The acrid smell of chicken poo hit Andrew Clarkson’s nostrils as he slid the bolt back, ducked through the door to the nests and discovered a cane toad sitting in the middle drum. He yelped and scooched back hitting his head on the wooden door frame. Chicken wire bit into the back of his scalp. He dropped his mother’s rusted egg bucket onto the pen’s dirt floor and some yellow straw spilled out like goose feathers from his eiderdown.
‘Jesus Christ! I thought you were a bloody brown snake trying to get the eggs you bastard,’ the sixteen-year-old shouted at the amphibian perched in the twelve-gallon drum that his father used for the chicken nests. The toad had spread its slick whiteish stomach across ten eggs and oddly, stared up at him with its black doll eyes. Andrew realised it was the biggest cane toad he’d ever seen. Studying it closer in the greyish light, he noticed that it seemed alert. Tense even. Its warty brown shoulders hunched like a blow was coming from some predator. Jeez…not that they had many natural enemies. Their poison killed whatever tried to eat them – even goannas and wedge-tailed eagles.
No, this thing’s only true enemies were humans. Bored farm boys with golf clubs.
It certainly didn’t try to jump away like most green tree frogs did when he had to salt them. His mother couldn’t go to the outside dunny at night otherwise. She was afraid of them. The funny thing was – he’d never actually seen a cane toad this far west before. At his cousin’s at the Glasshouse Mountains – yeah, but not in this dry heat. Not in this drought.
Certainly not one with the circumference of a dinner plate. What a weird warty wanker, Andrew thought as he retrieved the egg bucket from the dusty ground. Ah… I do biology mate. These toads ate things much larger than themselves – frogs, even mice. The little shit is after the bloody eggs! The little shit is after the bloody eggs! Andrew looked around and spied a garden stake in the corner that his mother used to prop up her tomatoes, before everything died. He grabbed it by the square end and aimed it at the creature’s head. ‘Now you little shit, get off those eggs or I’ll bash your brains in!’
Andrew took a threatening step forward and the weirdest thing happened. The toad inflated to twice its size – surely a defence tactic he thought, but then thick white pus oozed from its shoulders like picking pimples on his face. Or squeezing out too much toothpaste. The teenager hesitated– he wondered if cane toads could somehow spit their poison out – project that shit into the eyes of their foes like skunks in America did and blind people. He didn’t want that to happen. He had a cricket game to get to. He had to open the bowling. Andrew looked down at the toad. Its size seemed to have shrunk a bit. It just stared back at him, the wide seam of its mouth a smirk.
He dropped the stake, retreating from the nest, keeping his eye on the amphibian. His boot scraped against something metallic on the floor. Looking down he saw a forty-four-gallon drum’s blue lid half-buried under a mound of poo. Impulsively he snatched it up with his two hands and wielding it like a shield, pushed forward towards his foe. He smashed the lid down over it, trapping the creature inside. Then he was through the pen door, grinning and sliding the bolt home. ‘Alright you bloody shithouse rat. I’ll be back after the game this afternoon and then we’ll finish this. I’m gonna get my dad’s nine iron and practise with your head,’ he hissed with all the venom his teenage hormones could muster.
Dusk was falling by the time Andrew was dropped home and remembered the stupid toad was still in the chook pen, probably eating all the eggs his mother needed for her baking. He said goodbye to the Krause family and put his kit down. He was ecstatic. He’d taken four wickets and scored a half-century. He zipped open his bag and retrieved his prize possession – his Gray-Nic bat. This’ll have to do he thought, swinging it around his head like a warclub.
All was as it should be. The chickens were perched on their roosts in feathered rows to his right. Opening the nest gate, he saw the drum lid was still in place. ‘Got ya, you little runt,’ Andrew beamed. He stalked forward, bat raised, ready to strike. With his left hand he flipped the lid off. The toad was gone. So were the eggs. But they weren’t eaten, he noticed. Instead, ten yellow chicks writhed in the broken eggshell. Peering into the dim nest, he reached down and picked one up. His right still held the bat. Bringing it out into the falling light he noticed two peculiar things – one was the lizard tail, like a baby blue tongue. The other was that instead of making a peeping noise, the little chick hissed at him like a snake. Then it looked at him right in the eyes.
Mr and Mrs Clarkson drove down their gravel driveway, their Kingswood’s headlights picking out the coolabahs that lined the track and the odd Hereford standing in the home paddock. Cows’ eyes flashed green, the night consuming their brown and white bodies as they passed. As the car neared their house Mrs Clarkson turned to her husband and said in mild surprise, ‘Peter, when did you get that new concrete statue for the garden? And why did you get a life-sized one? You know I only like native animals…’
Mr Clarkson stopped the car, wrenching the handbrake into place. In the car’s still twin beam’s he could make out the statue in more detail – it was an incredibly detailed representation of a young cricket player dressed in his whites, bat in hand – his face revealing the horror of getting out.
