Carnivorous Nights (11 page)

Geoff confirmed that this was true. He instructed us to look toward the west, past the rocks and surf. “See anything?” he asked.

“The ocean?”

“Heaps of ocean. If you set off from here, you wouldn't hit land again until you reached South America.” From Geoff's it's seven thousand miles across the water to Argentina, one of the longest stretches of open water in the world. It's swept by the Roaring 40s, the powerful western wind that confounds ships and blows the air clean.

On the old Woolnorth property at a coastal headland called Cape Grim, the Australian government runs the Baseline Air Pollution Station. At times, Cape Grim has registered the purest air in the world.

Geoff left us to explore the rocky, lichen-encrusted shoreline. The beach was covered with small, swirling shells; huge strips of brown and green kelp; abalone shells inlaid with silvery mother-of-pearl; and cuttle bones. The air smelled fresh and briny, with a note of decaying seaweed. Inland, eucalyptus trees, bent by ocean gusts, lined a low cliff. We walked into the tufts of grass behind the beach. The landscape was windswept
and desolate, and it seemed devoid of wildlife. But then we began to look more closely. In between the tussocks of grass—everywhere—were piles of animal scat.

We pulled out our copy of
Tracks, Scats and Other Traces
and read from the introduction: “For many people who visit the wild places of Australia the mammals that live there are an unknown presence, rarely seen. But the signs of the presence are all around, if one can read them.” The signs included tracks, scratchings, scrapings, burrows, bones, and scats.

The abundance of scat led us to conclude that this place was profoundly alive. We had just worked this out when Geoff reappeared on the beach, wearing a black, full-body wetsuit and brandishing a sharp, serrated knife. He looked like a murderous seal. “Can't you just imagine a tiger walking along here?” he shouted.

Despite the chilly water temperature, he was about to leap into the sea in search of abalone. Abalone is the most expensive shellfish in the world—and one of Tasmania's most lucrative exports. Geoff dove into a salty pool ringed by rocks and came back with five big black shellfish. Each was the size of a tea saucer. We began to salivate.

“We'll eat well tonight,” he promised, prying open the shells and cutting the flesh free from the pearly interiors.

Before taking off from the beach, Geoff unhitched what was left of the dead pademelon from the back of the Pajero and left it for the local devils to snack on. “I only take out little bits of food on these nights,” he said. “So we don't give a complete feed to an animal. It just lures them into the area. Tomorrow night, after the rest of Team Thylacine arrives, we'll lay down another scent trail, conceal ourselves in a hide, and—if all goes well—watch the devils come down to feed.”

Just before we left, we saw a pair of long-legged shorebirds flying across the beach. As they disappeared, we heard them calling.
Heh, heh-heh-heh-heh-heh.
It sounded like a grating, staccato laugh. “Those are masked lapwings,” Geoff said. They were nesting on the beach. “When you hear them calling out at night, it might mean a devil's approaching.”

Not far from Geoff's house, we saw a small prickly object in the middle of the road.

“Wouldn't want anyone to hit that,” he said, pulling the Pajero to the side.

The prickly object was in motion, slowly ambling across the blacktop.

“That's an echidna. It's a bit like your porcupine.”

The echidna was a hunchbacked creature—about sixteen inches long—with a hairless needle of a snout. Its back was covered with long black hairs and white spikes.

Early settlers and explorers in this part of the world, not knowing what to make of the animals they encountered, often named them for creatures they were already familiar with. The echidna was originally called a porcupine because of its spiky back and sometimes a spiny anteater because, like South American anteaters, it had a long sticky tongue that darted out to eat ants and termites.

The name “echidna,” given to the animal by scientists, comes from Greek mythology. In ancient myth, Echidna was a hybrid monster—half beautiful woman and half snake—in other words, half mammal and half reptile. That seemed like an apt description for this animal. Though the echidna is placed firmly in the mammal camp (class:
Mammalia
), it has some reptilian characteristics. For example, a female echidna does not give birth to live offspring but actually lays an egg—a leathery, soft egg like a turtle's or snake's—and she lays it inside a pouch on her own belly. The egg incubates in this little pouch and when it hatches, the baby echidna (called a puggle) is only the size of a jellybean. The developing puggle remains in the pouch for two or three months until the growth of spikes makes it necessary for the mother to evict it.

