Stripes of the Sidestep Wolf

by Sonya Hartnett

  The sun had finished its sluggish haul to clear the horizon and now hung, faint and yellow, exhausted. A wren landed nearby, cocked its charming head at them, and wagged its tail wantonly. Satchel imagined ears everywhere, listening without comment, hundreds of unseen eyes upon them. Chelsea’s glasses gave her the soulless eyes of a fish – he wondered if she knew. For all the creatures that lived in the district, there were no fish, not in all the creeks and rivers and dams. There must have been, once, but not any more. If you wanted fish they had to be bought, dead.

  “When the British came to Tasmania, about a hundred and fifty years after Tasman found it, they started clearing forests and raising sheep. They brought dogs and horses and cattle, and they brought disease. Sometimes the settlers saw a tiger and sometimes the dogs would kill one. The Aborigines knew the animal and told the settlers what they knew. So people knew that it existed. The thylacine was shy, but it was never invisible.”

  The wren had whirled away to hop and hop among the branches, incapable of being still for longer than a heartbeat. Chelsea burrowed her hands into her pockets. What did she do, Satchel returned to puzzling. When he was building and felling and whittling away his days, how was Chelsea killing time? When he went to the hotels and talked about football, she was never there. Other girls, but not her. Before he’d given up playing, Satchel had been a full-back, and as such he’d had plenty of time, standing about while the game carried on at the opposite end of the field, to survey the gathered supporters. People came from miles to watch the matches, but he could not remember seeing Chelsea among them. She had rarely been a subject of Leroy’s conversation and maybe Leroy, too, had no idea what his sister did with her life. She was a mystery, living outside the closed universe of the small town where privacy was peeled like the skin of an apple. She must never have had a boyfriend because he would certainly have heard: two people together could never keep such a thing unknown.

  “Pretty soon, sheep started disappearing or being found dead. The tiger was probably killing some of them but there were a lot of dogs running free, and rustlers who stole stock at night. But the graziers blamed the tiger. It was a strange animal to them, and because it was strange they didn’t trust it or want it around. Someone decided that, one year, thylacines had killed fifty thousand sheep in an area along the coast. So, in 1830, something called the Van Diemen’s Land Company decided to pay a bounty on tiger scalps… What’s a land company?”

  He blinked, bringing himself back. “I don’t know. I suppose it owned, or grazed, a lot of land.”

  Chelsea dipped her head, the sun going white across her glasses. “I didn’t bother to find that out,” she said apologetically. “I could, if you want me to.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  She pressed her lips together and scutinized her papers. She was becoming uncomfortable on the chopping stump and shifted, her padding of clothes rising and slumping around her. “This Land Company already employed thylacine trappers, but now it wanted farmers to hunt them too. It offered five shillings for a male tiger’s scalp and seven for a female’s. You didn’t get more money if you killed any pups she had with her. Five shillings was a lot of money in those days, as much as a workman could earn in a day. And, when somebody had killed twenty tigers, the payment went up. Then they gave you six shillings for a male, and eight for a female. And it went higher, one shilling more for every seven extra tigers, until the most a person could get was ten shillings for a male and twelve for a female. I don’t understand why they had that complicated system.”

  “The more tigers died, the scarcer they became,” said Satchel. “If a hunter wanted to earn more money, he would have to start hunting as hard as he could.”

  “So they offered higher prices, to make sure people kept killing?”

  He nodded, and Chelsea bit her lip. “God,” she breathed. “They really wanted it gone. They wanted to wipe it out. It wasn’t even an accident. They did it on purpose. How … cruel.”

  Satchel drew his knees up and linked his hands around his shins. He felt a touch of warmth on the flesh between his shoulder blades where his collar dipped away. The sunlight on Chelsea made her sallow face luminous. Maybe someone had kissed her once, in a dark room’s corner somewhere, and he hoped it hadn’t been a Judas kiss that had later been used against her, affection as a decoy, a kiss to entrap. Surely she was too wary to let that happen to her, too conscious of her status as a joke. Walled out on every side, she would never find love here.

