Carnivorous Nights (38 page)

“What about the scat?” we said, glancing out the window.

“Maybe just leave it.”

“You don't want to use it for pigment?”

“I don't know if it'll work. It's kind of obvious, don't you think?”

“Uh—” Did other artists use wombat scat in their paintings? Either way, we couldn't leave it there. The publican had already branded us personae non gratae after our tiger question. If he toured the building's perimeter every night before bed, we didn't want him to find Baggies full of unexplained animal shit lying outside our window.

Retrieving the contraband would be a delicate matter.

“Let us handle this,” we told Alexis.

We located an unobtrusive side door (so we wouldn't have to go past the prying eyes in the bar), snuck out, hopped over some cow-proof fencing, and retrieved the renegade scat. No one was the wiser.

When we got back to the room, we saw that our thin-skinned friend had painted more than the platypus. He
had
made a drawing of the thylacine. It was in mid-stride, glancing furtively off to the right side of the paper and drying under his bed.

W
e left the valley with our tails between our legs and headed down to the coast. From Pyengana down to the sea was only thirteen miles, and we soon found ourselves in St. Helens, a funky beach town and fishing port perched on the mouth of George's Bay, where the George River (the one with the cheese named after it) poured into the sea.

In front of us, the vast expanse of the Tasman Sea stretched out toward New Zealand. Before getting to the coast, we had been feeling glum. Things were looking grim for the tiger. But the wide-open ocean inspired us to take a break from our search. We would wash away the hoax with a swim.

Driving north along the coast road, we saw vista after vista of pristine coves and inlets. We stopped at one, Binalong Bay, a semicircle of blue water bordered by a curving stretch of pure white sand. In the distance, a small motorboat was collecting saltwater crayfish from submerged traps
attached to buoys. We walked for about a mile along a sandy trail lined with white-barked eucalyptus trees and coastal shrubs, then climbed over slippery rocks, put on our swimming masks, and jumped in. Considering how hot the air temperature was—about 85 degrees—the water in the bay was unexpectedly cold. However, we forgot about the chill when we saw what lay below us.

The granite reef was as alive as any forest. Tall kelps and seaweeds grew from holdfasts on the rocky bottom and swayed with the current. It felt like we were sitting on top of a greenhouse looking down through the glass on unusually active and unruly garden beds. The kelp came in a variety of colors—gray, olive green, black-brown, even pinkish—and in an astonishing array of forms, branching into long streaming “leaves,” blooming into saw-toothed needles surrounded by air-filled floats, waving cabbages, rocking conifers, rolling corals, slow-dancing twigs, and nodding ferns. It was mesmerizing.

Underwater, we could see thirty feet in any direction. In the kelp beds, schools of silvery minnows dashed among the flowing strands. Dozens of domed blue jellyfish pulsed through the water. We dove into the cool of the streaming forest, and when Alexis surfaced, he cupped his hands and pushed a seahorse up through a column of water. The seahorse was yellowish green with a long snout, a dragonish mane, a long curled tail, and a prominent gut. We recognized it as the aptly named big-bellied seahorse, which is sometimes kidnapped from its salty home for the aquarium trade and for use in traditional medicines. Lacking the strong-muscled tails that most ocean vertebrates use to propel themselves through the water, seahorses are very weak swimmers and have to curl their tails around kelp strands to prevent the current from dragging them away. After getting its bearings, Alexis's seahorse teetered down to hide itself amongst the kelp again.

When the seahorse finally disappeared, we looked up to see a large stingray—about five feet across—hovering in front of us. Before we had time to panic, it glided off, fluttering and curling its winglike fins. It occurred to us that there were other large creatures out there: sharks, sea turtles, dolphins, seals, and somewhere further out even the giant squid.

Giant squid, also known as
Architeuthis
, are the largest invertebrates in the world. Until the 1860s when the first partial specimen was brought back to land, giant squids were thought to be creatures of myth—sea
monsters that haunted sailors' nightmares. Though more than a hundred specimens have since been recovered (either washed up on beaches or caught in fishing nets), to this day no one has ever seen a giant squid alive in its undersea habitat. From dead bodies and other evidence (undigested giant squid beaks as long as six inches have been found in the stomachs of sperm whales), it's known that giant squid can grow to a length of fiftyfive feet, possibly longer. Their two long tentacles and eight arms are lined with round, toothed suckers that they use to grip their prey. Their beaks are used to hack up prey before swallowing, and their eyes (hubcapsized, growing as large as fifteen inches in diameter) are the largest of any animal in the world. They're preyed on by sperm whales—which themselves reach a length of sixty feet and ninety thousand pounds—and in whale-on-squid battles, the giant squid sometimes leave circular sucker scars on whales' heads.

