Clearly, foxes were the bad guys in Tasmania. Yet, we found it strange to be rooting for the hunters. In films that depicted horseback-riding aristocrats chasing after packs of bloodhounds, we had always rooted for the fox. This whole anti-fox thing was requiring a reversal of thinking.
Ken slowed down and drove up a dirt road, stopping in front of a wire gate. We got out and surveyed the scene, grassy fields separated by hedgerows. This was just the kind of terrain where we could imagine a foxhunt.
“So, what do you think of foxhunting, you know, the kind with horses and hounds?” we asked.
Ken lit up a cigarette. “Actually, I'm the master of the Northern Hunt Club.”
“That's so sexy,” said Alexis.
The waning light obscured Ken's reaction.
“Is that on the mainland?” we asked.
“No.”
“It's in Tasmania?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh.” We didn't get it. How could they have a foxhunt in a place without foxes?
“Have you ever heard of aniseed oil?” Ken asked.
“I've had it rubbed on me,” Alexis said.
Ken took a deep puff on his cigarette. He explained that at his hunt club, the dogs chased after a lure that had been drenched in aniseed oil. This aromatic lure stood in for the fox. Except for that, the club carried on the old English traditions, with riders dressing in jodhpurs and pinks and sharing glasses of port at the end of the hunt.
A pickup truck drove up to the wire gate, and a man dressed identically to Ken got out. Ken introduced him as John McConnell, another member of the task force. He had red apple cheeks and a jolly demeanor. John put his arm around Ken, so that their Akubras were touching. “We're the best blokes,” he said.
These were the kinds of guys you would want to have around if the laws of society broke down. Nice and friendly, but able to pick off a looter at two hundred yards.
John brought out the task force's fox rifle. It had a black plastic stock and shiny stainless steel barrel. Our previous experience with firearms had been limited to cap guns and G.I. Joe's miniature arsenal.
“It's a Ruger .223 caliber,” John explained. “It was made in America, actually.” He whistled cheerily as he put it together and loaded it with bullets. “I was born and bred on a sheep farm,” he went on, noting our fascination with the rifle. “So we grew up with foxes being around all the time and of course as a young kid, not only were they a pest, but very good money in the skin industry. When you weren't doing odd jobs and working on shearing sheds, any spare time you had, you went foxhunting.” He shrugged. “Most country kids grow up with hunting.”
By this time, night had fallen and it was full dark. John handed the rifle off to Ken, opened the hood of the truck, and hooked up a cable to the pickup's battery. It powered a handheld spotlight. Then John hopped into the bed of the truck.
“Tally ho,” he said.
As Ken set the pickup in motion, he rested the rifle across his thighs. In the back of the truck, John moved the spotlight slowly back and forth, illuminating dry fields covered with pasture grass. The beam of light was filled with dust and flying insects. We smelled hay and cow manure.
We passed a shearing shed and stockyards. The paddocks were separated by wire fences and dotted with stands of wattle trees and eucalyptuses. As we drove slowly through the dark paddocks, with the spotlight sweeping the landscape, we heard the occasional moo of a cow rising out of the darkness and the shrill call of plovers crying keee, keee, keee. A longeared hare jumped out in front of us, leaving a trail of dust in its wake.
“We're looking for eye shine and movement,” Ken said as we drove slowly through the paddocks. “You look for everything, anything.”
Up ahead, a pair of luminous orbs shone out from the darkness.
“What's that?” we asked excitedly.
“It's a sheep,” said Ken.
“Oh.”
A few seconds later, we heard a telltale baaaaaahhhhh and passed a ghost-white sheep surrounded by pale brown tussocks of grass. Its eyes flashed a wet globby green. We thought about when sheep were first brought to Tasmania in the early nineteenth century. On bright moonlit nights, their eyes must have looked like neon signs to Tasmanian tigers, blinking “EAT HERE.”
“You can get an idea of what animal you're looking at, just by the color and nature of the eye shine,” Ken said. “Sheep and deer eye shine is quite greenish, sometimes a yellowy green, and sometimes it appears blue. Brushtail possums have soft reddish eyes. Rabbits have amber eye shine. And wallaby, you get a little bit of eye shine, but not much—usually you'll see movement first.”
