Tasmanian tigers lived and hunted on Geoff's land, too. Robinson wrote in his diary about seeing a mother “hyena”—one of the early names for the tiger—and her three cubs on a beach a few miles away. They must have stalked pademelons and wallabies along this very path. According to the recollections of old bushmen, tigers would follow their prey on a slow chase, trotting after them relentlessly until their victims got tired, at which point they would chomp them on the neck with their mighty jaws.
Along the ancient wallaby track, there was a fork—a natural wallaby crossing—that was strewn with dozens of cylinder-shaped scats in various degrees of decay. We studied one of the fresher ones closely. It was gray and white, and made up of fur and bone fragments. It looked familiar.
“It's a devil latrine area,” said Geoff. “They leave their poo here to communicate with each other.”
We waited quietly to see if the devil poo would communicate anything. Then underneath the sound of rushing wind and the muffled crash of waves, we began to hear something. It was a slow-rhythmed whirring noise. Whzzz … Whzzz… Whzzz. The sound was rising up from the ground all around us.
We looked at Geoff inquiringly. “Native dung beetles,” he said.
Tasmania has many species of native dung beetles—and they're all programmed to dispose of the scat of Tasmania's native creatures. Devils, wombats, pademelons. It's a natural solid waste management program. And it worked pretty well until the settlers brought in cows and sheep. The native cleanup crew turned up its mandibles at the huge, sloppy dung of these introduced beasts. Over the years, cow and sheep patties built up. They would dry out and sit there, turning fertile pasturelands into giant muckheaps. To prevent the loss of grazing land and the resulting proliferation of flies, a visionary entomologist came up with the idea of bringing in cow-patty-loving dung beetles from Africa. The scheme was successful— but given the volume of dung generated by livestock, new dung beetles have to be imported all the time.
We continued inland, walking through tufts of grass, across old pastureland, and short-cropped marsupial lawns. Geoff's land was vast, and dusk was a long process. Colors and shapes changed moment by moment. The sky was enormous, and as we walked, it subtly shifted from ultramarine to gray-purple.
Alexis pointed to a grassy rise topped with skinny, windswept tea trees. “What is that?” he said.
A creature was moving slowly toward us, its body black against the tan grasses. It looked like a bear cub cut off at the knees.
A look of bedazzlement lit up Geoff's face. “Fantastic,” he said. It was the devil in the flesh. And it was meeting us on our own turf—daylight or what was left of it. “You don't see this often.”
Though we had seen devils just two nights before, there was something different about this encounter. We hadn't lured this one with dead wallaby treats. This devil was just walking through, sharing the landscape with us, a rare intersection between two worlds.
The devil stopped and raised its head to sniff, almost lifting itself into the air. Every part of its body was in that sniff. The fading light shone dully on its sleek, glossy fur as it determined its next move.
Whatever scent was in the air—shifty humans or the irresistible odor of carrion—the devil determined to change course and headed off at an oblique angle. It trotted away with a herky-jerky lope—like the rocking gait of an Indonesian shadow puppet—and exited into the tea trees.
Seeing this ambassador from the nocturnal realm was auspicious and slightly transcendent. It even took Geoff a while to shake off his amazement. Wild devils don't make a habit of coming out in the light—and certainly not in the vicinity of people. But he came up with an explanation that was simple enough. It was a young devil out pushing the envelope, taking risks an older devil might not.
We were struck by our good luck. If we were visited by the elusive devil, could a tiger be next? “Do you think it means anything?” we asked Alexis.
“Yeah,” he said, lighting his mini-blowtorch. “It's Miller time.” Intoxicating smoke wafted into the Tasmanian twilight.
Geoff stopped to show us a tall green grass called a cutting rush. It looked like the cutting grass we had seen with Todd. “It's a species of Gahnia,” Geoff said. “The white pith is edible.” Careful not to cut himself on the sharp edges of the blades, he cut from the bottom of a few flat stalks and peeled back the green sheaths. The white inside tasted like a buttery potato.
“Delicious,” Chris pronounced.
“It's good bush tucker,” Geoff agreed.
Alexis wandered off down one of the crisscrossing wallaby tracks. When we caught up with him, he was staring intently at a small cluster of yellow flowers. “These dandelions are freaking me out,” he said. “Are they freaking you out?”
