Carnivorous Nights (21 page)

Suddenly, we felt a tug of inspiration—or maybe it was possession. Our backs hunched. Our hands squeezed into claws. We began to bare our teeth. Then we charged up and down the hill in back of the shack, spinning around and thrusting out our butts to repel each other's attacks—all the while doing our best
Exorcist
impressions: “Ra ra ra ra ra ra raaa, yahhhh, arrrrgggg.”

We took turns playing Shacky and pretended to gnaw on giant joints of wallaby meat, while occasionally sniffing the air. As a finale, we devoured an imaginary pademelon tail, using only our canine teeth—occasionally booty-bumping for position—and extended our bellies in satisfaction.

Exhilarated, we entered the shack. “What did you think of our Devil Play?” we asked. It had failed to draw applause.

Geoff had disappeared into the back, and Chris and Dorothy were both engrossed in reading magazines—seemingly.

Alexis looked up momentarily. “No comment,” he said.

Maybe we needed better costumes. Black turtlenecks or some rouge applied to the earlobes.

When Geoff reappeared, he told us about his own wildlife theatricals. Not long ago, a German documentary crew had visited the Northwest. They wanted to re-create a scene in which two fishermen supposedly captured a Tasmanian tiger.

The story was that the two fishermen were sleeping in a hut on the beach about thirty miles south of Geoff 's place. In the middle of the night, they heard growling sounds. When they went to investigate, they
found an animal eating fish from their bait bucket. To drive it off, one of the men hit the animal with a chunk of wood—and the creature collapsed. When they came back at first light, the animal was dead. And that's when they realized it was like nothing they had ever seen before.

Before leaving to go fishing, the two men weighted the body down with wood and sheet metal—so that other animals wouldn't drag it off. Sometime during the day, they told a fisherman with a two-way radio that they had killed a Tasmanian tiger and were planning to alert the authorities when they got back. The third fisherman circulated the story and it spread like bushfire.

When the two men returned to their camp that evening, they discovered it had been raided—the animal was gone, along with a new pair of boat paddles. To prove their story was true, one of the men collected hair and blood samples, which were turned over to Tasmanian wildlife authorities for analysis. Eric Guiler, a thylacine specialist at the University of Tasmania, concluded that the hair was not that of a devil and strongly resembled that of a Tasmanian tiger. An extensive search of the area was launched, but no tigers were found, though footprints, believed to be those of a tiger, were collected. The body of the missing animal never surfaced.

This incident occurred in 1961, and it was still one of the most hotly circulated tiger rumors in Tasmania. In some versions, the fishermen had been drinking heavily and been so smashed that they mistook a Tasmanian devil for a tiger. In others, the tiger was stolen by a government black-ops squad devoted to keeping the tiger's survival secret.

In the German dramatization, Geoff and one of his cousins were drafted to play the fishermen. Geoff's dog, Scratch, played the Tasmanian tiger, or Beutelwolf (as it's called in German). Scratch was filmed in silhouette, his triangular ears doubling for those of the tiger. In their scene, Geoff and his cousin pretended to bash Scratch with a boat paddle. They were paid for their performance in beer.

“When they first came to Tasmania, the filmmakers said they were convinced the thylacine was extinct,” said Geoff. “But by the time they left, they weren't so sure anymore. Tasmania has that effect.”

Outside the sky had turned black, and a nearly full moon hung low over the grassy terrain. Geoff hooked a spotlight up to the battery in his pickup, and we jumped into the bed of the truck.

“Let's party,” said Alexis as he fired his pipe.

“I'm not going to start until you're holding on tight,” yelled Geoff.

We gripped the back of the cab, and the pickup began bumping across the dark, undulating landscape. It felt like we were on a slow-moving roller coaster. Geoff switched on the spot, and dozens of creatures were illuminated. It was like a surreal Serengeti. Pademelons and Bennett's wallabies bounded in every direction. Seeing this burst of hopping life made us laugh wildly, and we tried not to lose our grip and go flying off.

Alexis did a play-by-play of the action. “Nibbler at one o'clock.” He pointed at a wallaby joey munching grass. (Nibbler was a word he usually reserved for young women who worked at Manhattan art galleries.) “You can't see me, I'm hiding. I'm a little pademelon.”

Close to the car, a dark furry animal was slinking away from us. Geoff put on the brakes and yelled that it was a brushtail possum. Moving low to the ground, it looked like a mink stole scuttling across the grassland. “Isn't that gorgeous?” Alexis said. “She's so sumptuous showing off her fur coat.”

Geoff 's truck continued to jolt along, and as we looked out over the moon-glazed grasses, we saw something hefty trotting beside a line of bushes. It was a wombat with a bristly gray coat and stumpy tail. Besides
the possum, the wombat was the only creature among the mass of hopping things that was moving on all fours.

The wombat put on a burst of speed and easily outpaced Geoff 's pickup. For a fat and cuddly-looking thing, it moved fast. Apparently, a wombat's short legs can take it to speeds up to twenty-five miles per hour.

Geoff explained that wombats emerge at night to graze on grasses and plant shoots, and spend their days in burrows. The long curving claws on all four of their feet make them accomplished diggers. (The pouches of female wombats face backward so that dirt won't get in during their excavations.)

