THE TIGER

The dingo pack crawled along on their bellies, inching toward the flock of Merino sheep a hundred metres away from where they lay in the long grass. Like Huskies, which facially they resembled, the dingoes were distantly related to the wolf and had a savage disposition. However, they were tame compared to the vicious larger dog, which had recently taken control of the pack.
So, reluctantly the dingoes submitted to this cautious approach, which was alien to them. Normally they would have charged down the slope and terrified the sheep into flight, making a cruel game of the hunt, since the yellow dogs knew they could easily run to ground the sheep. But their new leader insisted on a more systematic method, forcing the dingoes to creep up on the flock, attacking them from all sides at once to ensure that not a single sheep escaped alive.
They had used this new approach without failure over the previous week. Yet one of the dingoes became impatient and began to whine lightly from frustration, until seeing the bull terrier-like face of their new leader staring back at him. The larger dog snarled silently, baring its lethal fangs, glaring with eyes that almost seemed to glow yellow in the dark.
Remembering the way he had taken control of the pack a week earlier, effortlessly tearing their old leader limb-from-limb in the battle for leadership, the dingo whispered its apology and turned over onto its back on the dewy grass. The gesture was universally recognised by canines as an act of submission, which usually entailed the ‘victor’ going across to gently nip at the ‘loser’s’ soft underbelly. However, the gesture seemed unknown to the large wild dog, which merely stared at the grovelling dingo with an almost human look of contempt.
After a moment the dingo rolled over again and began to wag its tail in the hope the leader would accept this act of submission instead. The leader turned back toward the flock of sheep and the dingo accepted this as just another strange quirk of the wild dog’s nature. In the week that he had led them, the larger dog had already imposed strange customs upon them, including forcing them to hunt around the Merridale-East Merridale area, thirty kilometres from their home base near Glen Hartwell.
Finally, to the relief of the pack, the leader gave the signal to attack.
The sheep looked up at the strange coyote-like howl, but having never heard anything like it before, they did not immediately associate the sound with danger. But they recognised the yapping of the dingoes and turned to flee in the opposite direction ....
And ran straight into the second line of wild dogs, who had kept silent, concealed in the long grass.
Though nearly the size of the yellow dogs attacking them, the sheep had no chance against the dingoes and were soon being torn to pieces. One of the sheep jumped out of the fray and raced away from the dingo pack, only to stop in shock as it came face-to-face with the head dog. The Merino was as confused as it was afraid, having never before seen any animal like the large, tiger-striped dog.
Too late the sheep came to its senses and tried to sidestep round the wild dog, only to be snapped up in its powerful jaws and easily swung up off the ground, in a display of brute strength that none of the dingoes could have matched.
For a moment the commotion stopped as sheep and dingoes alike watched in awe as the grey-brown dog shook its head furiously, growling deep in its throat as it tossed the sheep around from side to side as effortlessly as a hound dog tossing around a squirrel.
After a moment the dingoes returned to the slaughter and quickly killed the entire flock of Merinos until the paddock reeked with the burnt copper smell of freshly spilt blood. They were noisily gulping down great chunks of meat and wool alike when the back porch light went on at the farmhouse nearly a quarter of a kilometre away.

Reaching for the loaded shotgun in the bracket above the back door, Sam Hart called to his teenage son, Vic, to follow him: “It’s that damn black wolf after our sheep,” said Sam, storming outside to start across the back yard: “I told that stupid bastard Forbes that we never should’ve stopped hunting it.”
“How do you know it’s the black wolf?” demanded Vic Hart. But his father was already out of hearing range, heading toward the back paddock where their flock of Merino sheep were grazing. Or rather where they had been grazing. Now all the two men found was the pack of dingoes swimming in a sea of blood and severed limbs. Not a single sheep remained, not even a complete carcase. Even the sheep in the jaws of the pack leader had been half consumed.
“You lousy bastards!” shouted Sam, startling the dingoes, which looked up and saw him for the first time.
Seeing the head dog, Sam raised his gun toward it. At the same moment, from behind him, Vic took aim at one of the dingoes and let fire with his Winchester repeater. The shot threw the large, yellow dog up into the air, killing it instantly and setting the pack to flight. It also startled Sam whose aim jerked up, so that instead of shooting the head dog, he blew a chunk of meat out of the carcase in the wild dog’s mouth.
As the large dog took to flight, still carrying the half-devoured sheep carcase in its powerful jaws, Vic moved forward to take aim at it. But he was so astonished by the sight of the great grey-brown dog, with black tiger-stripes running down along its back, that all he could do was stare after the animal as it bounded away, easily overtaking the dingo pack, despite the heavy load it carried.
Sam fired off three quick shots, which all went wide of the mark. Then, turning toward his son, he angrily demanded, “Why the hell didn’t you shoot it?”
“It was a tiger!” said Vic in shock.
“A what?” demanded Sam.
“A tiger, Dad, a tiger.”
“Bullshit, it was the black wolf!” insisted Sam Hart: “Are you blind?”
In truth though it was not Vic Hart who had been blinded. Although he was wrong in thinking the wild dog was a tiger, at least his was an honest mistake. His father on the other hand had become so paranoid about the black wolf over the last decade, that his hatred had blinded him to the fact that the black-striped dog looked nothing like a wolf.

