Carnivorous Nights (18 page)

The last trap was set beneath a giant fallen log. Todd looked positively Lilliputian when he stood on top of it. He leaned over the edge for more than a minute, peering down into the submerged trap, assessing the situation. Finally, he slowly pulled the line up. As the trap became visible just beneath the surface, we saw a shadow, something large and dark. It was a big male—more than twice as big as the two we had caught earlier. Todd held him up, and he waved his husky claws. This crayfish was more than a foot long.

“He's a buck, a sexually mature male, about fourteen or fifteen years old. Watch out for the claws. He'd break your finger.”

Biggie had incredible body armor. His hard, crusty shell was dark bronze and reinforced with various serrations and barbs. His claws were surrounded by spikes. Still glistening from the water, he angrily waved his five pairs of brawny legs. He looked like he was hopped up on steroids.

“It's a pretty well-defended animal,” Todd said, quickly measuring him. “Not too much can get at it.”

From the tip of his claws to the tip of his fanlike tail, Biggie was thirteen inches long. Todd placed him on the ground, so we could get a better look.

Biggie's eyes were like black beads, sitting atop quarter-inch-long stalks. His eyes had a distinctly intelligent look about them. For a hulking crustacean, they were profoundly expressive—and what they were expressing was outrage.

Clearly Biggie had never experienced such effrontery in his life. If the tiger was once the king of Tasmania's terrestrial realm, the lobster was the king of the rivers—at least this river—and he was going to assert his dominance.

He leaned his antennae back and reared up, his claws poised to strike. Alexis stuck his nose down to get a closer look and Biggie clapped his claws together.

We held a pencil right next to Biggie as a measure of comparative size and got ready to take a picture. But then he grabbed the pencil in his
right claw and waved it as if to say, “How'd you like me to write a book about you?????”
Three American fuckwits travel to Tasmania on an illdefined journey in search of a long-lost tiger and are eaten by a rare and amazing lobster, God's gift to crayfishdom.

“Hopefully,” said Todd, “this is the animal that saves our river system.”

“He's kind of sexy,” Alexis pointed out.

Todd looked thoughtful. “They have been called sexy before,” he said, studying Biggie's claw. “That's a hell of a nipple clamp.”

W
hen we got back on the Bass Highway, Alexis tried to call Dorothy and Chris. They had arranged for us to stay at the Sunset Holiday Villas in Arthur River, a few miles south of Geoff 's property. When he reached the proprietor, she told him that Chris and Dorothy had gone out to dinner. Alexis was worried about not getting back on time, but we figured we had better eat, too. This was not a part of the world where stores and restaurants stayed open late. Since the Bass Highway offered nothing to eat but pasture, we veered off toward the town of Stanley.

Stanley is situated at the end of a four-mile-long finger of peninsula that juts into the Bass Strait. A huge, steep-walled rock called the Nut hovers over the town. From a distance, the Nut seemed to rise like a biscuit and looked like a big, fat Pillsbury Grand. About 12.5 million years ago, the five-hundred-foot-high Nut started out as a lake of boiling hot lava inside a volcano. At some point the lava lake cooled down, solidifying
into greenish basaltic rock. Ultimately, the softer rock of the volcano's cone eroded away, leaving this squat cylindrical landmark.

As we sped up the peninsula toward the Nut, twilight began to descend. The narrow roadway unfurled like a black ribbon in front of us. We wanted to get there before the little town shut down.

Suddenly in the dimming light about fifty feet ahead, we saw three native hens standing on skinny legs beside the blacktop. All three started to cross, but then two of the hens saw the Pajero coming and skittered to a stop. The third native hen put on a fabled burst of speed, dashing across the road like a sprinter.
It made it!
But then it looked back. When it saw the other birds hadn't followed, it started back and dived right in front of us.

“Suicide hen!” Alexis shouted, as we slammed on the brakes.

We heard a thunk and looked out the back window to see its lifeless body rolling away. When it came to a stop, one of its little wings was pointing upward, the feathers ruffling slightly in the breeze.

It's one thing to see a dead animal on the side of the road. It's another thing to be responsible for it. We had vowed not to kill any animals in Tasmania. Now we were responsible for the end of a dynasty.

Alexis pulled out his
Field Guide to Tasmanian Birds.
He put a checkmark next to the native hen's picture. Beside it he wrote, “KOR.” Killed on road.

When we got to Stanley, we stuck our heads into a little café called the Stranded Whale. It was a tearoom that served plates of scones with pots of jam and clotted cream. But there was something incongruous about the decor. The walls were decorated with photographs of whales—all of them dead or dying. They had washed up on Stanley's beaches, which appeared to be a magnet for strandings. By way of explanation, the waitress said the Stranded Whale was owned by an oceanographer.

“What's with the predilection for giving out-of-the-way watering holes morbid names like the Slaughtered Lamb and the Bucket of Blood?” we asked Alexis.

“I don't know. I thought that was only in the movies. Maybe we should open a bar and call it the Asphyxiated Cat.”

A little girl sitting at one of the tables—she was about three years old— pointed at one of the dead whales. “Mama, look at the big fishie!” she said.

