Carnivorous Nights (27 page)

“Don't a lot of people here believe it?”

“A lot of people
want
to believe. That's the whole thing, yeah? It was an animal that wasn't scared of humans—and that was probably its biggest downfall. There's plenty of documented evidence of people walking
along trails and turning around and there'd be a thylacine coming along behind them. Or they'd walk through a camp in the night. Why does this animal stop doing
that
? Basically, it disappeared. Extinction.”

“What do you think of the cloning project?” Alexis asked.

“Interesting,” Chris said. He could see why the cloning scientists would want to bring the thylacine back. “It's like any extinct animal. It's a tragedy to think that humans wiped out something.” He paused to reflect. “That's exactly what stopping foxes in Tasmania is all about, stopping further extinctions. Because if foxes get established, that's what will happen.”

“Then you'll really need to send in the clones,” said Alexis. “You'll have to clone every mammal in Tasmania.”

T
hat evening we met Ken Wright, one of several fox eradication officers employed by the Tasmanian government. He was in his mid-forties and had the deeply tanned, sunburned face of an outdoorsman, just beginning to be slashed with crow's-feet. His outfit included khaki slacks, a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, wire-rimmed glasses, and a brown Akubra hat—the emblem of outback Australia—that matched the color of his short, wiry brown beard. If he'd had a bronze
star pinned to his shirt, instead of a Parks and Wildlife patch that pictured a snarling Tasmanian devil, we might have taken Ken for the ghost of Wyatt Earp. His slender, intelligent face exuded a quiet authority.

Ken had picked us up at our motel in Launceston, and we drove south on the Midlands Highway, entering a flat terrain of farm fields lined with hedgerows. Low forested hills hung in the distance. The Midlands was the most British-influenced section of Tasmania, with some of the towns resembling English country villages. But once you got out onto the farmland, it was more like the Wild West.

Ken was taking us foxhunting, something he did virtually every night. As we sped past the hedgerows, the sky turned from pale pink to purple. We all sat quiet, admiring the vast landscape.

“So this is an unusual job,” Alexis said finally. “Did you ever think you'd be working as a professional foxhunter in Tasmania?”

“Bloody no.”

Ken had worked for twenty-five years shearing sheep in South Australia, Queensland, Victoria, and Tasmania. “That's about as Australian a job as you can get,” he said.

Some days, he would shear 160 sheep, one every ninety seconds or so. It was backbreaking work, but he liked country life, raising dogs, hunting, riding. As a sideline back in the 1970s, he had hunted foxes on the mainland and sold their pelts to the fur industry for making stoles, jackets, trimmings. That was when fur was still popular. “Course it's not trendy to wear fur anymore,” Ken said. “So the whole industry of selling fox skins basically collapsed. When the skins were worth money, foxes were controlled a lot better.”

From an early age, Ken had learned there were all kinds of ways to hunt a fox. The most common method was spotlighting, nabbing a fox in a beam of light and shooting him with a high-powered rifle. Sometimes he would use dogs—terriers in particular—who sniffed out foxes and drove them out of their dens or along creek lines toward waiting guns.

“We'd also whistle them in the morning.”

“You just whistle and they'll come?” asked Alexis.

“Yeah, you whistle like a rabbit caught in a trap. And you make it plaintive.” He showed us a whistle he kept under the dash. The fox thinks he's headed toward a conveniently injured rabbit—a tasty meal. What he gets instead is a bullet in the head.

“It doesn't always work,” Ken went on. “You get an experienced fox, an older fox, he may have been whistled at before and shot at, so he turns tail and runs.”

As Ken drove down the highway, he pointed off into the countryside at what was believed to be the epicenter of the fox outbreak. “Just over there about five kilometers, that's where we think the litters of fox cubs were raised and released.” In the last year, there had been dozens of sightings in and around this stretch of highway.