Half an hour later Sergeant Mel Forbes (a tall, powerfully built, snowy-haired man) and his constable, Andrew Braidwood (a tall, lean, fiercely blond man in his early thirties), were being shown the blood-strewn paddock by Sam and Vic Hart. Though normally the sight of the gore and severed limbs would have sickened them, over the last week they had seen similar sights at half-a-dozen local sheep stations.
“It’s getting worse,” was Drew’s only comment. His thick rubber work boots squelched as he walked across the bloody grass to prod at the lone dingo carcase.
“Because of that bloody wolf!” insisted Sam, making the two policemen look toward him.
“The black wolf?” asked Mel.
“That’s right, the bloody thing is leading the dingo pack,” insisted Sam.
“No it’s not,” contradicted his son, Vic: “It’s a Bengal tiger.”
“A Bengal tiger?” asked Drew, astonished. Both policemen knew of Sam Hart’s paranoia about the black wolf and knew that the wolf had roamed the surrounding countryside for more than a dozen years without attacking the livestock on any of the local sheep or cattle stations. However, a Bengal tiger was another thing altogether: “Are you sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure!” insisted Vic, as the four men headed back toward the farmhouse: “I got a clear look at the black tiger stripes running down its back.”
“It was the black wolf, damn it!” insisted Sam, drawing looks from both of the policemen. It was easier for them to believe that the black wolf was leading the dingo pack. They had all seen the wolf, so they knew for certain that it existed.

“A Bengal tiger?” said Drew half an hour later as he and Mel walked toward their Holden Rodeo Ute: “Is it possible?”
“My first instinct is to say no,” admitted Mel climbing in behind the steering wheel: “Except that I can still remember a few years back when you said, ‘A black wolf, is it possible?’ And you were wrong that time.”

After the recent series of dingo attacks, the Glen Hartwell and Merridale police forces had a small posse on permanent alert.
“Black wolf! Black wolf!” chanted ‘Weird’ Warren Horne happily, as the first group of hunters pulled up at the Hart property in Des Hutchinson’s Land Rover.
“Can’t someone shut up that bloody retard?” demanded Sam Hart, as he and Vic walked over to meet the men.
“You’re all heart Sam,” said Danny Ross from Glen Hartwell (nicknamed ‘Bear’ because of his great height and muscular physique), drawing snickers from the other hunters.
“Just keep him away from me then,” said Sam, ignoring the snickers.
While waiting for the others to arrive, the eight men looked around the paddock where the previous night’s slaughter had occurred. The paddock reeked with the smell of rotting flesh from the remains of the mutilated sheep and the lone dingo carcase decomposing in the sun, since Mel Forbes had instructed the Harts not to traipse across the field destroying whatever clear prints they might find.
“Pooh!” said Warren wrinkling his nose in disgust at the smell.
“Stay out of the way, Warren,” cautioned his brother Brian.
There were hundreds of dingo tracks, however, they went off in all directions since the yellow dogs had scattered at the sound of Vic’s Winchester. In their terror, many of them had run through the forest for kilometres before calming down enough to start circling back toward their home base.
“I hope you bastards aren’t trampling over everything?” demanded Mel as he climbed from the cabin of the Rodeo Ute, which had just, pulled up behind the farmhouse.
“No, just having a quick look around,” Bear Ross assured him.
“Find anything?”
“Too bloody much,” he replied. He waved an arm around to indicate the spoors, which went off in all directions.
Doing their best not to tread on the prints, the fourteen men walked around the paddock for twenty minutes before they heard a shout of: “Over here!” Looking up they saw Vic Hart standing by the boundary fence, a couple of hundred metres away from the scene of the slaughter.
“What is it?” asked Brian Horne as they started across. But one look at the giant dog tracks gave them the answer.
“Black wolf! Black wolf!” chanted Warren Horne and for once Sam Hart didn’t tell him to shut up. Twice the size of the dingo tracks, the prints clearly were made by the pack leader.
“They’re heading toward LePage,” said Vic, pointing to where the prints continued on the other side of the fence.
Using the Rodeo Ute and Des Hutchinson’s Land Rover, they followed the tracks across the country until shortly after noon, when they lost the spoors around the northern side of Glen Hartwell. It confirmed their suspicions that the dingo pack was the same one, which had been glimpsed around the Glen over the last few years.
“You’ve got to hand it to them,” said Des Hutchinson with grudging respect: “They sure know how to cover their tracks.”
“And cover ground,” said Brian Horne.
“But why have they started to hunt so far from their home base?” asked Bear Ross: “And why have they suddenly become so vicious? In the past, they’ve taken a stray sheep or raided a chicken hutch, but that’s all.”
“Because now they’re led by the Bengal tiger,” said Vic Hart.
“The black wolf!” corrected his father.
“Black wolf! Black wolf!” chanted Warren, receiving a glare from Sam Hart.
“Whatever it is, you’re crediting it with too much intelligence,” insisted Mel Forbes: “Wild animals act by instinct, not intelligence.”
“Then obviously their new leader has a stronger instinct for survival than the other dogs,” said Brian Horne: “As well as being more vicious.”
They discussed the dingoes and their leader for a while, as they ate their lunch. After the meal, they hunted through the forest of pine and gum trees outside Glen Hartwell for the rest of that day. By nightfall they were fed up and glad to give up for the night. They agreed to meet again early the next morning to resume the hunt, however, only nine of the fourteen men would turn up.

