Carnivorous Nights (8 page)

“We estimate it's three months old,” said Sandy. But no one could say for sure. Thylacines had never been bred in captivity. No scientific observations of thylacines were ever made in the wild. Everything that was surmised about their development was based on studies of other distantly related marsupial carnivores.

We thought back to the thylacine skin Sandy had shown us in the cabinet of extinct mammals. One teat in the pouch had been enlarged. Had that thylacine been feeding this pup? Sandy had wondered about that, too. Unfortunately, she said, the museum's old collection records did not include that information. Family relationships among specimens had not been documented.

We studied the pup and felt almost voyeuristic, putting our noses right up to the side of the glass. The fur was so thin and wispy, the pup looked almost naked. To all appearances, it was still as vulnerable as it had been when it was taken from its mother's pouch. We could see why it had been the inspiration for so much scientific longing.

We didn't know if the Australian Museum would ever succeed with cloning the tiger—or even if it was a good idea. All we knew was that we were head over heels again for the tiger.

After nearly twenty minutes inside the safe, we were starting to feel woozy from the fumes emanating from the flask and the temperature had risen uncomfortably. “Do you mind if we get some fresh air?” we asked Sandy.

Alexis gave the pouch pup a parting look as Sandy put it back in its bucket. “Hey,” he said. “Here's something that will fulfill your fantasies. What if its eyes suddenly popped open?”

We quickly came up with a movie title:
The Reawakening of Baby Thylanstein.
But then we thought better of it.

“Let it sleep,” we said. Maybe it was dreaming of Tasmania.

W
e had two major biogeographical boundaries to traverse to reach Tasmania. The first one—Wallace's Line—had been crossed a week before on board a plane on our way to Sydney. The second—the Bass Strait—was yet to be breached.

Separating Tasmania from the Australian continent, the Bass Strait is a formidable barrier. One hundred fifty miles wide, it roils and churns unpredictably. Countless craft lay at its bottom, and it had claimed the lives of thousands of sailors. It's possible to fly across the strait and avoid the notoriously treacherous waters, but we wanted to savor the experience of crossing into a new world. The Bass Strait ferry, the
Spirit of Tasmania
, left every night (weather permitting) from Melbourne on the mainland's southern tip. We caught a short flight south and that night rendezvoused with Alexis and Dorothy at a Thai restaurant in Melbourne's South Yarra district. We had to be at the ferry at 8:00 P.M.

Just as we were diving into spring rolls, a stranger walked up to the
table. He was boyish-looking, with light brown hair and a crooked smile. Suddenly, he threw his arms around our shoulders and gave us a squeeze.

“Hey, team!” He had an American accent.

Who was this guy?

Alexis jumped up immediately and shook his hand. It was Alexis's friend from New York, the one he had said “might” be coming.

The newcomer sat down, bit into a spring roll, and introduced himself. His name was Chris Vroom. He was thrilled about the idea of going to Tasmania. And we rapidly absorbed his life story. As a Wall Street analyst, he had made a killing during the Internet boom and at age thirty-seven was already semiretired. Since Chris didn't have to work, he indulged his two passions, travel and art. He traveled whenever he got the urge and recently had been to Antarctica and the Himalayas. As for his other interest, he had immersed himself in New York's contemporary art scene, becoming a serious collector and using his own money to start a nonprofit organization that gave grants to promising young artists. One of his prize possessions was a sculpture constructed entirely from police officers' batons. Chris and Dorothy hit it off immediately and began talking about galleries, who was on the board of what museum, and who had sneaked off with whom at the last Venice Biennale.

We broke in. “So what made you decide to take a trip to Tasmania?”

“Alexis invited me,” he responded enthusiastically.

Oh. Right. This was rapidly evolving from “might” be joining us to full-fledged expedition member. We continued our inquiry. “What was the thing that intrigued you most about the idea?” We were still hoping to uncover a latent scientific background, a degree in biology or an unrequited passion for meat-eating marsupials. Even an interest in Bigfoot would do.

