Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [62]
We asked if he thought the Tasmanian tiger was still out there in the bush.
“Yes. No reason why it shouldn't be. All the sightings can't be false— especially considering some of the people who've made them. Parks and Wildlife have as much as admitted that. I'm quite convinced.”
Here was a man who had lived in Tasmania all his life, who had intimate contact with the bush. And he was certain that thylacines survived. Our hopes surged wildly. Murph must have seen the evangelical look in our eyes. With all the attention the tiger gets, he said, you had to have some perspective on it, a sense of humor.
To be blunt, we weren't the first people to come to the Edge of the World asking about the thylacine. In the mid-1980s, not long after the Naarding search ended, an old bushman named Turk Porteus—who ran a tourist boat on the river—fueled the fire when he reported seeing a tiger on the Arthur where it intersected with the Frankland River, fifteen miles upstream from where we were staying. Turk said he and his father had trapped a mother tiger and her cubs when he was a boy and meant to keep them as pets, but they needed money and ended up selling the tigers for £11. Taking some of the last tigers out of the wilderness had plagued Turk's conscience, and after his sighting he told the local papers that he was relieved to see the tiger still out there in the bush. Some locals thought Turk had made up the story to stimulate business, but others weren't so sure. Either way, Turk's sighting brought even more tiger seekers into the Northwest—all hoping to be the ones to rediscover it and bask in its Grail-like light. That's where Murph and Betty stepped in.
“We had a film crew up here a few years ago looking for the Tasmanian tiger on the Arthur,” said Betty. “So we decided to oblige them.”
She pulled a photo album off a shelf and opened up to a page with a color photograph of a shaggy Tasmanian tiger crouched in riparian foliage. “We made it up of pieces of carpet,” she said. “Then we put it up on the riverbank, so that as their boat went up the river, they would go right past it.” She and Murph chuckled. “We couldn't help ourselves.” They never found out if the filmmakers were fooled. But when some of their neighbors went on a duck-hunting trip up the Arthur, they were ambushed by a furry, striped predator. “BOOM, BOOM,” said Murph, taking aim with an imaginary rifle. “They blasted it.”
Early that evening Geoff drove up in his pickup to take us spotlighting for animals on his property. Alexis slung a pair of binoculars around his neck and Dorothy topped off the woolen shirt she had purchased at the Backpacker's Barn with a chartreuse silk scarf.
“They are a lovely couple,” Geoff said. “I wonder if it will work out?”
We all caravanned out to the coast, Chris being relieved that he didn't have to share space with a rotting marsupial. When we got there, Geoff set up a telescope facing the ocean. “Have a look,” he said, shouting above the sound of the waves. We peered through the lens, and an offshore scene leapt into view. A line of black birds streamed through the circle of light, some of them flying just inches above the water's surface. “They're short-tailed shearwaters—also called muttonbirds.” They had plump bodies and long, thin wings (more than twice as long as their bodies) that were in constant motion. They poured through the circle of light in a never-ending procession.
Each spring, 18 million muttonbirds migrate to Tasmania's coasts and offshore islands to breed and nest. There are more than 150 colonies, one of which has at least 3 million muttonbirds in it. Such numbers were hard to comprehend. Tasmania's aboriginal people had hunted the muttonbirds for food—and so did the European settlers, who called them flying sheep. As we gazed through the telescope at the procession, we felt like we were looking back in time at the preindustrial world. The muttonbirds had spent the day diving for fish, squid, and krill to bring back to their young in their nests. “They're heading back to their burrows for the