After this little adventure, Suzi suggested we cool off in the river. Fortunately, the forest immediately bordering the Styx River was protected by law. No logging was permitted within 130 feet of the banks. So far, that rule had been obeyed at least in this part of the valley.
Suzi led us down a path through pure rain forest that was junglelike with myrtles, tree ferns, and spikes of native laurel with green drooping leaves. Along the riverbank, sunlight poured through a gap in the canopy. The Styx was only about twenty-five feet wide and dark reddish brown, stained by runoff from the buttongrass plains higher up.
When we dipped our feet into the water, our toes went numb. The Styx was frigid. Backing away, we resigned ourselves to standing on the bank and admiring the tree ferns. Suzi dropped into the river without testing it and then began mocking us from the opposite shore. “I go swimming here every time I come, no matter what season. Come on!”
“No rat lover is going to show me up,” Alexis muttered. He grimaced as he hit the water, then doggy-paddled over to the far bank, lifted himself out, and shivered in the sun. We plunged in, too. The swiftness of the current caught us off guard. We struggled to get hold of a moss-covered snag so as not to be swept downstream.
Fending off the chill, we took in the surrounding rain forest. The far bank was a riot of life. There were round-leaved myrtle trees, possibly as old as five hundred years; tree ferns with spongy brown trunks hosting countless species—epiphytes, lichens, fungi, finger ferns, filmy ferns— that wore their dying brown fronds like beards; and dead wet logs covered with bright green mosses. Suzi said this rain forest was the work of a thousand years. Yet it was also continually being renewed, always young.
We ducked our faces into the water. All we could see was brown murk. The icy temperature was unbearable. We quickly leapt out and attempted to defrost.
Suzi filled up a plastic bottle with river water. It was the color of Lip-ton's iced tea and had tiny bits of detritus suspended in it. She offered us a drink.
“No thanks.”
She looked offended.
“It won't make you sick. The Styx River is pure here.”
We took tentative sips of the tea-colored liquid. It tasted fine.
“Here's to immortality,” said Alexis.
We hoped no platypuses had been crapping upstream.
We were still dripping wet when Suzi turned the station wagon off the main route through the valley into a gravel offshoot. It was called Skeleton Road and had been built for logging, but the forestry folks had run into a snag. A wedge-tailed eagle's nest had been discovered in one of the trees intended for felling about two hundred feet from the road. These eagles, which had wingspans of seven feet, were an endangered species in Tasmania. There were only 130 pairs of breeding “wedgies” left on the island. Their nests were huge conglomerations of sticks, usually added to over many years and constructed in the highest eucalyptus tree available. Nests could weigh more than eight hundred pounds.
Under the Forest Practices Code, Forestry Tasmania was required to leave a buffer zone of about twenty-two acres between any eagle's nest and logging operations so that the wedgies would not be scared away. Currently, the nest was not occupied, but the forest had been given a temporary reprieve in case the eagles decided to come back. Meanwhile, the Wilderness Society had been using the protected forest surrounding the nest to promote the Styx to the world.
Suzi took us to see the Chapel Tree. It was an eighty-three-meter-(272-feet-) tall eucalyptus, standing on an enormous base measuring eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) around. Its buttressed roots were huge, the size of trees themselves, and they looked like the talons of a Brobdingnagian eagle gripping the forest floor. The entire base of the tree was covered in vegetation: a blanket of moss, hard water ferns. Myrtle saplings were actually growing from the Chapel Tree's trunk.
Suzi pointed out a narrow, triangular opening in the tree's side. It was about seven feet high, and when we walked through, it led into a large hollow. On one occasion, she said, twenty-eight people had crammed inside. The tree hollow was like a cave, dark and smelling of fungus. We shone a flashlight over our heads, but the light was too dim to see how high the hollow went. Liquid dripped down from above. “That smells like bat piss,” Suzi said.
Despite appearances, the hollow was not unhealthy to the tree. When Eucalyptus regnans trees reach the age of about 120, hollows start to form at the base, or butt, from rot, fungi, bacterial activity, and wood-eating insects. Water and nutrients are carried to the treetop through the xylem inside the outer trunk, so the rotting heartwood isn't terribly consequential to the life of the tree. However, loggers don't care for the hollowedout butts because they can't sell the wood, and when they cut a tree like this one, they usually discard the butt and burn it. The hollows were useful to wildlife though—in fact, they were critical to forest life.
“This is an apartment block for animals,” Suzi said from the hollow's darkest recess. Because there was so much decay going on inside— microbial action made things warmer—the tree hollow was actually “heated” in winter. Bats, black cockatoos, sugar gliders, and owls all took refuge there. We wondered if a family of thylacines had ever used the Chapel Tree as their den.
Suzi said that Catholic priests, Buddhist monks from Tibet, aboriginal spiritual leaders, and representatives of the Ainu people had all visited the Chapel Tree and prayed for the forest. We decided to have a moment of silence ourselves.
As we meditated, we thought how apt the name Styx was for this forest —particularly this one around Skeleton Road. The forest was trapped in limbo—designated for the ax, but in a state of reprieve. How long before the choppers came and took this forest to the other side?
“O Great Pan,” we prayed, “save yourself !” Unfortunately, forest gods were notoriously unreliable.
“The government has the ability to act,” Suzi said. “If the government had acted a hundred years ago, we would still have the thylacine. It's the same thing with our old-growth forests.”
On our way out of the Styx valley we saw a few last scenes of devastation: a steep forested slope that had been cable-logged, more clear-cuts, and denuded land with invading trees growing in rows.
What made this all the more excruciating was that just to the west was the border of Tasmania's Southwest National Park. Somehow in drawing the boundaries for the national park, the largest trees in the Southern Hemisphere had been left immediately outside the lines.
29. CRYPTID
Back in Hobart, we had dinner at a fish place called Mures. We sat outside on the docks and Alexis jabbed his fork menacingly at a seagull that approached too close. A festive umbrella shaded our table and when we looked up we saw the face of the Tasmanian tiger. The umbrella was sponsored by the Cascade Brewery, and the stylized tiger was their logo. Thylacines were everywhere in Tasmania—and nowhere.
Our last hope for the tiger was a gentleman named Col Bailey. He was sometimes described as a “true believer” and had been searching for the thylacine for nearly forty years. When we called him at his home in Maydena, a town in the Tyenna valley near where the last known wild thylacine was captured in the 1930s, he instructed us to meet him at a crossroads outside of Mount Field National Park—just a few miles north of the Styx.
In the morning we headed back out toward the wilderness, following the main road along the Derwent River, then joining up with the more remote Gordon River Road. When we arrived at the agreed-upon location, Col was waiting for us by a bridge over a babbling stream. Considering how hot it was, he seemed overdressed. On top of a long-sleeved shirt, he wore a thermal vest as if he were preparing for weather only he had been informed about. His eyes were screened by thick polarizing sunglasses. And his graying sideburns peeked out from beneath a cap with the face of a neon green thylacine on it. Something about his manner made him look like a retired FBI agent. But the green thylacine made us think crypto-cop.
He waved us over to a wooden picnic table and gave u
s his card. It read, “Col Bailey, thylacine consultant, author, researcher.” On it was a black-and-white photo of Col holding a pair of binoculars and appearing to stare at two thylacines in the background.
As we studied the card, he said, “I know without a doubt, 100 percent certain, that the tiger still exists. Just leave it at that.”
We sat across from Col, and he laid down a manila envelope on the table. We readied ourselves for some new evidence. “I really enjoyed reading your prospectus,” he said. He opened the envelope, and took out a neat stack of paper. It was a copy of our proposal for this very book with a full-color reproduction of one of Alexis's thylacine paintings on the cover.
Our eyes popped open. How had he gotten a copy of that?
“You're probably wondering where I got a copy of this.”
“Well … yes.”
He smiled a tiny smile. “I can't reveal my sources.”
