The Old Mate was at the wheel of his truck on the way home from his local pub late on Christmas Eve. Now the pub was in the middle of the the Outback about a days ride on a good horse west of nowhere, not that the Old Mate ever had a good horse. The days when the Old Mate rode home from the pub on his horse are now long gone. These days the Old Mate has a truck of sorts, which like his horse, more or less know’s its way home which is fortunate because the Old Mate is a bit vague and the more Christmas cheer he’s had the more likely it is he’ll get bushed and the sun will rise on another Christmas Day with him slumbering under a Coolibah tree nursing a splitting hangover and with flies crawling about in his mouth doing nothing in particular.
The Cooper Creek in outback south west Queensland... having a channel flood.
Anyway, anyway anyway, back to the Old Mate driving home... the Old Mate sees a black cat in the middle of the road blinded by his truck’s headlights. Now the Old Mate’s reactions aren’t that flash when he sober... so bang... he hits the cat. Because the Old Mate hates cats... and only because of the environmental carnage they do to the endemic wildlife of the outback... he gets out to with his shotgun to make sure the cat is dead.
Square-tailed Kite over the Hay Plains.
Sure enough the cat is as stone dead as a flattened rat; an ex-cat, deceased, departed this world, an un-cat; so he pumps a couple of shotguns shells into it just in case.
Eastern Yellow Robin, Illawarra Escarpment.
The Old Mate looks around and sees in the distance the lights of an isolated farmhouse. Now although he hates cats the Old Mate’s not completely devoid of feelings and seeing it’s Christmas and the Christmas cheer he had at the pub hasn’t yet turned into a hangover he thought he might go over to the farmer’s place and let them know about the sad demise of the cat just incase the ex-cat is their cat... it being Christmas and all that... and they may have some whiskey with which to commiserate the whole hullabaloo.
Anyway, the farmer’s wife came to the door and the Old Mate said, “Sorry about this ma’am but I just drove over your cat in my truck and killed him. “Not so fast”, says the farmer’s wife, “it may not have been our cat. Can you describe him?”
So the Old Mate does his dead cat impression by laying down in the dust sprawled out with his arms and legs at funny angles and his tongue hanging out...
“No, you bloody halfwit”, says the farmers wife, “what did he look like before you hit him?”
At that, the Old Mate got up, covered his eyes with his arms crossed and screamed “Aggggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!”
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