The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  Like the dodo and the great auk, the tiger found a curious immortality as a global icon of extinction, more renowned for the tragedy of its death than for its life, about which little is known. In the words of the Tasmanian novelist Richard Flanagan, it became “a lost object of awe, one more symbol of our feckless ignorance and stupidity.”

  But then something unexpected happened. Long after the accepted date of extinction, Tasmanians kept reporting that they’d seen the animal. There were hundreds of officially recorded sightings, plus many more that remained unofficial, spanning decades. Tigers were said to dart across roads, hopping “like a dog with sore feet,” or to follow people walking in the bush, yipping. A hotel housekeeper named Deb Flowers told me that, as a child, in the 1960s, she spent a day by the Arm River watching a whole den of striped animals with her grandfather, learning only later, in school, that they were considered extinct. In 1982, an experienced park ranger, doing surveys near the northwest coast, reported seeing a tiger in the beam of his flashlight; he even had time to count the stripes (there were 12). “10 a.m. in the morning in broad daylight in short grass,” a man remembered, describing how he and his brother startled a tiger in the 1980s while hunting rabbits. “We were just sitting there with our guns down and our mouths open.” Once, two separate carloads of people, eight witnesses in all, said that they’d got a close look at a tiger so reluctant to clear the road that they eventually had to drive around it. Another man recalled the time, in 1996, when his wife came home white-faced and wide-eyed. “I’ve seen something I shouldn’t have seen,” she said.

  “Did you see a murder?” he asked.

  “No,” she replied. “I’ve seen a tiger.”

  As reports accumulated, the state handed out a footprint-identification guide and gave wildlife officials boxes marked THYLACINE RESPONSE KIT to keep in their work vehicles should they need to gather evidence, such as plaster casts of paw prints. Expeditions to find the rumored survivors were mounted—some by the government, some by private explorers, one by the World Wildlife Fund. They were hindered by the limits of technology, the sheer scale of the Tasmanian wilderness, and the fact that Tasmania’s other major carnivore, the devil, is nature’s near-perfect destroyer of evidence, known to quickly consume every bit of whatever carcasses it finds, down to the hair and the bones. Undeterred, searchers dragged slabs of ham down game trails and baited camera traps with roadkill or live chickens. They collected footprints, while debating what the footprint of a live tiger would look like, since the only examples they had were impressions made from the desiccated paws of museum specimens. They gathered scat and hair samples. They always came back without a definitive answer.

  In 1983, Ted Turner commemorated a yacht race by offering a hundred-thousand-dollar reward for proof of the tiger’s existence. In 2005, a magazine offered 1.25 million Australian dollars. “Like many others living in a world where mystery is an increasingly rare thing,” the editor in chief said, “we wanted to believe.” The rewards went unclaimed, but the tiger’s fame grew. Nowadays, you can find the thylacine on beer cans and bottles of sparkling water; one northern town replaced its crosswalks with tiger stripes. Tasmania’s standard-issue license plate features an image of a thylacine peeking through grass, above the tagline EXPLORE THE POSSIBILITIES.

  With the advent of DNA testing and Google Earth and cell-phone videos, it became ever more improbable that the Tasmanian tiger was still out there, a large predator somehow surviving just beyond the edge of human knowledge. In Tasmania, the idea gradually turned into a bit of a joke: the island’s very own Bigfoot, with its own zany, rivalrous fraternities of seekers and true believers. Still, Tasmanians point out that, unlike Bigfoot, the thylacine was a real animal, and it had lived, not so very long ago, on their large and rugged and still sparsely populated island. As the decades passed, the number of reports kept going up, not down.

  We are many centuries removed from the cartographers who used the phrase “Hic Svnt Leones” (“Here are lions”) to mark where their maps approached the unknowable, or who populated their waters with ichthyocentaurs and sea pigs because it was only sensible that the ocean would hold an aquatic animal to match every terrestrial one. We’ve learned quite a bit, since then, about where and with whom we live. By certain accounts, however, our planet is still full of unverified animals living in unexpected places. The yeti and the Loch Ness monster are famous; less so are the moose rumored to roam New Zealand and the black panthers that supposedly inhabit the English countryside. (The British Big Cat Society claims that there are a few thousand sightings a year.) Panther reports are also common across southern Australia.

