Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [103]
Trudy herself had been actively searching for the tiger since the early 1990s. She pointed at two bulletin boards plastered with newspaper clippings near the bar. Headlines included, “Experts Split on New Tiger Claims,” “Extinct or Escape Artist?,” and “The Tiger Is Dead: Long Live Our Guilt.”
“That's me,” she said, pointing at one of the clippings. There was a news photo of Trudy, a few years younger and with longer hair, next to a fellow tiger hunter named Joe Parsons. They were sitting beneath a drawing of a roaring tiger. The accompanying headline read, “Tigers' Secret ‘Safe with Us.’ ” The clipping explained how Trudy and Parsons had opened the Tassie Tiger Research Centre and spent two to three days every week looking for the tiger.
“The way that I do it is I've gone back years—probably thirty, forty, fifty years—where sightings have occurred and then gone back there myself. And I get recent sightings, too, so you can confirm that they're still in the area. I've been plodding along with this for about ten years.”
“So have you ever seen a tiger?” we asked again.
She looked at us and gave us a Mona Lisa smile.
We decided to try a different tack. “Why do you think there isn't any hard evidence that the tiger survived? Like scat or tracks?”
She thought there probably was scientific evidence—but that there was a movement to suppress it.
“The Tasmanian government doesn't want them to be found,” she said. “So at the moment you can't take any scat out of Tasmania to prove that it's thylacine, devil, or whatever. There were some guys over from England. They got a lot of scat that they wouldn't let them take out of Tassie.”
The story was that a British researcher named Bob Eeles had arrived in Tasmania in June 2001 with the expectation of obtaining scat samples from the Queen Victoria Museum in Launceston. (Over the years, copious amounts of scat had been donated to this museum in the hopes that it would someday be scientifically identified as thylacine excrement.) According to one article, Eeles was expecting to take back “armfuls of poo” to be examined by the “ancient DNA lab” at Oxford. However, the removal of the scat was blocked by museum and government officials, who said the scat was valuable scientific data and they were not permitting it to be taken out of Tasmania—and certainly not back to England. In the words of one defender of the poop, “the days of colonial plundering are gone.”
“That's too bad about the scat … So what was your best thylacine sighting?” We thought we would try again.
“Personally, or—?”
“Personally.”
“I'm not going to say with all these listening.” She pointed at the other women clustered around the bar and then turned all the way around on her barstool so that her back was to the other patrons. She spoke quietly.
“It was late last year, in November. No,” she corrected herself. “It was in September or October. And it was just one of those things … when you see something that you don't believe you've actually seen.”
She had been camping out in a tent in the bush near Mole Creek. “It was about three o'clock in the morning. And my dog—a little border col-lie—started to go a bit silly.”
Emerging from behind her car's trailer, she saw a tan-colored animal. And she shone a spotlight on it. “I saw the stripes, and I said ‘naahhh, it couldn't be.’ So I took the spotlight off it and then put