Carnivorous Nights

by Margaret Mittelbach

  “What's wrong with the forests nearby?” Alexis said. “Why don't they promote those?”

  “Maybe they don't want people to get too attached to them,” we suggested.

  “It's like they're keeping trees in concentration camps—like they did with the Tasmanian aboriginals,” he continued.

  We wandered into the EcoCentre's gift shop, where we found stuffed devils and possums. They all had a curious flattened look. “They look like they've been run over by logging trucks,” said Alexis. “I think I've seen enough fake forest.”

  We returned to the relentless, shadeless heat of the real world. Inside the car, the wombat and devil scat had been brought back to life by the baking sun, and the Pajero smelled like the Bronx Zoo. As we drove off, we imagined wiggly stink waves trailing behind us.

  Alexis stared out the window and loaded his pipe. “That was depressing,” he said. “Human beings never fail to disappoint me.”

  About thirty miles further down the highway, we saw a sign for the Weldborough Pass Rainforest Walk and stopped. It turned out to be a well-groomed path through a 272-acre patch of temperate rain forest. It was filled with interpretive signs intended to educate children about the rain forest. The signs, put up by the Parks and Wildlife Service, were told from the point of view of “Grandma Myrtle,” an ancient rain forest tree. The actual forest was luxuriant and primeval. The understory was dominated by huge tree ferns—sunlight streamed through their ten-foot-long fronds creating patterns on the ground. Reaching up high into the sky were furrowed old myrtle trees, their trunks covered in aquamarine lichens and their roots carpeted with moss.

  Grandma Myrtle's home was beautiful, but it was also desperately small. The total acreage translated to less than half of a square mile, and we could have finished the circuit in ten minutes if Alexis hadn't wandered off the path to pee behind a tree fern. No one had ever mapped the territories of thylacines, but one scientist who studied bounty records estimated the home range for a pair of tigers could be anywhere from thirty-four to fifty-four square miles. For a thylacine, this reserve could hardly be called a habitat. And the thylacine's relatives, the spotted-tailed quolls, were particularly reliant on wet, old-growth forests like these. They used fallen logs and tree hollows as hiding places and dens. Male spotted-tails had territories of twelve hundred acres (about two square miles) and could travel twelve miles a night. If you think of a territory as an animal's house, the reserve would just fit into a quoll's broom closet. And much of the forest outside its boundaries was still fair game for the chainsaws.

  From the top of the Weldborough Pass (elevation 1,952 feet), the road plunged into the Pyengana valley, nestled between wooded hills and filled with verdant pastureland. Tasmania is known for English-style landscapes, and this lush valley truly fit the bill. Except for the eucalyptus trees on the hills, Thomas Hardy would have felt quite at home.

  By the time the winding road reached the valley floor, Alexis was not only high but entering a post-pot food frenzy. We made a beeline for a sign that read “Pyengana Dairy, Makers of Cloth-bound Cheddar Cheese.”

  Behind a long, low building, a hundred brown-and-white dairy cows were grazing on emerald green grass. Inside, we found a formal tasting room, where a young woman offered us cubes of cheddar cheese, starting from mild and moving up to sharp.

  “God, this is delicious,” Alexis said, eyeing some lemon-flavored biscuits on a shelf. “Should we get cookies? Let's get cookies.”

  We ended up with a brick of sharp cheddar and a round of soft washedrind cheese named George after the George River that cut through the valley. Then while leaning against the Pajero and breaking off hunks of cheese, we pulled out a photocopy of a Sydney Morning Herald article about Pyengana's 1995 thylacine sighting. The park ranger had told the newspaper that he was 150 percent sure that he had seen a thylacine:

  What I viewed for two minutes was about half the size of a fully matured German shepherd dog, he had stripes over his body from about half way down, and his tail was curved like a kangaroo's.… He sniffed the ground, lifted his head and ran into the bush. He was a scrappy color like a dingo—that horrible sandy color that looks like he needed a bath.

  It sounded pretty convincing.

