Carnivorous Nights (22 page)

James is not bothered by the lack of conclusive physical evidence, nor the fact that the tiger is officially “presumed extinct,” nor the fact that most scientists disagree with his position. He made the leap of faith more than fifty years ago when he was thirteen years old and heard what he believed was a thylacine calling in the bush.

“That's probably the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

“What did it sound like?”

James threw back his head—sending his thick mop of gray hair flying— and gave off a high-pitched “EeYIP! EeYIP!” It was a variation of the call Murph had produced.

“That was the end of me,” James said. “That's why I started looking for this jolly tiger.”

When James was nineteen, he started interviewing hundreds of old bushmen and trappers.
How had they snared the tigers? What did tigers eat? Where did they live?
James became a one-man thylacine lore encyclopedia.

Based on his research, he concluded that Tasmanian tigers had taken to eating sheep because fur trappers had emptied the bush of game. “The bounty came on because the natural tucker was taken away from them,” he said. Thousands of thylacines were killed for the bounty, and it's theorized that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a disease went through the already depleted tiger population, pushing it over the edge into extinction. Many trappers reported seeing weak, ill-looking tigers with thinning hair that made little attempt to fight when trapped in their snares. “They reckon there's a disease that went through them. A lot of the scientists think it was distemper. But the old-timers say it wasn't a disease at all. When the tigers came down to the coastal areas, they looked poor from lack of food.” If there had been no disease, that meant tigers living in more remote areas, where the trappers hadn't penetrated, could still be around.

He also learned that a surprising number of Tasmanians had kept captured tigers as pets. “Ones taken at an early age made a hell of a good pet. There was no wagging the tail—they're physically incapable of it—but they would sit by the table while you were eating and they would follow you along. Very loyal.” Of course, there were limits to what these wild predators would put up with. “There was a guy at Balfour, he had one. He thought he would take him out on a lead and the tiger bit him on the backside.”

Then there was the tiger's incredible nose. “Evidently their brain— there's so much of it used for their smelling capabilities—they can smell further than any animal on the earth. One fellow had a pet tiger that he
brought up with his dogs. It could smell nine kilometers down the track from where he lived. As soon as someone started on the track, the tiger's hair would bristle up.”

Alexis's nose crinkled skeptically. “That's a helluva schnozz,” he said.

And finally there were the tiger's culinary habits. “They're a blood feeder,” James told us with obvious relish. “They always opened their prey up around the heart where the main of the blood was. They folded the skin back very neatly. Then they ate across the stomach down to the leg.”

We got a little chill at the thought of a tiger lapping up our blood and wondered if the old bushmen that James had interviewed had been prone to exaggeration. We had read that tigers actually had an average sense of smell—relying more on sight and hearing for hunting. And the “blood feeder” thing sounded like a campfire tale.

Then again,
who knew
? Every predator has a preferred method for devouring its prey. And some animals are remarkably skilled in the art of selective butchery. A mountain lion eats the internal organs of its victim first, then covers the carcass with grass and twigs, and returns to it over subsequent days. When a grizzly bear preparing for hibernation catches a salmon, it carefully removes the fatty skin, brains, and eggs—the parts with the highest fat content—and discards the rest. A pod of killer whales will gang-attack another species of whale—sometimes one that's three times their size—only to eat the big whale's high-protein tongue, leaving the rest of the carcass behind. So maybe the idea that the thylacine drank its victim's blood wasn't really that unbelievable.

James brought out a huge cardboard box filled with tiger memorabilia. There were reports, photographs, newspaper clippings, drawings of tracks, and an astonishing amount of correspondence. Hundreds and hundreds of people had written to James over the years, offering advice about how to find the thylacine (
perhaps if he could devise a better trap, had he checked in the hollows of trees?
), inviting themselves along on searches, wanting to know more about the tiger's life, habitat, and habits. Some of the letters were official correspondence from museum curators, magazines, and television producers. Most were from private citizens fascinated or even obsessed with the thylacine. There were letters from Australia, England, Scotland, Germany, and the United States:
My desire is to come to Tasmania and find the thylacine.… I hope to get there soon…. I would sometime very much like to work with you.

After a while, the longing in these letters became embarrassingly familiar. We started to go through the piles of photos. There was the famous black-and-white photo of Wilf Batty, the last man to shoot a Tasmanian tiger. There were photos of tigers in captivity, their powerful legs in midpace as they strode through makeshift enclosures. And there was a news photo from the Launceston
Examiner
headlined, “$2600 Grant to Tiger Men.”

In it, we made out a young James, standing with two other fellows beside a Land Rover. In 1972, James had joined a tiger triumvirate. It was called the Thylacine Expedition Research Team, and it conducted one of the most thorough and best-documented searches for the tiger since the animal disappeared in the 1930s. It was a peculiar group. There was James himself, a dairy farmer from the Tasmanian Northwest and an expert in tracking; Jeremy Griffith, a young zoology student from the mainland, who spent every spare moment looking for the tiger and trying to drum up funding; and Bob Brown, a medical doctor, also from the mainland, who had come to Tasmania to get involved in environmental politics.

