Myself and my mate Brian, who I was living with at the time, had each taken two weeks paid holiday from work to go to a spot Brian swore we would love. I remember at the time that I'd never even heard of it before. I should have, as it was relatively well known. It's a place called Mount Warning. Mount Warning is twelve hundred meters high, give or take, and it's just a big, splendid jungle covered hill with a rock summit that sticks up from the coastal hinterland
in far northern New South Wales. The thing, apart from its beauty in historical relevance with the indigenous people of that area is that it is the first place to receive the rays of sun in Australia. Being the highest easternmost point in the country attracts a lot of sun lovers, hippies, alternative types in the light, plus a lot of people like me who love nature and want to see the place for its own and maybe the sun thing too.
So the three of us took a train from Sydney to I can't pronounce this word, murwill Bump, merwill Bump, murwill Umba, merwill Umba, where we hired a car and a big tent big enough for the three of us in our gear, we drove to a place right at the foot of the mountain, a kind of caravan park with camping sites too. Back then it was called Willumbon Wildlife Reserve, which in retrospect turned out to be funny. My mate Brian is a herpetologist and a damn good one.
He still is, and ostensibly the reason for all of us going all the way that far north right on the Queensland border was so that he could do some snake hunting and collecting, which he was permitted to do so. Seeing as FJ was no fan of potentially fatal pieces of rope, Brian trained me up as his assistant. Basically, I helped him catch him bag. I would also render first day should we cop a bite from a nasty species.
Each day we would head out into the vastness of the surrounding area, looking for snakes along the roadsides and near the creeks, each time probing a bit further up the mountain road and its verges. At night, we would walk to a large wayside spot two kilometers from the campsite with our guitars and gear, and we would cook our dinner on an open fire beside the nice clear creek that ran along behind the clearing. We would sometimes catch yabbies in the creek and cook them in the
billy right there. We'd stay up there well into the night and then walk back down the dark, unlit road to the campsite so we could sleep. Rush routine worked
really well. It wasn't school holidays or anything, but in the caravan park there were still quite a few holiday makers and gray nomads and such, and so by heading up the road each night when it started getting dark, we would be away from the other people and be at ease to make some noise, have a few ales whoop it up a bit, and carry on like you
do when you are in your twenties. One night, one very dark night, Brian explained that on moonless nights, a lot more snakes than things are apt to move around, as it is safer for them from nocturnal predators. They're
being less light than normal, which made sense to me. Plus, it had been a very hot day, it being late November and coming into summer, and he knew that some snakes would be soaking up the last of the heat from the sealed roads up in the bush and it was a very good chance we could back some pythons, and as it turned out, he was exactly right. Our other mate, Jay wasn't keen on going up and past
our firepit area on this particular evening. He had a book to read and just wanted to kick back in the tent and plank quietly on his acoustic and have some time for him, which was cool with us, so Brian and I took the snake bags. We took a good stick, a dolphin torch, and off we went. We stopped at the fireplace and bowled the billy for a cup of tea as the sun set. Once it was dark, we headed up the road that leads to the peak of the mountain. It's a long walk to the top,
eight kilometers from where we were. He hadn't made any plans to go all the way to the top, just walk along and bag some snakes, enjoy the night's warmth and the music. I guess it would have been nine or ten that night. Neither of us had watches, and mobile phones hadn't been invented yet. We had one eight foot carpet snake, which is a beautiful python, a few brown tree snakes in the bags, and we're just quietly chatting, no torch on for quite some time, so as to
let our eyes get accustomed to the darkness. It was a different kind of bush up there from what I was used to up north. It is tropical and more like jungle than bush. The thick green tangle whirld came right up to the roadsides on both sides of the road, except it wasn't green. It was just an all encompassing living blackness of vines and palms and figs and ferns and trees that sting and stab and things that want to bite you everywhere you step. It's not a silent
darkness either. The forest is full of life and movement, with things that croak and squeak and chatter and squabble and scurry and fly and hump past your face and flap into you and scrabble in the branches above you. In the black. We were walking slowly along this dark tree covered tunnel of a road to our left, and I heard a branch crack. Now many Australian trees are self pruning, especially in summer, Ucalyptus especially. They dropped their
