Carnivorous Nights

by Margaret Mittelbach

  Just as we were diving into spring rolls, a stranger walked up to the table. He was boyish-looking, with light brown hair and a crooked smile. Suddenly, he threw his arms around our shoulders and gave us a squeeze.

  “Hey, team!” He had an American accent.

  Who was this guy?

  Alexis jumped up immediately and shook his hand. It was Alexis's friend from New York, the one he had said “might” be coming.

  The newcomer sat down, bit into a spring roll, and introduced himself. His name was Chris Vroom. He was thrilled about the idea of going to Tasmania. And we rapidly absorbed his life story. As a Wall Street analyst, he had made a killing during the Internet boom and at age thirty-seven was already semiretired. Since Chris didn't have to work, he indulged his two passions, travel and art. He traveled whenever he got the urge and recently had been to Antarctica and the Himalayas. As for his other interest, he had immersed himself in New York's contemporary art scene, becoming a serious collector and using his own money to start a nonprofit organization that gave grants to promising young artists. One of his prize possessions was a sculpture constructed entirely from police officers' batons. Chris and Dorothy hit it off immediately and began talking about galleries, who was on the board of what museum, and who had sneaked off with whom at the last Venice Biennale.

  We broke in. “So what made you decide to take a trip to Tasmania?”

  “Alexis invited me,” he responded enthusiastically.

  Oh. Right. This was rapidly evolving from “might” be joining us to full-fledged expedition member. We continued our inquiry. “What was the thing that intrigued you most about the idea?” We were still hoping to uncover a latent scientific background, a degree in biology or an unrequited passion for meat-eating marsupials. Even an interest in Bigfoot would do.

  But it was Tasmania's scenery and adventure sports that had caught Chris's attention. He had read about the island's glorious beaches, great swimming, and incredible surfing—and he mentioned seaplanes and scuba diving. It sounded exciting. Too bad we wouldn't be doing any of that stuff.

  “We're pretty much focusing the trip around the tiger,” we said. “Its natural and cultural history, its iconography, the possible veracity of eyewitness reports.”

  We were trying to make our plans sound as boring as possible, but Chris's face betrayed a hint of alarm. “There are tigers in Tasmania?” he said. Apparently Alexis had failed to brief him on the thylacine aspect of our trip.

  “Don't worry,” Alexis shouted across a plate of pad thai. “They're ex-tinct—probably.”

  For the next hour, Chris and Dorothy returned to their discussion about art. The tiger receded into the background.

  When it was time to head off for the ferry, Chris explained he hadn't been able to book a cabin and was flying into Devonport, the Tasmanian city where the ferry docked. He would meet us there the following morning.

  “So, what's the agenda?” he said. “Can I have a copy of the itinerary?”

  “Uh—” Itinerary? “Well, the day after tomorrow we're going to see devils … hopefully.”

  This time Dorothy looked at us strangely. Then she said, “Those are animals, right?”

  Twenty minutes later we were at Melbourne's Station Pier, entering the ferry's cavernous bowels. Hundreds of cars were creeping on board and stacks of pet-filled cages were being rolled off to an unseen kennel area. Because of Tasmania's island status—and freedom from many of the exotic species that plagued the mainland—restrictions on bringing in plants, animals, even certain types of food were taken very seriously. We joined a line of passengers waiting to have their luggage checked. Every bag was opened, poked, and occasionally thoroughly searched. According to a pamphlet we had been given, the inspectors were primarily looking for fresh fruit and illegal animals, such as foxes and pythons. But Alexis looked nervous.

  “Did you bring the P-O-T with you?” we whispered loudly.

  “Shhhhhhh …I was afraid to bring it on the plane from Sydney. But I got some more here. It's way down in the stuff sack of my sleeping bag.”

  When it was Alexis's turn to have his bag searched, he suddenly became oversolicitous and hyper. “Do you want me to open that for you? No problem. I can undo that strap. Do you need me to unzip anything? How about this? This? No, thank you.”

