Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [138]
Once again, the picture raised more questions than it answered. “Where was it captured in the wild?” Bob wondered. “Was this animal sent to a zoo overseas?” Although the senator's search had officially ended decades before, he was still collecting and sifting evidence.
28. FLAILING IN THE STYX
A few days later, still mulling over the fate of the tiger, we headed west out of Hobart with Suzi Pipes, a campaigner for the Tasmanian Wilderness Society. She was driving us to the Styx valley—the one Bob had told us about—in her Nissan Bluebird station wagon. And while relieved to let someone else take the wheel for a while, we were not entirely comfortable with her laissez-faire motoring style. She seemed to think the road was a distraction.
Suzi was about five feet two inches tall, with a short blond bob. She was bonding with Alexis over the topic of pets. He had shown her the boudoir photo of his cat, Beatrice.
“I really miss my puss'ems,” he said.
“I know how you feel,” said Suzi. “I already miss my rats.”
Suzi kept Norway rats as pets. They roamed freely through her house. Recently they had staked out territory in her bedroom and were biting holes in her bedsheets. While telling this story, she was looking over her shoulder at Alexis in the back seat. Meanwhile, we were trying to alert her that we were rapidly approaching a car stopped in our lane.
“Uh, Suzi … there's a car … watch out!”
She turned around and slammed on the brakes just in time. “Sorry,” she said cheerfully. Next to the stopped car, a man and a woman were crouching on the highway and examining the pouch of a dead wallaby, presumably looking for a joey that might have survived the crash. Little did they know how close they had come to becoming roadkill themselves.
As she slowed down to observe them, Suzi told us she had always wanted to look after an orphaned marsupial. “If you're caring for a joey, you can take them to work with you. You can take them to the cinema. You're allowed.” We wondered whether young Ruby, the wallaby who hopped through our motel room in Arthur River, would have enjoyed going to the movies. Perhaps Ruby would have appreciated marsupial exploitation films like Kangaroo Jack and Howling III: The Marsupials.
The Wilderness Society, Suzi told us, was heading the crusade to preserve Tasmania's old-growth forests. The Styx Valley was home to some of the tallest trees in the world. Yet half the valley was designated as “production forest,” which meant that large swaths of old-growth trees were being chopped down.
Suzi drove off the highway onto an unpaved logging road, and we crossed a wooden bridge over the Styx River. We paused to consider the implications of crossing a real river with a mythological name and watched the dark water curve off into shadows beneath ancient trees. The bridge's supports were made with whole, unfinished logs of astonishing size. The thylacines that had once drunk from this river had truly lived among giants.
Our first stop in the valley was the Big Tree Reserve. Ironically, we had to pass by ugly clear-cuts and tree plantations to get there. The reserve is home to what has been dubbed “The Big Tree,” a Eucalyptus regnans that is eighty-six meters (282 feet) tall. We walked along a gravel trail lined with informational signs that had been laid down through the forest.
When we reached the Big Tree, we looked up and thought, Living things aren't supposed to get this big. At its base, the Big Tree was fortythree feet around. It would have taken an army of tree huggers to embrace it. Next to it Alexis looked like a termite standing underneath