Carnivorous Nights (5 page)

Les pointed out tracks in the sand, impressions of little claws and long feet. “Wallaby,” he said. “They're active at night.”

We walked beneath the hanging cliff for about a quarter of a mile. Then Les stopped and gestured toward the underside of the shelter. The rock was stained pink, brown, and white, and it was covered in dark, swirling lines. “This is it,” he said.

At first we couldn't see anything. But then the dark lines seemed to shift and reassemble themselves. They formed a picture of three animals: a menagerie à trois.

We could make out a python with a thick, coiled body, its head pointed upward, its tongue in mid-flick. There was a kangaroo that had a long muzzle and short, pointed ears. It was looking to the right with an almost arrogant expression on its face. The third animal was Les's tiger
—was it a tiger?
It had a big, doggy head with triangular ears (one facing forward and one back), a skinny neck, two stumpy front legs, and dark stripes across its elongated body. It appeared to be speared through by the tail of the haughty kangaroo.

The drawings were made using charcoal. Les showed us a large oval of ash on the ground. It was an ancient fire pit, one of three in this rock shelter, and it was thousands of years old. Les thought two, maybe three aboriginal families had spent their evenings at this spot regularly. “These fire mounds were used for cooking large animals. They would have dragged a kangaroo up here and covered it over.” Then he added, “Pythons have a lot of meat on them, too.” We began to wonder if the rock art was actually an ancient menu.

The python was probably a diamond python, a species that grows to about six feet and still lives in Royal National Park (it eats bats, other small mammals, birds, and lizards). The wallaby was probably the brushtail rock wallaby, now an endangered species. All, including the thylacine, were nocturnal.

We began to look for something besides the stripes that might indicate this drawing was a tiger, rather than a crosshatched kangaroo. Its eye was
a deep black almond, which gave it a slightly savage appearance. Very thylacine-y. Then again, from different angles, the animal looked more like a kangaroo than a tiger.

Then we saw something. It could have been just a fold in the rock, but there it was, a charcoal line, the tiger's mouth. We had spent too much time at the museum looking at the tiger to miss it. Tasmanian tigers have a wicket-shaped grin. The line of their mouths extends far back into their heads toward the ears and turns up at the corners—a feature that allows them to open their mouths in an unusually wide gape. When we saw that crafty grin beaming out at us across the millennia, we knew we would join the 60 percent crowd.

“It looks like I have another convert,” Les said.

We looked at the charcoal lines marking the sandstone. What made this thylacine drawing all the more remarkable was that it survived when so many aboriginal drawings had been lost.

At one time, Les explained, every inch of this rock shelter would have been covered with paintings. In fact, in the background behind the python-wallaby-thylacine were the faded or partial beginnings of many other drawings—the un-filled-in outline of a disembodied head, a featureless kangaroo in mid-leap.

These three charcoal drawings had survived because they were protected from the fading rays of the sun and covered with a clear skin of silica that had leached out of the rock face and formed a protective sheath.

“The wonderful thing about this drawing is that it's no longer on the surface of the rock. It's
in
the rock. It's probably preserved forever now.”

“How old is this drawing?” we asked.

Les borrowed one of our notebooks and drew three kangaroo heads. On one, he drew two stick ears—just two lines. On another he drew triangular ears, and on the last one he drew rounded ears. Stick ears were used on the oldest Tharawal drawings: 4,500 to 8,500 years old. Triangle ears dated from 3,500 to 4,500 years ago. Rounded ears were the most recent, disappearing only with European occupation less than two hundred years ago.

He circled the kangaroo with the triangular ears. “That's what we're looking at, and I reckon it's about four thousand years old.” The date fit. Thylacines were still living on the mainland then.

“Why did aboriginal people draw the thylacine?”

