We leafed through the calendar looking for Geoff's photo, expecting to see a caption that read, “Geoff King and Pademelon: The Naked and the Dead.” But he wasn't in there.
“How come you're not in the calendar?” Dorothy asked, flashing him a knockout smile.
“I'd have loved to,” he responded. “But I wasn't invited.”
We thumbed through the newspapers and found a full-page ad for Tasmanian-made Cascade Premium Lager. It showed a bottle of beer with a pair of tigers prominently displayed on the label. Under a blurb that said “Out of the Wilderness … Pure Enjoyment” was a thylacine lapping suggestively from a misty, jungle-like stream.
The island was filled with such representations. The sides of tour buses like the Tassie Link and Tigerline Coaches were painted with stylized tigers. Tourist brochures were filled with them. Tasmania's state cricket team was named the Tigers, and their cricket caps were emblazoned with aggressive, toothy-looking thylacines. We reached into one of our pockets and pulled out a 50-cent piece.
“Alexis! Heads or tails?”
“Tails,” he said, then added with a trace of wariness, “What are we flipping for?”
“A Cadbury bar.”
We twirled the coin into the air and it landed on heads: the profile of the Queen of England. We turned the coin over. Tails was two thylacines standing on their hind legs and holding up the Tasmanian coat of arms.
Alexis bought us a chocolate bar from Mr. April. But then he upped the ante. “That's nothing,” he said. “What about all the license plates?”
License plates? We walked around to the back of the Pajero. Behind the license number was the Tasmanian government logo, a tiger in a circle of green, peeking out of the grass. The thylacine had been right behind us all the time, and we hadn't even noticed.
We headed north toward the Naarding site and after about ten miles, Geoff turned off the highway onto an unpaved logging road that cut through a low-growing eucalyptus forest. Eucalyptus leaves have a waxy coating that reflects sunlight and produces a hazy glimmer. At first it's dazzling, but after a while the reflection tires the eyes. We began to feel sleepy and dazed. White dead spars poked up through the canopy, reminders of an older forest, one that was taller. As we drove, the Pajero kicked up a thick cloud of dust, and we lost sight of Chris's car behind us until Geoff rolled to a stop at a deserted fork in the middle of the trees.
“He was parked right here,” said Geoff, pointing at a triangular wedge of land where the roads met.
We waited for the dust to settle before stepping out into the crossroads. Beneath our feet, the sandy soil was the consistency and color of flour, with particles as fine. A light wind rose, covering us all in a thin layer of white.
“The story is that Naarding was out doing a snipe survey,” Geoff continued. “He got up in the middle of the night to take a piss, and then saw a tiger. He claimed he had time to count the stripes and that he saw its testicles as it retreated.”
That had been in 1982. Hans Naarding was a wildlife biologist, originally from South Africa, assigned to do fieldwork in the Northwest. He said he had parked at this isolated spot for the night and planned to sleep in his vehicle. It was raining hard. Around 2:00 A.M., he woke up and, out of habit, swept the area with a small spotlight. Through the rain just twenty feet away, he saw a tiger standing, its eyes shining yellow in the light. He observed it long enough to count twelve stripes on its back and to see it open its jaws and flash its teeth. But when he reached for his camera, the tiger disappeared into the forest.
Naarding's story wasn't that different from hundreds of other sightings that had been reported, except for the fact that Naarding worked for Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service—and a lot of his colleagues believed him.
The Parks and Wildlife Service is charged with the protection of rare and endangered animals, and it seemed imperative to make a thorough investigation. If the tiger still survived in this remote part of Tasmania, perhaps it could be saved from extinction. But the wildlife officials didn't want to stir up a lot of publicity. Newspaper reporters, TV cameras, and tiger buffs of all kinds would pour into the Northwest if they got wind of Naarding's story. And that wouldn't be very scientific. It would be best, they decided, to conduct the search in secret. A wildlife officer named Nick Mooney (the same one whom we had called for advice before leaving the States) was chosen to investigate.
