Out in the Back Country
The Kimberley Region of North West Australia

By nine o'clock on the morning of our tenth day, I was trying to prepare myself mentally for perhaps another fourteen days alone. As harsh as it might sound, my mind did not keep referring back to the events of the previous evening. If help did not arrive I would have another fourteen days to endure and it was critical that I remain mentally strong. The
previous nightís challenges had been totally unexpected but there was nothing that I could now do to reverse their having happened. All I could now do was manage the mental impact and prepare for the possibility that the helicopter would not arrive.

I am not sure what I was feeling immediately prior to the appearance of the chopper from around a bend in the gorge. In preparation for what lay ahead, I had cooked up a feed of porridge and digested copious quantities of water to alleviate the still present effects of dehydration. I immediately told the pilot about Kanch,. We boarded the chopper and headed for the top of the ravine to look for him. At this stage I was not sure whether he was still alive as I had not heard from him since the evening before. I prayed he was still okay.

The country at the top of the ravine was every bit as rugged as I had experienced the night before. Upon identifying the point at which we had the evening before commenced our descent, I started down and found Kanch was alive, but distressed and dehydrated and would not let me touch him. I was standing on a ledge that was not more than one foot wide, and the drop was 180 feet straight down. Between his cave and me there was one small ledge of not more than six inches in width.

I recall feeling very fatalistic as I stood on the small ledge and reached into the cave and pulled Kanch out by his tail to the cliff edge of his cave. Pulling Kanch out from the cave and holding him by his skin could pull me out over the edge of the cliff. The challenge rested upon resisting that momentum and managing my own fear to see whether I could get Kanch out.

	Having got Kanch out of the cave I now had to get him along the ledge and across the crevice in which we had been stuck the evening before. I salvaged four tiny pieces of rope from the chopper and hauling him up the cliff praying my knots would not come undone. Poor old Kanch did not know what day it was. I look back on the trip - despite its ending - with a great feeling of satisfaction and a sense of achievement. The country was brutal, and often when I look at Kanch now, I think of the night during which he was stuck on the cliff and my feelings that I might have decided to leave him there had the chopper pilot not come. I still have trouble comprehending the thought.

It took a while, but Kanch seems to have forgiven me and we are friends, but I am not sure he would follow me on such a trip again, and I don’t blame him.