‘The Long Weekend In Alice Springs’

Craig San Roque’s Long Weekend In Alice Springs

Alone on a clear winter’s night in 2008, I lugged my swag up a dry creekbed a couple of kilometres north of Alice Springs and slipped into unconsciousness. Later, from the inchoate, moonlit sand beneath my head, the guttural sound of a wild dog’s growling dragged me back to my body. Seemingly, I had been suspended deep in the remnants of the ancient, granulated ridges beneath me—now terrifyingly rendered into a conduit for dog-noise. By the time I found the means to move, the hound had gone, unsighted, into the night. On the fringe of Alice Springs a few weeks earlier, another person—somnolent like me, though inebriated—had been killed by a pack of wild dogs. Another had been severely injured. I decided to drive myself…