Carnivorous Nights

by Margaret Mittelbach

  On the drive over, Brooke saw a dead animal in the middle of the road. It was a young devil—badly mashed.

  “It's sad, you know. I saw him last night.” Her face creased with concern.

  “You recognize it?”

  “Yeah, you just get a feel for them, their size and markings.”

  Brooke stopped to move it to the side, and Alexis jumped out, too. The animal's entrails were splayed out across the blacktop, and its nearly liquefied carcass was crawling with flies. Alexis pushed his camera right up next to the body. “Could I get you to pose with that?” he asked. Brooke didn't seem to hear him, but he was able to snap her picture as she used a plastic shopping bag for a glove and moved the body into the brush.

  Then we got back on the road. “I'll take you to a wild cave called Snail Space, just to give you a feel for it,” she said. We parked by a sign that read “PETS AND FIREARMS NOT PERMITTED,” and walked into the woods. The cave's entrance was a vertical slit in the ground, with ferns dripping down over the top and dogwood trees, mosses, and lichens growing all around it. A muddy, two-foot-wide chute led down toward the rocky entryway. One by one, with Alexis in the lead and gripping a small flashlight between his teeth, we slid down the hole.

  When we reached the narrow entrance, we put out our hands to brace ourselves against the rock—and felt a tickling sensation. Something was moving. As the hair rose on the backs of our necks, we turned our heads. The rocky wall was heaving with brown insects. Tiny brown eyes, crawling legs, and probing antennae.

  “Motherfucker!” we heard Alexis whisper from inside the cave.

  “Careful of the cave crickets,” Brooke warned.

  The cave crickets were only an inch long and didn't have fangs or stingers. They weren't threatening-looking. It's just that there were so many of them, and their antennae were absurdly long—as long as four times the length of their bodies. We experienced a complex emotion: an ancient fear of creepy-crawlies combined with concern that we might squash a rare cave beast.

  As we descended through the rocky slot, we tried not to touch or hold anything. It was disconcerting plunging deeper and deeper into darkness, not knowing what might be on either side.

  After a few more feet, the rocky slot opened into a small chamber. The four of us barely fit inside—and when Alexis shone his flashlight on the stone walls and ceiling, it illuminated cave spiders and hundreds of crickets.

  This area of the cave was called the twilight zone due to the fact that it was not completely dark. When we looked back toward the entryway, we saw a wafer-thin slit of light. That was all that remained of the outside world.

  The crickets, Brooke told us, were endemic to the caves of northern Tasmania, usually living near cave entrances in dense colonies. They were considered trogloxenes (troglo = cave, xeno = strangers), because they sometimes went out. Primarily scavengers, the crickets ate moss growing near the cave entrance and dead fellow invertebrates.

  We stepped backward to get a broader view of the chamber and suddenly felt the floor—mud, gravel, and rock—giving way beneath our feet.

  For a moment, we lost our equilibrium and began falling backward into a deep, lightless hole—filled with God knows what. We grabbed hold of the walls of the rock chamber and, regaining our balance, found ourselves holding hands with what we prayed were cave crickets. From behind, we heard a small rock tumbling down the hole: PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING, PLING. Hello? We didn't hear it land. Gingerly, Alexis sidled forward and shined his flashlight down. If there was a bottom we couldn't see it.

  “Careful,” Brooke said. “There's a drop there.”

  We had nearly become accidentals, like the unwitting wombats and wallabies that fell down sinkholes and ended up becoming food for famished cave creatures. We looked at the crickets in a new light. They were scavengers, weren't they?

  “What's down there?” Alexis asked.

  Brooke explained that if you went far enough into the caves, you reached the deep zone where no light penetrated and troglobites lived. In the deep zone, it was humid and the temperature was constant no matter what the season. Troglobites had evolved to live in these odd conditions. They often were pale or without pigment. Sometimes they had no eyes. Since no plants could grow in this lightless environment, being an herbivore wasn't an option. Deep zone creatures had two choices: eating each other or waiting until something fell in that they could scavenge upon.

