Eva Hornung
Tasmania has been invaded from the north by a fox.
A pregnant vixen arrived by sea in the belly of the TigerCat. Photographs hit the front pages: uniformed wildlife experts point at the floor of the Cat’s hold. From Devonport to Hobart and from Swansea to Strahan, people talk of it, shaking their heads, wondering what will happen.
Even as the forensic experts go to work on the impounded vessel, the sightings begin.
A fox could do untold damage. A fox could gnaw at the heart of this country, suck it back to white gristle and shit it out in hairy scat. TASMANIA ATTACKED! the headlines cry, above pictures of the uniforms and an identikit of the fox. The army, the air force and the resources of Tasman Forest are brought in to hunt her down. No expense is spared. Twelve choppers, two from the air force and ten from Tasman Forest, pound the air above the city and the foothills.
Suddenly the fragility of the island and its unprotected borders are blinding. Suddenly the stark white trees of the deadlands in the centre seem more visible, sentinel skeletons with armbands of silver, mementi mori of some past great invasion.
The island is on edge, on the brink.
The bone-thin vixen (her own army squirming in her belly) is sighted in the suburbs ten times and missed ninety-nine. She is moving west from the port, sure and efficient as an armoured personnel carrier, eating sufficient native birds, lizards, insects, snakes, amphibians, rodents and marsupials to leave a trail of cleaned bones and to keep her babies fat. She passes rapidly through the yards, under fences, through rhododendrons and rose gardens to the denser gardens and the bush at the foot of Mount Wellington; and then, for a short while, she disappears. Troops eddy and lose direction and Tasman Forest special forces stop massing on the streets, scouring gardens with spotlights and shooting rabbits, devils and quolls.
There is a lull.
It is winter and the land is shadowed, even sombre. The nights are long and the mornings and evenings end and begin at midday. The trim-edged woodpiles on which Tasmanians pride themselves (you can tell a lot about a person from their woodpile) slowly shorten as the wood fires puff without stopping. On a clear day, Mount Wellington looms over the smoking city, a white-haired old man contemplative over a campfire. The cold sea and the red icebreaker vessels in the harbour bring murmurs of the frozen Antarctic. Tasmanians gather in pubs and talk openly of the fox. The talk carries a bellyful of histories into the warm fug – past poisons and murders and losses: the dark things to be visited on this land.
For the first time, the greenies and the rednecks are united – this is an environmental disaster you can shoot.
Everyone has bitter words for Victoria, the home port of the fox. It’s an act of insane jealousy, of war, of terrorism, to smuggle a fox to Tasmania. It was deliberate. Nothing good has ever come from Victoria. Melbourne, riddled with foxes, is a polluted wasteland. Melburnians are known to live in fear and lock their doors at night.
The Examiner runs stories daily and speculates on the clash between the fox and Tasmania’s other carnivores.
PRAY THE DEVIL SAVES US, the Mercury screams.
The fox’s apocalyptic wail shakes the air.
It is winter. She follows a tunnel pathway trodden through the undergrowth by many animals. Mountain ash loom in impeccable lines, up and away to the clear sky where their feathery leaves wave in thinner air. The light at the forest floor is dim, blue-green, pungent. Richly traced with the pathways of pulsing feather and fur. The mottled trunks glow a rimmed pink at dusk, the light dims to amber and the new smells still in the chilled air. The redolent stories of the night begin. Every thicket is laced with stories, filled with evening piping and shrilling. The birds give alarm uncertainly and the animals, despite themselves, stop and stare at the red stranger trotting up, smiling, to meet them.
It is winter but she shines and glitters rich red above the snow, rich red beneath the blue-frosted eucalypts. Rich red among the gaunt Huon pines and rich purple in the night shadows of the King Billys. Her ribs disappear even as her milk fills her undercarriage. Her masked face takes on a blue-black sheen and her whiskers lengthen.
Her cubs are larger at birth than any she’s had before.
It is a muted spring on Mount Wellington. Bushwalkers find piles of white bones and old scat but no other sign of the fox. The special forces comment grimly on the nightly news. The experts are hopeful as each day lengthens and there is still no sighting. Maybe she died. Maybe the devils got her young. Maybe the 1080 baits Tasman Forest uses to protect trees from wildlife have got her.
The moss and lichen warm under her paws. She avoids the aridity of the cropped green carpet lands – the dead trees are too few for shelter. She and her family hug the sleek and shining pelt of grass and marshlands, the warm blood of plenty pulling them northwards. The sounds of wood ducks call them on until the crackle of bark birds, the tonk-tonk of linnets and the musk of potoroos draw them back into the woods; and then diamond birds in the white gums pull them to the mountains again.
