Carnivorous Nights (17 page)

We sloshed for a quarter mile up the Hebe, and Todd laid the second and third traps in deep, shaded pools. Then he jumped up on a huge rotted log—which lay like a bridge across the river—and dropped the last trap down on a length of blue twine. The trap and bait slowly sank, disappearing into the tea-dark water.

“We'll give each trap about three quarters of an hour.”

As we reversed direction and slogged back downriver, Todd picked up the pace. He was no longer a forest cat. He had turned into a river otter. And we were having trouble keeping up. We tripped over snags concealed beneath the dark water, plopped into hidden holes, and lost our balance on slippery rocks. Often his voice would trail off as we floundered behind.

“Some people might look at this and see a messy river,” we caught him saying. “It's full of snags, fallen logs, fallen leaves and branches. In some parts it's shallow and in other parts there are deep pools. But it's a healthy river. Lobsters eat the wood and detritus. Juveniles occupy the shallower parts, and the older lobsters like to lurk in the pools …”

We lost him again for a few minutes, but then made a huge effort to catch up, churn-clomping through the calf-high water. “Another thing that has to be considered is the lobster's lifestyle,” he was saying. “Some animals are very adaptable. They reproduce quickly, mating frequently and having lots of young. The lobster's the opposite of that. Lobsters are slow to move into new areas and slow to reproduce. Male lobsters don't start breeding until they're nine years old and females not until they're fourteen. And the females only breed once every two years.”

When we reached the shallows again, Todd slowed the pace. He flipped over a few small rocks and put a hand net in the current to trap anything that had been hiding. On the fifth or sixth try, he caught a tiny lobster that easily fit in the palm of his hand. Olive brown and shiny from the water, its shell was delicate and nearly translucent. “This is their typical color,” he said. “But they go from blue to black. You can actually find them sky blue in other stream systems.”

The baby lobster had a jointed mermaid tail that ended in a fan, two miniature claws it was waving, and two long antennae. Todd said it was a female. He pointed out two circles by her second set of legs where eggs would form when she matured.

“This one is probably just two years old, heading into her third season. So it'll be another twelve years before she's sexually mature. She'll hang around this area for another three or four years yet. This shallow area is safe because platypus and fish can't really swim that well in here and get under the rocks.”

Platypuses? This was another reminder that we were in a strange-ass place.

Todd took out a measuring tape. “She's ten centimeters all up. They're pretty vulnerable at this stage. Probably only about 10 percent would survive to even this size.”

She didn't look like a giant—but then again, this youthful crayfish was already the size of an average adult crayfish in America. In Louisiana and Mississippi—America's crayfish capitals—crayfish typically reach sizes of about three inches, and they're considered a delicacy, served up as crayfish étouffée, crayfish bisque, and crawdads in clarified butter. On mainland Australia, crayfish are called yabbies—and eaten with similar zeal—barbecued with garlic or put into salads with mango and avocado. When we thought about all this, we began to get a little hungry. It was getting toward lunchtime.

Todd must have sensed what we were thinking. Conservationists, he told us, have been advocating that the lobster be rechristened as
tayatea
, what's believed to be their original aboriginal name, in the hopes that if it isn't called a lobster anymore, people won't be tempted to eat its sweet, delectable flesh.

Todd put the crayfish down on the stream bank and she backed away from us. Crayfish everywhere walk backward, keeping their eyes—and
claws—facing the enemy. As she back-stepped into the water, she looked like a gunslinger exiting a bar with both barrels raised. Then she took on the color of the stones—and melted away.

Todd said it was time to check the traps. We churn-clomped back up-river—and checked each one: Empty. Empty. Empty. Empty. The bait hadn't been touched. So we headed downriver again and set up on a dry, gravelly bank to eat lunch.

We had brought chicken, or chook, sandwiches, garnished with butter, lettuce, and beets. Tasmanians seemed to prefer butter over mayo in their sandwiches, and sweet purple beets over tomatoes. As we ate we observed hundreds of butterflies and other flying insects swarming in the treetops above the riverbank. We listened for birdcalls, but didn't hear any— maybe it was too hot. We all sat silently for a minute.