  Some of these mystery animals may be part of explicable migrations or relict populations—there are active, if marginal, debates about whether mountain lions have reappeared in Maine, and whether grizzlies have survived their elimination in Colorado—while others are said to be menagerie escapees. Australian fauna are reported abroad so often that there’s a name for the phenomenon: phantom kangaroos, which have been seen from Japan to the UK. In some places (such as Hawaii, and an island in Loch Lomond), there are actual populations of imported wallabies. Elsewhere, the kangaroo in question was nine meters tall (New Zealand, 1831) or eschewed its usual vegetarian diet to kill and eat at least one German shepherd before disappearing (Tennessee, 1934).

  What are we to make of these claims? One possible explanation is that many of us are so alienated from the natural world that we’re not well equipped to know what we’re seeing. Eric Guiler, a biologist known for his scholarship on thylacine history, was once asked to investigate a “monster” on Tasmania’s west coast, only to find a large piece of washed-up whale blubber. Mike Williams, who, with his partner, Rebecca Lang, wrote a book about the Australian big-cat phenomenon, told me that “people’s observational skills are fairly low,” a diplomatic way of explaining why someone can see a panther while looking at a house cat. In April, the New York Police Department responded to a 911 call about a tiger—presumably the Bengal, not the Tasmanian, kind—roaming the streets of Washington Heights. It turned out to be a large raccoon. Williams, who travels to Tasmania a few times a year to look for thylacines, described the continued sightings as “the most sane fringe phenomena.”

  Another explanation is that the natural world is large and complicated, and that we’re still far from understanding it. (Tasmania got a lesson in this recently, when the government spent $50 million to eradicate invasive foxes, a scourge of the native animals on the mainland, even though foxes were never proven to have made it to the island.) Many scientists believe that even now, in this age of environmental crisis and ever-increasing technological capability, more animals are discovered each year than go extinct, often dying off without us even realizing they lived. We have no way to define extinction—or existence—other than through the limits of our own perception. For many years, an animal was considered extinct a half century after the last confirmed sighting. The new standard, adopted in 1994, is that there should be “no reasonable doubt that the last individual has died,” leaving us to debate which doubts are reasonable. Because the death of a species is not a simple narrative unfolding conveniently before human eyes, it’s likely that at least some thylacines did survive beyond their official end at the Hobart Zoo, perhaps even for generations. A museum exhibit in the city now refers to the species as “functionally extinct”—no longer relevant to the ecosystem, regardless of the status of possible survivors.

  Tiger enthusiasts are quick to bring up Lazarus species—animals that were considered lost but then found—which in Australia include the mountain pygmy possum (known from fossils dating from the Pleistocene and long thought to be extinct, it was found in a ski lodge in 1966); the Adelaide pygmy blue-tongue skink (rediscovered in a snake’s stomach in 1992); and the bridled nailtail wallaby, which was resurrected in 1973, after a fence builder read about its extinction in a magazine article and told researchers that he knew where some lived. In 2013, a photogr
apher captured 17 seconds of footage of the night parrot, whose continued existence had been rumored but unproven for almost a century. Sean Dooley, the editor of the magazine BirdLife, called the rediscovery “the bird-watching equivalent of finding Elvis flipping burgers in an outback roadhouse.” The parrots have since been found from one side of the continent to the other. Is it more foolish to chase what may be a figment, or to assume that our planet has no secrets left?