He stopped to point out a wombat burrow—a giant mouse hole in a soft hummock of earth—and advised us never to crawl inside. Woe, he said, to the unwelcome visitor that tries to follow a wombat into its underground home. For defense, wombats have a thick plate composed of bone and cartilage on their backs. A wombat can use this plate to block the entrance of its burrow and crush the skull of an interloper. Occasionally, wombats kill one another in subterranean turf wars, squashing each other like deranged linebackers. They can also inflict serious bites with their strong, chisel-like incisors.

In the spotlight, the wombat's stout body and the way it trundled along with a heavy step gave it the look of a hippopotamus. We watched the wombat's backside quiver enticingly as it moved off.

“What a butt,” said Alexis.

Roving across Geoff 's land, we observed more hoppers, diggers, and nibblers. It was marsupial heaven, the Outback crossed with Middle Earth. We felt slightly melancholy at the thought that in the morning, we would be moving on to explore other parts of the island, other thylacine haunts. When the pickup hit the gravel on the Arthur River Road, we crammed back into the Pajero and prepared to go our separate ways.

“Okay, Team Thylacine,” said Geoff. He knocked on the hood for emphasis. “You're finished here.” The next day we would begin searching for more people like Murph, people who believed the tiger was still out there. It was after midnight when we said goodbye to the one-eyed man who had ferried us through the realm of the devil.

“I
f we're going to keep wombat hours, I really need to crawl into a dark burrow,” Alexis said, unrolling the window of the Pajero as we drove down the Bass Highway. It was mid-morning—just hours since our magical marsupial tour had ended—and about 80 degrees. The sun was beginning to beat down relentlessly. Dorothy and Chris had gone off to do some exploring and would meet up with us later.

We were becoming almost intimate with the two-lane Bass Highway—
the sparkling ocean waters in the distance, the dry brown grasses of the cow paddocks, blocks of blue poppy fields, patches of eucalyptus forest, the logging trucks that shook the blacktop. Even some of the roadkills were beginning to look familiar.

While Alexis dozed off, we mulled over the tiger. Before coming to Tasmania, we had been nearly convinced that the thylacine no longer roamed its old haunts, but after talking to Murph we weren't so sure. It's true there was no convincing physical evidence. But there were those niggling eye- and ear-witness reports.

About ten tiger sightings a year are reported to the Parks and Wildlife Service in Tasmania. However, there are many more that don't make it into official statistics. Sometimes rather than calling the government, tiger spotters call someone they know will be more open to their claims. That was the man we were going to see.

We passed a road construction crew on the bridge over the Black River, and turned inland. Our destination was the home of James Malley, and after a few wrong turns into isolated homesteads, we pulled up to a large, nineteenth-century wooden farmhouse surrounded by paddocks. A sheep next to the immaculately groomed front walk gazed at us quizzically as its owner came out to meet us. James wasn't the twitchy conspiracy theorist we had expected. He was tall, big-shouldered, and rosy-cheeked, just over sixty. And his expression was sunny and affable.

“I'm just working on a new tiger trap,” he explained as he ushered us inside. “It's an intricate snare with a trip wire—a tigers-only trip wire that won't catch smaller carnivores. It's baited with a blood scent that frightens herbivores. I've tested it with tracking pads, and so far wombats and kangaroos won't go near it.”

Although James had never seen a tiger himself, he had been looking for them for more than forty years. “I get calls from all over Tasmania,” he said, sitting us down on a pair of comfortable brown couches in his living room.

In fact, he had just investigated a sighting that he thought was quite promising. It had merited an article in the Hobart
Mercury
headlined “Tassie Tiger Alert After Reported Bush Sighting.” James was quoted extensively.

The article reported that a man had stopped his car to switch into fourwheel drive on a backroad in Tasmania's Northwest. As he did so, he saw
two wombats run across a track in front of him. To the man's surprise, the wombats were followed by a Tasmanian tiger. The man reported that the tiger then stopped and looked at him for about ten seconds from about fifteen feet away—and then continued the chase. When he got home, the man immediately called James.

“He couldn't believe his eyes,” James told us. “It sent him right off.”

James quickly went out to the location of the sighting to look for tiger tracks, but didn't find any. “The wallabies were all jumpy,” he added. He took the wallabies' skittishness as a sign that a predator had recently been in the area.

So why, we asked, do eyewitnesses phone James rather than the Parks and Wildlife Service? For one thing, he said, “People get frustrated because they ring the authorities and they don't do a damn thing about it.” For another, James didn't question their honesty or sanity. What he did do, though, was give them a good grilling. “I'm pretty ruthless when I'm culling out sightings,” he said. Eyewitnesses were prone to making mistakes. Native animals, even dogs and cats, were sometimes mistaken for the tiger. “I ask them, ‘How long did you see it? Did he have a bushy tail with plenty of hair at the bottom?’ And if they say yeah, yeah, then
no
, they haven't seen one.”

He's also careful to keep people's names quiet. Even in Tasmania, where a large percentage of the population believes the thylacine is still around, you are liable to be branded a nutter if you report seeing one.

Strangely, that was also the Tasmanian government's longtime excuse for considering records about tiger sightings exempt from Freedom of Information requests. Although the Parks and Wildlife Service maintained they were protecting the privacy of people who made the sightings, the refusal to release any information about the locations and types of sightings for many years made tiger enthusiasts suspicious. As James put it, “The authorities in the Parks and Wildlife Service, they'll tell you they're extinct, but they know damn well they're not.”