, in my unbiased opinion, and whenever we came across her in the bush, we tried to run her down and stirrup-iron the old bitch into heaven, hell, or wherever camels go in the great hereafter.
Now she was dead, died on her own, smack-bang in the middle of the gateway, her legs sticking straight up in the air like fence posts, and her belly puffed out like a balloon. She looked just like a bloody bagpipe gone mad.
Her big ugly head was wedged in the gate and one of her hocks had part of the fence wire wrapped around it and pulled tight enough to play a tune on.
The horrible thought came down on us like a black cloud from the Kennedy Ranges. How were we going to get rid of the old girl? She was too big to pull away with the draught horse. Anyway, the horse wouldn’t go anywhere within cooee of the camel, dead, alive or otherwise. She was too big to burn, too big to bury and too big to ignore.
The trouble was, she got bigger every day. And stink! Oh, Gawd, she stunk something awful. The smell coming from her rotten hide was downright poisonous.
It was impossible to stand too close to dead Dolly without fainting. And right in the middle of that rotten pong was a solid blanket of black bush flies, millions of the things, fighting and buzzing over and inside the carcase in a living mass.
“I’m going to shoot her,” a jackeroo said. “I’m going to shoot her and let the air out. If we don’t, she’ll bust, and we’ll have bits of her flying everywhere.”
He brought the .303 army rifle, aimed carelessly at the bulging belly, and fired. AS the bullet struck Dolly’s mangy hide, an explosion of gas erupted from the guts, and into our faces flew a stink that made us cough and splutter as we ran for cover, gasping for breath.
She beat us. Even though she was dead, she still beat us with her stink. We left her there for the ants and flies to finish off in their good time.
Further down the fence, we cut the wire and made another gateway, and even when the old girl was nothing but a pile of bones, we left her there as a sort of memorial – a monument to a dirty, stinking, rotten old fleabag of a camel that was neither a use nor an ornament in the scheme of things that was.
© C. O’Roie, Carnarvon, West Australia.
