Carnivorous Nights (14 page)

Although devils don't come out until after dark, Geoff wanted us to be concealed an hour before sunset. “Once we're inside the shack,” he said, “the devils won't be able to see or hear us.” He seemed anxious not to spook the devils, so we rounded up the group and went into the little house to hide. Inside, the fishing shack was roughly furnished with two bunk beds, a large table, utensils, and a brick fireplace. A well-used dartboard surrounded by puncture marks hung behind the door.

Geoff gathered some wood and lit a fire. Once it was roaring, he produced the skulls of various animals—a platypus, an echidna, two spottedtailed quolls (carnivorous marsupials, also called native cats), and a
devil—and displayed them along the table. In the flickering firelight, it was a ghoulish scene—an ossuary of Tasmanian wildlife. The platypus skull was toothless and dominated by V-shaped bones outlining the strange beak; it looked like a dowsing rod. The echidna's skull was also tooth-free and elongated into a tube that supported the creature's snout and housed its long, ant-catching tongue. The quoll skulls showed those animals' meat-eating preferences, with four sharp fangs and a series of serrated, razor-sharp molars. But the heads of these predators were dwarfed by the devil's.

The devil's skull was thick, solid, and powerful-looking. Its three-quarter-inch-long canines were pronounced, sharp, and curving. But the eight molars in the back of the lower jaw were the skull's most impressive feature. They were solid, designed for the heavy work of bone-crunching, and the two molars in the very back had sharp, arrowhead-shaped extensions for tearing flesh. Geoff pointed to the thick layer of bone that made up the jaw. “There's an enormous amount of area here to attach muscle to, and that's what gives them their incredible jaw strength.” A twenty-five-pound Tasmanian devil, he said, has the chomping power of a hundred-pound dog.

We considered the box office potential of
Jaws V—
starring a Tasmanian devil instead of a shark.

Chris uncorked two bottles of Shiraz, and after pouring everyone a glass, we made a toast. “To the devil,” Alexis said. “To the devil,” we chorused. Geoff twirled the red liquid in his glass.

In a drawer, we found a collection of magazines. Beneath some recent issues of
Boating
were soft-core porn magazines dating from the 1960s and 1970s with titles such as
Man
and
Adam.
Chris began reading an article titled “Are Blue Movies Doomed?” Dorothy settled down with “A Penny for Your Pants.”

A picture window faced out the back of the shack. As night slowly fell, we stood looking out with Alexis. Through the glass, we could see the headless wallaby laid out on a patch of dirt. It was surrounded by beach grasses rustling in the coastal breeze. Behind the wallaby, a triangular outcrop of pink quartzite—shaped not unlike the back tooth of a devil— jutted into the dark blue sky. Geoff had set the stage well, training a small spotlight on the carcass. We waited in the near darkness, pondering all the roadkill we had encountered.

“Look, I see something!” Alexis whispered.

A Tasmanian devil was standing in front of us on a little rise. It stood in profile, sniffing the air, in the last remnants of fading light. It was the size of a big, husky bulldog and was covered with sleek black fur with a thin white band crossing its chest. Its chunky barrel of a body was supported by remarkably short, stout legs. Its neck was so thick as to be almost nonexistent—a heavy bearish head seemed to take up nearly one quarter of its overall body size. This fat, hulking head was topped by tiny, round, reddish pink ears.

Geoff had a look of bliss on his face. “She's a lovely girl, isn't she?”

We studied the devil's features. She had a big, black round nose at the end of a short, nearly hairless snout; beady black eyes that were set wide; and an abundance of long, messy whiskers.

Alexis squinted. We could tell he was trying to put the devil into some familiar animal category—without much success. “That is a crazy-looking predator,” he said after a while. “It's like a child's drawing of a scary dog.”

“See how she has a tear out of her left ear?” said Geoff. “If she turns round, you can see there's a wound on her right side.” Geoff knew this devil. She had denned under the shack the previous year, and five months earlier he had seen her with four devil babies in her pouch. He had nicknamed her Shacky. “She must have a den not far away, so she's prepared to take a risk with a bit of light still about.”

Shacky trotted down to survey the carcass, her glossy coat shining in the light as she approached it. There was a hint of stealth in her movements. Before venturing to take a bite, she lifted her head and appeared to look right at us through the window. “She can't see you,” Geoff whispered. Her pink ears twitched ever so slightly, as if she were listening for an approaching threat. Then below the wallaby's tail, she tore off a gob of flesh and chewed it in the back of her jaw. We could see her fangs flashing as she cut through each bite with her molars.

