Thylacine

In the Australian bush at night, you could find a lost sixpence or the feldspar in a piece of quartz; you could find the buckle from a dog's collar or a sooty owl in a tree. But you'd never find a pound note or an ant, and you'd never find an old sepia photograph, or why things are the way they are, although men will look for it there, some of them all of their lives.¹

And so Douglas was looking again, even though he'd told his brother he was going to check on the chooks. That cold winter luminescence shone with such a fierce white light.² Ah, it's a cold star - a cold star bearing the steely light of a cold moon, bearing that light for some things, but not enough for vision.(? this bit baffles me. let's ask widjaja!) Old iron shines like new milled steel, a shovel blade glints sharp from the work in gravelly soil, trees shimmer like chandeliers, the dam like a disc of stamped plate. All these old things gleam anew.³ The barbed wire's rusty knots glisten with frost, spider's webs are jewelled like the most precious things hung from the pale necks of the world's most desirable women.

Douglas checked the chooks and they stared back at him. Stupid chooks. He closed his finger around the neck of a hen, and it blinked one eye but didn't move.

He checked the wire where he'd made the repair; it was still intact. Six chooks they'd lost, and not a murmur. No feathers. No wild cackles. No fox dashing about in panic and blood lust. Just a chook off the roost and a neat hole in the wire. Douglas didn't know this animal. Clarrie said a dingo or a native cat, but Douglas knew he didn't believe it himself. Clarrie knew the bush better than that, but he was the sort of bloke who always needed to propose a solution even if he knew it was wrong; anything to fill a gap.

When they'd found the human skulls, Clarrie had said it was just old-timers caught in a fire, even though he must have seen the strangeness of the sockets. Old Pearson had died out in the bush, killed by a tree that slipped back off its stump and drove his leg into the ground. Pinned him there. The bull ants stripped him clean. Clarrie had seen Pearson's skull and must have seen the difference in these others, but he just rolled them away with his boot and said it must have been two old-timers. Clarrie was like that.

Douglas saw the stones⁴ but didn't bother to tell Clarrie; he'd only argue back. So he'd returned later and picked them up and placed them in the crook of a tree near where the skulls had been found. Where he could put his hands on them again.

The two brothers got on alright. They could put in a row of fence posts in a day and say no more than was needed to accomplish the task⁵ -- and to put in a row of stringybark posts you don't need to say a lot. There's holes and posts and a straight line. If the posts ram tight, and the eye slips along the flat faces of each post, the job's done.

Douglas didn't need people. He sold the tickets at the local dance because it meant you could stand out on the verandah and listen to the blokes yarn and maybe add your piece about the last flood, but it was a way of meeting people without going through the bother of trying to balance a noisy china cup on a saucer and think of something to say at the same time⁶.

And the women always made him nervous. And dancing. Dancing was plain impossible. He watched other blokes dance, blokes like him, bush workers, timber millers, cow cockies, and yet they could get around; some of them just glided about.

He watched the women's bodies like the other men, but he'd never really seen one he wanted. During national service the boys had played up a bit, and that time he'd gone up to Candelo with the cricket team he didn't come back for three days. But not anyone you'd want to marry, stay with always; and anyway, who'd have him? Short, freckly bloke on a broken-down dry ridge farm. Women round here knew where the gravel pits were.

He'd never asked Clarrie. He'd never asked Clarrie anything much. Clarrie wasn't the sort of bloke you asked anything of. He guessed that Clarrie had knocked about a bit. Those trips to Bombala to sell cows sometimes took a while, but Clarrie never seemed ... never seemed lonely or something. Clarrie always had everything worked out. Douglas thought he'd know if anything worried his brother. When the old man had died, Douglas had watched, stunned, as tears dropped from his brother's eyes. Clarrie had wiped his face with a rag and said, 'Dad taught me everything. All I know about the bush and that. That's all,' and again he plunged his spade into the broken clay of the grave.

They got on alright, but there were times when Douglas liked to get away. The nights at the dances, the other blokes and the music, watching the women - it was just something different. And nights like this, with the cold moonlight.

He didn’t tell Clarrie, you couldn’t, but he knew some poems by heart. All the schoolbooks were still on the shield. Probably never occurred to Clarrie to throw them out. The sixth-grade reader, Modern Short Stories and that book of French poems⁷ that came with their lounge suite at the clearing sale.