In the photo, a representative from the British Tobacco Company is presenting the three with a check for $2,600. James has muttonchop sideburns, a narrow tie, and a big-buttoned, wide-lapeled suede car coat. Jeremy is golden-haired, wearing a sport jacket. He looks like Ryan O'Neal in
Love Story.
Lean and lanky, Bob is the conservative-seeming one, with a square jaw, short hair, and a formal black suit. The photo looks like an album cover for an early 1970s British folk-pop band.

James had been looking for the tiger for ten years when he first met Jeremy Griffith in 1968. Together, they made some memorable treks in search of the tiger, carrying impossible loads on their backs through sucking swamps and junglelike bush. Their most ambitious adventure was a ninety-mile trek undertaken at the end of 1970. Believing thylacines in more settled areas might have died out from poisoning meant for devils, they focused on an area of the western coast between Macquarie Harbour and Port Davey. They believed this area was untouched by hunters and (unlike some other remote regions) had a reasonable amount of game for the tiger to live on. This section of the country was notorious. Tasmania's first prison had been located at Macquarie Harbour and brutal as it was for the convicts, the surrounding bush was worse. One in ten convicts escaped into the unforgiving landscape—and almost all perished in the attempt.
In one famous case, a group of escapees—defeated by the relentless rains and confusing, rocky terrain—resorted to murder and cannibalism before the last survivor was finally captured.

James and Jeremy flew into the depths of this wilderness, hitching a ride in a small plane with an archaeologist looking for aboriginal carvings. And then they began looking for tigers.

James was a very physical person. He'd grown up in the bush and working on a farm. But Jeremy was indefatigable. At one point on the expedition, he took over half of the things in James's pack and was carrying 140 pounds. “He was still faster than me, and if he wasn't watching, I'd have popped a big stone in his pack just to slow him down. He got me to keep going by telling me stories.”

The trip was grueling. “We were walking right up to our chest in mud and covered in leeches. One day when we were making camp, the leeches were so thick on Jeremy, he raked them off his face and threw down handfuls. There were bush fires, rivers we had to ford.” They combed the coast north of Port Davey looking for tiger tracks, but found none. Then they turned inland cutting through buttongrass plains and rain forest to reach Macquarie Harbour. Despite all the hardship of the trip, the tiger was nowhere to be found. When James and Jeremy reached the coast again, they were spotted by abalone divers. “We were rough and ragged. Our clothing was torn to bits. When they first saw us, they turned the boat around. We looked like criminals on the loose left over from convict days,” James said. They caught a ride back to civilization in the diving boat.

James's enthusiasm was not dulled one whit by the trip's lack of success. On his own time and money, he continued to investigate sightings and track the bush, laying down countless blood and scent trails, in the hopes of obtaining a tiger footprint. “I had to do it out of my own pocket,” he said, “out of the scent of an oily rag.” In May 1971, James found what he was convinced were tiger tracks in the north-central community of Beulah, an area where there had been many tiger sightings. Jeremy flew down especially from the mainland to look at them. While the tracks were proof to James that the tiger survived, Jeremy was less certain and they decided together that the tracks “were not clear enough to be used as evidence.” Meanwhile, Jeremy wrote hundreds of letters and organized meetings with government officials. He also scrounged donations together to open a temporary exhibit in Launceston, Tasmania's
second largest city, to raise public awareness about the tiger and encourage people to report sightings. That's when Bob Brown, the third team member, got involved.

Bob had a medical practice in Launceston, and he spent less time in the bush and more on logistics. He rented the tiger hunters an office in Launceston and created maps plotting tiger sightings. The idea was that
they would personally investigate every new sighting and rank it as to its quality and credibility. Not only would they interview witnesses in detail, they would go to the sighting locations and thoroughly search them for footprints, tiger scat, and actual animals. In addition, they investigated high-quality sightings from previous years.

To get the public involved, they created fact sheets, several of which James still had. One flyer titled “Reward $100 for Tiger Tracks” showed thylacine tracks drawn and initialed by Jeremy, alongside wombat and devil tracks for comparison. At the bottom of the flyer it read, “IF YOU FIND TIGER TRACKS, PLEASE GO TO ANY LENGTHS TO PRESERVE THEM AS WE DESPERATELY NEED THE EVIDENCE” and “To Find Tracks, we must be informed of Sightings Quickly.”

As the search intensified through the later part of 1972, it seemed that there were explanations for many of the best sightings: A stray German shepherd with its ribs showing was found in the vicinity shortly after one well-known tiger incident. A striped feral cat was discovered in the vicinity of another. A set of footprints long assumed to be those of a tiger proved to be wombat tracks. Famous photographs of a tiger taken from a helicopter were actually of a dog.

The three tiger hunters logged thousands of miles following up on sightings and tracking the bush. But with no compelling physical evidence and the debunking of some of the best-known sightings, Jeremy and Bob eventually lost heart. In a fifteen-page report on the results of the search written in December 1972, Jeremy Griffith came to the conclusion that the tiger was extinct—though he encouraged Tasmanians to continue to report any sightings. In a three-page addendum, Bob Brown advocated that the tiger be classified as extinct. He concluded, “If a live thylacine were found at some future date the event, while joyous, would be remarkable.”

James's contribution to the report was short and unambiguous. It read: