So this morning my sister (four years my senior) and mother decided to let my brother's river fish back free in the river now that he is no longer living with us as the fish were just too much to take care of. (Sounds ridiculous, I know. Fish being too much to handle. But the tank is dirty and we don't know how to clean it because once you get the water out we weren't sure whether tap water was okay to fill it up again with and there is some bad of little things that you're supposed to float in there to level things out and the filter keeps konking out and one of them started refusing to eat his mealworms and ended up dying. So it was back to the wild with the remaining two and the snail!) So mother went on the computer while my sister and I scooped some of the water from the tank into a small bucket and plopped the fish and snail into it, and off we headed down bush.
Now I don't know about where you guys live, but the Aussie bush is an incredibly dangerous place. We have some of the most poisonous snakes in the world, and poisonous spiders hang in every single branch it seems. Brush against the wrong branch and you can end up with a back full of ticks. And don't even get me started on the mosquitoes and jumping ants! (For those of you who don't know, jumping ants are nearly and inch long and give a killer bite.) Not to mention the spiky and poisonous plant life, the foxes, the territorial koalas, bunyips, and in my personal case, the odd chance that maybe the bull escaped again. And once you get past all of that, there is always the well disguised electric and barb wire fences and rusty farming and cooking equipment left behind by the farmer or my brother and his friends when they used to go camping.
So, now that you have a rough idea of what the tamed Aussie bush can throw at you, I shall continue. Everyone in my family knows that bush like the back of their hands. We grew up in there. Going swimming in the lake, and playing in the fields. But as we, at least my sister and I, got older, we stopped going into the bush almost entirely. And when we went down there today... Well it started horribly before we'd even reached the barb wire fence down the back. A fallen tree and overgrown lantana covered the path, so we had to go into my neighbours backyard and manoeuvre around the plants. That should have been the warning, but we ignored it.
Once we got through the fence, boy oh boy were we met with a huge surprise. The entire make-shift pathway we had going on was entirely overgrown with grass up to my waist and a few creeping vines. So, fish-bucket in hand, we trudged through. It was itchy, and muddy and gave me a few scratches. And that was just the first six or so meters. Remember those deadly snakes I mentioned? Yep. You can't see the ground, you don't know what you're standing on, you just gotta hope it's safe. So, six meters in, past the waist-high grass and we were faced with a slightly over grown electric fence, or a very over grown free path. Fortunately sister remember that that electric fence would block us in, so we had to crawl through the spiky lantana. Which miraculously only had one spider web on it. ...That I could see.
The rest of the story is really more of the same. Just lantana. Everywhere. All of our old trails are absolutely obliterated. We spent a good amount of time just scrambling through the brush in any direction that felt like it was heading in the right direction toward the creek. We ran into countless spider webs, all but about two holding spiders in our clear view. It was intense. We were climbing over fallen trees and branches, and stooping under others. And on more than one occasion we had to crawl on our hands and knees, pushing the bucket along in front of us. There would be like a meter between every lantana bush where we would stop, stand up and stretch our sore backs, have a bit of a breather, decide on a new direction and either we should crawl again, or whether it would be easier to hack them down a little. In the case of the latter, we'd spend a good 5 minutes breaking branches and stomping them down. Just because that was easier and much more fun then crawling some more.
To say we got lost countless times would be pointless, we were as good as lost as soon as we stepped through the back fence and realised our paths were overgrown, and by the time we passed that first electric fence we were well and truly lost. Not long later and we couldn't tell where we were coming from from where we were going. By some incredible miracle, we managed to mix my sister's weed-whacking skills and ability to find the best path, with my ability to be able to tell the direction of the creek just by the sound of it's running water and a few recognisable trees jutting up in the distance.
It took us a good long while, but finally we reached the creek. We released the fish and snail and turned around. We were faced with the over grown lantana that we'd just been fighting through, or a pretty over grown but at least not lantana infested path through bare, dead looking trees surrounding by tall brown grass and long, weaving, brittle vines. We chose the 'death' path, because at least it was a little easier to navigate, despite the fact neither of us knew how to go home that way; that was more my brothers part of the bush.
In any case, after much zig-zagging, and walking in circles, we finally managed to some how miraculously make it home. We were pretty much hysterical with relief and adrenaline, covered in scratches and itchy all over, but alive! No snake bites, or spider bites (despite the fact that we upset a good hundred or so, surely, the way we were destroying the plant life to preserve our own!) and a quick tick-check once we got upstairs has thus far proved us to be tick-free. (Though there is no guarantee; they're tricky little buggers!)
Turns out though, mother was cackling herself the whole time because she could hear us every single time we screamed. (And I assure you, we were screaming a lot. Every spider, every branch that jabbed us, every time we tripped on the vines, every time some tall grass brushed against us like a spider or some other creeping insect.) Isn't it nice to know that our mother can hear us screaming in fear and agony, lost in the bush, and she laughs? A-yup. That's where I get my sense of humour from~
((And for those of you who don't know what lantana is, it's a suffocating vine with really pretty flowers. You can look it up, and it's look pretty and you'll be wondering what we were complaining about, but only someone who has actually been inside a lantana shrub would ever understand. At least today wasn't the first time! XD
h e r e is a picture to give you a rough idea of what we were crawling through and tearing apart. Though ours is a lot more advanced and has become more of a tree than a shrub. I'm pretty sure that's a different species though, because ours has much bigger spikes on the branches, though they do still have the tiny fibres that make the branches and leaves extra sticky so they grab at you as you crawl through.))
