Carnivorous Nights (12 page)

By the time we got back to Geoff's house, the other members of Team Thylacine had already arrived. Chris was playing with Scratch, while Alexis and Dorothy were leaning against the hood of Chris's car. They looked sleek and tanned from their day at the beach.

Geoff looked relieved. “Well, this isn't too bad,” he whispered, glancing sideways at Alexis. “I've never met a New York artist before. I was expecting a seedy character with a goatee and leather pants. These people look relatively normal.”

Everyone shook hands, and Chris presented Geoff with four bottles of wine.

“Welcome to the Northwest,” said Geoff.

“The roadkill here is unbelievable,” Alexis said as if he were raving about the quality of the local tomatoes.

Dorothy made a face. “He made us stop to photograph them all.”

We asked Alexis if he had been able to identify any of the creatures.

“No, but they all had a marsupial gesture.”

He got out his digital camera and showed us a rogue's gallery of dead animals.

“This one's completely flattened,” he said, clicking on a torn-up object we would have taken for a shredded bit of old carpet if there hadn't been bone and muscle protruding. “It must have been run over by one of those logging trucks.”

He continued to click. “This one's a triptych—it's in three sections. I think it's some sort of kangaroo-like creature. And this one is totally unfamiliar. It's got a furry tail though. Any ideas about this one, Geoff ?”

Geoff had a look. “Hard to say, really.”

Alexis clicked through a couple more portraits. Then he put down his camera. “What about tigers, Geoff ? Have there been any tiger roadkills?”

“None that have been documented.”

In a place suffused with flattened fauna, the absence of a single, verified tiger roadkill in more than half a century was used by skeptics as more proof that the tiger was extinct. True believers had their own argument, however. The surviving tiger population had simply become adept at dodging cars.

That night at sunset, we would return to Geoff's property in an attempt to see Tasmanian devils. Meanwhile, Geoff suggested we all head out to the scene of the famous tiger sighting he had mentioned the day before. The sighting had been made by a man named Hans Naarding about twelve miles north of Geoff's in a remote area called Togari. On the way, we stopped at a small roadside store, where we picked up the local newspaper, the
Advocate.
The big story was that a man had gone wood chopping and never came back. There was a search party out looking for him. We wondered if the devils had eaten him.

Alongside the newspaper, the store was selling a black-and-white charity calendar, titled the “Men of Marrawah.” Mr. April was the proprietor himself, a bald and beefy gentleman, standing naked and stocking grocery shelves. Mr. September was Geoff's brother, Perry, angling
for fish in only his birthday suit. For a small town, Marrawah had a surprising number of pinup boys. We ordered some sandwiches and picked up bottles of water and a few Cadbury chocolate bars. Mr. April was very solicitous about our sandwiches. He didn't think we'd want lettuce because it wasn't quite fresh. But he did put on sweet purple beets. It was hard not to imagine him nude while he was spreading the bread with butter.

We leafed through the calendar looking for Geoff's photo, expecting to see a caption that read, “Geoff King and Pademelon: The Naked and the Dead.” But he wasn't in there.

“How come you're not in the calendar?” Dorothy asked, flashing him a knockout smile.

“I'd have loved to,” he responded. “But I wasn't invited.”

We thumbed through the newspapers and found a full-page ad for Tasmanian-made Cascade Premium Lager. It showed a bottle of beer with a pair of tigers prominently displayed on the label. Under a blurb that said “Out of the Wilderness … Pure Enjoyment” was a thylacine lapping suggestively from a misty, jungle-like stream.

The island was filled with such representations. The sides of tour buses like the Tassie Link and Tigerline Coaches were painted with stylized tigers. Tourist brochures were filled with them. Tasmania's state cricket team was named the Tigers, and their cricket caps were emblazoned with aggressive, toothy-looking thylacines. We reached into one of our pockets and pulled out a 50-cent piece.

“Alexis! Heads or tails?”

“Tails,” he said, then added with a trace of wariness, “What are we flipping for?”

“A Cadbury bar.”

We twirled the coin into the air and it landed on heads: the profile of the Queen of England. We turned the coin over. Tails was two thylacines standing on their hind legs and holding up the Tasmanian coat of arms.

Alexis bought us a chocolate bar from Mr. April. But then he upped the ante. “That's nothing,” he said. “What about all the license plates?”

License plates? We walked around to the back of the Pajero. Behind the license number was the Tasmanian government logo, a tiger in a circle of green, peeking out of the grass. The thylacine had been right behind us all the time, and we hadn't even noticed.

We headed north toward the Naarding site and after about ten miles, Geoff turned off the highway onto an unpaved logging road that cut through a low-growing eucalyptus forest. Eucalyptus leaves have a waxy coating that reflects sunlight and produces a hazy glimmer. At first it's dazzling, but after a while the reflection tires the eyes. We began to feel sleepy and dazed. White dead spars poked up through the canopy, reminders of an older forest, one that was taller. As we drove, the Pajero kicked up a thick cloud of dust, and we lost sight of Chris's car behind us until Geoff rolled to a stop at a deserted fork in the middle of the trees.

“He was parked right here,” said Geoff, pointing at a triangular wedge of land where the roads met.

We waited for the dust to settle before stepping out into the crossroads. Beneath our feet, the sandy soil was the consistency and color of flour, with particles as fine. A light wind rose, covering us all in a thin layer of white.