  When we heaved our bags forward, however, the inspector gave us a piercing look. We had been selected for extreme searching. She carefully opened each compartment and removed our things: clothes, underwear. Then she pulled out a stack of books we were carrying and stared at the title on top. We hoped it was something like The Future Eaters, an irreproachable ecological history of Australasia. But when we glanced down, we saw it was Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature.

  “Okaaay, then,” she said, rapidly shoving our stuff back inside our bags. “You have a nice trip.” We followed Alexis and Dorothy onto the upper decks.

  Ahhhh, it felt good to be on board. Behind us were the glass skyscrapers of Melbourne. In front of us open water. Our adventure was about to begin. We passed a ship's officer wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons.

  “Do you think this will be a smooth crossing?” we asked. The Spirit of Tasmania was designed to handle waves as high as twenty-five feet. It had recently replaced a high-speed, wave-smashing catamaran that—though reducing the ferry trip from fourteen hours to six—had been decommissioned after earning itself the nickname “Vomit Comet.”

  The officer looked at us blankly. “The waves should only be up to thirty meters tonight,” he said. Mother of Poseidon! We started to do the math. Thirty meters was three times bigger than the Banzai Pipeline. It was Perfect Storm size. The officer watched our faces turn a pale shade of green. Wait a second … Then he added with the faintest suggestion of a smile, “No worries. This should be an easy night.” We gulped down some Dramamine anyway.

  As the Spirit pulled away from the dock, we stood by the railing and watched the lights of the city fade away. The sheltering arms of Port Phillip, Melbourne's harbor, stretched out for miles. It felt like we were traveling over smooth, smoky glass. If this was the badass Bass Strait, we could handle it. Of course, it wasn't. The moment the ferry passed beyond the harbor's reach, the Spirit began to pitch and we felt the strait's force yanking at our innards. It seemed to be sending us a message: “Don't underestimate my power, landlubbers.”

  The Bass Strait has been described as “rough,” “capricious,” and “dangerous.” It's shallow and easily disturbed—nowhere more than 230 feet deep—so when waves come rolling in from either side, they grow in height and sometimes break like surf against a beach. From the west, the wind comes from the Roaring 40s, a raging circum-global system that barrels across the open ocean and reaches screaming speed when it funnels into the Bass Strait.

  By the standards of the strait, we were in for a calm night. Still, when we looked down at the tossing waters lit up by the lights of the ferry, the waves looked ominous. One misstep on the slippery deck and we would be swept away, like cigarette butts down a storm drain.

  To get a different perspective, we climbed up three flights of narrow metal stairs and felt the sucking pull of shifting gravity as the boat knocked us from side to side. On the top deck, the force of the wind made it hard to walk and whipped our hair into Medusan up-dos. High Plexiglas barriers ringed the perimeter. When we looked out, it was too dark to see the tempestuous chop below. And all we could hear was the howling wind. The only other people who had ventured this high were two drinking buddies, leaning into seats fastened to the deck.

  Despite the Bass Strait's ferocity, we knew many animals negotiated its turbulent waters. Seals and sharks. Little blue penguins, albatrosses, and other birds that nested on the strait's many islands.

  Alexis peered down toward the dark water and yelled above the wind. “You know, twelve thousand years ago, we could have taken this journey by foot,” he said.r />
  We imagined a sped-up version of geological events dating back 250 million years. At the start of the film, all the world's continents are joined together in one big mass called Pangea. Then Pangea splits in two. The great southern continent—Gondwanaland—is created. And slowly Gondwanaland begins stretching like taffy. First Africa breaks away, then South America. Now, just Antarctica and Australia are left jammed together—and Tasmania is the sticking point. Finally after much straining and pulling, Antarctica drifts off, leaving Australia and Tasmania still connected. Millions of years pass, and a series of Ice Ages begin. Australia and Tasmania remain fitfully connected by a land bridge. Aboriginal people, tigers, wallabies, and other animals travel back and forth.

