Fortune's Son

by Jennifer Scoullar

  Daniel found political lobbying to be a complicated beast. Alliances shifted like sand. He came to understand that the thylacine question was just a pawn in a much larger power struggle between urban and rural members. The average town dweller enjoyed seeing tigers on display in zoos, and thought rich farmers should pay to solve their own problems.

  But to their surprise and dismay, the Royal Society found that the ‘Chinese question’ was tangled up with the thylacine issue. Anti-Chinese feeling was strongest in the towns, so some city MPs agreed to vote for the bounty in exchange for promises from rural members to support anti-Chinese immigration legislation.

  ‘This is outrageous! One has nothing to do with the other,’ said Daniel, during dinner with a Hobart parliamentarian who was an advocate for the tigers, but an enemy of the Chinese. Here was a man who understood about habitat change and saw tigers being used as scapegoats for poor farming practices. Yet he still planned to horse-trade his vote.

  ‘I hate Chinamen more than I love tigers,’ was his response.

  The members of the Royal Society grew more despondent daily. ‘The standard of moral and intellectual debate in this state is a disgrace,’ said Daniel. ‘The bigots plan to sell out the thylacine, in spite of our facts and statistics.’

  There was a murmur of agreement. The vote would take place next week and they could do little more to influence it.

  The fateful day arrived. Debate commenced in Hobart’s grand parliamentary chamber, before a packed public gallery. Things began well enough. Several members spoke in opposition to the bill. Mr Young said that if any group could take care of themselves, it was the large sheep-owners. Colonel St. Hill did not see that it would be a great calamity if sheep owners were driven off crown lands anyway. Daniel felt quite optimistic when Mr Fenton ridiculed the idea of five hundred pounds doing all the good that was expected of it. He said runs had not been given up on account of tigers, but because of wild dogs and low wool prices.

  Now Lyne spoke, stating that sheep owners lost at least fifty thousand sheep each year in Glamorgan alone. Daniel could barely contain himself. He’d read the report of the Chief Inspector of Sheep. It estimated there were only forty-four thousand sheep in the whole of the district. Apparently the tigers had wiped out the entire sheep population, along with ten per cent of next year’s flock!

  The speeches rolled on interminably, well into the evening – some for, some against. At times Daniel was hopeful of success, the next minute certain of defeat. Everyone wanted his say.

  Two more members spoke for Lyne. Mr Sutton argued that mutton would be cheaper if tigers were exterminated. So did Mr Pillinger. Then Mr Dumaresq spoke. He couldn’t see how tigers could be any more numerous now than formerly. Nor could he understand why they weren’t destroyed at the sheep owners’ own expense. He did not support the bill. Neither did the speaker, Mr Dobson, who spoke in defence of the tigers.

  The vote began at close to midnight, and remained neck and neck until the last. Daniel held his breath for the last vote, preparing a cheer. Eleven against – twelve for, and surely Dobson’s vote a foregone conclusion. That meant a tie, and the motion could only be carried in the majority.

  But to Daniel’s horror, Dobson’s courage failed him at the crucial moment. As former leader of the Opposition, he feared voting against so many of his old allies. So he refrained from voting at all.

  ‘I think the ayes have it.’

  On the basis of Dobson’s missing vote, the bill had passed, twelve votes to eleven. A jeer rose from the gallery, still filled with onlookers despite the lateness of the hour. Public sentiment did not support the result, yet for Daniel it didn’t matter. The thylacine was as good as extinct. It was now only a matter of time.

  Back at Binburra and with Daniel away, Luke and Belle grew ever more reckless. Despite Elizabeth’s efforts to keep them apart, they arranged secret rendezvous. Their favourite ruse was to ride out separately, on some pretext or other, and then meet at the waterfall. It became their special place, a place to explore forbidden love.

  Belle, consumed by their new passion, abandoned her old friends. ‘You are all the world I need, Luke.’

  It thrilled him to hear it. It also thrilled him that she spent no more time with Edward Abbott. He couldn’t stand the idea of her being anywhere near Canterbury Downs. With his tomboy princess by his side, all things seemed possible.