Echidna sexual relationships are among the most unusual in the mammal world. At the beginning of the breeding season in winter, a single female echidna may be followed for weeks by as many as ten males in single file, each hoping to father the one puggle she will have that year. This strange procession is known as an echidna train, and the males are usually lined up from largest (at the front of the line) to smallest (serving as the caboose). After weeks of rejecting their advances, the female will finally select one male—usually the largest—although rival males may need to engage in a head-butting contest in order to defend their ascendancy. Mating includes lengthy foreplay during which the male probes the female for several hours with his snout and strokes her spines, followed by belly-to-belly coupling to avoid mutual spiking—an event that can last as long as three hours. Afterward, the male and female go their own ways,
with the female preparing to lay her egg and the male possibly joining another echidna train in the hopes of mating again.

The echidna is a charming and enigmatic animal—and one that we gathered, by the calm manner of its rolling gait, is not easily intimidated. Geoff waited until the echidna had safely crossed the road, and then we got out to take a peek. It must have sensed us coming, but instead of running away, it showed off a simple but impressive defense strategy. As if it were on an elevator, the echidna seemed to literally sink inches down into the ground. “It's digging in,” Geoff said. “Not much can get at it now.” The echidna had used its sharp-clawed feet to burrow rapidly downward, and all that remained of it on the surface was its spiky back. It looked like a huge ball of black yarn stuffed with knitting needles.

Although echidnas are sometimes killed on the road, they are the only Tasmanian animals that can have revenge on a hit-and-run driver. In return for being sent to echidna heaven, they can retaliate with a spike in the tire.

G
eoff had invited us to spend our first night in Tasmania at the King family home. His wife and two young sons were away on vacation, so he had the one-story sprawling wooden farmhouse to himself. When we went inside, we saw that his living room was lined with an assortment of natural history ephemera. A plaster cast of a Tasmanian devil's footprint. Skulls of various animals. Seashells and driedout sea sponges. Driftwood painted with intricate designs. There was also a small library of books on Tasmanian flora and fauna. He had field guides on birds, mammals, shells, reptiles, trees, wildflowers, and rain forest fungi. There were also books on aboriginal history, as well as a government report dating from 1980 called
The Tasmanian Tiger
, which analyzed the possibility of the tiger's survival. It was full of charts and graphs.

In the kitchen, Geoff cut the cream-colored, tonguelike abalone meat into thin pieces and quickly sautéed them in butter, with a touch of fresh garlic. He presented us with two small plates. “I wanted you to taste the
most tender bits,” he said. Then he returned to the kitchen to warm up some homemade curry. We gobbled down the abalone in between sips of sauvignon blanc we had bought in Devonport. The abalone's clamlike flesh was ambrosial—sweet and meaty, with a hint of the ocean it had just been pulled from. After these appetizers, Geoff joined us at the table, bringing over plates of chicken curry and rice. He had prepared the curry using a free-range chicken, or “chook” as he called it.

After a few bites, we reminded him that the other members of our expedition would be arriving the next day at noon.

“Now, who are they exactly?” Geoff asked.

Alexis, we explained, was an artist. He was going to be making images of Tasmanian wildlife. Dorothy was an art critic and Alexis's new love interest. And Chris … who was Chris? We didn't really know him.

Geoff stopped eating. “He's not an ax murderer, is he?”

“No, he's a wealthy art collector from Manhattan.”

“Oh well, that could be more dangerous.”

After dinner, we switched over to a carton of Shiraz that Geoff brought out from his pantry and watched a cricket match that went on for hours— which still wasn't long enough for us to understand the rules. When we finally jumped into our sleeping bags around 2:30 A.M., we discovered that the guestroom had been invaded by an army of small brown beetles. They made soothing clicking noises and occasionally plopped down on us throughout the night.

