Where the dust road crossed the creek, the boy stopped. The brindle shade of the redgums often tricked him there, but this time there really was something unusual among the rock-rubble of the empty river bed. A large animal was sitting there, watching him.
He dropped his schoolbag at his feet. It made the wrong sort of noise as it hit the ground, but only a small and ignored part of his mind noticed this. Most of his attention was taken by the animal. It was so still and so silent, and it blended so well into the shadows that he had difficulty in making out exactly what it was.
‘Hello,’ said the boy.
The animal opened its mouth twice, but no sound came out. Its eyes were soft and brown. It was a dog, surely.
‘Where did you come from?’ the boy said. There were no dogs in the area apart from his own one, which never strayed far from the house. There were no other houses for a wandering dog to come from. It was fifteen kilometres to the next station, and twenty to the town.
A yellow tailed black cockatoo soared in from the bush beyond the creek and settled on a high branch. The dog stood, and as it did so he saw that it wasn’t like any dog he had ever seen. Its tail was too long and too fat. Its hind legs were the wrong shape. He was intrigued, and he was afraid it was getting up to leave, disturbed by the arrival of the cockatoo. But when it moved, it came towards him, padding softly on massive paws.
The boy took a step backwards. His foot hit the bag, which made the wrong noise again. Books don’t rattle. But then, why would he be carrying books? He could hardly remember the last time the school bus had come to bring him into town. What had made him think he would be carrying books?
Stripes. The dog that wasn’t a dog had stripes across its back. He had seen that before. There was a picture of it in his mind. He knew he ought to remember what it was, but he didn’t. And it was still padding towards him. He lifted the bag by its shoulder strap, ready to swing. It was the only weapon he had, but it was too light to be of any use.
And in any case, he didn’t need it. The dog thing stopped at the edge of the road and sat down again, quite calm and not remotely threatening. They were both in full sunlight now. The heat was intense, but the boy noticed with pleasure that it wasn’t bothering him at all. His father was like that. He would work all day in the fields, winter or summer, hardy and rugged as a lizard. It was his mother who fussed about sunnies and hats and sunblock. He was surprised she had let him out of the house at all, with the sun so high and strong.
He held out a hand to the animal and rubbed his fingertips together. ‘Here boy. Here, funny dog.’
‘Not a dog,’ the animal said.
‘No?’ said the boy. ‘What are you, then? A wolf?’
‘Did you ever see a wolf with stripes?’ said the dogwolf thing, twisting slightly to give the boy a better view of its back.
‘No,’ said the boy. ‘Tigers have stripes. Are you a tiger?’
The dogwolftiger thing gave a humorous snort and sat up on its hind legs. It put a broad paw on its midriff. ‘Did you ever see a tiger with a pouch?’
‘No,’ said the boy. There were no baby dogwolftiger things in there, but it was definitely a pouch, just like the roos and wallabies had. That picture was in his thoughts again. A photograph somewhere. But the knowledge of what this creature was had got locked away in the depths of his mind, along with the memory of what he was carrying in the bag, and of where he was coming from and going to. And since he ought to know, it seemed to him that it would have been bad manners to ask the animal what its name was. Instead he said, ‘So tell me this. What are you doing here?’
‘I’m returning,’ said the dogwolftigerroo. ‘Just like you.’
A green rosella and a brilliant blue wren joined the cockatoo in the gum tree. They all sat on the same branch, looking down like the audience at a theatre.
The dogwolftigerroo stood up and stretched itself, then opened its long jaws impossibly wide. Its teeth were formidable, but somehow the boy knew that this behaviour was not threatening; something more along the lines of a limbering-up exercise. When it had once again settled itself on its powerful haunches, the dogwolftigerroo began its story.
‘I used to live here,’ it said. ‘I lived here for a long, long, long time. I had no friends because I was inclined to eat anything that came close enough to talk to, but I had no enemies either, because I was the biggest beast in the bush and had by far the most dangerous bite. There were good years and bad years, but on the whole this was a fine place to live and hunt and bring up my children.’
The boy loved stories, and he wanted to sit down so he could relax while he listened. A schoolbag full of books would have made a comfortable seat, but just in time he remembered the rattle, so he sat down on the road instead.
