Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [60]
We took turns holding Ruby and tried feeding her with a long-nippled bottle the owners had given Chris.
“We won't let that mean Tasmanian tiger eat you, Ruby.”
“You need some milk, don't you?”
Alexis cuddled Ruby against his bare chest as if he were modeling for the Marsupial Edition of GQ. “Who's the baby?” he goo-gooed at her. “Do you want to go back to New York with Daddy?”
Ruby was the same species of wallaby we had seen nibbling on Geoff 's marsupial lawn. Her fur was dewdrop soft, like a silk cloth, and it was pale gray with spots of chestnut on her back and neck. The tips of her paws, nose, ears, and tail were black as if she had dipped them in soot. Stroking her fur was profoundly calming. It felt like we had taken a sedative.
When the motel owners first rescued Ruby, she was considered to be about six months old—although it's hard to know when to start the clock on a marsupial's age. In a certain sense, marsupials are born twice: first when they emerge undeveloped and hairless from the womb and make their desperate crawl to the pouch, and again many months later when they take their first peek out of their protective shelter. At the time her mother was killed, Ruby was still nearly hairless. To save her, the motel owners had to feed her specially made marsupial baby formula. They put her in a makeshift pouch and kept her out of the light, otherwise she could have gone blind. Ruby stayed in her surrogate pouch for three weeks without ever attempting to come out.
By the time we met her, Ruby was a year old. At sixteen inches high, she was about half-grown, and we observed that her feet were already enormous, one quarter the length of her body. (The foot-to-body ratio in humans is typically about one sixth to one seventh.) Wallabies are not called macropods for nothing.
Ruby soon became restless with all our canoodling (at her age, she was growing less dependent on both the pouch and the formula), and she squirmed away. She poked tentatively around on the carpet for a few minutes and then began hopping through the room as if she had springs in her backside. Boing. Next to Alexis's backpack. Boing. On the couch next to the remote. Boing. Boing. Boing. And then she took a dump, five neat round pellets. No problem. We scooped them up and plunked them into the toilet. Ruby followed us into the bathroom, snooped behind the john, and took another dump on the tile floor, and then hopped into one of the bedrooms and effortlessly hopped from the floor to the middle of the bed, where she pooped again.
The sedative was beginning to wear off.
Alexis picked up Tracks, Scats and Other Traces and flipped it open. There were fifty pages of glossy photographs, many in color, of scat—tiny marsupial mouse shits, hearty echidna poops, kangaroo dumps, even cow patties. He looked carefully from the book to the five round brown pellets Ruby had just deposited. “Yup, she's definitely a Bennett's wallaby,” he said. Then he looked at the bedspread. There was a damp spot where Ruby had just peed. “Maybe you better take her home before I turn her into pigment.”
12. MILLER TIME
After returning Ruby to the Sunset's owners, we headed outside. Where were we exactly? The panic of night driving had not left much room for observation. It turned out the Sunset stood at the mouth of the Arthur River, one of the longest rivers in Tasmania. The Arthur started out up in mountain streams above the Tarkine and ran down one hundred miles until it met the Southern Ocean. From the onelane bridge we had crossed the night before, the river looked slowmoving and sleepy. We walked down to a narrow, sandy beach that marked the river's mouth. The beach was littered with sun-bleached logs that had washed down from the forests upstream. It was as if a giant had swept his huge, beefy paw through a swath of tall trees, plucked up a handful, and casually tossed them down again.
We sat with Chris for