“This is a typical way that they'll enter a carcass,” said Geoff. “In through the anus. They find a soft bit that they'll work and work until they get it open enough, and then they're right into the rich meat of the rear legs.”

We heard the sound of teeth chewing on flesh amplified behind us— and jumped.
What was that?
Geoff had hidden a baby monitor in the
grass near the wallaby carcass and placed the speaker over the fireplace.
Rip. Smack.
“I like to leave that as a little surprise,” he said. Through the window, we observed Shacky using her muscular neck and jaws to yank off tidbits of fat, flesh, and gristle.

“In the morning there won't be anything left of the carcass … except the bottom jaw with little teeth in it and maybe some crushed bits of bone.”

We asked Geoff what the devils would be eating if we hadn't left the wallaby out for them.

Devils, he explained, are incredibly adept at finding food. They'll troll up and down the beach, sniffing for the washed-up carcasses of seals, birds, and fish. Inland, they'll smell out dead wallabies, pademelons, platypuses, wombats, frogs, even dead farm animals. They also dine on Tasmania's endless supply of roadkill.

“Do they ever eat human remains?” we asked.

Geoff assured us that if we ended up dying in the remote bush, where so many things can go wrong—hitting your head, breaking your ankle— Shacky or one of her pals would take care of us. “There's no worries at all,” he said cheerfully. “A lot of the bushwalkers who go missing in Tasmania are cleaned up by devils.”

But did he know of any actual cases where devils had eaten a person's body?

Geoff thought back. “There was a guy who hung himself up in New Norfolk and his legs were missing,” he said. “And then there was another case where all that was left of a body was bones—strewn over a large area.”

Perhaps because of their carrion-eating ways and the fact that they occasionally snacked on dead humans, devils were never very popular in Tasmania. The pejorative name “devil” was assigned to them by the earliest English settlers. It's only recently that the devils' evolutionary value and role in the ecosystem have been appreciated. Today, the devil is the official symbol of the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service. But many of the farmers who live near Geoff still think devils are foul beasts. “One of the things I'm trying to do is show that devils aren't as evil as they're made out to be,” Geoff said. “They're pretty rough with each other, though they don't often hurt each other in their contests. And with people, they're actually quite timid.”

They also might have some medical benefits. Geoff pointed at the small open wound on Shacky's right flank. “She's had that now for two years. It doesn't seem to heal. But it hasn't seemed to harm her either. Devils have an incredible antibacterial quality to their blood, similar to crocodiles. They've done a little testing. So you might be sitting in New York in a few years' time and rubbing ‘devil blood cream’ on your hands.”

For all the gore, Shacky was rather elegant. She was particular about the way she tackled her meal and occasionally even dainty in her movements. Taking a break from her feast, Shacky lifted up her blooddrenched maw and sniffed the air with her sensitive nose. Satisfied that no other animals were sneaking up on her, she returned to her repast of raw wallaby. Over the baby monitor, we began to hear the sounds of crunching bone.

“That's so adorable,” whispered Alexis, as Shacky gnawed on the wal-laby's leg bone.

“She's still got a bit of a pouch,” Geoff said. Like other marsupials, devils give birth to embryo-sized young that have to crawl through their mother's fur to get to the safety of the pouch where the teats are located. Although there are only four teats available, female devils give birth to as many as thirty rice-grain-sized, naked young. Survival of the swiftest takes place as the newborns scramble to reach the pouch. Since only four can get teats, the rest perish. The ones that survive do most of their developing in the pouch, which is like a second womb. After a few months, the young devils venture out for the first time, but still return to the pouch for milk and protection for several more weeks. “The pouch should shrink when the young go off on their own,” Geoff explained. “She looks like she might still be taking care of her young in a den somewhere.”

Shacky gave a little twitch. It was clear that she sensed something out there in the dark. “Could it be a tiger?” Geoff whispered.

