Carnivorous Nights (24 page)

None of them had the same ring.

“How about dinner bell for puss-'ems?” Alexis offered.

We began to feel that Alexis's position on penguins was parochial.

Up ahead, the guide had stopped and everyone in our group bunched up around him. He was shining his red beam onto the trail just ahead. A mother penguin had plopped herself down in the middle of the trail. She looked exhausted. In fact, she was probably taking a micro-snooze. “She's done in,” the guide said. “We'll have to turn round.”

“Can't we move her?” one of the tour participants asked.

The guide was shocked. “This is
their
place,” he said.

Alexis took on the role of the penguin. “Go away,” he said in a high timorous voice. “You're scaring me. I don't like you.” Then he giggled.

We went back down the way we came. Perhaps as a form of consolation, our guide told us a little about the penguins' sex lives. “A few weeks ago during the breeding season, things got pretty noisy up here. You should hear the sounds they make calling to their mates.” He made it sound like some kind of orgy.

“Ozzie and Harriet go wild,” said Alexis.

On first glance, the little penguins seem to be the epitome of family life. Males and females “mate for life”—with a relatively low divorce rate of 18 percent, according to penguin researchers. (Not bad compared to a human divorce rate of 50 percent in the United States and 40 percent in Australia.) Husband and wife little penguins raise their young together, sharing the duties of sitting on eggs, watching young chicks, and feeding older juveniles.

But a closer look reveals a looser lifestyle. Partners frequently cheat— sometimes mating with four different birds in one night! Husbands do attempt to keep their wives from consorting with other males—but they're so easily distracted by their own infidelities that they have trouble successfully guarding their territory. Their cries during breeding season are sometimes described as wails, and the sound of all the nighttime calling in the rookery is thought to stimulate sexual activity.

Alexis seemed to be taking on a renewed interest. “Maybe someone should knit them some lingerie.”

“Survival of the sexiest?” we suggested.

“You got it, baby.”

The tour was officially over. Alexis, Dorothy, and Chris decided to walk back to the Pol and Pen, while we lingered at the bottom of the trail. Before the guide took off, we asked him whether Tasmanian tigers had ever preyed on little penguins.

“Maybe they still do,” he said cryptically. Then he smiled and walked away.

With the shadowy hulk of the Nut looming above us, we envisioned a striped quadruped slinking down the beach with a blue-tuxedoed bird in its mouth. Anchovy ? fairy penguin ? Tasmanian tiger. It was an exotic food chain.

T
asmania's not very big, 177 miles from top to bottom, and 188 miles across at its widest. Some people told us we could drive across the island in a day and see everything there was to see in a weekend—but it just wasn't true. There are so many areas where roads, even trails, don't penetrate, so many folds in the landscape—forming countless hills and valleys. There's always something new to be found over the next ridge.

We looked at the map of Tasmania that James Malley had given us. The place-names provided a snapshot of the early-settlement era and were by turns quaint, romantic, and bizarre. Some were achingly British: Queenstown, Stonehenge, Northumbria Hill. Others were English spellings of aboriginal words—Marrawah (eucalyptus tree), Maydena (shadow), and Corinna (tiger). Some names described landforms or a place's most prominent flora or fauna—these included Frenchman's Cap (a high peak), Whale Head (a coastal point), Reedy Marsh and Rushy Lagoon (both townships), Black River (where James Malley lived), Opossum Bay, and the Tiger Range. And still others were testimony to the land's remoteness and the hard life of the first surveyors and settlers: Misery Plateau, Desolation River, Lake Repulse.

There was no name to describe the spot we had marked with an X, the place where James had heard a Tasmanian tiger calling when he was thirteen. It was in the middle of the South Arthur Forests on the edge of the meandering blue line that stood in for the Arthur River.

We decided to take James's advice. Find a high ridge in good tiger habitat on the south side of the river. Head up there at night and listen.

“Alexis, would you be up for a little tiger hunting tonight?” We were eating a breakfast of scones and clotted cream at the Stranded Whale. The claws of
Astacopsis gouldi
loomed up behind us.