BLACK WOLF ATTACKS HART STATION! Announced the front-page headline of the Merridale Evening Standard that night. Although news of the attack had come too late for the morning editions, by the end of the day all the local newspapers were running stories about the dingo attack.
“It has been confirmed that the black wolf is now leading the pack of dingoes which has been ravaging the livestock on local sheep stations,” announced the Standard, going on to give a more-or-less accurate account of the attack on the Hart property. Except for claiming that it had been a Merino ram (at least twice the size and weight of the ewe actually taken), which the ‘black wolf’ had carried away in its jaws: “While loping majestically across the ichor-coated fields!”
The black wolf? thought Ernie Singleton in amazement as he was sitting down to the colossal dinner which his wife, Rowena, set before him with a wry grin. When they had first married, eight years ago, she had been astonished by the monthly eating binges, which her husband went on. However, she soon came to accept them as a normal part of country life, which breeds hearty eaters.
But the truth was that Ernie Singleton was a werewolf!
Due to a hereditary taint in his genes, two or three nights each month, around the 23rd to the 25th, Ernie transformed into the Black Wolf. The transformation to wolf and back again burnt up a tremendous amount of energy, leaving him with a hunger that was more like a famine.
Ernie had always enjoyed his nighttime romps as the Black Wolf. But now, reading of the savage attack the night before, when he had been out as the Black Wolf, he wondered whether he might be a danger to his family. Whether he recalled everything he did as the Black Wolf? He had been the Black Wolf for twelve years now and had no memory of ever attacking other creatures on his late-night jaunts. But now be wondered whether he might have savaged livestock, or even people, over the last dozen years without any memory of it?
“Black wolf!” chanted young Kirsty, making Ernie look up at the little honey-blonde girl and the grown woman beside her, whom the girl already so much resembled.
Ernie was shocked to see his daughter pointing straight at him as she said, “Black wolf!” But then he realised she was pointing toward the newspaper, which carried a supposed photograph of the Black Wolf. None of the handful of people Ernie had encountered in wolf form had ever managed to photograph him, and obviously, it was a picture of a grey-brown North American timber wolf.
“That’s more like a grey wolf,” pointed out Rowena with a laugh. As though reading her husband’s thoughts.
“Black wolf!” insisted Kirsty. Obstinately preferring to believe the newspaper, rather than her mother.
Ernie smiled at the little girl’s feistiness and received an answering grin from his wife. Despite his smile, though, he was too afraid to really be amused. Watching Rowena as she ate, he wondered if it was possible that he was slowly losing his humanity altogether.
He had wondered in the past about the genetic defect, which allowed his body to transform from man to beast and back again. Had wondered how such a thing could be possible. Now he wondered whether he might be slowly becoming more wolf and less human with each transformation. Whether after twelve years of shape changing he might be slowly changing irreversibly into a wolf?

Only six years earlier Cherrytree Farm had been one of the most prosperous properties in the Merridale area. In a district known for its large sheep and cattle stations, Cherrytree had been unique, being an orchard producing cherries, fruit, and virtually every type of edible berry that can be grown in the Victorian countryside. Then, six years ago, in December 1989, Helen Horne had been brutally murdered and her husband, Clem, had died of a heart attack soon after, leaving their eldest son, Brian, with the double task of managing the orchard and caring for his intellectually handicapped brother, Warren. This responsibility, on top of the grief of losing both parents, had been too much for Brian to handle. The orchard’s fortunes had soon nose-dived, to the point where nowadays, despite still producing a small crop of cherries, Cherrytree’s main produce was wool and mutton.
Despite being exhausted from the fruitless dingo hunt that day, Brian was unable to fall asleep when he went to bed. He had lain awake for hours, brooding over the farm’s recent hard times, when he heard the sound of barking outside.
Although he wondered what the Kelpies would be barking at so late at night, he didn’t pay much attention until he realised there was too much noise to be produced by just the six dogs that he had bought from Ernie Singleton a few years earlier. Sitting up in bed, he listened closely for a while before realising there were at least two distinctly different barking sounds that he could hear. Clearly, there was a furious dogfight in progress.
Dressing as quickly as he could, Brian grabbed a shotgun and box of cartridges from the gun cabinet in his bedroom and then headed down the corridor. At the back of the house, he met his brother standing looking out through the partly-opened door.
Hearing footsteps behind him, Warren looked around and said, “Black wolf! Black wolf!” Halting the smile, which had started to form on Brian’s lips at the sight of his brother, a giant of a man, dressed in white pyjamas covered with Disney cartoon characters.
“Stay here!” warned Brian pushing past Warren. Then, seeing a flurry of activity in the distance, he added, “No matter what happens, stay in the house.”

At the dog yard, the sight of their six red Kelpies gutted and torn limb-from-limb sickened Brian. But more shocking was the sight of the field beyond, which was awash in blood and entrails: the remains of the station’s one-hundred-odd Merino sheep, torn to pieces by the pack of dingoes, which stood noisily gulping down flesh and wool, unaware of Brian’s approach.
You bastards! thought Brian. He was careful not to articulate the thought for fear of alerting the wild dogs before he had time to raise his shotgun.
Taking careful aim at a dingo ten metres away, Brian hesitated for a second to allow his hands to stop shaking from rage. Then, calmer, he slowly pressed the gun’s triggers, firing both barrels at once.
In the silent night, the shotgun blast sounded like a cannon shot and at such close range the buckshot did almost as much damage to the yellow dog.
At the sound of the blast, the dog pack looked up in alarm. Two of the dingoes turned and raced toward the forest, a quarter of a kilometre away. But after the previous night’s cowardly retreat, their leader had savagely punished the pack, so most of the wild dogs knew to stand their ground this time.
Breaking open his shotgun, Brian dropped the empty cartridge cases onto the grass and reached into his coat pocket for two more shells. Before he could reload, though, the tiger-striped dog gave its coyote-like howl and the remaining dingoes leapt forward.
Expecting the wild dogs to flee at the sound of the gunshot, Brian was caught off guard by the attack. He dropped one cartridge onto the grass but managed to load the second shell into the shotgun before the yellow dogs reached him. Snapping the gun shut, he fired at the advancing pack, killing one dog and wounding two others, which fell back to lick their wounds. But in seconds the remaining dingoes had swarmed upon him, taking Brian to the ground.

