They had set up a rest tent a few hundred metres away from the fire front, from which Helen Horne, Rowena and Samantha Frankland, Gloria and Holly Ulverstone, and one or two other locals were serving food and drinks to the fire-fighters.

Holly was serving coffee to Donald Esk and Bear, when into the clearing raced a large black wolf.   Almost twice the size of a black Barb-Kelpie, the wolf stopped by the open flap of the tent, as though wanting the people inside to see him.

“My God!” cried Holly.   The first to see the wolf, she pointed back over Bear’s shoulder toward it.

They turned to see what she was pointing at and Bear said, “Relax, he’s probably just fleeing from the bushfire.”

He got up to investigate, and as he approached the wolf began wagging its tail.

“See, he just wants to be friends.”

“He was probably attracted by the smell of food,” suggested Gloria.   She handed Bear a large slab of iced jaffa cake and he waved it around in front of himself, trying to entice the wolf to come forward for it.

He almost got close enough to touch the wolf, when it suddenly turned tail and fled a few metres across the clearing.

“Here boy!” called Bear, holding up the jaffa cake and whistling as though the wolf were an ordinary dog.

“It’s a shame Ernie isn’t here,” said Helen Horne, not noticing the pained look in Rowena’s eyes at the mention of Ernie’s name.   “With his talent for handling dogs, it’d probably be eating out of his hands by now.”

Half a dozen people left the tent and joined in the attempt to capture the wolf.   But although still wagging its tail, the black wolf had no intention of allowing itself to be caught.

Bear was still trying to capture the black wolf, when from the other end of the clearing he heard a high-pitched shriek.   He ran across to investigate, as from the fire front lurched the figure of the infernal beast.

“Oh my God!” cried Donald Esk, seeing the flaming creature and mistaking it for a man.   “The poor bastard’s on fire.”

Bear retreated toward the other side of the clearing at the approach of the infernal beast, expecting the others to follow suite.   But as Esk and the other fire fighters raced toward it, he realised they thought the monster was a human being.

“Look out, it’s the Devil!” he called.   But only Holly heard and looked toward the big man in astonishment, wondering if she had heard correctly.

Seven men and women quickly surrounded the infernal beast.   They raised the nozzles of their backpacks toward it, and began covering the creature from head to foot in fire-retarding foam.

As the white foam coated it, dousing its life-giving fire, the infernal beast began to screech shrilly, from pain and fear.   Twisting and turning every which way in agony, it tried to shoot out its lethal flames at the fire fighters; however, its powers had deserted it under the death-giving foam.   So it attempted to lash out at the people with its large arms, but it was already too weak from the loss of its flames to be able to harm them as they covered every square centimetre of its giant body in a mountain of foam.

“Do you think he’s dead?” asked one of the fire fighters as the creature fell in a heap on the thick carpet of pine needles.

“Poor bastard, he hasn’t got a chance,” said Esk.   He shook his head ruefully.

At the opposite end of the clearing, the black wolf stood watching the proceedings with a broad toothy grin on his canine face, savouring the death of the infernal beast for a few moments.   Then he turned and raced into the forest, heading back toward the Singleton sheep station on the outskirts of Merridale.

*      *      *

The period immediately afterwards was a time of regrets and confusion.   Early that morning Jerry Green was greeted at the morgue in Baltimore Drive, Glen Hartwell, with the corpse of the infernal beast.

Its flames doused, the infernal beast looked more like a gargoyle than a man.   Although basically human in shape, it was a bright orangey colour, with just a hint of devil’s horns on its forehead and smooth, rubbery skin.   “But rubber which doesn’t melt in fire,” explained Don Esk as they dumped the carcase onto a metal table in the operating theatre near the back of the small morgue.

After an unsuccessful attempt to perform an autopsy on the creature, Jerry had the carcase packed in ice and sent it off to the East Melbourne laboratories of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), in the hope the government lab might be able to determine what the infernal beast really was.   However, he heard nothing more from them until six months later when he rang through to Melbourne.   At first the CSIRO research director pretended to know nothing about any such mysterious carcase.   But finally he admitted that they had received it, but didn’t have any idea what the creature was.

Despite his assurances that he would keep Jerry informed of any new developments, the man never rang back, and the CSIRO switchboard refused to put Jerry through when he tried to ring him again.

Bear Ross was just as confused as Jerry Green.   He had thought the creature was the supernatural devil and therefore invincible against natural weapons, until seeing it killed by fire extinguishers.   ‘But surely you can’t kill the Devil with foam-throwers?’ he thought.   He never found out the solution to his dilemma.   But after the death of the creature the two remaining bushfires, which had been burning out of control for weeks, both went out in a matter of hours.   And Glen Hartwell and the surrounding towns became strangely immune to fire after that, even avoiding the minor brush fires which all forests have every summer, making the fire department almost redundant (although they were still needed to fight occasional industrial fires in the manufacturing section of Glen Hartwell) for more than fifteen years.   Up until the time of the “Black Monday” holocaust, which burnt out of control for more than a year from October 1999 to February 2001, destroying fifty percent of Victoria’s forestland and taking more than a quarter of a million lives.

*      *      *

After leading the infernal beast to the Westmoreland fire front (aware that his strategy could have backfired costing the lives of the fire-fighters), Ernie had returned to his sheep station to bury the carcases of Tanya and the other station dogs killed by the infernal beast.

As he lowered the corpse of the Barb-Kelpie bitch into the ground, Gordo began to whine mournfully.   Gordo and Tanya had been mates for five years and now the large black dog was lost without his bitch.

Hurting from the sheepdog’s grief, Ernie thought of his own possible loss.   His own uncertain future with, or without Rowena Frankland, because of his werewolf taint.   A few weeks earlier he had bought a small diamond engagement ring, ready to give to Rowena.   Now the ring lay abandoned in its box at the back of a drawer of his dressing cabinet, possibly never to be given to her.

THE END

(c) Copyright 2011

Philip Roberts, Melbourne, Australia