• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

That evening we met Ken Wright, one of several fox eradication officers employed by the Tasmanian government. He was in his mid-forties and had the deeply tanned, sunburned face of an outdoorsman, just beginning to be slashed with crow's-feet. His outfit included khaki slacks, a white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, wire-rimmed glasses, and a brown Akubra hat—the emblem of outback Australia—that matched the color of his short, wiry brown beard. If he'd had a bronze star pinned to his shirt, instead of a Parks and Wildlife patch that pictured a snarling Tasmanian devil, we might have taken Ken for the ghost of Wyatt Earp. His slender, intelligent face exuded a quiet authority.

Ken had picked us up at our motel in Launceston, and we drove south on the Midlands Highway, entering a flat terrain of farm fields lined with hedgerows. Low forested hills hung in the distance. The Midlands was the most British-influenced section of Tasmania, with some of the towns resembling English country villages. But once you got out onto the farmland, it was more like the Wild West.

Ken was taking us foxhunting, something he did virtually every night. As we sped past the hedgerows, the sky turned from pale pink to purple. We all sat quiet, admiring the vast landscape.

“So this is an unusual job,” Alexis said finally. “Did you ever think you'd be working as a professional foxhunter in Tasmania?”

“Bloody no.”

Ken had worked for twenty-five years shearing sheep in South Australia, Queensland, Victoria, and Tasmania. “That's about as Australian a job as you can get,” he said.

Some days, he would shear 160 sheep, one every ninety seconds or so. It was backbreaking work, but he liked country life, raising dogs, hunting, riding. As a sideline back in the 1970s, he had hunted foxes on the mainland and sold their pelts to the fur industry for making stoles, jackets, trimmings. That was when fur was still popular. “Course it's not trendy to wear fur anymore,” Ken said. “So the whole industry of selling fox skins basically collapsed. When the skins were worth money, foxes were controlled a lot better.”

From an early age, Ken had learned there were all kinds of ways to hunt a fox. The most common method was spotlighting, nabbing a fox in a beam of light and shooting him with a high-powered rifle. Sometimes he would use dogs—terriers in particular—who sniffed out foxes and drove them out of their dens or along creek lines toward waiting guns.

“We'd also whistle them in the morning.”

“You just whistle and they'll come?” asked Alexis.

“Yeah, you whistle like a rabbit caught in a trap. And you make it plaintive.” He showed us a whistle he kept under the dash. The fox thinks he's headed toward a conveniently injured rabbit—a tasty meal. What he gets instead is a bullet in the head.

“It doesn't always work,” Ken went on. “You get an experienced fox, an older fox, he may have been whistled at before and shot at, so he turns tail and runs.”

As Ken drove down the highway, he pointed off into the countryside at what was believed to be the epicenter of the fox outbreak. “Just over there about five kilometers, that's where we think the litters of fox cubs were raised and released.” In the last year, there had been dozens of sightings in and around this stretch of highway.

Ken said our destination was a sheep and cattle property near the town of Powranna in the Northern Midlands. This area is the heart and soul of Tasmanian sheep farming—home to about 750,000 sheep in a community with a human population of about twelve thousand. Most of the farmers in the district were letting the fox task force search their land.

“Farmers are quite worried about the whole thing,” Ken said. “In some parts of the mainland, foxes can take up to 30 percent of your lamb growth every year. That's just huge, that's money down the drain as far as the farmer's concerned.”

“Have foxes killed any lambs around here?”

“We've had a few lambs come in that have looked very fox-suspect. Farmers have called us, and we've gone out and had a look. We've seen lambs with their noses