Carnivorous Nights (16 page)

T
he next morning we were driving with Alexis back down the Bass Highway, past pastures, cows, and the occasional sheep. He was still talking about the dead wombat and how he might make pigment from its flesh. “I'll pulverize it and mix it in with acrylic medium,” he said. Then he added, “Tell me again, what are we doing today?”

“We're going fishing for the freshwater thylacine.”

So far, we had hugged the coast. But inland, Tasmania was covered by wet forests and sliced by thousands of rivers, streams, and creeks.

“Oh yeah,” said Alexis. “Just so you know, I told Chris and Dorothy there wouldn't be room for them in the boat.”

“What boat?”

“I don't know.” He sighed. “I didn't know what to tell them.”

We had advised Alexis the day before that Chris and Dorothy should find something else to do today. After their politely bemused response to our visit to the Naarding site, we didn't think they would have the patience for our little fishing expedition. Our quarry?
Astacopsis gouldi
, one of Tasmania's most bizarre and elusive creatures.

“Is it rare?” Alexis asked.

“Very.”

If it weren't for the Internet, we probably never would have heard about it. We'd been doing Google searches to find out more about Tasmania and its wildlife and discovered that certain combinations of keywords led to unexpected material. When we put in “Tasmanian tiger + sightings,” Google spit back hundreds of Web sites about cryptozoology that lumped the tiger in with such mythical creatures as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Chupacabra, a goat-sucking monster. Other keyword combinations led to a number of amateur science fiction stories and online role-playing games in which the Tasmanian tiger was a character (usually a futuristic hybrid or mutant with special powers). Living or extinct, the Tasmanian tiger had a pretty active life in cyberspace.

Further Googling served up scientific information—providing new leads in our search for strange Tasmanian beasts. That's how we found
Astacopsis gouldi
(“Tasmania + invertebrate”), an absolutely gargantuan species of crayfish. It was an extreme animal—the largest freshwater invertebrate in the world—and it lived only in Tasmania. Its rareness combined with the fact that it was the fiercest animal in the river ecosystem had earned it the nickname of freshwater or invertebrate thylacine. But most Tasmanians just called it the giant lobster.

We were driving down the Bass Highway to meet Todd Walsh, a freshwater biologist who's made saving the lobster and Tasmania's rivers his personal business. We had arranged to meet him at a turnoff near Wynyard about seventy miles back down the highway from Geoff King's
house. Actually Geoff had arranged it. (He and Todd used to play footie together.) When we pulled up, Todd was waiting beside a red four-wheel-drive Terrano, wearing dark sunglasses and a gray T-shirt with a kangaroo on it. He was in his mid-thirties, with a bright-eyed open countenance and small slightly elfin features.

“G'day,” he said. “So you're the ones who want to see the famous lobster? Are you feeling fit?”

“Er …” We admitted we hadn't visited the gym recently.

“You're all right,” he said. “Gyms are for fuckwits anyway.”

Then he jumped into his four-wheel drive and we caravanned inland through rolling farm country. Eventually Todd stopped in front of a locked metal gate that blocked a gravel road. It was a logging route, but Todd had permission to go through. He pulled out his lobstering gear— traps, buckets, and bait—and distributed it among us. “We'll have to walk along here a bit.”

“So how come I've never heard of the lobster?” Alexis asked as we crunched along the gravel. “It's such an extreme animal.”

“It's the location, isn't it?” Todd said. “Tasmania's very isolated. The thylacine's popular because we shot 'em, and they died out. The devils are popular because of the cartoon—and the name.
Devil.
It's all marketing.”

But the lobster was getting to be somewhat well-known, he said, certainly among crayfish experts. “I've had crayfish people from all over the world fly in specifically to come to Tassie. It's like the Holy Grail.”

“What do they say when they see one?”

A smile flickered across Todd's face. “
Fuck!
That's what they say.”

We crunched along beside parched, brown pastureland. The temperature was climbing toward 90 degrees. After half a mile or so, trees began appearing on each side of the road. On the right were small, scrubby pines, all growing at a uniform height.
What a weird little ecosystem
, we thought. “That's a tree farm,” Todd said.

“Jesus,” said Alexis, looking at the evenly spaced trees. “It's like an invading army.”

