Alexis's reason for drawing the island's wildlife with forest soil, river mud, and animal by-products was surprisingly academic. “The materials,” he had explained, “have a relationship to the history, geography, or direct interaction I have with particular organisms. They come out of the tradition of diaristic travel. They have a sense of intimacy.”
They also smelled. We buried the bags of scat deep beneath our gear inside the Pajero, and Geoff said he would see us the next day.
It was still another ten miles to our motel in Arthur River, which is sometimes referred to as “the Edge of the World.” This last leg of the trip was even more nerve-racking than the trip from Stanley to Geoff's. We were dead tired. The gravel road was pitch black and completely devoid of traffic. Potential roadkills lurked everywhere, and several times we had to slow to a crawl to avoid actual ones littering the road. After crossing a narrow, one-lane bridge, we finally reached our destination. In the headlights, we saw a sign for Sunset Holiday Villas pointing toward two wooden buildings off in the gloom.
Alexis nodded toward a lone pademelon standing in the parking lot. “If the tiger is still out there, there's a shitload for it to eat.”
The lights of the two buildings were dark and the curtains were drawn. Inside, there was no sign of life. We found ourselves whispering.
“Is this the place?”
“Why isn't anybody here?”
“There's Chris's car.”
“How come there aren't any lights on?”
We weren't even sure which building was the motel. We persuaded Alexis to canvass one of them while we waited in the car. He came back and hissed, “It's somebody's house.”
Now it was our turn. We made our way up the steep plank stairway of the other building. After deliberating for a few moments, we knocked on one of the doors. Dorothy, dressed in a white nightie, opened the door, revealing a square of light. She looked livid and thrust a key into our hands. We went back to the car and took out our gear, lingering on the gravel while Alexis went upstairs to face the music. We guessed we were in the room next to theirs. We went up, tried the key, and knocked several times. Where was Chris? We couldn't get the door open.
“Do you think it's the wrong room?”
“It must be the wrong key.”
We tiptoed back toward Alexis and Dorothy's room. Inside, we heard Dorothy yelling at Alexis for being so late.
“Maybe we should just sleep in the car.” As we stood outside, we noticed that the night air smelled of the sea.
Finally, we knocked again. Alexis opened the door, looking harried. Behind him, we could see Dorothy pacing and red-faced. Alexis held out a key without saying a word. In her state of exasperation, Dorothy had given us the wrong one.
As we slunk back to our room, we considered that perhaps love unleashes the fiercest beast of all. We had a sense we had just witnessed the emergence of a new species. In the morning, we vowed to announce our discovery to the world: Pradasuccuba amiphagi. Translation: The boyfriend-eating devil who wears Prada.
That night, we dreamed about wombats and feral cats and devils and pademelons and giant lobsters and tea-brown rivers and pitch-black highways. In one of the dreams, a group of rowdy marsupials and motley Tasmanian creatures were riding in the back seat of the Pajero.
“Don't go so fast,” a native hen criticized.
“You're driving on the wrong side of the road,” a bristly wombat screamed.
“Ahhhhhhghghhghghg!!!!!!!!” We nearly collided with a giant white moth.
Just as an echidna began to berate our poor driving, we were awakened by the sound of Alexis, Dorothy, and Chris entering our suite.
They had a kangaroo with them. It looked a little out of its element among the furniture and stood there politely.
Chris was beaming. “It's a Bennett's wallaby,” he said.
The owners of the motel had found this kangaroo on the roadside inside its dying mother's pouch, and they were raising it themselves. Chris had offered to watch her for half an hour.
“Her name's Ruby,” he said. “Although it might be Roo B. That's her rap name.”
She took a few tiny hops and sniffed one of our mud-encrusted hiking boots. Then she began to lick them.
Chris held out a big woolen stocking cap, with a small label stitched on the side that read “Billabong.” “It's her pouch.” As he held it open, Ruby hopped in and flipped herself over. With her little gray snout peeking out, she looked like a human baby in a sling.
“So where were you last night, Chris?”