  Even Elizabeth’s direct pleas fell on deaf ears. Luke wouldn’t give Belle up, not this time. The voice of reason faded to a whisper. Belle filled Luke’s mind, banishing pain and grief more completely than laudanum ever had. When they were together, even guilt disappeared. But it crept back home when he was alone, like a soft, insistent knocking at the door. Guilt over disobeying Elizabeth. Guilt over his father’s death. Guilt over Angus.

  Luke hated that Scruffy remained with Molly. That woman wasn’t fit to care for a cockroach. If not for her greed, Angus would never have been down that stinking pit in the first place. He would bring the little terrier home to live at Binburra. It was the last thing he could do for Angus. But not today. Today he would spend with Belle.

  He slipped Sheba’s bridle over her ears and opened the sliprails. He had one eye on his horse and the other on the track above the homestead. When Luke saw Belle canter Whisky up the hill, he swung on to Sheba bareback. He waited for a few minutes, watching for prying eyes. Then he gave Sheba her head and raced off in pursuit. Already tasting Belle’s skin on his tongue, aching to hold her again.

  Elizabeth watched him go from her bedroom window. She felt like the onlooker of an imminent train wreck, certain of looming disaster and powerless to prevent it. Both Luke and Belle denied the affair and their deceit wounded her. She wished now she’d confided in Daniel and she hoped that when her husband returned, he would somehow know what to do.

  Daniel stayed on in Hobart for a few days following the disastrous vote. The decision and behaviour of the House in general had provoked significant public outrage. The wool kings were seen to be flagrantly abusing the public purse. A damning editorial in the Tasmanian Mail summed up popular sentiment.

  Year after year, this pampered industry wins the favours of the legislature. If any of their bills are rejected by the House, a few large landholders meet, urge their views on the accommodating Attorney-General and, hey presto, the rejected bill is reinstated. Thus the wool kings govern the House and get whatever they desire for the protection of their industry.

  The Government puts a price upon the heads of native wolves, even though our own zoos report good specimens are rare and hard to find. They have £500 voted to them for the slaughter of rabbits on Crown Lands, even though these same pastoralists brought the rabbits here in the first place . . . there is no reason why one sixpence should come out of consolidated revenue for the destruction of rabbits, wolves or anything else.

  Daniel took some cold comfort from a flurry of letters to the editor, ridiculing John Lyne and his cohorts.

  Tiger Lyne, as the honourable Member for Glamorgan is now very generally called, is on the warpath, again, on the lookout for sheep killers, nay even manslayers. If he tells us the truth, the jungles of India do not furnish anything like the terrors that our own east coast does in the matter of wild beasts of the most ferocious kinds. According to Tiger Lyne, these dreadful animals may be seen in their hundreds, stealthily sneaking along, seeking whom they may devour, and it is estimated that in less than two years they will have swallowed up every sheep and bullock in Glamorgan.

  Daniel struggled to accept that a major extinction was happening right under his nose, and for so little reason. Like Elizabeth, he felt like an onlooker at a train wreck. It was just a different train wreck. A vigorous debate began among the members of the Royal Society. Some thought an education campaign could do some good. Others believed zoos should try to acquire sufficient animals to support captive breeding through a private bounty on live specimens. Maria Island was proposed as a possible sanctuary for a remnant po
pulation.

  ‘It’s hopeless,’ said Daniel. ‘If a man captures a thylacine out in the backblocks, he has only to chop its head off and claim a pound. This does not spoil the skin, which then earns him several more. Far simpler than lugging a live animal for miles to a train station, in the hope of sending it to a zoo and perhaps gaining a greater reward.’

  Glum silence greeted these words. His reasoning was faultless.

  Daniel finished packing for the trip home. Checking himself in the mirror, he snatched his tie undone and began again. He needed Lizzie. He needed Binburra. Coomalong, his grand old house, didn’t feel like home any more. There was nothing left for him in Hobart, not now the bounty scheme had passed.

  Daniel’s thoughts turned to the cubs. He hadn’t told anybody from the Royal Society about his rare guests. They’d want to put them in a zoo. But he had a different plan – to release the young thylacines into the highest, most inaccessible reaches of the Binburra ranges, at a place called Tiger Pass. Let them make one final, improbable stand against extinction.

