Steve & Me

by Terri Irwin

  Coming back from the school, Steve suddenly slammed on the brakes, skidding over the dirt. He cursed himself. “I was going too fast,” he said. “I think I ran over a bearded dragon.”

  He got out of the truck, completely crestfallen, until he discovered that the lizard was alive and well, sitting poised in the middle of the road.

  Steve got the lizard off the road and then lay down on the dirt with it to get it on film. “What a little ripper,” he said. “Look how he pops out his beard as a defense mechanism. He’s got all those spiny scales down his back to keep predators from eating him.”

  Steve was face-to-face with the lizard, which was all puffed up, trying to look intimidating. He was just inches away as he spoke with passion about the little desert dweller. The lizard, though, had other ideas. He decided he was a little bit tougher than Stevo. In an instant, the lizard had launched himself straight up in the air and latched onto Steve’s face.

  Steve jumped back, but not before he’d been solidly bitten on the nose.

  “You bit me on the nose, you little brat!”

  I burst out laughing. Steve took the opportunity to reiterate an important lesson. Whenever an animal nails you, it’s not the animal’s fault. It’s your fault.

  “I was sitting nose-to-nose with the little bloke,” he said. “Of course he was going to bite me.” He held no contempt for the lizard. Meanwhile, the crew and I were still recovering. We laughed so hard tears streamed down our faces. The lizard seemed to smile himself as he ran off and skittered up a log.

  As we continued down the dingo fence, we passed through gate after gate. Steve was driving, so I was the designated “gate getter.” Every single gate that we encountered had some new and inventive method of latching shut. Each farmer had his or her own design, and some were fascinatingly complicated. I’d have to look very carefully as I undid the contraption, so I’d have a hope of getting it properly closed again.

  Stop the truck. Figure out the gate. Open the gate, drive the truck through, close the gate.

  Some of the gates had been closed for years and years, and the saltbush had grown up to block them. I tried to push these gigantic overgrown tumbleweeds out of the way, while Steve was ever anxious to get going. I got good at battling my way through gate after gate.

  It was when we had to stop for Steve to change our second tire of the day that the unthinkable happened.

  Sui ran off into the bush and grabbed what looked like a small piece of wood. She was always chewing some stick, so I didn’t pay any particular attention. Then suddenly the fact of where we were hit me full blast. I ran over to her.

  “Drop it,” I yelled. She spat out the piece of wood, which turned out to be an ancient, dried-out piece of meat.

  Signs warning against 1080 poison had been posted on almost every gate that we went through. A cruel poison, 1080 basically makes a dog go mad. It will salivate and run around frantically, seemingly in extreme pain. Finally it will foam at the mouth and go into seizure, before it collapses. It’s a horrific way to die.

  We were afraid that the old piece of meat had originally been dosed with 1080. We spent a fretful night, monitoring Sui. She never showed any symptoms of poisoning, so I must have gotten to her just in time.

  Mile after mile, we followed the dingo fence—and didn’t find a single live dingo. We kept finding dead ones, hanging from trees and fences. When a dingo is killed, it has to be scalped in a certain way to qualify for a bounty.

  We saw endless dingoes skinned from their ears down their back, including their tail. The bounty hunters hang the carcass or pelt on whatever side of the fence the dingo was shot. That tells anyone who is passing by which side of the fence the dingo had been seen on. The hunters get ten dollars for each dingo scalp.

  As we continued heading south through the Flinders Ranges, we encountered harsh weather. It was freezing cold, and the rain came down horizontally. We drove until almost dark. In the headlights of the truck, I saw small animals popping out of the ground everywhere.

  Steve leaped out of the truck excitedly and motioned me over to get a close-up look at the creatures emerging from the mud.

  “Cycloranas,” Steve said, “water-holding frogs.” He explained that these frogs would burrow into the ground and then cover themselves with a membrane that would hold in water. They wouldn’t pee, and none of their bodily fluids would evaporate. They could remain underground for weeks, months, or even years, until the next rain hit.

