Carnivorous Nights (10 page)

We weren't keen to participate in “nature's way.” Each time we drove away from one of our roadside autopsies, we scanned the highway for animals that could end up as flattened fauna. But no Tasmanian wildlife was waiting to dash beneath our wheels. In fact, the only creatures we saw were ravens picking at the flesh of animals that were already dead. We identified them as native Tasmanian forest ravens,
Corvus tasmanicus
, and checked them off in our bird book.

As for the rest of the scenery, it was lullingly monotonous. Brown pastures baked beneath the summer sun. Hereford cattle swished their tails. Except for the occasional splattered beast, nothing struck us as stopworthy until we came across a farm field filled with strange-looking plants. Bloated, anemic-blue bulbs floated atop unusually long brown stalks. A sign on a low fence read, “DANGER. KEEP OUT. TRESPASSERS PROSECUTED. ILLEGAL USE OF CROP MAY CAUSE DEATH.”

The plants were opium poppies—the kind used to make heroin and morphine—and the bulbs were seed heads very close to harvest time. A field of the same crop in Afghanistan or Asia's Golden Triangle would draw down the wrath of international drug agents. But this was legal. Tasmania had a United Nations sanction to grow poppies for making medical-grade morphine and codeine. The island produces about 40 percent of the world's supply.

The poppy field spread out before us like a blue mist. Just a little slash in one of the bulbous seed heads would produce a sap that would soon harden into highly potent opium. We would see plenty of tigers under
those conditions. We were tempted to lie down in the field and take a long, opium-induced nap. But we kept driving—mile after lonely mile.

As we passed signs for the towns of Black River, Smithton, and Marrawah (and roads named Devil's Elbow and Dismal), the pastures gave way to stands of forest dominated by eucalyptus trees. Signs of civilization dwindled to the vanishing point. We had nearly run out of highway, when we reached a ramshackle farmhouse, standing alone at the side of the road and surrounded by brush. A man in a polo shirt, blue slacks, and Blundstone boots was waiting out front. He was accompanied by an excited gray dog.

“Meet Scratch,” he said. “I'm Geoff King.”

Geoff was a sturdily built man, with wavy, auburn hair graying slightly at the temples. His face was red from being out in the sun, and it was immediately noticeable that he was blind in one eye. The blind eye drifted to the left, and it gave him a waggish expression—as if he was thinking of a good joke.

He ran his good eye over us. “You look a bit done in,” he said.

We explained that we weren't used to driving on the left side of the road, and were actually feeling a bit dizzy. He congratulated us on not crashing. “Good on ya. You did a wonderful job.”

We had heard Geoff King was an expert at finding Tasmanian devils in their wild state. In the absence of the tiger, the devil earned the title of being the largest marsupial carnivore in the world.

He inspected our four-wheel drive. “That's a lovely bus,” he said. “If you're not too tired we could take a ride over to my property.”

“Would you want to drive?” we suggested.

“Absolutely …mind if we just put this in the back?” “This” was a black plastic recycling bin—the size of a big milk crate—covered by a tarp. Dozens of flies swirled around it. We looked at it apprehensively. “It's for the devils,” Geoff explained.

As he lifted the mysterious black box into the back of the Pajero, we attempted to ignore the rank odor emanating from inside.

Geoff drove the Pajero down to a T where the highway ended and turned left onto a narrow strip of blacktop. “This lonely outpost is the Arthur River Road,” he said. At first the road was paved, but it soon turned to gravel. As we crunched along, Geoff explained that he hadn't
always been a devil specialist. He had been a cattle farmer. In fact, the King family had been running cattle in this far corner of Tasmania for more than one hundred years. Geoff and his brother, Perry, were the fifth generation of Kings to work the land.

Geoff, however, was a strange bird by the standards of most people in this farming community. For one thing, he was more interested in wildlife than livestock. For years, he tried to run cattle on his family's coastal property with an eye toward conservation—attempting to reduce the cat-tle's impact on the fragile foreshore and sensitive seaside plants. But in 1997, he decided to go his own way. He gave up on running cattle, split the family property with his brother, and turned most of his half (830 acres) into a wildlife preserve. Once the cattle were removed, the habitat started to revive—and all sorts of creatures moved in.