In the months after the sighting, Nick began a methodical search that covered more than 250 square kilometers of forest, farmland, and coast around the area of the Naarding sighting. He created sand traps in an attempt to document the impression of a tiger footprint; he monitored camera traps along animal trails in the hopes of snapping the tiger's picture; and he baited traps with animal meat. He examined countless scats and rooted out possible dens. And he also ran into Geoff King.
Fairly early in the investigation, Geoff wandered into Nick while he was doing fieldwork. Being a chatty type, Geoff began questioning him about what he was working on. Nick was vague. Not long after that, Geoff ran into Nick again at the local pub. He went up to him, slapped him on the back, and said, “So, have you found the Tassie tiger yet?”
“I'd only been joking,” Geoff told us. “But he pulled me aside and said, ‘You've found me out, mate. Would you mind keeping it a secret?’ I was flabbergasted.”
Nick's search was spread over fifteen months in 1982 and 1983. Sometimes Geoff would accompany Nick on his investigations. One method was simply driving around at night, shining a spotlight into the darkness and hoping to see a pair of eyes shining back at you. Some animals' eyes reflect yellow in the dark, others green or blue, and others red. Most wildlife experts in Tasmania can identify an animal by eye shine alone. Although Naarding had said the eyes of his tiger had flashed yellow in the dark, no one could confirm the color of a Tasmanian tiger's eye shine. So Nick and Geoff would drive around looking for something unusual gleaming out of the night.
One night, they saw something. “Nick said, ‘That's not quite right.’ And we began to get excited. It was a very unusual color. We crept up on those eyes in the dark, so as not to scare the animal off—whatever it was. Of course, it wasn't scared of us. It turned out to be a cow.”
Nick's sand traps were similarly unfruitful, turning up the tracks of nearly every Tasmanian mammal but the tiger. And so were the camera traps—although they did get some great candids of surprised wallabies, annoyed devils, and stealthy possums. But as far as the tiger, no concrete evidence emerged.
In 1984, Nick Mooney wrote up his findings in Australian Natural History magazine. Although the search had failed to turn up conclusive physical evidence of the tiger's survival, he remained “optimistic that more of us will see this mysterious and beautiful animal.” He wrote:
The recent sighting confirms that the search area was used by thylacines at least irregularly up until autumn 1982. If irregular use was normal, this may not have changed. If regular use was normal, the only factor changing this would have been disturbance, such as intensified forestry….
The problem of what should and should not be done is perplexing. Before rational decisions can be made, we must decide on certain basic facts about the animal. We know very little of its ecology. When the thylacine was common, all efforts were to kill or capture, not study it, a common attitude to predators in those days. We have little fact, much hearsay, and some folklore. Unfortunately, most of the bushmen who had frequent first hand contact with the thylacine are now dead.…
Whether a “wait and see” policy or a more active long term searching policy aimed at active management should be adopted is under careful consideration. A contingency plan is being prepared in the event that elusive extant thylacines are finally found. Hopefully this will occur in secure areas involving sufficient numbers to allow study and a population recovery in the near future.
The Naarding sighting had stirred up a near frenzy of hope that the Tasmanian tiger somehow—against all odds—had survived. But e
very year since, that hope had dimmed another watt. When we talked to Nick on the phone, he was far less optimistic than he was in 1984. Still, Tasma-nia's Parks and Wildlife Service continues to record and occasionally investigate tiger sightings.
As Geoff finished his story, we began to look around. The Naarding site was nothing like the lush, misty forest we had seen in the beer ad. It was nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the intersection of the barren roadways looked like a dusty truck stop. We wondered how many tiger seekers had visited this spot before us and started to feel slightly selfconscious.
Dorothy and Chris stood around in the baking sun. We imagined they were wishing for margaritas and beach towels (though they were too polite to say anything). We began taking copious notes, making sketches of the site, snapping photographs, rubbing our chins and speculating, and pacing around in the dust.