In the morning, we drove over to have a cup of tea with Geoff's mother, Dulcie. In front of her white clapboard ranch house—which was as isolated as Geoff's—she kept peacocks as pets. Four small brown peachicks pecked the ground in her front yard.

“Aren't they lovers?” she cooed.

She was a wiry, energetic woman, about seventy years old, sportily dressed in black shorts, striped ankle socks, and sandals. Geoff had told us that in her twenties, Dulcie had been the all-Tasmanian badminton champion and came close to representing Australia in the Commonwealth Games.

She fixed us tea with lemon from her lemon tree. And we sat down in a room decorated with framed drawings of horses. (A family-owned horse had won the Tasmanian pacing championship in 1979.) Geoff had hoped
his mother would have some stories to tell us about the Tasmanian tiger. But when she heard the word “tiger,” she said, “Ooooh, the tigers are traveling at this time of year—the tiger snakes.”

Our ears perked up. Getting lost, land leeches, and hypothermia were high on our list of bush dangers. But tiger snakes were higher.

“My first memory is of snakes,” Dulcie told us. One day when she was a young girl, she was helping her brothers drive cattle through a field when a tiger snake bit her. “It banged like a hammer on my leg,” she said, pointing to her thigh. “It just stood up and struck. The poison went off on my trousers. I remember they were new blue jeans.”

The snake's fangs hadn't broken the skin, but her family called in the doctor anyway. “He said even a little bit could do you in. If you stay calm, you can last eighteen hours, but if you run around …” She trailed off.

After finishing our tea, we all went for a drive. Geoff took backroads to the top of a nearby hill, where we had a panoramic view of rolling green pasture and stands of native forest. Occasionally, we could make out a lone eucalyptus tree, with its angular skeleton of forking branches and blue-green leaves growing in flat tufts on top. These oddball trees were the epitome of Down Under.

“What we have here,” said Geoff, “is a very English pasture system grafted onto a very Tasmanian landscape.” English ryegrass and clover grew fitfully in the fragile sandy soil. Tasmanian farmers are highly protective of these pasture grasses, surrounding them with fences to stop native animals from grazing—and frequently resorting to shooting.

On the way down the hill, we drove along a shady, wooded road. Geoff pointed out some huge gray-barked eucalyptuses. “Smithton peppermint gums,” he said. There were also dark, thick-trunked wattle trees called blackwoods with heavy spreading branches covered in long green leaves. “Very good for making furniture,” Dulcie commented.

As we drove, we passed a tract of forestland. Something terrible had happened: the land was a black hole of uprooted tree stumps, gouged earth, and small scattered limbs. It looked like it had been bombed.

“What happened?” we asked.

“It's a clear-fell,” Geoff said. “It's crown land—it belongs to the government. They're wood chipping it for export to Japan. The wood chips are used for making paper.” He pointed out a few remaining piles of
branches, broken logs, and brush. “They pushed those together to be burned.”

“This was always my favorite road,” his mother added sadly. “We would drive cattle down here through these lovely trees and listen to the birdsong.”

At the bottom of the hill, Geoff opened a gate in a wire fence and drove into a green pasture filled with Dulcie's cows. Geoff made a bellowing noise and dozens of Black Anguses and brown-and-white Herefords began following the Pajero.

Most of this grazing land, he said, had been painstakingly cleared by hand by the early settlers. There had always been a history of logging and land clearing in the Northwest. But that was when trees were felled by determined men using axes and double-handed crosscut saws. “A lot of Tasmanians were in these isolated areas, and they would chip away at the land year after year.” These days logging had a more industrial quality. The logging companies used chainsaws, bulldozers, mechanical log loaders, and excavators. After clear-cutting a parcel of forest, they would torch the land, burning off the remaining debris. It didn't seem to matter if the local community was opposed to a forest being cut down. The government had a quota system—a certain amount of public forest could be chopped each year, including a certain percentage of old-growth forest. Now, the logging companies were chopping the trees as fast as they could. Geoff said it was as if they had switched the bounty from the thy-lacine's head and put it on the forests.