Porn, animal cruelty: all just part of the odd job

The kitten escapes and, as Monday ups dawn by a few lumens, the crow looks my way and we both know the window for such stealth just closed.

But even without the camouflage of a forming sky, he'll probably get another chance before dusk because the scores of rabbits between me and the office have become recklessly complacent and, sure enough, as I trudge back across the same ankle-wincing paddock of warrens after work, my predator, or maybe another member of his murder, has a small, decapitated coney head pinched by the ears in its beak. I approach thinking the bird will fly away, but it just hops to one side, as if wanting me to acknowledge his prize.

Knowing crows are scary smart and can recognise faces, I begin to think this could well be the same fellow I embarrassed at sun-up and had been hanging around all day just to prove he was a fine hunter after all and this morning's miss was an aberration, probably even my fault. Capeesh?

His unapologetic glare brings to mind the magical visitor in Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing with Feathers.

I do eat baby rabbits, plunder nests, swallow filth, cheat death.

The moment feels all the more portentous because less than 24 hours ago, I startled a raven eating a rabbit while I was out cutting (hopefully) the final load of wood for the season. Stretched over a block of acacia as if pinned for biology class autopsy, the full-grown animal's intestines had been arranged expertly to one side so the silky black surgeon could get to the choicer cuts beyond the rib cage.

Such Blair Witch-cum-Game of Thrones moments aren't so unusual when you're alone in our rough, vaguely abused part of the bush. Inexplicable cairns and rusty old cans creep you out, as do extinct camp fires in the middle of nowhere. Rotting limbs of tools, ferrous nods, vitreous winks. The shredded remnants of a cigarette packet from an era long before warnings from disease-ridden orifices. An abandoned rifle in the undergrowth. What manner of evil took place here? Disposing of a firearm is surely a red flag, even if, given the context, it does evoke the Elmer Fuddish, potentially racist, gag: What's a wok? A thing you thwow at a wabbit when you haven't got a wifle.

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Driving home, so many rabbits, alive and dead, stir memories of my childhood's elderly neighbour; a hobbling trapper who smelled of sweat and mothballs and sold pelts to Akubra.

On my father's instruction, I'd rise about 5am a couple of days a week and meet Mr Walmsley warming up the ancient Toyota in his driveway. Our plague fields were never more than 20 minutes away and we'd (he'd) adroitly set twitchy steel jaws around pellet scratchings. I'd be at school or cricket when he did the rounds later in the day but I'd often be back in time to sit in his mulberry tree and watch as he'd pull body after body from hessian sacks, wring each animal's neck for good measure, throw them in a blood-warm pile in front of the tank stand, then move on to the business of skinning.

As odd jobs go, it was odd, but sort of wonderful.

Dad seemed to have a long list of off-kilter contacts to whom I'd be foisted in the hope, I suppose, I'd learn a little about a world of which I wasn't really a part and of a milieu I think he missed.

The one-armed junk man (sweat and soiled tea towels), I'm sure, had no interest in taking me on. We had little in common and the conversation would flatline in the flatbed as we drove between throw-outs and the tip, but two spare hands, no matter how milky white and soft, must have been better than the unaccompanied variety.

He was right to be wary of me because I stole the nudie magazines he'd purloined from a demolition site. He'd hidden the Playboys (more bunnies) in the tray and I pinched them when he wasn't looking and, like a squirrel with nuts, stashed the glossy treasures inside an old drum across the street for access at a later time, which happened to about 12 minutes after my defrauded employer dropped me back home.

My BMX had never reached such speeds. I collected the booty booty and rocketed for my mate's place - its backyard gloriously abutting the town's biggest park - and yelled for him to come outside because I had something to show him.

His abject disgust when I produced the exotic titles from under my shirt so thoroughly doused my prurience, I immediately agreed the right thing to do was consign them to the skip across from the netball courts.

I've always regretted (centre)folding so meekly, but not the part-time job with the junk man. Another unique experience, not to mention educational.

I also spent a good year of Saturday mornings lubricating nipples (nothing X-rated, this time) and washing down tip trucks at a depot up the highway but my work could never begin until I'd done battle with the resident billy goat (urine).

Like Cato to my Clouseau, he'd wait in ambush behind the shed which housed the high-pressure hose and grease guns and charge when my back was turned, refusing to leave until we'd had our wrestle.

I'm ashamed to admit, however, I think I injured him one morning, when I grabbed his horns and twisted his neck too hard. He bleated in pain and jumped back, a look of betrayal on his long, satanic face.

My hircine adversary trip-trapped away and never returned for a rematch.

Not long after, I somewhat arrogantly quit that gig and took up a coveted position at the town's new McDonald's. It was the cool thing to do. The fledgling franchise united teenagers from different high schools and gifted us an early work ethic appreciated by those who'd hire us in later life.

But as valuable as my time under those anodyne arches was, it was never as authentic as that free-range exposure to smelly old men, pornography and animal cruelty.

Not that you'd crow about such things these days.