“The story is that Naarding was out doing a snipe survey,” Geoff continued. “He got up in the middle of the night to take a piss, and then saw a tiger. He claimed he had time to count the stripes and that he saw its testicles as it retreated.”

That had been in 1982. Hans Naarding was a wildlife biologist, originally from South Africa, assigned to do fieldwork in the Northwest. He said he had parked at this isolated spot for the night and planned to sleep in his vehicle. It was raining hard. Around 2:00 A.M., he woke up and, out of habit, swept the area with a small spotlight. Through the rain just twenty feet away, he saw a tiger standing, its eyes shining yellow in the light. He observed it long enough to count twelve stripes on its back and to see it open its jaws and flash its teeth. But when he reached for his camera, the tiger disappeared into the forest.

Naarding's story wasn't that different from hundreds of other sightings that had been reported, except for the fact that Naarding worked for Tasmania's Parks and Wildlife Service—and a lot of his colleagues believed him.

The Parks and Wildlife Service is charged with the protection of rare and endangered animals, and it seemed imperative to make a thorough investigation. If the tiger still survived in this remote part of Tasmania, perhaps it could be saved from extinction. But the wildlife officials didn't
want to stir up a lot of publicity. Newspaper reporters, TV cameras, and tiger buffs of all kinds would pour into the Northwest if they got wind of Naarding's story. And that wouldn't be very scientific. It would be best, they decided, to conduct the search in secret. A wildlife officer named Nick Mooney (the same one whom we had called for advice before leaving the States) was chosen to investigate.

In the months after the sighting, Nick began a methodical search that covered more than 250 square kilometers of forest, farmland, and coast around the area of the Naarding sighting. He created sand traps in an attempt to document the impression of a tiger footprint; he monitored camera traps along animal trails in the hopes of snapping the tiger's picture; and he baited traps with animal meat. He examined countless scats and rooted out possible dens. And he also ran into Geoff King.

Fairly early in the investigation, Geoff wandered into Nick while he was doing fieldwork. Being a chatty type, Geoff began questioning him about what he was working on. Nick was vague. Not long after that, Geoff ran into Nick again at the local pub. He went up to him, slapped him on the back, and said, “So, have you found the Tassie tiger yet?”

“I'd only been joking,” Geoff told us. “But he pulled me aside and said, ‘You've found me out, mate. Would you mind keeping it a secret?’ I was flabbergasted.”

Nick's search was spread over fifteen months in 1982 and 1983. Sometimes Geoff would accompany Nick on his investigations. One method was simply driving around at night, shining a spotlight into the darkness and hoping to see a pair of eyes shining back at you. Some animals' eyes reflect yellow in the dark, others green or blue, and others red. Most wildlife experts in Tasmania can identify an animal by eye shine alone. Although Naarding had said the eyes of his tiger had flashed yellow in the dark, no one could confirm the color of a Tasmanian tiger's eye shine. So Nick and Geoff would drive around looking for something unusual gleaming out of the night.

One night, they saw something. “Nick said, ‘That's not quite right.’ And we began to get excited. It was a very unusual color. We crept up on those eyes in the dark, so as not to scare the animal off—whatever it was. Of course, it wasn't scared of us. It turned out to be a cow.”

Nick's sand traps were similarly unfruitful, turning up the tracks of nearly every Tasmanian mammal but the tiger. And so were the camera
traps—although they did get some great candids of surprised wallabies, annoyed devils, and stealthy possums. But as far as the tiger, no concrete evidence emerged.

In 1984, Nick Mooney wrote up his findings in
Australian Natural History
magazine. Although the search had failed to turn up conclusive physical evidence of the tiger's survival, he remained “optimistic that more of us will see this mysterious and beautiful animal.” He wrote:

The Naarding sighting had stirred up a near frenzy of hope that the Tasmanian tiger somehow—against all odds—had survived. But every year since, that hope had dimmed another watt. When we talked to Nick on the phone, he was far less optimistic than he was in 1984. Still, Tasma-nia's Parks and Wildlife Service continues to record and occasionally investigate tiger sightings.

As Geoff finished his story, we began to look around. The Naarding site was nothing like the lush, misty forest we had seen in the beer ad. It was nearly 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside, and the intersection of the barren roadways looked like a dusty truck stop. We wondered how many
tiger seekers had visited this spot before us and started to feel slightly selfconscious.

Dorothy and Chris stood around in the baking sun. We imagined they were wishing for margaritas and beach towels (though they were too polite to say anything). We began taking copious notes, making sketches of the site, snapping photographs, rubbing our chins and speculating, and pacing around in the dust.

In the heat and white light of the day, there wasn't an animal in sight. Not a bird. Not a skink. Not even a tiger snake. The scrawny trees around us looked drained of life.

Alexis took a bottle of water, and poured a thin line of liquid into the white floury dust of the road, just where Naarding had parked. We looked over his shoulder. He had drawn a Tasmanian tiger—and we watched its watery stripes evaporate in the flaming summer heat.

“Now you see it, now you don't,” he said.

We walked over to the spot where Naarding said his tiger had disappeared into the forest. The vaguest suggestion of a trail dipped down from the road and was flanked by two large tree stumps that looked like
jagged, rotting teeth. Behind the stumps was a tangle of bracken fern, leading down into a patch of young eucalyptus forest.