Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [42]
Geoff gathered some wood and lit a fire. Once it was roaring, he produced the skulls of various animals—a platypus, an echidna, two spottedtailed quolls (carnivorous marsupials, also called native cats), and a devil—and displayed them along the table. In the flickering firelight, it was a ghoulish scene—an ossuary of Tasmanian wildlife. The platypus skull was toothless and dominated by V-shaped bones outlining the strange beak; it looked like a dowsing rod. The echidna's skull was also tooth-free and elongated into a tube that supported the creature's snout and housed its long, ant-catching tongue. The quoll skulls showed those animals' meat-eating preferences, with four sharp fangs and a series of serrated, razor-sharp molars. But the heads of these predators were dwarfed by the devil's.
The devil's skull was thick, solid, and powerful-looking. Its three-quarter-inch-long canines were pronounced, sharp, and curving. But the eight molars in the back of the lower jaw were the skull's most impressive feature. They were solid, designed for the heavy work of bone-crunching, and the two molars in the very back had sharp, arrowhead-shaped extensions for tearing flesh. Geoff pointed to the thick layer of bone that made up the jaw. “There's an enormous amount of area here to attach muscle to, and that's what gives them their incredible jaw strength.” A twenty-five-pound Tasmanian devil, he said, has the chomping power of a hundred-pound dog.
We considered the box office potential of Jaws V— starring a Tasmanian devil instead of a shark.
Chris uncorked two bottles of Shiraz, and after pouring everyone a glass, we made a toast. “To the devil,” Alexis said. “To the devil,” we chorused. Geoff twirled the red liquid in his glass.
In a drawer, we found a collection of magazines. Beneath some recent issues of Boating were soft-core porn magazines dating from the 1960s and 1970s with titles such as Man and Adam. Chris began reading an article titled “Are Blue Movies Doomed?” Dorothy settled down with “A Penny for Your Pants.”
A picture window faced out the back of the shack. As night slowly fell, we stood looking out with Alexis. Through the glass, we could see the headless wallaby laid out on a patch of dirt. It was surrounded by beach grasses rustling in the coastal breeze. Behind the wallaby, a triangular outcrop of pink quartzite—shaped not unlike the back tooth of a devil— jutted into the dark blue sky. Geoff had set the stage well, training a small spotlight on the carcass. We waited in the near darkness, pondering all the roadkill we had encountered.
“Look, I see something!” Alexis whispered.
A Tasmanian devil was standing in front of us on a little rise. It stood in profile, sniffing the air, in the last remnants of fading light. It was the size of a big, husky bulldog and was covered with sleek black fur with a thin white band crossing its chest. Its chunky barrel of a body was supported by remarkably short, stout legs. Its neck was so thick as to be almost nonexistent—a heavy bearish head seemed to take up nearly one quarter of its overall body size. This fat, hulking head was topped by tiny, round, reddish pink ears.
Geoff had a look of bliss on his face. “She's a lovely girl, isn't she?”
We studied the devil's features. She had a big, black round nose at the end of a short, nearly hairless snout; beady black eyes that were set wide; and an abundance of long, messy whiskers.
Alexis squinted. We could tell he was trying to put the devil into some familiar animal category—without much success. “That is a crazy-looking predator,” he said after a while. “It's like a child's drawing of a scary dog.”
“See how she has a