Trees, Todd explained, had been cleared in order to grow trees—faster, stronger, better trees that had been imported from outside Tasmania. They would be cut down in a few years for wood chips. On the opposite side of the road, a wall of native forest loomed up. The trees were tall, and
the forest looked thick and impenetrable. Todd indicated that this was our destination.

This would be our first journey into the Tasmanian bush. “Anything we should watch out for in the woods?” we asked.

“A lot of people are worried about the snakes. But on the whole, I'm more scared of bears.”

“Bears?”
There were no bears in Tasmania.

“I went to America for a crayfish conference and I was shit-scared of going into the American woods. It's the unknown …”

“I saw a bear on the porch of my country house—” Alexis began.

“Bugger that! A nine-foot grizzly coming at me? I'll take a six-foot tiger snake. Now that's all right.”

Six feet?

“So,” Alexis said, “the tiger snake is the one to be concerned about?”

“All the snakes are poisonous over here. If you stand still, they'll go right past you.”

“What happens if you get bit?” we asked.

“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you won't be. But if you are, the tiger snake's venom delivery system isn't all that effective. Its fangs are really small. The mainland's a bit more deadly. They have some nasty ones over there.” He brushed a few flies from the bait bucket he was carrying. “Taipans are pretty aggressive,” he continued. “They're probably the only snake you've really got to watch. That's an angry snake. A lot of people say tiger snakes are angry at this time of year, but they're just more active.”

What exactly was the difference between “active” and “angry”?
We wished we had worn thicker pants.

Todd pointed out some tall clumps of grass growing on the edge of the forest. They had two-foot-long, dull green blades. “Watch out for cutting grass. It's more common than snakes,” he said. “Don't grab it. Even if you're falling over, don't grab it.” We looked more closely at the cutting grass. Each blade had paper-thin, finely serrated edges. “It's like a scalpel,” Todd said. Just then he turned off the road and into the trees.

As soon as we pierced the wall of forest, we were enveloped in shade and damp. Thick-trunked trees climbed up high overhead and fanned out into a leafy mass. Ferns covered the sloping forest floor, and dead trees lay
where they had fallen, wearing thick coats of luxuriant green moss. A moment before, we had been in a virtual desert. This was lush, primordial. We felt like we had entered a time warp.

“There's no trail,” Todd explained, hopping over a fallen log and starting down a steep slope. “See that creek? We'll follow that down to the river to avoid the undergrowth.”

As we bushwhacked down, a thick layer of decaying wood, rotting leaves, and mud sucked at our boots. Huge, decomposing logs blocked our way. Looming overhead and making up the understory were tree ferns—twenty-foot-high holdovers from the Age of the Dinosaurs with massive green fronds sprouting like hair from the tops of weird, spongy trunks.

“I feel like I'm on Skull Island,” Alexis said, looking up into a parasol of seven-foot-long fern fronds. We all gazed upward but there was no sign of King Kong or his brother and sister apes.

“This is wet sclerophyll,” Todd said, “which is almost rain forest, but not quite.”

Sclerophyll means “hard leaf ” and referred to the waxy coating on the leaves of the eucalyptus trees that dominated the canopy. But this forest was anything but hard.

It was a riot of growth and decomposition—living and dying, slippery and rough. Fallen logs and dead spars practically melted into the ground. As we took each step, the forest floor shifted in ways we didn't expect. We clutched at tree trunks, logs, and branches for support.

“A lot of the trees are rotten,” Todd warned. “Don't grab a dead tree. Things tend to fall away.”

You'd think telling the difference between a live tree and a dead one would be easy. It wasn't. When we grabbed on to one reddish-colored tree trunk, it literally crumbled away in our hands, and we toppled backward, sliding down into the mud.

“No worries,” Todd said. “You'll get your bush bearings in a minute.”

As we proceeded over ground that was often the consistency of the inside of a Three Musketeers bar, we quickly discovered it was a good idea to keep moving. If we stepped on top of a fallen log and paused for too long to plot our next step, one of our legs would crash through with a crunch, leaving us knee-deep in decaying wood.

