Carnivorous Nights (37 page)

Outside, the sun beat down on brown grass. There was hardly a tree in sight—unless you counted the lobbed-off tree ferns that had been transplanted into a bed of wood chips.

“I don't get it. Is this where the forestry people have their offices?” Alexis said.

It was. The EcoCentre was actually a building within a building. Forestry Tasmania's offices were hidden from public view in a three-story wooden structure surrounded by the outer glass wall. The EcoCentre was designed to be energy-saving, tilting toward the north to receive maximum sun exposure in winter. During the summer, louvers—controlled by smart-building software—opened and closed to keep the building cool and funnel the warm air back outside. The public space, with its high-tech hardware and software, wrapped around the offices like a doughnut.

It was a postapocalyptic design. An eco-friendly building erected by the same people who were destroying habitats just down the road. They even had an Orwellian slogan: “Forestry Tasmania: Growing Our Future.”

Alexis looked like he was going to foam at the mouth.

“Is this their vision of the future?” he said. “Highly controlled simulations of what Tasmania used to look like? It's like
Silent Running.
” (In the movie
Silent Running
, the world's last forests are preserved on a spaceship bio-dome, because they can no longer survive on a ravaged Earth.) Alexis began to peruse the informational sheets scattered around the exhibits. A fact sheet on Tasmania's tall trees explained that Forestry Tasmania protected all trees over eighty-five meters tall (279 feet) and suggested that if visitors wanted to see some of the Northeast's tall trees they should drive to the Evercreech Forest Reserve. The reserve was thirty miles from the EcoCentre as the crow flies and one hundred miles by road.

“What's wrong with the forests nearby?” Alexis said. “Why don't they promote those?”

“Maybe they don't want people to get too attached to them,” we suggested.

“It's like they're keeping trees in concentration camps—like they did with the Tasmanian aboriginals,” he continued.

We wandered into the EcoCentre's gift shop, where we found stuffed devils and possums. They all had a curious flattened look. “They look like they've been run over by logging trucks,” said Alexis. “I think I've seen enough fake forest.”

We returned to the relentless, shadeless heat of the real world. Inside the car, the wombat and devil scat had been brought back to life by the baking sun, and the Pajero smelled like the Bronx Zoo. As we drove off, we imagined wiggly stink waves trailing behind us.

Alexis stared out the window and loaded his pipe. “That was depressing,” he said. “Human beings never fail to disappoint me.”

About thirty miles further down the highway, we saw a sign for the Weldborough Pass Rainforest Walk and stopped. It turned out to be a well-groomed path through a 272-acre patch of temperate rain forest. It was filled with interpretive signs intended to educate children about the rain forest. The signs, put up by the Parks and Wildlife Service, were told from the point of view of “Grandma Myrtle,” an ancient rain forest tree. The actual forest was luxuriant and primeval. The understory was dominated by huge tree ferns—sunlight streamed through their ten-foot-long fronds creating patterns on the ground. Reaching up high into the sky were furrowed old myrtle trees, their trunks covered in aquamarine lichens and their roots carpeted with moss.

Grandma Myrtle's home was beautiful, but it was also desperately small. The total acreage translated to less than half of a square mile, and we could have finished the circuit in ten minutes if Alexis hadn't wandered off the path to pee behind a tree fern. No one had ever mapped the territories of thylacines, but one scientist who studied bounty records estimated the home range for a pair of tigers could be anywhere from thirty-four to fifty-four square miles. For a thylacine, this reserve could hardly be called a habitat. And the thylacine's relatives, the spotted-tailed quolls, were particularly reliant on wet, old-growth forests like these. They used fallen logs and tree hollows as hiding places and dens. Male spotted-tails had territories of twelve hundred acres (about two square miles) and could travel twelve miles a night. If you think of a territory as an animal's house, the reserve would just fit into a quoll's broom closet.
And much of the forest outside its boundaries was still fair game for the chainsaws.

From the top of the Weldborough Pass (elevation 1,952 feet), the road plunged into the Pyengana valley, nestled between wooded hills and filled with verdant pastureland. Tasmania is known for English-style landscapes, and this lush valley truly fit the bill. Except for the eucalyptus trees on the hills, Thomas Hardy would have felt quite at home.