“I slept in there,” he said, indicating Alexis and Dorothy's room.
He would have gotten the full brunt of the battling devils. But with Ruby, it seemed like everyone had taken a chill pill. Dorothy and Alexis looked cozy again. The lovers' tiff was over.
We took turns holding Ruby and tried feeding her with a long-nippled bottle the owners had given Chris.
“We won't let that mean Tasmanian tiger eat you, Ruby.”
“You need some milk, don't you?”
Alexis cuddled Ruby against his bare chest as if he were modeling for the Marsupial Edition of GQ. “Who's the baby?” he goo-gooed at her. “Do you want to go back to New York with Daddy?”
Ruby was the same species of wallaby we had seen nibbling on Geoff 's marsupial lawn. Her fur was dewdrop soft, like a silk cloth, and it was pale gray with spots of chestnut on her back and neck. The tips of her paws, nose, ears, and tail were black as if she had dipped them in soot. Stroking her fur was profoundly calming. It felt like we had taken a sedative.
When the motel owners first rescued Ruby, she was considered to be about six months old—although it's hard to know when to start the clock on a marsupial's age. In a certain sense, marsupials are born twice: first when they emerge undeveloped and hairless from the womb and make their desperate crawl to the pouch, and again many months later when they take their first peek out of their protective shelter. At the time her mother was killed, Ruby was still nearly hairless. To save her, the motel owners had to feed her specially made marsupial baby formula. They put her in a makeshift pouch and kept her out of the light, otherwise she could have gone blind. Ruby stayed in her surrogate pouch for three weeks without ever attempting to come out.
By the time we met her, Ruby was a year old. At sixteen inches high, she was about half-grown, and we observed that her feet were already enormous, one quarter the length of her body. (The foot-to-body ratio in humans is typically about one sixth to one seventh.) Wallabies are not called macropods for nothing.
Ruby soon became restless with all our canoodling (at her age, she was growing less dependent on both the pouch and the formula), and she squirmed away. She poked tentatively around on the carpet for a few minutes and then began hopping through the room as if she had springs in her backside. Boing. Next to Alexis's backpack. Boing. On the couch next to the remote. Boing. Boing. Boing. And then she took a dump, five neat round pellets. No problem. We scooped them up and plunked them into the toilet. Ruby followed us into the bathroom, snooped behind the john, and took another dump on the tile floor, and then hopped into one of the bedrooms and effortlessly hopped from the floor to the middle of the bed, where she pooped again.
The sedative was beginning to wear off.
Alexis picked up Tracks, Scats and Other Traces and flipped it open. There were fifty pages of glossy photographs, many in color, of scat—tiny marsupial mouse shits, hearty echidna poops, kangaroo dumps, even cow patties. He looked carefully from the book to the five round brown pellets Ruby had just deposited. “Yup, she's definitely a Bennett's wallaby,” he said. Then he looked at the bedspread. There was a damp spot where Ruby had just peed. “Maybe you better take her home before I turn her into pigment.”
12. MILLER TIME
After returning Ruby to the Sunset's owners, we headed outside. Where were we exactly? The panic of night driving had not left much room for observation. It turned out the Sunset stood at the mouth of the Arthur River,
one of the longest rivers in Tasmania. The Arthur started out up in mountain streams above the Tarkine and ran down one hundred miles until it met the Southern Ocean. From the onelane bridge we had crossed the night before, the river looked slowmoving and sleepy. We walked down to a narrow, sandy beach that marked the river's mouth. The beach was littered with sun-bleached logs that had washed down from the forests upstream. It was as if a giant had swept his huge, beefy paw through a swath of tall trees, plucked up a handful, and casually tossed them down again.
We sat with Chris for a while on an old log and watched a fishing boat motor out into the ocean. The day felt sleepy like the Arthur. Maybe we were turning nocturnal.
Chris mentioned that the day before, while we were out lobster hunting, a tire on his rental car had burst. He had taken it to a tire service next door to the Sunset. “You should talk to Murph,” he said of the repairman. “He knows all about tigers—and he doesn't like devils very much.”
