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“I don't know … Maybe I was temporarily deluded into thinking there was some hope.”

Not sure about the proper method of feeding beer to a pig, we tentatively poked the bottle over the fence. Slops seized the neck between his lips and chugged it in a single gulp.

Alexis went over to the Pajero and grabbed the heavy case containing his art supplies. “I'm going to paint a platypus,” he announced.

“You're not inspired to do a thylacine?”

“Not today. I don't want to go near the animal that suddenly seems never to have existed.” He disappeared into the pub.

We decided to leave him to it—this was the first time he had seemed interested in drawing—and drove six miles out to St. Columba Falls, where the barman said the fake sighting had occurred. Who knew? Maybe the hoax was a hoax.

We left the Pajero in a parking area next to a tour bus—with the image of a thylacine painted on its side. It took us about ten minutes to walk along the path to the falls. They were 295 feet high, with water pouring down on huge slabs of rock. The stream that flowed out of the waterfall burbled alongside banks overgrown with sassafras trees and tree ferns. The scenery reminded us of the Cascade Beer ad. All that was missing was a seductive-looking thylacine emerging from a bank of tree ferns to lap the water.

We stood there for about twenty minutes, willing a Tasmanian tiger to come out from behind the trees. We weren't picky. Relict, ghost, clone, animatronic, even one made from carpet fragments would do. But all we saw were black cockatoos flying over the treetops.

When we got back to the pub, we found Alexis in our room. It was pretty nice, a triple, designed for families and groups traveling together like ourselves—and it had been immaculate when the barman first showed it to us. Though we had been gone for less than two hours, Alexis had completely trashed the place. What had been a prim, bounce-a-coin-off-the-tight-fitting-sheets kind of room was now an artist's atelier cum opium den. The scent of marijuana blended with the acrid odor of chemicals. Dirty paintbrushes, crumpled pieces of paper, and plastic cups filled with dark, oozy liquids were spread around the room. Bloody tissues had been scattered across the floor.

“I lost my shit,” Alexis said.

We were stunned. Apparently he had gone off the deep end. “What happened?”

“No, I really lost my shit. Take a look out the window.”

The bags of devil and wombat scat had been removed from the Pajero and were now lying on the ground next to a neighboring cow pasture.

“I was drying them on the windowsill—and they fell out.”

We turned around and noticed that Alexis's foot was bandaged up.

“Have you been bleeding?”

“A leech got me. I must have picked it up when I went to pee in the forest.”

We imagined a hungry leech sensing the hot stream of urine and thinking “mealtime!” before inching over to Alexis's sandals. Alexis turned on his digital camera and showed us photos of the leech embedded in the sole of his bare foot. He had used his mini-blowtorch to heat up the ravenous worm until it disengaged. Then he put the creature—still engorged with his blood—in a clear, lidded paint cup. He had completely documented the experience on camera. At the bottom of the paint container, the leech was still alive, writhing slightly.

Unfortunately, he'd had a little trouble staunching the bleeding. “Yeah, it was really flowing.” As the leech was slurping, it had secreted the anticoagulant chemical, hiruden, from its salivary gland to prevent Alexis's blood from clotting.

Despite the chaos in the room, Alexis had produced a striking drawing. He had mushed up mud collected from the Meander River with acrylic matte medium from his art case. The result was a chocolate brown pigment.

“I mixed up four different concentrations, and I started with the lightest density and then progressively went darker. Then it sort of had a life of its own.”

It had come alive. Alexis had transformed the detritus-flecked mud into a platypus. The duck-billed