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Peter Michael
August 14, 2007 12:00am
CAPE York stockman David George has spent seven nights up a tree in a crocodile-infested swamp, bleeding and with little food - and lived to tell the tale.
The father-of-one and co-manager at Silver Plains cattle station yesterday told his remarkable tale of survival and rescue by chopper in rugged bushland near Coen, in the state's remote far north.
"Every night I was stalked by two crocs who would sit at the bottom of the tree staring up at me," Mr George recalled yesterday.
"All I could see was two sets of red eyes below me and all night I had to listen to a big bull croc bellowing a bit further out.
"I'd yell out at them, 'I'm not falling out of this tree for you bastards'."
Dazed and bleeding after a tumble from his horse earlier this month, the bushie had given the horse its head in the pre-dawn dark to get him home – only to find it had taken him more than a kilometre into the heart of a croc swamp.
"I had to get off the horse and fall on the long 8ft-high swamp grass to clear a path, when I fell straight into a crocodile nest," he said.
"That spooked me. There were some monstrous tracks and the big ones are never far from the nest.
"I couldn't go back, it was too far and too dangerous, so I headed to the nearest high ground and stayed there, hoping someone would come and find me before the crocs did."
He tried everything over the next few days to attract the attention of airborne search teams, including flashing sunlight off his tobacco tin, waving his shirt on a stick and spreading toilet paper in the tree branches.
"The scrub was that thick they could not see me through the foliage. It was very frustrating – they flew within 20 feet (6m) of me at one stage," he said.
Three days into his ordeal and his food supply of two meat sandwiches was gone.
"If I hadn't seen the crocs circling me, and if I hadn't fallen into the croc nest, I would have made a push for it. But I knew the safest thing was for me to sit tight and wait."
On the eighth day of his ordeal, the missing stockman was found last Wednesday after a search involving the Australian Army, police, SES crews from Coen, Cooktown, Cairns and Brisbane and Aboriginal trackers.
"They gave me a Cherry Ripe chocolate bar after they winched me up to the chopper – it was like a gourmet meal," he said.