Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [141]
After this little adventure, Suzi suggested we cool off in the river. Fortunately, the forest immediately bordering the Styx River was protected by law. No logging was permitted within 130 feet of the banks. So far, that rule had been obeyed at least in this part of the valley.
Suzi led us down a path through pure rain forest that was junglelike with myrtles, tree ferns, and spikes of native laurel with green drooping leaves. Along the riverbank, sunlight poured through a gap in the canopy. The Styx was only about twenty-five feet wide and dark reddish brown, stained by runoff from the buttongrass plains higher up.
When we dipped our feet into the water, our toes went numb. The Styx was frigid. Backing away, we resigned ourselves to standing on the bank and admiring the tree ferns. Suzi dropped into the river without testing it and then began mocking us from the opposite shore. “I go swimming here every time I come, no matter what season. Come on!”
“No rat lover is going to show me up,” Alexis muttered. He grimaced as he hit the water, then doggy-paddled over to the far bank, lifted himself out, and shivered in the sun. We plunged in, too. The swiftness of the current caught us off guard. We struggled to get hold of a moss-covered snag so as not to be swept downstream.
Fending off the chill, we took in the surrounding rain forest. The far bank was a riot of life. There were round-leaved myrtle trees, possibly as old as five hundred years; tree ferns with spongy brown trunks hosting countless species—epiphytes, lichens, fungi, finger ferns, filmy ferns— that wore their dying brown fronds like beards; and dead wet logs covered with bright green mosses. Suzi said this rain forest was the work of a thousand years. Yet it was also continually being renewed, always young.
We ducked our faces into the water. All we could see was brown murk. The icy temperature was unbearable. We quickly leapt out and attempted to defrost.
Suzi filled up a plastic bottle with river water. It was the color of Lip-ton's iced tea and had tiny bits of detritus suspended in it. She offered us a drink.
“No thanks.”
She looked offended.
“It won't make you sick. The Styx River is pure here.”
We took tentative sips of the tea-colored liquid. It tasted fine.
“Here's to immortality,” said Alexis.
We hoped no platypuses had been crapping upstream.
We were still dripping wet when Suzi turned the station wagon off the main route through the valley into a gravel offshoot. It was called Skeleton Road and had been built for logging, but the forestry folks had run into a snag. A wedge-tailed eagle's nest had been discovered in one of the trees intended for felling about two hundred feet from the road. These eagles, which had wingspans of seven feet, were an endangered species in Tasmania. There were only 130 pairs of breeding “wedgies” left on the island. Their nests were huge conglomerations of sticks, usually added to over many years and constructed in the highest eucalyptus tree available. Nests could weigh more than eight hundred pounds.
Under the Forest Practices Code, Forestry Tasmania was required to leave a buffer zone of about twenty-two acres between any eagle's nest and logging operations so that the wedgies would not be scared away. Currently, the nest was not occupied, but the forest had been given a temporary reprieve in case the eagles decided to come back. Meanwhile, the Wilderness Society had been using the protected forest surrounding the nest to promote the Styx to the world.
Suzi took us to see the Chapel Tree. It was an eighty-three-meter-(272-feet-) tall eucalyptus, standing on an enormous