In the heat and white light of the day, there wasn't an animal in sight. Not a bird. Not a skink. Not even a tiger snake. The scrawny trees around us looked drained of life.
Alexis took a bottle of water, and poured a thin line of liquid into the white floury dust of the road, just where Naarding had parked. We looked over his shoulder. He had drawn a Tasmanian tiger—and we watched its watery stripes evaporate in the flaming summer heat.
“Now you see it, now you don't,” he said.
We walked over to the spot where Naarding said his tiger had disappeared into the forest. The vaguest suggestion of a trail dipped down from the road and was flanked by two large tree stumps that looked like jagged, rotting teeth. Behind the stumps was a tangle of bracken fern, leading down into a patch of young eucalyptus forest.
We leaned against one of the big stumps and wondered what Naarding had really seen, if anything. We considered the possibility that Naarding had been right. It was easy to imagine a tiger emerging from this scraggly forest into the crossroads and being blinded by a beam of light. He might well have turned tail, flashed his balls, and said, “Later, pal.” But then what happened to him? Did he breed? Did he die alone in the bush? The white roads leading off in three directions suggested the possible fates of the tiger: extinct, surviving, or wavering in between the two. We thought about the “in between” road. Maybe Naarding hadn't seen a flesh-and-blood tiger. Maybe he had seen a ghost, an apparition of Tasmania past. Being the victim of species-cide might incite the tiger to come back from the dead and haunt the island. The Northwest seemed like a promising breeding ground for ghost stories.
Alexis interrupted our ruminations. “I don't think you want to put your hand there,” he said. We turned around and saw a phalanx of large black ants boiling up from the stump we had been leaning against. Their legs and backsides were painted red as if they were wearing war paint. And the pincers jutting from their oversized heads were so large, we could actually see their toothy outlines as they waved them at us menacingly.
Geoff peered down. “Inchmen,” he pronounced. “They can be very nasty.”
Inchmen, also called bull ants, didn't take kindly to intruders near their nests. Each had a retractable stinger with which it could jab a victim repeatedly and inject venom that caused instant pain. It could last for days. And if you were unfortunate enough to be allergic, you could go into anaphylactic shock and die.
We thanked Alexis and promised to give him back the Cadbury bar.
“No problem,” he said. “The road to Tigerville is paved with angry creatures.”
8. DEVIL NIGHT
We drove off in another cloud of dust. We had ended up feeling a little embarrassed about our interest in the Naarding site. But really it had been kind of exciting—our first contact with the thylacine. Or at least its habitat. Had we not needed to rush back to go on devil patrol, we would have employed Team Thylacine in recreating the whole episode. Geoff would have been drafted to play Naarding. We would have been the Latham's snipes—migratory birds that breed on Russian and Japanese islands—which Naarding was observing. Alexis could have been the tiger. Chris and Dorothy could have been panicked pademelons fleeing the scene.
“Do you think there will be any time to go to the beach?” Alexis asked as Geoff turned the Pajero back onto the highway. Dorothy looked hopeful.
We glared. “The devils live on the beach at Geoff 's,” we said between gritted teeth.
“Just asking.”
Geoff jumped in. If we wanted to see Tasmanian devils, we would need to be hidden well before dark, so the devils wouldn't suspect our presence.
Before heading out to his seaside property, Geoff stopped in front of his barn to pick up a few supplies for the night. It was a rectangular building, made of corrugated iron sheets.
“Coming in?” Geoff asked.
We decided to wait outside while Dorothy, Chris, and Alexis accompanied Geoff to look at the horses, chooks, or whatever animals he kept inside. We took in the last heat of the day and looked up at the wide-open, pale blue sky.
We wondered if the real-life Tasmanian devil would bear any resemblance to the cartoon character of the same name. The character—nick-named Taz—had started as a minor player in Bugs Bunny cartoons in the 1950s. Taz was depicted as a dull-witted, hairy, slavering beast that whirled like a tornado and had an insatiable appetite for everything and anything, including mountainsides, elephants, and of course rabbits. Although Taz had originally costarred with Bugs only three times, he had come back in recent years as a star in his own right—not only having his own Warner Bros.–produced Looney Tunes series but spawning an industry of toys, T-shirts, and other swag. Often Taz was the only reason geography-challenged Americans had even heard of Tasmania. And it was frequently confused with Tanzania.
