Death of a wallaby

It was a misty early morning start for me last Thursday and as I drove along the Rock Valley Road I noticed a red necked wallaby that had been hit by a car. It was also obvious that the poor thing was still alive. I pulled up and walked across to it and it struggled to get up but it was badly hit and just flailed around. The various options about what to do rushed through my mind as a couple of other cars came hurtling along the road.  By this stage I'd looked into its eyes and so there was no way I was going to be able to run over it to kill it now. The only option was for me to pick the animal up as gently as I could (and hope that it didn't struggle too much) and put it in the back of the suzuki and take it to the vet in Lismore which had treated my egg bound goanna a few years ago.
I grabbed the wallaby (which was a medium sized male) at the base of the tail (lucky I had years of handling wallabies and kangaroos when I worked at a wildlife park in my teens and early 20s) and then put my arm around its body and it accepted this without too much resistance. I placed it on the old doona that we have in the back of the car and headed down to Lismore. About 10 minutes before I reached Lismore it made quite a lot of scratching noises and I half expected it to lurch itself on to me as I held on to the steering wheel (but that was just me being my near-hysterical self).
I pulled in to Lismore Veterinary Clinic (yep it's a well-deserved free plug) just as two of the staff were arriving to open up the place. I greeted them and then explained why I was there and they were very fine about me bringing the wallaby there. I opened up the door to the back of the suzuki only to find that the wallaby had died en route, probably when I heard it making the noise. So there I was at 7.30am at the vet's with a dead wallaby in the back of my vehicle, half expecting them to say, 'well thanks, but we don't really want to accept a dead wallaby' when the young woman reached in and grabbed the animal and hauled it out of my car. 'Leave it with us, it's no problem at all' she said. 'And thanks for doing that, at least it died in the back of your car on a soft blanket and not by the side of the road'. So thank you Lismore Veterinary Clinic.