“So have you ever seen a thylacine?” Alexis blurted.

Todd laughed. “Ahhh, no I haven't.”

“What do you make of all the sightings?”

“Well…I think if they survived, someone would have a photo or a video or a dead one somewhere.” He followed up with the rational, scientific viewpoint: “When they were shooting them for the bounty, they shot a hundred in one year, a hundred the next year, a hundred the third year, and then none or one the next year. Their stocks were down, and they reckon now that it's just bad luck that they decided to get a plague, like a flu, go through them. They couldn't handle it. The population just crashed.”

He was probably right. We'd heard this argument before that the tigers had been pushed into extinction by the one-two punch of overhunting followed by disease. But we still felt a vague, tiny, ultra-minute glimmer of hope.

“What do you think of all the people who come to look for the tiger?”

Todd paused a moment before answering. “Ah, well, they're in a dreamworld,” he said. “It's like the Yeti or Bigfoot, isn't it?”

Tasmanians, he said, needed to get more involved in protecting the native animals that were still around. And sometimes that meant using tough measures. He cited the feral cat problem as an example. “They kill birds, they kill small mammals … and they're bloody big, big as a possum. Savage. They get to six kilo. That's fourteen pounds.”

“What's the best way to get rid of them?” Alexis asked.

“I had a steel trap, but I've given it back to the Parks Department now. It had a trip lever inside and when the door shut, they couldn't get out. Then I'd take the whole thing, put that in a big plastic bag, and then put it on the exhaust pipe. It might frighten them a bit, but they certainly don't have any pain. They just get knocked out and die. I reckon thirty seconds and they're unconscious, so I think it's a great way to kill them. I only do that because it's a painless way to go. The RSPCA [Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals] wouldn't see it that way. You're supposed to take them to the RSPCA and have them put a needle in.”

Todd mentioned that he hadn't been feeling too kindly toward his local Animal Rescue group. They had kidnapped his dog. He had been letting the dog run around unleashed on the property of a fish farm where he was working, and one day someone came and lured his dog into their car. “He jumped in and went for a ride, as you do, being a dog. He thought it was great fun.” Then they took the dog to Animal Rescue and when Todd called, they refused to give the dog back, saying that it was being mistreated. “He was lean, very lean. They thought, since its ribs were showing a bit, that we'd been starving it. We got him back after a fight. When I took him to the vet, the vet said he was as fit as a race-horse—in prime condition.”

From up above, we heard the distant whine of an engine. It was a propeller plane—though we couldn't see it behind the curtain of trees. “It's either for fire spotting or dope spotting,” Todd said. “The cops have a really big dope task force.”

Alexis's ears perked up. “I have some pot that I got in Melbourne—it's really strong shit.”

Todd gave him an inscrutable look. “It probably came from here,” he said finally. “Tassie supplies Sydney and Melbourne.”

We began to slog up the river again. The sun was bright, but the teabrown water seemed to absorb all the light and our legs were invisible beneath the surface. The forest along the banks was like a shimmering green wall—ferns, tree ferns, ancient trees dripping with moss and lichens. From the air, the Hebe must have looked like a tiny crack in the forest's armor. It wasn't easy pushing through the thigh-deep water—it was like
exercising on an underwater treadmill—but it was pleasant being heated from above and cooled from below.

Up ahead, emerging from the undergrowth, we saw what looked like a chicken on stilts. It was creeping through the fern fronds along the bank. “That's a Tasmanian native hen,” Todd said. Like the lobster and the devil, the native hen doesn't live anywhere in the world except Tasmania. It stood about eighteen inches high, its plump, brown-feathered body supported by long gray legs. Its beak was yellow, short, and stout, and its eyes were bright red. With only rudimentary wings, Tasmanian native hens are flightless. Their only defense against predators is their running ability. In short bursts, they've been clocked at speeds up to fifty kilometers per hour. Their main predators are harrier hawks, eagles, feral cats, and Tasmanian devils. And they have also been killed by farmers for grazing on newly planted crops. But people didn't care much for their taste— at least Todd didn't. “You want to know how to cook a native hen?” he asked. “You boil it in a pot with a rock. When it's cooked, you keep the rock and throw away the chook.” Such lack of culinary appreciation was good for the hen. Another of Tasmania's flightless birds, the Tasmanian emu—a long-necked avian giant that stood five feet high on stilt legs— was tasty enough to be eaten to extinction by the island's early colonists.

