Carnivorous Nights (20 page)

“Like the devil? That's a weird sound.”

“Bizarre,” he agreed.

Murph had snared wallabies for their pelts in his youth, and one time
he accidentally snared a Tasmanian devil. He took the devil home and kept it alive in a big wooden crate. He said it was a vicious little beast— and warned us to be on our guard in the bush.

“If you were injured and had nothing to defend yourself with, that would be the end of you. A devil would come at you and take a nip.” Murph thrust his head forward devil-style. “A hard wooden broom han-dle—they can just bite that off like a guillotine. And they don't leave anything.”

We asked if he thought the Tasmanian tiger was still out there in the bush.

“Yes. No reason why it shouldn't be. All the sightings can't be false— especially considering some of the people who've made them. Parks and Wildlife have as much as admitted that. I'm quite convinced.”

Here was a man who had lived in Tasmania all his life, who had intimate contact with the bush. And he was certain that thylacines survived. Our hopes surged wildly. Murph must have seen the evangelical look in our eyes. With all the attention the tiger gets, he said, you had to have some perspective on it, a sense of humor.

To be blunt, we weren't the first people to come to the Edge of the World asking about the thylacine. In the mid-1980s, not long after the Naarding search ended, an old bushman named Turk Porteus—who ran a tourist boat on the river—fueled the fire when he reported seeing a tiger on the Arthur where it intersected with the Frankland River, fifteen miles upstream from where we were staying. Turk said he and his father had trapped a mother tiger and her cubs when he was a boy and meant to keep them as pets, but they needed money and ended up selling the tigers for £11. Taking some of the last tigers out of the wilderness had plagued Turk's conscience, and after his sighting he told the local papers that he was relieved to see the tiger still out there in the bush. Some locals thought Turk had made up the story to stimulate business, but others weren't so sure. Either way, Turk's sighting brought even more tiger seekers into the Northwest—all hoping to be the ones to rediscover it and bask in its Grail-like light. That's where Murph and Betty stepped in.

“We had a film crew up here a few years ago looking for the Tasmanian tiger on the Arthur,” said Betty. “So we decided to oblige them.”

She pulled a photo album off a shelf and opened up to a page with a color photograph of a shaggy Tasmanian tiger crouched in riparian foliage.
“We made it up of pieces of carpet,” she said. “Then we put it up on the riverbank, so that as their boat went up the river, they would go right past it.” She and Murph chuckled. “We couldn't help ourselves.” They never found out if the filmmakers were fooled. But when some of their neighbors went on a duck-hunting trip up the Arthur, they were ambushed by a furry, striped predator. “BOOM, BOOM,” said Murph, taking aim with an imaginary rifle. “They blasted it.”

Early that evening Geoff drove up in his pickup to take us spotlighting for animals on his property. Alexis slung a pair of binoculars around his neck and Dorothy topped off the woolen shirt she had purchased at the Backpacker's Barn with a chartreuse silk scarf.

“They are a lovely couple,” Geoff said. “I wonder if it will work out?”

We all caravanned out to the coast, Chris being relieved that he didn't have to share space with a rotting marsupial. When we got there, Geoff set up a telescope facing the ocean. “Have a look,” he said, shouting above the sound of the waves. We peered through the lens, and an offshore scene leapt into view. A line of black birds streamed through the circle of light, some of them flying just inches above the water's surface. “They're short-tailed shearwaters—also called muttonbirds.” They had plump bodies and long, thin wings (more than twice as long as their bodies) that were in constant motion. They poured through the circle of light in a never-ending procession.

Each spring, 18 million muttonbirds migrate to Tasmania's coasts and offshore islands to breed and nest. There are more than 150 colonies, one of which has at least 3 million muttonbirds in it. Such numbers were hard to comprehend. Tasmania's aboriginal people had hunted the muttonbirds for food—and so did the European settlers, who called them flying sheep. As we gazed through the telescope at the procession, we felt like we were looking back in time at the preindustrial world. The muttonbirds had spent the day diving for fish, squid, and krill to bring back to their young in their nests. “They're heading back to their burrows for the night now,” Geoff said.

