Steve & Me

by Terri Irwin

  Bob and Lyn approached. “A pair of emus, just up the road,” Bob shouted.

  Steve jumped into the Ute, and we were off to get a look. We spotted the two flightless birds, an adult and a subadult, but they bolted as soon as we arrived.

  “Too bad,” I said, watching the emus kicking up dust. “That would have been good.”

  “Get Henry,” Steve yelled. Then he leaped from the truck and hit the ground running.

  It’s impossible to catch an emu. They can reach speeds of up to forty miles an hour. Steve sprinted off and ran like the wind after the younger bird. It was huge, nearly full grown, and running like mad. I sat in the truck and watched in shock. Henry looked as stunned as I was. There was nothing he could do but put camera to shoulder and tear off after them.

  “This is going to be a good laugh to watch,” I said to John.

  To my amazement, the three made a big circle and began to head back in the truck’s direction.

  “Is it just me,” I said to John, “or is he gaining on it?”

  With the young emu taking huge, ground-gulping strides, the dust puffing up from each footstep, and Steve in his Timberlands kicking up the dirt right behind, they came toward us. Steve lunged forward and grabbed the bird in a bear hug. He picked the emu clean up off the ground, its big, gangly legs kicking wildly.

  Steve grinned from ear to ear. Henry caught his breath and tried to stop the camera from shaking. “Emus are spectacular,” Steve said exuberantly. “It’s the dad who raises the kids. All the mother does is deposit her eggs in a nest scraped into the ground. Then it’s the father’s responsibility to raise them up.”

  After his commentary, Steve let the emu go. As it trotted off, Henry turned to Steve and said, “I’m not sure if I got all that.”

  Steve immediately bolted off like a jackrabbit and ran after the emu, and I’ll be darned if he didn’t catch it again. Once more Steve turned to Henry and told him all about emus. Then he kissed the bird, gave it a hug, and released it a second time.

  If emus tell stories around the campfire, that one had a humdinger to tell for years to come.

  We got back on the road, heading west. I remember my thoughts as we ventured into the Simpson Desert. There’s nothing out here. The landscape was flat and lifeless. Except for the occasional jump-up—a small mesa that rose twenty or thirty feet above the desert floor—it just looked like dirt, sticks, and dead trees. The Simpson Desert is one of the hottest places on earth.

  But Steve brought the desert to life, pointing out lizards, echidnas, and all kinds of wildlife. He made it into a fantastic journey.

  In the middle of this vast landscape were the two of us, the only people for miles. Steve had become adept at eluding the film crew from time to time so we could be alone. There was a local cattle station about an hour-and-a-half drive from where we were filming, a small homestead in the middle of nowhere. The owners invited the whole crew over for a home-cooked meal. Steve and I stayed in the bush, and Bob and Lyn headed to one of their favorite camping spots. After having dinner, the crew couldn’t locate us. They searched in the desert for a while before deciding to sleep in the car. What was an uncomfortable night for them turned out to be a brilliant night for us!

  Steve made it romantic without being traditional. His idea of a beautiful evening was building a roaring campfire, watching a spectacular sunset, and cooking a curry dinner for me in a camp oven. Then we headed out spotlighting, looking for wildlife for hours on end. It was fantastic, like the ultimate Easter egg hunt. I never knew what we’d find.

  When Steve did discover something that night—the tracks of a huge goanna, or a tiny gecko hiding under a bush—he reveled in his discovery. His excitement was contagious, and I couldn’t help but become excited too.

  The best times in my life were out in the bush with Steve.

  In the morning, the crew remained M.I.A.

  “Are they going to be all right?” I asked Steve.

  “They’re all together and they’ve got a vehicle,” he said. “They’ll be fine.”

  Which meant more time for us to explore. Near the camp was a man-made dam carved out of the desert. The cattle stations created these dams so that across the vast, million-acre properties, the cattle could roam freely and not have to be checked regularly. The cattle could count on these dams, as they held water from the occasional rain shower.