Todd himself moved through the wet forest with ease. As he effortlessly sprang onto logs and over the wet, shifting ground, he looked like some kind of nimble forest cat. Slender with a light, athletic build, he seemed designed for the bush.

In flat sections when we dared to look away from our feet, we studied the woods more closely. The canopy was more than one hundred feet overhead. Mixed in with the eucalyptus trees were rain forest species like myrtle and sassafras. These tree species were ancient, Todd said, with fossil forms dating back 80 million years. They had small, leathery green leaves, and their trunks were tall, straight, and solid—good for holding on to.

“So is this a good place for lobsters?” we asked Todd.

“It is. Trees are very important to river systems. Lobsters mainly eat rotting wood. But if they find a dead roo or a fish on the river bottom, they'll eat it. The biggest ones are fourteen pound and a bit over three foot long.”

Alexis whistled.

“Yeah, they're pretty big. 'Course, I haven't seen any over ten pound.”

The biggest lobsters, he said, had all been trapped and eaten. Freshwater lobsters were a delicacy in this part of Tasmania—so much so that the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service had declared the lobster a vulnerable species. Lobsters could live until they were forty years old, and they just kept growing year after year. But the biggest, oldest, meatiest lobsters were now extremely rare. In 1998, the government had imposed an allout fishing ban to give the giant lobsters a chance to recover. “It will be a few years before we see those sizes again,” Todd said. He began to pick his way across a boggy flat.

We followed and our boots plunged into soft, wet mud. Then we slid down a muddy embankment on our backsides and found ourselves at the river's edge.

When we left the dim light of the forest, the sunlight on the river was dazzling.

“It's called the Hebe, H-E-B-E,” said Todd. He pronounced it “he bee,” as in heebie-jeebies. “It comes from a place called Dip Range and it runs into the Flowerdale River, which runs into the Inglis River.” Geoff
had told us his great-great-granddad had drowned in the Inglis River while crossing it on horseback.

We looked down at the water. It was the color of freshly brewed tea. “Why's the water brown?”

“It's tannin.” Most of the rivers in Tasmania are this color, he said, stained by natural runoff from the buttongrass plains covering Tasmania's hills.

The Hebe was slow and meandering, twisting out of view every couple hundred feet. Huge eucalyptus logs fell over it and across it and lay half submerged. Branches hung down over its steep banks, which were overgrown with trees and ferns. It was the most pristine river we had ever seen.

“This is as good as you'll see anywhere,” Todd agreed. “It's one of the lobster's last strongholds. Lobsters only live in northern Tassie and only in rivers that flow into the Bass Strait, except for the Tamar. They're also in the Arthur catchment, which flows near Marrawah where you just came from. But that's it.”

Todd laid out his fishing gear, four collapsible basket-shaped nets, and unwrapped his bait, rainbow trout heads and a local saltwater fish called stripey trumpeter. “This will be a treat for them,” he said. With a piece of wire, he skewered the fish heads and tied them to the nets.

We asked him if he did a lot of fishing.

“I'm a fisherman from way back. My grandfather, father, and myself used to catch and eat lobsters.”

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, his grandfather told him, you couldn't walk for three feet in a river without coming across a lobster. Local people would take home pots of them. Two-foot-long lobsters could be found lurking in streams hardly larger than puddles. Their massive claws would be mounted as trophies and hung on walls just like a buck's antlers. But then the population began to dwindle.

“They taste so nice that a lot of people still go out and catch them, even though the maximum fine is now ten grand.”

“When was the last time you ate one?”

“Two weeks before the ban,” he said. “They're sensational.”

Now, instead of fishing for lobsters to eat, Todd had a scientific permit to catch and release them to monitor the health of their population.
“We'll go upstream and set some traps,” he said. “And we'll drag some big lobsters out.”

Where we entered the Hebe, the water was only a foot deep and very slow moving, barely making a sound as it trundled over small stones. We followed Todd over islands of gravel to where he dropped down the first trap beside a submerged log.

Since the banks were made impassable by the thick green vegetation, we walked in the middle of the river. Our hiking boots were designed to be waterproof even in ankle-deep water. However, this feature was rendered moot when we stepped into a hidden pool and the river came streaming in over our boot tops. Pretty soon the water was up to our thighs. From then on, things felt rather squishy.