Ernie Singleton sat up in bed in the dark concentrating. In the past, he had found that by a concentrated effort of willpower, he could hold off the transformation to the Black Wolf long enough to allow Rowena and Kirsty to fall asleep. Now, afraid of what he might do as the Black Wolf, he had resolved to stay up all night concentrating, in the hope of preventing the shape-changing from occurring altogether.
In the past, the change had always occurred between 11:00 PM and 1:00 AM. It was now just after 2:00, so with only a few hours to go until dawn Ernie had started to believe that perhaps he really could hold off the shape-shifting.
As his confidence grew though, he allowed his concentration to slip and started to recall with fondness the pleasure he had known in the past loping through the night forest. He had started to wonder whether he would ever again enjoy the freedom of the forest by night when he started to feel dizzy, then realised that he had changed to the Black Wolf in bed.
Clawing his way out of the blankets, he tried to shape-change straight back to human form. He concentrated as hard as he could but soon found himself longing for the early morning romp through the forest. After ten minutes or so he conceded defeat, not knowing whether he had failed because of the call of the night weakening his resolve, or whether he had to leave the house then return before he could change back. In the past, he had always run through the forest for at least a couple of hours as the Black Wolf before transforming back to human form.
Whatever the reason for his failure, he knew that he couldn’t stay where he was for fear of Rowena waking. Although he had not intended to go out that night, the bedroom window was open, so Ernie jumped down from the bed and raced across to the window.

Standing at the back door Warren Horne watched in shock as the yellow dogs swarmed upon his brother: “Brian!” he shouted, as he started to run across the backyard. He got a few metres away from the porch before realising that he could do nothing to help Brian empty-handed. He reversed direction and ran back into the farmhouse. Then after a minute or two he returned with his double-barrel shotgun and started across the yard at a gallop.

Unable to reload the shotgun for fear of exposing his face or genitalia to the sea of snapping jaws, Brian lay upon the grass, curled up in the foetal position, in the hope of avoiding serious injury. Hearing the sound of running feet though, he risked a quick glance up from under his arms and was horrified to see Warren running across the field, now looking vulnerable rather than humorous in his Disney-patterned pyjamas.
In his hands, Warren carried the double-barrel shotgun that Brian had bought him a few years ago so he wouldn’t feel left out when they went out hunting together. But with the mind of a six-year-old, Warren was not allowed any cartridges, so the shotgun was useless against the dingoes.
Brian started to shout to Warren to return to the house, then realised it would only alert the dingoes to his presence. Instead, at the risk of a badly mauled arm, he raised his left band to wave toward Warren, trying to shoo him away. But the wild dogs had already seen the approaching figure and two dingoes dropped away from Brian to start toward the retarded man.
In desperation Brian tried to break away from the remaining dogs, ignoring their snapping jaws in a bid to locate his shotgun. After a moment he managed to touch the butt, but still had the Herculean task of pulling the shotgun toward him, then reloading it.
The two dingoes were only metres from Warren when he pointed his shotgun at the nearest dog and pulled the trigger. To the astonishment of Brian, the rifle blared, killing the dingo instantly. The second yellow dog stopped in its tracks. Warren pointed the gun at it from point-blank range and fired the second barrel.
Shocked by the death of their two comrades, and not knowing the shotgun was now empty, the dingo pack decided that they didn’t want to take on two men at once. So, despite the angry coyote-like yipping of their leader, the wild dogs dropped away from Brian and raced across the paddock toward the nearest boundary fence.
Ignoring the agony of his injuries, Brian pulled his shotgun toward him, fumbled a cartridge into a chamber and fired one last shot at the retreating dingoes, before collapsing to the ground again.
Seeing Brian lying unconscious, the tiger-striped dog turned its bull terrier-like head toward Warren and started across the field toward him. But as Warren fumbled to reload the shotgun, the animal was suddenly overwhelmed with a race memory of a time long ago when men with rifles had driven its species to the brink of extinction. Knowing fear for the first time in its life, the grey-brown dog turned tail and raced after the fleeing dingo pack.

When Ernie left the house as the Black Wolf, he had only intended to run around in front of the farmhouse for a couple of hours, then attempt to change back to human form. But once outside he found himself being drawn inexorably toward the nearby forest. Even when he gave in to the call of the wild, he hadn’t intended to stray far into the woodlands, but after an hour of running realised that he had travelled deep into the forest around East Merridale. He had reached the outskirts of Brian Horne’s Cherrytree Farm before turning to head for home.
Hearing the sound of a gunshot, he started to flee before realising the shot was too distant to have been aimed at him. After a moment’s hesitation, he headed in the direction of the gunshot and arrived around the back of the Horne farm just as Warren ran across the backyard to rescue his brother. Knowing that Warren’s shotgun was never loaded, he leapt the two-metre tall boundary fence and started across the paddock to help the two brothers. But at the sound of the shotgun blast, the wolf stopped in his tracks and waited to see what would happen next.
As Warren fired a second time the dingoes scattered, so the Black Wolf leapt back across the timber fence and hid in a thick Mulga bush to allow the pack to race past him. He let the last yellow dog go by, then waited another minute. Finally, he stepped out of the bush...
And came face-to-face with the large, tiger-striped dog.
Not quite as large as the wolf, the grey-brown dog was naturally vicious, so with hackles raised it started toward Ernie. The Black Wolf froze in his tracks for a moment, less from fear than amazement at the sight of the totally unknown animal approaching him. Though he had never been in a dogfight before, the wolf prepared for the inevitable, when Warren Horne fired his shotgun one last time.
At the sound of the shot, the wild dog sidestepped Ernie and raced off into the forest. The Black Wolf started after it and chased the dog deep into the forest, hoping to follow it back to the dingoes’ lair, so he could lead the hunters to it tomorrow in human form. But he soon realised that the tiger-striped dog had left him far behind and had vanished into the night.
After losing the wild dog, Ernie returned to Cherrytree Farm to see that the Hornes were all right. Unable to change back into human form yet, the Black Wolf watched from a distance as Warren half-dragged, and half-carried Brian into the farmhouse. He waited around until hearing the first wailing of approaching sirens, which meant Warren, had managed to make himself understood to the ambulance service.