  The wildlife knew where to get a drink as well. We crept up on the dam before sunrise. I could feel Steve’s tension as we peeked over the dirt-bank lip, not knowing what we would see. This morning a family of dingoes gathered beside the water. The adults fed on a feral cat they had killed. The pups sat a few yards away, waiting their turn. Feral cats look exactly like house cats, and they looked out of place in the remote, harsh outback. The dingoes took full advantage, since they had a family to feed.

  Steve and I watched the dingo family play out its drama for a long time. Then we edged our way down to the dam and hopped in. The water was cold, but it felt good.

  “This is great,” I said, as we swam together.

  “I’ve been coming here since I was just a little tacker,” Steve said. Bob had brought his young son with him on his research trips, studying the snakes of the region.

  As I walked in and out of the water, washing up, shampooing my hair, and relishing the chance to clean off some of the desert dust, I noticed something hard underfoot.

  “Steve, I stepped on something here,” I said.

  He immediately started clearing the bottom of the pond, tugging on what I had felt beneath the murky water.

  “Tree limb,” I guessed.

  “Look around,” Steve said, yanking at the mired object. “No trees here at all.”

  He couldn’t budge whatever it was, but he didn’t give up. He went back to camp, drove to the dam in his Ute, and tied a chain to the obstacle. As he backed up the truck, the chain tightened. Slowly a cow’s pelvis emerged from the muck.

  I watched with horror as Steve dislodged an entire cow carcass that had been decomposing right where I had been enjoying my refreshing dip. I must have been poking among its rib cage while I brushed my teeth and washed my hair.

  Steve dragged the carcass a good distance off.

  “Do you think we should tell the crew?” he asked me when he came back.

  “Maybe what they don’t know won’t hurt them,” I said.

  Steve nodded. “They probably won’t brush their teeth in there, anyway.”

  “Probably not,” I said, pondering the possibility of future romantic dips with Steve, and what might lurk under the water at the next dam.

  When we returned to camp, Steve insisted I sit down and not lift a finger while he cooked me a real Aussie breakfast: bacon and sausage with eggs, and toast with Vegemite. This last treat was a paste-like spread that’s an Australian tradition. For an Oregon girl, it was a hard sell. I always thought Vegemite tasted like a salty B vitamin. I chowed down, though, determined to learn to love it.

  As the sun rose in full, Steve began to get bored. He was antsy. He wanted to go wrangle something, discover something, film anything. Finally, at midmorning, the crew showed up.

  “Let’s go,” Steve said. “There’s an eagle’s nest my dad showed me when I was just a billy lid. I want to see if it might still be there.”

  Right, I thought, a nest you saw with Bob years ago. What are the chances we’re going to find that?

  John looked longingly at the dam. “Thought we might have a tub first,” he said. The grime of the desert covered all of them.

  “Oh, I think we should go,” I said hastily, the cow carcass fresh in my mind. “You don’t need a bath, do you, guys?”

  “Come on,” Steve urged. “Wedge-tailed eagles!”

  No rest for the weary.

  “So, Steve,” I said as gently as I could, not wanting to dissuade him as we headed out. “How old were you when Bob took you to see this nest?”

  “Must’ve been six,” he said. More than tw
o decades ago. I stared around at the limitless horizon. I had my doubts. I watched Steve’s eyes dart across the landscape. He struck out in a particular direction and led us over a series of jump-ups. Then he’d get his bearings and head off again.

  One hour. Two hours. If someone had put a gun to my head I could not have led them back to the dam.

  “I think I know where it is,” Steve said abruptly. We continued on a little farther. Sure enough, in the distance I saw an unusually large eucalypt. In its main fork was what appeared to be a thick pile of debris and sticks, carefully laid together, that must have been eight feet thick.

  There it was, an eagle’s nest, twenty feet off the ground.

  As we approached, we could see the tip of a bird’s wing hanging over the edge of the nest. I looked at Steve. He had the same thought I did: There was a dead eagle in the nest. But he swung up into the tree anyway, and after a moment called down to us, “Bring the camera up here.”