branches all the time. This is one reason so many Australian birds and marsupials have adapted to live in hollows made where the tree branches have come off. The animals and trees have evolved together, so hearing a branch crack is nothing unusual. Usually we didn't even mention it. We heard it and barely acknowledged it as we kept chatting in the dark, barely able to see each other though we were right side by side. A few moments later
came another crack. This was different altogether. This was quite close, maybe a stone's throw away, and it came from down the gully that we knew was beside us. It wasn't deep, maybe thirty meters. It just a fold in the land that the runoffs used to join with the creek. Now this was a break, the sound of something literally breaking, maybe the trunk of a fairly large soul. It just went bang, more like a gunshot than a branch breaking. You could tell that this tree didn't break like a
dead fall. It just got broken green, and it was loud, and it was closed. And we stopped, but before either of us called to say, oh crap. From the same spot as the snap came a sound like a cough. I've often described it as a bit like someone clearing their throat, like a big man going um, or a cross between that and a cough. I can make a sound pretty close to it. We turned to each other and Brian spoke first, but all he got was, did you hear that? Suddenly the air was torn apart, like
as if by thunder. The loudest and most horrific, ear splitting, blood curdling scream yell roar hit us like a bomb blast. The sound literally vibrated our bodies and in our ribs and skulls, and it seemed to take heat and strength out of us, if only for a moment. It lasted for what seemed like an impossible time. Maybe it was about as long as one can hold its breath, maybe shorter. I can't, with impunity say how long that scream went for, but it was long and drawn out in the most
ferocious and frightening sound I've ever heard. As it tailed off, there was another huff or a cough at its end, and the two of us stood, weakened the knees and bones, waiting for the hammer to fall. It sounded like the warning of certain death to come at any second. We had suddenly plummeted into a few horrible moments to the
very bottom of the food chain. It was a bit like when you're swimming out in the surf behind the brake and you see a fin and you don't know if it's a dolphin or not, and you suddenly realized that you might be on something's menu, and there's nothing you can do about it, so you accept the fact that there are only three out comes. One you will make it safely to shore. Two you're going to get injured,
possibly badly, and three you're going to die today. Well, whatever made that sound was close, and it was the king of the effing jungle. Years after this incident, I would have the pleasure of having a male lion roar from twenty meters behind me in the dark. A lion's roar, as almost bowel moving as it was, was nowhere near as loud and powerful and barrel chested as this thing. Seriously, the yali that made that roar must have been freakin huge.
In those first few moments after the scream, nothing happened. There was complete silence, not a cricket chirp, not a possum stir, not a frog croak. Everything was silent as a grave. It was as if that roar had sucked the vitality out of every living thing in that area. That area either, but the whole bloody mountain seemed to hold its breath. I was snapped out of my shock by Brian, whose face was almost nose to nose with mine as he said, Okay, Harry Butler, what the f
was that? Now? Please allow me to just give a very quick heads up on that last comment for your American listeners. Harry Butler is a well loved Offsea naturalist who had a popular TV show on the ABC called Harry Butler in the Wild. We had all grown up with this show. In fact, Harry was one of the people to inspire the late Steve Irwin to take the path that he took in life. So there's Brian, eyes like dinner plates, waiting for me to give him a sensible answer, and I could not. He knew that I
was very good in the bush. He knew I had heard everything that was to hear in the bush. He knew I was running through my noise catalog in my mind, trying really hard to equate that sound was something in my Brett's book of bush Noises. Now, after a moment, I gave him my honest answer, I'll be ft if
I know, Mike. And then it hit me. I was back in w J at night with the same bloke, and I was looking at the yowie I'd seen all those years ago, and I knew what it was in an instant that was out there and had made that sound. And I said, wait, I think I might know what this is. Mate. Brian, looking more serious than I'd ever seen him look before, said oh yeah. I said, yeah, do you want to know what I reckon it was? He looked right into my face. I could practically hear
his gears turning. He took a moment and he said no. Suddenly I wasn't scared. Maybe it was the pleading look in Brian's eyes that made me think he was relying on me for a solid and helpful idea. The third response, I call it there is flight, fight, and a total complacence of Bambi volence. So I finally said, well, Mike, if it's big enough to sound like that and it wants us, we are eft. And Brian replied we're closer to the peak than the camp. Let's have some balls