In late spring the fox becomes visible again, almost. There are sightings of strange yellow eyes at night around Doo Town. Red hairs found on a fence near the Bay of Fires are sent to the Forest and then to Victoria for analysis. Footprints appear in the mud around dams and the forests seem hushed over leaf litter that buries the trail of bones. Electricity to a remote farm is cut, the wires chewed through; and then the quolls vanish. Greenies rich in fox folklore and mainland experiences are welcomed in redneck haunts, and rednecks with long genealogies of trapping and marksmanship speak at Greenpeace meetings.
Summer brings strange portents.
The weather stays grim and savage over Ben Lomond. The light of the sun hasn’t been seen since the fox landed.
A jagged stone bridge, built by chained hands two centuries before, falls suddenly into the drain (once a river) beneath it. There is no explanation.
A record number of teenagers jump off forbidden things: for pleasure off Kings Bridge into the South Esk River; and to their deaths off the rim of the Tasman Blowhole into the raging sea.
She sits under a sizzling canopy. Leaves mottle the white-hot sun to a sliding shimmer across her fiery back. The cicadas rasp and sigh. The lichen clings like a pale dried skin to the rocks. The mosses are browned and crisp and the stalks of the grasses whisper against each other. She is above the fern line, a speck of red in this open, once-logged woodland. Below the hill she knows a wide river bends. She can smell the water, sticky and blood-rich, and she has tasted the abundance of water in the animals and birds. She surveys the forest, ears pricked for sounds of food stirring, but all she can hear now is the sound of her young at play and the distant mumble and footfall of cows. These trees and hollows have been licked clean. She can smell only fox stories and fading whispers of other trails. She doesn’t rest long. They will be gone in a minute, leaving eggs in high nests to cool to a final stillness.
The beloved can hunt now for themselves, and the clan moves fast. Soon they will disperse.
The Examiner, 14 February:
TERROR STRIKES!
All doors are locked in Jericho tonight after an alleged sighting of a fox in the early hours of this morning. ‘When I realised it might be a fox, I called the dogs off,’ Harry Proctor, a local grazier, said today. ‘You never know what a fox might do to my dogs.’
Jericho is the second town to have a scare in as many nights. Bagdad, just forty kilometres away, locked all doors last night after an unexplained wailing was heard by several Fox Emergency Line callers.
A young male fox ranges over a headland heath above a wild western ocean, eating as he goes. The wind blows over the land. He leaves small explosions of hot blue feathers scattered in the tea-tree brush and flecks of blood on the black rocks. He is too well fed to bother chewing lizards’ legs, beaks or birds’ feet, so he leaves these too – tiny ciphers drying in the now brief midday sun.
A vixen stalks an eastern marshland. She is a small smokeless flame, licking through the reeds and grasses without so much as a crackle. She is seeking variety. She is bored with black ducks, bitterns, marsh snakes, egrets, pademelons, ibises, spoonbills, water dragons, skinks, rails, crakes, turbo chooks, banjo frogs, water rats, voles, mice, dunnarts and potoroos.
Her brother in the north wails his breathless cry to a chill moon. He is perched on a jagged tor, silhouetted above a cataract. A glittering city trickles out from far beneath him, curves in scattered glints and then spreads across hills and plain. The sheen of a wide river stretches towards the northern sea.
He has just killed twenty-three peacocks.
He is answered to the south-west and the south-east.
*
In March the light is tilting into shadow and summer is over. Before the winter comes and the mud bogs the trucks, Tasman Forest orders the logging of strips for wide roadways through the Cradle Mountain, Franklin-Gordon and South-West national parks. ‘Without access, we cannot hope to win this war,’ a spokeswoman says, staring unsmiling into the eyes of the TV viewers. ‘God help us if we have to log more.’
Surveillance teams are formed in the autumn. Ultraviolet cameras are imported from the United States and set up at key locations in the forests, mountains, marshes and plains. Satellites are sent up from Woomera. Victorians advertise in the Examiner and the Mercury – ‘Fine Fat Foxes Fought and Killed’, and ‘Seven at One Blow’ – and the best Victorian fox killers are flown in by Tasman Forest.
As the hunters head for the hills, Tasman Forest runs community service announcements – in the event of a fox emergency. Get Foxed, a fox repellent invented by a feral and tested on devils, is an overnight sensation and spawns a thousand imitations. Prophylactics dominate the stalls at festivals and markets.