Geoff would camp out on his property at night and watch wallabies, wombats, and devils. With income from the cattle gone, he started offering wildlife tours—and he focused on devils, black-furred, four-legged marsupials that screamed like banshees in the dead of night. These fierce animals lived only on the island of Tasmania, having been driven extinct on the mainland several hundred years ago—probably, like the thylacine, by the dingo. Geoff learned the devils' habits, what they liked to eat, and how best to observe them. Until then, he had never really seen a devil up close. “Most of the time you only see them dead on the road or running across the road very quickly. Just being able to sit down in the darkness with these animals and learn the males from females has been terrific.”

We decided this was a good time to raise the tiger question. “You don't ever see any tigers while you're out looking for devils, do you?”

“Nahhh,” he said. “But you are in tiger country.”

Northwestern Tasmania had been the location of some of the most credible tiger sightings in recent years. It was also the place where a bounty was first put on the tiger's head.

In 1825, Geoff said, the Van Diemen's Land Company—a Londonbased concern—was granted hundreds of thousands of acres on which to raise sheep by the British crown. The company's main holding was Woolnorth, a huge parcel that made up the entire northwest tip of the island. Convicts from the island's jails were brought in to herd sheep, and contract workers from England (including Geoff's great-great-grandfather) were shipped in on long, perilous ocean voyages to help run the station.

In its first few years, the Van Diemen's Land Company suffered huge stock losses. Its sheep were killed off by bad weather and disease. And some were killed by animals—wild dogs, Tasmanian tigers, possibly devils. But tigers were targeted as the main culprits. It was a typical story. The British and their descendants had systematically gone after the top predator in most places they lived—particularly if it was considered a threat to livestock. In 1830, the company offered a bounty of 5 shillings for each male tiger and 7 shillings for each female tiger. The bounty would be increased to 10 and 12 shillings respectively as more tigers were killed. In 1836, the company hired its first “tiger man”—the first in a long series— whose job was to help eradicate the animal. Eventually, other groups of landowners began setting up their own organizations to pay tiger bounties, and the Tasmanian government set up an island-wide bounty system in 1888, paying £1 for each dead adult tiger.

As the bounty years wore on through the latter half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, tigers were seen less and less in the settled areas. In fact, they became so rare that if one was captured or shot, people would come from miles around to take a look.

One of the most famous photos of the Tasmanian tiger was taken in the nearby community of Mawbanna in 1930. It shows a young man, named Wilf Batty, holding a shotgun and squatting on his knees next to the stiff body of a tiger. The body is leaned up against a fence and the tiger's eyes are closed. It's believed that this was the last tiger ever to be shot in Tasmania.

“What about the sightings?” we asked. “What about all the people who say they've seen them?”

“I've spoken to people who say they've seen them or heard them. Lots of people believe the tiger's still around,” Geoff said.

“What do you think?”

“I'd have to say that based on the evidence—or lack of it—that it's probably gone. But then you never know.” He thought for a minute. “Tomorrow I'll take you to a place where there was a famous tiger sighting. It was taken very seriously because the fellow who reported it was a wildlife expert employed by the government. It sparked an extended search.”

Geoff stopped and engaged the four-wheel drive. Then he made a sharp right and drove off the gravel road straight into the bush and onto
a narrow, barely discernible track. As the Pajero lurched forward into a shallow sandy ditch, we remembered the woman at the car rental agency saying something about not taking the vehicle on unmapped roads.

As the Pajero squeezed through a corridor of tiny-leaved tea trees, rough branches scraped along the sides of the car and poked in through the open windows. The sandy track was rutted, dipping and cresting in a series of small waves. As we jounced along, we felt like we were back on the pitching ferry. Geoff worked the wheel in ways we had never imagined.

“You're a really good driver,” we said, our teeth rattling.

“Well, I have a bit of a reputation. I used to be the designated driver after parties and other spirited events.”

“You don't drink?”

“I do. But if you only have one eye, you can get pissed, and you won't see two lines going down the middle of the road. No double vision.”

