Fox

Near my old house in Bundoora, a police officer once shot a kangaroo after it was struck by a car on Plenty Road. I was a student at the time and was meeting a woman to buy a textbook when I’d heard about it. I found her seated at an outdoor table in front of the library with two of her friends, one of whom was crying. Her friend was patting her on the back and speaking to her in a low voice. I was struck by how quiet her sobs were, as if I was watching her with the sound cut off. I envied her; whenever I am in tears, I cannot keep quiet, it’s as if I have burst.

The woman who was crying noticed me first, which made me feel like an intruder, standing there. Thankfully, one of her friends recognised me from our tutorials together. I had failed the unit earlier in the semester, probably because I didn’t have a textbook, and was redoing it in the summer semester. She placed the thick statistics book in my hands after I’d paid her and told me that her friend had been on the tram when a police officer had stepped onto the tracks, pulled his gun out and shot a kangaroo twice.

“Can you believe they would do that? Right in front of everyone,” she said.

~

Last weekend, Benjamin and I were driving along the dirt road leading out of Great Otway National Park when we passed a group of wallabies by the side of the road. They looked like statues, their eyes flashing in the reflection of the headlights of Benjamin’s car.

“They’re so eery,” said Benjamin. It was just before dawn; we’d intended to take the walking trail to Lake Elizabeth in the hopes of seeing a platypus. Unfortunately, the part of the trail that crossed the Barwon River was submerged, and the signs next to the trail gave us sufficient warning against attempting to cross it. The crisp winter air was bracing and dense with the scent of earthy humus and eucalypts.

Benjamin was undeterred, promising that we’d come back again soon, when it hadn’t rained the night before. When we got back to the car, he turned to me and apologised.

“It’s not your fault at all. You don’t need to apologise.”

“I know how badly you wanted to see a platypus,” he said.

I considered telling him the truth; that I would have felt nothing at the sight of the creatures, just like every other animal I’d ever encountered. I considered telling him that his habit of apologising for everything made me feel guilty for remaining in my feelings, while he absolved himself of his own. Instead, I told him we’d see a platypus next time.

Before we set off, Benjamin put on a podcast about the American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones that we had been listening to on the drive over.

“Sorry,” he said. “I know you prefer music.”

“I don’t mind,” I said. Soon, I was beginning to nod off when the car slowed down; ahead of us, a silver Volvo was parked on the right shoulder of the dirt road with its headlights off. To the left was a precipitous drop, though most of it was obscured by the thick tree cover and low light. I tried not to look out of the car while Benjamin drove. Even a glimpse of the steep slope between the trees was enough to make me ill. I was trying to be nonchalant in front of Benjamin; I was trying to be normal.

Two people were by the side of the road, a man and woman in their fifties. The man was pointing a flashlight at the ground when Benjamin stopped the car behind them. The woman approached us, and Benjamin pulled the handbrake and got out of the car.

“The poor thing,” she was saying to him when I approached them.

“What happened?” I said.

“It’s a fox. It’s dying. Someone ran it over and left it to die,” said the woman. The man approached us; he was holding a flashlight in one hand and a small camping shovel in the other.

“It’s dead,” said the man. His expression was grim.

“What do we do?” said Benjamin.

The man shrugged. “Nothing. The park rangers will probably dispose of the carcass at some point.”

I didn’t look at the fox while Benjamin and the man pushed it off the road with sticks. When he got back inside the car and we set forth again, I asked him if he’d ever hit an animal with his car.

“No. I mean … what a way to go. It must have been in so much pain,” he said.

I don’t know why I started telling him the story of the police officer who shot the kangaroo. It was the first time I’d ever told anyone; it had so very rarely crossed my mind since. I remember following the reporting on the incident closely when it happened.

The Police Association Secretary gave a bizarre interview to a journalist where he seemed almost proud of the officer’s actions, calling kangaroos “vicious animals”, and boasting that he himself had put down dozens of animals. The RSPCA took a dim view of the police officer’s actions, labelling the killing as inhumane, noting that one shot, properly aimed, to the base of the brain was all that it took. The RSPCA spokesperson, who was also a vet, stressed that if you don’t know where the vital centres are in the base of the brain of the kangaroo, you don’t shoot it. When I told Benjamin this, he was frowning.

“So you’re supposed to just let it die? Is that it?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You said it yourself. You’re supposed to just let it die slowly?”

“It’s about minimising suffering, not shooting animals,” I said. I was feeling hot; I didn’t know why. I realised that I had snapped at him without meaning to, but I was also annoyed, upset. Why? Why was I upset? I closed my eyes and slowly exhaled.

“I’m sorry,” said Benjamin.

“Please stop apologising,” I said. “I hate it.”

Benjamin didn’t respond. In a cruel turn, I welcomed the awkward silence in the car. We didn’t speak for another twenty minutes except for once when he asked if I could unscrew the lid of his water bottle for him so he could take a sip while he drove. It wasn’t until we were back on the M1 that he suddenly spoke.

“There was blood on their car,” he said.

“You mean they … “

“And afterwards too, with the shovel,” he said.

When he dropped me off at home, it was too late for me to go back to bed, so I opened my laptop and looked up the details of the incident where the police officer shot the kangaroo. I remembered the name of a photographer who was on the scene, Elwood.

I typed “Elwood kangaroo shot plenty road” into Google and the first result was for a Herald Sun article that featured a dramatic photograph of the incident. It was this image that I remembered. In the photo, the police sergeant is framed from the torso down, cocking a .38 revolver in his disposable blue nitrile gloves, pointing it at a kangaroo laying over the tram tracks, as if in repose. In the background a B-class route 86 tram is stopped across an empty intersection. The sky is bright grey.