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It sounded pretty convincing.

After gorging on cheese, we drove over to the Pub in the Paddock, which was the only other building in the valley as far as we could see. It looked like a good place to get information. However, just outside the pub, we were sidetracked by the sight of a spectacular pig. The pig— which was the size of a mini-tractor—was standing in a pen, where a sign announced his name was Slops and read “HI! GEEZ I'M DRY. I'D LUV A BEER.” Funny, he didn't look dry. He looked like he had just come back from The Lost Weekend.

Next to Slops's muddy pen, two rusting drums were filled with hundreds of empty beer bottles, or stubbies as they're called in Australia. The most popular beer in northern Tasmania, we had learned, was locally made Boag's Draught. But Slops wasn't picky. Sifting through his collection, we found bottles of Cascade Export Stout, Victoria Bitter, James Boag's Premium Light, Mercury Medium Sweet Alcoholic Cider, and Carlton Cold-Filtered Bitter. He snorted at us through the fence. On closer inspection, he didn't look so much like a souse as a friend, grunting congenially and inviting us to share a cold one with him.

“Do you think he wants another beer?”

“If Slops has a drink, I'm going to light up another bowl,” said Alexis.

The Pub in the Paddock was a bed-and-breakfast as well as a pub, so we decided to take a room there for the night in order to pursue our tiger investigations. Inside, the barman and four or five customers were deep in conversation. After much hemming and hawing, we finally caught his attention. In spite of the fact that he owned a beer-drinking pig, he was a no-nonsense guy. He asked us to pay for our room in advance—and he informed us that since there was nowhere else to eat in Pyengana, we would be having dinner in his pub at six o'clock.

We were aching to ask about the Pyengana tiger sighting, but there was something about the barman's cool manner that made us reticent to raise the subject.

“Nice pig,” we said instead.

This turned out to be an okay topic. The barman informed us that Slops had recently been cutting back on his alcohol consumption. Representatives from the RSPCA had stopped by not long before. They had suggested that drinking Boag's Draught night after night wasn't healthy for a pig. So the barman had begun watering down the contents of Slops's stubbies, creating a pigs-only lite beer. The barman sighed and looked wistful. Gone were the days when Slops could drink seventy-six full-strength beers in an evening.

He seemed to be opening up, and we thought it was a good time to introduce the subject of the tiger.

“So …uh… we'd heard there was a tiger sighting here a few years ago …”

He looked at us coldly for a moment, as if he were examining a speck of dirt on the bar. “Hoax,” he said curtly.

The men and women huddling around the bar looked our way. We saw a ripple of recognition in their eyes: oooooh, tiger nutters.

The barman looked as if he would have liked to have ended the conversation there.

“But wasn't it a park ranger who saw the tiger?” we asked.

“It was a hoax,” he repeated. Clearly, something about the story offended his sensibilities. He told us the rest of it reluctantly.

The Pub in the Paddock—and Slops—changed hands frequently. This barman was the fourth owner since the purported tiger sighting. The fellow who owned it in 1995 had evidently paid a part-time forest ranger $500 to say he had seen a tiger by the town's famous high waterfall. “It brought a mess of TV crews and visitors from the mainland. The pub was crowded for three weeks.” It had all been a ploy to drum up business— apparently it was still working. The people at the bar seemed to be quietly chuckling.

We decided to buy Slops a beer. At least the pig wasn't a hoax. The barman sold us a watered-down Cascade Premium Lager with two Tasmanian tigers on the label.

As we walked out to Slops's pen, Alexis looked dejected. “I can't believe it was a hoax,” he said.

“Aren't all