He didn’t feel like it tonight, but sometimes he’d said those poems looking over the dam and down to the river: “Slowly, silently, not the moon I walks the night in her silver shoon…” Shoon, shoon. He’d worked out that it must be shoes. Their teacher had just expected them to know, but then she was the sort of jackass who’d never seen the paws of a sleeping dog in the frosty moonlight. How many people had?⁸

He’d worked out how to say some of the French poems, too. He’d looked in amazement at the sheet music while cleaning up after a dance one night as a folded page fell from the back of a book, with the ‘non, je ne regrette rien’. He wondered what it meant, but he found ‘alouette, gentille alouette’, and suddenly the words and the song snapped to the front of his brain and he turned back to ‘non, je ne regrette rien’, and he worked out how most of the words must sound; but he’d never told Clarrie. Clarrie wasn’t the sort of bloke you could.

What was that?

He didn’t move. He didn’t even let his heart beat any differently after its initial hesitation. He could feel the hair on his shoulders and across his neck edging upwards, but he didn’t move.

There it was again. A growl like he’d never heard before. He didn’t move his head, but his eye swivelled and saw it almost straightaway. After all, he was a bushman, and this was his yard, and so his eyes found the strange object in it instantly. And look at it! What an animal!

The beast had been looking at the house but felt the man’s eyes find his own, and they looked at each other, and the barbs of glance hooked in eye flesh. Memories and visions are made thus.⁹

The animal was gone in the next instant, and Douglas knew he’d be off, but he followed him to the edge of the timber and stopped by the fence. Douglas spoke and his voice, clear and hard in the sharp air, chased and found the beast. ‘Je vou regarde - I saw you, dog, or … wolf. That’s what you are. I saw you, tiger god.¹⁰ Thylacine.’ What a word to pitch into the moonlight.

Even as it ran, the animal heard the yelling and the strange word that was its name, and the sound would stay. Thylacine! It stood on the dry ridge among the shards of quartz and swing its heavy head to look down into the valley, knowing it was safe. Surely nothing could spirit itself through time so quickly. But a voice could, and did again.

‘I know you’re up there, tiger. I saw you.’

The two knew each other. The wolf would remember the voice and the man would never forget the beast. In this universe of beings, these two were fused by the light of a silver moon.¹¹ Both hearts beat; the tiger on the ridge, the man in the valley.

‘I saw you, tiger.’¹²

There are some things, the man knew, that could never be denied. A man’s spirit is built thus.¹³

But animals are as logical as men, and Douglas had stood out in the bush where he knew the tiger must pass. The feldspar shone in the shafts of moonlight, the eucalypt leaves hung like small, bright scimitars of snipped tin, and the dog was there. Douglas could feel its presence by the way his hair crept beneath his collar.

‘I know you’re there, dog.’

At the first word, before the muscles of the leg had flung the bones into flight, the animal’s eyes had seen the other’s eyes above where the voice had come out of the moonshine.

‘I saw you, Thylacine. You can’t deny that.’¹⁴

Some nights, man’s logic and beast’s logic diverged. The man knew he’d keep seeing it, although not so close to the house again. Chickens weren’t that attractive. Not to a wild animal. Foxes and chickens were built for each other, but Tasmanian tigers - well, they could take chickens or leave them, and when men were around, they left them.

But some nights, out of the bush came that quiet sound. No chase, no guns, just the sound. You looked out for things like that. You didn’t get too close to snakes, you kept out of the way of eagles, and, especially, you kept out of the way of men. But this one kept on being there. You never heard it; it was always where you couldn’t smell it. And then, just that noise, not growling, just the same quiet sounds. No harm came, but you avoided things like that, if you could. It was better without the moon. The man wasn’t there without the moon.¹⁵

‘Hey fellas, old Jack reckons he’s seen a Tasmanian tiger out by the river.’ Bob Ridgeway turned his big, red face over his shoulder to yell to the other blockers.

‘Bull,’ said Arnold Carter. ‘Old Jack’s been on the white lightning(cider) again.’

Old Jack didn’t like Carter, so he shut up.

