Evening. I spent thirty years as a wildlife ranger, fifteen of those in Tasmania. Before that I worked in Africa, observing everything from elephants to leopards. I know animals. I know what they look like, how they move, how they behave. That is not arrogance, that is simply experience. And I know what I saw in the autumn of 1982, near Togari in the far north-west of the island. I had been out surveying snipe that day, which is a type of wading bird. The department had me tracking populations in the wetland areas. Tedious work, honestly, but someone had to do it. By evening I was exhausted, and the weather had turned absolutely foul. Howling gale, horizontal rain, the kind of conditions where you just want to curl up and wait it out.
I had parked my LandCruiser down a disused forest track, near a crossroads in this dense patch of swamp forest. There was no point trying to drive anywhere in that weather. So I climbed into the back of the vehicle, got into my sleeping bag, and tried to get some rest. The rain was thrumming on the roof, the wind was shaking the whole vehicle. Miserable night. At around two in the morning, something woke me. I cannot tell you what exactly, maybe a noise, maybe just instinct after all those years in the field. But I grabbed my spotlight, cranked down the window, and when I opened it the rain just poured in. makes it hard to see anything - Dave' I shone the beam around into the darkness, just out of habit really, and the beam came to rest on something standing there in front of the vehicle.
It was a thylacine. Standing side-on, maybe six or seven metres from my LandCruiser, lit up perfectly in the spotlight beam. I knew immediately what it was. The dropped jaw, the distinctive posture, the stripes. You do not mistake a thylacine for anything else if you know what you are looking at. And I did. I had studied every photograph, every piece of footage of these animals. This was unmistakably one of them. It was an adult male, in excellent condition despite being sopping wet from the rain. I counted twelve black stripes across its sandy coat. The eyes reflected that pale yellow colour in the torchlight. Beautiful animal. Absolutely beautiful. It moved only once, opening its jaw wide and showing its teeth, that incredible gape they were known for. Then it just stood there, and for a moment it turned its head and held my gaze.
[ Story continues in the full game... ]