“Um—”
Just then, a sleek black animal streaked through the grass ahead of us. It moved about three times as fast as the devil.
“What is that?” shrieked Alexis. “A devil on crack?”
“That was a feral cat,” said Geoff.
“It looked like a fucking tiger.”
The way the cat was bounding through the grass, fully extending its muscle-bound body, it looked like a miniature black panther. It must have been chasing its dinner and was miles from any human abode. Geoff listed some of the creatures that would make easy prey for a house cat gone bush. Skinks, antechinus, swamp rats, and ground-nesting birds like superb fairy wrens. On small islands, the introduction of feral cats has caused animals—from parakeets to wallabies—to be extirpated.
We continued to walk, and Alexis asked us to hang back behind the group. His eyes had grown bloodshot and his pupils were cavernous.
“You know that Vroom has a lot of cash?” he said. His tone had become conspiratorial. “I have the perfect project for him. I'm going to ask him to fund a feral cat eradication program for Tasmania.”
We considered the resulting headlines. “Yank Millionaire Wants Your Cats Dead.” “Kitten Killer to Pussums: I Want Your Blood.”
Then we had a flash of the future: the Vroom Museum in Smithton. At the main entrance would stand a bronze statue of Chris, with one hand raised in a fist and the other holding up a limp, lifeless cat. Hanging on the museum's walls would be hundreds of tiny mounted cat heads, with inscriptions like “Ginger, two-year-old domestic cat, killed at Johnson's Farm.”
“There could be a publicity problem,” we suggested. “The locals may not share your healthy antipathy toward feral cats—some of which are their pets.”
“It would cost just a fraction of his wealth,” Alexis argued. “Remind me to ask him about it.”
We decided to test his commitment. “What about Beatrice?” we asked.
“Mew,” he said, batting his imaginary paw. “Beatrice isn't a cat,” he added. “She's my kitteny mittens.”
Our walk ended at the back end of the devil shack, where the picture window faced out on scenes of nocturnal butchery. It was almost dark and Geoff suggested that Team Thylacine have a fortifying glass or two of wine before heading out to look for creatures of the night. While Geoff led the others inside, we examined the spot where Shacky & Co. had devoured the entrails of a wallaby like they were saltwater taffy. All that was left were dried bloodstains and a few bits of gristle.
Suddenly, we felt a tug of inspiration—or maybe it was possession. Our backs hunched. Our hands squeezed into claws. We began to bare our teeth. Then we charged up and down the hill in back of the shack, spinning around and thrusting out our butts to repel each other's attacks—all the while doing our best Exorcist impressions: “Ra ra ra ra ra ra raaa, yahhhh, arrrrgggg.”
We took turns playing Shacky and pretended to gnaw on giant joints of wallaby meat, while occasionally sniffing the air. As a finale, we devoured an imaginary pademelon tail, using only our canine teeth—occasionally booty-bumping for position—and extended our bellies in satisfaction.
Exhilarated, we entered the shack. “What did you think of our Devil Play?” we asked. I
t had failed to draw applause.
Geoff had disappeared into the back, and Chris and Dorothy were both engrossed in reading magazines—seemingly.
Alexis looked up momentarily. “No comment,” he said.
Maybe we needed better costumes. Black turtlenecks or some rouge applied to the earlobes.
When Geoff reappeared, he told us about his own wildlife theatricals. Not long ago, a German documentary crew had visited the Northwest. They wanted to re-create a scene in which two fishermen supposedly captured a Tasmanian tiger.
The story was that the two fishermen were sleeping in a hut on the beach about thirty miles south of Geoff 's place. In the middle of the night, they heard growling sounds. When they went to investigate, they found an animal eating fish from their bait bucket. To drive it off, one of the men hit the animal with a chunk of wood—and the creature collapsed. When they came back at first light, the animal was dead. And that's when they realized it was like nothing they had ever seen before.
Before leaving to go fishing, the two men weighted the body down with wood and sheet metal—so that other animals wouldn't drag it off. Sometime during the day, they told a fisherman with a two-way radio that they had killed a Tasmanian tiger and were planning to alert the authorities when they got back. The third fisherman circulated the story and it spread like bushfire.