  Henry tried, but there was no way he could climb the tree carrying his gear. He hoisted the camera up to Steve instead. As Steve filmed, he described what he saw.

  “Two eaglets,” he said. “One well-developed chick and one chick that looks really bad, really tired.”

  That was nature’s way. When times were good, both eagle chicks would fledge. But there wasn’t always enough food to fledge two babies. The stronger chick would dominate at feeding time and get most of the food. Sometimes one chick would push the other out of the nest to its death, and the parents would be left to raise just one.

  Times were hard out on the edge of the Simpson Desert. It looked as though only one chick would survive. As we studied the structure, we could see how it had been added to over time. The nest may have been more than one hundred years old.

  As we surveyed the nest further, we discovered that it was full of bones. We used them to tell us what the chicks had been eating. As I examined the ground beneath the nest, I saw more bone fragments, littered far and wide. Almost all of them were the remains of bearded dragons. Poking up from the dirt were skulls, bits of skin, and the lizards’ hard scales. Mama and Papa Wedge-tail had been flying day in and day out, hunting the big bearded dragon lizards to feed their young.

  More amazing than that, though, was the fact that Steve had been able to locate the eagle’s nest so many years after he’d first visited it.

  We left, allowing the survival-of-the-fittest drama to play out between the chicks. They would live or die according to the harsh laws of nature. We headed deeper into the desert, to the black soil plains, after the most venomous snake on earth.

  In the late 1800s, cattle musterers drove their herds across thousands of miles of the arid landscape on the edges of the Simpson Desert. In cracks and fissures in the black soil lived snakes that would emerge from their underground homes to heat up in the sun. As the cattle approached, the snakes would move—giving the drovers the impression that they were actually following the cattle.

  “Whoa,” said the drovers, “those are some real fierce snakes.”

  That’s the story of how the fierce snake got its name. It is, drop for drop, more venomous than any snake in the world, but it causes little human disruption because it lives in such a remote environment. Fierce snakes disappear into subterranean holes and cracks, lying in wait for when the rat plague happens, as it does every few years. Then it’s happy days for the snakes, as they eat their fill.

  Not until the 1970s was the species rediscovered after first being described some eighty years earlier. Steve’s dad Bob was passionate about these secretive snakes, and he joined the scientists at the Queensland Museum to study them.

  Steve knew just how and when to find them. We headed out early the next morning, before there was wind. The temperature was exactly right at eighty-six degrees Fahrenheit. Steve got a faraway look in his eye, as though he was concentrating or communicating. Then he headed off. Ten minutes later, we were on the trail of a fierce snake.

  “Would you like to tail one?” Steve asked.

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “I don’t know how to catch a fierce snake.”

  Steve had already “tailed” one of the snakes. Gently grabbing the end of its tail, he could hold it at arm’s length and examine it. During this procedure, snakes would often defecate, and we could get some clue about what they’d been eating. Steve would tail a snake, put it in a bag, release it, and keep what remained.

  “You grab the next one,” Steve said. He spotted a four- or five-foot-long fierce snake. It glistened in the sun like glass, brilliantly shiny and sleek.

  “It’s warming up now,” Steve said as we approached. “You’re going to have to be quick.”

  Yes, Terri, I said to myself, please be quick so as not to get struck by the most venomous snake on earth. If you get bitten out here, you’re in a load of trouble.

  We crept up behind the fierce snake. I got close enough to grab it, but the snake suddenly and violently swung its head around, directly at me, poised and ready to strike. I backed off abruptly. Time and again I approached the snake just as I’d seen Steve do it: Walk up behind the snake as it started to slither away, and grab it by the tail. I knew what to do, but I couldn’t do it. Every time I reached down, the snake would swing around and I would jump a mile.

