Carnivorous Nights (44 page)

“I don't mean to be crude,” said Alexis, pointing toward the double tree. “But how much would you get for a tree this size?”

Yeah, we thought. Picassos and Pollocks sold for millions of dollars. How much was this forest worth?

When all that remained of Jupiter's Salad Tongs was a dead stump,
Suzi replied, the government—the people of Tasmania who owned the land—would receive $1,200 to $1,400. About a quarter of a cent per resident.

It was sobering. We started to head back down the trail, following the flags, but soon became disoriented. We couldn't find the next trail marker—or the one behind us either. Somehow we had gotten off the trail. We turned to Suzi, assuming she would have a plan—but she looked baffled. “This is why I don't usually do these kinds of bush walks,” she said.

You don't?

“Well,” Alexis said, surveying the steep terrain. “It's all downhill from here.”

We commenced an off-trail bush bash. The forest floor was thick with stalks. Several times as we pitched downward, our way was blocked by the roots of giant trees and the twisting trunks of ancient ferns. As we picked our way down, we began to name some of the obstacles. A rocky hole, hidden by a cover of leaves, became Zeus's Folly. A fallen log was dubbed Sisyphus Didn't Know the Half of It. And the forest itself became the Ferny Labyrinth of the Minotaur. After dishing out the proper amount of woody recalcitrance, the forest spit us out a quarter mile down the road from where Suzi's station wagon was parked.

After this little adventure, Suzi suggested we cool off in the river. Fortunately, the forest immediately bordering the Styx River was protected by law. No logging was permitted within 130 feet of the banks. So far, that rule had been obeyed at least in this part of the valley.

Suzi led us down a path through pure rain forest that was junglelike with myrtles, tree ferns, and spikes of native laurel with green drooping leaves. Along the riverbank, sunlight poured through a gap in the canopy. The Styx was only about twenty-five feet wide and dark reddish brown, stained by runoff from the buttongrass plains higher up.

When we dipped our feet into the water, our toes went numb. The Styx was frigid. Backing away, we resigned ourselves to standing on the bank and admiring the tree ferns. Suzi dropped into the river without testing it and then began mocking us from the opposite shore. “I go swimming here every time I come, no matter what season. Come on!”

“No rat lover is going to show me up,” Alexis muttered. He grimaced as he hit the water, then doggy-paddled over to the far bank, lifted himself
out, and shivered in the sun. We plunged in, too. The swiftness of the current caught us off guard. We struggled to get hold of a moss-covered snag so as not to be swept downstream.

Fending off the chill, we took in the surrounding rain forest. The far bank was a riot of life. There were round-leaved myrtle trees, possibly as old as five hundred years; tree ferns with spongy brown trunks hosting countless species—epiphytes, lichens, fungi, finger ferns, filmy ferns— that wore their dying brown fronds like beards; and dead wet logs covered with bright green mosses. Suzi said this rain forest was the work of a thousand years. Yet it was also continually being renewed, always young.

We ducked our faces into the water. All we could see was brown murk. The icy temperature was unbearable. We quickly leapt out and attempted to defrost.

Suzi filled up a plastic bottle with river water. It was the color of Lip-ton's iced tea and had tiny bits of detritus suspended in it. She offered us a drink.

“No thanks.”

She looked offended.

“It won't make you sick. The Styx River is pure here.”

We took tentative sips of the tea-colored liquid. It tasted fine.

“Here's to immortality,” said Alexis.

We hoped no platypuses had been crapping upstream.

We were still dripping wet when Suzi turned the station wagon off the main route through the valley into a gravel offshoot. It was called Skeleton Road and had been built for logging, but the forestry folks had run into a snag. A wedge-tailed eagle's nest had been discovered in one of the trees intended for felling about two hundred feet from the road. These eagles, which had wingspans of seven feet, were an endangered species in Tasmania. There were only 130 pairs of breeding “wedgies” left on the island. Their nests were huge conglomerations of sticks, usually added to over many years and constructed in the highest eucalyptus tree available. Nests could weigh more than eight hundred pounds.

Under the Forest Practices Code, Forestry Tasmania was required to leave a buffer zone of about twenty-two acres between any eagle's nest and logging operations so that the wedgies would not be scared away. Currently, the nest was not occupied, but the forest had been given a
temporary reprieve in case the eagles decided to come back. Meanwhile, the Wilderness Society had been using the protected forest surrounding the nest to promote the Styx to the world.

Suzi took us to see the Chapel Tree. It was an eighty-three-meter-(272-feet-) tall eucalyptus, standing on an enormous base measuring eighteen meters (fifty-nine feet) around. Its buttressed roots were huge, the size of trees themselves, and they looked like the talons of a Brobdingnagian eagle gripping the forest floor. The entire base of the tree was covered in vegetation: a blanket of moss, hard water ferns. Myrtle saplings were actually growing from the Chapel Tree's trunk.

Suzi pointed out a narrow, triangular opening in the tree's side. It was about seven feet high, and when we walked through, it led into a large hollow. On one occasion, she said, twenty-eight people had crammed inside. The tree hollow was like a cave, dark and smelling of fungus. We shone a flashlight over our heads, but the light was too dim to see how high the hollow went. Liquid dripped down from above. “That smells like bat piss,” Suzi said.