“Oh, there could have been lots of reasons,” Les said. Sometimes animals were drawn to tell a story or they could be totem animals, drawn to call on their spirits. In rock shelters like this one where families gathered for warmth and shelter at night, the rock art is often diary-like. “It's sort of
Days of Our Lives
,” Les continued. “They're keeping a record. ‘I saw a thylacine today.’ That would be a remarkable occurrence, I think, even for an aboriginal person. They're such a cunning and secretive animal. When you saw one, it was an event.” We imagined a thylacine passing unseen in the night and the drawings of the animals moving and dancing in the light of the flickering fire pits.

It was tragic that the thylacine was extinct on the mainland. But had it completely vanished from the earth? We asked Les what he thought. Les said he believed the thylacine survived in Tasmania. “They say there are no dingoes in this park, but I've seen them,” he said. “Tasmania's a big place with many untouched wild areas. The thylacine is out there. It has to be.”

As we were talking, Alexis had begun collecting chunks of charcoal left over from a recent bushfire and bits of yellow ocher. He planned to use them as drawing materials. He hadn't said much while we were looking at the ancient animal triptych, though he had photographed it with his digital camera and made a quick sketch.

“Do you think it's a thylacine?” we asked.

“Maybe,” Alexis said. “But it could be a rabbit for all I know.” Then he looked admiringly at the work of these long-vanished artists. “I know one thing. I hope my shit's still around in four thousand years.”

By the time we got back to the boat, it was nearly beached. With some difficulty, Les extricated the pudding from Tiger Shark Hole and anchored in the main part of the Southwest Arm. In the distance, we saw the tiny figures of water-skiers, swimmers, and numerous pleasure craft. Alexis and Dorothy decided to go for a dip and leapt into the green water. We advised them to watch out for tiger sharks, but they paid no attention.

Les pulled out a cold can of Victoria Bitter and popped the top. “Nothing I like better than a day on the water, good conversation, and a good beer,” he said. Then he began telling us about his day job. It turned out studying rock art was a sideline for him these days. He worked with the New South Wales Department of Corrective Services, counseling prisoners and parolees with drug, alcohol, mental health, and violence
problems. Some of his work was profoundly gratifying, helping people get straight, putting their lives back together. But in the criminal justice system, he also encountered some hard nuts—murderers, serial killers.

“Working in the jails, we have a saying: Yes, I'm paranoid. But am I paranoid enough?” Alexis and Dorothy climbed out of the water and retreated to their sunny perch on the roof.

Drug addiction, Les continued, really exacerbated the problems of felons. Surprisingly, he said the most problematic drug he had to deal with was marijuana. It caused tremendous social problems. “In my experience it's worse than heroin,” he said. “It affects brain function.”

“Really?”
we said.

We excused ourselves and went onto the roof of the boat. Dorothy, in a gingham bikini and with her Gucci sunglasses propped on her head, was giving Alexis a shoulder rub. He took his pot pipe out. Clearly, he had been eavesdropping. “Tell Les I'm killing my last brain cell,” he said, flicking his lighter.

A
few nights after our visit to the ancient portrait gallery, we sat on benches in Sydney's Hyde Park beneath the thick, tropical leaves of Moreton Bay figs. Flying foxes were jostling for position in the trees. Once in a while, one of them would take off, its four-foot-long, leathery wings silhouetted against the city's skyscrapers. It was odd. Animals the size of cats were flying through the evening air and the city's residents barely seemed to notice.

Across the street at the venerable Australian Museum, something else strange was going on. Cloning scientists were trying to bring the Tasmanian tiger back from the dead. We had made an appointment with the cloning team and been casing the museum for days beforehand, visiting exhibits on ancient Australian megafauna, purchasing tiger souvenirs in the gift shop (most notably a bronze tiger tiepin)—and hanging out in the park with the megabats.

The cloning project had received an enormous amount of press in Australia. Our favorite headline had been, “Get a Life, Scientists Tell Extinct Tiger.” Most of the articles were accompanied by a photo of a specimen from the museum's collection: a perfectly preserved thylacine pup, eyes closed and floating in a jar of alcohol.

