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“No worries,” Todd said. “You'll get your bush bearings in a minute.”

As we proceeded over ground that was often the consistency of the inside of a Three Musketeers bar, we quickly discovered it was a good idea to keep moving. If we stepped on top of a fallen log and paused for too long to plot our next step, one of our legs would crash through with a crunch, leaving us knee-deep in decaying wood.

Todd himself moved through the wet forest with ease. As he effortlessly sprang onto logs and over the wet, shifting ground, he looked like some kind of nimble forest cat. Slender with a light, athletic build, he seemed designed for the bush.

In flat sections when we dared to look away from our feet, we studied the woods more closely. The canopy was more than one hundred feet overhead. Mixed in with the eucalyptus trees were rain forest species like myrtle and sassafras. These tree species were ancient, Todd said, with fossil forms dating back 80 million years. They had small, leathery green leaves, and their trunks were tall, straight, and solid—good for holding on to.

“So is this a good place for lobsters?” we asked Todd.

“It is. Trees are very important to river systems. Lobsters mainly eat rotting wood. But if they find a dead roo or a fish on the river bottom, they'll eat it. The biggest ones are fourteen pound and a bit over three foot long.”

Alexis whistled.

“Yeah, they're pretty big. 'Course, I haven't seen any over ten pound.”

The biggest lobsters, he said, had all been trapped and eaten. Freshwater lobsters were a delicacy in this part of Tasmania—so much so that the Tasmanian Parks and Wildlife Service had declared the lobster a vulnerable species. Lobsters could live until they were forty years old, and they just kept growing year after year. But the biggest, oldest, meatiest lobsters were now extremely rare. In 1998, the government had imposed an allout fishing ban to give the giant lobsters a chance to recover. “It will be a few years before we see those sizes again,” Todd said. He began to pick his way across a boggy flat.

We followed and our boots plunged into soft, wet mud. Then we slid down a muddy embankment on our backsides and found ourselves at the river's edge.

When we left the dim light of the forest, the sunlight on the river was dazzling.

“It's called the Hebe, H-E-B-E,” said Todd. He pronounced it “he bee,” as in heebie-jeebies. “It comes from a place called Dip Range and it runs into the Flowerdale River, which runs into the Inglis River.” Geoff had told us his great-great-granddad had drowned in the Inglis River while crossing it on horseback.

We looked down at the water. It was the color of freshly brewed tea. “Why's the water brown?”

“It's tannin.” Most of the rivers in Tasmania are this color, he said, stained by natural runoff from the buttongrass plains covering Tasmania's hills.

The Hebe was slow and meandering, twisting out of view every couple hundred feet. Huge eucalyptus logs fell over it and across it and lay half submerged. Branches hung down over its steep banks, which were overgrown with trees and ferns. It was the most pristine river we had ever seen.

“This is as good as you'll see anywhere,” Todd agreed. “It's one of the lobster's last strongholds. Lobsters only live in northern Tassie and only in rivers that flow into the Bass Strait, except for the Tamar. They're also in the Arthur catchment, which flows near Marrawah where you just came from. But that's it.”

Todd laid out his fishing gear, four collapsible basket-shaped nets, and unwrapped his bait, rainbow trout heads and a local saltwater fish called stripey trumpeter. “This will be a treat for them,” he said. With a piece of wire, he skewered the fish heads and tied them to the nets.

We asked him if he did a lot of fishing.

“I'm a fisherman from way back. My grandfather, father, and myself used to catch and eat lobsters.”

Back in the 1940s and 1950s, his grandfather told him, you couldn't walk for three feet in a river without coming across a lobster. Local people would take home pots