  Then about twelve thousand years ago, the last Ice Age ends and glaciers begin to melt. The seas rise, flooding the shallow valley between Tasmania and Melbourne and forming the Bass Strait. Tasmania is turned into an island. Nothing goes in and nothing goes out, unless it has wings or fins, for thousands of years. For the tigers, that separation turns out to be a good thing. On the mainland the tigers die out, but they live on in Tasmania—the furthest outpost beyond Wallace's Line. The film ends.

  In those years during which the island was completely isolated, the only people who encountered the Tasmanian tiger or even knew it existed were the aboriginals who lived there. Geographers have calculated that about four thousand people and four thousand thylacines lived in Tasmania at any given time. This delicate balance was maintained for a remarkable ten thousand years. Along with the thylacines the island sheltered other curious animals: Tasmanian devils, unusual kangaroos, flightless birds, spiky anteaters. The Bass Strait was like a moat and Tasmania was an impregnable citadel.

  In 1642 the citadel's walls were breached when the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was commissioned to map Terra Australis Incognita (the Unknown Southland) and came across Tasmania instead. After landing, he and his crew reported seeing smoke from the fires of the aboriginals, enormous towering trees, and animal tracks on the ground “not unlike the paws of a tiger.” Tasman christened the island Van Diemen's Land after his patron, Anthony van Diemen, the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company—and Van Diemen's Land was the name in use until 1856 when the island was renamed for Tasman himself.

  After Tasman's departure, Van Diemen's Land was not called on again for more than a hundred years. But in the 1770s there were a rash of short visits. Captain Marion du Fresne stopped in on behalf of France in 1772, Commander Tobias Furneaux investigated for England in 1773 (as part of the expedition of Captain James Cook), and Captain Cook himself dropped by in 1777.

  In 1770 Cook had claimed the Australian mainland for England, and this visit ultimately resulted in the Sydney area's being settled as a prison colony for British convicts in 1788. A few years later, when French explorers and scientists aboard the ships Géographe and Naturaliste began surveying the area around Van Diemen's Land, the British decided it was time to stake another claim. In 1803 they set up a second convict settlement on the southeast coast of Van Diemen's Land. From 1803 to 1853, about seventy thousand prisoners were transported from England and Ireland, and the island quickly earned a reputation as a cruel “convict hell.” If the condemned weren't doing hard labor under threat of the lash in prisons such as Port Arthur and Macquarie Harbour, they were “assigned” to work for private landowners. As one convict ballad from the early nineteenth century warned:

  The first day that we landed upon that fatal shore,

  The planters they came round us full twenty score or more,

  They rank'd us up like horses, and sold us out of hand,

  They yok'd us unto ploughs, my boys, to plough Van Dieman's land.

  The cottages that we live in were built of clod and clay,

  And rotten straw for bedding, & we dare not say nay,

  Our cots were fenc'd with fire, we slumber when we can,

  To drive away wolves and tigers upon Van Dieman's land.

  Wolves and tigers? The confusion was understandable. Van Diemen's Land was a strange place—unknown, unfamiliar, and filled with bewildering plants and animals. When the colonists spotted their first thylacine, they weren't sure if it was a wolf, a tiger, or what it was. In 1805 William Paterson, one of the island's first lieutenant governors, reported that an “animal of a truly singular and nouvel description” and “of the carnivorous and voracious tribe” was killed by dogs on the is-land's north coast. At the outset, the colonists couldn't agree what name to give this unfamiliar beast. Paterson thought it looked like a hyena or a “low wolf dog,” and for many years it was variously dubbed hyena, hyena opossum, zebra opossum, dog-headed opossum, zebra wolf, panther, tyger, tiger wolf, striped wolf, and Tasmanian dingo. Sightings were rare in the colony's first years, and in 1810 the explorer John Oxley wrote that the tiger “flies at the approach of Man, and has not been known to do any Mischief.” This status as a benign new animal didn't last long, however. The first reported killing of a sheep by a thylacine was in 1817. From that moment on, thylacines had a price on their heads.

