Carnivorous Nights_ On the Trail of the Tasmanian Tiger - Margaret Mittelbach [50]
This would be our first journey into the Tasmanian bush. “Anything we should watch out for in the woods?” we asked.
“A lot of people are worried about the snakes. But on the whole, I'm more scared of bears.”
“Bears?” There were no bears in Tasmania.
“I went to America for a crayfish conference and I was shit-scared of going into the American woods. It's the unknown …”
“I saw a bear on the porch of my country house—” Alexis began.
“Bugger that! A nine-foot grizzly coming at me? I'll take a six-foot tiger snake. Now that's all right.”
Six feet?
“So,” Alexis said, “the tiger snake is the one to be concerned about?”
“All the snakes are poisonous over here. If you stand still, they'll go right past you.”
“What happens if you get bit?” we asked.
“Ninety-nine times out of a hundred you won't be. But if you are, the tiger snake's venom delivery system isn't all that effective. Its fangs are really small. The mainland's a bit more deadly. They have some nasty ones over there.” He brushed a few flies from the bait bucket he was carrying. “Taipans are pretty aggressive,” he continued. “They're probably the only snake you've really got to watch. That's an angry snake. A lot of people say tiger snakes are angry at this time of year, but they're just more active.”
What exactly was the difference between “active” and “angry”? We wished we had worn thicker pants.
Todd pointed out some tall clumps of grass growing on the edge of the forest. They had two-foot-long, dull green blades. “Watch out for cutting grass. It's more common than snakes,” he said. “Don't grab it. Even if you're falling over, don't grab it.” We looked more closely at the cutting grass. Each blade had paper-thin, finely serrated edges. “It's like a scalpel,” Todd said. Just then he turned off the road and into the trees.
As soon as we pierced the wall of forest, we were enveloped in shade and damp. Thick-trunked trees climbed up high overhead and fanned out into a leafy mass. Ferns covered the sloping forest floor, and dead trees lay where they had fallen, wearing thick coats of luxuriant green moss. A moment before, we had been in a virtual desert. This was lush, primordial. We felt like we had entered a time warp.
“There's no trail,” Todd explained, hopping over a fallen log and starting down a steep slope. “See that creek? We'll follow that down to the river to avoid the undergrowth.”
As we bushwhacked down, a thick layer of decaying wood, rotting leaves, and mud sucked at our boots. Huge, decomposing logs blocked our way. Looming overhead and making up the understory were tree ferns—twenty-foot-high holdovers from the Age of the Dinosaurs with massive green fronds sprouting like hair from the tops of weird, spongy trunks.
“I feel like I'm on Skull Island,” Alexis said, looking up into a parasol of seven-foot-long fern fronds. We all gazed upward but there was no sign of King Kong or his brother and sister apes.
“This is wet sclerophyll,” Todd said, “which is almost rain forest, but not quite.”
Sclerophyll means “hard leaf ” and referred to the waxy coating on the leaves of the eucalyptus trees that dominated the canopy. But this forest was anything but hard.
It was a riot of growth and decomposition—living and dying, slippery and rough. Fallen logs and dead spars practically melted into the ground. As we took each step, the forest floor shifted in ways we didn't expect. We clutched at tree trunks, logs, and branches for support.
“A lot of the trees are rotten,” Todd warned. “Don't grab a dead tree. Things tend to fall away.”
You'd think telling the difference between a live tree and a dead one would be easy. It wasn't. When we grabbed on to one reddish-colored tree trunk, it literally crumbled away in our hands, and we toppled backward,