Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [69]
Then again, who knew? Every predator has a preferred method for devouring its prey. And some animals are remarkably skilled in the art of selective butchery. A mountain lion eats the internal organs of its victim first, then covers the carcass with grass and twigs, and returns to it over subsequent days. When a grizzly bear preparing for hibernation catches a salmon, it carefully removes the fatty skin, brains, and eggs—the parts with the highest fat content—and discards the rest. A pod of killer whales will gang-attack another species of whale—sometimes one that's three times their size—only to eat the big whale's high-protein tongue, leaving the rest of the carcass behind. So maybe the idea that the thylacine drank its victim's blood wasn't really that unbelievable.
James brought out a huge cardboard box filled with tiger memorabilia. There were reports, photographs, newspaper clippings, drawings of tracks, and an astonishing amount of correspondence. Hundreds and hundreds of people had written to James over the years, offering advice about how to find the thylacine (perhaps if he could devise a better trap, had he checked in the hollows of trees?), inviting themselves along on searches, wanting to know more about the tiger's life, habitat, and habits. Some of the letters were official correspondence from museum curators, magazines, and television producers. Most were from private citizens fascinated or even obsessed with the thylacine. There were letters from Australia, England, Scotland, Germany, and the United States: My desire is to come to Tasmania and find the thylacine.… I hope to get there soon…. I would sometime very much like to work with you.
After a while, the longing in these letters became embarrassingly familiar. We started to go through the piles of photos. There was the famous black-and-white photo of Wilf Batty, the last man to shoot a Tasmanian tiger. There were photos of tigers in captivity, their powerful legs in midpace as they strode through makeshift enclosures. And there was a news photo from the Launceston Examiner headlined, “$2600 Grant to Tiger Men.”
In it, we made out a young James, standing with two other fellows beside a Land Rover. In 1972, James had joined a tiger triumvirate. It was called the Thylacine Expedition Research Team, and it conducted one of the most thorough and best-documented searches for the tiger since the animal disappeared in the 1930s. It was a peculiar group. There was James himself, a dairy farmer from the Tasmanian Northwest and an expert in tracking; Jeremy Griffith, a young zoology student from the mainland, who spent every spare moment looking for the tiger and trying to drum up funding; and Bob Brown, a medical doctor, also from the mainland, who had come to Tasmania to get involved in environmental politics.
In the photo, a representative from the British Tobacco Company is presenting the three with a check for $2,600. James has muttonchop sideburns, a narrow tie, and a big-buttoned, wide-lapeled suede car coat. Jeremy is golden-haired, wearing a sport jacket. He looks like Ryan O'Neal in Love Story. Lean and lanky, Bob is the conservative-seeming one, with a square jaw, short hair, and a formal black suit. The photo looks like an album cover for an early 1970s British folk-pop band.
James had been looking for the tiger for ten years when he first met Jeremy Griffith in 1968. Together, they made some memorable treks in search of the tiger, carrying impossible loads on their backs through sucking swamps and junglelike bush. Their most ambitious adventure was a ninety-mile trek undertaken at the end of 1970. Believing thylacines in more settled areas might have died out from poisoning meant for devils, they focused on an area of the western coast between Macquarie Harbour and Port Davey. They believed this area was untouched by hunters and (unlike some other remote regions) had a reasonable amount of game for the tiger to