“She's really Down Under,” said Alexis. “She's going in through the anus and coming out the belly button. Do you think if the carcass were big enough, she would just climb right in it?”
“Sometimes people will see a cow they thought was dead—and it moves,” said Geoff. “It's because a devil eating the carcass has worked its way inside.”
“Ghost cow …”
“Zombie cow …”
“Elsie gets it the wrong way …” said Alexis. “You know what we're going to need to do, Geoff ? I'm going to have to put an intestine in a bag and make pigment from it. Can we arrange that?”
Geoff 's eyes opened wide. “Fantastic,” he said.
Shacky was still gorging when a new devil appeared on the scene. He was coal black except for a single white marking circling the top of his foreleg. He stood at the top of the hill like a general preparing for battle and studied the scene. Shacky clearly knew he was there. The General's head was massive. (As they get older, the males' heads become proportionally bigger, and the head and shoulders can be as much as 25 percent of a male devil's body weight.) By comparison Shacky looked petite. We heard the far-off peep of a bird—a lapwing or plover—and out of nowhere a third devil raced across the field of combat, screeching and heading straight for Shacky. She merely looked at this would-be interloper and hissed—causing the intruder to zigzag into a complete retreat. On top of the hill, the General continued to stand his ground and sniff the air. Just as Shacky was preparing to take another bite, he charged down the hill, screaming what sounded like the battle cry of hell.
“Lovely, lovely,” Geoff whispered as they engaged in their whirling devil-match. “He's in wonderful condition.” EERRERGEEE. AHGH. RARRGH. Either Shacky had finally eaten her fill or the big male was too much for her. With a final roundhouse booty-bash, he forced her from the carcass. Shacky skulked away into the night.
The screams from this last battle had unnerved us. But Geoff told us we didn't know the half of it.
One night when Geoff was a young boy, neighbors on the farm twenty miles down the road had been out shooting wallabies. They were culling them to prevent them from grazing on stockland. There was a shooting accident, and a neighbor boy was killed. While the family made arrangements in town, Geoff was asked to look after their deserted farm. The dead wallabies—about thirty or forty of them—had been left in a pile a few hundred feet from the farmhouse. In the night, the devils came for them. “I'll never forget lying in bed, listening to the cacophony—the devils, I don't know how many there were, screaming and yowling. It was the most bone-chilling thing I'd ever heard.”
By the time the General got to work on the carcass, the wallaby's bones were sticking up through the flesh. Muscle and sinew dribbled out of his mouth. His muzzle was covered with blood. Then, without even being challenged, he simply scampered off. We looked at the empty stage.
“That's not usual,” Geoff said. “But then who knows? Maybe there's a tiger out there after all.” Tigers were more than twice as big as devils— and the only animals in Tasmania that could kill an adult devil. Even if tigers had truly breathed their last as a species, devils would still be hardwired to keep an ear out for the tiger's approach. “It's like they're listening for a ghost,” Geoff added.
After a minute or two, the General returned to the edges of the spotlight and very tentatively licked the wallaby. Then he perched alongside the carcass, gripped the mangled body tightly with his front paws, and hauled up gob after gob of wallaby flesh. Suddenly, he reared back as if summoning all his strength, and like a weightlifter using a clean-and-jerk motion, he lifted the carcass …up…up…up… Geoff looked stunned. “He's pulled it free!” he shouted. The General's black eyes gleamed as he scuttled off backward, dragging the carcass and metal stake into the darkness.
Geoff grabbed a pair of work gloves and flashlight and raced out of the shack. Where the hell was he going? A gibbering panic broke out among our ranks as we watched Geoff disappear over the hill and out of the range of the spotlight. We imagined him returning with ten devils attached to his arms and legs, screaming for help.
Instead, Geoff reappeared, holding the mangled wallaby triumphantly over his head. He had won the tug-of-war with the devil—and this was his bloody prize.
“Wild work” was all we could think.
9. HOPPING
After Geoff 's horror movie turn, we decided to pack it up for the night. As we washed out the wineglasses and put the animal skulls back on their shelves, Geoff shared some disturbing news about the devils.