  “Almost sixty years later the farmers were still whingeing about the tigers and the government decided that it would start paying a bounty too. Lots of the men in government were graziers, you see, so they had an interest in dead thylacines. The government paid bounty for the next twenty-one years. It’s hard to say how many tigers died during this time but it must have been thousands, maybe tens of thousands. Not all of them died for a bounty: they were killed for collectors and museums, and they were caught to make waistcoats from their skins, and a lot were sold to zoos and died. They never bred in captivity. But the government did keep a record of its bounty, from 1888, when eighty-one were paid, to 1912, when three years had passed without paying any. In 1900 it paid over a hundred and fifty. In 1905 it paid over a hundred. In 1908 it paid seventeen. It’s thought that a disease, brought in on the boats, might have caused the drop in those three years, because animals hunted to extinction usually disappear gradually, not suddenly. Other species got this disease too, but there were enough of them for some to survive it. They weren’t being hunted at the same time, like the thylacine was.”

  She looked at her notes but he saw she wasn’t really reading them, that she knew these figures off by heart. “In 1909,” she said, “the government paid two tiger bounties. The year after that, none. None, and none. There were never any more.”

  She wrung off her gloves, revealing pallid blotchy hands, and smoothed the papers on her lap. There were orange wafers of fungus growing on a trunk within his reach and Satchel picked at it, covering his fingers with its dustiness.

  “The last tiger to be killed in the wild was shot by some hillbilly in 1930. The last captive tiger died in Tasmania on the seventh of September 1936. It was named Benny, Benjamin. He had been brought to the zoo as a baby with his mother and his brother.”

  She sniffed, but not because she was crying: the cold had made her nose run and she blotted it dry with a tissue. He remembered that she had not cried on the occasion when she was most provoked to do so, when she’d worn her dreadful badge to school, and he wondered what would make her give in – a movie perhaps, or sheer frustration. Yes, that was right: he could imagine her weeping as the credits rolled over some tear-jerker, luxuriating in the pleasure of it. She could let herself cry for make-believe, but not for anything real. “That’s basically the end of the story,” she was telling him, “except for one thing. The government realized, at some point, that the tiger had become rare, and they thought it was time to do something about it. On the tenth of July 1936, they declared the thylacine a protected species. Fifty-nine days later, the last known tiger – Benjamin, the one in the zoo – died. He was twelve years old.”

  She looked at him through her huge, ash-coloured eyes. “The thylacine is officially extinct now. No convincing evidence has ever been found that says any different. But people have been claiming to have seen them for years. Since the last tiger died in the zoo, people have seen them everywhere.”

  “…But no evidence.”

  She dabbed her nose. “No.”

  “That’s a problem, don’t you think? If the animal was living, something would be found to prove it. Someone would hit one on the road or find bones or a fresh carcass. Even a footprint. But there’s been nothing.”

  “Maybe it’s careful now,” she suggested. “Maybe it hides. People find new animals all the time, animals that have been around for ages but no one’s discovered before. These aren’t weirdo people, who say they’ve seen a thylacine. A ranger saw one
once. He didn’t want to talk about it, in case people thought he was crazy.”

  Satchel smiled sceptically; he got up from the rock and walked around, his legs unbending painfully with the cold. “All right,” he said, “let’s say they did survive in Tasmania. That’s possible, maybe. But I can’t believe they still exist on the mainland.”

  “Lots of the sightings have been on the mainland.”

  “But you said it yourself: the dingo drove them out about three thousand years ago. That’s a long time. A long time, to pretend to be extinct. A long time, to hide every single scrap of proof that you’re alive.”

  Chelsea sat silent, watching him pace through the grass, the tough brown stems of the ferns cracking under his steps. Eventually she said, “What about you? You saw something that looked a lot like a thylacine. Do you think you’ve gone mad?”

