From Distant Euroa

by Alan Baxter

Kylie Baird wiped sweat from her brow as she stepped into the coolness of the Silver Hotel. Cool compared to the blistering heat and pounding sun outside, anyway. A bit of shade and a couple of struggling ceiling fans weren’t much, but they made a difference.

“Schooner of New, thanks, Bazza,” she said with a smile, but Barry was already pouring it. He knew her order.

“You’re grubbier than usual, Kylie.”

“Been a bastard long day. Three idiot cows got caught up in fencing near Johnson’s south paddock. Had hell’s own job getting them out.”

“You’ve earned this then.” He passed the beer across the bar.

Kylie swallowed half without a breath and sighed. “That’s the good stuff.”

“Is it?”

She laughed. “Well, nah, it’s like piss. But it’s beer.”

She turned to lean back against the bar and spotted a group of three men sitting in one corner, watching her surreptitiously. She raised her glass, gave them a nod. They responded with red-faces and nervous grins, clearly embarrassed to have been acknowledged.

“Jesus, Baz, you’d think men could greet a woman in a pub without acting like dills. It’s 1938, not 1838.”

“Out of towners,” Baz said. “Up from Melbourne.”

Kylie laughed. “That’d explain it.”

Unable to help herself, she wandered over, determined to embarrass them some more. In tight jeans and shirt tied at the tails to expose a smooth midriff, she knew she had them at a disadvantage.

“Fellas!” She raised the glass again.

The three all wore hunting clothes that looked as if they’d been bought the day before, still with creases from the packaging. All were somewhere in their mid-thirties at her best guess, so maybe a few years younger than her at most. The one in the middle, taller with sandy hair, seemed the least shocked by her. “Er, Madam?” he ventured.

Kylie barked a strident laugh. “Madam? Holy hell, never in my life have I been called madam. Kylie’ll do ya.”

He nodded, wincing slightly, perhaps at her brazenness. “I’m Peter. This is Saul and Colin.”

The men either side nodded, but kept their silence.

“Good to meet ya. What brings you to Euroa?”

The men shared a glance, almost guilty. “Just a kind of business trip,” Peter said.

“Yeah? What kinda business?”

They shared a nervous glance again.

“Youse can be honest with me,” Kylie said, sitting down uninvited. “I’m just a farm girl from the outback, so I probably won’t even understand.” She heard Bazza’s chuckle from behind the bar and couldn’t suppress a grin of her own. She sipped beer to cover it.

“We’re… hunters.”

“Crypto-hunters!” added Saul, smirking as if he expected to her make good on her promise of not understanding.

She nodded slowly, sipped again. “Cryptozoology around these parts has a long history.”

That silenced them.

Peter blinked at her. Eventually he said, “That right?”

“Certainly. It’s why you’re here, obviously. What are you after? Bunyip?”

“Possibly,” Peter allowed. “But a more specific creature than that.”

Kylie nodded. She knew what they wanted, why else would they have come to this particular town. “Well, as long as it’s not the mythical Euroa Beast, maybe you’ll get lucky.”

Peter and Saul frowned, Colin actually went pale.

“You’re suggesting the Euroa Beast isn’t real?” Peter asked, leaning forward. There was a challenge in his eyes, he was clearly prepared to debate the point.

Kylie thought maybe she’d let him. “You think it is?”

He sat back, took on an air of lecturing. “The Brisbane Courier, then the Melbourne Argus both reported in early 1890 that sightings of the beast had been made, by several credible witnesses. In Wylonemby, not far from here.”

“I know it,” Kylie said. “Lot of swamp, big creek.”

“That’s it. There have been numerous reports that the swamp is infested by an unidentifiable monstrosity, some say up to three hundred feet long. Reports date anecdotally back before 1890 too.”

“Three hundred feet, you say?”

“Indeed. Tales of dogs fleeing the place, and never being convinced to return, men cutting reeds seeing the enormous presence of a creature bigger than anything modern science can identify. One fellow reports a head the size of a wagon that looked more like a huge bulldog than anything else, emerge from the water and bask for several minutes, before leaving, trailing a long, sinuous, serpentine body behind it.”

“For three hundred feet?”

Peter smiled. “Well, we must keep a level head even in cases such as these. Probably, as with fishing, the tale, as it were, grows longer in the telling.”

Kylie returned the man’s grin. “I should say so. More like thirty feet, which let’s be honest, is big enough!”

“You’ve heard the stories too? So you believe it exists?”

“Believe it? No. I know it for a fact.”

“You’ve seen it?”

“Seen it, caught it, sent it to Scotland.”

“What?”

Kylie smiled again, drained her beer and sauntered back to the bar to get another. Bazza handed it to her, freshly poured and ready. He smirked. “Stop teasing them.”

“Should I tell them the whole story?”

“Yeah. Or they’ll chase their tails in the bush for days. City folk like that’ll probably cark it out there.”

“Madam… I mean, Kylie,” Peter called across the pub. “What do you mean, sent it to Scotland?”

She returned to their table and sat down. “Sit back and I’ll tell you the tale. You’ll be disappointed, I suspect, but better’n wasting your time.

“This all happened a few years ago, about 1932, I think. I was droving sheep up Wylonemby way, and we always had to be careful because the damn things would get stuck in the swamps and die. They were drawn to water, of course, scrub and bush out there doesn’t offer much, but we had to keep them on the creek side, away the soft ground that’d suck their feet and hold ’em fast.

“Anyway, one day I was rounding up a few strays and found a horrible mess. Just the back half of a sheep, lying on the creek bank. Torn clean in two, the front end nowhere to be seen. I had two kelpies with me, good dogs, brave and smart, and they started carrying on, barking and tucking their tails, desperate to be away. I told ’em to calm down and started trying to see this carcass better, when something huge splashed out in the water. The dogs went bananas. They wouldn’t leave me, but hauled at my pants and sleeves, trying to drag me away. I had a spook in me by then, so I went. As I got back on my horse, which was also whinnying and kicking up dirt, pulling at his rope, we all saw something arch up out of the water some twenty yards out. Enormous, it was, mud brown on top, paling underneath. It looked like the back of an eel, but an eel the size of a house. Such a thing couldn’t possibly exist. I put heels to that horse and we bolted, both dogs tearing along in front.

“But of course, once everyone had calmed down, I got to thinking. I’d read about the Euroa Beast, lots of local folk believed the legends. And I’d just seen the damn thing. So I wrote to a cousin of mine, Graeme Baird, in Scotland. I knew the subject was something of a specialty for him and he’d be interested.

“Thing is, I don’t think the letter even got to him before matters moved along. I was in this very pub, telling my tale like I’m telling it to you now, and a couple of the local blokes agreed with me. One said he’d lost stock to the beast downstream of where I’d spotted it, and the other said he’d seen something a good ten miles upstream. The thing had a pretty big range. ‘We should get rid of it,’ one of those blokes said, and the other agreed, and I knew they meant to kill it. You can’t blame ’em, given they were losing stock and all, but I couldn’t bear to think of something that might be one of a kind being hurt like that. It deserved to live, it wasn’t the beast’s fault it happened to exist, and exist there.

“Those two men got to talking and I knew they planned a hunting party for the next weekend, so that meant I only had a few days. That was a few days to find it, catch it, and get it to Port Melbourne.”

Peter held up a hand. “Now wait, here I know you’re having us all on.”

“Am I?”

“Port Melbourne is over one hundred miles from here. How could you possibly transport a beast of that size over such a distance? And what would you do when you got it there?”

Kylie smiled, sipped beer. “Well, that’s the story I’m telling, isn’t it?”

Peter sighed, sat back. “Very well.”