When the two men returned to their camp that evening, they discovered it had been raided—the animal was gone, along with a new pair of boat paddles. To prove their story was true, one of the men collected hair and blood samples, which were turned over to Tasmanian wildlife authorities for analysis. Eric Guiler, a thylacine specialist at the University of Tasmania, concluded that the hair was not that of a devil and strongly resembled that of a Tasmanian tiger. An extensive search of the area was launched, but no tigers were found, though footprints, believed to be those of a tiger, were collected. The body of the missing animal never surfaced.
This incident occurred in 1961, and it was still one of the most hotly circulated tiger rumors in Tasmania. In some versions, the fishermen had been drinking heavily and been so smashed that they mistook a Tasmanian devil for a tiger. In others, the tiger was stolen by a government black-ops squad devoted to keeping the tiger's survival secret.
In the German dramatization, Geoff and one of his cousins were drafted to play the fishermen. Geoff's dog, Scratch, played the Tasmanian tiger, or Beutelwolf (as it's called in German). Scratch was filmed in silhouette, his triangular ears doubling for those of the tiger. In their scene, Geoff and his cousin pretended to bash Scratch with a boat paddle. They were paid for their performance in beer.
“When they first came to Tasmania, the filmmakers said they were convinced the thylacine was extinct,” said Geoff. “But by the time they left, they weren't so sure anymore. Tasmania has that effect.”
Outside the sky had turned black, and a nearly full moon hung low over the grassy terrain. Geoff hooked a spotlight up to the battery in his pickup, and we jumped into the bed of the truck.
“Let's party,” said Alexis as he fired his pipe.
“I'm not going to start until you're holding on tight,” yelled Geoff.
We gripped the back of the cab, and the pickup began bumping across the dark, undulating landscape. It felt like we were on a slow-moving roller coaster. Geoff switched on the spot, and dozens of creatures were illuminated. It was like a surreal Serengeti. Pademelons and Bennett's wallabies bounded in every direction. Seeing this burst of hopping life made us laugh wildly, and we tried not to lose our grip and go flying off.
Alexis did a play-by-play of the action. “Nibbler at one o'clock.” He pointed at a wallaby joey munching grass. (Nibbler was a word he usually reserved for young women who worked at Manhattan art galleries.) “You can't see me, I'm hiding. I'm a little pademelon.”
Close to the car, a dark furry animal was slinking away from us. Geoff put on the brakes and yelled that it was a brushtail possum. Moving low to the ground, it looked like a mink stole scuttling across the grassland. “Isn't that gorgeous?” Alexis said. “She's so sumptuous showing off her fur coat.”
Geoff 's truck continued to jolt along, and as we looked out over the moon-glazed grasses, we saw something hefty trotting beside a line of bushes. It was a wombat with a bristly gray coat and stumpy tail. Besides the possum, the wombat was the only creature among the mass of hopping things that was moving on all fours.
The wombat put on a burst of speed and easily outpaced Geoff 's pickup. For a fat and cuddly-looking thing, it moved fast. Apparently, a wombat's short legs can take it to speeds up to twenty-five miles per hour.
Geoff explained that wombats emerge at night to graze on grasses and plant shoots, and spend their days in burrows. The long curving claws on all four of their feet make them accomplished diggers. (The pouches of female wombats face backward so that dirt won't get in during their excavations.)
He stopped to point out a wombat burrow—a giant mouse hole in a soft hummock of earth—and advised us never to crawl inside. Woe, he said, to the unwelcome visitor that tries to follow a wombat into its underground home. For defense, wombats have a thick plate composed of bone and cartilage on their backs. A wombat can use this plate to block the entrance of its burrow and crush the skull of an interloper. Occasionally, wombats kill one another in subterranean turf wars, squashing each other like deranged linebackers. They can also inflict serious bites with their strong, chisel-like incisors.
In the spotlight, the wombat's stout body and the way it trundled along with a heavy step gave it the look of a hippopotamus. We watched the wombat's backside quiver enticingly as it moved off.
“What a butt,” said Alexis.