He glanced at the claws. “Sure,” he said. “Who knows what may lurk in the heart of the Tasmanian bush.”

The area we had chosen for our tiger vigil was the Milkshakes Hills, a 690-acre forest reserve on a vast swath of land managed by Tasmania's forest service. It was on the south side of the Arthur, about eight miles upstream from where James had heard the tiger's call. The nearest town was Trowutta, the place where James grew up, ten miles north via the road. South of the Milkshakes, there were no roads at all. The nearest town was twenty-five miles away at Savage River.

As we drove south from the coast toward the Milkshakes, much of the road was unsealed. The day was hot and clear. The only clouds around were the dust storms kicked up by our speeding cars. Since we were following Chris, any scenery—dry pastureland, rain forest, and logging trucks—was obscured by a dirty brown scrim.

We stopped only once, pulling onto the gravel just past a wooden sign that read “Kanunnah Bridge—Arthur River.” Kanunnah was one of the
aboriginal names for the tiger. Below the bridge, the Arthur was surrounded by green temperate rain forest. Trees blanketed a sandbar in the middle of the river. A flock of white cockatoos flew over the treetops. Gazing at the dense forest, we began to appreciate the possibilities for concealment. It looked primordial enough to harbor an assortment of dinosaurs, not to mention a widely scattered population of dog-sized nocturnal predators. Maybe James hadn't just been hearing things.

When we arrived at the campsite, we pitched our tents under a pair of giant tree ferns, using some of the shed fronds to pad the ground. The facilities included a barbecue, a decent supply of wood, and a water tap marked “Not for Drinking.” In the outhouse—which Australians called a dunny—there was a logbook in which visitors could write their thoughts about their visit. Most of the entries were pretty bland: “Beautiful drive!” or “Thanks for the dunny.” But as we read further, we realized the little notebook was rife with references to snakes. “Another snake in the dunny,” someone had written, accompanied by a squiggly drawing of a tiger snake. Since we had yet to see a tiger snake, we spent a fair amount of time holding our noses and peering down the hole of the pit toilet with our flashlights.

Much to our disappointment, the search of the outhouse came up empty. When we returned to camp, we saw Alexis crouched down next to his tent. We assumed he was doing some sort of butt-firming exercise, but then noticed that standing just a few feet away was a gray-furred pademelon—a very scraggly-looking one. We had seen dozens of these two-foot-tall wild kangaroos while spotlighting at Geoff's, but this was the first live pademelon we had seen in the daytime. They were supposed to be nocturnal.

Alexis was extending his arm to offer the pademelon a bit of bread and instructing Dorothy about the best method of photographing them in a moment of interspecies communion. “Wait a sec,” he was saying. “Let's try to get …the money shot.”

“That pademelon looks like it has mange.”

Alexis ignored us. “Come on, Mangy, pose with Daddy,” he cooed.

We had heard about macropods like this one. Hanging around campsites and getting sick on junk food. “You know, feeding processed food to kangaroos can give them a disease called lumpy jaw,” we said.

Alexis didn't respond.

“It's an infection of the mouth. It's fatal.”

Alexis withdrew the bread. “Sorry,” he said to the pademelon.

With the offer of a snack rescinded, Mangy loped on all fours over to where Chris was cutting up strips of meat for the grill. Chris shooed him away, and Mangy sniffed hopefully at a locked garbage receptacle before retreating to the perimeter of the campsite. There he sat by the trunk of a eucalyptus tree, looking at us with brown, dewdrop eyes.

We cracked open one of our books,
Tasmanian Wild Life
, written in 1962 by the Tasmanian naturalist Michael Sharland. And we looked up his description of the pademelon:

Ouch. Some of the pademelons we had seen were quite attractive. Yet Sharland had captured our camp pademelon perfectly. Mangy had greasy fur with matted clumps sticking out here and there. Hanging around the camp, hitting up hikers for handouts, Mangy was the macropod equivalent to a bum.