But it was Tasmania's scenery and adventure sports that had caught Chris's attention. He had read about the island's glorious beaches, great swimming, and incredible surfing—and he mentioned seaplanes and scuba diving. It sounded exciting. Too bad we wouldn't be doing any of that stuff.

“We're pretty much focusing the trip around the tiger,” we said. “Its natural and cultural history, its iconography, the possible veracity of eyewitness reports.”

We were trying to make our plans sound as boring as possible, but
Chris's face betrayed a hint of alarm. “There are tigers in Tasmania?” he said. Apparently Alexis had failed to brief him on the thylacine aspect of our trip.

“Don't worry,” Alexis shouted across a plate of pad thai. “They're ex-tinct—probably.”

For the next hour, Chris and Dorothy returned to their discussion about art. The tiger receded into the background.

When it was time to head off for the ferry, Chris explained he hadn't been able to book a cabin and was flying into Devonport, the Tasmanian city where the ferry docked. He would meet us there the following morning.

“So, what's the agenda?” he said. “Can I have a copy of the itinerary?”

“Uh—”
Itinerary?
“Well, the day after tomorrow we're going to see devils … hopefully.”

This time Dorothy looked at us strangely. Then she said, “Those are animals, right?”

Twenty minutes later we were at Melbourne's Station Pier, entering the ferry's cavernous bowels. Hundreds of cars were creeping on board and stacks of pet-filled cages were being rolled off to an unseen kennel area. Because of Tasmania's island status—and freedom from many of the exotic species that plagued the mainland—restrictions on bringing in plants, animals, even certain types of food were taken very seriously. We joined a line of passengers waiting to have their luggage checked. Every bag was opened, poked, and occasionally thoroughly searched. According to a pamphlet we had been given, the inspectors were primarily looking for fresh fruit and illegal animals, such as foxes and pythons. But Alexis looked nervous.

“Did you bring the P-O-T with you?” we whispered loudly.

“Shhhhhhh …I was afraid to bring it on the plane from Sydney. But I got some more here. It's way down in the stuff sack of my sleeping bag.”

When it was Alexis's turn to have his bag searched, he suddenly became oversolicitous and hyper. “Do you want me to open that for you? No problem. I can undo that strap. Do you need me to unzip anything? How about this? This? No, thank
you.
”

When we heaved our bags forward, however, the inspector gave us a
piercing look. We had been selected for extreme searching. She carefully opened each compartment and removed our things: clothes, underwear. Then she pulled out a stack of books we were carrying and stared at the title on top. We hoped it was something like
The Future Eaters
, an irreproachable ecological history of Australasia. But when we glanced down, we saw it was
Cryptozoology A to Z: The Encyclopedia of Loch Monsters, Sasquatch, Chupacabras, and Other Authentic Mysteries of Nature.

“Okaaay, then,” she said, rapidly shoving our stuff back inside our bags. “You have a nice
trip.
” We followed Alexis and Dorothy onto the upper decks.

Ahhhh, it felt good to be on board. Behind us were the glass skyscrapers of Melbourne. In front of us open water. Our adventure was about to begin. We passed a ship's officer wearing a blue blazer with brass buttons.

“Do you think this will be a smooth crossing?” we asked. The
Spirit of Tasmania
was designed to handle waves as high as twenty-five feet. It had recently replaced a high-speed, wave-smashing catamaran that—though reducing the ferry trip from fourteen hours to six—had been decommissioned after earning itself the nickname “Vomit Comet.”

The officer looked at us blankly. “The waves should only be up to thirty meters tonight,” he said.
Mother of Poseidon!
We started to do the math. Thirty meters was three times bigger than the Banzai Pipeline. It was
Perfect Storm
size. The officer watched our faces turn a pale shade of green.
Wait a second …
Then he added with the faintest suggestion of a smile, “No worries. This should be an easy night.” We gulped down some Dramamine anyway.

