Free Mountain Tails by Sharyn Munro

then race inside to identify it in my Australian mammals book.
    Fur—brown, quite coarse-looking; ears—small; eyes—round black dots; nose—long and pointy, pink tip; tail—apparently nonexistent. It was much bigger than a bush rat, and the back feet were long; I thought of what used to be called rat-kangaroos, like the Long-nosed Potoroo, a vulnerable species which I knew others had seen in these mountains. Oh please let it be something special like that!
    We left the guzzler to continue its dinner while I looked it up. No, the head shape was totally wrong for a Long-nosed Potoroo; our critter’s face most resembled a Long- footed Potoroo, but that poor fellow was now rare and only ever seen far, far south of here, in Victoria. And they both had long tails.
    After leafing through the whole book, I decided this must be a bandicoot, a Northern Brown Bandicoot, but what about the tail? Depending on its sex, it ought to have a tail length of between 130–170 millimetres. Perhaps in the dark we just couldn’t see it? No way to check now, as dinner was over and the guzzler gone.
    But our place had got onto the top ten list and the abbreviated bandicoot returned most nights for several weeks. I could get as close as 10 centimetres away, even talking at normal levels to my partner, and it did not flinch. We thought it might be deaf, for if it actually looked at us, saw us away from the torchlight, it did scuttle off.
    So I had plenty of opportunity to search for that tail, and there simply wasn’t one. Since no creature in my book fitted such criteria, I guessed it must have lost its original tail to a predator. This was either a case of a missing tail, or else it was a species not yet noted by anyone anywhere!
    We grew to expect the evening sounds as the guzzler arrived for dinner: slurp, slurp, guzzle, guzzle, snuffle, snuffle ... yum, yum! Bandicoots being fairly omnivorous—from spiders and worms to berries and seeds—it wouldn’t have minded what was on the menu.
    But even if well fed, being damaged, tail-less and possibly deaf must have made our bandicoot an easy prey, for it suddenly came no more. Assuming it would be around forever, and because it was always dark when we saw it, I hadn’t taken a photo, which I now regret.
    Bandicoots are the only close relatives of the bilby, which is a sort of long-eared, long-legged, slender, soft-furred bandicoot. Because a bilby looks cute and is seriously endangered, it’s become a symbol for our many endangered animals, with the Easter Bilby now a chocolate alternative to the Easter Bunny.
    There used to be two species of bilby: the Lesser Bilby and the Greater Bilby. The Lesser is even less now, because they are all gone, forever. The delicate and graceful Pig-footed Bandicoot, also now extinct, looked very like a bilby.
    Bandicoots don’t dig burrows like bilbies do—not that such hidey-holes have saved them from harm. Although once common over the whole drier three-quarters of Australia, bilbies are now only found in certain deserts and small pockets.
    When I was a child, growing up on a coastal hinterland farm, bandicoots were the only native mammal I ever saw. My parents simply considered them pests, on the same level as mice, because they dug holes in the lawn. We saw them hurry off into the darkness when we ventured to the outdoor loo. It didn’t occur to me that they were the only survivors of what must have been a rich, multi-layered world of animals before most of the bush there was cleared for orchards and market gardens.
    The only other native animals of which I was then aware, the Redbellied Black Snakes, the leeches and the ticks, were also pests—nasty ones. I had no concept of conservation or biodiversity, of the inherent value and ecological links of the natural world. I knew I preferred the remnant patch of bush by the creek, but that was partly aesthetics and partly the secret shelter and