Carnivorous Nights (13 page)

We leaned against one of the big stumps and wondered what Naarding had really seen, if anything. We considered the possibility that Naarding had been right. It was easy to imagine a tiger emerging from this scraggly forest into the crossroads and being blinded by a beam of light. He might well have turned tail, flashed his balls, and said, “Later, pal.” But then what happened to him? Did he breed? Did he die alone in the bush? The white roads leading off in three directions suggested the possible fates of the tiger: extinct, surviving, or wavering in between the two. We thought about the “in between” road. Maybe Naarding hadn't seen a flesh-and-blood tiger. Maybe he had seen a ghost, an apparition of Tasmania past. Being the victim of species-cide might incite the tiger to come back from the dead and haunt the island. The Northwest seemed like a promising breeding ground for ghost stories.

Alexis interrupted our ruminations. “I don't think you want to put your hand there,” he said. We turned around and saw a phalanx of large black ants boiling up from the stump we had been leaning against. Their legs and backsides were painted red as if they were wearing war paint. And the pincers jutting from their oversized heads were so large, we could actually see their toothy outlines as they waved them at us menacingly.

Geoff peered down. “Inchmen,” he pronounced. “They can be very nasty.”

Inchmen, also called bull ants, didn't take kindly to intruders near their nests. Each had a retractable stinger with which it could jab a victim repeatedly and inject venom that caused instant pain. It could last for days. And if you were unfortunate enough to be allergic, you could go into anaphylactic shock and die.

We thanked Alexis and promised to give him back the Cadbury bar.

“No problem,” he said. “The road to Tigerville is paved with angry creatures.”

W
e drove off in another cloud of dust. We had ended up feeling a little embarrassed about our interest in the Naarding site. But really it had been kind of exciting—our first contact with the thylacine. Or at least its habitat. Had we not needed to rush back to go on devil patrol, we would have employed Team Thylacine in recreating the whole episode. Geoff would have been drafted to play Naarding. We would have been the Latham's snipes—migratory birds that breed on Russian and Japanese islands—which Naarding was observing. Alexis could have been the tiger. Chris and Dorothy could have been panicked pademelons fleeing the scene.

“Do you think there will be any time to go to the beach?” Alexis asked as Geoff turned the Pajero back onto the highway. Dorothy looked hopeful.

We glared. “The devils live on the beach at Geoff 's,” we said between gritted teeth.

“Just asking.”

Geoff jumped in. If we wanted to see Tasmanian devils, we would need to be hidden well before dark, so the devils wouldn't suspect our presence.

Before heading out to his seaside property, Geoff stopped in front of his barn to pick up a few supplies for the night. It was a rectangular building, made of corrugated iron sheets.

“Coming in?” Geoff asked.

We decided to wait outside while Dorothy, Chris, and Alexis accompanied Geoff to look at the horses, chooks, or whatever animals he kept inside. We took in the last heat of the day and looked up at the wide-open, pale blue sky.

We wondered if the real-life Tasmanian devil would bear any resemblance to the cartoon character of the same name. The character—nick-named Taz—had started as a minor player in Bugs Bunny cartoons in the 1950s. Taz was depicted as a dull-witted, hairy, slavering beast that whirled like a tornado and had an insatiable appetite for everything and anything, including mountainsides, elephants, and of course rabbits. Although Taz had originally costarred with Bugs only three times, he had come back in recent years as a star in his own right—not only having his own Warner Bros.–produced Looney Tunes series but spawning an industry of toys, T-shirts, and other swag. Often Taz was the only reason geography-challenged Americans had even heard of Tasmania. And it was frequently confused with Tanzania.

Our thoughts were interrupted by the sounds of Geoff cursing and Dorothy emitting a shrill cry. We rushed into the dimly lit barn.

