Carnivorous Nights (46 page)

As we passed the provocatively named rivers, our minds drifted into the mid-twenty-first century. Scientists were ready to release the first pair of cloned Tasmanian tigers. It had been a long road of trial, error, devil moms, and thylacine diapers. But the tigers had been reborn, complete with stripes and wicket-shaped grins. And there were Don Colgan and Karen Firestone from the Australian Museum. Through gene therapy, they had extended their life spans just long enough to witness the fruits of their labors. The confluence of the Adam and Eve rivers seemed like a fitting place to unveil the first mated pair. The tigers would walk into the wild in the same place they had seemingly walked out of it, and we would watch the newly minted thylacines stroll off together into the sunset …

We asked Col if cloned tigers would ever be an acceptable substitute for wild-bred thylacines.

Col nearly shook with exasperation. The cloning project drove him mad. Even if scientists were successful, he thought cloning was all wrong. “It's going to be a clinical tiger. It will be sickly and diseased, not one you can stick in the bush. It will be an imposter without natural instincts.”

People should be
looking
for tigers not
making
them, Col said. He had met with the director of the Australian Museum, the man who had started the thylacine DNA project, and told him, “When I find a tiger, I'll let you know. Then you can stop the cloning.”

He asked us to turn off the gravel road onto a small dirt track. It was blocked by a gate with a “No Entry” sign. Col produced a key, unlocked the gate, and instructed us to drive up a road, littered with huge rocks
and tree branches, slicing through thick green forest. We felt like we were about to take a meeting with a rebel leader.

After jostling over deep ruts, we reached two abandoned shacks made from graying wooden slats and corrugated metal. They stood alongside the Adam River. “This is Adamsfield,” Col said. “What's left of it.” In the 1920s, these shacks marked the edge of a mining boomtown, where prospectors mined for a black gold called osmiridium, a rare alloy used for making the nibs of fountains pens and jewelry, and even in the creation of a poisonous gas. It commanded £30 per ounce. Osmiridium was discovered in the area in 1909, mining began in 1925, and by 1926, two thousand people were living in Adamsfield.

Thylacines lived in the area, too. “The last six tigers in the Hobart zoo were found within thirty miles from here,” said Col, gesturing at the nearby hills. “Elias Churchill caught one and put it in a sideshow. I got to Elias in '69, and he said he was in on the last capture near here. It was in the Florentine valley and weighed fifty-five pounds.”

Alexis bent down to pick up some soil to use for pigment, and Col told him to be careful. The area was booby-trapped with abandoned mine shafts. Some of the shafts had been used as temporary holding pens for captured thylacines. “They would throw down a live wallaby to feed them,” Col said. Eventually the thylacines would be transported to Hobart on the back of a pack mule.

Col believed thylacines were still living in the Adamsfield region. He had caught wind of a story that a thylacine had been killed nearby—but that the perpetrators had hidden the body so they wouldn't be prosecuted for killing a rare animal. “In 1990 there were some men hunting wallaby. A thylacine reared up and they shot it. They got rid of it somewhere. The legend is it's in a cave around here, but I can't find the cave.”

We stood on the banks of the Adam River. Eucalyptus and scrubby shrubs were reflected in the water like a mirror. Col wanted to show us what was left of the town on the other side of the Adam. Presumably, there had once been a bridge.

“Don't drive on the mud side or we'll get stuck,” Col said as we coaxed the Pajero over flat river rocks and created a spray worthy of the SUV commercials we so despised back in the United States.

After crossing the Adam, we drove for a mile on a rough track until it
became impassable. Col then led us on foot through thick vegetation to a lane covered in moss and tree ferns.

“This was Main Street,” he said. Underneath drooping fern fronds, we found a wooden sign with Adamsfield written on it. Next to the sign was a small collection of antique trash—a cooking pot, a bucket with its bottom rusted out, a rubber boot, and brown glass bottles. Adamsfield, which had once contained three general stores, a pub, a school, a hospital, and a community hall, had burned in a series of bush fires and its remains were being swallowed up by the rain forest. We took a stroll down Main Street, squeezing between tree ferns and the trunks of stringybarked eucalyptus saplings.

We walked silently until Col found an animal trail and turned off. He motioned for us to go ahead of him, and parted some woody shrubs for us to take a look. Through the green brush, we could see a sunken plain surrounded by low wooded hills. It looked like a vast natural amphitheater. “It's a very rare find when you get something like this,” Col said in a low voice. “This is all natural. It's never been cleared. We're thirty miles from the nearest town.”

In the foreground, the green and tan grasses of a marsupial lawn had been nibbled down by wallabies and wombats. On the horizon, rugged mountains of bare rock gleamed white in the sunshine. “There's the Tiger Range,” said Col. “They hide up there during the day and come down to hunt at night. They'll creep along through these grasses and pounce on a wallaby.”

We had gotten so used to the pattern of the animals in Tasmania, invisible during the day and abundant at night, that the thought of a thylacine emerging from the wooded hills to dispatch a wallaby seemed entirely plausible. The wild landscape, the ghost town, and the hot breath of the leatherwood-scented wind were working their magic.

We closed our eyes and mouthed, “We
do
believe in thylacines. We
do
believe in thylacines.” When we opened them, we half expected to see a Tasmanian tiger standing in front of us. But the natural amphitheater remained empty.

W
e spent the next couple of nights in the Tyenna valley slowly trolling the roads for wildlife, looking for eye shine caught in the headlights. Maybe a thylacine would wander by. There were plenty of pademelons and wallabies hopping about. Once we caught sight of a small chubby owl sitting in the middle of the blacktop. We checked our bird guide. It was called a boobook.