  “Then they emerge up from their tiny tombs, lose their membrane, and are good as gold,” Steve said, marveling. “They’re ready now to reproduce and feed and do their own thing.”

  It was an epic task to get the camera out and set up the waterproof gear to film the cycloranas. The rain finally broke, and Steve was able to film a scene. We had been driving all day, out in the rain, changing flat tires from the debris on the track. Steve even had to repair the fence when the crew’s truck slid sideways across the slippery mud, knocking a neat hole in one section. Everybody was beyond exhausted.

  No matter how hard Steve tried, he couldn’t get his words right. He couldn’t properly explain how the frogs could go so long without water. “Membranes” became “mum-branes,” “water-filled” was “water-flood.”

  We were all getting frustrated. John said, exasperated, “Just give us something really concise.” I whispered two words into Steve’s ear. He turned to the camera.

  “Water…nah,” he said. The whole crew cracked up. Two words to sum up the water-holding frog.

  That night there was no way to light a fire to cook dinner. We got out a loaf of bread and a container of tomato sauce, and everyone had sauce sandwiches in the car. Since the vehicles were packed full of gear, it was impossible to sleep inside. No use erecting tarps, either, in the driving, sideways rain. So Steve laid out our swags with Sui in between them, and then wrapped the tarp around us like a giant burrito. We slept like that, with the rain pelting down on top of us. But we were so completely exhausted that we slept just fine.

  The next morning, the sun rose to a clear day. We all realized how muddy and road-weary we were after our eventful evening. One of the most challenging aspects of our journey was finding a place to take a tub. There weren’t always dams handy, and drinking water was too precious to bathe in. But since we were traveling along the dingo fence, we were in livestock country. It wasn’t unusual to come upon a trough with water running from a bore pipe, out in the middle of nowhere.

  In the daylight, we were lucky enough to spot a sheep trough not far from where we’d camped. This trough didn’t have a float valve, so it had overflowed and made a bit of a pond around itself. With all the sheep coming and going, the “pond” was more like thick, oozing mud than water. In spite of the obvious challenge of getting past the mud, I was determined to take advantage of a nice tub. As the only woman on the trip, I pulled the whole “ladies first” thing and headed off.

  I was excited as I hiked over with my toothbrush, soap, and shampoo. But as I arrived I was greeted by the overwhelming smell—a sheep had gotten bogged down in the mud and died some time ago. Its body was partially liquefied and teeming with maggots. Ignoring this little friend would be difficult, but I had no idea when I’d get my next chance to clean up. I picked my way around the mud and balanced precariously on the edge of the concrete slab that the trough rested on. The water was dribbling in slowly from the bore pipe, and three-quarters of the surface of the water was covered in an algae-like slime.

  After removing a patch of the green goo, I stashed my clothes on a dry corner of the concrete and eased myself in. I tried not to think about the water bugs nibbling on me, and I made a real effort not to stir up the sludge on the bottom of the trough—remnants of dead birds that had drowned. Put it out of your mind, I thought.

  As I held my breath, I went under. I resolved that I wouldn’t wash my hair again for a week. It was so icky to stick my head clear under! I finished up and let everyone have their turn. I supp
ose it was better than not bathing at all…perhaps.

  We spent twenty days and endured three thousand miles of jolting, pounding, off-road bush driving. But we had a hard-won sense of accomplishment when we pulled up on the stunning cliff-side view of the Great Australian Bight, a huge open bay carved out of the southern coastline. We had made it.

  Below us, three hundred feet down a sheer rock face, was the Southern Ocean. A pod of southern right whales passed by, their calves following along with them. Steve and I and the crew watched the family dramas of the whales play out below us.

  A calf felt naughty and went darting away from his mother’s side. Come back, the mother called, come back, come back, you naughty little whale. When she was under the water, we couldn’t hear anything, but as she surfaced we could actually hear the whale song from our perch three hundred feet in the air.