“And the fox?”
“With the fox, eye shine is the biggest and first indicator. It's not so much the color as the brightness. The color tends to change depending on the angle or atmospheric conditions. Sometimes a fox's eyes appear reddish, but mostly they're a really bright gold or silver color.” He paused to consider the shifty qualities of the fox. “You actually look for a bit of eye separation as well,” he added. “A cat gives you a fairly bright reflection, but it looks like it has only one eye. With the fox you can actually see the eye separation.”
Ken peered into night. As the spotlight swept the fields, we tried to use our newfound eye knowledge. Hopping rabbits and sauntering brushtail possums were all over the place—flashing us with amber eyes, red eyes. Groups of sheep flashed green and blue. It was like the stars had fallen onto the grassy farm fields.
A rabbit dashed across the headlights. For a moment, we were mesmerized by its golden gaze.
“Rabbits, of course, are nonnative,” Ken said. “You know the story of rabbits being brought to Australia?”
“Yeah, what a disaster,” Alexis said.
Tasmania's fox problem was only the most recent ecological catastrophe resulting from animal importations into Australia. Foxes and rabbits have a very close relationship, too. Both were introduced into the wilds of mainland Australia by English settlers for the purpose of hunting—the first foxes following on the hind legs of the first rabbits by only a few years. The first twenty-four rabbits were brought to Victoria in 1859. A typical female rabbit can have six litters a year, producing about thirty offspring. With reproductive capabilities like that, those original twenty-four rabbits permutated into an army. By the early 1900s, the continent was overrun. They nibbled grazing lands bare, destroyed the fragile landscape with their burrowing, and displaced native burrowers like the hare wallaby, bilby, and bandicoot. Eventually, mass rabbit hunts were organized. A two-thousand-mile-long fence was built to stop the rabbits from spreading. But the long-eared interlopers simply kept breeding—and dug under.
When foxes arrived in Australia, they could scarcely have found themselves in a more hospitable situation. Rabbits are their favorite food. But hungry foxes did not stop the rapidly breeding rabbits. Quite the contrary. The dastardly bunnies just hopped into new territories and provided food for more and more foxes. And when a fox can't find a rabbit, it will eat a marsupial instead. Together, foxes and rabbits have been called the “deadly duo”—bringing death and extinction to midsized marsupials all over Australia.
Ultimately, the rabbits were somewhat contained. Rabbit viruses were introduced in the 1950s and the rabbit population dropped precipitously. But the rabbit still has a bad reputation. Environmentalists are particularly irked by the story of the Easter Bunny. The notion of a “good” bunny out doing good deeds is anathema. So there is a movement to replace the Easter Bunny with the Easter Bilby, a similarly long-eared but native creature, which now only survives in places rabbits, foxes, and feral cats can't reach. Thousands of pounds of Easter Bilby chocolates are sold every year, and Australian environmentalists hope to one day eradicate chocolate bunnies all across their great land.
Knowing all this, we drew some satisfaction from the fact that both Ken and John were wearing Akubras—made from pure rabbit felt. The superabundance of rabbits was not lost on early Australian milli
ners, and rabbits are turned into one of the most iconic of all Australian clothing items.
We were scanning the ground beneath a line of wattle trees when we heard John yell from above. “Moggie!”
Ken stopped the pickup, and we felt a crackle of excitement. John was shining the spotlight into a tip, a pit filled with rubbish and farm debris, surrounded by brush. A Cyclopean figure glared back at us, its one eye glowing like a white-hot coal.
We weren't sure what a Moggie was, but it sounded sinister, and we were on the verge of asking just what we were facing when we recognized the animal pinned in John's spotlight. It was a small, striped quadruped: an orange tabby cat. It looked like it had just walked out of a pet shop.
“Moggie?”
Ken opened his door, picked up the rifle, and flipped down the stand onto the hood of the pickup. Then he leaned down and looked through the sight, his finger on the trigger.
“It's a nickname for a cat,” he said.
Ken, we knew, had shot foxes from 1,200 feet in Victoria. We were scarcely one hundred feet from the tabby. Moggie, we figured, didn't have much of a chance. Alexis began to look a little pale, and we felt a sudden chill.