and just keep going. And then, and only then did we remember we had a torch. It had been gripped in my hand the whole time. And although our minds were still full of tilt, that roar had frozen us to the spot, and it took a moment to fall. So I shined the light straightforward to the spot where the sound had come from, and despite the rays barely penetrating that vast green wall, a second after flicking it on, there came a thud, like someone dropping a bag of
cement from the back of a truck. We felt it through the road. We knew it was a foot thump, a stamp, like what an annoyed horse would do, only so much more powerful. Okay, you don't like the light either, I thought, so I shined it down the corner of the road behind us. Nothing same in front, just more road in jungle, and I turned off the light. I had kind of judged that as I walked about the seven kilometers an hour, that we had been walking pretty slowly for an hour or so, and we had covered
about five kilometers. We were a long way from home, and that bugger. Yahwe probably knew it. So we continued up the road, slowly at first, and then with an f U king Kong attitude, completely unarmed. Of course, the noises of the bush came back, but conversation had begun to die away, and after about another twenty minutes or so, Brian just stopped and said to me, very quietly and seriously, Bretto, I can feel it watching us, Mate, Can you feel that? Of course I can, mate, But he hasn't made us
move on yet. That's a good thing, nay, said my mate. Dude, this feels wrong. And when the road hits the base of the path it stops at this park. Now, said my mate, dude, this feels wrong. And when the road hits the base of the path it stops at this little car park thing. And then there's this little rocky, windy footpath to the summit, like through the forest. Mate. This was new info, and straightway changed my mind. Suddenly.
That single lane road felt like a much safer line to take than to blunder in total darkness right into this thing's backyard with a torch or no torch. The blacktop felt like a wiser of two options. Okay, mate, let's go home. We did one hundred and eighty degree and walked back down that blackest pitch road past where the roar happened, down and down and down, watched all the way. I have no doubt. We got back to
our tent at about midnight. FJ was still awake. He had been filming some footage on the old microcassette video camera we had taken with us to catalog the holiday. In the clip, he was laying back with a cigarette and telling the camera that he could hear some very strange noises coming from up the mountain and that he was glad he was staying right here. He hoped we were okay. I still have the footage. It's a shame he didn't get any of what he was hearing on tape.
But the gist of it is that he was five kilometers away and he heard the roar, so you can imagine what standing a stone's throw away did to us. We sat in the tent and we talked about it, had a couple of stiff drinks, and turned in. Now here's the bit that drove it all home for me and my mate. Next morning, it was sunny, perfect and people out and about, and all the reality around you makes your logic denial thing kick in and you wonder did that stuff really happen? You get it the day
after very every real experience with something otherworldly. You guys know what I mean. But we went to the little shop in the caravan park that morning for some stuff and it was like a little general store beside the park's end ground swimming pool, postcards, post office, milk bar, etc. I joked about something to Brian about the last night's goings on, and the really nice bloke that ran the shop just up and said, you blokes up near the big fella on the mountain last night, eh or something
like that. It was years ago. Anyway, this bloke goes on to tell us that it is playing local knowledge and it has been for a long time. There is a yalie up on Mount Warning and there always will be, and most people know that. He went on to say that the indigenous people of the region would go miles out of their way to avoid that mountain back in
their day. He told us about how the lady had the little place on the left after the kindergarten in Wallumbe had her little terrier just swooped up from its running tether by that big bugger in one hand as it went straight through her laundry line. The dog didn't even yell, It just crushed it in one hand as the yowie went straight on through her yard into the bush, dragging fresh laundry after it. I had been past her
house a dozen times or more. So even though we didn't need to be, we felt pretty validated by the bloke in the shot because even though he may have been stretching the truth even a tad. I don't know, but I know what we heard on Mount Warning that night, and it was big. It was a bloody yowie. It could have been nothing else. We don't have bears, We don't have cougar's wolves or the sorts of land predators that can growl or roar like that. We don't have
huge deer like moose er el in our forests. That Mike Bellow pretty well. It was no koalis fighting or possums going at it for fruit, or bats screeching. There are yowie's, you might call them sasquatch. It is mysterious, but it's really no mystery. It's very plain and simple.