  Mama scolded the calf, and we saw the young whale come dutifully shooting back over to follow his mother for a while. Sometimes the calf would approach his mama for a drink of milk and nurse for a few minutes. Then he would escape once more, and the whole scenario played itself out all over again.

  We watched the whales for hours. That night around the campfire, we discussed whaling, how sad and cruel and horrible it was.

  “If we killed cows the way we killed whales, people wouldn’t stand for it,” Steve said. “Imagine if you drove a truck with a torpedo gun off the back. When you saw a cow you fired at it, and then you either electrocuted it over the course of half an hour or the head of the torpedo blew up inside of it, rendering it unable to walk or move until it finally bled to death.”

  “We’ve got to get that message out,” I said to Steve. But his idea was to bring the beauty and joy of the whales to people, so that they would naturally fall in love with them and not want to hurt them. He didn’t want to dwell on images that would make people sad and upset.

  Steve remained thoughtful and silent as the fire died. The ocean sounded against the cliffs below. The games of the whale families played over and over in our minds.

  In spite of our extensive searching, we never saw a live dingo down the whole line of our journey. It was time to try a different approach. The next morning the helicopter pilot arrived early. Going up with him, Steve actually finally spotted some dingoes from the air.

  The beautiful, ginger-colored dogs played along the fence, jumping over it or skirting under it with effortless ease.

  School holidays were upon us, and it would be getting busy at home, so I returned to the zoo by air, while Steve drove the Ute back. Greeting Shasta after my long time away made me feel both comforted and homesick. I missed my cougar, Malina, so much, and I wanted to continue to work on protecting cougars back in the States. So I resumed my efforts to bring Malina over to Australia.

  I soon learned that it is always easier for a bureaucrat to say no. They can’t get in trouble saying no. While some government departments were extremely supportive, others wouldn’t give me the time of day. I was absolutely crestfallen when ARAZPA would not support my application. In addition, ARAZPA’s Taxon Advisory Group (TAG), an accrediting organization for zoos, was of the considered opinion that because cougars were not endangered in most of their range in America, there was no need to make them a priority species in Australia. Therefore, Malina would have to remain in the United States.

  Their decision left me feeling very uncomfortable. All apex predators survive precariously. It is extraordinarily difficult to bring a predatory mammal species back after they land on the endangered list. I felt it was better to keep them off the list in the first place. Malina could have served as the “spokes-cat” for everything from Sumatran tigers to cheetahs. ARAZPA’s profound lack of support would be a recurring theme as I continued to battle my way through the red tape of bureaucracy.

  It was taking too long to get Malina to Australia, so I needed to get her more permanent housing in the States. Fortunately, I had fantastic friends at Wildlife Images near Grants Pass, Oregon. This wildlife rehabilitation facility was the best in the country, run by a family totally dedicated to helping wildlife. They agreed to take Malina and house her in a beautiful enclosure, complete with shady trees and grass under her feet. Steve came with me to Oregon, and we filmed her move to the new luxury accommodations.

  Sadly, Malina never made it to Australia. About a year after her move to Wildlife Images, she got sick. She was taken to a vet and sedated for a complete examination. It turned out her kidneys were shutting down. It could have been a genetic problem, or just old age. Either way, she never woke up.

  One night, as I cooked dinner in our home on the zoo grounds, I brooded over my troubles. I didn’t want to spend the evening feeling sorry for myself, so I thought about Steve out in the back, fire-gazing. He was a very lucky man, because for Steve, fire-gazing literally meant getting to build a roaring fire and sitting beside it, to contemplate life.

  Suddenly I heard him come thundering up the front stairs. He burst wild-eyed into the kitchen. He’s been nailed by a snake, I thought immediately. I didn’t know what was going on.

  “I know what we have to do!” he said, extremely excited.

  He pulled me into the living room, sat me down, and took my hands in his. Looking intensely into my eyes, he said, “Babe, we’ve got to have children.”

  Wow, I thought, that must have been some fire.

  “Ok-aaay,” I said.

