Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [125]
“Did you know Naarding?”
“Oh yeah, I knew him well. He worked in Tasmania for ten years or more. His sighting is phenomenal. He was either lying or he saw it. There's no way he misidentified it. He counted the stripes and smelled it. I reckon he saw one. That northwest area is phenomenal for tiger sightings. Always has been. Naarding's sighting was just prior to mass forestry activity up there. Where that animal lived is gone now. The habitat is destroyed.”
“Is it possible the thylacine could still be out there? Could it have eluded searchers for so long?”
David thought it was conceivable. “They can't even find foxes. And they're living in paddocks up the road.”
But the fact that he thought it was conceivable didn't mean that he thought it was likely. The thylacine had faced too many guns, too many snares. “Some people will promote the theory that the thylacine was ‘on the way out,’ that it had reached the end of its road in terms of evolution and would have died out anyway. But the thylacine had been living here with aboriginals for ten thousand years when the white man arrived. It was not on its way out. The settlers blamed the thylacine for stock loss, and then killed it. You could also argue that collectors were one of the nails in the thylacine's coffin. They were frantically trying to get them for zoos and museums. Probably a thousand animals were taken out of the wild for collections. Then in the 1930s and 1940s we know that poisons like strychnine were being used to kill rabbits and devils. That probably killed thylacines off, too.”
Ugh. Human beings were dirty, dirty animals.
David said people needed to start thinking of Tasmania's natural world in a more integrated fashion. “The real wilderness starts up in the highlands, goes down through the forests, and goes out to the continental shelf where the giant squid and the sperm whales live. This whole wild wilderness is a continuum.”
We thought about the buttongrass plains up in the Milkshakes flowing down to stain the Hebe, flowing down to the Arthur River and out past Geoff 's place to the sea. David had said it was okay to have hope—and we were basking in it. But Alexis seemed to have other things on his mind. From the look on his face, we could tell that the moment David mentioned the giant squid, he had been struck with thylacine amnesia.
“Are there Architeuthis specimens here in the museum?” Alexis asked.
Indeed there were. Although thylacines were still the favorite land animal at the museum, giant squid had their fans, David said. When the 550-pound female giant squid washed up on nearby Seven Mile Beach, her body was transported on ice to the Tasmanian Museum and an announcement was made that the world's biggest calamari would be displayed to the public. The giant squid caused a near stampede and the museum packed in more visitors than on any day in its history.
Alexis was champing at the bit to ask if the museum had any Architeuthis ink. When he finally did, David said he would be glad to give Alexis some, but they didn't have any on hand. The museum, he believed, had given its giant squid ink to the Tasmanian calligraphy society. We could see the wheels turning in Alexis's brain. “Calligraphy!??!! Calligraphy? They gave their rare giant squid ink to the winners of a perfect penmanship contest?” Alexis looked crestfallen, but he quickly recovered. “What about sperm whales? Do you have anything I could use for that?”
“Blubber is really good,” David said. “Sperm whale blubber is incredibly tough. But then it runs like a fluid when it gets warm. It's amazing stuff.”
Alexis made an appointment to meet with the museum's art history department, and the next day walked out triumphantly with a tiny bottle of translucent amber liquid. A white waxy lump lay at the bottom. The bottle was marked, “Spermaceti from Stranded Sperm Whales, Strahan, Tasmania, 1998.”
“What have you got there, Captain Ahab?”
Alexis