  One of the creatures that was beyond our sight was the cave pseudoscorpion (Pseudotyrannochthonius typhlus), a tiny stingerless eightlegged arachnid that over thousands of years of cave life had lost its eyes and pigment. What the pseudoscorpion got in exchange for its eyes and coloration was an enhanced sense of smell, long sensory hairs on its legs with which it could sense the slightest vibration, and a set of rangyarmed pincers for reaching out and grabbing any meat that might fall its way. The pseudoscorpion was a super-endemic, meaning that it only lived in the Mole Creek cave system—and as far as scientists knew, only in a few of those. Like most deep zone creatures, it couldn't survive in the open air. It was listed as rare under Tasmania's Threatened Species Protection Act.

  We pondered the pseudoscorpion's genus name: Pseudotyrannochthonius. (Pseudo = false, tyranno = fierce. And chthonius?) Chthonius had several lives in Greek mythology. In one story, Chthonius was one of the black steeds that powered Pluto's chariot from the underworld and back. In another, he was a warrior that sprang from the earth and attacked anyone in his path.

  When one thought about it, these caves were the perfect retreat for an outlaw species. What if Tasmanian tigers had gone underground when they were being hunted for the bounty? We conjured up a blind, longwhiskered, albino tiger living in Tasmania's unexplored depths. This was the kind of animal Alexis specialized in painting: mutant, cryptic, and improbable …We glanced back at the doomsday hole as we climbed out of the cave, covering ourselves in mud.

  “Do you have any feelings about the Tasmanian tiger?” Alexis asked Brooke after we had all emerged, blinking into daylight. “Do you think it's still out there?”

  She looked pained—the same look she had when she picked the dead devil off the road. “I hope so,” she said, not sounding very hopeful. “I hope the tiger's out there somewhere. And if it is, I wouldn't say a word.”

  20. DRINKING IN THE TIGER BAR

  After our trip down the cave hole, we decided it was time for some refreshment. On the map a place called Mole Creek was the nearest town, so we headed that way. We left the forests and entered a more pastoral landscape: paddocks dotted with sheep, a farm stand selling Tasmanian leatherwood honey, a tabby cat sitting in some-one's front yard. We rolled to a stop on Mole Creek's tiny main street.

  Alexis climbed out of the Pajero. “You mind if I do some stretching?” he asked. Before we could answer, he had folded his body over on the sidewalk and begun executing a sequence of yogalike moves. Salutation to the Sun. Downward-facing Dog. Grasshopper Waggling Hindquarters. “You should do this, too,” he said, looking at us critically. “You're not getting any younger.” He stood up and leaned to the left. “Come on, you guys. Stretch !”

  We looked around. The street was deserted and we figured what the heck. Creakily, we stretched toward the pavement.

  “Thaaat's it. Look! There's money on the ground. Reach for it. Reach ! You want that money. There you go.”

  After Alexis put us through our paces, we began looking around and spotted a red-brick building with a Tasmanian tiger painted in the window. Around the tiger, “Tassie Tiger Research Centre” was painted in black letters. We peeked in. It didn't look like much research was going on anymore. Boxes of files and papers were strewn across the floor. Whoever had been looking for the tiger must have given up—or left town fast.

  A sign in a neighboring window read “Tiger's Lair Café Bar.” We halted just outside of the door. Our pants and boots were still covered with cave mud …We brushed ourselves off as best we could.

  Alexis stro
de into the bar—and then froze in his tracks. “I—oh— wow …”

  We were surrounded. They plastered the walls, loomed over tables, intermingled with bottles of liquor on the bar. It was frightening. A lifesized Tasmanian tiger hovered over the green felt of a pool table, its mouth open in a toothy, papier-mâché snarl. A cuddly tiger toy sat inside a habitat diorama next to a bottle of rum on tap. There were tiger paintings, drawings, cartoons, photographs, newspaper clippings, even tigers set into stained glass.

  “It's like the Louvre for tiger freaks,” Alexis said in a hushed voice.

