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“What boat?”

“I don't know.” He sighed. “I didn't know what to tell them.”

We had advised Alexis the day before that Chris and Dorothy should find something else to do today. After their politely bemused response to our visit to the Naarding site, we didn't think they would have the patience for our little fishing expedition. Our quarry? Astacopsis gouldi, one of Tasmania's most bizarre and elusive creatures.

“Is it rare?” Alexis asked.

“Very.”

If it weren't for the Internet, we probably never would have heard about it. We'd been doing Google searches to find out more about Tasmania and its wildlife and discovered that certain combinations of keywords led to unexpected material. When we put in “Tasmanian tiger + sightings,” Google spit back hundreds of Web sites about cryptozoology that lumped the tiger in with such mythical creatures as Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and the Chupacabra, a goat-sucking monster. Other keyword combinations led to a number of amateur science fiction stories and online role-playing games in which the Tasmanian tiger was a character (usually a futuristic hybrid or mutant with special powers). Living or extinct, the Tasmanian tiger had a pretty active life in cyberspace.

Further Googling served up scientific information—providing new leads in our search for strange Tasmanian beasts. That's how we found Astacopsis gouldi (“Tasmania + invertebrate”), an absolutely gargantuan species of crayfish. It was an extreme animal—the largest freshwater invertebrate in the world—and it lived only in Tasmania. Its rareness combined with the fact that it was the fiercest animal in the river ecosystem had earned it the nickname of freshwater or invertebrate thylacine. But most Tasmanians just called it the giant lobster.

We were driving down the Bass Highway to meet Todd Walsh, a freshwater biologist who's made saving the lobster and Tasmania's rivers his personal business. We had arranged to meet him at a turnoff near Wynyard about seventy miles back down the highway from Geoff King's house. Actually Geoff had arranged it. (He and Todd used to play footie together.) When we pulled up, Todd was waiting beside a red four-wheel-drive Terrano, wearing dark sunglasses and a gray T-shirt with a kangaroo on it. He was in his mid-thirties, with a bright-eyed open countenance and small slightly elfin features.

“G'day,” he said. “So you're the ones who want to see the famous lobster? Are you feeling fit?”

“Er …” We admitted we hadn't visited the gym recently.

“You're all right,” he said. “Gyms are for fuckwits anyway.”

Then he jumped into his four-wheel drive and we caravanned inland through rolling farm country. Eventually Todd stopped in front of a locked metal gate that blocked a gravel road. It was a logging route, but Todd had permission to go through. He pulled out his lobstering gear— traps, buckets, and bait—and distributed it among us. “We'll have to walk along here a bit.”

“So how come I've never heard of the lobster?” Alexis asked as we crunched along the gravel. “It's such an extreme animal.”

“It's the location, isn't it?” Todd said. “Tasmania's very isolated. The thylacine's popular because we shot 'em, and they died out. The devils are popular because of the cartoon—and the name. Devil. It's all marketing.”

But the lobster was getting to be somewhat well-known, he said, certainly among crayfish experts. “I've had crayfish people from all over the world fly in specifically to come to Tassie. It's like the Holy Grail.”

“What do they say when they see one?”

A smile flickered across Todd's face. “Fuck! That's what they say.”

We crunched along beside parched, brown pastureland. The temperature was climbing toward 90 degrees. After half a mile or so, trees began appearing on each side of the road. On the right were small, scrubby pines, all growing at a uniform height. What a weird little ecosystem, we thought. “That's a tree farm,” Todd said.

“Jesus,” said Alexis, looking at the evenly spaced trees. “It's like an invading army.”

Trees, Todd explained, had been cleared in order to grow