The Continuing Story of Mothball Wombat : Hark the Wombat - by Jackie French

Have you read Part 1 : Mothball Comes Home ? Read it here

Part 2 : Hark the Wombat (Mothball's Baby)

May, June, July, August, we were pretty sure by now Mothball had a baby in her pouch. Mothball's pouch got bigger, and bigger still. By September it was dragging on the grass. And the baby still hadn't climbed out into the world.

Mothball's baby, it seemed, was as stroppy as she was. He didn't want to come out. And so he didn't.

But now the pouch was decidedly too small. Either the baby's legs poked out or his head did. Sometimes there'd be a two headed wombat, grazing on the grass outside my study, Mothball's head at one end and the baby's at the other, munching grass between Mothball's back legs.

Then he would somersault inside the pouch and the two back legs would poke out instead and a great arc of urine would fly into the sky. Wombats don't wear nappies. They just point their bum in the right direction.

Mothball was seriously uncomfortable now - that dragging pouch was a nuisance, especially when she had to climb over the wooden edge of the herb garden.

Finally I watched out the study window as she clambered up over the new herb bed, dragging the pouch as she went. It must have been a rough ride in the pouch, because the next time I looked there was the baby, small and round and brown, trying to crawl back into his pouch - with Mothball lying spreadeagled, stomach flat on the ground, determined not to let him back in.

The baby pushed from one direction and then the other, then it bent down cautiously and ate some grass. It had been eating grass for about two months by now, but only from the safety of the pouch.

Grass apparently tasted just as good outside. Mothball waited till the baby was eating happily, then stood up cautiously and began to munch as well.

I never saw the baby back in the pouch again after that, though sometimes over the next three weeks it would wriggle its head in to drink milk.

One early morning I was picking beans in the vegetable garden, bending over the plants with my jumper hanging loosely down. Whump!

Something clambered into my jumper. It did a somersault, and suddenly there was a small brown face peering up at me, as though to say: 'This is an unusual pouch. Not bad though...'.

We called the baby Hark, mostly because whenever Mothball bashed the garbage bin to call us to give her carrots one of us would say, 'Hark! The wombat!'.

Hark was small and round and brown, with a bald spot on his bum. It wasn't mange - I was worried about that at first. It was just a bald spot - maybe from an injury when was quite small.

For a while he padded at Mothball's heels. Then he grew bolder.

He bounced at wallabies.

He bounced at echidnas.

He bounced at shadows and at Bryan as he went to feed the chooks.

Like all small wombats I've known he loved to play the wombat game that I'd first played with Bounce - he'd jump out at me from behind a bush and butt me in the back of the legs till I fell over. Then it was my turn to hide and jump out at him.

Mothball was more sedate these days. I got the impression that all this bouncing annoyed her. One late afternoon I looked out to see her padding determinedly up the mountain, with Hark at her side.

Two days later she was back. There was no sign of Hark. Mothball had decided it was high time that he was weaned.

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The months went by. Mothball mostly ignored us now. For a while she worked on her hole, extending it. We'd wake in the night to the sound of rocks hitting the floor below our bed and every morning there'd be another barrow load or two of dirt for Bryan to cart away.

But she no longer demanded carrots. She didn't even bother to bash the garbage bin. And for the first time since I'd made friends with my first wombat the doormat wasn't chewed.

Then one day she was gone. She had wandered off into the night.

I wasn't worried. Mothball was the most determined wombat I had ever met, and I was quite sure she knew how to look after herself. And life went on.

There were other wombats about the house now. But we didn't name them, apart from Totally Confused, the wombat I often met while driving in at night.

Most wombats dash across the road when they finally realise a car has approached. But Totally Confused would stand in the middle of the road, unable to make up his mind which way to go, so considered that finally he'd just go around in circles, for ten minutes or more, till finally I'd get sick of it and give him a gentle boot on the bum to propel him off the road so I could drive on in.

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2001 had been dry. By the year's end the creek had vanished and the grass was brown. Now the summer of 2002 was worse. Days over 40 C, winds like the breath of hell, heat unrelenting for night after night...

It was January, and Bryan had gone up to Sydney for his daughter's birthday. Edward was home, in a brief interval between bushfires, before he went back to university. We had just finished dinner when there was a yell at the back door.

'Hunh, hunh, hunh, hunh, hunh!!!!!!'

It had been so long since I'd heard Mothball's call I didn't register at first that it was.

'Hunh, hunh, hunh, hunh, hunh!!!!!!'

I opened the back door, was about to reach for the screen door when a large brown ball rammed through the door, pushing aside the aluminium base, knocked me flying and speared down the hall.

Edward peered out of the kitchen door and started to laugh.

'Do something!' I yelled.

'What?' Edward was laughing so hard now he could hardly speak.

