Yarloop stories

Yarloop fox in trap

You have all seen the movie scene where the hero fixes up the wild animal be it a wolf or whatever by removing the thorn from a sore paw. My experience with a diminutive fox makes me doubtful any such event could occur. I set rabbit traps at the mouth of rabbit burrows to trap rabbits that I would then take home and hit on the back of the head to kill them before skinning and gutting them before giving the prepared rabbit to Mum to cook. On this occasion a baby fox was caught in the trap. It looked cute. I wanted to set it free. I went to get hold of the trap to do so but before I had got anywhere near enough to touch anything the fox tried to bite off my hand. Soothing words did no good. Eventually I got a suitably large piece of wood so I could bludgeon the little fellow to death as I wanted my rabbit trap. There was a bounty for fox tails so I cut that off to collect it. The smell was just awful. And I never did take it down to Harvey to get the money. Gary says he took it to Harvey and handed it in and got the bounty. He also says it smelt awful.

Yarloop first rabbit skin

Our father was not around. I cannot remember whether it was because he was in hospital because of a skin condition he got during the war which crippled him for a month or so each year or he had got into trouble from drinking too much.
I had been out rabbit trapping and had a rabbit to skin and gut. Our father did all the skinning and cleaning of rabbits up to this time and as with just about everything else he had not shown my brother or me what to do. When friends came he would engage them in his efforts to work on the car or anything else but his own children did not get the same attention for some reason. Anyway it was a case of having to get the job done and it was but a poorer effort would be hard to imagine. The adage practice makes perfect certainly applies to skinning and gutting rabbits as future efforts were much better.

1966 Basil’s horse

I had worked on Basil Blackburn’s farm helping milk the cows in his dairy and as a result was able to ride a horse he had at his farm up in the hills. The dairy farm was on the flat where irrigation water provided the cows with good food so they made good milk. Yarloop is at the beginning of the Darling scarp so to the east of it you have the hills and valleys of the Darling Range. From the South West Highway it is along the roads to the east of the highway. It is picturesque country and at that time was also a good place to shoot rabbits. My story about Mike Anderson and I going rabbit shooting and driving over a dugite snake is set in these hills. We also were walking through some trees just below a ridge line when we were confronted by a swarm, stampede, host or whatever of kangaroos which we had obviously disturbed. All of a sudden we had kangaroos passing us left right and nearly centre. They had come and gone before we lifted up our rifles. They were 0.22. Mine was one I had bought off Mike. A single shot Cooey.

Anyway, back to horses. The culprit in this story deserved to have a bullet in his head. I was told the usual horse was not available but there was one at the property I could take for a ride. There was a shed with the gear in it and the horse was in the yard. After putting on its saddle etc it was time to get aboard and enjoy myself.

Horse I guess just wanted to rest. People who can ride a horse better than I can have told me what I should have done. What I did was mount the horse and have him promptly try to squash me by lying down. Fortunately I was able to step off him. I was considerably shaken. He wasn’t small. I could envisage me under him. That was the end of my horse riding days at Yarloop.