Over the last fifty years, Tasmanian devils had enjoyed a population boom—and a measure of protection and positive publicity. That wasn't always the case. For years and years, from settlement times onward, these creatures of the night were hunted, poisoned, drowned, and shot. As late as the 1960s, there were concerns that the devil might be headed for extinction. Now, Geoff said, devils were facing another threat.
A mysterious devil disease was racing through parts of Tasmania. The disease was lethal, causing disfiguring facial tumors, and appeared to be spreading from devil to devil. Before the disease was detected in the mid1990s, the devils' overall population was estimated at 150,000. Since then, the population had dropped by one third. In areas where the disease was most virulent, devil numbers were down 85 percent.
Although the disease had not yet reached the Northwest, Geoff was concerned. “It's worrying,” he said. On an island, species are more vulnerable and things can change very quickly. He couldn't imagine Tasmania without those bloodcurdling screams.
With the ocean at our backs, we left the shack and rode through the darkness across Geoff's property. The headlights and moon cast misshapen shadows over the landscape.
We hadn't traveled more than a hundred yards when we turned a corner and a small, squat, furry animal came into view. The animal stood motionless, bottom-heavy and stooped over. It was a little hunchback kangaroo. For a moment, it was frozen in the headlights, a cowering marsupial Quasimodo. Then it sprang into life, and with a series of short quick hops, zigzagged away into a small tangle of trees.
“That's a Tasmanian pademelon.” It was a live version of the creature we had dragged behind the Pajero the day before.
“Wow, that's my first one,” said Alexis.
“Mark the date,” said Geoff. “You're no longer a virgin.”
Geoff stopped the vehicle on top of a small rise looking out over an expanse of grass. “This is a nice little spot. It's quite juicy,” he said. The grass was clipped short, but not by cows or lawn mowers. “It's basically a marsupial lawn. It's kept short by the amount of animals that are here. Look at that mob.” He pointed at five kangaroo-like animals that were munching grass in the middle of the field. These were bigger and sleeker than the chubby pademelon—and they weren't intimidated by the Pajero. Their eyes glowed yellow in the headlights.
“Those are Bennett's wallabies,” Geoff said. “What we fed to the devils tonight.” The biggest wallabies stood over four feet tall and had two-and-a-half-foot-long tails that stretched out on the ground behind them. Their triangular faces were marked by tiny white mustaches, and their long ears twisted and turned so they could listen for predators in two directions at once.
It was startling to see wild animals in a landscape that had been desolate just a few hours before. It was, as they say, hopping.
“Where do they go during the day? Into the woods?”
“Yeah, just into the verge.”
As we slowly jounced over the undulating track, a wallaby or pademelon would occasionally boing across our path. In the silvery moonlight, we picked out the forms of dozens of grazing, nibbling, hopping animals.
Pademelons and Bennett's wallabies were just two of the forty-five species of macropods that live in Australia. Macropod means “big foot.” These animals have huge hind feet, as well as powerful hind legs and long thick tails. Following this basic kangaroo body model, Australia's macropods had evolved to live in eve
ry landscape and habitat, including deserts, swamps, rain forests, and rocky terrain. There are even two that live in trees.
Just a few feet away, we saw a tiny creature on its hind legs, hopping next to a dark outcrop of rocks. It looked like a furry overgrown mouse.
“Is that another species?” we asked.
“Nahhh, that's a joey—probably just out of the pouch.”
It was a young pademelon—about eight inches high and apparently about thirty weeks old. It hopped tentatively on tiny macrofeet, staying within one or two hops of its mother's pouch. Then it hopped back in and poked its tiny head out. It would spend about four months in this half-in/half-out stage before heading off on its own.
At one time, Geoff said, Tasmanian pademelons had also lived on Aus-tralia's mainland. But a combination of factors—clearing of their forest homes, persecution by British settlers, and predation by foxes—proved too much for them. By the early 1900s, this small kangaroo species had vanished from the mainland. Now it survived only in Tasmania.