Suddenly, the quiet of the shack was ripped by a guttural demonic screaming, a combination of rabid dog and Linda Blair in
The Exorcist.
It was shocking, otherworldly, bizarre—thrilling. It ranged in pitch from deep throaty snarling to insectlike sibilation. A devil with a huge head (“that's a male,” Geoff said) charged down the hill and insinuated himself between Shacky and the carcass. An aggressive, whirling dance began,
accompanied by a series of screams, hisses, and growls. First, the male tried to ram Shacky with his rump, but she turned on him howling and feinted at his face with her teeth. Then he turned his back on her and tried to gain a position on the carcass. But she whipped around shrieking and snarling, and butt-bumped him off. To counter, he tried to rumpram her, but she bit him, and he dashed offstage, with a small bloody wound on his left flank.

It had all happened in less than ten seconds—and we were left with the shocked, slightly guilty exhilaration one feels after witnessing a bloody bar fight.

“I guess that's why they call them devils,” Chris said.

Even Geoff was impressed. “That big male was at the top of the ranks.”

Shacky ambled back to her feed as if nothing had happened. Although female devils are considerably smaller than males, they regularly win such battles.

“You see it a lot with females, particularly when they've got young,” Geoff said. “They can be half the size of a male that will approach, but they defend the carcass and stay. It's about who's hungriest.”

We couldn't help but notice that Shacky was supersizing it. “How much can one devil eat?”

“On average, devils consume 15 percent of their body weight every night, but they can take in as much as 40 percent. This one belies the statistics. The amount of food I've seen Shacky eat over the last couple of months, she should be as fat as mud.”

We did a few calculations on a notepad. An average male devil weighing twenty-three pounds can, on a hungry day, eat more than nine pounds of meat and bone. That's comparable to Alexis, a 180-pound human male, eating 70 pounds of food in a twenty-four-hour period. We'd seen Alexis chow it down—particularly when he was high—but never quite like that.

“Why do devils eat so much?”

For one thing, Geoff said, devils have to cover long distances at night in search of food. If they haven't eaten, they're constantly in motion. Radio tracking has shown devils traveling as far as twenty miles in a single night. During these sojourns, they typically jog at a rate of six miles per hour. All that running requires energy. Plus, when females are nursing their young, they need much more food than the average devil.

Geoff pointed out that Shacky was beginning to gnaw on the wallaby's tail. “There's some really juicy and nourishing food in the tail,” he said. “They go to the tail when they want a bit of a delicacy. Generally, they leave the intestines for last.”

Even without its head, the wallaby must have weighed at least twenty pounds. “She couldn't eat the whole thing, could she?”

“She could eat the bulk of the back end of that wallaby and she would be a very big, round girl. She'd be really bloated.”

We asked Geoff if he had a name for the male devil that Shacky had vanquished.

“Oh no, I don't give them names. She's the Shack Mother because she denned under the shack. But I find it hard to give them names because I might find them dead on the road the next day.”

He looked at Shacky with affection. “It's a bit sad. Most devils only live to age five or so. I estimate she's about four now—but she's had a pretty easy life around here, so she might live a bit longer. In wildlife parks, they can live till they're eight.”

Shacky had abandoned the tail and gone back to work on the hole she'd been excavating in the wallaby's hindquarters. Then her entire head disappeared inside. For a moment, she looked like she was wearing a big, furry, bloody hat.

“She's really Down Under,” said Alexis. “She's going in through the anus and coming out the belly button. Do you think if the carcass were big enough, she would just climb right in it?”

“Sometimes people will see a cow they thought was dead—and it moves,” said Geoff. “It's because a devil eating the carcass has worked its way inside.”

“Ghost cow …”

“Zombie cow …”

“Elsie gets it the wrong way …” said Alexis. “You know what we're going to need to do, Geoff ? I'm going to have to put an intestine in a bag and make pigment from it. Can we arrange that?”

Geoff 's eyes opened wide. “Fantastic,” he said.

Shacky was still gorging when a new devil appeared on the scene. He was coal black except for a single white marking circling the top of his
foreleg. He stood at the top of the hill like a general preparing for battle and studied the scene. Shacky clearly knew he was there. The General's head was massive. (As they get older, the males' heads become proportionally bigger, and the head and shoulders can be as much as 25 percent of a male devil's body weight.) By comparison Shacky looked petite. We heard the far-off peep of a bird—a lapwing or plover—and out of nowhere a third devil raced across the field of combat, screeching and heading straight for Shacky. She merely looked at this would-be interloper and hissed—causing the intruder to zigzag into a complete retreat. On top of the hill, the General continued to stand his ground and sniff the air. Just as Shacky was preparing to take another bite, he charged down the hill, screaming what sounded like the battle cry of hell.