Despite the famine, which always struck him the day after his nighttime jaunts, Ernie set out early the next morning to see that Brian and Warren were all right.
He knew that Brian had been taken to the Glen Hartwell and Daley Community Hospital since it was the only hospital within sixty kilometres of East Merridale.
Although he wasn’t allowed to visit Brian, he met up with Mel Forbes and Des Hutchinson in the foyer of the hospital.
“How is he?” asked Ernie, taking them by surprise since the attack hadn’t appeared in the morning newspapers. Unable to tell them how he knew without admitting to being the Black Wolf, Ernie made up a story about coming into town to purchase feedstock and hearing of the attack.
Clearly not completely satisfied with the story, Mel stared at Ernie for a moment before answering: “Bad,” he finally said: “But at least he’s out of danger now.”
As they started down the yellow-walled corridor toward the waiting room, Ernie asked: “Who’s going to take care of Warren till Brian’s allowed home?”
“Me and the missus,” said Des Hutchinson, opening the door to show his wife, Liz, comforting Warren. He lowered his voice to say: “It’ll do her good to have someone to look after. She’s been almost a zombie since ... " He swallowed hard before saying: “Since our Leon was taken from us five years ago by that murdering bastard who killed Helen Horne!”
“Strictly speaking I should report the matter to the Community Services Department in the big smoke,” said Mel as they walked into the small waiting room: “But Gina Foley says Brian ought to be home again in a month or two, and Des and Liz can look after Warren till then.” His face took on a hard look for the first time since Ernie had known him, as he added, “Those cold-hearted bureaucrats up in Melbourne can go to buggery if they don’t like it!”
The three men took magazines from the large wooden table in the centre of the room as they went past, although none of them would even open the magazines.
Des walked across to sit on the cushioned bench beside his wife. As he placed an arm around her shoulders, Liz looked up to smile at him for a moment, then turned back to Warren who had fallen asleep with his head cradled against her bosom having had only a couple of hours sleep the night before.
After a few words with Liz, Mel and Ernie sat across the opposite side of the room so they could talk quietly without disturbing Liz or Warren.
Mel talked for ten minutes or more, describing the devastation of the Horne station, while Ernie listened, unable to admit he had seen it for himself the night before. Eventually, he stopped for a breather before adding: “Sam Hart will be disappointed. Warren insists the dog leading the dingo pack wasn’t the Black Wolf.”
Pretending to be surprised, Ernie asked, “Then what is it?”
“Don’t ask me. Warren insists that it was a huge brownish dog, with black tiger stripes running down along its back.”
“Well, that fits in, more-or-less, with what Vic Hart said.”
“Yeah,” agreed Mel: “But what the hell kind of wild dog is bigger than a dingo and brown with black stripes?”
Ernie shrugged, at last able to be truthful since he had no idea what the tiger-striped wild dog was.
They talked for a few minutes more about the dingo hunt, being led in Mel’s absence by Bear Ross, and then Ernie said his goodbyes and left the hospital.

Ernie collected his brown Range Rover from Baltimore Avenue, and then drove up along Baltimore Drive for five minutes, before parking in a small car park in Patterson’s Lane. Leaving his car, he walked up the cobbled lane until turning left into Boothy Street and then walked up to a large stone building on the corner of Dirk Hartog Place.
Glen Hartwell was one of the earliest towns founded after the establishment of Victoria in 1835, so the local library was more than a hundred and fifty years old. Built by convict labour in a pseudo-Grecian style, the outside was decorated with large stone pillars and two white marble lions guarded the entranceway. Once the focal point of the town, the library was now falling into decay, the lions and pillars crisscrossed with a network of fine, grey cracks.
The inside of the library was a single large room, separated into sections by the floor-to-ceiling length bookcases. Ernie headed for the non-fiction section at the back of the building.
He browsed through a number of encyclopædias, before locating an enormous volume titled, The Complete Encyclopaedia of Australasian Wildlife.
Ernie carried the book across to one of the three wooden reading tables a few metres away and sat down. He wasted nearly half an hour browsing through the giant volume before thinking to check the index at the back. He quickly located the heading “Wild Dogs of Australia”. Flicking to the page mentioned, he was amazed to find himself looking at a picture of the bull terrier-headed, tiger-striped dog that he had come face-to-face with the night before.
Even more amazing than the picture, was the text below:
The Thylacine (also called the Tasmanian tiger, Tasmanian wolf, Taswegan tiger, or Taswegan wolf) is Australia’s only truly indigenous wild dog -- the dingo having come to Australia with the Aborigines from Malaysia over 50,000 years ago.
The ‘tiger’ (actually a distant relative of the wolf) was declared a protected species in 1936. However, it was probably already extinct in Tasmania by that time. On mainland Australia, the Tasmanian tiger has been extinct for at least 3,000 years.
Stunned by this information, Ernie sat open-mouthed for a moment before reading on. However, there was less than a page of information about the ‘tiger’ in the encyclopædia. So he returned the volume to the bookcase and hunted around for references to the creature in other books.
Although he found short paragraphs about the Tasmanian tiger in a number of books, they were all much the same. It appeared little had been discovered about the creature. He was on the brink of giving up when he located a small book titled, The Taswegan War: 1900-1930 by Professor Daley Bromby.
Like the other books it started out by telling him that, despite being related to the wolf, the tiger was a true marsupial, thus sometimes being called the marsupial wolf. But from then on the book became increasingly controversial:
At first, the European settlers to Tasmania regarded the tiger as only a minor nuisance, occasionally raiding their sheep or cattle stations.
Unlike the settlers on the mainland, who set out to destroy as much of the indigenous wildlife as possible (including the Aboriginal population), the early Taswegan settlers tried their best to fit in with the environment. They chose to ignore the raids upon livestock, although the Thylacine was infinitely more vicious than the dingo. The tiger would often slaughter an entire flock of sheep, then feed upon only one or two of the carcases ....
From the late 1850s onward, there were disturbing rumours of increasingly savage attacks upon the Aboriginal tribes around the state. From time to time the Taswegan police sent out hunting parties to cull bands of tigers. However, it was not until 1876, with the death of Truganini, the last full-blood Taswegan Aborigine, that the authorities started to take the reports seriously ....
By the turn of the century, the tigers had started to attack settlers’ farms with increasing savagery, slaughtering all livestock and even the station owners themselves. In desperation, the Taswegan government placed a bounty upon the tiger and began issuing rifles by the thousands to the settlers.
From 1900 to 1930 a full-scale war was fought between the settlers and the tigers before finally the Thylacine was driven to the point of extinction....
By the late 1930s, aware of the dwindling population of the tigers, and unaware of their savage nature (being isolated on the mainland), the Australian federal government declared the Thylacine a protected species. Fortunately, by then the tiger was already extinct, or, without the legal right to defend themselves, the entire human population of Tasmania would have been wiped out...!
Having skimmed the text to obtain the above information, Ernie was about to close the book when he noticed a footnote at the bottom of the final page: “Despite Professor Bromby’s claims about a ‘War of the Tigers’ since the Thylacine became extinct in the late 1930s very little is known about its habits or nature. The professor’s assertion that it had a ferocious disposition and savaged the Aborigines and European settlers has never been substantiated and is now not likely to be.”
Ernie checked the book out of the library so that he could read it at his leisure. After last night he couldn’t become the Black Wolf again for another four weeks, so he hoped to spend the intervening time honing up on the Thylacine. But he learnt little else from the book, other than the fact that there have been rare sightings of the Tasmanian tiger in Western Australia, New South Wales, and Victoria, from the late 1950s to modern times. Again the editorial footnotes disputed this, however, pointing out: “The tiger has been extinct outside Tasmania for 3,000 years, and there is no mention of the Thylacine in mainland Aboriginal Dream-Time legend, which normally mentions every aspect of Aboriginal life, including every animal that the Aborigines are familiar with”.