  “I might have,” he answered. “I’ve got plenty of reasons.”

  “Me too,” she said, and he looked at her. He knew she felt her alienation, but it was jarring to hear her acknowledge it. She smiled, as if to lessen his awkwardness, and he glimpsed her small, tidy teeth.

  “Will you look at these, Satchel?” she asked. “Will you look at them, and see what you think then?”

  She proffered some papers and he shuffled through them, seeing photocopied pictures of thylacines. Rather, it was a single thylacine, the same animal snapped in different positions with the background always the same. It was a caged tiger, and the space behind it was a maze of wire. It did not appear frightened but it seemed aware, and world-weary. It had not always chosen to look at the camera and he imagined the thwarted photographer, fruitlessly clicking his fingers. Always, it stood against the wire that hemmed it in.

  “The thylacine was about the size of a labrador, but much leaner, more athletic,” she said. “It was a marsupial, and it ate birds and other marsupials. It had a pouch that faced backwards, possibly to protect the babies from being scratched by the undergrowth. It was a yellowy-tan colour, except for the fifteen to twenty dark stripes crossing its back from its shoulders to its tail. It had teeth like a dog, but it had more of them. The tail was long and it didn’t wave, like a dog’s does – it was more rigid, like the tail of a kangaroo. It sat like a dog and lay down like a dog, but it could also use its tail for support and stand upright, like a kangaroo can, with its forelegs off the ground. It didn’t howl or bark, but it growled, and it could make a rough, coughing sort of sound. It could open its jaws wider than any other animal except the snake, over one hundred and twenty degrees. Satchel, look at it.”

  She finished in a whisper, running out of air. She had stepped off the chopping stump and come close to him, her fingers hovering above the images. She looked into his eyes now, pinkness in her cheeks, pasty and earnest and reeking of lavender. “Was that the animal you saw?”

  He straightened the papers and handed them to her. “If you want to believe that it was,” he said, “isn’t that enough?”

  “No, it’s not. Satchel, are you afraid I’ll think you’re stupid? Because I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t think you’re stupid, and I don’t.”

  Her plaintive eyes were searching his face. He sighed, stalling, shrugging his coat around him. He groaned, “Chelsea, why is this so important to you?”

  She blinked, her eyelids like shutters. When she spoke, her words were hushed. “Can’t you imagine what it would be like, Satchel, if we discovered this animal had not gone extinct? That something could be found, when everyone thought it was lost? That it’s here, when we thought it was gone? It would be a thing of such … hope. It would mean that the world is a better place – at least, that it’s not as bad as it seems. That we’re not as bad as we seem. It would be like – forgiveness – for some of the things that we’ve done wrong.”

  He stared at her; she lowered her gaze and muttered, “I can’t explain it very well.”

  Satchel turned to look at the mountain. The sun had burned off the morning’s haze and the solidity of the loftiest peaks was clear against the sky. A hawk or a kite was riding the thermals but nothing else was moving. He wished the animal would walk out from where it was hiding, that he could whistle and it would come. She could see it for herself, then. He wondered why she craved forgiveness, what she imagined she had done wrong: she was surely the least sinning of creatures, so meek that her footprints barely preserved in the muck.

  “It’s cold,” he sighed. “We’re both cold. Let’s go.”

  He headed for the car and she hurried after him, lunging clumsily through the grass. “Thank you for bringing me here,” she said. “Thank you for letting me see it.”

  “I don’t own this place. You can come here whenever you like.”

  He turned the key and the wagon jumped and started, taken by surprise. Chelsea dropped into the passenger seat, her clothes massing around her. She said, “I know something you don’t know.”

  “Don’t tell me,” he replied. “I don’t want to hear.”

  He twisted to see behind him and crunched the gears into reverse. The car leapt backwards, its engine powering, its rear kicking up and its nose snuffling the ground. Chelsea grabbed for the dashboard and mud spat across the windows. He glanced at her and smiled and the glaze of panic left her face, and she smiled back at him.

