The Thylacine

Mary set out before dawn, backpack and thumb, down the dusty rutted road out of town. A pale glow rimmed the mountains. Fisherman’s hours, Uncle Armand used to call this, except that Uncle Armand was dead now and there weren’t any fish within an hour’s drive of Tilany. Mary’s pack was full of rolls of film and nonperishable food snatched off the shelves of Armand’s pantry and his last packet of cigarettes, too, although she’d never even touched one before. Her bedroll and tent were lashed to the top. Armand’s camera was slung around her neck. She had pepper spray, a utility knife, a carefully folded wad of cash and a topographical map of Tasmania. No one could say that Mary was not prepared.

She’d been the first to master survival skills in the Girl Guides, and Uncle Armand had only encouraged this once she’d gone to live with him: long bush hikes, no-tool shelter-making, quizzes on edible plant identification. He was forever ordering solar water purifiers and build-it-yourself wind turbines and cases of MRE rations from America, convinced of a vague apocalypse lurking ever closer. In the end it was a heart attack. Just a simple seizure of his cardiac muscles as he moved the couch to vacuum.

The sun rose steadily as Mary walked, and she pulled her baseball cap down to shield her eyes. Five kilometers outside of town she met the highway, where distant cars swam like mirages through the waves of heat rising from the bitumen. It was here that she’d really begin: find someone to pick her up, suffer their company, make a journey in fits and starts to Melbourne where the ferry awaited.

The first driver who stopped for her was a sandy-haired boy barely older than herself, face strewn with freckles, the arm hanging from his car window burned a darker tan. He asked her about herself and she made up stories. She was going walkabout before university, she said. She had an exclusive scholarship. Aerospace engineering. Her parents worked for the Secret Intelligence Service. The boy drove in silence, maybe listening, maybe believing.

She spent the first night in a truck stop diner, nodding over coffee. She pulled her books out of her pack and paged through them to the worn spots, where they fell open on their own. Walker’s Marsupials of the World, Australian Mammals, The Last Tasmanian Tiger. She’d highlighted, dog-eared, circled. She’d printed out articles from the Internet, blurry photos, tales of sightings. Her fingers drifted over the words, trembling from caffeine. She was out on the road again before the sun crested the ridge.

________

The thylacine, also known as the Tasmanian tiger, was not a tiger at all. It was a marsupial, its vague likeness to a tiger or wolf only a coincidence of evolution. Seen in the flesh, the thylacine was clearly a separate breed: its tail was long and stiff like a kangaroo’s, its head thick and oblong, its gait graceless. Its nickname came from the dark, bold stripes across its back. It was a unique animal, the only member of its family—but it was ruthlessly hunted as a pest, forced backwards ever further by the eroding of its habitat, hounded by a virus carried by the invasive wild dog. It was, Mary thought, a beautiful animal, an ethereal ghost in black-and-white film footage, its familiar doglike movements becoming suddenly alien as it stood on hind legs, opened a massive, yawning jaw, made a strange hopping motion against the walls of its cage. The last confirmed sighting of a thylacine in the wild occurred in 1930; a farmer shot the animal as it approached his chicken coop. Six years later, the last known living thylacine died in a Tasmanian zoo. Some people believed that the animal had persisted in the wild and was perhaps alive even today. Mary believed this. Uncle Armand had, too. He talked about the wilds of Tasmania, the way animals—and people—could retreat and live undisturbed in the...