Sunlight filtered in through gaps in the roof, illuminating a gruesome tableau. What looked like a dead kangaroo was hanging from the rafters. It was swaying slightly, a noose around its neck and its tail hanging straight down. On the floor nearby, a rough sack partially covered the body of another dead animal. The body and the sack were smeared with blood and covered with lumps of shit. The second victim was mangled beyond recognition, but probably another kangaroo-like creature. It looked like the scene of a marsupial murder-suicide. Alexis, Chris, and Dorothy bathed the dead animals in a strobe light of camera flashes as they rapidly clicked photographs.

Alexis pushed a button on his digital camera and showed us a photo of
Geoff—taken minutes before—removing a stiff creature from a dingy white freezer at the back of the barn. Geoff was holding it upside down by its tail.

What kind of barn was this?
It certainly wasn't used for keeping horsies. It was more like a meat locker.

Geoff was in a foul mood. He quickly explained what had happened: In the freezer, he stored a small supply of roadkill. That way, if he did a devil viewing, he would always have meat for creating a scent trail or feeding the devils. The day before, in preparation for our arrival, he had removed a Bennett's wallaby, a medium-sized type of kangaroo, from the freezer and placed it in the sack to defrost. But something had gone wrong. Some kind of carnivorous animal had gotten into the barn, torn through the top of the sack, and gorged itself on the wallaby meat. The attack had been ferocious. Geoff pointed to the wallaby's head. Its face had been eaten off. To add insult to injury, the ravenous beast had crapped all over the wallaby's corpse.

Geoff 's anger was rising. He knew who the perpetrator was. The key evidence was the distinctive shape of the turds on top of the dead wallaby. It was cat shit.

A cat?

“Ferals,” said Geoff bitterly. In Tasmania—all across Australia—house cats had gone completely wild. There were tens of thousands of feral cats living in the bush. They were the same species as the domestic cat (
Felis catus
), but these feral cats survived without the help of people and preyed on native wildlife. “They're savage,” Geoff said. “Horrible.”

Alexis surveyed the carnage. It was a bloody mess. “That was one bad pussy,” he said. “Was it marking its territory?”

“No, it just shitted it out, so it could eat more.”

To thwart the cat's returning for another meal, Geoff had hung another frozen wallaby from the barn's rafters. Hopefully out of the cat's reach. That explained the creature swinging by its neck. But it also presented a new problem. The hanging wallaby wouldn't be defrosted for hours. What would we use for devil food?

As we had learned, roadkill was not exactly hard to come by in Tasmania. Early that morning a visiting biologist whom Geoff had befriended had deposited the dead bodies of a wallaby and a possum outside his barn.
Thought you could use these.

The donations were fresh and ready to go. Geoff quickly retrieved them and put the carcasses into a familiar-looking black bin, which he loaded into the back of the Pajero. Chris offered to bring his car, too. Fitting all six of us plus the carcasses into the Pajero was a bit of a squeeze.

As we caravanned out to Geoff 's property and turned onto the Arthur River Road, Alexis pulled out his wallet. “Hey, Geoff, do you want to see a picture of my girlfriend?”

Dorothy rolled her eyes. When Alexis handed over a small photo, Geoff 's face instantly lit up.

“Ahhh, she's lovely,” he said. “What's her name?”

“Beatrice.”

It was a photo of Alexis's pet cat stretched out Cleopatra-style on a faux leopard-skin rug. She was a Maine coon with thick, luxuriant gray fur and tabby markings. It was hard to believe that this pampered pussy was the same species as the wild beast that had savaged the defrosting wallaby.

A few years ago, Alexis had spent $5,000 to save Beatrice's life. She had fallen from the window of his third-floor loft apartment in Manhattan and suffered a collapsed lung, a broken pelvis, and two broken legs. She had to have her left front leg amputated and was now a three-legged cat.

As Alexis stared at the photo, he curled his right hand into a paw and made a batting motion. Then he said, “Meeeew, meeew.”

We gave him a look.

“What?” he said. “I miss my puss-'ems.”

When we arrived at the edge of Geoff's property and the start of the narrow dirt track that led to the coast, Geoff advised Chris to abandon his car and join us in the four-wheel drive. The only way Chris could fit was to cram into the luggage area and sit on the floor next to the dead animal bin.