  After gorging on cheese, we drove over to the Pub in the Paddock, which was the only other building in the valley as far as we could see. It looked like a good place to get information. However, just outside the pub, we were sidetracked by the sight of a spectacular pig. The pig— which was the size of a mini-tractor—was standing in a pen, where a sign announced his name was Slops and read “HI! GEEZ I'M DRY. I'D LUV A BEER.” Funny, he didn't look dry. He looked like he had just come back from The Lost Weekend.

  Next to Slops's muddy pen, two rusting drums were filled with hundreds of empty beer bottles, or stubbies as they're called in Australia. The most popular beer in northern Tasmania, we had learned, was locally made Boag's Draught. But Slops wasn't picky. Sifting through his collection, we found bottles of Cascade Export Stout, Victoria Bitter, James Boag's Premium Light, Mercury Medium Sweet Alcoholic Cider, and Carlton Cold-Filtered Bitter. He snorted at us through the fence. On closer inspection, he didn't look so much like a souse as a friend, grunting congenially and inviting us to share a cold one with him.

  “Do you think he wants another beer?”

  “If Slops has a drink, I'm going to light up another bowl,” said Alexis.

  The Pub in the Paddock was a bed-and-breakfast as well as a pub, so we decided to take a room there for the night in order to pursue our tiger investigations. Inside, the barman and four or five customers were deep in conversation. After much hemming and hawing, we finally caught his attention. In spite of the fact that he owned a beer-drinking pig, he was a no-nonsense guy. He asked us to pay for our room in advance—and he informed us that since there was nowhere else to eat in Pyengana, we would be having dinner in his pub at six o'clock.

  We were aching to ask about the Pyengana tiger sighting, but there was something about the barman's cool manner that made us reticent to raise the subject.

  “Nice pig,” we said instead.

  This turned out to be an okay topic. The barman informed us that Slops had recently been cutting back on his alcohol consumption. Representatives from the RSPCA had stopped by not long before. They had suggested that drinking Boag's Draught night after night wasn't healthy for a pig. So the barman had begun watering down the contents of Slops's stubbies, creating a pigs-only lite beer. The barman sighed and looked wistful. Gone were the days when Slops could drink seventy-six full-strength beers in an evening.

  He seemed to be opening up, and we thought it was a good time to introduce the subject of the tiger.

  “So …uh… we'd heard there was a tiger sighting here a few years ago …”

  He looked at us coldly for a moment, as if he were examining a speck of dirt on the bar. “Hoax,” he said curtly.

  The men and women huddling around the bar looked our way. We saw a ripple of recognition in their eyes: oooooh, tiger nutters.

  The barman looked as if he would have liked to have ended the conversation there.

  “But wasn't it a park ranger who saw the tiger?” we asked.

  “It was a hoax,” he repeated. Clearly, something about the story offended his sensibilities. He told us the rest of it reluctantly.

  The Pub in the Paddock—and Slops—changed hands frequently. This barman was the fourth owner since the purported tiger sighting. The fellow who owned it in 1995 had evidently paid a part-time forest ranger $500 to say he had seen a tiger by the town's famous high waterfall. “It brought a mess of TV crews and visitors from the mainland. The pub was crowded for three weeks.” It had all been a ploy to drum up business— apparently it was still working. The people at the bar seemed to be quietly chuckling.

  We decided to buy Slops a beer. At least the pig wasn't a hoax. The barman sold us a watered-down Cascade Premium Lager with two Tasmanian tigers on the label.

&n
bsp; As we walked out to Slops's pen, Alexis looked dejected. “I can't believe it was a hoax,” he said.

  “Aren't all sightings inherently hoaxes if you think the tiger's extinct?”

  “I don't know … Maybe I was temporarily deluded into thinking there was some hope.”

  Not sure about the proper method of feeding beer to a pig, we tentatively poked the bottle over the fence. Slops seized the neck between his lips and chugged it in a single gulp.

  Alexis went over to the Pajero and grabbed the heavy case containing his art supplies. “I'm going to paint a platypus,” he announced.

  “You're not inspired to do a thylacine?”

  “Not today. I don't want to go near the animal that suddenly seems never to have existed.” He disappeared into the pub.

  We decided to leave him to it—this was the first time he had seemed interested in drawing—and drove six miles out to St. Columba Falls, where the barman said the fake sighting had occurred. Who knew? Maybe the hoax was a hoax.

