Carnivorous Nights

by Margaret Mittelbach

  Ouch. Some of the pademelons we had seen were quite attractive. Yet Sharland had captured our camp pademelon perfectly. Mangy had greasy fur with matted clumps sticking out here and there. Hanging around the camp, hitting up hikers for handouts, Mangy was the macropod equivalent to a bum.

  After Chris removed the steaks from the eucalyptus wood fire, we began to gorge on grilled sandwiches made with Tasmanian grass-fed beef. Mangy looked on longingly and moved slightly nearer.

  In preparation for our thylacine stakeout, we paged through another one of our books, Tasmanian Mammals. Though conventional wisdom says the Tasmanian tiger is extinct, this field guide, published in 2002, was maintaining a hopeful stance.

  We decided to share some of the information. “It says here that the tiger is ‘mainly nocturnal but may bask in the sun in cold weather.’ It also says it makes a ‘coughing yap’ when it's disturbed and a ‘high-pitched yip or yap’ when looking for prey.”

  “So we should listen for a yip or a yap?” said Chris as he poured Tasmanian pinot noir into our collapsible drinking cups. He was getting into the spirit.

  “Yeah,” we said. “But it might be difficult. The book says the tiger's very secretive.”

  Alexis gave us a hard stare. “Calling the thylacine secretive is like saying Elvis has ‘kept to himself’ for the last twenty-five years.”

  “Does Elvis have a range map?”

  He leaned in. The range map for the tiger was an outline of Tasmania with four question marks on it.

  An hour before sunset, the five of us began hiking the trail that led out of the campsite and wended its way to the hilltop above. Mangy escorted us for a few yards into the darkening forest, but then stopped, realizing that we weren't headed toward a pile of snacks.

  “Do you think he'll follow us the whole way?”

  Alexis stopped walking. “Why would a pademelon join a search for this island's apex predator?” he demanded.

  We thought Alexis might be ascribing too much intelligence to this pademelon, but then Mangy looked at us suspiciously. “Hey, I was just looking for something to eat,” he seemed to be saying. “I didn't want to be eaten.” Then he hopped back toward the camp.

  The trail that led out of the campground was a well-used one. First, it passed through what naturalists in Tasmania call a “mixed forest,” a combination of eucalyptuses and rain forest trees. Boardwalks covered areas of the trail that would have been muddy in a rainier season. Fallen, disintegrating trees were hosts to young ferns, mosses, and lichens growing in bright green patches.

  As we walked through the dark greenery, we thought about all of the expeditions that had been launched to find the tiger. Michael Sharland, the pademelon-hating naturalist who wrote Tasmanian Wild Life, had participated in one of the earliest searches in 1938. That was just two years after the last-known living tiger had died at the Hobart zoo. Led by Arthur Fleming of Tasmania's Animals and Birds Protection Board, the 1938 expedition went out into the goldfields near the Jane River, about ninety miles south of the Milkshakes. None of the miners working in that remote region had ever seen a tiger—but they thought they had heard tigers “making a curious yapping sound at night in the broken country around them—a sound they could ascribe to no other known animal.” The 1938 expedition did not find a Tasmanian tiger, either living or dead, but it did find a set of footprints in the mud at a place called Thirkell's Creek. They took plaster impressions—and later the tracks were identified as those of a tiger.

  Then there was the young naturalist David Fleay, who had an actual close encounter with the tiger. In fact, he was bitten on the ass by one in 1933 while taking the animal's picture. Fleay was fiddling with his camera while inside the tiger enclosure at the Hobart zoo, when the tiger snuck up behind him and took a bite. For the rest of his life, Fleay treated his tiger scar like a badge of honor, and he went on to become a renowned wildlife expert. He was the first person to successfully breed platypuses in captivity and one of the first to milk tiger snakes for their venom, so that an antivenin could be produced. In the 1940s he launched a full-on expedition to find Tasmanian tigers in the wild. He thought if he could capture the last ones and breed them in captivity, he could save the species. After months of futile searching, he found what were identified as Tasmanian tiger prints in an area called Poverty Plain. He also reported that he nearly caught a tiger in a trap, but that it escaped, leaving hair and feces behind. And he believed he heard Tasmanian tigers calling at night. He likened the sound of the tiger's call to “the slow opening of a creaking door.”

