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 wa
s 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.
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 t
hat 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.”
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