  We headed back down the metal stairs, experiencing an increasing sense of vertigo. The ship was designed to focus passengers inward. The size of a cruise ship, it had once plied the Adriatic Sea. Its built-in stabilizers and size insulated it from the roughness of the strait. And when we were inside—out of the wind—we barely noticed we were on the water. There was a bar, a restaurant, a tiny dance floor, a sitting area with TV monitors showing the Australian Open and the movie Police Academy, and a room filled with slot machines called the Admiral's Gaming Lounge.

  When we visited the onboard gift shop, we were thrown for a loop. If Tasmanians historically had not cared much for the thylacine, they obviously liked it now. Tasmanian tiger T-shirts, jerseys, and hooded sweatshirts lined rack after rack. There were tiger snow globes, decorative plates, pewter figurines, sun visors, key chains, refrigerator magnets, collectible spoons, shot glasses, tea towels, and “stubbie” holders for keeping beer bottles cold. One long, multi-binned shelf was devoted exclusively to stuffed animal versions of the tiger. There were also numerous tiger books—from children's stories to scientific treatises. And there were even little striped jackets you could buy to dress up your dog as a thylacine. Apparently being branded extinct was no barrier to marketing.

  We couldn't decide if the tchotchke-ization of the tiger was cute or disturbing. The Tasmanian devil ran a close second as the icon of choice. The devil toys had red tongues and big white fangs. Alexis quickly began criticizing the form, coloring, and texture of the stuffed animals. “What is this? This looks like a dog. What's wrong with these people?”

  He picked up a book that showed a mummified version of a Tasmanian tiger. It had been found at the bottom of a cave in the Nullarbor Plain on the Australian mainland in the 1960s. The dry air and constant temperature in the cave had desiccated and preserved the body. Though the tiger was shrunken and dried-out-looking, you could still see its weird wolfy shape, several dark brown stripes, rows of sharp teeth, and even its tongue. When the tiger mummy was first found, some people thought the animal had died in recent times, which would mean that thylacines had somehow survived on the mainland. But when scientists radiocarbon-dated the mummy, they discovered it was more than four thousand years old.

  Alexis pointed at the photo. “I have a mummified fox that looks exactly like that.”

  “Where'd you get that?” we asked.

  “It was a present.”

  We spent the rest of the evening sampling Tasmanian wines from the bar on the foredeck. When we went to return our glasses, a tipsy woman at the bar was whispering to a friend and leaning her head toward Alexis and Dorothy. “Those two there. Wasn't he one of Carrie's boyfriends? And she's the rich one. Not Miranda, but—”

  “Charlotte.”

  “That's the one.”

  They had mistaken them for actors on Sex and the City.

  Around midnight, we decided to retire to our cabin a
nd fell asleep immediately. After what seemed like twenty minutes, a tiny intercom positioned next to our heads tinnily blared, “We have arrived. It is six A.M.” This announcement was repeated every few seconds until we were finally rousted.

  Looking and feeling haggard, we trailed behind Alexis and Dorothy to the outer deck and looked out expectantly as the ferry approached the island and the city of Devonport. In the distance, mist shrouded a low mountain. In the foreground were a medium-sized industrial port, a McDonald's, and a multiplex cinema.

  Alexis looked at the McDonald's. “We may have more to fear from globalization than we do from land leeches,” he said.

  Straggling off the ferry, we passed an old-looking beagle. This canine cop was the last line of defense in the effort to stop the importation of exotic species. As we filed past, he wagged his tail and panted at us. Alexis smiled at the beagle and patted the sleeping bag strapped to the bottom of his backpack. When we were just out of earshot he muttered, “That dog should retire if it can't sniff out this shit. He should be put out to doggy pasture.”

  6. DAY OF THE DEAD

  We had arrived in Tasmania, the land of the tiger. And along with intense fatigue, we felt a sudden sense of urgency. “Alexis,” we said blearily. “We need to get out into the bush … to walk where the tiger walked … watch its stripes melting into the forest.” Our eyes must have looked slightly wild.

  “Wake up!” snapped Alexis. “You're babbling. You need some strong coffee.” He pointed at a tour bus parked next to the ferry with a picture of a thylacine on the back. “See. The thylacine's right there. Go commune.”