Ken said our destination was a sheep and cattle property near the town of Powranna in the Northern Midlands. This area is the heart and soul of Tasmanian sheep farming—home to about 750,000 sheep in a community with a human population of about twelve thousand. Most of the farmers in the district were letting the fox task force search their land.

“Farmers are quite worried about the whole thing,” Ken said. “In some parts of the mainland, foxes can take up to 30 percent of your lamb growth every year. That's just huge, that's money down the drain as far as the farmer's concerned.”

“Have foxes killed any lambs around here?”

“We've had a few lambs come in that have looked very fox-suspect. Farmers have called us, and we've gone out and had a look. We've seen lambs with their noses eaten off and their tongues eaten out, a typical fox kill. Sometimes they'll chew a little bit of ear, and that's all they'll eat off that one lamb. And they'll just keep doing it.

“But it's not just the farmers,” he continued. “Anyone with feelings about wildlife conservation would be worried as well. If the foxes get established here, we'd probably lose every species under five kilos. There are so many native animals in that five-kilo-and-under range that you don't find anywhere else—not anywhere else in the world except Tasmania. Australia's got a terrible record for mammals becoming extinct in the last two hundred years. But in Tasmania, there's only one that's supposed to be gone—the Tasmanian tiger. Now we're looking at twelve, fifteen, twenty species that could go.”

“Things aren't looking good for Mangy,” Alexis said.

Clearly, foxes were the bad guys in Tasmania. Yet, we found it strange to be rooting for the hunters. In films that depicted horseback-riding aristocrats chasing after packs of bloodhounds, we had always rooted for the fox. This whole anti-fox thing was requiring a reversal of thinking.

Ken slowed down and drove up a dirt road, stopping in front of a wire gate. We got out and surveyed the scene, grassy fields separated by hedgerows. This was just the kind of terrain where we could imagine a foxhunt.

“So, what do you think of foxhunting, you know, the kind with horses and hounds?” we asked.

Ken lit up a cigarette. “Actually, I'm the master of the Northern Hunt Club.”

“That's so sexy,” said Alexis.

The waning light obscured Ken's reaction.

“Is that on the mainland?” we asked.

“No.”

“It's in Tasmania?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” We didn't get it. How could they have a foxhunt in a place without foxes?

“Have you ever heard of aniseed oil?” Ken asked.

“I've had it rubbed on me,” Alexis said.

Ken took a deep puff on his cigarette. He explained that at his hunt club, the dogs chased after a lure that had been drenched in aniseed oil. This aromatic lure stood in for the fox. Except for that, the club carried on the old English traditions, with riders dressing in jodhpurs and pinks and sharing glasses of port at the end of the hunt.

A pickup truck drove up to the wire gate, and a man dressed identically to Ken got out. Ken introduced him as John McConnell, another member of the task force. He had red apple cheeks and a jolly demeanor. John put his arm around Ken, so that their Akubras were touching. “We're the best blokes,” he said.

These were the kinds of guys you would want to have around if the laws of society broke down. Nice and friendly, but able to pick off a looter at two hundred yards.

John brought out the task force's fox rifle. It had a black plastic stock and shiny stainless steel barrel. Our previous experience with firearms had been limited to cap guns and G.I. Joe's miniature arsenal.

“It's a Ruger .223 caliber,” John explained. “It was made in America, actually.” He whistled cheerily as he put it together and loaded it with bullets. “I was born and bred on a sheep farm,” he went on, noting our
fascination with the rifle. “So we grew up with foxes being around all the time and of course as a young kid, not only were they a pest, but very good money in the skin industry. When you weren't doing odd jobs and working on shearing sheds, any spare time you had, you went foxhunting.” He shrugged. “Most country kids grow up with hunting.”

By this time, night had fallen and it was full dark. John handed the rifle off to Ken, opened the hood of the truck, and hooked up a cable to the pickup's battery. It powered a handheld spotlight. Then John hopped into the bed of the truck.

“Tally ho,” he said.