  We had been in theme bars before. Sports bars. Irish bars. Seventies bars. Goth bars. Transvestite bars. None of them approached the hyperspecificity of the Tiger Bar—or the range of homegrown artistic vision. The imaginations of countless people had been let loose, and creative styles ranged from earnest reverence (oil paintings of noble-looking thylacines poised beside snowcapped mountaintops and gazing across rocky gorges) to wisecracking insouciance (a gang of roguish tigers shooting pool while smoking cigars). One corner of the bar was dedicated to the Tasmanian tiger in sports. There was a tiger swinging a golf club with its tail sticking out of its pants (titled Tiger Woods), a tiger pugilist with boxing gloves (Tiger Tyson), a tiger with a cricket bat, a tiger rowing crew.

  Walking slowly from image to image, Alexis muttered approvingly as if he were at a Manhattan gallery opening. Then he took out his camera and began carefully documenting each work. It didn't take him long to locate the erotic art. One piece painted directly on the wall above the bar was of a slinky motorcycle chick. She was naked except for a black leather jacket and thigh-high boots, and there was a paw print tattooed on her left butt cheek. We consulted our animal tracks book and discovered that the print was of a tiger's front paw—and anatomically accurate.

  “Yeah, baby, give me some of that interspecies luuuhhvv,” said Alexis, clicking his camera shutter. “It's getting a little freaky in Mole Creekie.”

  We sat down and ordered drinks from the woman tending bar. Even though we were drowning in thylacine memorabilia, we weren't sure what to say. Despite the Planet Thylacine decor, the Tiger Bar wasn't giving off an outsider-friendly vibe.

  “Nice pictures,” we said to the bartender.

  She nodded noncommittally. We noticed that all the bar patrons were women. They looked tough.

  “Do you get a lot of people asking about the tiger in here?” we asked.

  “Mmhuhm.” She didn't elaborate.

  Behind the bar, a pile of caps and T-shirts were for sale. They were black with orange lettering and insignia. Beneath the words “Mole Creek Tiger Bar,” a mother thylacine and her cub stood next to a tuft of grass. We bought one of each, and the bartender started to warm up.

  “Been to the caves?” she asked.

  “Yeah.” We got the feeling that every ear along the bar was cocked in our direction. “We're actually researching Tasmanian wildlife, particu-larly…um…the thylacine and its history—”

  She cut us off. “You better talk to Trudy then.”

  The barkeep pointed to a woman at the other end of the bar. She was somewhat heavyset, with dark, short-cropped hair, and looked to be in her late thirties. We had noticed her before and thought she had been giving us the eye while we looked at the tiger art.

  We walked over and introduced ourselves. Trudy was drinking Jim Beam Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey and Cola. It was a mixed drink that came in a can. For about a minute, there was complete silence. The small crowd at the bar looked at us expectantly.

  “So, you're the person to talk to about the tiger around here …”

  She seemed embarrassed. “Yeah.” There was a brief awkward silence.

  “We like the art.”

  “It's all right,” she said and twisted uncomfortably in her seat.

  “Are you affiliated with the research center next door?”

  “That's temporarily closed.”

  “So …are you a tiger hunter?”

  “Yeah …the thylacine … yeah …”

  “Have you ever seen one?”

  Trudy laughed nervously. “It's a really hard thing,” she said. Then she paused for a long time and took a sip of her drink. “People who have seen them—probably people like me—won't actually tell anybody. But they are definitely out there.” She paused again. “They're in areas people wouldn't expect.”

  It was obvious Trudy had a story to tell. We figured if we wanted to hear it, we should attempt to appear more nonchalant. “So are you from around here?” we asked.

  Yes, she said. She was from the Mole Creek area. And tigers were in her blood. “My grandfather was one of the old snarers … and he used to watch the little fellows for days on end near their den.”