Arriving home around 1:00 PM, Ernie told Rowena of Brian Horne’s condition.
“Oh my God!” said Rowena, shocked to hear of the attack on Brian: “How is he?”
“In a bad way,” Ernie said, seating himself at the kitchen table, ready for a late lunch: “But he should be allowed home in a month or so.” He went on to tell her about the Hutchinsons looking after Warren, although his thoughts were really about the Tasmanian tiger and his mounting conviction that it would be up to him, as the Black Wolf, to tackle the tiger.
Although he knew that eventually Mel Forbes and the hunters would track the dingo pack to its lair, Ernie could not be certain they would kill the tiger. And he didn’t know how many other stations would be attacked, how many other people hurt, or even killed before the pack was stopped. Watching Rowena as she moved about the kitchen with the little golden-haired girl in tow, he remembered the book’s claim that the tigers had savaged humans and felt sick at the thought that Rowena and Kirsty could be its next victims if the dingoes’ lair wasn’t located quickly.

After the loss of four of their members to the guns of Brian and Warren Horne, the dingo pack became wary of humans for a while. Over the next month, they settled for slaughtering wild kangaroos and emus, staying well clear of the sheep and cattle stations. Although this was a relief to the station owners, it made things difficult for both Mel Forbes and Ernie Singleton. The dingo hunters spent weeks scouring the countryside around Glen Hartwell and Merridale, but with thousands of hectares of wattle, pine, and gum forests to cover, they had no success.
By the first night of his transformation that month, no one had heard from the pack since the attack on the Hornes, so all Ernie could do was return to Cherrytree Farm as the Black Wolf and attempt to follow the tiger’s spoors back to its lair.
Although there had been no rain over the month, the tracks had been obscured by the prints of wild animals, so after a fruitless night’s search, he resolved to start at Glen Hartwell the next night, in the hope he could do better than the dingo hunters.
The next night Rowena went to sleep early, so Ernie was able to set out as the Black Wolf shortly after 10:00 PM Loping through the sweet-smelling eucalyptus forest at a steady pace, he managed to reach Glen Hartwell well before midnight, which gave him more than three hours to search the area before having to start back to Merridale.
He soon located the spot where the hunters had lost the dingo tracks a month earlier, after the attack on the Hart station. As Ernie had suspected, with his superior werewolf senses he was able to pick up the dingo spoors and track them well beyond the point the hunters had given up. He followed the prints for a long time, heading around the outskirts of Glen Hartwell, until he had started to believe the pack must live beyond the Glen, outside Daley or even Perry. But finally, the tracks started to double back and headed into the forest again until reaching the base of Mount Abergowrie in the forest near the northern side of Glen Hartwell. The tracks circled halfway around the base of the mountain, then started up the steep incline.
Mt. Abergowrie had been ravaged by the Ash Wednesday bushfires of January and February 1983, losing almost all of its original foliage. Now, a dozen years later, the Black Wolf found himself wandering through an eerie landscape where new green foliage stood side-by-side with twisted, blackened gargoyle shapes, like weird tree monsters from some Lovecraftian fantasy.
He had climbed more than two-thirds of the way up the side of the mountain and had started to fear that he would follow them all the way to the top when the prints suddenly veered to the left and started around the side of the mount. After a few hundred metres, the bushes began to thin out until the Black Wolf suddenly looked out over a small clearing.
From the state of the clearing, he could tell that this was where the dingo pack made its base. The flattened grass showed clear outlines where large bodies had recently lain and were strewn with the gnawed and yellowing remains of a plethora of sheep and cattle bones -- as well as many types he didn’t recognise.
At the other side of the clearing was the opening to a cave. Approaching as near as he dared, the Black Wolf could clearly see the figure of a Tasmanian tiger in the cave. Why isn’t it on the hunt? he wondered: Perhaps it’s ill or injured? But there had been no attacks reported on sheep stations lately, so with no farmers to shoot at it, the wolf wondered how the tiger could have been injured.
He crept round the side of the foliage ringing the clearing to get a better view and realised, ‘It’s not the same tiger! This one is much smaller! Perhaps it’s not fully grown yet?’
He watched for a while, wondering about this second tiger before noticing movement from the brownish, tiger-striped dog. At first, he thought the tiger was getting up to leave and Ernie prepared to retreat further into the forest. Then he realised it was only the stomach of the tiger that was moving. He watched entranced as the dog’s belly undulated like waves on a stormy sea. Some form of massive growth inside it? he thought, wondering if the dog was too sick to go out hunting with the pack. Then seeing the flap of the marsupial pouch on the tiger’s belly, he realised: It’s a female tiger!
As the bitch rolled over a fraction the pouch opened a centimetre or two, just enough for the Black Wolf to see the three tiny, tiger-striped puppies inside the pouch suckling on their mother’s nipples.
After watching for a while, the Black Wolf circled around to the other side of the clearing and lay down beside a twisted grey-white ghost gum to await the return of the pack.
Although he was slightly larger than the Tasmanian tiger, the Black Wolf remembered the ferociousness that the beast had shown at Cherrytree Farm and couldn’t stop thinking of Professor Bromby’s claim that the Thylacine had been merciless killers. Growing increasingly uneasy, he decided: I’ll have to take the tiger by surprise if I’m going to have any hope of defeating it.