As the
Spirit
pulled away from the dock, we stood by the railing and watched the lights of the city fade away. The sheltering arms of Port Phillip, Melbourne's harbor, stretched out for miles. It felt like we were traveling over smooth, smoky glass. If this was the badass Bass Strait, we could handle it. Of course, it wasn't. The moment the ferry passed beyond the harbor's reach, the
Spirit
began to pitch and we felt the strait's force yanking at our innards. It seemed to be sending us a message: “Don't underestimate my power, landlubbers.”

The Bass Strait has been described as “rough,” “capricious,” and “dangerous.” It's shallow and easily disturbed—nowhere more than 230 feet deep—so when waves come rolling in from either side, they grow in
height and sometimes break like surf against a beach. From the west, the wind comes from the Roaring 40s, a raging circum-global system that barrels across the open ocean and reaches screaming speed when it funnels into the Bass Strait.

By the standards of the strait, we were in for a calm night. Still, when we looked down at the tossing waters lit up by the lights of the ferry, the waves looked ominous. One misstep on the slippery deck and we would be swept away, like cigarette butts down a storm drain.

To get a different perspective, we climbed up three flights of narrow metal stairs and felt the sucking pull of shifting gravity as the boat knocked us from side to side. On the top deck, the force of the wind made it hard to walk and whipped our hair into Medusan up-dos. High Plexiglas barriers ringed the perimeter. When we looked out, it was too dark to see the tempestuous chop below. And all we could hear was the howling wind. The only other people who had ventured this high were two drinking buddies, leaning into seats fastened to the deck.

Despite the Bass Strait's ferocity, we knew many animals negotiated its turbulent waters. Seals and sharks. Little blue penguins, albatrosses, and other birds that nested on the strait's many islands.

Alexis peered down toward the dark water and yelled above the wind. “You know, twelve thousand years ago, we could have taken this journey by foot,” he said.

We imagined a sped-up version of geological events dating back 250 million years. At the start of the film, all the world's continents are joined together in one big mass called Pangea. Then Pangea splits in two. The great southern continent—Gondwanaland—is created. And slowly Gondwanaland begins stretching like taffy. First Africa breaks away, then South America. Now, just Antarctica and Australia are left jammed together—and Tasmania is the sticking point. Finally after much straining and pulling, Antarctica drifts off, leaving Australia and Tasmania still connected. Millions of years pass, and a series of Ice Ages begin. Australia and Tasmania remain fitfully connected by a land bridge. Aboriginal people, tigers, wallabies, and other animals travel back and forth.

Then about twelve thousand years ago, the last Ice Age ends and glaciers begin to melt. The seas rise, flooding the shallow valley between Tasmania and Melbourne and forming the Bass Strait. Tasmania is turned into an island. Nothing goes in and nothing goes out, unless it has wings
or fins, for thousands of years. For the tigers, that separation turns out to be a good thing. On the mainland the tigers die out, but they live on in Tasmania—the furthest outpost beyond Wallace's Line. The film ends.

In those years during which the island was completely isolated, the only people who encountered the Tasmanian tiger or even knew it existed were the aboriginals who lived there. Geographers have calculated that about four thousand people and four thousand thylacines lived in Tasmania at any given time. This delicate balance was maintained for a remarkable ten thousand years. Along with the thylacines the island sheltered other curious animals: Tasmanian devils, unusual kangaroos, flightless birds, spiky anteaters. The Bass Strait was like a moat and Tasmania was an impregnable citadel.

In 1642 the citadel's walls were breached when the Dutch explorer Abel Tasman was commissioned to map Terra Australis Incognita (the Unknown Southland) and came across Tasmania instead. After landing, he and his crew reported seeing smoke from the fires of the aboriginals, enormous towering trees, and animal tracks on the ground “not unlike the paws of a tiger.” Tasman christened the island Van Diemen's Land after his patron, Anthony van Diemen, the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company—and Van Diemen's Land was the name in use until 1856 when the island was renamed for Tasman himself.