Eats roots and leaves

..not
generally natural to where wombats delve. Many fragile metres of foil and fibreglass
were regarded as a mere inconvenience to its general construction and mining
operations and were demolished both rapidly and noisily in the small hours of
a winter morning as it waddled and crumped its way under the house to directly
underneath where I was sleeping. To say that I woke with a start is an understatement
as it did sound like the seven dwarfs were in full swing with pick and shovel.
I thought that an extensive tunnel-and-chamber complex was being developed and
that even though wombats are solitary animals in this case a consortia of Vombatidae
had been developed and that our house would disappear into a newly wombat-made
cavern.
In the Bible it may say ‘and so it passed’ but in this case it looked
like it had come to stay.
No doubt the flood of warm air from the broken ducting made the intellectually
diminutive beast more comfortable, but we were now largely bereft of warmth.
And of course it is particularly cold at the moment here in the outer fringes
of Melbourne and I did think it better that I have the benefit of expensively
warmed air than the rather better insulated wombat.
Well, the ducting has been repaired by me – crawling under the house was
a speciality that I didn’t need to revisit – but keeping the beast
out is a different matter. These animals have a protected status and you just
cannot attempt to pick them up and take them elsewhere. It is not even legal.
Wombats are very territorial and will savage any interlopers into their territory,
so putting a carefully wrapped marsupial into the boot and dropping it in a
nearby municipality is not a nice, or proper, thing to do. Actually, trying
to pick one up is not recommended either as they are made to the same specific
density as depleted uranium and those claws, so artful adapted to digging through
clay and rock, may do one a little damage to one’s flesh.
The idea with wombat proofing is to make ingress impossible but egress easy
by leaving a one-way door on their favourite way out. Wherever that might be.
Get it wrong, and wombats will walk through heavy duty mesh right beside your
cunningly created door because that is what they do. Something to do with limited
brain power or just an interesting sense of humour. And of course they can still
decide to dig under whatever barriers you have put in their way, although excavating
through bricks, chicken wire on the ground or concrete blocks is another matter.
As I have proved.
Now, I am not the heaviest of sleepers at the best of times, but as the fortified
perimeter was being established I became attuned to the slightest scruffle,
actual, potential or imagined. In the small hours of the morning when wombats
start the night shift and begin brewing their breakfast coffee, washing the
dishes and going to the bathroom the noises instantly alerted my heightened
senses. I would awake with a mighty adrenalin rush that prevented me from sleeping
for the next eight hours. The person in the mirror soon resembled the horrified
mask of Edward Munch’s “The Scream”. Not worth $119,922,500
however that one version fetched in 2012. As one commentator said about the
buyer “If they did understand it, they would do something more generous
with the money.”
Strangely I have never seen the beast that walks in the night – although others
have – so to me it was just a cacophony of unwelcome sounds that a created an
image of a red-eyed fiend that waited until I had dropped off before deliberately
creating as much of a ruckus as possible. Most likely it came from a few doors
down where a kind couple had raised an orphaned wombat from infancy and then
let it roam free. Thanks.
But I think, hope, pray that I have finally won the battle. The past few nights
have been quiet and though the neighbours’ dogs still bark that might
be at anything from a possum to a fox. Or a passing wombat.
There is a triangular green sign on our front gate that says ‘Land for
Wildlife’. I hereby give notice that this does not include the land under
the house.