Carnivorous Nights (15 page)

“Lovely, lovely,” Geoff whispered as they engaged in their whirling devil-match. “He's in wonderful condition.”
EERRERGEEE. AHGH. RARRGH.
Either Shacky had finally eaten her fill or the big male was too much for her. With a final roundhouse booty-bash, he forced her from the carcass. Shacky skulked away into the night.

The screams from this last battle had unnerved us. But Geoff told us we didn't know the half of it.

One night when Geoff was a young boy, neighbors on the farm twenty miles down the road had been out shooting wallabies. They were culling them to prevent them from grazing on stockland. There was a shooting accident, and a neighbor boy was killed. While the family made arrangements in town, Geoff was asked to look after their deserted farm. The dead wallabies—about thirty or forty of them—had been left in a pile a few hundred feet from the farmhouse. In the night, the devils came for them. “I'll never forget lying in bed, listening to the cacophony—the devils, I don't know how many there were, screaming and yowling. It was the most bone-chilling thing I'd ever heard.”

By the time the General got to work on the carcass, the wallaby's bones were sticking up through the flesh. Muscle and sinew dribbled out of his mouth. His muzzle was covered with blood. Then, without even being challenged, he simply scampered off. We looked at the empty stage.

“That's not usual,” Geoff said. “But then who knows? Maybe there's a tiger out there after all.” Tigers were more than twice as big as devils— and the only animals in Tasmania that could kill an adult devil. Even if
tigers had truly breathed their last as a species, devils would still be hardwired to keep an ear out for the tiger's approach. “It's like they're listening for a ghost,” Geoff added.

After a minute or two, the General returned to the edges of the spotlight and very tentatively licked the wallaby. Then he perched alongside the carcass, gripped the mangled body tightly with his front paws, and hauled up gob after gob of wallaby flesh. Suddenly, he reared back as if summoning all his strength, and like a weightlifter using a clean-and-jerk motion, he lifted the carcass …up…up…up… Geoff looked stunned. “He's pulled it free!” he shouted. The General's black eyes gleamed as he scuttled off backward, dragging the carcass and metal stake into the darkness.

Geoff grabbed a pair of work gloves and flashlight and raced out of the shack.
Where the hell was he going?
A gibbering panic broke out among our ranks as we watched Geoff disappear over the hill and out of the range of the spotlight. We imagined him returning with ten devils attached to his arms and legs, screaming for help.

Instead, Geoff reappeared, holding the mangled wallaby triumphantly over his head. He had won the tug-of-war with the devil—and this was his bloody prize.

“Wild work” was all we could think.

A
fter Geoff 's horror movie turn, we decided to pack it up for the night. As we washed out the wineglasses and put the animal skulls back on their shelves, Geoff shared some disturbing news about the devils.

Over the last fifty years, Tasmanian devils had enjoyed a population boom—and a measure of protection and positive publicity. That wasn't always the case. For years and years, from settlement times onward, these creatures of the night were hunted, poisoned, drowned, and shot. As late as the 1960s, there were concerns that the devil might be headed for extinction. Now, Geoff said, devils were facing another threat.

A mysterious devil disease was racing through parts of Tasmania. The disease was lethal, causing disfiguring facial tumors, and appeared to be spreading from devil to devil. Before the disease was detected in the mid1990s, the devils' overall population was estimated at 150,000. Since
then, the population had dropped by one third. In areas where the disease was most virulent, devil numbers were down 85 percent.

Although the disease had not yet reached the Northwest, Geoff was concerned. “It's worrying,” he said. On an island, species are more vulnerable and things can change very quickly. He couldn't imagine Tasmania without those bloodcurdling screams.

With the ocean at our backs, we left the shack and rode through the darkness across Geoff's property. The headlights and moon cast misshapen shadows over the landscape.

We hadn't traveled more than a hundred yards when we turned a corner and a small, squat, furry animal came into view. The animal stood motionless, bottom-heavy and stooped over. It was a little hunchback kangaroo. For a moment, it was frozen in the headlights, a cowering marsupial Quasimodo. Then it sprang into life, and with a series of short quick hops, zigzagged away into a small tangle of trees.

“That's a Tasmanian pademelon.” It was a live version of the creature we had dragged behind the Pajero the day before.

“Wow, that's my first one,” said Alexis.

“Mark the date,” said Geoff. “You're no longer a virgin.”

Geoff stopped the vehicle on top of a small rise looking out over an expanse of grass. “This is a nice little spot. It's quite juicy,” he said. The grass was clipped short, but not by cows or lawn mowers. “It's basically a marsupial lawn. It's kept short by the amount of animals that are here. Look at that mob.” He pointed at five kangaroo-like animals that were munching grass in the middle of the field. These were bigger and sleeker than the chubby pademelon—and they weren't intimidated by the Pajero. Their eyes glowed yellow in the headlights.

“Those are Bennett's wallabies,” Geoff said. “What we fed to the devils tonight.” The biggest wallabies stood over four feet tall and had two-and-a-half-foot-long tails that stretched out on the ground behind them. Their triangular faces were marked by tiny white mustaches, and their long ears twisted and turned so they could listen for predators in two directions at once.

It was startling to see wild animals in a landscape that had been desolate just a few hours before. It was, as they say, hopping.

“Where do they go during the day? Into the woods?”

“Yeah, just into the verge.”

As we slowly jounced over the undulating track, a wallaby or pademelon would occasionally
boing
across our path. In the silvery moonlight, we picked out the forms of dozens of grazing, nibbling, hopping animals.