Tasmanian native hens also have another interesting quality. They're one of the world's few polyandrous birds,
poly
meaning many and
andr
meaning men. That is to say, females typically have multiple mates—and these female-dominated family groups are usually bound for life. Bird scientists call this type of family arrangement—whether headed by a male or female—a dynasty. Female native hens may have one, two, three, or four husbands in their little setup—and they mate with them all.

“I'm digging this chook,” said Alexis.

The native hen took one look at our splashing and high-stepped off into the ferns.

As we continued our trek upriver, we checked all the traps again. They were still empty.

Todd assured us the lobsters were all around us. But hidden in the dark waters, camouflaged to blend in with the color of the rocks and stream, they might easily go undetected.

“Would you say they're a cryptic animal?” we asked.

“Cryptic is the perfect word for them,” he said and led us further upriver to find a better location for one of the traps.

We began what became a routine, tromping up and down the river, checking the traps each time, and occasionally moving them. We were having absolutely no luck—although once Todd pulled up a trap and found the bait had been stolen. An entire rainbow trout head had gone missing. “Bastards!” Todd mumbled admiringly. Then he rebaited the trap. “He'll be back.”

We continued our circuit and when we stopped to take a break, we calculated we had been searching for four hours. Our waterlogged boots felt like lead weights. And we had discovered new hazards: sharp sticks poking us from underwater, exposed tree roots that tripped us up, and a poisonous caterpillar that Todd warned us not to touch. He also mentioned that there were bloodsucking, heat-seeking terrestrial leeches lurking in the trees—but our legs were so chilled from the cold river water, they probably couldn't sense us. “Horrible animals,” Todd said, cringing. “I hate leeches more than anything. They make me itch for a month.”

It occurred to us that though we had been traversing the same halfmile stretch of river over and over, we had only the vaguest clue where we were or how to get back to the road. If something were to happen to Todd, we might end up as lobster bait ourselves.

Behind us, we heard Alexis chanting, “
Tayatea
… come out and playuh.”

Todd turned over a few stones and showed us a stone fly larva, a sleek black bug with red stripes. It was an indicator species, meaning that it was vulnerable to pollution, and symbolized the overall healthiness of the Hebe. Not every river in the lobster's range was in such good shape. “In some rivers, lobsters have been wiped out or nearly so,” Todd said.

Apparently being delectable wasn't the lobster's only problem. “The worst thing is land clearing for agriculture,” he said. “When they clear the trees, the soil just runs right into the rivers and covers up the lobsters' homes.”

The glare of the sun had become less intense. A bird called from the treetops. Time was passing—and just when we started thinking this fishing expedition was going to be a bust, the Hebe began to unveil its secrets.

On our next circuit, lobsters were in two of the first three traps. Gingerly, Todd held them up for us to examine. Both were young males, about six inches long. Their shells were olive brown, and one had sky blue markings on its underside. They looked a little roughed up. The first had a scar on his flank, and the second was missing a claw. Todd told us these injuries might have been the result of lobster-on-lobster violence. They flailed and clapped their inch-long claws as if to emphasize his point.

“They're pretty territorial,” he said. “You put a couple in the bath together and they'll tear each other apart.”

We watched as the young giants scuttled off into the Hebe. They looked like little gladiators.

Although sunset wasn't until nine and it was only five o'clock, the light was already beginning to fade in the river valley. We could have been satisfied with the two young males—but Todd clearly wasn't. There was only one trap left on this run, and he couldn't let go of the big lobster. “I've got to keep trying,” he said. “It becomes an obsession.” If this last trap didn't deliver the goods, he thought we should stay and keep looking even if it meant hiking back in the gloom. We all agreed—although Alexis was getting nervous. In addition to telling Dorothy that there would be no room in the “boat,” he had said we would be back at 2:00
P.M.
Now he was torn between the potential wrath of his girlfriend and seeing a once-in-a-lifetime biological oddity.