Carnivorous Nights (45 page)

“How did you originally get interested in the thylacine?”

“I saw a tiger in 1967.”

“Where?”

“I was canoeing along the Coorong.”

The Coorong? The Coorong coastline was on the Australian mainland where the thylacine had been extinct for thousands of years. At least that's what we'd been told.

Col knew the mainland location of his thylacine sighting might tend to undermine its credibility in certain circles.

“You may think that's strange to see a tiger over there, but I believe it was a tiger to this day. I spoke to a lot of people in southeastern South Australia that claimed to have seen the same animal.” In fact, the mainland had as many thylacine sightings as Tasmania did.

Col's 1967 sighting had a strong impact on his life. Not long afterward, he began flying down to Tasmania to interview Tasmanians about the tiger. For three decades Col tracked down trappers and bushies and people who claimed to have seen the animal. When he got tired of flying back and forth, he moved to Tyenna and started publishing oral histories about the tiger in the local newspaper, the
Derwent Valley Gazette.
Eventually, in 2001, Col published these stories in a book called
Tiger Tales.

The publication of
Tiger Tales
shook even more informants out of the woodwork. “When I had my book out, a fellow rang me from Keith [a town] along the Coorong. He said, ‘Hey, I saw the same animal that you did a year later but I never told a living soul until now.’” Further evidence
emerged when Col gave a lecture at the Mount Field park center. A man from the audience came up to him and said that his grandfather used to transport thylacines from Tasmania to the mainland on fishing boats and sell them to private zoos. This provided Col with a logical explanation for his sighting on the Coorong. “These tigers could have been released on the mainland,” he said. “Or they could have got out and bred up.”

As for Tasmania itself, Col was certain the tiger was still out there. “I get reports, thirty to forty a year, from all areas of the state, from the Northeast, the Northwest, the Central South highlands, and the west coast. They can't all be the same tiger. There have to be viable breeding colonies.”

Col had recently investigated a promising sighting from the northern part of the island. A man and his wife were driving on a dirt track across their property in the early hours of the morning. As they were crossing a creek bed, they saw a thylacine walk across the track and up the bank. The man turned his four-wheel drive around and shone the lights on the animal. Both he and his wife got a good look and agreed it was a Tasmanian tiger. When they got home, they told their family about the sighting and their daughter-in-law said she had seen the same animal six months earlier in the same place. “These people are in typical thylacine country,” said Col. “Not heavily bushed. Light understory. Tigers were caught there during the early days of the bounty. I've been up there looking, but it's a lot of area to cover.”

“Where is that exactly?” we asked.

“Now, that's top secret.” He smiled.

We asked Col what he thought of other thylacine hunters. Did they share information?

“We're all a little jealous of each other,” he admitted. “We don't get together often.” We imagined Col, James Malley, and Trudy Richards hunched over a map of the island, divvying up their turf.

We told Col about our own expedition to the Milkshakes. It was no surprise to him that we hadn't run into
Thylacinus cynocephalus.
He informed us that we had made a critical error.

“Remember, the tiger has a first-class sniffer,” he said. “He can smell from miles away. Perfume, smokers, even bad BO will scare him off.” We were guilty of these scent infractions and several more. That was why
camera traps never caught the thylacine on film, he said. The cameras were lousy with foreign scent. When Col went out looking for the tiger, he anointed himself and his gear with eucalyptus or tea tree oil, a trick he learned from his father, who had been a trapper.

“You get an atomizer and you dilute it fifty to one with water,” he said. “And you spray everything—your pack, your clothes. It fools the tiger.”

Despite years of drenching himself in bush odors and searching the is-land's backcountry, Col had yet to see a thylacine in Tasmania. But he believed he had been in their presence. “I've smelled them in the bush and I can tell you they have a very rank odor.” He had also heard them. “The tiger makes a very distinctive call like the fox terrier.
Yip, yip
—with an echo or callback. In the bush, they'll grunt like a pig.” And several times Col had gotten the feeling he was being watched by a tiger. “This tiger's a curious animal,” he said. “They'll keep out of sight, but you'll have the feeling they're there. You start to get a sixth sense in the bush.”