As Ken set the pickup in motion, he rested the rifle across his thighs. In the back of the truck, John moved the spotlight slowly back and forth, illuminating dry fields covered with pasture grass. The beam of light was filled with dust and flying insects. We smelled hay and cow manure.

We passed a shearing shed and stockyards. The paddocks were separated by wire fences and dotted with stands of wattle trees and eucalyptuses. As we drove slowly through the dark paddocks, with the spotlight sweeping the landscape, we heard the occasional
moo
of a cow rising out of the darkness and the shrill call of plovers crying
keee, keee, keee.
A longeared hare jumped out in front of us, leaving a trail of dust in its wake.

“We're looking for eye shine and movement,” Ken said as we drove slowly through the paddocks. “You look for everything, anything.”

Up ahead, a pair of luminous orbs shone out from the darkness.

“What's that?” we asked excitedly.

“It's a sheep,” said Ken.

“Oh.”

A few seconds later, we heard a telltale
baaaaaahhhhh
and passed a ghost-white sheep surrounded by pale brown tussocks of grass. Its eyes flashed a wet globby green. We thought about when sheep were first brought to Tasmania in the early nineteenth century. On bright moonlit nights, their eyes must have looked like neon signs to Tasmanian tigers, blinking “EAT HERE.”

“You can get an idea of what animal you're looking at, just by the color and nature of the eye shine,” Ken said. “Sheep and deer eye shine is quite greenish, sometimes a yellowy green, and sometimes it appears blue. Brushtail possums have soft reddish eyes. Rabbits have amber eye shine.
And wallaby, you get a little bit of eye shine, but not much—usually you'll see movement first.”

“And the fox?”

“With the fox, eye shine is the biggest and first indicator. It's not so much the color as the brightness. The color tends to change depending on the angle or atmospheric conditions. Sometimes a fox's eyes appear reddish, but mostly they're a really bright gold or silver color.” He paused to consider the shifty qualities of the fox. “You actually look for a bit of eye separation as well,” he added. “A cat gives you a fairly bright reflection, but it looks like it has only one eye. With the fox you can actually see the eye separation.”

Ken peered into night. As the spotlight swept the fields, we tried to use our newfound eye knowledge. Hopping rabbits and sauntering brushtail possums were all over the place—flashing us with amber eyes, red eyes. Groups of sheep flashed green and blue. It was like the stars had fallen onto the grassy farm fields.

A rabbit dashed across the headlights. For a moment, we were mesmerized by its golden gaze.

“Rabbits, of course, are nonnative,” Ken said. “You know the story of rabbits being brought to Australia?”

“Yeah, what a disaster,” Alexis said.

Tasmania's fox problem was only the most recent ecological catastrophe resulting from animal importations into Australia. Foxes and rabbits have a very close relationship, too. Both were introduced into the wilds of mainland Australia by English settlers for the purpose of hunting—the first foxes following on the hind legs of the first rabbits by only a few years. The first twenty-four rabbits were brought to Victoria in 1859. A typical female rabbit can have six litters a year, producing about thirty offspring. With reproductive capabilities like that, those original twenty-four rabbits permutated into an army. By the early 1900s, the continent was overrun. They nibbled grazing lands bare, destroyed the fragile landscape with their burrowing, and displaced native burrowers like the hare wallaby, bilby, and bandicoot. Eventually, mass rabbit hunts were organized. A two-thousand-mile-long fence was built to stop the rabbits from spreading. But the long-eared interlopers simply kept breeding—and dug under.

When foxes arrived in Australia, they could scarcely have found themselves in a more hospitable situation. Rabbits are their favorite food. But hungry foxes did not stop the rapidly breeding rabbits. Quite the contrary. The dastardly bunnies just hopped into new territories and provided food for more and more foxes. And when a fox can't find a rabbit, it will eat a marsupial instead. Together, foxes and rabbits have been called the “deadly duo”—bringing death and extinction to midsized marsupials all over Australia.