We had owned dogs before—blind, deaf and grumpy when I knew them, which wasn’t very well as they were already old and faded quickly—but it had been a couple of years since Jody had finally gone and the house had been pet-free. My mother wasn’t consulted about Mocha; Dad picked her up on impulse from one of our Tolmie neighbours. She was the runt of the litter—smaller than my school shoes at 6 weeks—but that didn’t matter in the city. My brothers complained for awhile that she was annoying, that we didn’t need her, or that she had chewed through their socks and was clearly uncontrollable. But I caught one of them saying a heartfelt goodnight to her late one Saturday. I considered paying him out at the time but thought better of it.

When I started high school, my mother would come upstairs every morning at 6:45am to wake me up. Mocha would bound in after her and lick me on the hand or the face or whichever part of me was closest to the edge of the bed—if she could make it through the mess on my bedroom floor. When I was living in Poland she’d still come upstairs while Mum woke up my brothers, and would run down to the end of the corridor where my bedroom was just to see (Mum used to say) if I had come back in the night and she hadn’t noticed. On her birthday and Christmas day we’d give her toast with Vegemite for breakfast. She loved it so much that on the few occasions when she escaped into the street and refused to come back, all we needed to do was flick the spring on the toaster and she’d be back at our feet within seconds.

She had been getting old for awhile but had only started to show it in the last few years. When I took her for a walk on Christmas Eve (two blocks, that’s all she could manage) I wondered how I would feel when she died. She was 14. We all knew it was inevitable, but it’s hard to know how you’ll react to something until it actually happens. I had been preparing myself for awhile—making sure I said goodbye to her properly every time I left the house in case it was the last time I saw her. I’ve been living out of home for years, but still the thought choked me up, and I realised then how much weight our pets carry in our lives, and how much just knowing she was still around was a source of comfort and support even from the other side of the country.

Mocha always knew damn well when we were going travelling, no matter how much we tried to pretend otherwise, and would race out the front door and jump into the front seat of the car at the first opportunity. She would sit in the car, sometimes for hours, while we packed. ‘You’re not going anywhere without me.’ On Tuesday morning, it was no different. I was headed to Moulamein, my father out bush with our cousins, and Mocha was already sitting up in the back of the Land Cruiser with her tongue hanging out and a giant grin on her face. I didn’t get a chance to give her a goodbye pat—I was running late and too busy wondering if I’d forgotten to pack something myself. That was the last time I saw her, because six hours later, in a beautiful piece of bush called Limestone, my stupid, careless second-cousin drove off without looking and caught her under the front wheel. She was so badly hurt, they shot her. I didn’t find out until Friday afternoon when I turned my phone back on and found voicemail messages from my 23-year-old brother, drunk and distraught and mostly incomprehensible at half past midnight, pleading with me to call him, please, just call him.

You know your childhood is over when your childhood pets die. 2009 ended with a tempest. My childhood ended last Tuesday with a gunshot and a whimper. Part of me feels like we ought to qualify our sadness and anger with ‘It’s just a dog, but…’ but the truth is, it’s never ‘just a dog’. And if the lumps on her chest had turned to cancer and we’d been forced to take her to the vet to have her put down, I probably wouldn’t have felt so angry. We were prepared for something like that and it would have given the whole family some kind of closure, not to mention saving that beautiful, trusting animal such acute stress and trauma. But instead she was killed by someone else’s hard black skidding tyre and a bullet to the brain. It wasn’t the way it should have been—it never is. But she damn well didn’t deserve to have it end like that.

I miss her.

The carcass of a wild pig lay discarded in the middle of the oval, flies buzzing and crawling over it. Two crows perched on the rump, pecking at wormy flesh through coarse black hair. They flapped a few feet into the air as I drew near. It didn’t occur to me to steer clear until a shadow passed over the grass in front of me, and I looked up to see a hawk circling just metres from my head. Above it, spiralling, turning and turning in the widening gyre, were five or six more—swooping in close to the carcass one after another, looking for a chance to dig in their talons and beaks. For an unsettling moment it felt like it was me they were circling, and the jolt it gave me left my hands tingling.

In the city, death is sanitised. White sheets and chemicals strip the blood and spit and shit from death and halt decay, because we prefer instead to see quietude, composure, rest—as though the reward for a hot, quick, electric life is inertia. And when the muck of it manages to splash through, it’s unexpected. In our shock we sensationalise it, dramatise it, and talk about tragedy and grief and respect to remove ourselves from the reality of rot and disintegration. But out in remote country, those white sheets don’t exist. Death is everywhere, raw. Blood and dirt mingle and open wounds fester. Temporality feels as close as skin.

The Europeans were afraid of the bush. They tried to stifle it, to conquer it. It was a quest, a duty: man against nature. Even now, we barricade ourselves in and push the world out—hiding from sunlight, from storms, from insects, from snakes, from people, from possibility, from ourselves. How could such a passionate need for control be anything other than an acute manifestation of the fear of death? I wonder sometimes if everything—if Western culture in its entirety—can be boiled down to this.

Sometimes in the city, in the deep hours of the night, I hear birds. They don’t sing at that hour; they cry. Sometimes I think they’re crying for us, for our fear of nothingness, of not knowing, of not meaning. Sometimes I think about crying with them: so afraid, not of death, but that the weight of possibility will bury me before I’m finished.