After Chris removed the steaks from the eucalyptus wood fire, we began to gorge on grilled sandwiches made with Tasmanian grass-fed beef. Mangy looked on longingly and moved slightly nearer.

In preparation for our thylacine stakeout, we paged through another one of our books,
Tasmanian Mammals.
Though conventional wisdom says the Tasmanian tiger is extinct, this field guide, published in 2002, was maintaining a hopeful stance.

We decided to share some of the information. “It says here that the tiger is ‘mainly nocturnal but may bask in the sun in cold weather.’ It also says it makes a ‘coughing yap’ when it's disturbed and a ‘high-pitched yip or yap’ when looking for prey.”

“So we should listen for a yip or a yap?” said Chris as he poured Tasmanian pinot noir into our collapsible drinking cups. He was getting into the spirit.

“Yeah,” we said. “But it might be difficult. The book says the tiger's very secretive.”

Alexis gave us a hard stare. “Calling the thylacine secretive is like saying Elvis has ‘kept to himself’ for the last twenty-five years.”

“Does Elvis have a range map?”

He leaned in. The range map for the tiger was an outline of Tasmania with four question marks on it.

An hour before sunset, the five of us began hiking the trail that led out of the campsite and wended its way to the hilltop above. Mangy escorted us for a few yards into the darkening forest, but then stopped, realizing that we weren't headed toward a pile of snacks.

“Do you think he'll follow us the whole way?”

Alexis stopped walking. “Why would a pademelon join a search for this island's apex predator?” he demanded.

We thought Alexis might be ascribing too much intelligence to this pademelon, but then Mangy looked at us suspiciously. “Hey, I was just looking for something to eat,” he seemed to be saying. “I didn't want to
be
eaten.” Then he hopped back toward the camp.

The trail that led out of the campground was a well-used one. First, it passed through what naturalists in Tasmania call a “mixed forest,” a combination of eucalyptuses and rain forest trees. Boardwalks covered areas of the trail that would have been muddy in a rainier season. Fallen, disintegrating trees were hosts to young ferns, mosses, and lichens growing in bright green patches.

As we walked through the dark greenery, we thought about all of the expeditions that had been launched to find the tiger. Michael Sharland, the pademelon-hating naturalist who wrote
Tasmanian Wild Life
, had participated in one of the earliest searches in 1938. That was just two years after the last-known living tiger had died at the Hobart zoo. Led by Arthur Fleming of Tasmania's Animals and Birds Protection Board, the 1938 expedition went out into the goldfields near the Jane River, about ninety miles south of the Milkshakes. None of the miners working in that remote region had ever seen a tiger—but they thought they had
heard
tigers “making a curious yapping sound at night in the broken country around them—a sound they could ascribe to no other known animal.” The 1938 expedition did not find a Tasmanian tiger, either living or dead,
but it did find a set of footprints in the mud at a place called Thirkell's Creek. They took plaster impressions—and later the tracks were identified as those of a tiger.

Then there was the young naturalist David Fleay, who had an actual close encounter with the tiger. In fact, he was bitten on the ass by one in 1933 while taking the animal's picture. Fleay was fiddling with his camera while inside the tiger enclosure at the Hobart zoo, when the tiger snuck up behind him and took a bite. For the rest of his life, Fleay treated his tiger scar like a badge of honor, and he went on to become a renowned wildlife expert. He was the first person to successfully breed platypuses in captivity and one of the first to milk tiger snakes for their venom, so that an antivenin could be produced. In the 1940s he launched a full-on expedition to find Tasmanian tigers in the wild. He thought if he could capture the last ones and breed them in captivity, he could save the species. After months of futile searching, he found what were identified as Tasmanian tiger prints in an area called Poverty Plain. He also reported that he nearly caught a tiger in a trap, but that it escaped, leaving hair and feces behind. And he believed he heard Tasmanian tigers calling at night. He likened the sound of the tiger's call to “the slow opening of a creaking door.”