Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [148]
Col believed thylacines were still living in the Adamsfield region. He had caught wind of a story that a thylacine had been killed nearby—but that the perpetrators had hidden the body so they wouldn't be prosecuted for killing a rare animal. “In 1990 there were some men hunting wallaby. A thylacine reared up and they shot it. They got rid of it somewhere. The legend is it's in a cave around here, but I can't find the cave.”
We stood on the banks of the Adam River. Eucalyptus and scrubby shrubs were reflected in the water like a mirror. Col wanted to show us what was left of the town on the other side of the Adam. Presumably, there had once been a bridge.
“Don't drive on the mud side or we'll get stuck,” Col said as we coaxed the Pajero over flat river rocks and created a spray worthy of the SUV commercials we so despised back in the United States.
After crossing the Adam, we drove for a mile on a rough track until it became impassable. Col then led us on foot through thick vegetation to a lane covered in moss and tree ferns.
“This was Main Street,” he said. Underneath drooping fern fronds, we found a wooden sign with Adamsfield written on it. Next to the sign was a small collection of antique trash—a cooking pot, a bucket with its bottom rusted out, a rubber boot, and brown glass bottles. Adamsfield, which had once contained three general stores, a pub, a school, a hospital, and a community hall, had burned in a series of bush fires and its remains were being swallowed up by the rain forest. We took a stroll down Main Street, squeezing between tree ferns and the trunks of stringybarked eucalyptus saplings.
We walked silently until Col found an animal trail and turned off. He motioned for us to go ahead of him, and parted some woody shrubs for us to take a look. Through the green brush, we could see a sunken plain surrounded by low wooded hills. It looked like a vast natural amphitheater. “It's a very rare find when you get something like this,” Col said in a low voice. “This is all natural. It's never been cleared. We're thirty miles from the nearest town.”
In the foreground, the green and tan grasses of a marsupial lawn had been nibbled down by wallabies and wombats. On the horizon, rugged mountains of bare rock gleamed white in the sunshine. “There's the Tiger Range,” said Col. “They hide up there during the day and come down to hunt at night. They'll creep along through these grasses and pounce on a wallaby.”
We had gotten so used to the pattern of the animals in Tasmania, invisible during the day and abundant at night, that the thought of a thylacine emerging from the wooded hills to dispatch a wallaby seemed entirely plausible. The wild landscape, the ghost town, and the hot breath of the leatherwood-scented wind were working their magic.
We closed our eyes and mouthed, “We do believe in thylacines. We do believe in thylacines.” When we opened them, we half expected to see a Tasmanian tiger standing in front of us. But the natural amphitheater remained empty.
30. REMAINS
We spent the next couple of nights in the Tyenna valley slowly trolling the roads for wildlife, looking for eye shine caught in the headlights. Maybe a thylacine would wander by. There were plenty of pademelons and wallabies hopping about. Once we caught sight of a small chubby owl sitting in the middle of the blacktop. We checked our bird guide. It was called a boobook.
On the third night, we headed back to Hobart, and as we were traveling down an unlit back road, three white cats crossed right in front of us. We could have struck a blow for the island's ecology and run them over, but driving instincts (or perhaps our inner cat ladies) kicked in. We screeched on the brakes and stopped in time. The trio prowled off into a paddock. Their fur glowed with a spectral light in our high-beams.
“Damn,” said Alexis. “We can't catch a break. Even the ghosts we see are placentals.”
Placentals. The word reminded us that we would soon