  CHAPTER 26

  Elizabeth threw herself into Daniel’s arms as he climbed the verandah steps. He brushed back her hair, a bemused smile playing on his lips.

  ‘I’ve been gone three weeks, Lizzie – not three years.’ His smile changed to an expression of tender concern. ‘Lizzie? What’s all this about?’

  She pulled away, composed herself, then captured him with earnest eyes. ‘Darling, you must listen to me.’

  Lizzie confessed her suspicions about Belle and Luke in a great outpouring, the words flowing unchecked, right there on the verandah, before he’d even set foot in the door.

  Daniel didn’t want to believe it. He denied the possibility, even reprimanding her for allowing imagination to get the best of her. But a final, searching look at his wife’s troubled face convinced him. Relocating the tigers took on a fresh urgency. It would also serve as a pretext to separate the young lovers.

  Daniel planned to lead Luke, along with Bear and the tigers, into the mountain wilderness. Years ago, he’d explored deep into the ranges, guided by an old musterer named Billy. As a boy, Billy’s Aboriginal mother had taught him to navigate the remote maze of canyons, caves and undisturbed forests lying to Binburra’s north.

  Daniel’s favourite place was a rocky pass, enclosed on either side by sheer walls of stone, which were striped and patterned with shadows, fringed with jagged sandstone battlements. This was Loongana Warraroong – the Pass of the Tiger, and thylacines used to be common there. Billy said that, once upon a time, the pass led to a track down the escarpment, an entrance to a vast, lost valley where families hunted abundant game and walked for weeks without reaching its limit. What was it Billy said? ‘A place hidden from everything but sky.’ Then an earthquake blocked the way, sealing the valley within colossal, unscalable cliffs.

  ‘I can show you how to get down to the valley,’ said Billy. The pass walls were honeycombed with caverns, filled with paintings and rock carvings. Into a cave they went. To Daniel, it had looked like all the other caves. But as they progressed into its dim recesses, it led sharply down. Ancient steps lay carved in limestone. After half an hour of climbing in near-darkness, they stood on the valley floor. Daniel had looked up, staggered by the sheer size of the cliffs rising around him, forming an impenetrable natural fortress. It was to this place that Daniel would bring the tigers.

  ‘You must go at once, my love,’ urged Elizabeth, when he told her his plan. ‘Before it’s too late.’

  ‘I wonder if the cubs will follow us,’ said Daniel that evening in his library, after he’d told Luke of his idea.

  ‘Of course they will.’ Luke could barely contain his excitement. ‘They’re completely bonded to Bear. We’d better give them time to rest up in the middle of the day and, where possible, travel with the moon at night. I wager we’ll not lose them.’

  Daniel’s expression turned grave. ‘There’s one more thing, Luke. My wife tells me you’re overly fond of Belle, and she of you.’

  The guilt clouding Luke’s face gave him away.

  ‘This must stop, of course,’ said Daniel. ‘There’s no future in it. Unfair it may be, but such a match is impossible.’

  ‘I understand, sir,’ said Luke, feeling like a fraud. He’d not give Belle up this time, not even for Daniel.

  At midnight Luke met Belle in the stable to say goodbye. The round moon, framed in a high window, lit the space with a soft radiance. She lay wrapped in his arms, while warm, sleepy puppies pressed against them.

  ‘I wish I could come with you to Tiger Pass.’ Belle traced his lips with her finger. ‘I asked Papa, but he said no. He hardly ever says no.’

  ‘Your father suspects something between us.’ Luke ran his fingers through her chestnut hair. ‘He warned me off.’

  ‘Did he?’ Belle sat up. ‘Don’t you dare let him spoil things.’ She kissed him in sweet, slow motion, stirring his blood.

  ‘Nobody will tear us apart.’ He pulled her close. ‘I’ll find a way to marry you, Belle. I promise.’

  Luke and Daniel left on foot the next day at dawn. The terrain would soon become too rugged for horses. Bear wore a pack and carried his share of provisions. Daniel half-expected the young tigers to run off on release. Instead they stayed close to Bear, slipping easily into old patterns, rippling like shadows through the foggy forest. It was only out here that the perfection of their camouflage became apparent.