We had known cats were on the menu for the evening. But when confronted with this imminent feline assassination, a new idea struggled to the surface of our consciousness: Were we crazy? What were we doing out hunting a kitty-cat?
We knew ridding the world of this fluffy beast was for the greater good … and yet, when it came down to it … shouldn't someone call the fire department and help Moggie get home? We had been culturally programmed to serve and protect Felis catus.
A debate began raging in our minds: It was being held on the stage of the Kaufman Theater at the American Museum of Natural History. Speaking against the cats was Mangy. He'd cleaned himself up and was dressed in a suit. A plastic name tag pinned to his jacket read “Director, Vroom Museum.” He was standing before a blackboard, using his tail as a pointer and going over the following list. “Repeat after me,” he lectured.
Cats are spree killers.
They kill for sport.
They shit on dead wallabies.
They make mincemeat out of cute little macropods.
On the opposite side of the stage was Beatrice. She was narrating a PowerPoint presentation. It was a personal appeal.
Since the time of the ancient Egyptians, cats have been partnered with the human race … An audience of house cats—Manx, Siamese, Persian, and Rex—murmured and nodded their heads in approval.
We braced for the blast. But Ken never got a chance to squeeze the trigger. Moggie darted off into a tangle of brush.
The rifle's stainless steel barrel glinted mutely in the moonlight. “He didn't go far,” Ken predicted. The spotlight darted through the dark-ness—as if it were chasing an escaped felon through a prison yard.
“So,” we asked nervously, “have you killed a lot of cats?”
“Yeah,” he said. “They're not very elusive.” He saw us eyeing the gun. “Have a look,” he offered.
We took turns peering through the rifle's telescopic sight. Moggie's lair leapt into the foreground. It seemed as if we could see a single blade of grass glowing in the spotlight from fifty feet away.
Ken continued. “What's happening down here is that we're getting sightings of things that aren't foxes coming in as foxes. We'll go out and spotlight and see a big ginger cat running around. We shoot that cat and the sightings stop. So, it gets rid of the background noise—the sightings that are just nonsense basically. Cats are such destructive pests as well. And it keeps us in good practice. If we see a fox, we want to be confident that, when we pick up that rifle, we're going to be able to shoot it.”
“So,” we began rather tentatively, “have either of you ever had a cat for a pet?”
“Heaps of 'em!” John said enthusiastically. “They're fantastic—if they're able to stay home and be looked after. Unfortunately, in the wrong habitat, they can do a lot of damage. The cat is such a great hunter—it's got that instinct to stalk and hunt. They're great survivors. That's why they cause so much trouble in the environment.”
Ken started up the pickup again, and we began cruising slowly around the perimeter of the tip. We were stalking the cat. “Here puss, puss, puss,” Ken murmured. An orange blur streaked through the brush and vanished behind a log. Ken stopped and set up the rifle again. It was another tense moment. We were still struggling with our inner cat ladies. Ken began to make kissing noises, “psssssss, pssssst, pssssssst,” to lure the cat out into the open. “Sometimes it works,” he said. His eye was glued to the sight as John swept the trees with the spot. We waited about five minutes, but Moggie stayed hidden.
“Is Moggie typical of the size of the cats you shoot?” we asked. “He seemed kind of small for a feral cat.”
“They're normally about two or three kilos. The biggest cat we shot was nine and a half kilos.” Twenty-one pounds. “For a cat, that's a fair lump—and all muscle.”
Alexis, who had not said a word since Ken first drew a bead on Moggie, finally perked up. “That's no flabby tabby,” he said.
We asked Alexis who he was rooting for, the shooters or Moggie.
“What can I say?” he said. “I don't think I could have handled it if they blew that cat away.”
When it came to feline eradication, Alexis could talk the talk but he couldn't walk the walk.
We returned to the prime target, scanning fields and paddocks for signs of foxy activity.
“What are our chances of actually seeing a fox?”
“Tonight?” Ken said, scanning the paddocks. “Less than one percent … Personally I've seen four that could have been a fox. But they just wouldn't give us a chance to shoot them. So we can't confirm that.”
