Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [36]
Alongside the newspaper, the store was selling a black-and-white charity calendar, titled the “Men of Marrawah.” Mr. April was the proprietor himself, a bald and beefy gentleman, standing naked and stocking grocery shelves. Mr. September was Geoff's brother, Perry, angling for fish in only his birthday suit. For a small town, Marrawah had a surprising number of pinup boys. We ordered some sandwiches and picked up bottles of water and a few Cadbury chocolate bars. Mr. April was very solicitous about our sandwiches. He didn't think we'd want lettuce because it wasn't quite fresh. But he did put on sweet purple beets. It was hard not to imagine him nude while he was spreading the bread with butter.
We leafed through the calendar looking for Geoff's photo, expecting to see a caption that read, “Geoff King and Pademelon: The Naked and the Dead.” But he wasn't in there.
“How come you're not in the calendar?” Dorothy asked, flashing him a knockout smile.
“I'd have loved to,” he responded. “But I wasn't invited.”
We thumbed through the newspapers and found a full-page ad for Tasmanian-made Cascade Premium Lager. It showed a bottle of beer with a pair of tigers prominently displayed on the label. Under a blurb that said “Out of the Wilderness … Pure Enjoyment” was a thylacine lapping suggestively from a misty, jungle-like stream.
The island was filled with such representations. The sides of tour buses like the Tassie Link and Tigerline Coaches were painted with stylized tigers. Tourist brochures were filled with them. Tasmania's state cricket team was named the Tigers, and their cricket caps were emblazoned with aggressive, toothy-looking thylacines. We reached into one of our pockets and pulled out a 50-cent piece.
“Alexis! Heads or tails?”
“Tails,” he said, then added with a trace of wariness, “What are we flipping for?”
“A Cadbury bar.”
We twirled the coin into the air and it landed on heads: the profile of the Queen of England. We turned the coin over. Tails was two thylacines standing on their hind legs and holding up the Tasmanian coat of arms.
Alexis bought us a chocolate bar from Mr. April. But then he upped the ante. “That's nothing,” he said. “What about all the license plates?”
License plates? We walked around to the back of the Pajero. Behind the license number was the Tasmanian government logo, a tiger in a circle of green, peeking out of the grass. The thylacine had been right behind us all the time, and we hadn't even noticed.
We headed north toward the Naarding site and after about ten miles, Geoff turned off the highway onto an unpaved logging road that cut through a low-growing eucalyptus forest. Eucalyptus leaves have a waxy coating that reflects sunlight and produces a hazy glimmer. At first it's dazzling, but after a while the reflection tires the eyes. We began to feel sleepy and dazed. White dead spars poked up through the canopy, reminders of an older forest, one that was taller. As we drove, the Pajero kicked up a thick cloud of dust, and we lost sight of Chris's car behind us until Geoff rolled to a stop at a deserted fork in the middle of the trees.
“He was parked right here,” said Geoff, pointing at a triangular wedge of land where the roads met.
We waited for the dust to settle before stepping out into the crossroads. Beneath our feet, the sandy soil was the consistency and color of flour, with particles as fine. A light wind rose, covering us all in a thin layer of white.
“The story is that Naarding was out doing a snipe survey,” Geoff continued. “He got up in the middle of the night to take a piss, and then saw a tiger. He claimed he had time to count the stripes and that he saw its testicles as it retreated.”
That had been in 1982. Hans Naarding was a wildlife