  That afternoon he went to the big town to do the family’s grocery shopping, a task he hated but did anyway. Laura had written out a list and this he followed obediently, but he added things that beckoned to him. William had a sweet tooth and Satchel threw into the trolley packets of biscuits and a slab of chocolate. Laura liked things that made Satchel and his father flinch: dates, dried apricots, almonds in their bitter skins. Satchel favoured nothing in particular but he stood a long time before the dazzling selection of dog foods, wondering what Moke would choose.

  He travelled home along the highway, touching the horn to cars he recognized, taking the old road turn-off and cruising through his town, raising a hand as he passed neighbours on the street. He coasted by the shops and the houses and finally swung into the driveway of the service station, where he dropped his foot from the accelerator and stared in dumbstruck disbelief. There was a car parked by the petrol pumps and William was in the office.

  He left the shopping in the wagon and walked to the house, refusing to let himself run. He walked deliberately but thoughts were rushing through his head, tripping over each other, sparkling like fireworks. His skin seemed cold and prickly but inside he felt the welling of an outrageous joy. William was in the office, where he had not been for eight years. There was a car at the petrol pumps, and William was there. William had opened the station. Satchel yanked back the flyscreen door and called, “Mum, you won’t believe it, Dad’s outside, he must be—”

  He stopped. Leroy Piper was sitting at the kitchen table, grinning sleekly at him. Moke had her head wedged under his arm and, at the sight of Satchel, she thrashed around to free herself. Laura was swilling the teapot and looking at him blankly. “What’s he up to now?” she asked.

  “…He’s in the office.”

  “Oh, I know. He needs a part for that generator he’s working on. He thought there might be one somewhere in the office. Cup of tea? Did you get the groceries?”

  Satchel pulled out a chair and sat opposite Leroy. “Hi,” he said.

  “Howdy.”

  “You didn’t go away for long.”

  Leroy snorted. “I’m not staying, either. I just came back to get some clothes. A flying visit, is all.”

  “Is that your car out the front?”

  “Nope, I borrowed it. I’m sharing a house with the guy who owns it.”

  Satchel nodded. He found it oddly difficult to think of something to say, as if Leroy had been away for years, or they had had some tremendous argument. “Found any work yet?”

  “Have. Got the first job I asked for. It’s not bad, the pay’s all right, the boss is slack.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  Laura set mugs of tea in
front of them. “Where’s the groceries, Satchel? In the station wagon?”

  “Leave them,” he said. “I’ll bring them in later.”

  She took her cup and went out to sit on the veranda, where the sunlight would be boxed and the flooring would be warm. Satchel and Leroy looked at each other. Satchel could hear the clock ticking on the windowsill. “Have you missed me?” blurted Leroy.

  “Yeah, I guess. I’ve been busy.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “But are you enjoying yourself? Are you glad you went?”

  “Shit, yeah.” Leroy’s face looped into a grin. “It’s great.”

  “You won’t be coming home, then?”

  “I’ll come back at Christmas, on birthdays, times like that. You playing cricket this summer?”

  “Probably.”

  “Maybe I’ll come and watch, one day.”

  Satchel looked down at his dog, and scratched her silky ear. Leroy was wearing a shirt he had never worn before: he took pride in his appearance and liked spending money on himself. Satchel was wearing his old clothes, his flannel shirt not tucked in and his jeans going thin at the knees. He asked, “Do you want something to eat?”

  “Nah, your mum gave me a toasted sandwich.”

  “How long have you been waiting for me?”

  “Not that long. It was all right, I was talking to your mum.”

  “Oh.” Satchel smiled weakly; Leroy blew on the surface of his tea.

  “She says the work you had is finished now.”

  “Yeah. But something will turn up.”

  Moke settled at Satchel’s feet, curling circular like a cat. Satchel dangled a hand but she was out of his reach. “Your dad,” said Leroy. “How’s he?”