Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [77]
Ouch. Some of the pademelons we had seen were quite attractive. Yet Sharland had captured our camp pademelon perfectly. Mangy had greasy fur with matted clumps sticking out here and there. Hanging around the camp, hitting up hikers for handouts, Mangy was the macropod equivalent to a bum.
After Chris removed the steaks from the eucalyptus wood fire, we began to gorge on grilled sandwiches made with Tasmanian grass-fed beef. Mangy looked on longingly and moved slightly nearer.
In preparation for our thylacine stakeout, we paged through another one of our books, Tasmanian Mammals. Though conventional wisdom says the Tasmanian tiger is extinct, this field guide, published in 2002, was maintaining a hopeful stance.
We decided to share some of the information. “It says here that the tiger is ‘mainly nocturnal but may bask in the sun in cold weather.’ It also says it makes a ‘coughing yap’ when it's disturbed and a ‘high-pitched yip or yap’ when looking for prey.”
“So we should listen for a yip or a yap?” said Chris as he poured Tasmanian pinot noir into our collapsible drinking cups. He was getting into the spirit.
“Yeah,” we said. “But it might be difficult. The book says the tiger's very secretive.”
Alexis gave us a hard stare. “Calling the thylacine secretive is like saying Elvis has ‘kept to himself’ for the last twenty-five years.”
“Does Elvis have a range map?”
He leaned in. The range map for the tiger was an outline of Tasmania with four question marks on it.
An hour before sunset, the five of us began hiking the trail that led out of the campsite and wended its way to the hilltop above. Mangy escorted us for a few yards into the darkening forest, but then stopped, realizing that we weren't headed toward a pile of snacks.
“Do you think he'll follow us the whole way?”
Alexis stopped walking. “Why would a pademelon join a search for this island's apex predator?” he demanded.
We thought Alexis might be ascribing too much intelligence to this pademelon, but then Mangy looked at us suspiciously. “Hey, I was just looking for something to eat,” he seemed to be saying. “I didn't want to be eaten.” Then he hopped back toward the camp.
The trail that led out of the campground was a well-used one. First, it passed through what naturalists in Tasmania call a “mixed forest,” a combination of eucalyptuses and rain forest trees. Boardwalks covered areas of the trail that would have been muddy in a rainier season. Fallen, disintegrating trees were hosts to young ferns, mosses, and lichens growing in bright green patches.
As we walked through the dark greenery, we thought about all of the expeditions that had been launched to find the tiger. Michael Sharland, the pademelon-hating naturalist who wrote Tasmanian Wild Life, had participated in one of the earliest searches in 1938. That was just two years after the last-known living tiger had died at the Hobart zoo. Led by Arthur Fleming of Tasmania's Animals and Birds Protection Board, the 1938 expedition went out into the goldfields near the Jane River, about ninety miles south of the Milkshakes. None of the miners working in that remote region had ever seen a tiger—but they thought they had heard tigers “making a curious yapping sound at night in the broken country around them—a sound they could ascribe to no other known animal.” The 1938 expedition did not find a Tasmanian tiger, either living or dead, but it did find a set of footprints in the mud at a place called Thirkell's Creek. They took plaster impressions—and later the tracks were identified as those of a tiger.
Then there was the young naturalist David Fleay, who had an actual close encounter with the tiger. In fact, he was bitten on the ass by one in 1933 while taking the animal's picture. Fleay was fiddling