As Col slowly paged through the proposal, we felt a surge of embarrassment. How had we described him? Did we call him a colorful Tasmanian character? Had we used the word “kooky”? Actually, we had introduced him as follows:
Bailey is a full-time tiger hunter, who lives in Maydena outside of Tasma-nia's Mount Field National Park. He is certain that Tasmanian tigers survive in the wild—although he has yet to prove it. As the director of the Tasmanian Tiger Research and Data Centre, he has documented and investigated a total of 3,200 eyewitness accounts.
“Where did you get this 3,200 number?” Col asked.
“Wasn't it on your Web site?” we said.
Col maintained a Web site where people could send in their sighting reports and contact him for information. And he got plenty of hits. As one of Tasmania's most visible tiger hunters, Col received constant media inquiries. He had appeared in several documentaries about the thylacine and been interviewed by hundreds of reporters. The media frenzy was not limited to Australia either. “Tons of Yanks hound me. The Japanese hound me. I get inquiries from Sweden, Germany, Italy, France. No Russians or Chinese yet. Sometimes I want to run away and hide.”
At home Col had carton after carton filled with newspaper clippings about the tiger—some of which he had written himself. He laughed. “I've been married for forty-four years, and I've been researching the Tassie tiger for nearly as long. My wife says, ‘Better you're messing about with the tiger and not with another woman.’”
“How did you originally get interested in the thylacine?”
“I saw a tiger in 1967.”
“Where?”
“I was canoeing along the Coorong.”
The Coorong? The Coorong coastline was on the Australian mainland where the thylacine had been extinct for thousands of years. At least that's what we'd been told.
Col knew the mainland location of his thylacine sighting might tend to undermine its credibility in certain circles.
“You may think that's strange to see a tiger over there, but I believe it was a tiger to this day. I spoke to a lot of people in southeastern South Australia that claimed to have seen the same animal.” In fact, the mainland had as many thylacine sightings as Tasmania did.
Col's 1967 sighting had a strong impact on his life. Not long afterward, he began flying down to Tasmania to interview Tasmanians about the tiger. For three decades Col tracked down trappers and bushies and people who claimed to have seen the animal. When he got tired of flying back and forth, he moved to Tyenna and started publishing oral histories about the tiger in the local newspaper, the Derwent Valley Gazette. Eventually, in 2001, Col published these stories in a book called Tiger Tales.
The publication of Tiger Tales shook even more informants out of the woodwork. “When I had my book out, a fellow rang me from Keith [a town] along the Coorong. He said, ‘Hey, I saw the same animal that you did a year later but I never told a living soul until now.’” Further evidence emerged when Col gave a lecture at the Mount Field park center. A man from the audience came up to him and said that his grandfather used to transport thylacines from Tasmania to the mainland on fishing boats and sell them to private zoos. This provided Col with a logical explanation for his sighting on the Coorong. “These tigers could have been released on the mainland,” he said. “Or they could have got out and bred up.”
As for Tasmania itself, Col was certain the tiger was still out there. “I get reports, thirty to forty a year, from all areas of the state, from the Northeast, the Northwest, the Central South highlands, and the west coast. They can't all be the same tiger. There have to be viable breeding colonies.”
Col had recently investigated a promising sighting from the northern part of the island. A man and his wife were driving on a dirt track across their property in the early hours of the morning. As they were crossing a creek bed, they saw a thylacine walk across the track and up the bank. The man turned his four-wheel drive around and shone the lights on the animal. Both he and his wife got a good look and agreed it was a Tasmanian tiger. When they got home, they told their family about the sighting and their daughter-in-law said she had seen the same animal six months earlier in the same place. “These people are in typical thylacine country,” said Col. “Not heavily bushed. Light understory. Tigers were caught there during the early days of the bounty. I've been up there looking, but it's a lot of area to cover.”
“Where is that exactly?” we asked.
“Now, that's top secret.” He smiled.
We asked Col what he thought of other thylacine hunters. Did they share information?