I scrambled to my feet and hurried over to the bathroom. Mothball had already torn the towels to muddy shreds and had started on the toilet paper. Seconds later she had the plastic bath mat by one corner and was wrestling it to shreds.

I reached down to catch her but she evaded me, leaping backwards and releasing the bath mat to take a great lunge at my dress, tearing it down one side

'Edward!' I shrieked.

Edward was laughing so hard now he could hardly stand. But he has grown up with wombats. Edward can make a noise that I can't even imitate, but that wombats follow. He finally got enough breath to signal Mothball outside.

Mothball followed him, while I ran to the larder, got out rolled oats, handfuls of carrots, and the wombat feeding dish. I could hear Mothball outside, attacking the garbage bin and Edward's laughter.

I raced out the door - and Mothball lunged again, leaping high into the air as she tore my dress from neck to hem.

I put the food down. 'There you are, you dopey marsupial!'

Mothball gave my dress one last great rip, then crouched down on her haunches to eat.

She finished that bowlful in twenty minutes. I gave her another, but it was more than she wanted. She even left the last two carrots. But she was still angry.

Mothball was hot and hungry. And she blamed humans for the entire drought.

Maybe she had a point. Maybe we were to blame, with our cars and our global warming. From Mothball's point of the view it was the duty of the humans in this house to keep the world safe and comfortable for wombats. And we had failed.

Mothball wanted revenge.

It didn't matter how much we fed her, how many carrots I tried to bribe her with. For the next six weeks Mothball ate - and then destroyed.

First the doormat, then the garbage bin. Every box down in the shed was ripped to shreds. No matter how high we hung the mop - and wombats cannot jump, there is no way that wombats can jump - Mothball managed to reach it in the night and tear off its few remaining strings.

She chewed the garden chairs. She ate the garden table. She started on the bedroom door, the front door and then the window frames. Bryan raced to town in the now ancient green truck and brought back reinforcing mesh. He nailed it carefully to every exposed door and window, so it looked like we had armed ourselves against an army of small angry gnomes.

Still the attacks continued. Washing was shredded from the line. Mothball had always hated anything wet flapping on her nose as she pushed past the clothesline. I had lost a pair of sheets and Edward his best jeans to Mothball's claws. But now she spent hours leaping up as the clothes flapped above her, till in desperation we took our washing up to the laundry in town, where it would be safe from wombat teeth.

She seemed to have an instinct for any human item left outdoors at night: a garden trowel mauled till it was unrecognisable, a pair of boots shredded, a gumboot torn. I waited for the clang in the night that meant she had decided to turn her attentions to my car.

And then it rained. On the 18th of February, to be exact, not that I was counting. Softly, gently, steadily, so there was no run off for twenty-four hours, just soaking, glorious rain. By the morning of the 19th the world was a green fuzz, instead of brown.

And Mothball as eating. And eating. And eating.

It kept on raining. Mothball kept eating, with the steady munching of any grass eater who has known drought, methodically sweeping from one centimetre to the next.

It kept on raining. The grass was ankle high now. Mothball could afford to be picky, wandering from this lush clump to the next, a mouthful here, a few minutes guzzling there. She no longer demanded carrots, oats and wombat nuts at the back floor. She no longer paid any attention to us at all, except for a nightly chew of the doormat.

I'm not sure why she chewed the doormat. Maybe it was dessert. Maybe it was habit. Maybe it just felt nice against her teeth. Maybe doormats contain all the odours of any human who has passed over them and all the world their feet have brushed, and this was Mothball's way of asserting dominance over them all.

She kept eating grass and chewing the doormat for another six months, and life with wombats turned into routine again.

Morning: Watch Mothball finish eating and lumber back to her hole. Evening: Avoid Mothball as I change the hoses before bed - she'll growl nowadays if I pass too close.

Night: Wake at 2 am to the earthquake sound of Mothball scratching under the bed.

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Meanwhile, Hark came back.

He was bigger and a lighter brown than he was when he trotted off at Mothball's heels, but the bare patch on his bum was unmistakable. And I worked out who his father is too.

It was three weeks ago. I was driving back late from Canberra, when I was stopped by a wombat on the road. Hark.

He seemed to be thinking. He dashed to the right, then to the left, then changed his mind and stepped to the right..... then skipped around in circles, trying to decide which way to go, till I got out of the car and hooshed him off into the thorn bushes.

For once Totally Confused was not totally confused at all and managed to father one large determined wombat, who just has a slight problem sometimes making up his mind which way to go.

But Hark is his mother's son as well. He is a digger too - a rare thing in a wombat, at least in this end of the valley. (Maybe we just have the most incompetent wombat engineers in the world.)

Last week he was extending the hole under our bedroom. I watched him from my study, the sturdy legs digging, pushing, digging, the determined head squinting at the day. He leaves his droppings neatly around the house too and on the front step every night, to make sure everyone that passes knows this place is his.

And we do.