While the Black Wolf lay in the grass awaiting the return of the dingo pack, the Tasmanian tiger was leading them on their first attack on a sheep station in a month. This time they raided a property on the outskirts of Lenoak, a town midway between Glen Hartwell and Merridale. Struggling to conquer his own hereditary fear of guns, the tiger hadn’t been able to muster enough authority to force the pack to stray as far from their lair as on past hunts.
The station they selected was owned by an elderly couple named deGraff. The deGraffs had retired to the countryside only three years earlier, using their lump sum superannuation payment to purchase a small sheep station.
Rather than risk another surprise attack from hunters, this time the tiger organised an assault upon the farmhouse itself. It leapt straight through a plate glass window at the back of the farmhouse and then led a careful search through the building.
Michael deGraff was halfway down the corridor, on his way to investigate the sound of breaking glass, when the Thylacine dragged him to the carpet and quickly tore out the old man’s throat.
Leaving the body in the hallway, the tiger led the pack up to the front bedroom where they found Eileen deGraff awaiting her husband to return.
“Is that you, Mike?” she called out as the bedroom door began to swing inwards.
After devouring the fleshier portions of the deGraffs’ bodies, the wild dogs returned to the outside. They slaughtered the station’s four Queensland Healer dogs, before going on to butcher the small flock of Merino sheep.
They feasted upon the sheep until less than an hour before sunrise, and then with bellies full to aching, slowly set off toward their home base.

As the hours passed, the Black Wolf became increasingly impatient. He had almost decided to give up his vigil for the night when the first of the dingo pack finally appeared in the clearing. Seeing the large yellow dog, the suckling bitch began to wag her tail in welcome and in the hope of sharing in the pack’s latest feast.
Ignoring the bitch, the dingo went straight past, heading into the cave, which led deep into the side of the mountain.
One by one the pack appeared, until finally the Tasmanian tiger arrived last of all, carrying a half sheep carcase in its jaws for its mate.
Realising this was the best chance he would get to take it by surprise, the moment the Thylacine headed toward the cave mouth, and the Black Wolf broke cover. He rocketed across the clearing, hoping to take the tiger by the side of the neck before it could release the sheep carcase.
The Black Wolf had almost reached the tiger when it suddenly dropped the carcase and spun around to its left. Its reflexes and senses were much sharper than the wolf had expected.
Aiming at the tiger’s neck, the wolf found himself with a mouthful of the tiger’s lower jaw instead. Biting down as hard as he could, the wolf began to shake his head from side to side in the hope that he was strong enough to end the fight before it started by snapping the tiger’s neck. However, the Thylacine was much stronger than the Black Wolf and more used to employing its strength for brutality.
Pulling away from the Black Wolf, the tiger lunged for the wolf’s soft underbelly. The wolf leapt aside just in time to stop himself from being disembowelled by the tiger’s razor-sharp teeth and stumbled. In a split second, the Tasmanian tiger was on top of him.
The two wild dogs rolled around upon the short grass, with the dingo pack looking on in interest, ready to support whichever of the dogs survived the fight. Having seen their previous leader easily overpowered when the tiger had challenged it for leadership, they weren’t game to stand against the Black Wolf for fear that he in turn might be stronger than the tiger.
It didn’t take long, however, to determine which of the two dogs was the stronger. Despite his superior size, the Black Wolf was soon on his back, futilely trying to snap upwards at the tiger, which was able to take its time, to aim vicious bites at the wolf’s ribs and flanks with almost scientific precision.
Realising that the fight was as good as won, the tiger stepped back a pace to gloat over its imagined victory. And in that instant, the Black Wolf leapt to his feet and ducked under the tiger’s defences to launch a savage attack at its unprotected throat.
The wolf bit down as hard as he could, making the Thylacine yelp from a mixture of shock and pain.
As the sharp teeth began to break through the flesh, the Tasmanian tiger did everything it could to throw the wolf off. When all else failed, it used its sheer strength to lift the wolf up off the ground as easily as it had carried a whole sheep carcase in its jaws.
Yet still, the Black Wolf clung on, until finally, the tiger collapsed to the ground from pain and loss of blood.
Learning from the tiger’s fatal mistake, the wolf did not stand back to gloat over his victory but continued to tear at the animal’s throat, until satisfied that the Tasmanian tiger was dead.
With the death of the tiger, the dingo pack slowly approached their new leader. They wagged their tails to show friendship and rolled onto their backs, offering up their soft underbellies in a gesture of submission. But with less than half an hour to go until sunrise, the Black Wolf had no time to waste if he was to get back to Merridale before his transformation back to Ernie Singleton.
The dingoes looked on in amazement as their new leader sprang away from the clearing and began thundering down the side of the mountain, narrowly avoiding head-on collisions with the ghost gums and wattles that lined the side of Mount Abergowrie. After a moment’s hesitation, the pack started down the mount after him, yapping loudly, furiously calling to him to come back.
The only thing the Black Wolf could think of, however, was the fact that he had never stayed in wolf form beyond daybreak before. So he didn’t know whether he would shape-change back to human form, naked in the forest, at dawn, or whether he would be trapped in wolf form until the next night. Or perhaps forever?
The dingo pack had fallen two kilometres behind Ernie before realising that they could never hope to catch up with their new leader. After baying for a few moments in the hope of attracting his attention, reluctantly they turned and headed back toward the mountain.
The Black Wolf was rocketing through the forest in a desperate flight for Merridale when the pain and loss of blood from his many injuries started to get the better of him. He had almost reached the outskirts of Lenoak when he collapsed to the forest floor, saved from further injury by the thick layer of pine needles and gum leaves which carpeted the forest.

