FRONTIER
crap and lent a hand, managing to pull the male out relatively easily. We tied him to a nearby tree before the drugs and forklift arrived.
I watched as Craig helped Willow and Mick get the last female out of the hole and we were done for the day.
I joined the croc in getting a hose-down. Each time someone got mud on them they cleaned it off, but it was just as important to make sure the crocs were totally hosed down, so they didn’t carry any diseases back to the Territory with them. We drove to the local motel and slept off our weariness, ready for day two.
There were 10 crocs in two pens left to clear out. We got into it early because we already had the 40 other crocs waiting in the back of the truck. Nick was topping up the sedative drugs every four hours to keep them calm. The truck was parked up in the shade and the crocs were all positioned comfortably with extra layers of hay padding and shade sails pulled over the top, but we still wanted to get the job finished sooner rather than later.
We moved the first out pretty quickly, because we had the entire team helping, which made everything easier. Well, that is, until we came across another cranky male in a pond.
All of us w e r e around this pond, all of us had a head rope and all of us had a pole to rouse him up. But every time the croc came up we kept missing! I decided to change tack.
‘All right, that’s it! I’m going to bring the little excavator in here, park it on the edge, extend the arm and scoop this croc out from a vantage point.’
The guys weren’t that keen on this, but I thought it was a good idea, so I ran back and hopped in the excavator and drove it down a small walkway, over an embankment and to the edge of the pond. I edged it down the bank just a bit and soon realised it was a lot steeper than I had anticipated. The excavator began sliding and then started tipping, so I extended the arm with the bucket to stop the machine rolling over. That worked for a second but then the machine was moving sideways and it kept going and going, and I couldn’t get the bucket around quick enough.
The soil shifted from beneath me and both the machine and I slipped straight into the middle of the pond with the bloody crocodile.
I was sitting in the excavator half submerged in the mud while all of the guys standing around the pond slapped their sticks like crazy, in an attempt to keep the attention away from me. I watched as the croc swirled around in the mud.
I was ready to jump on the excavator roof if I needed to.
‘Boys, quickly, go grab the chains and the big excavator and help get me out of here!’ I yelled.
Craig dropped his stick, ran off and then came straight back, flinging me some chains. I jumped on the roof, hooked up a couple of D-shackles and chucked the chains back to the guys with the big excavator, which had just arrived.
I was tempted to try my hand at making it from the excavator to the bank on foot, but I knew how unforgiving the mud was to move through, so I sat myself back in the excavator cab, waiting for the bigger machine to pull me out.
Each time the big excavator pulled I looked on at the chains in fear that they would snap, and I’d end up in even deeper shit with the croc. I knew I was slowly sinking, but I still had a small height advantage in the cab. Every so often I saw the croc do a bog lap around me, so I took the opportunity to see if I could coax it up to the surface with a little stick I had with me.
I tried to swipe him with the stick as he went past and the cheeky bastard showed himself all right, launching up and almost ending up in the cab with me! A commotion erupted from the guys as the croc came up for a second crack. His jaw knocked the bottom of the excavator as I finally became airborne, getting lifted to the bank. The croc was so intrigued by the sound of the excavator engine that he followed me up to the bank and the job was made easy. Nick got a head rope on him instantly and Craig, Willow, Seb and Mick pulled the rope off to one side until they got the croc under control.
I didn’t say much immediately after that debacle because I wasn’t the most liked person that morning, but the guys got over it pretty quickly. We relocated a couple more of them and, in true croc-catching style, finished the operation off with a real pearler.
In the last pen, there was a number of small ponds scattered around the place. We knew there was a male in one of them, but the question was which one. It was hard to pick because this particular enclosure had a heap of two-to threefoot crocs bounding around, so all of the ponds appeared to be pumping with life. (We weren’t allowed to catch any of the little ones; they had come from eggs that had accidentally not been collected at the right time, and were going elsewhere.
Willow, Jono and I did the rounds of the ponds, scop ing out where the guy would most likely be hiding. Willow knelt down at the water’s edge of one of the ponds and you wouldn’t read about it! The 14foot croc we were after torpedoed straight towards Willow. He slipped over in the mud and fell flat on his back. But the croc didn’t want to attack, it just wanted to get out of the way. Flying at him, it went straight over the top of Willow, using his body as a platform to slide across — over his back, over the top of his shoulders — and pushing off to get a bit more propulsion, slapping him in the face with its tail on the way out.
‘Good thing we know where he is,’ I said, pointing to the new pond the croc had just entered, but Willow wasn’t impressed. We moved along to the pond where there were 10 little crocs darting about the place. They looked like tadpoles in comparison to their big crocodile counterparts that we’d been catching. Still, the two-footers aren’t to be taken lightly either, their bite can rip apart muscles in an instant and leave behind a nasty infectious disease, so we had to be careful.
The croc reappeared at the surface of the pond, calmly keeping its distance.
‘At least this one isn’t playing hide and seek,’ Jono said.
I chucked a stone into the pond to see if it would get a reaction and the croc snapped, swiping its tail and cleaning up one of the little crocs along the way. The large croc propelled the fella through the air, and it beelined towards Jono. It hit him square in the chest and knocked him back in the mud, arse over tit. The little croc scurried back into the pond. It was entertaining for us all, but not for Jono, who was in a foul mood and joined Willow for a hose-down. The operation went on for another hour. We secured the last male and one more female, and then we were done.
The local media showed up with the intention of doing a story about the big relocation, but I cut things short because I wanted the crocs moved out ASAP. I pulled out a big fire hose, which was looped up on a spiel attached to a nearby wall, and used it to give the crocs one big spray-down. I added more hay and shading to the inside of the trailer and made sure each croc was safely secured. Then Jono, Mick and I flew to Kununurra, where we waited until the road train arrived and the crocs cleared the border. The customs fella was a bit confused when the cattle truck revealed a mob of crocs, but he signed off on the permits and across the border they went. The boys and I camped the night in Kununurra, leaving at first light, and met the road train at Darwin Crocodile Park at 9 o’clock the next morning.
Unloading the crocs was a hell of a lot easier than catching them, because they were still groggy and emerged from the truck with hardly any resistance. We made ramps so that the crocs could comfortably slide off the backs of the trailers, and once they were off we stretchered them out to their new pens. To this day they are all living happily in Darwin and some of them, one being Axel, have been moved to Crocosaurus Cove, where they live as display and education animals at the popular Darwin tourist attraction. Their new cushy homes are a far cry from their wild west
digs.