While Col was explaining his thylacine strategy, Alexis was laying out his paintings of Tasmanian animals on the grass next to the picnic table. Col got up from the table and eyeballed them. He focused on one, a lone thylacine shown from the side, with its head turned to stare at the viewer.

“This tiger's had a good feed,” said Col critically. “He's overweight.”

“She's carrying pouch young,” said Alexis a bit defensively.

“Could be,” said Col. “Just a suggestion, make them thinner. They do taper down at the belly.”

Col launched into a spontaneous lecture. “The thylacine had a six-foot-long body (some people say five feet, but I say six). It was two-and-a-half-feet high. It has short legs and a big woofy head and a long stiff straight tail.” We noticed that Col was shifting back and forth between the past and present tense.

“It's like a greyhound dog, very narrow in the loins but with a big deep chest which speaks of an animal that has big endurance. And stripes of course. And big jaws that can open very wide to crush and suffocate. The female tiger, which used to be called a slut or a bitch, is a third smaller. She has a backward-opening pouch, which she kept her young in. The male had a flap of skin over his private organs—it was protection, not a pouch. The male's head is much woofier. Female is daintier. But just like you get some blokes that are more feminine, it's the same with tigers.”

Just then, a warm breeze kicked up and the paintings started to flutter off. Alexis scrambled to pick them up before they dropped into the nearby stream.

Col suggested we all go for a drive. “Got room in the bus?” he asked. “I'll take you near the Florentine and Tiger mountain ranges. It's where the last tigers were caught in the wild. It's the real Never-Never.”

As we headed up into the mountains, the sun was startlingly bright, shimmering off the eucalyptus leaves and revealing range after range: the Sawbacks, the Sentinels, the Tiger Range. The landscape was so folded it might have concealed anything. “In some of these valleys there are phenomenal amounts of wildlife,” Col said. He pointed at a rocky cliff. “I've been up there and I can tell you … they
could
live up there.”

We told Col about our visit to Pyengana and asked if he was familiar with that sighting. He, too, had gone up to check it out. “Yes, it was true that one was a hoax,” he said. “But did you at least see the big fat alcoholic pig?”

Col shared that he had recently suffered a setback of his own. He frequently fielded calls from people hoping to launch expeditions in search of the tiger—and one he had received recently had sounded like a tiger hunter's dream. An American (whom we shall refer to as “C.” here) called Col up, claiming to represent a well-financed worldwide conservation group called Save the Species. “He rang me up and told me he was going to invest millions of dollars in a hunt for the tiger. He wanted
me
to lead the hunt,” said Col.

C.'s crew was going to bring in powered hang gliders to conduct aerial searches over vast sections of trackless wilderness. The gliders were going to be equipped with heat-seeking devices invented by the U.S. military that could pinpoint animals through the dense foliage. If anything was seen, they would parachute down and track the nocturnal thylacines with night-vision goggles. “Let's face it,” Col said. “You Yanks have got some good gadgets. He'd ring me up and talk for an hour at a time. They were also going to hire local helicopters.”

C. had shown up in Tasmania just months before for some preexpedition scouting. “The bloke was an overweight sort of guy. I took him for a walk on an asphalt path and he fell flat on his face and broke his nose. Here's a guy who reckoned that he went into the South American desert and lived with the natives. He said he was a Vietnam vet.”

Bit by bit, other elements of C.'s story didn't add up. For example, the supposedly wealthy American was driving an '84 Mazda. And C. let it slip that he lived with a roommate and had to go to the library to check his e-mail. “I thought, this guy's a fraud. He's not a rich man.” He sighed. “You get all sorts bashing your ear over this tiger.”

“Yeah, cryptozoologists have adopted the tiger, too,” we said.

This reminded Col of another hoax. “That's stunning about your Bigfoot,” he said. Not long before we had left the United States, the man who had originally inspired the search for Bigfoot was revealed posthumously to be an inveterate practical joker who in 1958 had made Bigfoot tracks using carved wooden feet.