Despite appearances, the hollow was not unhealthy to the tree. When
Eucalyptus regnans
trees reach the age of about 120, hollows start to form at the base, or butt, from rot, fungi, bacterial activity, and wood-eating insects. Water and nutrients are carried to the treetop through the xylem inside the outer trunk, so the rotting heartwood isn't terribly consequential to the life of the tree. However, loggers don't care for the hollowedout butts because they can't sell the wood, and when they cut a tree like this one, they usually discard the butt and burn it. The hollows were useful to wildlife though—in fact, they were critical to forest life.

“This is an apartment block for animals,” Suzi said from the hollow's darkest recess. Because there was so much decay going on inside— microbial action made things warmer—the tree hollow was actually “heated” in winter. Bats, black cockatoos, sugar gliders, and owls all took refuge there. We wondered if a family of thylacines had ever used the Chapel Tree as their den.

Suzi said that Catholic priests, Buddhist monks from Tibet, aboriginal spiritual leaders, and representatives of the Ainu people had all visited the Chapel Tree and prayed for the forest. We decided to have a moment of silence ourselves.

As we meditated, we thought how apt the name Styx was for this forest
—particularly this one around Skeleton Road. The forest was trapped in limbo—designated for the ax, but in a state of reprieve. How long before the choppers came and took this forest to the other side?

“O Great Pan,” we prayed, “save yourself !” Unfortunately, forest gods were notoriously unreliable.

“The government has the ability to act,” Suzi said. “If the government
had acted a hundred years ago, we would still have the thylacine. It's the same thing with our old-growth forests.”

On our way out of the Styx valley we saw a few last scenes of devastation: a steep forested slope that had been cable-logged, more clear-cuts, and denuded land with invading trees growing in rows.

What made this all the more excruciating was that just to the west was the border of Tasmania's Southwest National Park. Somehow in drawing the boundaries for the national park, the largest trees in the Southern Hemisphere had been left immediately outside the lines.

B
ack in Hobart, we had dinner at a fish place called Mures. We sat outside on the docks and Alexis jabbed his fork menacingly at a seagull that approached too close. A festive umbrella shaded our table and when we looked up we saw the face of the Tasmanian tiger. The umbrella was sponsored by the Cascade Brewery, and the stylized tiger was their logo. Thylacines were everywhere in Tasmania—and nowhere.

Our last hope for the tiger was a gentleman named Col Bailey. He was sometimes described as a “true believer” and had been searching for the thylacine for nearly forty years. When we called him at his home in Maydena, a town in the Tyenna valley near where the last known wild thylacine was captured in the 1930s, he instructed us to meet him at a crossroads outside of Mount Field National Park—just a few miles north of the Styx.

In the morning we headed back out toward the wilderness, following the main road along the Derwent River, then joining up with the more
remote Gordon River Road. When we arrived at the agreed-upon location, Col was waiting for us by a bridge over a babbling stream. Considering how hot it was, he seemed overdressed. On top of a long-sleeved shirt, he wore a thermal vest as if he were preparing for weather only he had been informed about. His eyes were screened by thick polarizing sunglasses. And his graying sideburns peeked out from beneath a cap with the face of a neon green thylacine on it. Something about his manner made him look like a retired FBI agent. But the green thylacine made us think crypto-cop.

He waved us over to a wooden picnic table and gave us his card. It read, “Col Bailey, thylacine consultant, author, researcher.” On it was a black-and-white photo of Col holding a pair of binoculars and appearing to stare at two thylacines in the background.

As we studied the card, he said, “I know without a doubt, 100 percent certain, that the tiger still exists. Just leave it at that.”

We sat across from Col, and he laid down a manila envelope on the table. We readied ourselves for some new evidence. “I really enjoyed reading your prospectus,” he said. He opened the envelope, and took out a neat stack of paper. It was a copy of our proposal for this very book with a full-color reproduction of one of Alexis's thylacine paintings on the cover.

Our eyes popped open. How had he gotten a copy of that?

“You're probably wondering where I got a copy of this.”

“Well … yes.”

He smiled a tiny smile. “I can't reveal my sources.”

As Col slowly paged through the proposal, we felt a surge of embarrassment. How had we described him? Did we call him a colorful Tasmanian character? Had we used the word “kooky”? Actually, we had introduced him as follows:

“Where did you get this 3,200 number?” Col asked.

“Wasn't it on your Web site?” we said.

Col maintained a Web site where people could send in their sighting reports and contact him for information. And he got plenty of hits. As one of Tasmania's most visible tiger hunters, Col received constant media inquiries. He had appeared in several documentaries about the thylacine and been interviewed by hundreds of reporters. The media frenzy was not limited to Australia either. “Tons of Yanks hound me. The Japanese hound me. I get inquiries from Sweden, Germany, Italy, France. No Russians or Chinese yet. Sometimes I want to run away and hide.”

At home Col had carton after carton filled with newspaper clippings about the tiger—some of which he had written himself. He laughed. “I've been married for forty-four years, and I've been researching the Tassie tiger for nearly as long. My wife says, ‘Better you're messing about with the tiger and not with another woman.’”