  She admitted that she had caught the tiger-hunting mania years before while working at a nearby wildlife park, taking care of devils, wombats, and other native animals. The park's former owner, Peter Wright, claimed to have found a tiger footprint near Cradle Mountain and then launched one of the most extensive and well-funded private searches ever con-ducted—reportedly at a cost of $250,000. In the winter of 1984, he flew supplies into a base camp near Lake Adelaide, about fifteen miles south of the Mole Creek karst caves. Then he set up camera traps in the surrounding bush that were linked by radio to the base camp. Innumerable photographs were developed, but the search turned up no positive evidence of the tiger.

  Trudy herself had been actively searching for the tiger since the early 1990s. She pointed at two bulletin boards plastered with newspaper clippings near the bar. Headlines included, “Experts Split on New Tiger Claims,” “Extinct or Escape Artist?,” and “The Tiger Is Dead: Long Live Our Guilt.”

  “That's me,” she said, pointing at one of the clippings. There was a news photo of Trudy, a few years younger and with longer hair, next to a fellow tiger hunter named Joe Parsons. They were sitting beneath a drawing of a roaring tiger. The accompanying headline read, “Tigers' Secret ‘Safe with Us.’ ” The clipping explained how Trudy and Parsons had opened the Tassie Tiger Research Centre and spent two to three days every week looking for the tiger.

  “The way that I do it is I've gone back years—probably thirty, forty, fifty years—where sightings have occurred and then gone back there myself. And I get recent sightings, too, so you can confirm that they're still in the area. I've been plodding along with this for about ten years.”

  “So have you ever seen a tiger?” we asked again.

  She looked at us and gave us a Mona Lisa smile.

  We decided to try a different tack. “Why do you think there isn't any hard evidence that the tiger survived? Like scat or tracks?”

  She thought there probably was scientific evidence—but that there was a movement to suppress it.

  “The Tasmanian government doesn't want them to be found,” she said. “So at the moment you can't take any scat out of Tasmania to prove that it's thylacine, devil, or whatever. There were some guys over from England. They got a lot of scat that they wouldn't let them take out of Tassie.”

  The story was that a British researcher named Bob Eeles had arrived in Tasmania in June 2001 with the expectation of obtaining scat samples from the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston. (Over the years, copious amounts of scat had been donated to this museum in the hopes that it would someday be scientifically identified as thylacine excrement.) According to one article, Eeles was expecting to take back “armfuls of poo” to be examined by the “ancient DNA lab” at Oxford. However, the removal of the scat was blocked by museum and government officials, who said the scat was valuable scientific data and they were not permitting it to be taken out of Tasmania—and certainly not back to England. In the words of one defender of the poop, “the days of colonial plundering are gone.”

  “That's too bad about the scat … So what was your best thylacine sighting?” We thought we would try again.

  “Personally, or—?”

  “Personally.”

  “I'm
not going to say with all these listening.” She pointed at the other women clustered around the bar and then turned all the way around on her barstool so that her back was to the other patrons. She spoke quietly.

  “It was late last year, in November. No,” she corrected herself. “It was in September or October. And it was just one of those things … when you see something that you don't believe you've actually seen.”

  She had been camping out in a tent in the bush near Mole Creek. “It was about three o'clock in the morning. And my dog—a little border col-lie—started to go a bit silly.”

  Emerging from behind her car's trailer, she saw a tan-colored animal. And she shone a spotlight on it. “I saw the stripes, and I said ‘naahhh, it couldn't be.’ So I took the spotlight off it and then put it on again. And it couldn't be anything else. The stripes were so distinctive. It was the first time I'd seen one—after all those years of searching … It was nowhere near as big as what I got the impression they were.”

  “How big?”

  “I don't know. Probably eighteen inches.”

  Eighteen inches? What kind of Lilliputian tiger was that? We found ourselves feeling deflated. Maybe it was a juvenile. Or a big-ass feral tabby cat.

  We weren't comfortable directly challenging her story. Instead, as tactfully as we could, we asked if she was teasing us—taking the piss as it were.

  She laughed and pointed at an older woman at the bar. “That's the real Trudy over there.”

  Huh?

  Everyone at the bar laughed. “I'm Trudy's mum,” the older woman said. “You know Trudy lives out in the bush without electricity.”