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By Root 745 0

now Ho-bart's Town Hall. Harris, who had never seen or heard of a woman being subjected to flogging, ran to see what the commotion was and found the woman in a fainting fit. Outraged, he asked Edward Lord—a lieutenant of the Royal Marines who was acting as the head of the settlement in the temporary absence of David Collins—under what authority he had ordered the punishment. Lord told Harris to shut his mouth, and when Harris persisted, Lord had Harris arrested at gunpoint by the marines. Harris was subsequently placed under house arrest and accused of insubordinate conduct. He remained under house arrest for about six months. Although the charges were finally dropped and the matter resolved, the stress and long confinement took a severe physical and psychological toll. In 1810, in failing health, Harris died after a short illness at the age of thirty-six.

Harris never had a chance to finish his work on the zoology of Van Diemen's Land, and the scientific name he ascribed to the tiger didn't stick for long. The year he died, it was decided by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, the famous French biologist, that Didelphis didn't really describe the genus properly, and the name Dasyurus cynocephalus was applied, Dasyurus being the new descriptor for carnivorous marsupials. In 1824, the Dutch naturalist Conrad Jacob Temminck proposed a new scientific name for the tiger that would have honored Harris: Thylacinus harrisii. But while Thylacinus stuck, the harrisii part was rejected. (The scientific name of the devil was altered, too. But in this case, Harris's contributions to natural history weren't forgotten. In 1837, the Tasmanian devil's scientific name was changed to Sarcophilis harrisii, Harris's Lover of Dead Flesh.)

Edward Lord, incidentally, went on to live a long and prosperous life. He became one of, if not the, largest stockholders in Van Diemen's Land. In 1817, a Tasmanian tiger measuring six feet four inches was killed on Lord's property, purportedly after killing some of his sheep. This incident was the first published report of a tiger attacking livestock—and it was the beginning of the end for Harris's tiger.

At the top of Mount Wellington, there was an informational sign. It stated that great tracts of the original eucalyptus forest on the lower slopes had been cut down by 1870. The “immense” trees, the “stately” trees, the trees “of incredible size” that Harris had written about were long gone.

We wondered if Harris had more paper, would he have finished his work on Tasmanian zoology? Would he have become a famous man? There was something ironic about the fact that the eucalyptus trees he loved so much were now being clear-cut for manufacturing paper.

Alexis glowered down the mountainside toward Hobart. “If that fucker Edward Lord was still alive, I'd hurl his ass off this mountain.” Then he said, “I can't wait to get back and do some work.”

How were we going to get back? We briefly considered walking down the Zig Zag Track. Then we looked at one another and stuck out our thumbs. A winding road snaked all the way down the mountain, and we hitched a ride in the back of a van. It dropped us off in Battery Point, and from there we walked back to our motel. We had found what was literally the last room in the entire city, everything being booked up due to a popular annual boat festival. It was conveniently located above Hobart's only twenty-four-hour liquor store.

Back in our room, Alexis took out his case of art supplies. Clearly the urge to create had possessed him. He removed the paint cup containing the leech that had sucked his blood on the Weldborough Pass. “Well, well … what do we have here?” he said. It was payback time.

“So I want to turn this leech into pigment,” he told us.

We agreed to help mash it up. Using the butt of a Bic pen as a pestle, we began grinding the nasty little animal to bits.

“Die, you…”

“I think it's already dead,” Alexis informed us.

He looked down at the little black flecks of leech muck at the bottom of the paint cup. There didn't seem to be any blood in there. The leech must have