By the time the winding road reached the valley floor, Alexis was not only high but entering a post-pot food frenzy. We made a beeline for a sign that read “Pyengana Dairy, Makers of Cloth-bound Cheddar Cheese.”

Behind a long, low building, a hundred brown-and-white dairy cows were grazing on emerald green grass. Inside, we found a formal tasting room, where a young woman offered us cubes of cheddar cheese, starting from mild and moving up to sharp.

“God, this is delicious,” Alexis said, eyeing some lemon-flavored biscuits on a shelf. “Should we get cookies? Let's get cookies.”

We ended up with a brick of sharp cheddar and a round of soft washedrind cheese named George after the George River that cut through the valley. Then while leaning against the Pajero and breaking off hunks of cheese, we pulled out a photocopy of a
Sydney Morning Herald
article about Pyengana's 1995 thylacine sighting. The park ranger had told the newspaper that he was 150 percent sure that he had seen a thylacine:

It sounded pretty convincing.

After gorging on cheese, we drove over to the Pub in the Paddock, which was the only other building in the valley as far as we could see. It looked like a good place to get information. However, just outside the pub, we were sidetracked by the sight of a spectacular pig. The pig— which was the size of a mini-tractor—was standing in a pen, where a sign announced his name was Slops and read “HI! GEEZ I'M DRY. I'D LUV
A BEER.” Funny, he didn't look dry. He looked like he had just come back from
The Lost Weekend.

Next to Slops's muddy pen, two rusting drums were filled with hundreds of empty beer bottles, or stubbies as they're called in Australia. The most popular beer in northern Tasmania, we had learned, was locally made Boag's Draught. But Slops wasn't picky. Sifting through his collection, we found bottles of Cascade Export Stout, Victoria Bitter, James Boag's Premium Light, Mercury Medium Sweet Alcoholic Cider, and Carlton Cold-Filtered Bitter. He snorted at us through the fence. On closer inspection, he didn't look so much like a souse as a friend, grunting congenially and inviting us to share a cold one with him.

“Do you think he wants another beer?”

“If Slops has a drink, I'm going to light up another bowl,” said Alexis.

The Pub in the Paddock was a bed-and-breakfast as well as a pub, so we decided to take a room there for the night in order to pursue our tiger investigations. Inside, the barman and four or five customers were deep in conversation. After much hemming and hawing, we finally caught his attention. In spite of the fact that he owned a beer-drinking pig, he was a no-nonsense guy. He asked us to pay for our room in advance—and he informed us that since there was nowhere else to eat in Pyengana, we would be having dinner in his pub at six o'clock.

We were aching to ask about the Pyengana tiger sighting, but there was something about the barman's cool manner that made us reticent to raise the subject.

“Nice pig,” we said instead.

This turned out to be an okay topic. The barman informed us that Slops had recently been cutting back on his alcohol consumption. Representatives from the RSPCA had stopped by not long before. They had suggested that drinking Boag's Draught night after night wasn't healthy for a pig. So the barman had begun watering down the contents of Slops's stubbies, creating a pigs-only lite beer. The barman sighed and looked wistful. Gone were the days when Slops could drink seventy-six full-strength beers in an evening.

He seemed to be opening up, and we thought it was a good time to introduce the subject of the tiger.

“So …uh… we'd heard there was a tiger sighting here a few years ago …”

He looked at us coldly for a moment, as if he were examining a speck of dirt on the bar. “Hoax,” he said curtly.

The men and women huddling around the bar looked our way. We saw a ripple of recognition in their eyes:
oooooh, tiger nutters.

The barman looked as if he would have liked to have ended the conversation there.

“But wasn't it a park ranger who saw the tiger?” we asked.

“It was a
hoax
,” he repeated. Clearly, something about the story offended his sensibilities. He told us the rest of it reluctantly.

The Pub in the Paddock—and Slops—changed hands frequently. This barman was the fourth owner since the purported tiger sighting. The fellow who owned it in 1995 had evidently paid a part-time forest ranger $500 to say he had seen a tiger by the town's famous high waterfall. “It brought a mess of TV crews and visitors from the mainland. The pub was crowded for three weeks.” It had all been a ploy to drum up business— apparently it was still working. The people at the bar seemed to be quietly chuckling.

