A few years ago there was this fellow out on a station who’d somehow got his hand caught in a piece of machinery and had lopped off one of his fingers. Amputated it, like.
So we got the call from this fellow; pretty laid back about the accident he was. Like most bushies, real laid back. ‘Just lost me finger, doc,’ he said. ‘What do yer reckon I should do about it?’
‘Look,’ said the doctor, ‘just put a bandage around the stump to stop the bleeding. When that’s done get your finger, the missing one, wrap it in a tea towel which is packed with ice and we’ll see if we can attach it when we get out there.’
‘Ah, doc,’ replied the fellow, ‘me finger’s pretty well, yer know, stuffed as far as I can see. It don’t look too good at all.’
‘Yeah, that may well be the case,’ said the doctor. ‘But, still and all, grab the finger, put it in a tea towel packed with ice and when we get out there we’ll have a good look at it. Right?’
When we landed at the station where the fellow lived, way out it was, he sauntered over to the plane. One hand was bandaged up around the stump and he’s got a tea towel in his other hand. Both the bandage and the tea towel were soaked through with blood. A real mess, it was.
So we got out of the plane. ‘G’day,’ we said. ‘How yer doing?’
And he said, ‘Oh, not real flash.’
Then we asked if we could have a look in the tea towel, just to see how bad the severed finger was.
‘Okay,’ he said.
As I said, this fellow had one hand covered in bandage and he was carrying the tea towel containing the severed finger in the other hand, making things a little awkward for him. Most of the ice had melted, which made it even worse. So when he went to pass over the bloodied tea towel it slipped out of his hand. Before we could catch it … ‘plop’, it came to land on the dusty ground.
Now, that wasn’t too bad. But with it being a station there were stacks of working dogs around the place. And all these dogs were kelpie-blue heeler crosses and they all looked the same and they all hung around in packs of about ten or twelve, gathered around the place.
What you’ve got to realise at this point is that on these stations they keep their working dogs fairly lean. They don’t like to overfeed them. That way they’ve got more stamina when it comes to mustering the sheep or cattle. Now these dogs can smell a free feed from about a kilometre away, and there was a pack of these kelpie- blue heeler crosses hanging around nearby.
Anyway, just as we were about to lean over and pick up the bloodied tea towel containing the mangled finger, one of the dogs shot out from the pack and started ripping into it, tearing it to shreds. We attempted to take the tea towel from the dog but, in a frenzy of hunger, it let us know in no uncertain terms that there was no way it was going to give it up. It was in no mood to have a free feed taken away from it.
In a flash the dog had munched the tea towel to shreds, then it scampered back into the safety of the pack. So we searched for the severed finger among the shredded tea towel but couldn’t find it, which left us to assume that the dog had swallowed it. The problem was, with a pack of ten or twelve of these dogs looking exactly the same, we had no hope of working out which one had just eaten this poor guy’s finger. Neither did he. He took a look at the tea towel strewn across the ground, then a look at the pack of dogs.
‘Beats me which one it was,’ he said with a shrug of his shoulders.
‘What can we do now?’ we were thinking. ‘Don’t panic. Okay, we can knock these dogs out, open them up one by one. Then, when we find the finger, we can assess the situation and take it from there.’
But the fellow must have read our minds. He gave the remnants of the tea towel a bit of a kick with his riding boot and said, ‘Ah, fellers, take me word fer it. The finger was pretty much stuffed anyways. What’s more, there’s no bloody way yer gonna cut open any of my dogs just to look fer me missing finger. I got nine of the buggers left, anyways.’