We headed up to the tire service—it was the same building we had mistaken for the Sunset the previous night—and walked up the wooden stairs. Through the window, we spied a man and a woman, who looked to be in their late sixties, eating breakfast in a room decorated with plump wombat figurines and furry wombat stuffed animals. We knocked tentatively, and the couple—who introduced themselves as Betty and Warren (“Murph”) Murphy—immediately invited us to join them.
“You must really like wombats,” we said.
Betty admitted she was a bit of a wombat fanatic. She had hand-raised several young ones found, just like Ruby, in their mother's pouches on the side of the road.
“Wombats are the nearest of animals to a human baby,” she said. “When they drink from a bottle, they close their claws around your little finger.” They can also be very naughty. Young wombats like to play fierce nipping games. We could imagine Betty—who was wiry and feisty looking—getting tough with a rambunctious adolescent wombat.
We explained that we were interested in Tasmanian wildlife and the Tasmanian tiger in particular.
“Ahhh, tigers …” said Murph in a hardy Tasmanian brogue. “My mum's brothers snared a tiger and caught three cubs in 1921 …I think it was in Brittons Swamp, near Smithton. The skin of the mother was in the family up until about ten years ago. My mum used to keep it as a rug on the bed. When we were kids, we used to play lions and tigers with it. Then my old uncle panicked, because someone told him it could be worth a pile of money. He put it in a bag and stored it at the bank for security—and the weevils got to it. So it ended up just a bagful of fur and chewed-up leather.”
His uncle had been right about the skin being valuable. About six months before we arrived in Tasmania, a hand-stitched rug made of eight tiger pelts sold at auction for $270,000. The family that originally owned the rug had used it to warm their piano bench.
“What happened to the three cubs your uncles caught?”
“One died and it's mounted at the museum. The other two went to the zoo,” he said.
Although that had been before Murph's time, he himself had spent years in the bush, working as an axeman and sawyer felling trees and later as a saltwater crayfish fisherman.
“Did you ever see a Tasmanian tiger?” we asked hopefully.
“No, but I've heard them.” Suddenly, he made a sharp cry. “Cay-yip!”
It was startling. Betty merely sipped her tea.
“About twenty-five years ago,” Murph continued, “we camped out for a fishing weekend up the Arthur River. We heard one on the hill above us and another one coming down toward the Arthur. They were calling to each other. They couldn't have been more than a couple hundred yards away. Sounds like that don't carry far in the bush.” He cay-yipped again.
His dog had been terrified by the encounter, which he said was further proof. “According to old-timers, dogs were absolutely petrified of tigers. I had never heard tigers before, but I had heard everything else we've got in the bush, and we have some very strange sounds.”
“Like the devil? That's a weird sound.”
“Bizarre,” he agreed.
Murph had snared wallabies for their pelts in his youth, and one time he accidentally snared a Tasmanian devil. He took the devil home and kept it alive in a big wooden crate. He said it was a vicious little beast— and warned us to be on our guard in the bush.
“If you were injured and had nothing to defend yourself with, that would be the end of you. A devil would come at you and take a nip.” Murph thrust his head forward devil-style. “A hard wooden broom han-dle—they can just bite that off like a guillotine. And they don't leave anything.”
We asked if he thought the Tasmanian tiger was still out there in the bush.
“Yes. No reason why it shouldn't be. All the sightings can't be false— especially considering some of the people who've made them. Parks and Wildlife have as much as admitted that. I'm quite convinced.”
Here was a man who had lived in Tasmania all his life, who had intimate contact with the bush. And he was certain that thylacines survived. Our hopes surged wildly. Murph must have seen the evangelical look in our eyes. With all the attention the tiger gets, he said, you had to have some perspective on it, a sense of humor.
