Mountain Tails by Sharyn Munro Page A

young. The female often eats her smaller partner after mating. Perhaps, like Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones, she ‘can’t get no-oo satisfaction’?
    This one was a safely small variety, not that I was thinking of picking it up; although they have no venom, they can bite. My mantis looked very frail, but then danger is a matter of scale: to a ladybird it would have been a veritable King Kong.
    It’s a good thing they’re only human-sized in science fiction films, and looking at that blank-eyed head I could see why they’ve been used as the models for so many ‘aliens’. It is a quintessentially inhuman ‘face’: there’s nothing to relate to.

THE QUOLL KIDS

    Although the shed is quoll-less at present, a quoll family has taken up residence there almost every year and I hope will do so again.
    Since there’s not much to hunt in the shed, the mother quoll has to go out foraging every night to feed herself while her young ones are growing. Once they’re older, she takes them with her or sends them out on forays of their own. These runs include my verandah, where I have my various waste containers, including a simple metal holder for a supermarket plastic bag as my ‘true garbage’ bin (it’s very old, from the days before we woke up to the plastic bag nightmare).
    She jumps in, scrabbles around, selects and jumps out. I hear her every night, and if I shine the torch on her through the window above,she takes no notice. Her boisterous kids make so much noise they often don’t hear me open the door, so sometimes I surprise two pink-nosed little faces peering in astonishment over the edge of the suspended plastic bag, followed by an explosion of spots as they make their getaway, gambolling off like runaway rocking horses.
    The quolls prefer strong cheeses like Blue Castello, and even though I think I’ve scraped the wrappers clean, they find them worthwhile. Anything dairy-based will do, or even substitute-dairy, like tofu. Spinach and ricotta lasagne, dropped on the floor and dumped on the compost, was popular, but bliss was an oily tuna tin when I had visitors. It was passionately and noisily licked from one end of the verandah to the other.
    I always thought my quoll had twins, as each summer, from dusk till dawn, I’d seen just two spotted bundles of mischief cavorting about the house yard while she went hunting. They’re fully furred, although less spotty than their mother, old enough to be left unattended in the playpen.
    I shut the front windows at night ever since two of them got inside into the sink, where they made a terrible racket cleaning up the unwashed dishes. When sprung by the torch, a flurry of spots leapt out the window, which I quickly shut before hopping back into bed. I soon realised that only one had got away, as an almighty din began; one had got confused and leapt down behind the fridge, where, once recovered from the shock, it was banging away at the coils trying to get out.
    Quolls are not reluctant to make their wishes known, or, as my Nanna used to say, they’re not backward in coming forward. Once I temporarily added some timber to a hotch-potch pile near the house, not bothering to remove the corrugated-iron covering. I knew the quoll used this as her halfway house, but not how often.
    Within minutes an extremely loud banging began from inside the pile and did not stop. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing? How’s aquoll supposed to survive if you squash my space? Get those extra planks off at once!’
    We rushed to do as told and lifted off the planks one by one until, the load apparently being light enough, the banging ceased. We were allowed to leave two planks on.
    But for all her ferocity, the quoll doesn’t always win. One day she came home late—midday—and along the track, which was unusual. She was moving slowly, awkwardly. Then I saw why. On her back she was carrying one of