Waking to find himself between soft, clean sheets in a warm bed, for a moment Ernie wondered whether the encounter with the Tasmanian tiger had been only a dream. Whether his being the Black Wolf was nothing but a dream? But smelling the sharp Iodine-like antiseptic smell and seeing the blue-uniformed nurses moving back and forth, he realised that he had awakened in the Glen Hartwell and Daley Community Hospital.
He tried to sit up but was wracked with shooting pains in his ribs and flanks and fell back onto the bed with a groan.
“Awake at last,” said a young nurse walking across from a neighbouring bed to see that he was all right: “We were starting to think you’d never come around.”
“How long was I out for?” he asked.
“Two days,” she replied, checking the chart at the front of his bed: “Not long enough to be a major worry, but long enough to cause concern to your wife.”
“How did I get here?”
“You had better ask Sergeant Forbes that,” she answered, writing on the chart before clipping it back to the bed: “He’s been ringing every few hours to see if you’ve come around.”
Half an hour later he was able to do just that as Mel Forbes came in to interview Ernie.
“You were found by one of the hunters just outside Lenoak,” explained Mel, pulling up a plastic stool to sit beside the bed.
“Hunters?” Ernie asked.
“Oh that’s right, you don’t know,” Mel said. He went on to tell of the massacre of Eileen and Michael deGraff: “After the bodies were found, all hell broke loose. It was bad enough the dingoes slaughtered sheep and cattle, but we couldn’t have them killing people. So we organised a posse of nearly eleven hundred hunters from all around the BeauLarkin to Willamby area. One of them found you lying naked in the bush just outside Percival.” He stopped and looked hard at Ernie.
Realising that the sergeant was waiting for an explanation, which he would need time to invent, Ernie quickly changed the subject: “And what about the dingoes?” he asked.
“They’re dead, thanks to you.”
“Why thanks to me?”
“Because when they brought you in here, you were raving about the Black Wolf and the dingo pack. Most of it didn’t make much sense, but we managed to make out that the dingoes were based up the side of Mt. Abergowrie. So we organised a full-blown search up the mount, located their lair, and blasted the bastards to hell.”
“And what about the tiger?” asked Ernie, meaning had they found the carcase of the Tasmanian tiger.
“Tiger?” echoed Mel, trying to sound matter-of-fact, but leaving Ernie with the impression that he was lying: “What tiger?”
“The tiger-striped dog that Vic and Warren both saw.”
“No sign of it,” said Mel, looking decidedly uncomfortable: “Guess they must have imagined it. After all, both attacks happened on dark nights ... Warren isn’t a very reliable witness ... And Sam Hart clearly saw the Black Wolf leading the pack. Which is a hell of a lot more likely....”
“Then you killed the Black Wolf?” teased Ernie, knowing full well they hadn’t.
“Well ... no,” admitted Mel: “But it’s possible the Black Wolf had a lair somewhere else and only met up with the pack to lead them on night raids....”
They talked for a while longer, but seeing Rowena and young Kirsty standing out in the corridor, they were both relieved to have an excuse to end the interview.

A week later Ernie was discharged from hospital, and a fortnight after that he was well enough to drive out to Glen Hartwell to investigate the site of the slaughter of the dingo pack. But when he reached Mount Abergowrie, he found the clearing had been cordoned off and was swarming with military and CSIRO personnel.
At first, they refused to answer any of Ernie’s questions. When he pressed them, they claimed the site had been found to contain dangerous radioactive elements. Ernie couldn’t help smiling as the scientists hinted that this had driven the dingoes crazy, effectively removing the need for them to have had any other dog leading them on the uncharacteristically savage attacks.
Though tempted to ask why the scientists weren’t wearing lead-lined suits if the area was radioactive, Ernie decided not to press the matter. Instead, he returned to his sheep station and, he hoped, to a relatively normal life.
He hardly thought any more about the dingo pack or the Tasmanian tiger, until two years later when the newspapers started to carry reports of a series of raids upon sheep stations up in New South Wales.
“The raids are the work of a crazed pack of dingoes,” ran one story in the Glen Hartwell Herald Daily Mail: “Although usually less savage by nature, dingoes have been known to take stray sheep or cattle from stations around Australia. However, the Pack, as the band is called, is unusually vicious and slaughters entire flocks of sheep, sometimes killing the station dogs as well.”
Ernie almost put down the newspaper, before the final paragraph caught his eye: “Although unconfirmed, it has been reported that the Pack is being led by a larger dog, with black, tiger-stripes running down its back.”
‘But how?’ thought Ernie, remembering the sight of the Tasmanian tiger with its throat torn out: ‘It couldn’t still be alive!’ Then he remembered the tiger bitch suckling her whelps, all of which clearly had the tiger stripes of their father, and he wondered whether two years later one of the Thylacine pups was following in its father’s footsteps, leading the Pack in this new series of attacks?
THE END
© Copyright 2024 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia