The green that blessed the hills along the Castlereagh Highway is almost gone, and the smaller streams to the north of Cherry Tree Hill are bereft of moisture, or reduced to muddy puddles - though the Cox's river is still churning through its reedy banks where it meets the Highway, but that's mostly salty water from the nearby coal mine. If you are reading this from the comfort of a home in Sydney, that's heading for your water supply, by the way.
The surest sign of the recent lack of rain is the growing toll that traffic is taking on the wildlife. The Kangaroos and wombats have had to overcome their fear of mankind's machinery and graze the greenest pastures - that long, narrow strip of a paddock either side of the road, that they have avoided until all other grazing is gone.
Their fear is justified, as the un-buried dead pile up along the edge of the tarmac. Their reflex leaps may save them from the lunge of a dingo, or the vanished thylacine, and might even have saved them from a well aimed spear, in times gone by, but are as likely as not to land them right in the path of a semi trailer doing 120 kph (or more - I have pulled off the highway more than once to concede the way to such high speed monsters of the night. They need not slow down for mere animals).
No instinct or ancestral memory can inform the decisions of a Wombat or Kangaroo caught in the long tunnel of blazing light that precedes the roaring, hundred and ten kilometre per hour or more passage of forty or fifty tonnes of truck and cargo. Even the Wedge Tail Eagle doesn't stoop so quickly upon its prey.
Though the big truck will safely charge through the collision, smaller vehicles will not. On several occassions I have been at accidents where the animal struck ended its journey inside the cabin of the vehicle with the driver and passengers. Once, I thought I was looking at a family on the brink of death, but it turned out that none of the blood was theirs, and their immobility was just frozen fear.
Heading east across the range, soon after sunset, there were more carcasses along the road than had been there when we had driven west only that morning. Shadows flitted across the path of oncoming headlights and vanished into the greater shadows of forest and scrub along the fence lines.
Somewhere near Cudgegong Waters, brilliant headlights showed a vehicle closing in rapidly from behind me. I estimated that its headlights would be at my rear bumper within a couple of minutes, but, on the next long straight, it was just as far behind. There had been Roos on the flats beside the road - had one of them startled that other driver and brought a sense of caution to what had seemed a headlong rush? It must have - I stayed under the speed limit all the way to the next town, and those lights stayed well back. I hope he finished his journey as safely and unscathed as I did.
Driving along the western side of the range is lovely as the sun drops behind the far ridges. The evening light is remarkably clear, picking out the subtly brilliant shades and colours of forest and field as the first long fingers of shadow stretch eastwards.
That's the catch, when driving the bush highways; the road is built for speed, and many drivers only think of that. But the bush is only a leap and a bound from its edge, and those reaching shadows conceal the wildlife that is creeping closer to the road's edge, looking for those succulent shoots that lurk in the water tables along each side. In a drying bush, they are just doing the best they can to survive - it's up to us, the "intelligent" ones, the beings who can imagine possibilities and chart alternative futures, to understand what might happen, and do our best to keep both them and ourselves in one piece. A little bit slower can be an awful lot safer - and slower travel offers more views, even under moonlight and starlight. Keep safe, and keep them safe, as well.
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