We decided to buy Slops a beer. At least the pig wasn't a hoax. The barman sold us a watered-down Cascade Premium Lager with two Tasmanian tigers on the label.

As we walked out to Slops's pen, Alexis looked dejected. “I can't believe it was a hoax,” he said.

“Aren't all sightings inherently hoaxes if you think the tiger's extinct?”

“I don't know … Maybe I was temporarily deluded into thinking there was some hope.”

Not sure about the proper method of feeding beer to a pig, we tentatively poked the bottle over the fence. Slops seized the neck between his lips and chugged it in a single gulp.

Alexis went over to the Pajero and grabbed the heavy case containing his art supplies. “I'm going to paint a platypus,” he announced.

“You're not inspired to do a thylacine?”

“Not today. I don't want to go near the animal that suddenly seems
never
to have existed.” He disappeared into the pub.

We decided to leave him to it—this was the first time he had seemed interested in drawing—and drove six miles out to St. Columba Falls, where the barman said the fake sighting had occurred. Who knew? Maybe the hoax was a hoax.

We left the Pajero in a parking area next to a tour bus—with the image of a thylacine painted on its side. It took us about ten minutes to walk along the path to the falls. They were 295 feet high, with water pouring down on huge slabs of rock. The stream that flowed out of the waterfall burbled alongside banks overgrown with sassafras trees and tree ferns. The scenery reminded us of the Cascade Beer ad. All that was missing was a seductive-looking thylacine emerging from a bank of tree ferns to lap the water.

We stood there for about twenty minutes, willing a Tasmanian tiger to come out from behind the trees. We weren't picky. Relict, ghost, clone, animatronic, even one made from carpet fragments would do. But all we saw were black cockatoos flying over the treetops.

When we got back to the pub, we found Alexis in our room. It was pretty nice, a triple, designed for families and groups traveling together like ourselves—and it had been immaculate when the barman first showed it to us. Though we had been gone for less than two hours, Alexis had completely trashed the place. What had been a prim, bounce-a-coin-off-the-tight-fitting-sheets kind of room was now an artist's atelier cum opium den. The scent of marijuana blended with the acrid odor of chemicals. Dirty paintbrushes, crumpled pieces of paper, and plastic cups filled with dark, oozy liquids were spread around the room. Bloody tissues had been scattered across the floor.

“I lost my shit,” Alexis said.

We were stunned. Apparently he had gone off the deep end. “What happened?”

“No, I really lost my shit. Take a look out the window.”

The bags of devil and wombat scat had been removed from the Pajero and were now lying on the ground next to a neighboring cow pasture.

“I was drying them on the windowsill—and they fell out.”

We turned around and noticed that Alexis's foot was bandaged up.

“Have you been bleeding?”

“A leech got me. I must have picked it up when I went to pee in the forest.”

We imagined a hungry leech sensing the hot stream of urine and thinking “mealtime!” before inching over to Alexis's sandals. Alexis turned on his digital camera and showed us photos of the leech embedded in the sole of his bare foot. He had used his mini-blowtorch to heat up the ravenous
worm until it disengaged. Then he put the creature—still engorged with his blood—in a clear, lidded paint cup. He had completely documented the experience on camera. At the bottom of the paint container, the leech was still alive, writhing slightly.

Unfortunately, he'd had a little trouble staunching the bleeding. “Yeah, it was really flowing.” As the leech was slurping, it had secreted the anticoagulant chemical, hiruden, from its salivary gland to prevent Alexis's blood from clotting.

Despite the chaos in the room, Alexis had produced a striking drawing. He had mushed up mud collected from the Meander River with acrylic matte medium from his art case. The result was a chocolate brown pigment.

“I mixed up four different concentrations, and I started with the lightest density and then progressively went darker. Then it sort of had a life of its own.”

It
had
come alive. Alexis had transformed the detritus-flecked mud into a platypus. The duck-billed animal was pictured from above, propelling itself through invisible water and twisting slightly, with its furry brown tail acting as a rudder.