Sliced Trees and Dead Words

1 - This is just like him. Always having to have the last word.

- WOLFE -

I never believed in the concept of self-fulfilling prophecies until I met my best mate Dalen, who obviously put a lot of stock into the idea. Like, how Usain Bolt coincidentally grew up to be the fastest man on Earth. Or how girls named Hope generally tend to be almost unbearably optimistic. Once, I even knew a girl named Lovely, who really was the loveliest person I'd ever met, despite my natural cynicism expecting the exact opposite.

But right now, I feel like I'm potentially fulfilling my own prophetic destiny.

Something just doesn't feel right. It's too still. Too dark.

Dalen would say it was my instinctual canine senses kicking in; the ones I spiritually inherited when my parents made the ridiculous decision to bestow upon me the name of Wolfe twenty-nine years ago.

I used to laugh Dalen off when we first met and he would come out with weird, pseudoscientific shit like this. But unfortunately there's enough evidence—without any measurable scientific formula, of course—which contributed to our shared consensus that I was, at the very least, more observant than most. Perhaps not a wild canine-level intuition, but not too far off.

I picked up on a lot of things other people missed, like the unstable scaffolding on our last job site that would definitely have resulted in the young apprentice bricky they had working there breaking a bone or two if I hadn't pulled him back just before it collapsed underneath him. Or the night a couple days after I met Dalen, when we were camping together on Cape Tribulation beach in Queensland, and I turned around just in time to see a damn prehistoric crocodile creeping out of the trees and heading towards his baby girl Medusa, then scared the terrifying thing off with a log I grabbed from our campfire, resulting in the second-degree burn of a lifetime and a month of laying bricks with just the one hand. Or the time when we were out in Kakadu National Park over in the Northern Territory, and I got up to piss and found a damn desert death adder latched onto Medusa's hind leg with its evil, venomous fangs and trying it's best to strangle the poor dog to death as it coiled itself around her.

How Medusa, the most gorgeous Blue Heeler X Kelpie in existence, survived that one is a damn miracle considering the size of the bloody snake that night. But Dalen, as always, put it down to my canine instincts, strength, expert flaming branch wielding, as well as my proficiency in administering needles filled with anti-venom. From all our years traipsing across the giant, beautiful landmass that is Australia, mostly camping out instead of hiring rooms in a motel when we're travelling to our next job site, I've had to pull the move enough times on all three of us, Medusa included, the absolute trooper.

It's kind of ironic really, considering of the three of us, I'm not the one with the longest history with intravenous injections. That title goes to my recovering friend, who may as well have been a pincushion when I first met him. Dalen has demons darker than most, which is why in moments like this, when my nerve-ends start tingling with panic, I know there's always a possibility . . .

But he wouldn't do that to me. And he definitely wouldn't do it to his baby Medusa, who he'd gladly give his life for if it meant saving her. Which, now I think about it, isn't the most reassuring thing in the world . . .

Maybe it's another snake. There aren't any crocs that I know of that make it this far up the Snowy Mountains of New South Wales where we've been camping the last week before heading further inland for a job. Then again, there are plenty of other dangerous Australian fauna poised and ready to kill us at the best of times.

It could be a spider. It's been a while since our last red-back bite, and Dalen is an absolute coward when it comes to eight-legged creatures, always leaving me to take care of any insect situations we stumbled into on our travels together. "Four legs is my absolute limit, Wolfey. You know I can't deal with anything more than what Medusa has," he would say, untying his laces and handing over his typically sweaty and rancid-smelling boot for me to get the job done, always keeping at least an arm's length away and refusing to get any closer than necessary. "All yours, mate."