We headed in, too. As we walked inland, the ocean sounds receded. Geoff led us along a two-foot-wide path that cut through the coastal grasses. The path was sandy, and along the edges the grass was tramped down. “This is a wallaby run,” Geoff said. “Once wallabies settle on a
trail, they tend to stick to it. They could have been using this same track for ages. It may be hundreds of years old.”

We thought about the Tasmanian tigers and aboriginal people who had lived and trafficked through here hundreds of years ago. There were several aboriginal sites on Geoff 's land—middens along the foreshore, mysterious arrangements of stones and depressions where huts had once stood. But Geoff wasn't completely comfortable talking about them. “It's not appropriate for Europeans to interpret aboriginal sites,” he said. “But I do think they're important. It connects me to the past going back six thousand years.”

Aboriginals lived on Geoff's land and all along the northwest coast until the early 1830s when a missionary named George Augustus Robinson came through and convinced the people to follow him and resettle on islands in the Bass Strait. His idea was that if the aboriginals were rounded up, they could avoid deadly confrontations with the white settlers. Robinson thought he was saving them, and he wanted to convert them to Christianity. Their destination was a concentration camp on Flinders Island—and almost all the aboriginals he took there died within a short time.

Tasmanian tigers lived and hunted on Geoff's land, too. Robinson wrote in his diary about seeing a mother “hyena”—one of the early names for the tiger—and her three cubs on a beach a few miles away. They must have stalked pademelons and wallabies along this very path. According to the recollections of old bushmen, tigers would follow their prey on a slow chase, trotting after them relentlessly until their victims got tired, at which point they would chomp them on the neck with their mighty jaws.

Along the ancient wallaby track, there was a fork—a natural wallaby crossing—that was strewn with dozens of cylinder-shaped scats in various degrees of decay. We studied one of the fresher ones closely. It was gray and white, and made up of fur and bone fragments. It looked familiar.

“It's a devil latrine area,” said Geoff. “They leave their poo here to communicate with each other.”

We waited quietly to see if the devil poo would communicate anything. Then underneath the sound of rushing wind and the muffled crash of waves, we began to hear something. It was a slow-rhythmed whirring
noise.
Whzzz … Whzzz… Whzzz.
The sound was rising up from the ground all around us.

We looked at Geoff inquiringly. “Native dung beetles,” he said.

Tasmania has many species of native dung beetles—and they're all programmed to dispose of the scat of Tasmania's native creatures. Devils, wombats, pademelons. It's a natural solid waste management program. And it worked pretty well until the settlers brought in cows and sheep. The native cleanup crew turned up its mandibles at the huge, sloppy dung of these introduced beasts. Over the years, cow and sheep patties built up. They would dry out and sit there, turning fertile pasturelands into giant muckheaps. To prevent the loss of grazing land and the resulting proliferation of flies, a visionary entomologist came up with the idea of bringing in cow-patty-loving dung beetles from Africa. The scheme was successful— but given the volume of dung generated by livestock, new dung beetles have to be imported all the time.

We continued inland, walking through tufts of grass, across old pastureland, and short-cropped marsupial lawns. Geoff's land was vast, and dusk was a long process. Colors and shapes changed moment by moment. The sky was enormous, and as we walked, it subtly shifted from ultramarine to gray-purple.

Alexis pointed to a grassy rise topped with skinny, windswept tea trees. “What is that?” he said.

A creature was moving slowly toward us, its body black against the tan grasses. It looked like a bear cub cut off at the knees.

A look of bedazzlement lit up Geoff's face. “Fantastic,” he said. It was the devil in the flesh. And it was meeting us on our own turf—daylight or what was left of it. “You don't see this often.”

Though we had seen devils just two nights before, there was something different about this encounter. We hadn't lured this one with dead wallaby treats. This devil was just walking through, sharing the landscape with us, a rare intersection between two worlds.

