Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [146]
Australia was not short on its own crypto-animals. The Yowie was Aus-tralia's answer to Bigfoot, a giant hominid covered in thick hairy fur. The people who looked for it were called Yowie hunters, and there were even Yowie candies. The Bunyip was a celebrated cryptid seen on the Australian mainland. In the book Cryptozoology A to Z, it is listed as a large hairy creature with the head of a horse that lives in rivers and lakes. But we had personally heard the Bunyip described as a ten-foot-high beast that combined every Australian marsupial and had huge fangs.
Col was adamant that the thylacine should be removed from the pantheon of cryptozoological animals. “Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, Yowies, and Bunyips have never been proven. The thylacine existed. They slot the tiger in with the cryptids because it's a mystery and presumed to be extinct. Strictly speaking, cryptozoology looks for things that are unknown, whereas the tiger is known to have existed.”
Alexis and Col discussed a cryptozoologist who went to the Congo to look for a dinosaur called Mokele-mbembe and ended up being imprisoned by rebel soldiers. “Is it worth risking your life looking for some fanciful animal?” Col asked. “Dinosaurs in the Congo? Come on!”
Then again, Col admitted to risking his own life when he ventured alone into the bush. “I get out into areas that nobody else goes into. I'm getting old. If I fall down, I'm devil meat. And they will eat you. An old bushie who worked in forestry told me that he lost one of his workmen and didn't know where he had gone. Then the police came to him and said we would like you to identify him. All they had was a wristwatch and the soles of his shoes. They eat from the anus up, you know.”
“It starts out fun but then goes terribly wrong,” said Alexis.
As we drove up the narrow mountain road, a lake came into view that presented a misty, mysterious scene. The white spars of thousands of dead trees rose from underneath the water. It was a drowned forest.
“This is Lake Gordon,” Col told us. “It used to be forested hills and valleys with small rivers, but it was dammed in the late 1960s.” The Hydro-Electric Commission of Tasmania had constructed a 460-foot-high concrete dam across the Gordon River, flooding 105 square miles of Tasmanian wilderness just north of Lake Pedder.
“It's haunting,” Alexis said. “An ancient forest submerged like a lost city.”
Col said dry weather in recent years had dropped the level of the lake 130 feet and unveiled the ghost forest. Red-stained rocky banks were also being exposed, and the original contours of the land were reemerging from the lake like a buried corpse. “They didn't count on having so many dry years,” said Col. “Before they logged and built this road, this area used to have more rain. When they took the trees out, it seemed to do something.”
Next, we passed columns of white, green, and blue wooden boxes stacked up by the roadside. “You might want to close your windows,” Col suggested. For a moment, we were reluctant—it was so hot and the breeze was so pleasant. Then we heard the telltale bzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Bees— perhaps indignant, perhaps just curious—had begun flying up to the Pajero.
“Whenever you see the hives, you know there's a leatherwood forest,” said Col.
Alongside the road, among the eucalyptuses and myrtles, we saw thickly foliated trees with long oblong leaves, blanketed in white blossoms. These trees were leatherwoods, a rain forest species that grows only in Tasmania and is very slow growing. Leatherwoods don't produce nectarrich flowers until they are more than seventy years old, and they are most productive between the ages of 175 and 210. By feeding on their blossoms, bees in fourteen thousand hives around Tasmania make more than one million pounds of honey a year—and it is one of the rarest and strangest honeys in the world. We had bought