Our thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of Geoff cursing and Dorothy emitting a shrill cry. We rushed into the dimly lit barn.
Sunlight filtered in through gaps in the roof, illuminating a gruesome tableau. What looked like a dead kangaroo was hanging from the rafters. It was swaying slightly, a noose around its neck and its tail hanging straight down. On the floor nearby, a rough sack partially covered the body of another dead animal. The body and the sack were smeared with blood and covered with lumps of shit. The second victim was mangled beyond recognition, but probably another kangaroo-like creature. It looked like the scene of a marsupial murder-suicide. Alexis, Chris, and Dorothy bathed the dead animals in a strobe light of camera flashes as they rapidly clicked photographs.
Alexis pushed a button on his digital camera and showed us a photo of Geoff—taken minutes before—removing a stiff creature from a dingy white freezer at the back of the barn. Geoff was holding it upside down by its tail.
What kind of barn was this? It certainly wasn't used for keeping horsies. It was more like a meat locker.
Geoff was in a foul mood. He quickly explained what had happened: In the freezer, he stored a small supply of roadkill. That way, if he did a devil viewing, he would always have meat for creating a scent trail or feeding the devils. The day before, in preparation for our arrival, he had removed a Bennett's wallaby, a medium-sized type of kangaroo, from the freezer and placed it in the sack to defrost. But something had gone wrong. Some kind of carnivorous animal had gotten into the barn, torn through the top of the sack, and gorged itself on the wallaby meat. The attack had been ferocious. Geoff pointed to the wallaby's head. Its face had been eaten off. To add insult to injury, the ravenous beast had crapped all over the wallaby's corpse.
Geoff 's anger was rising. He knew who the perpetrator was. The key evidence was the distinctive shape of the turds on top of the dead wallaby. It was cat shit.
A cat?
“Ferals,” said Geoff bitterly. In Tasmania—all across Australia—house cats had gone completely wild. There were tens of thousands of feral cats living in the bush. They were the same species as the domestic cat (Felis catus), but these feral cats survived without the help of people and preyed on native wildlife. “They're savage,” Geoff said. “Horrible.”
Alexis surveyed the carnage. It was
a bloody mess. “That was one bad pussy,” he said. “Was it marking its territory?”
“No, it just shitted it out, so it could eat more.”
To thwart the cat's returning for another meal, Geoff had hung another frozen wallaby from the barn's rafters. Hopefully out of the cat's reach. That explained the creature swinging by its neck. But it also presented a new problem. The hanging wallaby wouldn't be defrosted for hours. What would we use for devil food?
As we had learned, roadkill was not exactly hard to come by in Tasmania. Early that morning a visiting biologist whom Geoff had befriended had deposited the dead bodies of a wallaby and a possum outside his barn. Thought you could use these.
The donations were fresh and ready to go. Geoff quickly retrieved them and put the carcasses into a familiar-looking black bin, which he loaded into the back of the Pajero. Chris offered to bring his car, too. Fitting all six of us plus the carcasses into the Pajero was a bit of a squeeze.
As we caravanned out to Geoff 's property and turned onto the Arthur River Road, Alexis pulled out his wallet. “Hey, Geoff, do you want to see a picture of my girlfriend?”
Dorothy rolled her eyes. When Alexis handed over a small photo, Geoff 's face instantly lit up.
“Ahhh, she's lovely,” he said. “What's her name?”
“Beatrice.”
It was a photo of Alexis's pet cat stretched out Cleopatra-style on a faux leopard-skin rug. She was a Maine coon with thick, luxuriant gray fur and tabby markings. It was hard to believe that this pampered pussy was the same species as the wild beast that had savaged the defrosting wallaby.
Carnivorous Nights Page 9