berton, a zoologist and curator at the 

 Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in 

 Hobart, only a little is known about 

 devil behavior in the wild, but it's clear 

 that most of the tales of terror are 

 exaggerations. In truth, the Tasmanian 

 devil is generally a timid creature. Al- 

 though its jaws are strong and its bite 

 can be deadly, it is an opportunistic om- 

 nivore, not a vicious predator. Road- 

 kill, dead fish, and fat wombats are sta- 

 ples of its diet, with tadpoles and moths 

 added as garnish. 



Another myth is that devils hunt in 

 packs. In fact, they prefer the solitary 

 chase; their reputation for wolflike 

 vigilantism may have arisen from their 

 tendency to dine with friends. When 

 a devil encounters a substantial carcass, 

 a possum, say, or a young sheep, it sig- 

 nals its neighbors with loud shrieks, so 

 that all can share the bounty. The sight 

 of these small, active creatures tearing 

 gobbets of flesh while screaming at 

 each other may present a distressing 

 tableau, but it's no more cause for alarm 

 than a flock of crows or vultures peck- 

 ing at a fresh corpse. 



In spite of their bad reputation, Tas- 

 manian devils have had their champi- 

 ons over the years. One of the most 

 unlikely was a well-to-do Victorian 

 animal fancier named Mary Grant 



Tasmanian devil reinforces its reputation for ferocity. 



Roberts, who began breeding and 

 nurturing captive devils in a private 

 zoo in Hobart in the late 1800s. She 

 kept several families of devils, and 

 wrote perceptively of their feeding, 

 breeding, and social habits. "I, who 

 love them, and have had considerable 

 experience in keeping most of our 

 marsupials," Roberts wrote in 1915, 

 "will always regard them as first 

 favourites, my little black playmates." 

 Roberts's motherly enthusiasm for 

 Tasmanian devils was matched by the 

 scientific attraction they exerted on a 

 Tasmanian biology professor named 

 Theodore Thomson Flynn, the father 

 of the actor Errol Flynn. The elder 

 Flynn was the first to describe the 

 anatomy and physiology of the devil in 

 meticulous detail. 



Still, much remains to be learned 

 about devils. They are hard to ob- 

 serve in the wild, and only a few profes- 

 sionals study them — among them Pem- 

 berton. Farmers continue to view them 

 as a menace, and though the bounty on 

 them, imposed in the 1800s, is no longer 

 in place, devils have been adversely af- 

 fected by human development on their 

 remote island home. Yet at the same time, 

 the devil has become a popular symbol 

 of Tasmania, celebrated locally in tourist 

 brochures and worldwide as the 

 Warner Brothers cartoon charac- 

 ter Taz. On balance, the will to 

 protect the devil is there, but the 

 way remains unclear. 



In recent years an alarming 

 new element has entered the 

 picture: a grim affliction known 

 as devil facial tumor disease, or 

 DFTD. First recognized by a 

 wildlife officer named Nick 

 Mooney in 1 996, the disease de- 

 forms, then kills. No one knows 

 what causes DFTD — virus, en- 

 vironmental pollutant, invasive 

 microorganism, or, as most re- 

 cently suggested, allograph 

 transmission, whereby an infec- 

 tious cell line passes directly 

 from one animal to another 

 through a bite — but it may ulti- 

 mately determine whether the 



Tasmanian devil makes it in the wild. 

 Tracking its cause and finding a cure is 

 the most urgent item on the agenda for 

 the human advocates of this remark- 

 able marsupial. 



A Land Gone Lonesome: An Inland 

 Voyage Along the Yukon River 



by Dan O'Neill 

 Counterpoint, 2006; $24.95 



Leaving Dawson by canoe, as Alas- 

 kan writer Dan O'Neill did one 

 fine August day in 2001, you can travel 

 downstream eighty-five miles on the 

 Yukon River, to Poppy Creek, with- 

 out meeting a single year-round resi- 

 dent. It wasn't always that way. Around 

 1900, with the Klondike in the grip of 

 gold fever, several thousand people 

 lived along the Yukon between what 

 was then called Dawson City, in 

 Canada, and Circle City, Alaska. Some 

 had houses in settlements such as 

 Charley River, Coal Creek, and Star 

 City, where post offices and general 

 stores served the population; others 

 preferred the solitary life of hunting, 

 trapping, and prospecting from cabins 

 scattered along the great river and its 

 tributaries. In the warm months, stern- 

 wheelers carried people and produce 

 along the main channel of the Yukon; 

 in winter, mail carriers plied the snowy 

 trails along its banks, stopping at well- 

 stocked roadhouses never separated by 

 more than a day's dog-sled journey. 



Nowadays, gold fever is just a mem- 

 ory; the old towns and roadhouses lie 

 abandoned. Still, wilderness living has 

 its attractions, and in the 1970s, when 

 disaffected youth from the Lower 48 

 were moving back to the land, the 

 Yukon saw a brief resurgence of home- 

 steaders. John McPhee wrote memo- 

 rably of these folks in a series of arti- 

 cles for The New Yorker and in his 1977 

 book Coming into the Country. McPhee 

 depicted the new homesteaders as 

 latter-day pioneers, self-reliant and 

 sometimes eccentric, seeking to live a 

 life more genuine than the one af- 

 forded by urban civilization. Although 

 probably only a few of the new settlers 



NATURAL HISTORY September 2006 