  After a few minutes, the flat trail began to ascend, and as we climbed (“this is better than a StairMaster,” Alexis said), the vegetation began to change. The woodlands around the trail started to thin out. The thick greenery gave way to scrubby tea trees and then disappeared completely. It was a curious landscape. Outcrops of white rock peeped over hummocks of low-lying grasses and sedges that ranged in color from light brown to yellow-green to pale, fizzy blue.

  We were hiking through a type of grassland known as a buttongrass plain. On the map, there were plains like this on the peaks of hills all around us. Buttongrass plains are strange ecosystems with acidic soils, muddy and boggy during rainy periods and intensely flammable during droughts. And though they don't look like they can support much life, they're populated by creatures like burrowing crayfish, ground parrots, tiger snakes, and quolls. The main vegetative feature we saw was the buttongrass itself, a tan sedge that grew in tussocks with long shoots that sprouted out and ended in round brown seed heads. Filled with tannin, the buttongrass plain smelled pleasingly antiseptic.

  According to the experts, this was good tiger habitat—open country surrounded by forest. For thousands of years, as soon as it got dark, Tas-mania's herbivores would come out of the forest and out of their burrows to dine on grass and plant shoots. And the tiger, which was built for open-habitat hunting, would come out, too. Then it would begin to chase its prey—a medium-speed, trotting chase—until the pademelon (Mangy!) or potoroo was too tired or frightened to keep going. Then the tiger would pounce and administer a crushing, piercing bite to the back of the skull or neck.

  When we finally reached the top of the hill, we looked out in the remaining light. We had a 360-degree view from our grassy perch and were surrounded by rolling hills covered with forest. A low-lying mist in the distance blurred the edges of the horizon. To the south was the Tarkine, one of the most intact temperate rain forests in the world. (We thought about what the owner of the Backpacker's Barn had said on the first day we arrived in Tasmania: No humans should go into the Tarkine. Humans are dirty, dirty, dirty animals.)

  In the Milkshakes, there was not a single animal stirring. But the grassland was covered with scat, suggesting there was plenty of prey. We decided to make the most of the lingering daylight. Maybe we would find some evidence.

  We took out our scat guide, but it was strangely silent on the issue of tiger droppings, given that the author, Barbara Triggs, went pretty far against conventional thinking when she wrote that the tiger “is probably extinct on the mainland, but there may still be a small number in forest areas in Tasmania.” Probably extinct on the mainland? (The most recent fossil bones of Tasmanian tigers from mainland Australia were at least 3,000 years old.) Despite her optimism, Triggs didn't include a photo of tiger scat or even a description. That's probably because none existed. When the old trappers were snaring Tasmanian tigers for the bounty, they never bothered to put a piece of scat away for future generations.

  We began to comb the ground for tiger shit and encouraged Alexis to assist us. We figured asking the millionaires on the team would be out of the question.

  “What am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked.

  We didn't know. “Something that looks tiger-ish?” We consulted the book again. “Triggs says that, in general, the scat of carnivorous marsupials has an unpleasant odor.”

  “Great.”

  The scats came in a bewilder
ing array of shapes, shades, and sizes. Most were clusters of dried brown pellets in groups of four or five—which we had learned to recognize as wallaby and pademelon droppings. Some were remarkably tiny, probably the output of the broad-toothed mouse. There were also crusty, ovoid pellets containing animal fur, perhaps deposited by a predatory bird. And there were long, thin whitish scats that may have been squeezed out by a tiger snake. But nothing we found looked large enough or smelled bad enough to suggest a tiger had been walking through. Soon it was too dark to keep looking.

  We took stock of the scene around us. There was no sign of habitation anywhere out to the horizon. No lights coming up from houses or towns. No headlights streaming down unseen roadways. As the nearly full moon cast its icy light over the far-reaching landscape, it reflected brightly off the reedy trunks of white-barked eucalyptus trees. They looked like tall, thin ghosts rising from the dark ground.

  “This landscape encourages you to think that anything's possible. Don't you think?” Alexis said.

  We started listening, straining our ears to pick up even the slightest vibration. But all we heard was the wind rustling through the buttongrass. And the sound of Alexis flicking his lighter.

