Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [7]
“Uh—” The friend in question, Dorothy Spears, was a beautiful and wealthy art journalist—also recently separated—who had a penchant for wearing skintight leopard-print pants. Usually she vacationed in Majorca, the Greek islands, and the Hamptons.
We asked Alexis if she had ever encountered anything like a land leech. “Other than me?” he said. “Not that I know of.”
In the remaining time before we left, we contacted all sorts of tiger experts via phone and e-mail, setting up future appointments and getting the lowdown on what to expect. One person we talked with was Nick Mooney, an officer with the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service who had been involved in official searches for the tiger for twenty years. When we reached him, he was out somewhere in the Tasmanian bush and his cell phone kept cutting out. Although Nick couldn't deny the possibility of the tiger's survival, he didn't think it very likely. That said, the thylacine was terribly important to Tasmanian culture. The tiger was Tasmania's bald eagle, its grizzly bear, and timber wolf, all rolled into one. If we dreamed about the thylacine, we could only imagine the dreams Tasmanians had. Later, Nick e-mailed us with a list of people to meet on the island.
As the day of our departure approached, we put everything in order. We assembled our research materials: field guides, articles, accounts of the island written by early explorers and naturalists. Alexis put together a case full of paintbrushes, drawing paper, and chemical solutions for mixing his own pigments. Because we were traveling on separate flights, we agreed to rendezvous with Alexis and Dorothy in Sydney. That was where we would begin our search for traces of the tiger.
Shortly before we left, Alexis informed us another friend of his might be joining us in Tasmania. This time, we prayed it would be someone use-ful—an entomologist or DNA expert.
“He's a world traveler,” Alexis said. “He just likes exotic adventures.”
“How well do you know him?”
“I met him about a month ago at a dinner party.”
We were starting to lose control of this tiger.
2. ROCK ART
When we arrived in Sydney we dropped our bags at a hotel in the business district and set off on our first expedition—to the State Library of New South Wales. We spent many hours there, looking at old documents and folios, trying to get to know our quarry—its habits and history. In Sydney, we would be looking at the thy-lacine's distant past and possible future. But in Tasmania, who knew? We had only a week before leaving for the island and wanted to be prepared for anything. In one old account at the library, it was claimed that if you grabbed the thylacine by its stiff tail, it wouldn't be able to turn around and bite you. Another old bushie wrote that the tiger could be tied up, but never tamed. We wondered if this information would ever come in handy.
Taking a break from our research, we sat with Alexis and Dorothy at the city's Royal Botanic Gardens, having tea with scones and observing a bird. A big white ibis with a thin, curving beak flapped up onto a café table, gobbled up some crumbs, and then dipped the tip of its foot-long beak into a pot of clotted cream. Suddenly a woman shrieked. “Oh, shooo! Shoooooo!” The ibis flapped down to the ground and began strolling along on stiltlike gray legs. A few seconds later, it sidled up alongside another table and began probing the interior of another pa-tron's pocketbook with its cream-smeared beak.
Alexis was delighted by the bird's bad behavior. “That bird needs handcuffs,” he said. We hadn't even gotten as far as Tasmania and the wildlife was already bizarre.
Exotic ibises wandered Sydney's streets like pigeons, cadging freebies and putting their beaks where they didn't belong. But they were just the beginning of the city's strange animals. The night before, we had been standing outside an oyster bar in Kings Cross—Sydney's version of Times Square—and a huge creature had flown toward us, circled, and then landed with a thump in a small street tree. It hung there