  We left the Pajero in a parking area next to a tour bus—with the image of a thylacine painted on its side. It took us about ten minutes to walk along the path to the falls. They were 295 feet high, with water pouring down on huge slabs of rock. The stream that flowed out of the waterfall burbled alongside banks overgrown with sassafras trees and tree ferns. The scenery reminded us of the Cascade Beer ad. All that was missing was a seductive-looking thylacine emerging from a bank of tree ferns to lap the water.

  We stood there for about twenty minutes, willing a Tasmanian tiger to come out from behind the trees. We weren't picky. Relict, ghost, clone, animatronic, even one made from carpet fragments would do. But all we saw were black cockatoos flying over the treetops.

  When we got back to the pub, we found Alexis in our room. It was pretty nice, a triple, designed for families and groups traveling together like ourselves—and it had been immaculate when the barman first showed it to us. Though we had been gone for less than two hours, Alexis had completely trashed the place. What had been a prim, bounce-a-coin-off-the-tight-fitting-sheets kind of room was now an artist's atelier cum opium den. The scent of marijuana blended with the acrid odor of chemicals. Dirty paintbrushes, crumpled pieces of paper, and plastic cups filled with dark, oozy liquids were spread around the room. Bloody tissues had been scattered across the floor.

  “I lost my shit,” Alexis said.

  We were stunned. Apparently he had gone off the deep end. “What happened?”

  “No, I really lost my shit. Take a look out the window.”

  The bags of devil and wombat scat had been removed from the Pajero and were now lying on the ground next to a neighboring cow pasture.

  “I was drying them on the windowsill—and they fell out.”

  We turned around and noticed that Alexis's foot was bandaged up.

  “Have you been bleeding?”

  “A leech got me. I must have picked it up when I went to pee in the forest.”

  We imagined a hungry leech sensing the hot stream of urine and thinking “mealtime!” before inching over to Alexis's sandals. Alexis turned on his digital camera and showed us photos of the leech embedded in the sole of his bare foot. He had used his mini-blowtorch to heat up the ravenous worm until it disengaged. Then he put the creature—still engorged with his blood—in a clear, lidded paint cup. He had completely documented the experience on camera. At the bottom of the paint container, the leech was still alive, writhing slightly.

  Unfortunately, he'd had a little trouble staunching the bleeding. “Yeah, it was really flowing.” As the leech was slurping, it had secreted the anticoagulant chemical, hiruden, from its salivary gland to prevent Alexis's blood from clotting.

  Despite the chaos in the room, Alexis had produced a striking drawing. He had mushed up mud collected from the Meander River with acrylic matte medium from his art case. The result was a chocolate brown pigment.

  “I mixed up four different concentrations, and I started with the lightest density and then progressively went darker. Then it sort of had a life of its own.”

  It had come alive. Alexis had transformed the detritus-flecked mud into a platypus. The duck-billed animal was pictured from above, propelling itself through invisible water and twisting slightly, with its furry brown tail acting as a rudder.

  “What about the scat?” we said, glancing out the window.

  “Maybe just leave it.”

  “You don't want to use it for pigment?”

  “I don't know if it'll work. It's kind of obvious, don't you think?”

  “Uh—” Did other artists use wombat scat in their paintings? Either way, we couldn't leave it there. The publican had already branded us personae non gratae after our tiger question. If he toured the building's perimeter every night before bed, we didn't want him to find Baggies full of unexplained animal shit lying outside our window.

  Retrieving the contraband would be a delicate matter.

  “Let us handle this,” we told Alexis.

  We located an unobtrusive side door (so we wouldn't have to go past the prying eyes in the bar), snuck out, hopped over some cow-proof fencing, and retrieved the renegade scat. No one was the wiser.

  When we got back to the room, we saw that our thin-skinned friend had painted more than the platypus. He had made a drawing of the thylacine. It was in mid-stride, glancing furtively off to the right side of the paper and drying under his bed.

  25. BEACHES AND BEASTS

  We left the valley with our tails between our legs and headed down to the coast. From Pyengana down to the sea was only thirteen miles, and we soon found ourselves in St. Helens, a funky beach town and fishing port perched on the mouth of George's Bay, where the George River (the one with the cheese named after it) poured into the sea.