  Everyone was silent. As the night wore on, we began to feel like UFO buffs sitting in the desert beneath giant radio telescopes, listening for sounds from the stars: Is anybody there? We looked up at the Milky Way, and in the sky we saw Orion the Hunter. The constellation was upside down from the way we were used to seeing it. Mars glowed, low on the horizon.

  In the silvery darkness, everything—the grasses, the trees, the sky— had turned monochromatic. We thought about the famous flickering black-and-white film of the last Tasmanian tiger and in our minds superimposed them over this scene.

  If there was a tiger moving through the gloom somewhere below us, we wondered if we would be able to pick it out. Its sandy-colored body would blend in with the pale grassland and its stripes might look like shadows cast by the moon. Striping is said to be the most ancient form of camouflage. Yet in photographs, the fifteen or so deep black stripes on the tiger's back are what leap out at you. But maybe that's because the only pictures of tigers were taken in zoos, outside their natural habitats. Maybe in a place like this, tigers were invisible.

  After what seemed like hours of silence (but was actually exactly twenty-three minutes), a voice suddenly rose from the darkness.

  “I wasn't really into those beets on the sandwiches,” Chris said. “That's one thing I'm not going to do when I get home.”

  “Beets are actually really good for salads,” Dorothy responded.

  “I know. They're just a little sweet on a sandwich.”

  We found ourselves unable to resist weighing in. “Yeah, maybe they should try sprouts now and then. And what's with the butter?”

  Oh, well. Silence is to New Yorkers as roadkill is to Tasmanian devils. It has to be dragged away and devoured.

  We heard the sound of a coughing bark behind us, but it was just Alexis clearing his throat. He began using his flashlight to scan the landscape for wildlife. Nothing.

  After a while, Chris decided to head back to camp. His light slowly slalomed down the hill until it disappeared.

  We took turns illuminating the buttongrass plains, hoping to catch some sort of animal on the prowl. But it was like a ghost prairie. No predators. No prey. No owls. No night birds. Not the slightest sight of life. The only sound was a rinky orchestra of dung beetles, creaking away in the background.

  As we clicked the flashlights on and off, lighting up a barren rock, a dry tussock of grass, a lone twisted tree, we thought about the phenomenon of tiger sightings.

  About one official tiger sighting is lodged every month with the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. They even have a special form—and we had gotten ourselves a blank copy. At the top, it stated, “Every observation, no matter how trivial it may seem, might prove to be important in the search for the thylacine. All information will be received in strict confidence.”

  We pulled the sighting report form out of one of our notebooks and started to fill it out—just in case.

  But when we came to the question “activity at time of sighting,” we had to stop. What exactly were we doing? We thought about it for a second and then wrote, “sitting on a dark hilltop, listening for the Tasmanian tiger with our pot-smoking artist friend.”

  It didn't sound good. Even if we saw one, no one would believe us.

  It was only midnight when we finally cracked.

  “I think the marsupial party is elsewhere tonight,” said Alexis.

  “Yeah, let's go down.” We clicked off our flashlights.

  From far below us—at the start of the trail? on a highway?—we saw a series of flashing lights.

  “What's that light?” Alexis whispered. It flashed again. “What the fuck is that?”

  “Do you think it's Chris?” we suggested.

  “It can't be. He's nowhere near there.”

  We weren't sure where Chris was. Probably back at the camp, drinking wine, and clinking glasses with Mangy. But our bearings were screwed up and Alexis's paranoia jangled our nerves.

  At night the trail seemed different, complicated and winding. As we illuminated the small space in front of our feet, we drifted into the realm of fantasy. Back in New York, we had imagined countless scenarios in which we encountered the tiger. And we shared one that seemed particularly appropriate for this occasion.

  We were camping out in a remote forest, rain dripping down from towering eucalyptus trees. It was 3:00 A.M. We woke up to the sound of snuffling inside the dark tent. We turned on a battery-powered lantern only to see a live Tasmanian tiger hovering over Alexis's prone body. For a moment, we were thrilled, giddy. Then we saw that the creature was dining on Alexis's heart. (In the original fantasy, the tiger was eating Alexis's innards, but we changed it to his heart after James Malley told us that the tiger was a blood feeder.) In the shadowy light, we saw the tiger's powerful stripes rippling against its sandy coat. Then we saw its doglike head and gaping jaw lunging for us, teeth first. Our last words, whispered hoarsely into a conveniently turned-on tape recorder were, “It's alive. It's ALIVE!” (Sometimes, instead of saying “It's alive,” we just screamed “STRI-I-I-IPES!”)