  Ten years had passed since Daniel had last navigated these forests, and he surprised himself with his sure memory of the land. They stopped for lunch by the banks of a stream. Luke shared some mutton with the animals. The cubs curled up for a nap in the sheltering roots of an old King Billy pine. Daniel and Luke hardly talked, each lost in private thoughts.

  For three days they travelled, forging higher and higher into the ranges. As they climbed, their voices loosened, and Daniel told Luke about the bounty scheme. It mystified Luke that, for a pound, so many men wanted to destroy these rare tigers that he and Daniel sought so fervently to protect.

  The animals grew more bewilderingly beautiful as they moved through the ancient forest. Playing against a backdrop of paperbarks. Slinking across moss-encrusted logs. Paddling in crystal streams. The cubs graced the elemental landscape, utterly completing it.

  Daniel knew their strange journey – humans in companionship with thylacines – could never be repeated. Such extraordinary coincidences had led to this alliance. And now the thylacine stood at the very edge of the extinction precipice. Luke, too, seemed filled with melancholy. They travelled in meditative silence, experiencing a heightening of their senses: a poignant, ever-deepening connection to the land.

  At mid-morning on the fourth day they reached their destination. The sun shone warm in a cloudless sky. With Bear and the tigers bounding on ahead, they entered the pass. The first thing Luke noticed was the stillness. He’d never been to a cathedral, but imagined it might feel something like this. Pale purple shadows softened the cliffs’ jagged edges, and the air hung heavy in the silence. Luke felt the awed reverence of a pilgrim.

  A river ran through the ravine, narrow at times, then widening into a chain of dark, rocky pools. At the end of the pass it plunged, a topaz cascade, down a bottomless cliff. Tiger Pass was, in fact, a little hanging valley suspended high above a vast natural amphitheatre. For the longest time Luke simply looked, the scene one of such majesty that he couldn’t absorb it all at once.

  They retraced their steps, passing dozens of small caves peppering the rock walls. Daniel stopped beside a tall Huon pine. A thousand years before Christ was born, the little pine seedling had taken root beside this nameless river. Growing through the infinitely slow passage of centuries, weathering wind and sun and rain, until its twisted trunk rose sixty feet into the sky. It had served as a landmark for animals and humans alike, but the hunting parties were gone now. The ancient tree arched its branches in supplication, trailing pendulous, feathery foliage across the ro
cks as if to wipe away their tears.

  ‘This is it.’ Daniel pointed to a large cave formed by an overhanging granite shelf near the base of the pine.

  In they went, followed by the inquisitive animals. Looking up, Luke saw dozens of drawings on the rocks, handprints and concentric circles. People sheltering in this cave system over thousands of years had mixed ochre with their own blood to make these timeless images. As they ventured further in, the painted likeness of a thylacine gazed eerily down on them.

  At the rear of the cave a fissure opened up in the floor, leading to a precipitous pathway. Daniel lit a pair of candles and gave one to Luke. King, with the keen, wide eyes of a night hunter, leapt surely down, and they all followed. Bear brought up the rear, his bulky frame almost becoming wedged in the narrow gap. With an enormous wiggle and whine he managed to squeeze after the others.

  Flurries of tiny squeaking bats swarmed round their ears and vanished into the void. Water dripped from the roof. Points of cold light, furnished by a myriad of glow-worms, illuminated the clammy walls. A filigree of green and gold lichen crept over the rocks. Just as Daniel said, crude steps were carved into the steepest parts.

  After a difficult descent, they emerged from the base of the cliff through a leathery curtain of gumleaves. Now they stood on the valley floor. Luke looked up. Above the cave entrance, vertical cliffs towered hundreds of feet into the sky. Stands of beech opened into protected, grassy glades. A startled mob of fat, grazing pademelons bounded into the sheltering forest. The young tigers showed a keen interest in their traditional prey. Uttering high-pitched yips and with quivering jaws, they took off after the fleeing wallabies. Only when Bear failed to join the hunt did they circle back.