A snake, or Waugal, on a little, yellow, aluminium triangle nailed to a blackened tree trunk directed me through burnt forest. I used to think that all trail signs were called Waugals before I discovered that the word Waugal, pronounced ‘woggle’, means rainbow serpent or spirit being. An Aboriginal man had shown the rainbow sheen on the scales of a water python in a tourist park in the “top end” of Australia near Darwin. He’d held that snake with great respect as the protector of water holes in dreamtime stories, representing renewal of life as it sheds its skin emerging anew.
