Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [150]
As we walked through the meager ruins, Alexis became agitated. He offered a running commentary as if he were channeling the emotions of the long-dead animals. “It's so hilly and uneven. There's no flat ground to get comfortable. It feels like you could never get your footing … It has a vibe of neglect. It's horrible.”
The enclosure that held the zoo's last Tasmanian tiger had been located on the hillside behind the polar bear moat. But it had long since been razed. Not even the foundation was left. So there wasn't much to see, just dead grass. It was here that the films of the last Tasmanian tiger were taken by the naturalist David Fleay. He had filmed the last thylacine pacing in its pen, jumping up for food, and opening its powerful jaws nearly to the ears.
According to Col, this last thylacine was a twelve-year-old male that had come to the zoo as a pup in 1924 after being captured with its mother and two siblings in the Florentine valley. But the provenance of the tiger was a matter of some debate. Other researchers suggested it was a younger female tiger, captured in the Florentine by Elias Churchill in 1933. The zoo's records were unclear.
Male or female, old or young, the last days of this last tiger were not pleasant. Like most of the world, Tasmania was in the middle of the Great Depression, and the zoo had fallen into disrepair. The zoo's longtime caretaker had died and his daughter, Alison Reid, who lived next to the grounds and had taken over her father's duties, had just been fired. The city council had taken away her keys to the enclosures. The new keepers who had taken her place often left the animals in the open at night, not giving them access to shelter. On the night the last thylacine died, it was terribly cold and Alison could hear the animals crying out. The thylacine made a coughing bark—but there was nothing she could do. The last thylacine passed away on the night of September 7, 1936. The same year the thylacine was officially declared a protected species, but it was never caught again. September 7 is now commemorated as Threatened Species Day in Australia.
“That is beyond pathetic,” said Alexis as he squatted to scoop soil from beneath an uprooted tree trunk. “I usually don't get upset over the loss of an individual animal. To me the tragedy is when the entire species is gone. But that's so heartbreaking. The thylacine is considered a treasure now, and this individual was completely squandered.”
Alexis meant the tiger's life. But its body was squandered, too. The last thylacine's pelt and bones were not saved by any museum. They were cast away at the rubbish tip and allowed to disintegrate. The zoo itself closed the following year.
We thought about what David Pemberton had told us at the Tasmanian Museum. The Tasmanian wilderness began on the island's five-thousand-foot-high mountains and ended offshore where sperm whales attacked giant squid on the continental shelf. It was all interconnected. The rocks, soil, and nutrients that flowed through the island's rivers were bits and pieces of Tasmania. Included in the outpouring were fragments of thylacines, too, their bones eroded over the eons, flowing across the landscape, seeping into poppy-filled paddocks, and pouring into the ocean.
Alexis had the right idea painting the thylacine with soil, leaves, bark, and seaweed. These organic materials held traces of the tiger, making their way through the island's circulatory system. Tigers were in Tasma-nia's trees. In the water we drank from the Styx. Even in the wombat and devil scat we had carried with us for weeks.
Perhaps the Tasmanian tiger was a blood feeder after all. It had taken a bite and left something behind that coursed through the aortic vessel, bored into the kidneys and got into the brain, infecting us with thylacine visions.
“I can't get the image of the forest flooded by Lake