Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [127]
The only problem was Alexis didn't want to go. He wanted to do some painting, maybe go back to the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery to photograph a taxidermy of a male thylacine. It was a rare specimen, he said, because it displayed the tiger's testicles. Maybe he would go to the bookstore. Bookstore? Had he forgotten that Charles Darwin, the great evolutionist, had climbed Mount Wellington? That at the end of his fiveyear worldwide journey on the Beagle, just a few months after visiting the Galápagos, Darwin had visited Hobart and been unable to resist the call of the mountain?
In the past Alexis had made pilgrimages to three sites associated with Darwin: Darwin's home in London, South Africa's Cape of Good Hope, which the evolutionist had written about in his Origin of Species, and the rain forests of Brazil. “Darwin was here in Hobart at this exact same time of year,” we coaxed. “Today could be the anniversary of his climb.” This was not technically a fib. The precise date of Darwin's ascent was unknown.
We could see Alexis turning the parallels over in his mind. Darwin and Rockman. Rockman and Darwin. “I guess we could go to the museum later,” he agreed.
We consulted our copy of The Voyage of the Beagle. Although Darwin wrote that the Beagle had arrived in “Hobart Town” on February 5, 1836, and remained in port for ten days, the date of his assault on the mountain remained vague:
Another day I ascended Mount Wellington; I took with me a guide, for I failed in a first attempt, from the thickness of the wood. Our guide, however, was a stupid fellow, and conducted us to the southern and damp side of the mountain, where the vegetation was very luxuriant; and where the labour of the ascent, from the number of rotten trunks, was almost as great as on a mountain in Tierra del Fuego.
This was not Darwin at his best. The great evolutionist must have been feeling uncharacteristically crabby that day. Not wanting to suffer as Darwin felt he had or to be labeled stupid fellows, we decided to make life easy on ourselves. Since Mount Wellington was an urban mountain, we thought it would be appropriate to take a taxi partway up to Fern Tree, a small suburb about one thousand feet in elevation, where several trails led to the top. After paying the driver, we bought three bottles of water at a gas station, then found a trailhead on the side of the road and began the hike to the summit.
As soon as we plunged into the forest, we knew we were walking in Darwin's footsteps. In his log, he described the lower section of Mount Wellington this way:
In some of the dampest ravines, tree-ferns flourished in an extraordinary manner; I saw one which must have been at least twenty feet high to the base of the fronds, and was in girth exactly six feet. The fronds forming the most elegant parasols, produced a gloomy shade, like that of the first hour of the night.
The ferns were still there and they were still huge, their spongy trunks twisting up and their fronds drooping like curtains, brushing against our faces. We would never get used to walking in the shade of these prehistoric giants. “I'm always expecting to see a triceratops pop out from behind one,” said Alexis.
We walked along winding trails through a fern gully dotted with eucalyptuses for some time. We could have been in any Tasmanian forest. There were no views, no sense of elevation. But then the trail broke free of the trees and began to ascend Mount Wellington's eastern face. Two thousand feet below, we could see the blue Tasman Sea stretching out to the horizon.
As the trail climbed the side of the mountain, the forest thinned and the vegetation became bristly and stunted. Instead