Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [61]
Chris mentioned that the day before, while we were out lobster hunting, a tire on his rental car had burst. He had taken it to a tire service next door to the Sunset. “You should talk to Murph,” he said of the repairman. “He knows all about tigers—and he doesn't like devils very much.”
We headed up to the tire service—it was the same building we had mistaken for the Sunset the previous night—and walked up the wooden stairs. Through the window, we spied a man and a woman, who looked to be in their late sixties, eating breakfast in a room decorated with plump wombat figurines and furry wombat stuffed animals. We knocked tentatively, and the couple—who introduced themselves as Betty and Warren (“Murph”) Murphy—immediately invited us to join them.
“You must really like wombats,” we said.
Betty admitted she was a bit of a wombat fanatic. She had hand-raised several young ones found, just like Ruby, in their mother's pouches on the side of the road.
“Wombats are the nearest of animals to a human baby,” she said. “When they drink from a bottle, they close their claws around your little finger.” They can also be very naughty. Young wombats like to play fierce nipping games. We could imagine Betty—who was wiry and feisty looking—getting tough with a rambunctious adolescent wombat.
We explained that we were interested in Tasmanian wildlife and the Tasmanian tiger in particular.
“Ahhh, tigers …” said Murph in a hardy Tasmanian brogue. “My mum's brothers snared a tiger and caught three cubs in 1921 …I think it was in Brittons Swamp, near Smithton. The skin of the mother was in the family up until about ten years ago. My mum used to keep it as a rug on the bed. When we were kids, we used to play lions and tigers with it. Then my old uncle panicked, because someone told him it could be worth a pile of money. He put it in a bag and stored it at the bank for security—and the weevils got to it. So it ended up just a bagful of fur and chewed-up leather.”
His uncle had been right about the skin being valuable. About six months before we arrived in Tasmania, a hand-stitched rug made of eight tiger pelts sold at auction for $270,000. The family that originally owned the rug had used it to warm their piano bench.
“What happened to the three cubs your uncles caught?”
“One died and it's mounted at the museum. The other two went to the zoo,” he said.
Although that had been before Murph's time, he himself had spent years in the bush, working as an axeman and sawyer felling trees and later as a saltwater crayfish fisherman.
“Did you ever see a Tasmanian tiger?” we asked hopefully.
“No, but I've heard them.” Suddenly, he made a sharp cry. “Cay-yip!”
It was startling. Betty merely sipped her tea.
“About twenty-five years ago,” Murph continued, “we camped out for a fishing weekend up the Arthur River. We heard one on the hill above us and another one coming down toward the Arthur. They were calling to each other. They couldn't have been more than a couple hundred yards away. Sounds like that don't carry far in the bush.” He cay-yipped again.
His dog had been terrified by the encounter, which he said was further proof. “According to old-timers, dogs were absolutely petrified of tigers. I had never heard tigers before, but I had heard everything else we've got in the bush, and we have some very strange sounds.”
“Like the devil? That's a weird sound.”
“Bizarre,” he agreed.
Murph had snared wallabies for their pelts in his youth, and one time he accidentally snared a Tasmanian devil. He took the devil home and kept it alive in a big wooden crate. He said it was a vicious little beast— and warned us to be on our guard in the bush.
“If you were injured and had nothing to defend yourself with, that would be the end of you. A devil would come at you and take a nip.” Murph thrust his head forward devil-style. “A hard wooden broom han-dle—they can just bite that off like a guillotine. And they don't