Australia was not short on its own crypto-animals. The Yowie was Aus-tralia's answer to Bigfoot, a giant hominid covered in thick hairy fur. The people who looked for it were called Yowie hunters, and there were even Yowie candies. The Bunyip was a celebrated cryptid seen on the Australian mainland. In the book
Cryptozoology A to Z
, it is listed as a large hairy creature with the head of a horse that lives in rivers and lakes. But we had personally heard the Bunyip described as a ten-foot-high beast that combined every Australian marsupial and had huge fangs.

Col was adamant that the thylacine should be removed from the pantheon of cryptozoological animals. “Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Yowies, and Bunyips have never been proven. The thylacine existed. They slot the tiger in with the cryptids because it's a mystery and presumed to be extinct. Strictly speaking, cryptozoology looks for things that are
unknown
, whereas the tiger is
known
to have existed.”

Alexis and Col discussed a cryptozoologist who went to the Congo to look for a dinosaur called Mokele-mbembe and ended up being imprisoned by rebel soldiers. “Is it worth risking your life looking for some fanciful animal?” Col asked. “Dinosaurs in the Congo? Come on!”

Then again, Col admitted to risking his own life when he ventured alone into the bush. “I get out into areas that nobody else goes into. I'm getting old. If I fall down, I'm devil meat. And they
will
eat you. An old bushie who worked in forestry told me that he lost one of his workmen and didn't know where he had gone. Then the police came to him and said we would like you to identify him. All they had was a wristwatch and the soles of his shoes. They eat from the anus up, you know.”

“It starts out fun but then goes terribly wrong,” said Alexis.

As we drove up the narrow mountain road, a lake came into view that presented a misty, mysterious scene. The white spars of thousands of dead trees rose from underneath the water. It was a drowned forest.

“This is Lake Gordon,” Col told us. “It used to be forested hills and valleys with small rivers, but it was dammed in the late 1960s.” The Hydro-Electric Commission of Tasmania had constructed a 460-foot-high concrete dam across the Gordon River, flooding 105 square miles of Tasmanian wilderness just north of Lake Pedder.

“It's haunting,” Alexis said. “An ancient forest submerged like a lost city.”

Col said dry weather in recent years had dropped the level of the lake 130 feet and unveiled the ghost forest. Red-stained rocky banks were also being exposed, and the original contours of the land were reemerging from the lake like a buried corpse. “They didn't count on having so many dry years,” said Col. “Before they logged and built this road, this area used to have more rain. When they took the trees out, it seemed to do something.”

Next, we passed columns of white, green, and blue wooden boxes stacked up by the roadside. “You might want to close your windows,” Col suggested. For a moment, we were reluctant—it was so hot and the breeze was so pleasant. Then we heard the telltale
bzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Bees— perhaps indignant, perhaps just curious—had begun flying up to the Pajero.

“Whenever you see the hives, you know there's a leatherwood forest,” said Col.

Alongside the road, among the eucalyptuses and myrtles, we saw thickly foliated trees with long oblong leaves, blanketed in white blossoms. These trees were leatherwoods, a rain forest species that grows only in Tasmania and is very slow growing. Leatherwoods don't produce nectarrich flowers until they are more than seventy years old, and they are most productive between the ages of 175 and 210. By feeding on their blossoms, bees in fourteen thousand hives around Tasmania make more than one million pounds of honey a year—and it is one of the rarest and strangest honeys in the world. We had bought some leatherwood honey back in Mole Creek and found it had an unexpectedly intense quality. Not cloyingly sweet like most honeys, it had a distinct floral aroma and a smoky flavor that lingered on the palate.

“There's rogue beekeepers who come out and milk the honey in the night and the poor old beekeeper comes back and there's nothing left,” said Col. Worse was when honey rustlers stole the entire hive.

We turned off from Gordon River Road, which was paved, onto Clear Hill Road, which was covered only with loose gravel. It cut north through a pass in the mountains. Col turned his head from left to right, scanning the surrounding bush. “Many thylacines have been seen walking across this road, I can tell you,” he said as we rattled along.

The road crossed a bridge, where two small rivers cascaded down a rocky hillside and converged into a single stream. “It's the Adam and Eve rivers, going down to the Garden River,” Col said. The rapid rushing waters frothed against red and black rocks. On the crumbling stream banks, gnarled tea trees and wattles bloomed pink and white.