The trappers lay fifty thousand neckers of the finest garrotte wire and thirty thousand leggers, and set ten thousand spring traps with stainless-steel teeth and German-made trigger plates. They build five hundred hides of mottled canvas at locations deemed most likely. Covered in Get Foxed, they man them for a week on army rations, Sako 222s sighted for long range cocked and ready. Just in case, they dig five hundred holes with stakes at the bottom and cover them with leaf litter. They lay nearly fifty experimental designs, most coming from the fertile brains of Tasmania’s writers, artists and bush philosophers.
The hunters return from the hills with enough meat to feed their dogs and cats for twenty years, but no fox. Not one. The fox is around the same size as nearly all the wildlife on the island and many different heads have fitted into fox-sized nooses. The fox has shown more-than-devilish cunning in its use of natural selection.
Tasman Forest introduces a curfew. Irreverent jokes about fox appetites are no longer seen as funny. A teenager caught sharpening the points of a McDonald’s ‘M’ with red texta is expelled from school.
The island seethes with rumour and rising terror and the first evacuations begin.
The logging trucks clog both lanes of the Lyell Highway in a seemingly endless convoy, roaring with an excess of horsepower and enthusiasm. Going east laden with the freshly stripped carcasses stacked in the cradle of the horned trucks: Eucalypti globulus, viminalis, dalrympleana, gunnii, delegatensis, regnans and johnstonii (and the occasional Lagarostrobos franklinii or Athrotaxis selaginoides); and going west again, rattling and empty. Squashing enough fleeing wildlife to make the whole highway stink of carrion. They have bumper-stickers saying The Forest Fights the Fox. As winter begins the Foxies – a vocal minority of former greenies, assembling under the banned slogan Better the Fox than the Forest – become the most despised Tasmanians in recorded history. Prison populations rise to 10 per cent Foxies despite them being 0.001 per cent of the population overall.
The Mercury, 2 June:
HUONVILLE SAFE FROM FOX FRIGHT
Huonville can rest easy tonight, knowing that Tuesday’s alleged fox sighting was a case of mistaken identity. ‘We did think it was a fox, but it proved to be a Tassie tiger,’ a relieved Bastie Turpin said today. And the brave orchardist has the carcass to prove it.
The Mercury, 30 August:
FOX CRACKS GORDON DAM
Alarming cracks appearing in the Gordon Dam wall have been linked to the fox disaster, as the State of Emergency enters its terrifying third month. ‘The dam requires daily monitoring, maintenance,’ Lieutenant Brett Grunie, Tasman Dams, said. ‘We just can’t spare the men to Operation Fox-Fire, but we have had to. It’s disaster, whichever way you go.’ So far Tasman Dams has no conclusive evidence of alleged Foxie involvement.
The Australian, 11 November:
TAS GOES 1080
Tasman Forest has put all its resources into the controversial final attempt to either kill or starve out the fox. The evacuated island will in its entirety be 1080’d and left for an unspecified period. During this time, the island will be off limits, except for specially trained miners, who will be safely underground.
Tasman Forest’s Major-General Ippo Vaulter held a press conference this morning from his Melbourne base. ‘Tasmania has lost Tasman Dams altogether. It is imperative that the brave Tasman Mines workers maintain some revenue for our battered forces and for repatriation. There is no scientific evidence of the foxes burrowing more than a metre into the ground.’
Rumour has it that some foolhardy Foxies also remain in hiding in the impenetrable deep south-west, most likely out in the open.
‘These people are all wanted criminals,’ the major-general said. ‘We can’t hold off the operation because there is an unconfirmed rumour that four or five of them have chosen to stay. There will always be fifth columnists and bleeding hearts. When the going gets tough it is the Forest that gets things done, not these tragically, culpably misguided criminals. They’ll have a long wait. Our commandos will enter the zone in January to check for any sign of fox and to check that collateral odour has cleared.’
And if Operation Foxglove doesn’t work?
The major-general is reassuring.
‘In the unlikely event that Operation Foxglove is only partially successful, we will do everything we can to safeguard Tasmanians’ wealth and preserve our unique way of life.’
He intimates that Tasman Forest would have to strip the fox of habitat. Clearing the south-west would also raise revenue for fox-proofing human environments and rebuilding a mines-based economy.
‘Tasmania, I assure you, will survive,’ the major-general guaranteed. ‘It is bigger, older and richer than any of us can imagine.’