Roving across Geoff 's land, we observed more hoppers, diggers, and nibblers. It was marsupial heaven, the Outback crossed with Middle Earth. We felt slightly melancholy at the thought that in the morning, we would be moving on to explore other parts of the island, other thylacine haunts. When the pickup hit the gravel on the Arthur River Road, we crammed back into the Pajero and prepared to go our separate ways.
“Okay, Team Thylacine,” said Geoff. He knocked on the hood for emphasis. “You're finished here.” The next day we would begin searching for more people like Murph, people who believed the tiger was still out there. It was after midnight when we said goodbye to the one-eyed man who had ferried us through the realm of the devil.
13. A TIGER HUNTER
“If we're going to keep wombat hours, I really need to crawl into a dark burrow,” Alexis said, unrolling the window of the Pajero as we drove down the Bass Highway. It was mid-morning—just hours since our magical marsupial tour had ended—and about 80 degrees. The sun was beginning to beat down relentlessly. Dorothy and Chris had gone off to do some exploring and would meet up with us later.
We were becoming almost intimate with the two-lane Bass Highway—the sparkling ocean waters in the distance, the dry brown grasses of the cow paddocks, blocks of blue poppy fields, patches of eucalyptus forest, the logging trucks that shook the blacktop. Even some of the roadkills were beginning to look familiar.
While Alexis dozed off, we mulled over the tiger. Before coming to Tasmania, we had been nearly convinced that the thylacine no longer roamed its old haunts, but after talking to Murph we weren't so sure. It's true there was no convincing physical evidence. But there were those niggling eye- and ear-witness reports.
About ten tiger sightings a year are reported to the Parks and Wildlife Service in Tasmania. However, there are many more that don't make it into official statistics. Sometimes rather than calling the government, tiger spotters call someone they know will be more open to their claims. That was the man we were going to see.
We passed a road construction crew on the bridge over the Black River, and turned inland. Our destination was the home of James Malley, and after a few wrong turns into isolated homesteads, we pulled up to a large, nineteenth-century wooden farmhouse surrounded by paddocks. A sheep next to the immaculatel
y groomed front walk gazed at us quizzically as its owner came out to meet us. James wasn't the twitchy conspiracy theorist we had expected. He was tall, big-shouldered, and rosy-cheeked, just over sixty. And his expression was sunny and affable.
“I'm just working on a new tiger trap,” he explained as he ushered us inside. “It's an intricate snare with a trip wire—a tigers-only trip wire that won't catch smaller carnivores. It's baited with a blood scent that frightens herbivores. I've tested it with tracking pads, and so far wombats and kangaroos won't go near it.”
Although James had never seen a tiger himself, he had been looking for them for more than forty years. “I get calls from all over Tasmania,” he said, sitting us down on a pair of comfortable brown couches in his living room.
In fact, he had just investigated a sighting that he thought was quite promising. It had merited an article in the Hobart Mercury headlined “Tassie Tiger Alert After Reported Bush Sighting.” James was quoted extensively.
The article reported that a man had stopped his car to switch into fourwheel drive on a backroad in Tasmania's Northwest. As he did so, he saw two wombats run across a track in front of him. To the man's surprise, the wombats were followed by a Tasmanian tiger. The man reported that the tiger then stopped and looked at him for about ten seconds from about fifteen feet away—and then continued the chase. When he got home, the man immediately called James.
“He couldn't believe his eyes,” James told us. “It sent him right off.”
James quickly went out to the location of the sighting to look for tiger tracks, but didn't find any. “The wallabies were all jumpy,” he added. He took the wallabies' skittishness as a sign that a predator had recently been in the area.
So why, we asked, do eyewitnesses phone James rather than the Parks and Wildlife Service? For one thing, he said, “People get frustrated because they ring the authorities and they don't do a damn thing about it.” For another, James didn't question their honesty or sanity. What he did do, though, was give them a good grilling. “I'm pretty ruthless when I'm culling out sightings,” he said. Eyewitnesses were prone to making mistakes. Native animals, even dogs and cats, were sometimes mistaken for the tiger. “I ask them, ‘How long did you see it? Did he have a bushy tail with plenty of hair at the bottom?’ And if they say yeah, yeah, then no, they haven't seen one.”
Carnivorous Nights Page 15