Pademelons and Bennett's wallabies were just two of the forty-five species of macropods that live in Australia. Macropod means “big foot.” These animals have huge hind feet, as well as powerful hind legs and long thick tails. Following this basic kangaroo body model, Australia's macropods had evolved to live in every landscape and habitat, including deserts, swamps, rain forests, and rocky terrain. There are even two that live in trees.

Just a few feet away, we saw a tiny creature on its hind legs, hopping next to a dark outcrop of rocks. It looked like a furry overgrown mouse.

“Is that another species?” we asked.

“Nahhh, that's a joey—probably just out of the pouch.”

It was a young pademelon—about eight inches high and apparently about thirty weeks old. It hopped tentatively on tiny macrofeet, staying within one or two hops of its mother's pouch. Then it hopped back in and poked its tiny head out. It would spend about four months in this half-in/half-out stage before heading off on its own.

At one time, Geoff said, Tasmanian pademelons had also lived on Aus-tralia's mainland. But a combination of factors—clearing of their forest homes, persecution by British settlers, and predation by foxes—proved too much for them. By the early 1900s, this small kangaroo species had vanished from the mainland. Now it survived only in Tasmania.

Our observations on the marsupial lawn were cut short when Alexis burped loudly. It was one of those drawn-out, deep-from-the-belly belches that, while gross, is worthy of respect. Dorothy gave him a look of dismay. He shrugged. “I'm imitating the distress call of the over-the-hill devil,” he retorted.

When we reached the edge of Geoff's property, Chris retrieved his car, and we hit the gravel road that led back to the highway and Geoff 's house. Within a minute, we saw a dead wallaby on the roadside. Geoff stopped the Pajero, picked up the wallaby, and threw it into the brush.

For devils, Geoff explained, this road was a tempting smorgasbord—
a little taste of possum, a little pademelon, even a little devil. Devils aren't ashamed to eat their own brethren and often get run over while intent on a little roadside cannibalism. To protect the neighborhood devils from speeding cars, Geoff did a nightly roadkill run, tossing most of the dead animals to the side and taking some back for freezing.

“About twenty Tasmanian devils are killed on this road every year and I expect when it gets the tar or bitumen on it, it'll get worse,” he said. The gravel road was in the process of being paved.

“The main thing you can do is get people to slow down at night. If you drive down here at sixty kilometers an hour, you won't hit anything. In the 230 times I've done devil viewings, I've had maybe four animals hit me. At sixty kilometers an hour, you get down here in fourteen minutes. At a hundred kilometers an hour, you get down here in eleven minutes, and you would probably kill an animal a night.”

He stopped again to pick up a brushtail possum.

“It's quite fresh,” Alexis pointed out.

“Yes, it's been killed in the last couple of hours. We're just going to give it mouth-to-mouth …”

“It's gorgeous,” Alexis said, looking at the possum's thick, luxurious fur. “Too bad we've only seen dead ones.”

Geoff put the dead possum in the back of the Pajero—he was keeping this one for freezing—and Alexis took this opportunity to light his pipe. The smell of weed and the freshly dead possum combined to create a heady perfume. And it wasn't Chanel No. 5.

A little further along, the headlights illuminated something fairly large resting in the middle of the road. As Geoff maneuvered around it, lighting up a trail of blood, he identified it as a dead wombat—a big vegetarian marsupial that burrows like a woodchuck and is related to the koala. “I'll come back for that one later,” he said.

A moment after, we hit a sharp bump in the road. The possum in the back flew up and landed with a thump.

“It's ali-I-ive,” Alexis sang.

Geoff dropped Alexis and Dorothy off at his house and picked up another recycling bin. We rode back with him to where the wombat lay in a blind spot between two crests. “This is going to be a quick salvage operation,” Geoff said. “We don't want to become roadkill ourselves.”

We scuttled onto the moonlit road, and Geoff lifted up the poor beast,
unveiling a pool of blood beneath the body. He placed the animal in the black bin, wound-side down. Geoff's hands were drenched in blood. It took two of us to carry the wombat over to the car. It felt like we were hauling a sack of flour. The wombat's short, bristly fur was rough to the touch, and the body gave off an intense, musky odor.

“That's not the smell of it being dead,” Geoff said, wiping his bloodcovered hands on a rag. “That's its normal smell. Smelly animal the wombat, but much loved by the Tasmanian devil—for eating.”

Back at Geoff's, in front of the house, we examined the wombat with a flashlight. In the black recycling bin, it was curled up on its side. Its husky body was covered with coarse silver-gray hairs and its thickly padded feet were generously clawed. We studied the wombat's flat furless nose and its left eye, which was small, deep-set, and closed in death. The black container made the wombat look like it was in a little casket.

Alexis came out to sit vigil with us. “I should do a drawing of this,” he said. “It's poignant.”

In fact, the scene reminded us of a drawing we had once seen by the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A lover of animals, the nineteenth-century artist kept a wombat at his house in London—he had obtained his pet from an animal dealer—and would frequently hold it on his lap and scratch its belly. It's said he even allowed his wombat to sleep on a “silver serving dish” at the dinner table. (Some scholars believe Ros-setti's mealtime menageries were the inspiration for the mad tea party in
Alice in Wonderland.
)

In a letter Rossetti wrote to his brother in 1869, he said, “The wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness.” When Rossetti's beloved pet died just a few months later, he was heartbroken and memorialized it through a combination poem-and-illustration. Rossetti drew himself weeping, his face covered with a large hankie, with the chubby-bellied wombat lying dead on its back, looking remarkably like the specimen we were mourning. And he wrote these lines beneath his picture.