As we squeezed through the tea trees on the bumpy track, our vehicle began, more and more, to fill with the rank, sweet odor of decaying flesh.

“How're you doing back there?” we asked Chris.

His voice had taken on a resigned quality. “It's really humming,” he said.

We felt bad for him. “Have you ever seen a Tasmanian devil before?” we asked to get his mind off the smell.

“I've seen the cartoon.”

“Good on ya,” Geoff said. “This will be far more terrifying.”

A few minutes later, Geoff stopped the Pajero on a grassy rise, and we all got out. He pointed to a few devil footprints in the sand. This suggested devils had followed the scent trail we had laid the night before.

Geoff took the top off the bin, removed one of the limp carcasses, and dropped it on the sandy ground. “That's a brushtail possum,” he said.

Despite the odor, we bent down to take a closer look.

“There's nothing quite like the smell of marsupial braised in its own enzymes,” Alexis said, plugging his nose.

The opossums that lived back in the United States (the only marsupials that lived in North America) were unattractive animals. They had naked scaly tails, ratlike mugs, and hoary white-and-gray fur. But this possum was beautiful. Its slinky body was two and a half feet long, and it was covered with a plush black coat that was thickest on its bushy tail. Chris and Dorothy wisely kept their distance as Geoff tied a rope around the possum's dead body and attached it to the back of the Pajero.

“So why exactly are we doing this?” Chris asked.

“We're going to lay down a scent trail to attract
Sarcophilus harrisii
, the Tasmanian devil,” Geoff said. “The species name
harrisii
refers to Harris, the man who first scientifically described the devil. And the genus name,
Sarcophilus
, means lover of dead flesh.”

Geoff knelt down in the sand and slit the dead possum's belly open. With his one clouded-over eye, he looked like a cross between the Grim Reaper and a deranged pirate.

“We want to drag the guts along the ground,” he said, wiping his gore-covered knife on a patch of ferns next to the track. “Hopefully, a devil will follow the scent.”

“So,” said Alexis, “we're chumming terrestrial-style.”

With Geoff at the helm of the Pajero and the possum dragging behind us, we drove out across old pastureland and scrubby heath. On the way, we passed some landmarks of King family history, including the spot where Geoff's great-great-uncle first ran cattle in 1880. “My old uncle Charlie set up camp here for the first two years,” he said. “You can still see an old chimney.”

After a mile or two, we reached the sea. The waves of the Southern
Ocean were bigger than they had been the night before and crashed mightily against the rocky outcrops that lined the shore. The rocks, made of pink quartzite crystals and covered with patches of orange lichen, glowed molten red in the rays of the setting sun. There wasn't another human being in sight.

Geoff drove up to a tiny house about one hundred feet from the shoreline. It was slightly dilapidated, made of weathered asbestos siding, with a small brick chimney. The ground around the structure was sandy, covered with beach grasses, small wind-stunted trees, and massive outcrops of jagged rocks. Friends of Geoff's family had originally built the house as a fishing camp. Geoff called it “the shack.” And he used it as a blind from which to observe devils after dark.

While the other members of Team Thylacine went to look at the seashore, we watched Geoff detach what was left of the possum from the back of the Pajero. He threw the remains in the bush. Then he took the dead animal bin and heaved its contents onto the ground behind the shack. “We'll use this little morsel of flesh to attract the devils,” he said.

It was a roadkill wallaby. The body was still largely intact—muscular jumping legs, soft gray fur. However, its head was missing.
Severed in the collision? Eaten off ?
We never found out.

Geoff took a two-pronged metal stake and pounded it
—thump, thump—
through the furry animal's back and belly to hold it in place. We were reminded of a passage from
Dracula
when Professor Van Helsing destroys a gang of beautiful female vampires by driving wooden stakes through their hearts and cutting off their heads. It was “wild work,” the vampire killer wrote in his diary.