‘Then the blackfella came,’ the dogwolftigerroo went on. ‘He gave me a fright, that blackfella did, with his fires and his spears and his sneaking about in the bush. He became my enemy; my first one. I had to learn a whole new set of tricks to keep out of his way and the way of his fires and his spears. I did learn them and I stayed out of his reach. Once I got used to the new ways, I had to admit that this was still a pretty good place to live and hunt and bring up my children. And so it continued to be for a long, long, long time.’
The boy stretched himself full length on the road beneath the white glare of the sun. His mother would complain about the dust on his shirt. Not enough water for washing any more. But he never got as dusty and dirty as his father did, out on the land. When he thought of his father, a blink of a memory returned to him. The growling and complaining of heavy machinery. That was all.
‘Anyway,’ the dogwolftigerroo was saying, ‘as it turned out, the blackfella was a friend compared to what came next.’ It stopped and gazed, with a melancholy expression, into the middle distance.
‘What?’ said the boy. ‘What did come next?’
‘Mmm,’ said the dogwolftigerroo. ‘Sheep. What came next was sheep.’ It fell silent, musing, and a brief image visited the boy. Dirty heaps of something, scattered everywhere across the farm. It was connected to what his father was doing, the machines, the dust. While he waited for the story to continue, he rested his cheek on his elbow and looked up into the gum tree. A pair of possums had draped themselves comfortably there, long tails dangling. From the unseen bush beyond he could hear the glassy warbling of a magpie, and for some reason the sound unsettled him. It was as familiar to him as the sound of his own breath, but he hadn’t heard it for ages, and there was a reason for that. He just couldn’t remember what it was.
The dogwolftigerroo took up the story again, and the boy was glad, because he wasn’t at all sure he wanted to pursue those particular thoughts any further.
‘The thing about sheep,’ it said, ‘is that they’re not very smart. There are a lot of good things about sheep. They are very slow and very tasty. And, compared to most of the edible things in this land, they are very large. But they are not strong on ideas, or the execution of them. If it had been left to the sheep, there would have been no problem. They wouldn’t have been any threat to me at all.
‘But it wasn’t left to them. It wasn’t the sheep that came up with this ‘either them or me’ idea. It was the whitefella. And it was the whitefella who carried it out, right to the bitter end.’
The magpie had stopped singing, but the boy’s sense of unease was still there. Sheep. Those dirty heaps in the dust. Fleeces torn and flapping.
‘It wasn’t enough for the whitefella to take a share from the forests like the blackfella did,’ said the dogwolftigerroo. ‘No. He had to cut them down and burn them, and make fields for his millions of fat, delicious sheep. And he had no intention of sharing anything with anyone, least of all with me.’
The magpie flew low over the boy’s head and swooped up into the gum tree. It shouldn’t be there. It couldn’t be there.
‘I ran and I raced and I sped and I slunk and I fled and I crouched and I crept and I hid and I went far, far into the deepest depths and creeks and hollows and shadows and dens. But there was nowhere in the length and breadth of my world where the whitefella wouldn’t follow. He trapped me and put me in a cage and sent me across the sea. He killed me for sport and he killed me for money and he killed me for glory. He killed me when it was lawful and he killed me when it was unlawful. He killed me until he couldn’t kill me any more, because I wasn’t there for him to kill. He had wiped me out entirely.’
The boy was still looking into the tree. It wasn’t only the magpie that shouldn’t be there. None of those creatures should be there. The tree itself shouldn’t be there. It couldn’t be. It had dropped those branches, one by one, in a useless attempt to save itself from the drought that didn’t end. The drought that killed the sheep and had his father digging huge holes with the backhoe to bury them in, while all around him, and all across the whole country, the birds dropped dead and dying from the sky.
The pain of remembering hit him. He stood up and picked up his bag. But it was too late now to run away from the memories. Another one surged in, of that final morning, when there was no one left except for him, and the sun rose above the stripped and silent land and showed him its white-hot teeth.
‘So you’re like me,’ he said, at last remembering the name of the dogwolftigerroo. ‘You’re the only one left. The very last of the Tasmanian tigers?’
The thylacine shook its long, heavy head. ‘I am not the last,’ it said. ‘I have already told you. I am returning, like this tree and all the creatures in it. We are all of us extinct, now. Even you, with your little bag of bones, there. Why don’t you sit down again, and tell us all your story?’