  “How come I always die first in your fantasies?” Alexis asked.

  “How come I always have to walk in front of you when we're hiking?” Dorothy said.

  “Honey, you know I'm afraid of snakes.”

  When we got back to the campsite, it was completely silent. Chris was tucked into his tent, and Mangy was nowhere to be seen.

  We put on some extra layers against the cold, hopped into our sleeping bags, and got ready for a night on the hard ground—with only the fronds of tree ferns for cushioning. It was cozy to be bundled up, beneath exotic trees, with a friendly pademelon probably sleeping in the forest nearby. But in the middle of the night, we heard some very strange sounds. Around 3:00 A.M.—from the deepest of sleeps—we were roused by bloodcurdling, ululating animal screams. AHHHHHHhhhhhwaaaghhh. AHHHHHHhhhhwaaaaaaghhh. Someone, something, wanted to make its presence known. The cries, which seemed to come from high above us, were followed by a return to total silence. Maybe black cockatoos flying overhead …

  Early the next morning, we retraced our steps and took a walk through the rain forest trail next to our camp. To our surprise we saw a pademelon, effortlessly leaping three feet into the air and onto a fallen log. This species was perfectly designed to move through dense forest. Small enough to squeeze through thick foliage and agile enough to bound through the understory. We felt like we were getting a peek at the pademelon's true lair— and imagined a Tasmanian tiger chasing it through here.

  When we returned to the camp, Chris was making breakfast and Mangy had already arrived. He seemed to have adapted himself to human sched-uling—at least mealtimes. And this time, he had brought a friend, a female pademelon with a tiny joey peeking out of her pouch. The joey's h
ead was barely the size of a tennis ball and topped with big, perky ears. “Table for three,” Mangy seemed to be saying. “And we'll need a booster seat.”

  16. 1-300-FOX-OUT

  We were at a gas station on the outskirts of Launceston, Tasma-nia's second largest city. While we pumped petrol into the Pajero, we heard raucous monkeylike calls from above. Sitting atop a telephone wire was a squat, long-beaked bird. It let loose with an other set of whooping cries.

  “Laughing kookaburra,” said Alexis excitedly.

  This large kingfisher is one of Australia's most celebrated animals—almost as famous as the kangaroo and koala—and the subject of the beloved “Laugh Kookaburra” song (“kookaburra sits in the old gum tree/merry, merry king of the bush is he”).

  Alexis retrieved his Field Guide to Tasmanian Birds and paged through it until he found the kookaburra entry. He looked perplexed. “Uh-oh, you guys. Laughing kookaburras are not native to Tasmania. They were introduced from mainland Australia.” He began to look slightly angry and gazed up at the kookaburra malevolently. “You fat, motherfucking pigeon.”

  The sight of Alexis shaking his fist at a bird made us slightly nervous. Dorothy was gone. She was on her journey back to Manhattan. There was no buffer to protect us from the temperamental artist. Chris, while still in Tasmania, had also abandoned us. Apparently spending the night listening for a probably long-dead animal on a deserted hillside wasn't the eco-adventure he had been hoping for. Team Thylacine was down to three.

  After our night in the Milkshakes, we decided to stalk what we thought would be more likely quarry: Vulpes vulpes, the red fox, a creature that was sure to stir Alexis's blood.

  The red fox is not native to Tasmania or any part of Australia. In the 1860s and 1870s, the fox was introduced to the mainland by British settlers. They imported wild foxes along with other familiar species such as the house sparrow and starling, to make Australia seem more like Mother England. But unlike house sparrows and starlings, which were brought in for what passed as aesthetic reasons, the foxes were brought in for sport. They were introduced so that the settlers could engage in an age-old tradition—the hunting of foxes with horses and hounds. In the end, the scheme worked beyond anyone's expectations. By 1930, foxes had spread across the mainland, occupying virtually every type of habitat. But there was a problem: the foxes were the ones that did most of the hunting.