  We wandered farther and farther on the trail of the snake. I could see our truck way in the distance. I sweated profusely. I kept thinking the same thought. If I get bitten by this snake, I’m dead. Then I would try to push that thought away. Stop thinking, just grab the snake. Steve wouldn’t ask you to do something that you couldn’t do.

  But the whole process was becoming ridiculous. “What am I doing wrong?” I wailed.

  “You are too bloody scared,” Steve said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  Then I reached down and picked up the snake.

  It was magic. Once I had the nice, soft, supple body in my hands, it was as though the snake and I had a connection. Its skin was warm to my touch from sitting in the sun. I suddenly understood exactly how to hold on so it wouldn’t get away, and yet not squeeze it so tightly that it would get angry. The snake naturally kept trying to move off. I let the front part of its body stay on the ground and held the tail up.

  I felt such triumph—not that I had dominated the snake, but that it had let me pick it up. Steve held out the catch bag, and I carefully dropped the snake in. He tied a knot in the bag. We looked at each other and grinned. Then we both whooped and hollered and jumped in the air. He hugged and kissed me.

  “I’m proud of you, Terri,” he said. Once again I marveled at Steve’s instincts. He knew that this particular snake would be okay for me to pick up. He never hesitated, he never yelled at me or coached me—until I asked for help. Then he simply told me what to do.

  We headed back to the zoo, and back to the tangle of my immigration red tape. I had a renewed sense of confidence. I felt if I could face fierce snakes, I could face anything, even the Australian consulate.

  The lessons I took away from that trip always stayed with me. Give Steve the benefit of the doubt. If he takes off running after an emu, get the camera ready, because he’ll come back with one. If he says he’ll find a specific spot in a desolate landscape that he last visited more than twenty years before, don’t question him. Just ask him when he thinks we’ll get there.

  My education was just beginning. I would soon learn a few skills that no aspiring wildlife warrior should be without.

  Chapter Eight

  Egg Stealing

  I flew back to the States in December of 1992 with conflicting emotions. I was excited to see my family and friends. But I was sad to be away from Steve.

  Part of the problem was that the process didn’t seem to make any sense. First I had to show up in the States and prove I was actually present, or I would never be allowed to immigrate back to Australia. And, oh yeah, the person to whom I had to prove my presence was not, at the moment, present herself.

  Checks for processing
fees went missing, as did passport photos and certain signed documents. I had to obtain another set of medical exams, blood work, tuberculosis tests, and police record checks—and in response, I got lots of “maybe’s” and “come back tomorrow’s.” It would have been funny, in a surreal sort of way, if I had not been missing Steve so much.

  This was when we should have still been in our honeymoon days, not torn apart. A month stretched into six weeks. Steve and I tried keeping our love alive through long-distance calls, but I realized that Steve informing me over the phone that “our largest reticulated python died” or “the lace monitors are laying eggs” was no substitute for being with him.

  It was frustrating. There was no point in sitting still and waiting, so I went back to work with the flagging business.

  When my visa finally came, it had been nearly two months, and it felt like Christmas morning. That night we had a good-bye party at the restaurant my sister owned, and my whole family came. Some brought homemade cookies, others brought presents, and we had a celebration. Although I knew I would miss everyone, I was ready to go home.

  Home didn’t mean Oregon to me anymore. It meant, simply, by Steve’s side.

  When I arrived back at the zoo, we fell in love all over again. Steve and I were inseparable. Our nights were filled with celebrating our reunion. The days were filled with running the zoo together, full speed ahead. Crowds were coming in bigger than ever before. We enjoyed yet another record-breaking day for attendance. Rehab animals poured in too: joey kangaroos, a lizard with two broken legs, an eagle knocked out by poison.

  My heart was full. It felt good to be back at work. I had missed my animal friends—the kangaroos, cassowaries, and crocodiles.

  Steve and I had to shift an alligator to a new enclosure, and John came to film. Working with these large crocodilians was still pretty new to me. Steve jumped in and grabbed the full-grown female alligator, which immediately started heading for the water, dragging Steve with her.