I wished I could trust her as a caretaker, but I didn’t, not entirely. I wished I could talk to George, but he wasn’t answering his phone and such conversation as I could have made would only have disturbed him.
I decided to stay, and not to sleep. I sat up in a cold night in a cold bed, reading of tigers and wolves and marsupial beasts, their skeletons and observed behaviour. Granny had left a stack of journal articles by the bed, dissections of what their authors believed was a dead species. I wondered if the articles were a deliberate reminder of shredded paper and plastic bells, the fishing trail of a tentacle dragged through water, but how could she have known so much of what the Sea Witch had done? Perhaps their letters shared more than I knew; I had no way of knowing if I’d read them all.
Granny didn’t sleep either. I could hear her up and down the hall all night, the quick pattering footsteps of the old when they are trying to be light and cunning creatures.
In the middle of that cold night, I ventured out into the hallway to search for another blanket, and realized what those footsteps really were. Patter patter patter, and it was only because the floors were hardwood that I could hear them. On another surface, nocturnal hunters would be so very silent … Catching the dark outlines of shapes in the hall, my back slammed against a wall before my brain understood why. Fragments of my earlier reading surfaced between ragged breaths: a paper on thylacine physiology, and what their skeleton implied about their hunting techniques. All I could think of was the morphology of their limbs, the construction of elbow joints that suggested that thylacines were ambush predators, tigers rather than wolves. The two I’d held in my lap were too small for predation, but moonlight shining through windows reflected eyes a lot further from the ground than a tiny joey could account for. I could hear breathing over the footsteps, an almost silent panting, and I couldn’t tell which breaths were mine and which were theirs, but there was a faint stench of feeding, as if meat had been left out for pets and the scent of it had stained their teeth and tongues.
The whole house was shifting with them, stripes and small sounds and that warm, meat-scented breath: the convergence of the dead and the living, and I didn’t know if they hunted in a pack like wolves, or if together they were enough to bring down an animal so much bigger than they were. They were living in a house, but that didn’t mean domestication — they weren’t dogs, and if resurrection and care had changed their nature, I had no indication of it. They may have started out sleeping in Granny’s bed, but the scars on her arms … They were too big and too deep to have come from the joeys. Those marks had come from creatures that hunted. Creatures raised by a woman who had teased me with the prospect of hunting, and who I suspected enjoyed hunting herself. Both the stalking and the bloody death.
Can you watch something die and let it die? she’d asked, and whether she was speaking to me or of me I was no longer sure, but I locked myself in the bedroom, door shut against resurrection and marvel. Thylacines were nocturnal, with night vision much better than mine, and to attempt escape in darkness was a foolish endeavor. Better to wait until dawn, when they were asleep, I hoped, and I could make my way out of a window and run for the rental car. Yet when dawn arrived, I found all the tires on the car had been cut, leaving me stranded amid the eucalypts. There I would have stayed — for what, I don’t know — except a car pulled into the driveway and the passenger door opened up, the engine still running.
“Get in the fucking car, Ruby,” said George.
3
Turned out George hadn’t answered his phone because he was in the air at the time. “You’ve still got location tracking on your phone,” he said. “And I didn’t … I just felt there was something very wrong about all this.”
He’d never been the superstitious type; had never dreamed a death only to be woken by a phone call announcing the same. “The worst that could happen is that I’d look like a bloody fool,” he said. “Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Fool or not — and he wasn’t, and had never been — I was never so glad to see anyone in my life. “You would not believe the time I’ve had,” I told him, and explained everything, in hysterical, overwrought detail, after we’d traveled far enough that panic had calmed enough for complete sentences. I made him stop for breakfast in case disbelief at my story caused him to drive us into a ditch.
Halfway through my explanation, tucked into a quiet corner booth in a cafe, something stilled in him. A bitter, sardonic smile and then nothing. “What?” I asked when I was done and his face hadn’t changed through my recount of resurrection.
“This place,” he said.
I didn’t understand, and he waved his hand at the window, a vague gesture to the land. “Tasmanian tigers weren’t the only living things that went extinct here,” he said. “There’s a long history of hunting on this island.”
Something I’d known about and forgotten, a horror not close enough to immediately recall. Conflict between the Indigenous people of Tasmania and the colonial settlers resulted in slaughter and extermination orders, martial law and a white governor’s instruction to shoot Indigenous inhabitants on sight. The mustering of the Black Line, where every able-bodied male settler was ordered to take part in an organized drive to sweep