Sitting in the park, we reflected on the similarities between the flying foxes and the thylacine. Just as the thylacine had been in the nineteenth century, flying foxes were regarded as pests and, despite their abundance in Sydney, were actually rare. In many areas of Australia the bats' forest homes had been chopped down, and they had turned to eating fruit crops. As a result, farmers started killing the creatures, and in 2001 the gray-headed flying foxes wound up being listed as a threatened species. The difference was that, while rare, the megabats were still around, managing to survive in this busy, human-created environment, flying past church steeples and landing in street trees. The thylacine hadn't been so lucky. Protection efforts came too late. Now human beings—the same creatures that had hounded thylacines to the vanishing point—felt they had no recourse but to try and jump-start this species' flatlining heart.

As we watched the flying foxes, we began to wonder, What
is
life anyway? We remembered a scene from the 1931 movie
Frankenstein.
Dr. Frankenstein cranks open the ceiling above his lab, revealing a thunderstorm. As electric current surges through a V-shaped Tesla coil, the electricity reanimates slabs of graveyard flesh that Dr. Frankenstein's stitched together, and he screams, “
IT'S ALIVE. IT'S ALI-I-IVE!
”

That was cinematic science fiction. Dead humans can't be brought back to life—at least not yet. What the Australian Museum's scientists were proposing was that species could be. The implication? Extinction may not be as final as it sounds.

On the morning of our appointment, Alexis accompanied us to the
Australian Museum—Dorothy was spending the A.M. buying souvenirs— and we were ushered into the museum's Evolutionary Biology Unit. If we had imagined it would be outfitted like a mad scientist's lab, nothing could have been further from reality. It was a long room with cubicles, paper-piled desks, computer terminals, a coffeepot, and a small conference table. The unit's lead scientist, Don Colgan, was also distinctly un-Frankensteinian. His hair was not electroshocked but smooth, brown, and neatly parted. He didn't rant. In fact, at times, he was such a low talker, it was difficult to hear him.

Don introduced us to his colleague Karen Firestone, an expert on ancient DNA and marsupial carnivores. We all sat down at the conference table, and they offered us cups of tea.

We had looked up Don's curriculum vitae on the Internet. Typically, geneticists working at natural history museums were primarily concerned with taxa. How are species related? How did they evolve? When did one species branch off to form another? Much of Don's own work had to do with invertebrates—aquatic snails, spiders, shellfish—and how they fit into the tree of life. Ultimately, the work was historical: he used genetics to explain how species became the way they are. How had he gotten involved with this radically futuristic project?

It all started, he said, with another work of science fiction,
Jurassic Park.
In the book and subsequent movie, dinosaurs were brought back to life, using ancient dinosaur DNA extracted from amber fossils. After reading the book and seeing the movie, people started wondering if the Tasmanian tiger could be brought back in the same way, using DNA extracted from specimens at the Australian Museum. Don said no. Not possible. The question kept coming up and he kept saying no,
really
, it can't be done. In fact, it got to the point that he felt the need to write a detailed letter to his museum's director, the well-known paleontologist Mike Archer, explaining why cloning a tiger wouldn't work.

“The director took that as unequivocal support for the idea,” Don said. “Since then it's generated its own momentum. The animal is in the national psyche.”

Karen, an American in her thirties, had been hired specifically for the tiger project. “Before, I was working with dried skins to look at the population and conservation genetics of living carnivorous marsupials,” she
said. “It just seemed like a natural progression to work on a bigger, deader animal.”

The cloning project was premised on the notion that the Australian Museum had this wonderfully intact antique specimen of a tiger pup preserved whole. The plan was that they would extract DNA strands from the pup's soft tissue—its heart, its liver—and reassemble those strands to re-create the tiger's entire genome. Once the tiger's DNA had been copied, catalogued, and sequenced, they would create a thylacine DNA molecule in the lab. From that DNA molecule, this one-of-a-kind striped carnivore could be reborn.