  Last year, three men calling themselves the Booth Richardson Tiger Team held a press conference on the eve of Threatened Species Day—which Australia commemorates on the day the Hobart Zoo thylacine died—to announce new video footage and images that they said showed the animal. They’d set up cameras after Greg Booth, a woodcutter and a former tiger nonbeliever, said that while walking in the bush two years earlier he had spotted a thylacine only three meters away, close enough to see the pouch. The videos were shot from a distance, and grainy, but right away they prompted headlines, from National Geographic to the New York Post. By the time I arrived in Tasmania, this spring, the team had gone to ground. When I reached Greg’s father by phone, he told me that their lawyer had forbidden them from talking to anyone, because they were seeking a buyer for their recording.

  One of Tasmania’s most prominent tiger-hunting groups, the Thylacine Research Unit, or TRU, looked at the images and pronounced the animal a quoll, a marsupial carnivore that looks vaguely like a weasel. TRU, whose logo is a question mark with tiger stripes, has its own web series and has been featured on Animal Planet. “Every other group is believers, and we’re skeptics, so we’re heretics,” Bill Flowers, one of the group’s three members, told me one day in a café in Devonport, on the northern coast. Since Flowers began investigating thylacine sightings, he has been reading about false memories, false confessions, and the psychology of perception—examples, he told me, of the way “the mind fills in gaps” that reality leaves open. He talked about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in court cases, and pointed out that many people, after spotting a strange animal, will look it up and retroactively decide that it was a thylacine, creating what he calls a “contaminated memory.”

  It isn’t unusual for an interest in thylacines to lead back to the psychology of the humans who see them. “Your brain will justify your investment by defending it,” Nick Mooney, a Tasmanian wildlife expert, told me. I met Mooney, who is 64, in his kitchen, which was filled with drying walnuts and fresh-picked apples. In 1982, he was studying raptors and other predators for the state department of wildlife when a colleague, Hans Naarding, reported that he’d seen a thylacine. The department had just been involved in the World Wildlife Fund search, which had found no hard proof but, as the official report by the wildlife scientist Steve Smith put it, “some cause for hope.” Naarding’s sighting was initially kept secret, a fact that still provides grist for conspiracy theorists. Mooney led the investigation, which took 15 months; he tried to keep out the nosy public by saying that he was studying eagles.

  The search again turned up no concrete evidence, but, from 1982 until 2009, when Mooney retired, he became the point person for tiger sightings. The department developed a special form for recording them, noting the weather, the light source, the distance away, the duration of the sighting, the altitude, and so on. Mooney also recorded his assessment of reliability. Some sightings were obvious hoaxes: a German tourist who took a picture of a historical photo; a man who said that he’d got indisputable proof but, whoops, the camera lurched out of his car and fell into a deep cave (he turned out to be trying to stop a nearby logging project); people who painted stripes on greyhounds. Mooney noticed that people who had repeat sightings also tended to prospect for gold, reflecting an inclination toward optimism that he dubbed Lasseter syndrome, for a mythical gold deposit in central Australia. One man gave Mooney a diary in which he had recorded the hundred or so tigers he believed he’d seen over the years. The first sighting was by far the most credible. Eventually, though, the man would “see sightings in piles of wood on the back lawn while everybody else was having a barbecue,” Mooney said. “What we’re talking about here is the path to obsession. I know people who’ve bankrupted themselves and their family . . . wrecked their life almost, chasing this dream.”

  But there were always stories that Mooney couldn’t dismiss. The most compelling came from people who had little or no prior knowledge of the thylacine, and yet described, just as old-timers had, an awkward gait and a thick, stiff tail that seemed fused to the spine. There were also the separate groups of people who saw the same thing at the same time. He often had people bring him to the scene, and then would reenact the sighting with a dog, taking his own measurements to test the accuracy of people’s perceptions, their judgment of distance and time.

  In the media, Mooney is regularly consulted for his opinion on new sightings or the species’ likelihood of survival. (Extremely low, he says.) But he won’t answer the question everyone wants answered. Flowers told me, “We ponder very often, does Nick believe or does he not?” Mooney’s refusal to be definitive angers those who accuse him of perpetrating a government cover-up of a relict population and also those who think he’s encouraging nonsense by refusing to admit a dispiriting but obvious reality. Mooney thinks these views represent a thorough misunderstanding of how much we actually know about our world. “I don’t see the need to see an absolute when I don’t see an absolute,” he told me. “Life is far more complicated than people want it to be.” In his eyes, the ongoing mystery of the thylacine isn’t really about the animal at all. It’s about us.