Alexis immediately corrected her under his breath. “It's a cetacean,” he muttered. Then he pointed over our shoulders. “Hey, that's
Astacopsis gouldi
!”

We turned around. On the wall hung a monster-sized pair of claws. They were mounted trophy-style and posed to point menacingly toward the café's ceiling. The claws alone were fifteen inches long.

We remembered what Todd had told us about crayfish specialists and what they said the first time they saw the lobster.
Fuck!
we thought.

These claws were big enough to pincer us by the ears. We knew Biggie hadn't really been all that big. But these claws suggested a gargantuan lobster—one that probably measured a yard long from the top of the claws to the tip of the tail. Nothing that big could have lived in the Hebe. Could it?

“Maybe they should rename this place the Killer Crustacean,” Alexis said.

On the drive back down the peninsula, we couldn't stop thinking about
Astacopsis gouldi.
The giant claws spoke to us of possibilities, of phenomenal creatures and strange beasts that were just out of our reach.

We thought about the Tasmanian tiger. The evidence—or lack of it— pointed to the tiger's extinction. But on the flip side of the facts was faith—a lot of people had it. Probably half the people in Tasmania.

A few years ago, we had met a Buddhist monk. He was from the Himalayan country of Bhutan. More than most countries, Bhutan is untouched by Western influences. The king of Bhutan employs an official Migo hunter, and there is a national park devoted to this animal's preservation. The Migo is better known to most people as the Abominable Snowman or Yeti. It's a cryptozoological creature—a mystery animal—meaning that people report seeing it all the time, but there's no scientific evidence that it actually exists. We asked the monk if the Migo was real. He said of course it was real, as real as anything. It simply didn't exist in
our
reality.

Was the Tasmanian tiger like this? Here, but not here? Had it passed on to another realm? Or was it just hiding?

When we turned back onto the Bass Highway, nightfall began to descend. It was a slow process, a progression of flame-colored clouds parading across miles of pale purple sky, finally fading to black. In the
diminishing light, the sharp forms of eucalyptus trees stood out across glowing pasturelands until they finally dissolved into darkness. This transition, from day to night, was captured long ago by Bernard Cronin, a Tasmanian writer. His poem “The Way to Marrawah,” written in 1917, included a section about evening on this very stretch, the thirty secluded miles between the regional center of Smithton and Geoff 's remote community.

Except for our headlights, the road had gone completely dark.

“I think Dorothy's going to be pissed,” Alexis said from the gloom of the back seat.

“We're getting there.”

As we drove, flecks of white began softly striking our windshield. At first, there were just a few, but then the intensity began to increase.

“This is the strangest thing I've ever seen,” said Alexis.

We peered into the darkness. Small, delicate white moths in swarm numbers were fluttering, falling through the black sky. It looked like it was snowing.

We wondered where the moths were coming from. Had a migration blown in off the Bass Strait? Or maybe they had just emerged from their cocoons en masse. When Geoff had told us that young Tasmanian devils could live off moths, we thought that was pretty slim pickings. Apparently not. This would be a feast.

Pale wings thwacked softly against our windshield, coating it with body parts.

“Roadkill,” said Alexis each time one struck. “There's another roadkill. You killed it.” We tried to turn on the squirter to spray them off, but the windshield wipers came on instead, smearing insect gore across the glass.

As we drove through the nocturnal moth-storm, it was as if we had entered a combination carnival ride and shooting gallery. It was almost like a cartoon. Strange little animals kept popping up on the side of the highway, threatening to run out in front of us. A young pademelon tried to cross the Pajero's path and then leapt back to safety. A Bennett's wallaby dashed out and managed to get past before we smashed it. We clenched our teeth:
We will not kill a marsupial, we will not kill a marsupial …

“Hey, do you think you could drive any slower?” Alexis asked.

Although Geoff had recommended sixty kilometers per hour as a safe nonlethal speed, we were barely pushing forty.

By the time we rolled up to Geoff's house, it was 10:30 P.M. We apologized for coming by so late to pick up the rest of our gear, but he seemed thrilled to see us—or at least Alexis. During the day, he had looked up Alexis's artwork on the Internet and seen some paintings Alexis had made of Pleistocene creatures such as saber-toothed cats and the American mastodon, using tar from the La Brea Tar Pits. They were shadowy, fossil-like impressions. Geoff had also located some Rockmans of cockroaches, seagulls, and a Norway rat. The paint had been made using leachate from a garbage dump in New York City.

“They're absolutely fantastic, mate. I was stunned,” Geoff said. Alexis's plan was to use similar materials to paint Tasmanian wildlife. In the spirit of things, Geoff presented Alexis with two half-gallon-sized plastic bags filled with animal scat. “It's probably more than you can use …” he said apologetically.

One bag was filled with cube-shaped wombat scat. The other bag contained Tasmanian devil shit, and it was pretty fresh—oily and covered with what we took to be white mold. “That's actually bone fragments,” Geoff said.

We knew Alexis had asked Geoff for these materials, but we wondered if he had been high at the time. The idea was that Alexis would mash the scat up and mix it with acrylic medium, thereby creating a unique pigment. We imagined Geoff out on his beautiful seaside property, picking up pieces of wild animal dung and inspecting them to see if they were painterly.