  “You don’t understand, you don’t understand!” he said, trying to catch me up to his thoughts. “Everything we’ve been working for, the zoo that we’ve been building up, all of our efforts to protect wildlife, it will all stop with us!”

  As with every good idea that came into his head, Steve wanted to act on it immediately. Just take it in stride, I said to myself. But he was so sincere. We’d talked about having children before, but for some reason it hit him that the time was now.

  “We have got to have children,” he said. “I know that if we have kids, they will carry on when we’re gone.”

  “Great,” I said. “Let’s get right on that.”

  Steve kept pacing around the living room, talking about all the advantages of having kids—how I’d been so passionate about carrying on with the family business back in Oregon, and how he felt the same way about the zoo. He just knew our kids would feel the same too.

  I said, “You know, there’s no guarantee that we won’t have a son who grows up to be a shoe salesman in Malaysia.”

  “Come off the grass,” Steve said. “Any kid of ours is going to be a wildlife warrior.”

  I thought of the whale calves following their mamas below the cliffs of the Great Australian Bight and prepared myself for a new adventure with Steve, maybe the greatest adventure of all.

  Chapter Ten

  Animal Planet

  We were in far north Queensland, enjoying one of our many trips to Cape York Peninsula. We spent a lot of time with crocs in the wild here, and at the end of the trip, Steve had an idea. “I want to show you something,” he said, inviting me along on a drive. Usually such an invitation led to some new experience in the bush, or an exciting encounter with wildlife. This one was an encounter with an animal, all right, but it wasn’t in the bush.

  Steve was uncharacteristically quiet and subdued as we drove, and when we arrived at our destination, I understood why.

  A croc farm.

  It was a great expanse of land. A single one of the enclosures on the farm could have held our whole zoo. The breeding ponds were immense—and overcrowded.

  As soon as we arrived, Steve headed straight for the crocodile enclosures. Once inside, there were no fences or barriers to separate us from the big, territorial male crocs or the nesting females. There were only narrow, vehicle-wide tracks between the breeding ponds. The sense of exposure and vulnerability had me on edge. It was so different from the careful, respectful relationship we maintained with our own zoo crocs.

  “What’ll we do?” I asked Steve, eyeing the big salties on ei
ther side.

  “See these clubs, babe?” he said, picking one up from a whole collection that lay alongside the track. “They use these to belt the crocs.”

  As we walked the narrow strip of land between the ponds, Steve and I dodged strikes from male salties more than sixteen feet long, and from the aggressive, nesting females. We could be ambushed virtually anytime from any direction. If one crocodile came too close to another, they would even attack each other.

  We visited the farm’s nursery, where the eggs were hatched after collection and the babies were raised. I couldn’t wrap my mind around it. Every hatchling there would be used for the skin and meat trade. I wasn’t prepared for what I was about to see.

  It was the equivalent of the most heinous POW camp you could imagine. Steve and I entered a large shed filled with rows of lidded boxes. Rock-and-roll music spilled full blast from speakers mounted on the ceiling. The room was completely dark. One of the workers switched on the lights and lifted up one of the lids.

  Inside the box were a dozen or more small crocodiles, one or two feet long. So far, they had spent the whole of their existence inside such boxes. The baby crocs cowered pathetically as soon as the light hit their eyes.

  The worker lashed out with his stick. He bashed the crocs to force them into the corners of the box, striking them repeatedly, hard, wherever the stick happened to land. It took all my will not to scream “Stop!” and rip the stick out of his hands. What did he think he was doing?

  Steve looked at me, and I could tell he felt the same urge. “We’re on their turf now, mate,” he said to me quietly, meaning the croc farmers. As much as we wanted to right the evils of this cruel place, the business of crocodile farming was perfectly legal.

  The little crocs had no fight left in them. As they cowered, beaten back, the worker tossed meat to them. Then he slammed shut the lid of the box, plunging the baby crocodiles into darkness once more. That is how farm-raised crocs exist for the first three years of their lives, in a crowded, pitch-black prison, with constant, blaring music—then a sudden blast of light, a beating, and some food.