Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [66]
“When they first came to Tasmania, the filmmakers said they were convinced the thylacine was extinct,” said Geoff. “But by the time they left, they weren't so sure anymore. Tasmania has that effect.”
Outside the sky had turned black, and a nearly full moon hung low over the grassy terrain. Geoff hooked a spotlight up to the battery in his pickup, and we jumped into the bed of the truck.
“Let's party,” said Alexis as he fired his pipe.
“I'm not going to start until you're holding on tight,” yelled Geoff.
We gripped the back of the cab, and the pickup began bumping across the dark, undulating landscape. It felt like we were on a slow-moving roller coaster. Geoff switched on the spot, and dozens of creatures were illuminated. It was like a surreal Serengeti. Pademelons and Bennett's wallabies bounded in every direction. Seeing this burst of hopping life made us laugh wildly, and we tried not to lose our grip and go flying off.
Alexis did a play-by-play of the action. “Nibbler at one o'clock.” He pointed at a wallaby joey munching grass. (Nibbler was a word he usually reserved for young women who worked at Manhattan art galleries.) “You can't see me, I'm hiding. I'm a little pademelon.”
Close to the car, a dark furry animal was slinking away from us. Geoff put on the brakes and yelled that it was a brushtail possum. Moving low to the ground, it looked like a mink stole scuttling across the grassland. “Isn't that gorgeous?” Alexis said. “She's so sumptuous showing off her fur coat.”
Geoff 's truck continued to jolt along, and as we looked out over the moon-glazed grasses, we saw something hefty trotting beside a line of bushes. It was a wombat with a bristly gray coat and stumpy tail. Besides the possum, the wombat was the only creature among the mass of hopping things that was moving on all fours.
The wombat put on a burst of speed and easily outpaced Geoff 's pickup. For a fat and cuddly-looking thing, it moved fast. Apparently, a wombat's short legs can take it to speeds up to twenty-five miles per hour.
Geoff explained that wombats emerge at night to graze on grasses and plant shoots, and spend their days in burrows. The long curving claws on all four of their feet make them accomplished diggers. (The pouches of female wombats face backward so that dirt won't get in during their excavations.)
He stopped to point out a wombat burrow—a giant mouse hole in a soft hummock of earth—and advised us never to crawl inside. Woe, he said, to the unwelcome visitor that tries to follow a wombat into its underground home. For defense, wombats have a thick plate composed of bone and cartilage on their backs. A wombat can use this plate to block the entrance of its burrow and crush the skull of an interloper. Occasionally, wombats kill one another in subterranean turf wars, squashing each other like deranged linebackers. They can also inflict serious bites with their strong, chisel-like incisors.
In the spotlight, the wombat's stout body and the way it trundled along with a heavy step gave it the look of a hippopotamus. We watched the wombat's backside quiver enticingly as it moved off.
“What a butt,” said Alexis.
Roving across Geoff 's land, we observed more hoppers, diggers, and nibblers. It was marsupial heaven, the Outback crossed with Middle Earth. We felt slightly melancholy at the thought that in the morning, we would be moving on to explore other parts of the island, other thylacine haunts. When the pickup hit the gravel on the Arthur River Road, we crammed back into the Pajero and prepared to go our separate ways.
“Okay, Team Thylacine,” said Geoff. He knocked on the hood for emphasis. “You're finished here.” The next day we would begin searching for more people like Murph, people who believed the tiger was still out there. It was after midnight when we said goodbye to the one-eyed man who had ferried us through the realm of the devil.
13. A TIGER HUNTER
“If we're going