Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [147]
“There's rogue beekeepers who come out and milk the honey in the night and the poor old beekeeper comes back and there's nothing left,” said Col. Worse was when honey rustlers stole the entire hive.
We turned off from Gordon River Road, which was paved, onto Clear Hill Road, which was covered only with loose gravel. It cut north through a pass in the mountains. Col turned his head from left to right, scanning the surrounding bush. “Many thylacines have been seen walking across this road, I can tell you,” he said as we rattled along.
The road crossed a bridge, where two small rivers cascaded down a rocky hillside and converged into a single stream. “It's the Adam and Eve rivers, going down to the Garden River,” Col said. The rapid rushing waters frothed against red and black rocks. On the crumbling stream banks, gnarled tea trees and wattles bloomed pink and white.
As we passed the provocatively named rivers, our minds drifted into the mid-twenty-first century. Scientists were ready to release the first pair of cloned Tasmanian tigers. It had been a long road of trial, error, devil moms, and thylacine diapers. But the tigers had been reborn, complete with stripes and wicket-shaped grins. And there were Don Colgan and Karen Firestone from the Australian Museum. Through gene therapy, they had extended their life spans just long enough to witness the fruits of their labors. The confluence of the Adam and Eve rivers seemed like a fitting place to unveil the first mated pair. The tigers would walk into the wild in the same place they had seemingly walked out of it, and we would watch the newly minted thylacines stroll off together into the sunset …
We asked Col if cloned tigers would ever be an acceptable substitute for wild-bred thylacines.
Col nearly shook with exasperation. The cloning project drove him mad. Even if scientists were successful, he thought cloning was all wrong. “It's going to be a clinical tiger. It will be sickly and diseased, not one you can stick in the bush. It will be an imposter without natural instincts.”
People should be looking for tigers not making them, Col said. He had met with the director of the Australian Museum, the man who had started the thylacine DNA project, and told him, “When I find a tiger, I'll let you know. Then you can stop the cloning.”
He asked us to turn off the gravel road onto a small dirt track. It was blocked by a gate with a “No Entry” sign. Col produced a key, unlocked the gate, and instructed us to drive up a road, littered with huge rocks and tree branches, slicing through thick green forest. We felt like we were about to take a meeting with a rebel leader.
After jostling over deep ruts, we reached two abandoned shacks made from graying wooden slats and corrugated metal. They stood alongside the Adam River. “This is Adamsfield,” Col said. “What's left of it.” In the 1920s, these shacks marked the edge of a mining boomtown, where prospectors mined for a black gold called osmiridium, a rare alloy used for making the nibs of fountains pens and jewelry, and even in the creation of a poisonous gas. It commanded £30 per ounce. Osmiridium was discovered in the area in 1909, mining began in 1925, and by 1926, two thousand people were living in Adamsfield.
Thylacines lived in the area, too. “The last six tigers in the Hobart zoo were found within thirty miles from here,” said Col, gesturing at the nearby hills. “Elias Churchill caught one and put it in a sideshow. I got to Elias in '69, and he said he was in on the last capture near here. It was in the Florentine valley and weighed fifty-five pounds.”
Alexis bent down to pick up some soil to use for pigment, and Col told him to be careful. The area was booby-trapped with abandoned mine shafts. Some of the shafts had been used as temporary holding pens for captured thylacines. “They would throw down a live wallaby to