In the end I couldn’t do it. I kept an eye on him, though; kept that radical plan behind glass in case of emergencies.
I had forgotten about the island, about it being a place of outrageous extremes, of fairy tale animals, of terrible, dark cautions. I wanted the middle ground again, just for a day. I did not want the dark forests, the imaginary creatures, the yowling beasts. But I was drawn to it too, of course. It was my own childhood, my territory, my nature. And sometimes our nature makes us sick to our stomachs.
I began to collect books on the beast. Many island people did, just as if they were collecting biographies of family members. I read the books over and over. Jack did too. We read that its tail was heavy and stiff, as inflexible as a kangaroo’s. It was a dog that could not wag its tail. How disturbing it must have been to own a dog whose tail you could not encourage to wag. It could make a person resentful, a tail like that. The creature had had a surprisingly large brain capacity, much larger than expected. I wondered what that large brain had been used for? Dreaming?
Caged in zoos, thylacines were seen by most people as boring. The creature did not seem to know that what was required of it was a performance of some kind. Even a rebellious, zoo-crazed frenzy would have been something. But having no understanding of people, they showed no fear. We simply did not exist for them, and to be ignored is, for human beings, the worst thing in the world. Mostly, the beast sat in its cage looking pitiful, meekly accepting the situation it found itself in, without protest. Alive, it had been completely without entertainment value. Now that it is dead, it is a vacant space, able to be filled with anyone’s fantasies. It is replete with potential. People can’t get enough of it.
There were protests over the research, of course. Some mornings I had to cross a picket line. I know how you feel, I wanted to tell the protesters. I know all the issues. I think about them too. You’re right. This is a publicity stunt, a way to attract funding. But it is also so much more than that. Think of it as a resurrection, the raising of the dead. Such a thing has only been done once or twice before, and then by gods. How marvelous it would be!
Or is that what worries them?
But I was being unfair. Miracles, by their nature, provoke fierce, uncontrollable response. That is their purpose, surely.
And lately the creature was being spotted everywhere. People saw it in paddocks and scrubland, on mountains, even in small, suburban backyards. Dream tigers leaping suddenly out of the island’s subconscious and, just as suddenly, being sucked back in again, disappearing immediately, covering all tracks. Most sightings, I noted, occurred at night. That made sense, I thought. The beast, after all, had been a nocturnal hunter. But, also, night is the time of shadows and dreams, the time of yearning. It has been seen on the mainland too, though it has been extinct there for thirty centuries. Resurrection is an effort of the imagination as much as anything.
I hoped the effort and expense of the work would be worth it. Humans rarely change their habits, however. We might bring the beast back only to see it quickly become extinct once more.
~~~
It happened slowly, at continent-forming pace, but Jack began to ease into the island. He found a group of friends, sometimes even staying over with one or the other of them. He smiled a bit every now and then. He relaxed enough to give me a hard time. That was a good sign, believe it or not. It meant he was getting his confidence back. I took him to a small zoo one day with six or seven Tasmanian devils. He couldn’t believe them. “They’re just like cartoons,” he said. One of them opened its obscene mouth wide and growled, setting all the others off. Jack howled with laughter.
I loosened up enough to plan a veggie garden. We stopped being tourists. This crazy idea of mine was actually working. Sometimes we just stood there grinning at each other. It was probably the relief more than anything. After such a grim time, one or two good things made us giddy, hysterical, as if we were particularly lucky and fortunate people. I don’t know how it happened, except maybe that we just persevered. After all, we couldn’t go back, not really. It happened because we’d had no alternative.
One lunchtime, I saw old Dot Lutin in the street, a neighbour from my childhood. She screamed and hugged me, and made everything about the past seem instantly solid and graspable. We had a good old chinwag over a cuppa. It calmed me right down. For the first time since we’d arrived, I felt like I belonged.
That afternoon I stayed at work until the corridors were silent, and I made my way to the dark, chill room where the valuable specimens were kept. It was not the only specimen, I knew, but it was the best. I opened the jar, removed the thylacine, insured recently for two million dollars, wrapped it in a newly bought baby blanket, and took it to the forest, where I buried it under the canopy of a vast tree. Jack made a strange face at me that evening as we were watching the news, as if he knew exactly what I had done. I just smiled back at him.
~~~
JEN WHITE is an Australian author of speculative fiction who has
