Mountain Tails Read Online Free

bodies to fit through amazingly narrow spaces, it’s a constant battle to maintain vigilance against such squatters, even though I thought I’d found and filled every crack where they could enter.
    Yet each year, come the colder weather, out of the night shadows a tiny creature will suddenly dart onto the sink or the bench, stare at me with its round dark eyes, then disappear. I get out the live trap again: a folding aluminium tunnel with a spring-loaded platform inside, which, when stepped on, snaps the door shut.
    It’s not that I don’t like them. In fact, the Brown Antechinus is one of the cutest of our small mammals, despite being related to the Tasmanian Devil. Similarly carnivorous, they have lots of sharp little teeth, but they have pretty rounded ears like pink flowers, a pointy pink nose and rather ‘poppy’ black eyes. They’re great climbers.
    Being meat eaters, they don’t touch my fruit or vegetables—unlike the bush rats. My antechinus do like cheese, which is what I put in the live trap. Younger antechinus are too tiny, too light to trip the trap, so I have to wait until they grow bigger, feed them up with free cheese slivers until the night of their big surprise.
    Since they have a go at the actual door of the trap when in there, they don’t mind the taste of metal either. What began as a tiny nibbled corner has been increased by each overnight prisoner down the years until, star-shaped, it is now almost big enough for an escape hole, although the spiky edges are really sharp. I’ll have to patch it, but I’ll feel mean, after all their efforts—like prisoners laboriously digging a secret tunnel, only to be discovered right on the eve of escape. I wonder whether my lot here have developed a racial memory for this behaviour, and so pass it on in their genes?
    The memorable fact about these antechinus is that the males not only mate themselves silly but they mate themselves to death. Before they are a year old, over a period of two weeks they race about seeking females, fighting each other for the ladies’ favours and, when they win them, mating for six hours at a time. They do it with more than one female if they can.
    Not one male is left alive at the end of this frenzied mating season, which is usually in early spring. Not one male makes it to his first birthday. Apparently it’s the stress that does it.
    It doesn’t sound like much fun being a female either, even if they do live longer, what with males jumping them at every turn. I mean, six hours does seem overcompensation for the ‘ten-minute wonder’ that human females complain about. Not surprisingly after all that effort, pregnancy, which only lasts a month, is guaranteed.
    These little marsupials don’t actually have a pouch; instead they have six to ten exposed nipples, which the young latch on to—and they don’t let go for the first five weeks while they continue to develop, so Mum has to drag them about beneath her. At least she knows they’ll leave home by next winter, before the whole business starts again.
    But I don’t want their home to be mine, for they are nocturnal and I’m not. If I didn’t need sleep I wouldn’t really mind sharing the house with them. But I do, and between their scrabbling and hissing, and my nervous awareness of the high possibility of them running over my pillow, and thus my head, they stop me getting enough of it.
    P.S. After three consecutive mornings recently where the trap door was closed but nothing was inside, I realise they are now escaping via the nibbled hole, sharp edges or not. I am trying to think of a material to patch it with that they can’t possibly bear to eat, but I’m having trouble.

KOOKABURRA KINGDOM

    Moist ground, short grass, worms a-wriggling, birds a-watching—snap!
    Kookaburras claim my fence posts, my gates, my tree guards, my guttering, the glasshouse roof and the bare wintry