Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [144]
The publication of Tiger Tales shook even more informants out of the woodwork. “When I had my book out, a fellow rang me from Keith [a town] along the Coorong. He said, ‘Hey, I saw the same animal that you did a year later but I never told a living soul until now.’” Further evidence emerged when Col gave a lecture at the Mount Field park center. A man from the audience came up to him and said that his grandfather used to transport thylacines from Tasmania to the mainland on fishing boats and sell them to private zoos. This provided Col with a logical explanation for his sighting on the Coorong. “These tigers could have been released on the mainland,” he said. “Or they could have got out and bred up.”
As for Tasmania itself, Col was certain the tiger was still out there. “I get reports, thirty to forty a year, from all areas of the state, from the Northeast, the Northwest, the Central South highlands, and the west coast. They can't all be the same tiger. There have to be viable breeding colonies.”
Col had recently investigated a promising sighting from the northern part of the island. A man and his wife were driving on a dirt track across their property in the early hours of the morning. As they were crossing a creek bed, they saw a thylacine walk across the track and up the bank. The man turned his four-wheel drive around and shone the lights on the animal. Both he and his wife got a good look and agreed it was a Tasmanian tiger. When they got home, they told their family about the sighting and their daughter-in-law said she had seen the same animal six months earlier in the same place. “These people are in typical thylacine country,” said Col. “Not heavily bushed. Light understory. Tigers were caught there during the early days of the bounty. I've been up there looking, but it's a lot of area to cover.”
“Where is that exactly?” we asked.
“Now, that's top secret.” He smiled.
We asked Col what he thought of other thylacine hunters. Did they share information?
“We're all a little jealous of each other,” he admitted. “We don't get together often.” We imagined Col, James Malley, and Trudy Richards hunched over a map of the island, divvying up their turf.
We told Col about our own expedition to the Milkshakes. It was no surprise to him that we hadn't run into Thylacinus cynocephalus. He informed us that we had made a critical error.
“Remember, the tiger has a first-class sniffer,” he said. “He can smell from miles away. Perfume, smokers, even bad BO will scare him off.” We were guilty of these scent infractions and several more. That was why camera traps never caught the thylacine on film, he said. The cameras were lousy with foreign scent. When Col went out looking for the tiger, he anointed himself and his gear with eucalyptus or tea tree oil, a trick he learned from his father, who had been a trapper.
“You get an atomizer and you dilute it fifty to one with water,” he said. “And you spray everything—your pack, your clothes. It fools the tiger.”
Despite years of drenching himself in bush odors and searching the is-land's backcountry, Col had yet to see a thylacine in Tasmania. But he believed he had been in their presence. “I've smelled them in the bush and I can tell you they have a very rank odor.” He had also heard them. “The tiger makes a very distinctive call like the fox terrier. Yip, yip—with an echo or callback. In the bush, they'll grunt like a pig.” And several times Col had gotten the feeling he was being watched by a tiger. “This tiger's a curious animal,” he said. “They'll keep out of sight, but you'll have the feeling they're there. You start to get a sixth sense in the bush.”
While Col was explaining his thylacine strategy, Alexis was laying out his paintings of Tasmanian animals on the grass next to the picnic table. Col got up from the table and eyeballed them. He focused on one, a lone thylacine shown from the side, with its head turned