“We're all a little jealous of each other,” he admitted. “We don't get together often.” We imagined Col, James Malley, and Trudy Richards hunched over a map of the island, divvying up their turf.
We told Col about our own expedition to the Milkshakes. It was no surprise to him that we hadn't run into Thylacinus cynocephalus. He informed us that we had made a critical error.
“Remember, the tiger has a first-class sniffer,” he said. “He can smell from miles away. Perfume, smokers, even bad BO will scare him off.” We were guilty of these scent infractions and several more. That was why camera traps never caught the thylacine on film, he said. The cameras were lousy with foreign scent. When Col went out looking for the tiger, he anointed himself and his gear with eucalyptus or tea tree oil, a trick he learned from his father, who had been a trapper.
“You get an atomizer and you dilute it fifty to one with water,” he said. “And you spray everything—your pack, your clothes. It fools the tiger.”
Despite years of drenching himself in bush odors and searching the is-land's backcountry, Col had yet to see a thylacine in Tasmania. But he believed he had been in their presence. “I've smelled them in the bush and I can tell you they have a very rank odor.” He had also heard them. “The tiger makes a very distinctive call like the fox terrier. Yip, yip—with an echo or callback. In the bush, they'll grunt like a pig.” And several times Col had gotten the feeling he was being watched by a tiger. “This tiger's a curious animal,” he said. “They'll keep out of sight, but you'll have the feeling they're there. You start to get a sixth sense in the bush.”
While Col was explaining his thylacine strategy, Alexis was laying out his paintings of Tasmanian animals on the grass next to the picnic table. Col got up from the table and eyeballed them. He focused on one, a lone thylacine shown from the side, with its head turned to stare at the viewer.
“This tiger's had a good feed,” said Col critically. “He's overweight.”
“She's carrying pouch young,” said Alexis a bit defensively.
“Could be,” said Col. “Just a suggestion, make them thinner. They do taper down at the belly.”
Col launched into a spontaneous lecture. “The thylacine had a six-foot-long body (some people say five feet, but I say six). It was two-and-a-half-feet high. It has short legs and a big woofy head and a long stiff straight tail.” We noticed that Col was shifting back and forth between the past and present tense.
“It's like a greyhound dog, very narr
ow in the loins but with a big deep chest which speaks of an animal that has big endurance. And stripes of course. And big jaws that can open very wide to crush and suffocate. The female tiger, which used to be called a slut or a bitch, is a third smaller. She has a backward-opening pouch, which she kept her young in. The male had a flap of skin over his private organs—it was protection, not a pouch. The male's head is much woofier. Female is daintier. But just like you get some blokes that are more feminine, it's the same with tigers.”
Just then, a warm breeze kicked up and the paintings started to flutter off. Alexis scrambled to pick them up before they dropped into the nearby stream.
Col suggested we all go for a drive. “Got room in the bus?” he asked. “I'll take you near the Florentine and Tiger mountain ranges. It's where the last tigers were caught in the wild. It's the real Never-Never.”
As we headed up into the mountains, the sun was startlingly bright, shimmering off the eucalyptus leaves and revealing range after range: the Sawbacks, the Sentinels, the Tiger Range. The landscape was so folded it might have concealed anything. “In some of these valleys there are phenomenal amounts of wildlife,” Col said. He pointed at a rocky cliff. “I've been up there and I can tell you … they could live up there.”
We told Col about our visit to Pyengana and asked if he was familiar with that sighting. He, too, had gone up to check it out. “Yes, it was true that one was a hoax,” he said. “But did you at least see the big fat alcoholic pig?”
Col shared that he had recently suffered a setback of his own. He frequently fielded calls from people hoping to launch expeditions in search of the tiger—and one he had received recently had sounded like a tiger hunter's dream. An American (whom we shall refer to as “C.” here) called Col up, claiming to represent a well-financed worldwide conservation group called Save the Species. “He rang me up and told me he was going to invest millions of dollars in a hunt for the tiger. He wanted me to lead the hunt,” said Col.
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