‘He just said so,’ persisted Ridgeway. ‘Didn’t yer, Jack; while you was settin’ traps.’

Jack didn’t speak. His eyes gave an affirmative, but his shoulders looked as if hoping the head’s bloody mouth would stay shut.

‘Keep the cork in the kero bottle, Jack,’ said Carter, who knew how to use words like the whipping end of a roll of barbed wire. Jack flinched. ‘Anyone else seen a Tasmanian tiger?’ Carter let the last words leer. No one spoke.¹⁶ Douglas shuffled the last few dance tickets, and the group began chuckling and slapping broad shoulders. Jack slipped out into the moonlight, back to his camp. No one noticed. Silly old Jack, seein’ bloody tigers now. Poor old coot. Trust bloody Arnold to stick in the boot, eh!

The last Palma Waltz bleated to a close. As the hall was being packed up. Douglas cast an eye over the sheet music on the piano, but this new bloke didn’t use the same stuff that the other pianist had. Whatever happened to the other fella. Douglas wondered. Some blokes just disappear. Always a bit strange, that fella. Always quiet, never quite met your eyes. Except, every now and then while he was playing, he’d look up, and you’d catch him, and wonder what he was thinking. Not about the Pride of Erin, that’s for sure. Douglas wondered what non, je ne regrette rien(google translate says it means "no, i don't regret anything". zamn.) had meant. Could foreign words tell you anything more about a man?¹⁷

With the new moon, the chooks began to disappear again. Sometimes Douglas would wait for the tiger in the bush. He would crouch beside the river until the dog high-stepped through the shallows to hide its track. ‘Hello, Thylacine. I saw you.’ But he couldn’t tramp around the bush every moonlit night pretending to track a chicken thief. Clarrie’d get sick of it.

In bed, Douglas would think of the tiger, those swift glances they had shared.

They had gotten to know each other. Douglas could see the dog’s frustration in the glances now: ‘Here’s that man again.’ It was almost like tipping your hat. The man would greet the beast with its name, and the beast would recognise the man, recognise the voice long before even the instant it took to find the eyes above the voice. The man became an annoyance, like a new-fallen log across a path, an owl that snatches the bandicoot you’ve tracked all the way from the creek. To the tiger, the man became just another night animal, and the man knew it and revelled in that pride.¹⁸

Douglas lay in beg with the moon on his face, the pillow like a field of snow. Yes, it was as though the beast no longer thought of him as a man, but as an animal of the night, a clever one that would sometimes appear. Not an enemy but an equal, and strangely, Douglas’s heart strained with a feeling like … His throat went tight. The animal was proud, but it was more than that. It was almost like …

The blast of the shotgun rattled the window pane by Douglas's face¹⁹. He sat up in bed, with that strange cry still with its hooks at his chest. He saw Clarrie with the shotgun. Clarrie turned and looked up at Douglas's moon-white face at the window.

'I just shot at a wild dog. It won't get far. There's enough blood over here to fill a bucket.' Clarrie came over to the window holding up a finger dipped in blood. 'Thought I'd better do somethin' to stop you trampin' around the bush every night.'

Douglas stared at the blood on Clarrie's finger and felt his hairs prickling under his pyjama shirt. The claw of the beast's cry slowly released, but now there was another sensation.

Moonlight nights were terrible after that.²⁰ Douglas lay in bed, and the words of poems crept across his mind, trying to close up a sound (sic) with the soft stitches of the sounds and rhythms. If in the eleven books the brother owned, he'd found 'Tyger! Tyger! burning bright,' he would have read it aloud and hoped that the words would heal.²¹

But he didn't know those words, and his mind sought for words that it didn't, couldn't, know. If they'd had the seventh-grade reader, he would have found it there, but he didn't get to reach seventh grade. He was just a bushman.²²

The Tyger by William Blake

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
In the forests of the night; 
What immortal hand or eye, 
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies.  Burnt the fire of thine eyes?
On what wings dare he aspire? What the hand, dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder, & what art, Could twist the sinews of thy heart? And when thy heart began to beat. What dread hand? & what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain, In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp. Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears  And water'd heaven with their tears: Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?

Tyger Tyger burning bright,
In the forests of the night:
What immortal hand or eye,
Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

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