Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [135]
Some of their investigations sent them on far-flung, life-threatening journeys into the bush. “Jeremy was totally driven,” said Bob. “But mind you, so was James. I went into the Tarkine with James looking for tigers, and we crossed the Little Rapid River, and when we came back it was in flood. The river was fifty meters wide and flowing very fast. James couldn't swim. I said, ‘We have to camp here for a few days.’ But James was going to cross and that was it. I got a rope to the other side and he walked across. James was a big man. If he had fallen in, he would have drowned.”
They also drove thousands of miles back and forth across the island, interviewing eyewitnesses. This was where the work became discouraging. So many of the reports turned out to be cases of mistaken identity. One of the most promising dispatches came from a remote west coast beach. A young man had reported seeing a tiger while duck hunting. “He said it was getting dark, and suddenly there was a tiger standing on a dune looking at him from just twenty paces away. He had a gun with him and was against shooting it. We got there three days later, and there was great excitement. Men were fishing there for flounder, and James talked to the men. One of them had been to the museum in Hobart and was the most reliable witness among the lot. He said it was a tiger. There was a halfraised print on the dune. Then a couple of hours later, a guy came up the beach on a tractor. Loping up behind him was an Irish wolfhound. Everybody went quiet. I said, ‘Did you have that wolfhound tied up two nights ago?’ With quite a lot of embarrassment, he said, ‘I—I—I, yes, I did.’ I didn't believe him at all.… It was extraordinary. That dog was the last thing you would expect to see on the west coast of Tasmania. But there it was in front of all of us.”
Ultimately, however, it was a sighting Bob made himself that permanently altered his perception—and Jeremy's as well. Bob was driving home one night through a wooded area and saw a startling vision in the headlights. “Here was this animal. I immediately went back to get Jeremy, and I said, ‘You've got to see this.’ We went right to the spot, and the animal was still there. I got it in the headlights, and it was extraordinary. It had pointy ears and a long snout. It had a thick rump and a kangaroo-like tail and four chocolate-colored stripes across its fawncolored back.” Bob paused as we leaned in expectantly.
“And this is the thing. It was a greyhound dog that had the pattern and coloring of a thylacine.”
Eyewitness sightings, it seemed, were not very reliable. “We looked at 250 sightings and at the end of the day only four of those could not be explained by something else: a wombat, a dog, a feral cat.”
Upon investigation, even some historical sightings came under question. The tiger team interviewed veteran tiger hunters, including Arthur Fleming, the retired police inspector who, while working for the Tasmanian Animals and Birds Protection Board, had found tiger tracks in the southwest wilderness during the late 1930s. As a result, he continued to search for the tiger over many years. Bob visited Fleming to ask him about a series of sheep mutilations that were blamed on tigers in a farming community in 1957. Sheep had been found with their throats slashed, their bodies intact but cleaned of blood as if the blood had been slurped up. These vampirelike attacks were believed to be the work of a tiger and were long used as evidence that the tiger survived at least into the 1950s.
“Inspector Fleming gave us the full story,” said Bob. “Yes, there were a number of tiger sightings. So they put out a big steel box cage and baited it with liver. One morning they approached the box and there was a big animal in it. When they got to it, it was an Alsatian dog. They dispatched the Alsatian, and the sheep killing stopped. It was so typical. That component of the story was never conveyed by the media. It's