The Dogman and the Cat lady.

[Tuckeroo]

Seeing where on the subject of Dogman;
The previous thread has a bit left in it so I didn’t want to intrude to much with my lump of a story,
so I thought I better post it as a new topic.
It’s about a conversation I had with my neighbour, that’s fairly bizarre in itself.

It was in 1993 and I was living on a small rural property. One night I was lying in bed and could hear some
animal or person moving about outside. There was gravel where my car was parked and I could hear
footsteps on the gravel. There was usually cattle on the property but at this time there wasn’t any,
so I thought it strange to be hearing that sound.
The sound on the gravel was more of a soft scrapping sound like someone dragging their feet,
then the usual sound that you hear when a bony hoof walks across gravel.
Then I heard a deep sniffing sound at the back door and I thought, if that door handle starts rattling
and the door opens, I’m going to have to jump out of bed like lightning to defend myself.
Nothing happened, then I heard the footsteps moving away from the cabin across the gravel.

I though it was probably a feral pig, going by the guttural snort and sniff sound that I heard.
I had heard about Yowies, but being pre-internet days the only info was out of the local newspaper
of a sighting about 20 k’s from were I was living.
On that night the last thing I was thinking about was an unknown cryptid lurking about outside the cabin.
I just forgot about it till a week later when my neighbour rang me up.

She was a eccentric elderly lady, whom the owner of the property I was on warned me about. She lived
by herself with about 6 cats in a farm house that had seen better days.
Her house was close to the road and my driveway ran past the side of her house down to the valley behind.
I would often give her a wave when I was coming or going, if she was working in her vegy patch next
to the fence. You would see her cats lulling about in the sun as she worked.

She had rang me up before, talking about strange things; she told me once to be on the lookout
for an old vagrant, who was living in the bush at the bottom of the hill.
I remember thinking at the time that she probably wishes he would knock on her door and provide
her with a bit of company in her dotage. I didn’t think to ask her about the details of the
vagrant she saw, for a sec I had to remember what a vagrant was.

I just put those phone calls down to her being eccentric and a bit lonely but I thought I should write
these conversations down because you wouldn’t believe some of the things she talked about.
The next time she rang, I had some paper and a pen handy to record our conversation.

Here’s what she said amongst other things……

‘I’m worried about my cats, Russell has gone missing. I fear he has been bitten by a snake again.
Last year he was bitten and his eye came up like an organ stop’.

‘I try and keep my cats inside of a night now because I like native animals, that is since Rafael died
last year from a snake bite down in the dairy’. (old bales).

‘I still have Prudence the brain damaged one that doesn’t wander’.

‘I’m worried about Russell, because the other night I was coming home late and saw a dog like creature
in my headlights and I’ve lost a few of my chooks, I find them in the morning with their bodies twisted
about and their heads missing’.

‘I think it might be a hawk, but they don’t fly around at night do they’.

It was only later after the phone call that I started thinking about the noises I had heard the week before.
Later I would look in my old diary and see what I had written about that conversation and just think that
she may have seen a Yowie. But after reading the Dogman posts I’m starting to think differently.

She did actually say ‘a dog like creature’. You wouldn’t mistake a wild dog, dingo or a fox running
across the road for anything else. Although she was quite nutty she did describe it as a dog like creature.
I only wish now, that I should of twigged her about what she actually saw. At the time I was distracted,
trying to work out what an organ stop was.

T.

[Yowie bait]

Sounds like something was after her cats. Just goes to show that it pays to be yowie aware or in this case "dogman aware"if u live near or in the bush.