Tyger, Tyger
The food is strange here — the blood doesn’t flow freely as his teeth sink into the flesh. The innards tossed at him in chunks. Nothing is warm, like something freshly hunted and slain, stalked for hours until exhaustion. The meat is tough to chew, gritty and sinewy. It smells unclean, almost rotten.
But he’s hungry, and there’s been nothing else to eat.
He paces back and forth across the stark concrete box, sniffing at one corner, then another. He avoids the corner he’d marked. It’s too close to his food for his liking, his whole territory is too cramped, but there’s nothing he can do, he’s too small compared to them, too scared, he just wants to go into his cave where it’s cooler.
The heat is unbearable. They’ve forgotten to open the little opening that lets him back into his shaded cave, that lets him hide from the strange faces and pointing hands of the pink hairless two-footers who peer and leer at him from the other side of the fence. In this empty box, there’s nowhere for him to go.
The sunlight is too bright. He’s never felt anything like it before; it’s unnatural to him, the light, the warmth of it shining on his fur. He should be sleeping. He should be with his mate. They should be taking care of their litter -
(his eldest — shot by a two-footer, he saw the flash of the strange fire, tried to yip to warn him but was too late; his mate, her foreleg caught in a trap, their latest litter still in her pouch, the hunters drawn to her by her cries of pain)
- but he is alone in this strange place.
There’s no water.
He’s so very thirsty.
The cries of other animals are no comfort to him in the rapidly cooling night. Fewer two-footers are peering in at him, watching him scratch, yawn, pace. Finally, there are no more.
He paws at the little gate that keeps him from his cave. They hadn’t come back to open it. It’s suddenly so much colder. The difference to the day’s heat is extreme. It’s a cold he feels deep within his bones. He whines, wanting nothing more than to be inside the warmth of his cave, that safe space.
He gives up on the cave.
They won’t be coming to let him in.
He curls up into a tight ball, trying to keep himself as warm as possible.
And as he falls asleep, he dreams of his family.
He dreams of them running to a faraway place, deep, deep within the dark forests no two-footer can find. There are gorges there, too difficult for the two-footers to climb — great limestone cliffs and sandstone caves filled with secret waterfalls, where ancient groves of Wollemi and Huon pine and king’s holly grow undisturbed for millennia. Their striped hides disappear in the greens and browns of this hidden world, rich with the song of cockatoos and currawongs, kookaburras and rosellas. In the shadows of the night they would hunt; by day they would sleep, eat, raise their young, live, prosper, grow.
They could flourish here, far away from the strange fire and traps and concrete boxes of the two-footers.
He never wakes again.
But maybe somewhere out there, his family thrives.
The last captive thylacine — Tasmanian tiger — died on 7 September 1936 in Hobart Zoo, Tasmania, Australia. Nicknamed Benjamin, he is reported to have died as a result of neglect after being locked out of its shelter, after Hobart experienced extreme heat during the day and freezing temperatures at night. Just 59 days before, his species had been granted protected status after being decimated from decades-long hunting, foreign diseases and habitat destruction.
The thylacine was officially declared extinct in 1982. Despite this, there have been hundreds of unconfirmed sightings across Tasmania and mainland Australia since Benjamin’s death.
However, the Wollemi Pine — a tree previously only known from fossils two million years old — was rediscovered in 1994 in a tiny grove just two hundred kilometres from Sydney, Australia. Many still believe that a small population of thylacines could still be out there, somewhere, in Tasmania’s vast forests.