  In front of us, the vast expanse of the Tasman Sea stretched out toward New Zealand. Before getting to the coast, we had been feeling glum. Things were looking grim for the tiger. But the wide-open ocean inspired us to take a break from our search. We would wash away the hoax with a swim.

  Driving north along the coast road, we saw vista after vista of pristine coves and inlets. We stopped at one, Binalong Bay, a semicircle of blue water bordered by a curving stretch of pure white sand. In the distance, a small motorboat was collecting saltwater crayfish from submerged traps attached to buoys. We walked for about a mile along a sandy trail lined with white-barked eucalyptus trees and coastal shrubs, then climbed over slippery rocks, put on our swimming masks, and jumped in. Considering how hot the air temperature was—about 85 degrees—the water in the bay was unexpectedly cold. However, we forgot about the chill when we saw what lay below us.

  The granite reef was as alive as any forest. Tall kelps and seaweeds grew from holdfasts on the rocky bottom and swayed with the current. It felt like we were sitting on top of a greenhouse looking down through the glass on unusually active and unruly garden beds. The kelp came in a variety of colors—gray, olive green, black-brown, even pinkish—and in an astonishing array of forms, branching into long streaming “leaves,” blooming into saw-toothed needles surrounded by air-filled floats, waving cabbages, rocking conifers, rolling corals, slow-dancing twigs, and nodding ferns. It was mesmerizing.

  Underwater, we could see thirty feet in any direction. In the kelp beds, schools of silvery minnows dashed among the flowing strands. Dozens of domed blue jellyfish pulsed through the water. We dove into the cool of the streaming forest, and when Alexis surfaced, he cupped his hands and pushed a seahorse up through a column of water. The seahorse was yellowish green with a long snout, a dragonish mane, a long curled tail, and a prominent gut. We recognized it as the aptly named big-bellied seahorse, which is sometimes kidnapped from its salty home for the aquarium trade and for use in traditional medicines. Lacking the strong-muscled tails that most ocean vertebrates use to propel themselves through the water, seahorses are very weak swimmers and have to curl their tails around kelp strands to prevent the current from dragging them away. Af
ter getting its bearings, Alexis's seahorse teetered down to hide itself amongst the kelp again.

  When the seahorse finally disappeared, we looked up to see a large stingray—about five feet across—hovering in front of us. Before we had time to panic, it glided off, fluttering and curling its winglike fins. It occurred to us that there were other large creatures out there: sharks, sea turtles, dolphins, seals, and somewhere further out even the giant squid.

  Giant squid, also known as Architeuthis, are the largest invertebrates in the world. Until the 1860s when the first partial specimen was brought back to land, giant squids were thought to be creatures of myth—sea monsters that haunted sailors' nightmares. Though more than a hundred specimens have since been recovered (either washed up on beaches or caught in fishing nets), to this day no one has ever seen a giant squid alive in its undersea habitat. From dead bodies and other evidence (undigested giant squid beaks as long as six inches have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales), it's known that giant squid can grow to a length of fiftyfive feet, possibly longer. Their two long tentacles and eight arms are lined with round, toothed suckers that they use to grip their prey. Their beaks are used to hack up prey before swallowing, and their eyes (hubcapsized, growing as large as fifteen inches in diameter) are the largest of any animal in the world. They're preyed on by sperm whales—which themselves reach a length of sixty feet and ninety thousand pounds—and in whale-on-squid battles, the giant squid sometimes leave circular sucker scars on whales' heads.

  Some of the first reports of the giant squid's existence came from whaling vessels. We thought about Moby-Dick, Herman Melville's mid-nineteenth-century account of a monomaniacal whaling voyage to the South Seas. In one chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, and the crew of the Pequod encounter a giant squid while sailing toward the island of Java:

  A vast pulpy mass, furlongs in length and breadth, of a glancing creamcolor, lay floating on the water, innumerable long arms radiating from its centre, and curling and twisting like a nest of anacondas, as if blindly to clutch at any object within reach. No perceptible face or front did it have; no conceivable token of either sensation or instinct; but undulated there on the billows, an unearthly, formless, chance-like apparition of life.