  To the outside world, Tasmania has long been a place of wishful thinking. For centuries, legends circulated of a vast unknown southern continent, Terra Australis Incognita, which was often said to be a land of riches so great that, as one writer put it, “the scraps from this table would be sufficient to maintain the power, dominion, and sovereignty of Britain.”

  This is the dream that the explorer Abel Tasman was chasing when he sailed east from Mauritius on behalf of the Dutch East India Company, in 1642. (Mauritius, an island in the Indian Ocean, had become a popular stopover for Dutch sailors, who restocked their larders with a large and easily hunted bird that lived there, the dodo.) Almost seven weeks later, his crew sighted land, which they took for part of a continent, never discovering that it was an island. Onshore, they initially met no people, although they heard music in the forest and saw widely spaced notches carved into trees, which led Tasman to speculate, in his published journal, that giants lived there—a notion that may have inspired Jonathan Swift’s Brobdingnagians. Tasman also wrote that a search party “saw the footing of wild Beasts having Claws like a Tyger.”

  A century and a half later, the first shipload of convicts and settlers arrived. They didn’t know what creature—later named for the devil they feared it to be—made the screams they heard in the night. When, a few months after the establishment of a settlement at Hobart, some convicts caught sight of a large striped animal in the forest, it seemed another symbol of this strange and intimidating land. “I make no doubt but here are many wild animals which we have not seen,” a chaplain wrote. They encountered creatures like the platypus, an animal so bizarre—venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, with the furry body of an otter but egg-laying—that George Shaw, the author of The Naturalist’s Miscellany, believed it to be a crude hoax. From the beginning, the thylacine’s common names—zebra wolf, tiger wolf, opossum-hyena, Tasmanian dingo—marked it as another chimera, too incongruous to understand on its own terms.

  Three years after the colony’s founding, Tasmania’s surveyor-general wrote a scientific description that was read before the Linnean Society, in London: “Eyes large and full, black, with a nictant membrane, which gives the animal a savage and malicious appearance.” More harsh descriptions followed, from the 1830s through the 1960s: “These animals are savage, cowardly, and treacherous”; “badly formed and ungainly and therefore very primitive”; “marsupial quadrupeds are all c
haracterized by a low degree of intelligence”; “belongs to a race of natural born idiots”; “an unproportioned experiment of nature quite unfitted to take its place in competition with the more highly-developed forms of animal life in the world today.” The thylacine was stupid and backward and also, somehow, a terrifying menace to the new society, which blamed it for killing tens of thousands of sheep—an absurd inflation—and sucking its victims’ blood like a vampire.

  This abuse was part of a larger prejudice against marsupials that is sometimes called placental chauvinism. The science historian Adrian Desmond wrote that “civilized Europe, for its part, was quite content to view Australia as a faunal backwater, a kind of palaeontological penal colony.” As Europeans spread throughout Australia, killing native animals and displacing them with their preferred species, their assessments of marsupials were as unflattering as their racist dismissals of the people they were also killing and displacing.

  Aboriginal Tasmanians, who had lived on the land for roughly 35,000 years, were dying in large numbers, succumbing to new diseases introduced from Europe and attacks by colonists who wanted to raise livestock on the open land where they, and the thylacine, hunted. In 1830, just 27 years after colonization, Tasmania’s lieutenant governor called on the military, and every able-bodied male, to join a human chain that would stretch across the settled areas of the island and sweep the native people into exile. The operation, which used up more than half the colony’s annual budget, became known as the Black Line, for the people it targeted. That same year, a wool venture in the northwest offered the first bounties for dead thylacines, and the government of the island began offering them for living Aboriginal people—later to be amended to include the dead as well.