Some of the first reports of the giant squid's existence came from whaling vessels. We thought about
Moby-Dick
, Herman Melville's mid-nineteenth-century account of a monomaniacal whaling voyage to the
South Seas. In one chapter, the narrator, Ishmael, and the crew of the
Pequod
encounter a giant squid while sailing toward the island of Java:

The first known sighting of a giant squid in the Southern Hemisphere (documented by the French explorer François Péron) was off the shores of Tasmania in 1802. And over the past twenty years, three giant squid have washed up on Tasmania's east coast beaches, suggesting they might frequent waters only a few miles from the island's shore. The most recent stranding was in July 2002 when a female giant squid weighing 550 pounds washed up on Seven Mile Beach, less than ten miles from Hobart, the island's capital. When the squid was examined, biologists found she had sperm packets embedded in her mantle.

Giant squid are believed to have a bizarre and violent method of breeding. The male's penis, which can be more than three feet long, is like a hydraulic nail gun. And rather than directly fertilizing the female squid's eggs, the male injects packets of sperm (as long as eight inches, and about a quarter of an inch in diameter) under high pressure into the female's long arms. The sperm packets are stored in the arms until the female is ready to spawn, or deposit her eggs. How the sperm gets to her eggs isn't known. Scientists have suggested that the sperm packets might migrate through the female squid's body until they reach the area near her oviducts or that the female may tear open her own flesh with her tentacles.
It's also possible that the sperm packets are so chemically attracted to the eggs that they burst through her skin to complete the fertilization process. Each method of conception seemed dreamed up by the creators of
Alien.
Solving this biological mystery is just one reason seeing a giant squid in the wild has become an obsession for many scientists. One undersea expedition even strapped a camera to a sperm whale's head in a failed attempt to glimpse
Architeuthis.

As we were treading water, Alexis looked out toward the ocean and began musing. “The giant squid's the thylacine of the sea—but in re-verse—people thought
Architeuthis
was a mythical animal and then it turned out to be real. So the giant squid is still in the process of being discovered. The thylacine's a real animal that's in the process of becoming a myth.” He paused, his thoughts turning to more practical matters. “Do you think they still have the ink from the squid that washed up here? It would be great if I could get some giant squid ink to do a drawing.” Like other squid, octopi, and cuttlefish, giant squid secrete ink that they expel to cloud the water and confound their enemies. He gazed off determinedly, as if he were mind-melding with a squid and forcing it to wash up on the rocks. “I would give all the wombat scat in the world for one vial of giant squid ink.”

Just then we noticed Alexis's lips were beginning to turn blue. “We better get out before a male
Architeuthis
decides to impregnate you,” we said.

We swam back to the shore and, as we attempted to haul ourselves up on the boulders, realized our energy was sapped. While the octopus's garden was beguiling us with its charms, we had nearly gotten hypothermia. After using the last of our strength to drag our leaden legs out of the water, we sat there panting in the heat.

That night, we stayed in a town called Swansea. In the 1880s, the farmers from this region—the oldest rural municipality in Tasmania—had been the first to demand an islandwide bounty on the thylacine. At a local history museum, we found a bleak display. Hanging from the wall was a huge, rusting metal apparatus labeled “Tasmanian Tiger Trap.” It had massive metal jaws and an evil serrated grin. Beneath the trap was a blowup of an old black-and-white photo of a bearded hunter posed with his gun beside a strung-up Tasmanian tiger. The tiger is hanging upside
down, its body stretched out to the fullest extent and its huge head and snout just inches from the floor. The tiger's long tail arcs stiffly behind its back. Dating from 1869, this is the only surviving nineteenth-century photograph of the thylacine. Interestingly, the Tasmanian tiger was never photographed in the wild.

In the morning, we headed for Hobart. As we got closer to the capital, the number of logging trucks coming toward us began to increase, about one every three minutes.

“This really upsets me,” Alexis said after about ten huge trucks had left us sucking their wind. “Tasmania's lifeblood is spilling onto the blacktop.”

Hobart was originally founded as a British penal colony in 1804. But much of its early prosperity derived from the sea. Built near the mouth of the Derwent River and surrounded by channels and bays, Hobart is a port city. And when we crossed the bridge over the spectacular Derwent and found ourselves in the city's center, we were immediately charmed. Along the waterfront was a huge marina, Sullivan's Cove, filled with yachts, fishing boats, and long piers lined with seafood restaurants and fishmongers. The far end of the cove was fronted by a long row of yellow sandstone buildings. Once countinghouses and warehouses, they now housed fashionable bars, restaurants, shops, and art galleries. Up above on a bluff called Battery Point, winding streets were lined with historic homes, many of them originally built by the owners of whaling vessels. In the early days of the colony, whalers went after right whales that literally swarmed in the bays surrounding Hobart. They made fortunes on whale products—blubber from the whales was rendered and used for lamp oil; the whales' baleen was sold for making hoop skirts and corsets. In later years, when the right whales had all been killed (right whales are still an endangered species, not yet having recovered from the mass slaughter that took place over 150 years ago), the Hobart whalers turned to sperm whales, which were harder to catch and lived further out to sea.