The devil stopped and raised its head to sniff, almost lifting itself into the air. Every part of its body was in that sniff. The fading light shone dully on its sleek, glossy fur as it determined its next move.

Whatever scent was in the air—shifty humans or the irresistible odor of carrion—the devil determined to change course and headed off at an
oblique angle. It trotted away with a herky-jerky lope—like the rocking gait of an Indonesian shadow puppet—and exited into the tea trees.

Seeing this ambassador from the nocturnal realm was auspicious and slightly transcendent. It even took Geoff a while to shake off his amazement. Wild devils don't make a habit of coming out in the light—and certainly not in the vicinity of people. But he came up with an explanation that was simple enough. It was a young devil out pushing the envelope, taking risks an older devil might not.

We were struck by our good luck. If we were visited by the elusive devil, could a tiger be next? “Do you think it means anything?” we asked Alexis.

“Yeah,” he said, lighting his mini-blowtorch. “It's Miller time.” Intoxicating smoke wafted into the Tasmanian twilight.

Geoff stopped to show us a tall green grass called a cutting rush. It looked like the cutting grass we had seen with Todd. “It's a species of
Gahnia
,” Geoff said. “The white pith is edible.” Careful not to cut himself on the sharp edges of the blades, he cut from the bottom of a few flat stalks and peeled back the green sheaths. The white inside tasted like a buttery potato.

“Delicious,” Chris pronounced.

“It's good bush tucker,” Geoff agreed.

Alexis wandered off down one of the crisscrossing wallaby tracks. When we caught up with him, he was staring intently at a small cluster of yellow flowers. “These dandelions are freaking me out,” he said. “Are they freaking you out?”

“Um—”

Just then, a sleek black animal streaked through the grass ahead of us. It moved about three times as fast as the devil.

“What is that?” shrieked Alexis. “A devil on crack?”

“That was a feral cat,” said Geoff.

“It looked like a fucking tiger.”

The way the cat was bounding through the grass, fully extending its muscle-bound body, it looked like a miniature black panther. It must have been chasing its dinner and was miles from any human abode. Geoff listed some of the creatures that would make easy prey for a house cat gone bush. Skinks, antechinus, swamp rats, and ground-nesting birds like
superb fairy wrens. On small islands, the introduction of feral cats has caused animals—from parakeets to wallabies—to be extirpated.

We continued to walk, and Alexis asked us to hang back behind the group. His eyes had grown bloodshot and his pupils were cavernous.

“You know that Vroom has a lot of cash?” he said. His tone had become conspiratorial. “I have the perfect project for him. I'm going to ask him to fund a feral cat eradication program for Tasmania.”

We considered the resulting headlines. “Yank Millionaire Wants Your Cats Dead.” “Kitten Killer to Pussums: I Want Your Blood.”

Then we had a flash of the future: the Vroom Museum in Smithton. At the main entrance would stand a bronze statue of Chris, with one hand raised in a fist and the other holding up a limp, lifeless cat. Hanging on the museum's walls would be hundreds of tiny mounted cat heads, with inscriptions like “Ginger, two-year-old domestic cat, killed at Johnson's Farm.”

“There could be a publicity problem,” we suggested. “The locals may not share your healthy antipathy toward feral cats—some of which are their pets.”

“It would cost just a fraction of his wealth,” Alexis argued. “Remind me to ask him about it.”

We decided to test his commitment. “What about Beatrice?” we asked.

“Mew,” he said, batting his imaginary paw. “Beatrice isn't a cat,” he added. “She's my kitteny mittens.”

Our walk ended at the back end of the devil shack, where the picture window faced out on scenes of nocturnal butchery. It was almost dark and Geoff suggested that Team Thylacine have a fortifying glass or two of wine before heading out to look for creatures of the night. While Geoff led the others inside, we examined the spot where Shacky & Co. had devoured the entrails of a wallaby like they were saltwater taffy. All that was left were dried bloodstains and a few bits of gristle.