Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [142]
Suzi pointed out a narrow, triangular opening in the tree's side. It was about seven feet high, and when we walked through, it led into a large hollow. On one occasion, she said, twenty-eight people had crammed inside. The tree hollow was like a cave, dark and smelling of fungus. We shone a flashlight over our heads, but the light was too dim to see how high the hollow went. Liquid dripped down from above. “That smells like bat piss,” Suzi said.
Despite appearances, the hollow was not unhealthy to the tree. When Eucalyptus regnans trees reach the age of about 120, hollows start to form at the base, or butt, from rot, fungi, bacterial activity, and wood-eating insects. Water and nutrients are carried to the treetop through the xylem inside the outer trunk, so the rotting heartwood isn't terribly consequential to the life of the tree. However, loggers don't care for the hollowedout butts because they can't sell the wood, and when they cut a tree like this one, they usually discard the butt and burn it. The hollows were useful to wildlife though—in fact, they were critical to forest life.
“This is an apartment block for animals,” Suzi said from the hollow's darkest recess. Because there was so much decay going on inside— microbial action made things warmer—the tree hollow was actually “heated” in winter. Bats, black cockatoos, sugar gliders, and owls all took refuge there. We wondered if a family of thylacines had ever used the Chapel Tree as their den.
Suzi said that Catholic priests, Buddhist monks from Tibet, aboriginal spiritual leaders, and representatives of the Ainu people had all visited the Chapel Tree and prayed for the forest. We decided to have a moment of silence ourselves.
As we meditated, we thought how apt the name Styx was for this forest —particularly this one around Skeleton Road. The forest was trapped in limbo—designated for the ax, but in a state of reprieve. How long before the choppers came and took this forest to the other side?
“O Great Pan,” we prayed, “save yourself !” Unfortunately, forest gods were notoriously unreliable.
“The government has the ability to act,” Suzi said. “If the government had acted a hundred years ago, we would still have the thylacine. It's the same thing with our old-growth forests.”
On our way out of the Styx valley we saw a few last scenes of devastation: a steep forested slope that had been cable-logged, more clear-cuts, and denuded land with invading trees growing in rows.
What made this all the more excruciating was that just to the west was the border of Tasmania's Southwest National Park. Somehow in drawing the boundaries for the national park, the largest trees in the Southern Hemisphere had been left immediately outside the lines.
29. CRYPTID
Back in Hobart, we had dinner at a fish place called Mures. We sat outside on the docks and Alexis jabbed his fork menacingly at a seagull that approached too close. A festive umbrella shaded our table and when we looked up we saw the face of the Tasmanian tiger. The umbrella was sponsored by the Cascade Brewery, and the stylized tiger was their logo. Thylacines were everywhere in Tasmania—and nowhere.
Our last hope for the tiger was a gentleman named Col Bailey. He was sometimes described as a “true believer” and had been searching for the thylacine for nearly forty years. When we called him at his home in Maydena, a town in the Tyenna valley near where the last known wild thylacine was captured in the 1930s, he instructed us to meet him at a crossroads outside of Mount Field National Park—just a few miles north of the Styx.
In the morning we headed back out toward the wilderness, following the main road along the Derwent River, then joining up