Our observations on the marsupial lawn were cut short when Alexis burped loudly. It was one of those drawn-out, deep-from-the-belly belches that, while gross, is worthy of respect. Dorothy gave him a look of dismay. He shrugged. “I'm imitating the distress call of the over-the-hill devil,” he retorted.
When we reached the edge of Geoff's property, Chris retrieved his car, and we hit the gravel road that led back to the highway and Geoff 's house. Within a minute, we saw a dead wallaby on the roadside. Geoff stopped the Pajero, picked up the wallaby, and threw it into the brush.
For devils, Geoff explained, this road was a tempting smorgasbord—a little taste of possum, a little pademelon, even a little devil. Devils aren't ashamed to eat their own brethren and often get run over while intent on a little roadside cannibalism. To protect the neighborhood devils from speeding cars, Geoff did a nightly roadkill run, tossing most of the dead animals to the side and taking some back for freezing.
“About twenty Tasmanian devils are killed on this road every year and I expect when it gets the tar or bitumen on it, it'll get worse,” he said. The gravel road was in the process of being paved.
“The main thing you can do is get people to slow down at night. If you drive down here at sixty kilometers an hour, you won't hit anything. In the 230 times I've done devil viewings, I've had maybe four animals hit me. At sixty kilometers an hour, you get down here in fourteen minutes. At a hundred kilometers an hour, you get down here in eleven minutes, and you would probably kill an animal a night.”
He stopped again to pick up a brushtail possum.
“It's quite fresh,” Alexis pointed out.
“Yes, it's been killed in the last couple of hours. We're just going to give it mouth-to-mouth …”
“It's gorgeous,” Alexis said, looking at the possum's thick, luxurious fur. “Too bad we've only seen dead ones.”
Geoff put the dead possum in the back of the Pajero—he was keeping this one for freezing—and Alexis took this opportunity to light his pipe. The smell of weed and the freshly dead possum combined to create a heady perfume. And it wasn't Chanel No. 5.
A little further along, the headlights illuminated something fairly large resting in the middle of the road. As Geoff maneuvered around it, lighting up a trail of blood, he identified it as a dead wombat—a big vegetarian marsupial that burrows like a woodchuck and is related to the koala. “I'll come back for that one later,” he said.
A moment after, we hit a sharp bump in the road. The possum in the back flew up and landed with a thump.
“It's ali-I-ive,” Alexis sang.
Geoff dropped Alexis and Dorothy off at his house and picked up another recycling bin. We rode back with him to where the wombat lay in a blind spot between two crests. “This is going to be a quick salvage operation,” Geoff said. “We don't want to become roadkill ourselves.”
We scuttled onto the moonlit road, and Geoff lifted up the poor beast, unveiling a pool of blood beneath the body. He placed the animal in the black bin, wound-side down. Geoff's hands were drenched in blood. It took two of us to carry the wombat over to the car. It felt like we were hauling a sack of flour. The wombat's short, bristly fur was rough to the touch, and the body gave off an intense, musky odor.
“That's not the smell of it being dead,” Geoff said, wiping his bloodcovered hands on a rag. “That's its normal smell. Smelly animal the wombat, but much loved by the Tasmanian devil—for eating.”
Back at Geoff's, in front of the house, we examined the wombat with a flashlight. In the black recycling bin, it was curled up on its side. Its husky body was covered with coarse silver-gray hairs and its thickly padded feet were generously clawed. We studied the wombat's flat furless nose and its left eye, which was small, deep-set, and closed in death. The black container made the wombat look like it was in a little casket.
Alexis came out to sit vigil with us. “I should do a drawing of this,” he said. “It's poignant.”
In fact, the scene reminded us of a drawing we had once seen by the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A lover of animals, the nineteenth-century artist kept a wombat at his house in London—he had obtained his pet from an animal dealer—and would frequently hold it on his lap and scratch its belly. It's said he even allowed his wombat to sleep on a “silver serving dish” at the dinner table. (Some scholars believe Ros-setti's mealtime menageries were the inspiration for the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland.)