To be blunt, we weren't the first people to come to the Edge of the World asking about the thylacine. In the mid-1980s, not long after the Naarding search ended, an old bushman named Turk Porteus—who ran a tourist boat on the river—fueled the fire when he reported seeing a tiger on the Arthur where it intersected with the Frankland River, fifteen miles upstream from where we were staying. Turk said he and his father had trapped a mother tiger and her cubs when he was a boy and meant to keep them as pets, but they needed money and ended up selling the tigers for £11. Taking some of the last tigers out of the wilderness had plagued Turk's conscience, and after his sighting he told the local papers that he was relieved to see the tiger still out there in the bush. Some locals thought Turk had made up the story to stimulate business, but others weren't so sure. Either way, Turk's sighting brought even more tiger seekers into the Northwest—all hoping to be the ones to rediscover it and bask in its Grail-like light. That's where Murph and Betty stepped in.
“We had a film crew up here a few years ago looking for the Tasmanian tiger on the Arthur,” said Betty. “So we decided to oblige them.”
She pulled a photo album off a shelf and opened up to a page with a color photograph of a shaggy Tasmanian tiger crouched in riparian foliage. “We made it up of pieces of carpet,” she said. “Then we put it up on the riverbank, so that as their boat went up the river, they would go right past it.” She and Murph chuckled. “We couldn't help ourselves.” They never found out if the filmmakers were fooled. But when some of their neighbors went on a duck-hunting trip up the Arthur, they were ambushed by a furry, striped predator. “BOOM, BOOM,” said Murph, taking aim with an imaginary rifle. “They blasted it.”
Early that evening Geoff drove up in his pickup to take us spotlighting for animals on his property. Alexis slung a pair of binoculars around his neck and Dorothy topped off the woolen shirt she had purchased at the Backpacker's Barn with a chartreuse silk scarf.
“They are a lovely couple,” Geoff said. “I wonder if it will work out?”
We all caravanned out to the coast, Chris being relieved that he didn't have to share space with a rotting marsupial. When we got there, Geoff set up a telescope facing the ocean. “Have a look,” he said, shouting above the sound of the waves. We peered through the lens, and an offshore scene leapt into view. A line of black birds streamed through the circle of light, some of them flying just inches above the water's surface. “They're short-tailed shearwaters—also called muttonbirds.” They had plump bodies and long, thin wings (more than twice as long as their bodies) that were in constant motion. They poured through the circle of light in a never-ending procession.
Each spring, 18 million muttonbirds migrate to Tasmania's coasts and offshore islands to breed and nest. There are more than 150 col
onies, one of which has at least 3 million muttonbirds in it. Such numbers were hard to comprehend. Tasmania's aboriginal people had hunted the muttonbirds for food—and so did the European settlers, who called them flying sheep. As we gazed through the telescope at the procession, we felt like we were looking back in time at the preindustrial world. The muttonbirds had spent the day diving for fish, squid, and krill to bring back to their young in their nests. “They're heading back to their burrows for the night now,” Geoff said.
We headed in, too. As we walked inland, the ocean sounds receded. Geoff led us along a two-foot-wide path that cut through the coastal grasses. The path was sandy, and along the edges the grass was tramped down. “This is a wallaby run,” Geoff said. “Once wallabies settle on a trail, they tend to stick to it. They could have been using this same track for ages. It may be hundreds of years old.”
We thought about the Tasmanian tigers and aboriginal people who had lived and trafficked through here hundreds of years ago. There were several aboriginal sites on Geoff 's land—middens along the foreshore, mysterious arrangements of stones and depressions where huts had once stood. But Geoff wasn't completely comfortable talking about them. “It's not appropriate for Europeans to interpret aboriginal sites,” he said. “But I do think they're important. It connects me to the past going back six thousand years.”
Aboriginals lived on Geoff's land and all along the northwest coast until the early 1830s when a missionary named George Augustus Robinson came through and convinced the people to follow him and resettle on islands in the Bass Strait. His idea was that if the aboriginals were rounded up, they could avoid deadly confrontations with the white settlers. Robinson thought he was saving them, and he wanted to convert them to Christianity. Their destination was a concentration camp on Flinders Island—and almost all the aboriginals he took there died within a short time.
Carnivorous Nights Page 14