Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [70]
James and Jeremy flew into the depths of this wilderness, hitching a ride in a small plane with an archaeologist looking for aboriginal carvings. And then they began looking for tigers.
James was a very physical person. He'd grown up in the bush and working on a farm. But Jeremy was indefatigable. At one point on the expedition, he took over half of the things in James's pack and was carrying 140 pounds. “He was still faster than me, and if he wasn't watching, I'd have popped a big stone in his pack just to slow him down. He got me to keep going by telling me stories.”
The trip was grueling. “We were walking right up to our chest in mud and covered in leeches. One day when we were making camp, the leeches were so thick on Jeremy, he raked them off his face and threw down handfuls. There were bush fires, rivers we had to ford.” They combed the coast north of Port Davey looking for tiger tracks, but found none. Then they turned inland cutting through buttongrass plains and rain forest to reach Macquarie Harbour. Despite all the hardship of the trip, the tiger was nowhere to be found. When James and Jeremy reached the coast again, they were spotted by abalone divers. “We were rough and ragged. Our clothing was torn to bits. When they first saw us, they turned the boat around. We looked like criminals on the loose left over from convict days,” James said. They caught a ride back to civilization in the diving boat.
James's enthusiasm was not dulled one whit by the trip's lack of success. On his own time and money, he continued to investigate sightings and track the bush, laying down countless blood and scent trails, in the hopes of obtaining a tiger footprint. “I had to do it out of my own pocket,” he said, “out of the scent of an oily rag.” In May 1971, James found what he was convinced were tiger tracks in the north-central community of Beulah, an area where there had been many tiger sightings. Jeremy flew down especially from the mainland to look at them. While the tracks were proof to James that the tiger survived, Jeremy was less certain and they decided together that the tracks “were not clear enough to be used as evidence.” Meanwhile, Jeremy wrote hundreds of letters and organized meetings with government officials. He also scrounged donations together to open a temporary exhibit in Launceston, Tasmania's second largest city, to raise public awareness about the tiger and encourage people to report sightings. That's when Bob Brown, the third team member, got involved.
Bob had a medical practice in Launceston, and he spent less time in the bush and more on logistics. He rented the tiger hunters an office in Launceston and created maps plotting tiger sightings. The idea was that they would personally investigate every new sighting and rank it as to its quality and credibility. Not only would they interview witnesses in detail, they would go to the sighting locations and thoroughly search them for footprints, tiger scat, and actual animals. In addition, they investigated high-quality sightings from previous years.
To get the public involved, they created fact sheets, several of which James still had. One flyer titled “Reward $100 for Tiger Tracks” showed thylacine tracks drawn and initialed by Jeremy, alongside wombat and devil tracks for comparison. At the bottom of the flyer it read, “IF YOU FIND TIGER TRACKS, PLEASE GO TO ANY LENGTHS TO PRESERVE THEM AS WE DESPERATELY NEED THE EVIDENCE” and “To Find Tracks, we must be informed of Sightings Quickly.”
As the search intensified through the later part of 1972, it seemed that there were explanations for many