In a letter Rossetti wrote to his brother in 1869, he said, “The wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness.” When Rossetti's beloved pet died just a few months later, he was heartbroken and memorialized it through a combination poem-and-illustration. Rossetti drew himself weeping, his face covered with a large hankie, with the chubby-bellied wombat lying dead on its back, looking remarkably like the specimen we were mourning. And he wrote these lines beneath his picture.
I never reared a young Wombat
To glad me with his pin-hole eye,
But when he most was sweet & fat
And tail-less, he was sure to die!
10. SEXY BEAST
The next morning we were driving with Alexis back down the Bass Highway, past pastures, cows, and the occasional sheep. He was still talking about the dead wombat and how he might make pigment from its flesh. “I'll pulverize it and mix it in with acrylic medium,” he said. Then he added, “Tell me again, what are we doing today?”
“We're going fishing for the freshwater thylacine.”
So far, we had hugged the coast. But inland, Tasmania was covered by wet forests and sliced by thousands of rivers, streams, and creeks.
“Oh yeah,” said Alexis. “Just so you know, I told Chris and Dorothy there wouldn't be room for them in the boat.”
“What boat?”
“I don't know.” He sighed. “I didn't know what to tell them.”
We had advised Alexis the day before that Chris and Dorothy should find something else to do today. After their politely bemused response to our visit to the Naarding site, we didn't think they would have the patience for our little fishing expedition. Our quarry? Astacopsis gouldi, one of Tasmania's most bizarre and elusive creatures.
“Is it rare?” Alexis asked.
“Very.”
If it weren't for the Internet, we probably never would have heard about it. We'd been doing Google searches to find out more about Tasmania and its wildlife and discovered that certain combinations of keywords led to unexpected material. When we put in “Tasmanian tiger + sightings,” Google spit back hundreds of Web sites about cryptozoology that lumped the tiger in with such mythical creatures as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Chupacabra, a goat-sucking monster. Other keyword combinations led to a number of amateur science fiction stories and online role-playing games in which the Tasmanian tiger was a character (usually a futuristic hybrid or mutant with special powers). Living or extinct, the Tasmanian tiger had a pretty active life in cyberspace.
Further Googling served up scientific information—providing new leads in our search for strange Tasmanian beasts. That's how we found Astacopsis gouldi (“Tasmania + invertebrate”), an absolutely gargantuan species of crayfish. It was an extreme animal—the largest freshwater invertebrate in the world—and it lived only in Tasmania. Its rareness combined with the fact that it was the fiercest animal in the river ecosystem had earned it the nickname of freshwater or invertebrate thylacine. But most Tasmanians just called it the giant lobster.
We were driving down the Bass Highway to meet Todd Walsh, a freshwater biologist who's made saving the lobster and Tasmania's rivers his personal business. We had arranged to meet him at a turnoff near Wynyard about seventy miles back down the highway from Geoff King's house. Actually Geoff had arranged it. (He and Todd used to play footie together.) When we pulled up, Todd was waiting beside a red four-wheel-drive Terrano, wearing dark sunglasses and a gray T-shirt with a kangaroo on it. He was in his mid-thirties, with a bright-eyed open countenance and small slightly elfin features.
“G'day,” he said. “So you're the ones who want to see the famous lobster? Are you feeling fit?”
“Er …” We admitted we hadn't visited the gym recently.
“You're all right,” he said. “Gyms are for fuckwits anyway.”
Then he jumped into his four-wheel drive and we caravanned inland through rolling farm country. Eventually Todd stopped in front of a locked metal gate that blocked a gravel road. It was a logging route, but Todd had permission to go through. He pulled out his lobstering gear— traps, buckets, and bait—and distributed it among us. “We'll have to walk along here a bit.”
“So how come I've never heard of the lobster?” Alexis asked as we crunched along the gravel. “It's such an extreme animal.”
“It's the location, isn't it?” Todd said. “Tasmania's very isolated. The thylacine's popular because we shot 'em, and they died out. The devils are popular because of the cartoon—and the name. Devil. It's all marketing.”
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