Ken, John, and all the members of the task force were anxious for such confirmation, to bring in the body of a dead fox. Despite the evidence that at least one fox had dined on Tasmanian animals, the public and some government officials were growing impatient.
The situation was frustrating. Between the two of them, Ken and John had shot thousands of foxes on the mainland. They had the skills— tracking, luring, hunting, shooting. But the incipient population of foxes in Tasmania was proving elusive.
“We're going to be incredibly lucky if we actually get one,” John said. “It is really the needle in the haystack. At least on the mainland, foxes have territories—there's pressure. You know where their dens are. But here, the world's their own. They're gypsies. They've got no territories. It's a free and easy life with plenty of tucker.”
John shone his spotlight on two furry brushtail possums—one big and one small—shimmying up a small tree with feathery leaves and wispy, drooping branches. The smaller possum looked a little nervous. “It's a mother with a joey,” said Ken. In the spotlight, their eyes gave off a dull Mars-like glow. “When the young ones leave the pouch, they usually ride on their mother's back for a few weeks.”
“That's a wattle tree they're in,” John said. “They used to tan the skins of wallaby and possum with wattle bark.” At one time, Tasmania had a large trade in possum skins. Tasmanian brushtails have thicker, darker fur than their mainland counterparts, and their pelts were highly prized. As late as the 1970s, as many as 200,000 possum pelts a year were exported.
Tasmania's native possums were doing quite well in the absence of a significant fur trade. “They've gone berserk,” said Ken.
In the headlights, we surprised a group of brushtail possums that had overrun a small barn. At least three of the furry creatures were scrambling on the hay-covered floor feeding on a spilled sack of calf weaner pellets. A small brushtail with a beautiful black coat was running back and forth, balancing on a rusting wagon wheel. One reddish possum was sitting in a stooped position on top of a wooden gate—its thick furry tail hanging in front of it. It didn't seem to be scared by our arrival, and with its sprightly long ears sticking up, it appeared rakish and relaxed, like a ranch hand o
n a break. The scene looked like a goofball postcard and would have been complete if the animals were wearing Akubras and sucking on stalks of hay. “Greetings from the possum paddock, Tasmania,” or “Howdy, Possum!”
Brushtails were cute and abundant. But at an average weight of 3.3 kilograms (about seven pounds), they were also fox food. If foxes took hold, possums most likely wouldn't be eradicated, but they wouldn't be seen on the ground very often. The survivors would all be hiding in trees.
Ken drove on, and John's spotlight revealed two more animals next to a stand of wattles. They were kangaroo-like, but very small and slightly hunched over, standing about twelve inches tall on their hind legs. Their noses were elongated, more like a rat's than a kangaroo's. Ken stopped the pickup and turned off the engine. We watched them for a moment, then the dark-furred creatures hopped off into the safety of a large gorse bush. As they retreated, the spotlight illuminated white spots on the ends of their long, skinny tails.
“Potoroos,” said John from above. “They're also called tip tails.”
“That's perfect fox tucker,” said Ken.
“Foxes would just have them for lunch,” John agreed. “Feral cats would, too.” Potoroos weighed about 1.3 kilos (just under three pounds), making them ideal, easy prey.
The long-nosed potoroo was considered a secure species in Tasmania (at least it was until the foxes showed up). On the mainland, however, they were much rarer and listed as vulnerable, having disappeared from many areas due to habitat destruction as well as predation by foxes and feral cats. Tasmania was their last real refuge, and biologists agreed it would be unlikely that Tasmania's potoroos would survive a fox invasion. And, as with any extinction, their disappearance could have implications beyond their own species.
Unlike Bennett's wallabies and Tasmanian pademelons, which are grazers, the potoroo dines extensively on native truffles, which grow beneath the ground. Much like the truffle dogs and truffle pigs that sniff out France's coveted Périgord truffles, the potoroos rely on their long, powerful noses to descry the scent of Tasmanian truffles, the different species of which have been described as smelling like bubblegum, peanut butter, gasoline, and rotting onions. They use the long, sharp claws on their front paws to dig them up.
Carnivorous Nights Page 20