Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [67]
We were becoming almost intimate with the two-lane Bass Highway—the sparkling ocean waters in the distance, the dry brown grasses of the cow paddocks, blocks of blue poppy fields, patches of eucalyptus forest, the logging trucks that shook the blacktop. Even some of the roadkills were beginning to look familiar.
While Alexis dozed off, we mulled over the tiger. Before coming to Tasmania, we had been nearly convinced that the thylacine no longer roamed its old haunts, but after talking to Murph we weren't so sure. It's true there was no convincing physical evidence. But there were those niggling eye- and ear-witness reports.
About ten tiger sightings a year are reported to the Parks and Wildlife Service in Tasmania. However, there are many more that don't make it into official statistics. Sometimes rather than calling the government, tiger spotters call someone they know will be more open to their claims. That was the man we were going to see.
We passed a road construction crew on the bridge over the Black River, and turned inland. Our destination was the home of James Malley, and after a few wrong turns into isolated homesteads, we pulled up to a large, nineteenth-century wooden farmhouse surrounded by paddocks. A sheep next to the immaculately groomed front walk gazed at us quizzically as its owner came out to meet us. James wasn't the twitchy conspiracy theorist we had expected. He was tall, big-shouldered, and rosy-cheeked, just over sixty. And his expression was sunny and affable.
“I'm just working on a new tiger trap,” he explained as he ushered us inside. “It's an intricate snare with a trip wire—a tigers-only trip wire that won't catch smaller carnivores. It's baited with a blood scent that frightens herbivores. I've tested it with tracking pads, and so far wombats and kangaroos won't go near it.”
Although James had never seen a tiger himself, he had been looking for them for more than forty years. “I get calls from all over Tasmania,” he said, sitting us down on a pair of comfortable brown couches in his living room.
In fact, he had just investigated a sighting that he thought was quite promising. It had merited an article in the Hobart Mercury headlined “Tassie Tiger Alert After Reported Bush Sighting.” James was quoted extensively.
The article reported that a man had stopped his car to switch into fourwheel drive on a backroad in Tasmania's Northwest. As he did so, he saw two wombats run across a track in front of him. To the man's surprise, the wombats were followed by a Tasmanian tiger. The man reported that the tiger then stopped and looked at him for about ten seconds from about fifteen feet away—and then continued the chase. When he got home, the man immediately called James.
“He couldn't believe his eyes,” James told us. “It sent him right off.”
James quickly went out to the location of the sighting to look for tiger tracks, but didn't find any. “The wallabies were all jumpy,” he added. He took the wallabies' skittishness as a sign that a predator had recently been in the area.
So why, we asked, do eyewitnesses phone James rather than the Parks and Wildlife Service? For one thing, he said, “People get frustrated because they ring the authorities and they don't do a damn thing about it.” For another, James didn't question their honesty or sanity. What he did do, though, was give them a good grilling. “I'm pretty ruthless when I'm culling out sightings,” he said. Eyewitnesses were prone to making mistakes. Native animals, even dogs and cats, were sometimes mistaken for the tiger. “I ask them, ‘How long did you see it? Did he have a bushy tail with plenty of hair at the bottom?’ And if they say yeah, yeah, then no, they haven't