On the third night, we headed back to Hobart, and as we were traveling down an unlit back road, three white cats crossed right in front of us. We could have struck a blow for the island's ecology and run them over, but driving instincts (or perhaps our inner cat ladies) kicked in. We screeched on the brakes and stopped in time. The trio prowled off into a paddock. Their fur glowed with a spectral light in our high-beams.

“Damn,” said Alexis. “We can't catch a break. Even the ghosts we see are placentals.”

Placentals. The word reminded us that we would soon be leaving
upside-down pouch world. And we hadn't seen a thylacine, the king of the marsupial beasts. We hadn't even been fooled by a skinny dog.

We were feeling a little deflated. “Do you think we came in the wrong season?” we asked Alexis.

“I think we came in the wrong century.”

We experienced a moment of irrationality. Why hadn't we come in the 1800s? The early European settlers in Tasmania had not appreciated the thylacine. They had called it a hyena.

We wondered what would have happened if the Tasmanian aboriginals had ventured north and colonized Eurasia instead of the other way around. They could have sailed on ships made out of giant trees and flown under the flag of the thylacine, or Ghost Corinna. They might have found the animals north of Wallace's Line as bewildering as Europeans had found the wildlife of Australia and named the Bengal tiger “pouchless corinna” and the timber wolf “stripeless pouchless animal with the corinna head.”

“What do you think they would have called the beaver?” we asked.

“How about the wombat that swims with the fishes.”

As we were crossing the Tasman Bridge into Hobart's city center, we retrieved a message on our cell phone from Chris Vroom. We had not seen him since we parted company in the Milkshakes, though he had updated us periodically. Since then, Chris had gone scuba diving in the Tasman Sea, flown in a seaplane down the remote Gordon River, and crossed paths with three venomous tiger snakes on a hiking trail. But this last dispatch was different. He had chanced on an exhibition about the tiger in Strahan, a tourist hub on Tasmania's west coast. “I found something unbelievable,” he said. “There was a rug made out of the skins of eight thylacines.” The reception was crackling but we heard the emotion in his voice. Chris, who had been so cheerful, now sounded depressed. “The pelts were so beautiful and strange. Seeing them stitched together like that, as if they were going to upholster a couch … it's just so sad about the tiger …I get it now.”

The next morning Alexis packed some of his supplies into a box to mail back to New York. “You never know what the Department of Homeland Security's attitude is going to be toward devil scat,” he said. We noticed he had addressed the package to Dorothy's brownstone in Greenwich Village.

“How much of that scat are you sending?”

“Just a few pieces. I got rid of most of it.”

What did that mean?
We went into the bathroom of the motel where we were staying and saw that he had dumped most of the Baggie-ful of chunky wombat scats down the toilet. It was horribly clogged.

“You have to do it one at a time,” we screamed, frantically trying to stop the overflow. We spent the next ten minutes with a coat hanger helping to guide the scats to their final destination.

This was going to be our last day in Tasmania. And our last stop was the old Beaumaris Zoo, the spot where the last known Tasmanian tiger had perished in 1936—the one that Col said had been captured in the area around Adamsfield. Alexis wanted to get some material from the zoo to use as pigment for a portrait of the tiger. The zoo had closed decades earlier, but some of its ruins still stood in the Queens Domain, an old section of Hobart originally reserved for the use of the island's colonial governor and that was now public parkland.

Just off the Tasman Highway on the Domain Road, we found the abandoned zoo. It was tightly locked and surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. But it hadn't been forgotten. A section of fence had been cut out and flat, metal animal sculptures inserted. One of them was a sad-eyed, cartoony-looking thylacine depicted behind bars. A sign below read “Ghosts of Fur and Feathers.”

To get a closer look, we squeezed through a hole in the fence. The zoo had been built into a cliffside overlooking the Derwent River and was on knobby, rough terrain. We walked past what had once been the polar bears' moat. It was drained and deserted. Otherwise, all that remained were a few stone walls on the bare, brown ground.

At one time Hobart's zoo had held thylacine mothers and their pups, monkeys, lions, peacocks, wallabies, elephants, and wombats. We imagined the
yip, yip
of the thylacine harmonizing with the roars of lions and blares of elephants.

As we walked through the meager ruins, Alexis became agitated. He offered a running commentary as if he were channeling the emotions of the long-dead animals. “It's so hilly and uneven. There's no flat ground to get comfortable. It feels like you could never get your footing … It has a vibe of neglect. It's horrible.”

The enclosure that held the zoo's last Tasmanian tiger had been located on the hillside behind the polar bear moat. But it had long since been razed. Not even the foundation was left. So there wasn't much to see, just dead grass. It was here that the films of the last Tasmanian tiger were taken by the naturalist David Fleay. He had filmed the last thylacine pacing in its pen, jumping up for food, and opening its powerful jaws nearly to the ears.

According to Col, this last thylacine was a twelve-year-old male that had come to the zoo as a pup in 1924 after being captured with its mother and two siblings in the Florentine valley. But the provenance of the tiger was a matter of some debate. Other researchers suggested it was a younger female tiger, captured in the Florentine by Elias Churchill in 1933. The zoo's records were unclear.

Male or female, old or young, the last days of this last tiger were not pleasant. Like most of the world, Tasmania was in the middle of the Great Depression, and the zoo had fallen into disrepair. The zoo's longtime caretaker had died and his daughter, Alison Reid, who lived next to the grounds and had taken over her father's duties, had just been fired. The city council had taken away her keys to the enclosures. The new keepers who had taken her place often left the animals in the open at night, not giving them access to shelter. On the night the last thylacine died, it was terribly cold and Alison could hear the animals crying out. The thylacine made a coughing bark—but there was nothing she could do. The last thylacine passed away on the night of September 7, 1936. The same year the thylacine was officially declared a protected species, but it was never caught again. September 7 is now commemorated as Threatened Species Day in Australia.