Reaching a small crest, Geoff jammed on the brakes and ran around to the back of the vehicle. In every direction, the knobby landscape was covered with tufts of native grass.

Geoff hauled out the foul-smelling black bin, removed the tarp, and pulled up a limp creature. He held it up by the tail to give us a better look. A patch of dried blood marked its chest. We were by turns fascinated and revolted, but we tried to play it cool. “What the hell is that?” we blurted.

“It's a pademelon.”

“What kind of melon?” we asked, swatting away a few flies.

“It's a Tasmanian pademelon—also called a rufous wallaby. It's a small type of kangaroo, or macropod. This one was killed on the road we just drove down. I picked it up last night.”

He laid the pademelon down on the sandy track. We studied its soft brown-gray fur, and its long, carrot-shaped tail. Its head unfortunately was too squashed to give any sense of its original shape.

We practiced the name, muttering “pademelon, paddy-melon, pad-eee—mell-uhn.”

Geoff took a length of rope and tied it around the pademelon's legs and neck. He tied the other end to the back of the four-wheel drive. Then we drove off along the rutted track with the carcass bouncing along behind us.

“What we're doing is creating a scent trail,” Geoff said. Tasmanian devils, he explained, can smell the perfume of death from a mile away. So by laying down the alluring scent of Eau de Dead Pademelon, we would draw devils—out on a night of scavenging—to follow this road, too. “Devils like to hunt along streams and creeks, and they treat roads the same. So they'll wander along this track, follow this scent trail we're drag-ging—and know that food will be out there.”

“Is this what they like to eat?” We glanced back at the pademelon.

“Devils are carnivores, or meat eaters,” he said. “But they prefer to feed on animals that are already dead.”

“Do they ever hunt?”

“They can. Younger devils hunt more than older ones. A young devil coming out of the den could survive on a feed of moths for a night. They eat quite a variety of foods. Moths. Lizard eggs. Wallabies … Americans. They'll devour a carcass bones and all.”

Being dined on by devils is actually one of the things Tasmanians fear about the bush. Not really that devils would attack you—but that they might eat your body if you died in a remote area. There's also the vague concern that a devil might try to gnaw on you if you were injured.

“Naaaah,” Geoff said when we asked about this. But then he added, “Devils certainly have a very good sense of when other animals are weak and infirm though.” With their incredible noses, they follow or track sick animals—sometimes showing up before an animal is quite dead. He paused and lowered his voice to a stage whisper. “That's why we call them the auditors of the dark.”

He poked his head out the window and abruptly stopped the Pajero. “This is encouraging. I can see Tassie devil tracks here in the sand.”

We pulled out one of our guidebooks
—Tracks, Scats and Other Traces: A Field Guide to Australian Mammals
by Barbara Triggs—and turned to the “Tracks” section. It said, “The Tasmanian devil has squarish footprints, distinctive because the four forward-pointing toes that are visible on the front and hind foot tracks are evenly spaced and level.” The tracks in the sand looked like little bear claw prints.

We walked around to the back of the Pajero to see if the pademelon was still attached. Some of it was. We wondered when we might see an animal with all its parts.

“At night, we'd have seen two hundred animals by this time—walla-bies, bandicoots, possums, wombats,” Geoff said. “This is wonderful habitat for devils because there's so much food.”

“So most of the animals in Tasmania come out after dark?”

“That's their time.”

It was hard to believe we were in a wildlife paradise. Besides the dead pademelon, there wasn't an animal in sight.

Geoff drove on through the pale grasses until we reached the coast and saw waves crashing against a rocky beach. Fractured outcrops of pink quartzite jutted from the sea and formed ramparts on the shoreline.

“Welcome to King's Run,” Geoff said. His property stretched along three and a half miles of undeveloped coastline. It was stunning. An enormous block of bright blue sky hovered over a sea of beach grasses waving in the wind. Blue-green waves shot into fountains of spray and foam as they broke against the rose-colored rocks.

Some of the outcrops were as big as houses and covered with multicolored lichens—living organisms that are a combination of algae and fungi. They were rust red, burned orange, and pale green. Usually these vivid encrustations are considered a sign of good air quality.