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“This tiger's had a good feed,” said Col critically. “He's overweight.”

“She's carrying pouch young,” said Alexis a bit defensively.

“Could be,” said Col. “Just a suggestion, make them thinner. They do taper down at the belly.”

Col launched into a spontaneous lecture. “The thylacine had a six-foot-long body (some people say five feet, but I say six). It was two-and-a-half-feet high. It has short legs and a big woofy head and a long stiff straight tail.” We noticed that Col was shifting back and forth between the past and present tense.

“It's like a greyhound dog, very narrow in the loins but with a big deep chest which speaks of an animal that has big endurance. And stripes of course. And big jaws that can open very wide to crush and suffocate. The female tiger, which used to be called a slut or a bitch, is a third smaller. She has a backward-opening pouch, which she kept her young in. The male had a flap of skin over his private organs—it was protection, not a pouch. The male's head is much woofier. Female is daintier. But just like you get some blokes that are more feminine, it's the same with tigers.”

Just then, a warm breeze kicked up and the paintings started to flutter off. Alexis scrambled to pick them up before they dropped into the nearby stream.

Col suggested we all go for a drive. “Got room in the bus?” he asked. “I'll take you near the Florentine and Tiger mountain ranges. It's where the last tigers were caught in the wild. It's the real Never-Never.”

As we headed up into the mountains, the sun was startlingly bright, shimmering off the eucalyptus leaves and revealing range after range: the Sawbacks, the Sentinels, the Tiger Range. The landscape was so folded it might have concealed anything. “In some of these valleys there are phenomenal amounts of wildlife,” Col said. He pointed at a rocky cliff. “I've been up there and I can tell you … they could live up there.”

We told Col about our visit to Pyengana and asked if he was familiar with that sighting. He, too, had gone up to check it out. “Yes, it was true that one was a hoax,” he said. “But did you at least see the big fat alcoholic pig?”

Col shared that he had recently suffered a setback of his own. He frequently fielded calls from people hoping to launch expeditions in search of the tiger—and one he had received recently had sounded like a tiger hunter's dream. An American (whom we shall refer to as “C.” here) called Col up, claiming to represent a well-financed worldwide conservation group called Save the Species. “He rang me up and told me he was going to invest millions of dollars in a hunt for the tiger. He wanted me to lead the hunt,” said Col.

C.'s crew was going to bring in powered hang gliders to conduct aerial searches over vast sections of trackless wilderness. The gliders were going to be equipped with heat-seeking devices invented by the U.S. military that could pinpoint animals through the dense foliage. If anything was seen, they would parachute down and track the nocturnal thylacines with night-vision goggles. “Let's face it,” Col said. “You Yanks have got some good gadgets. He'd ring me up and talk for an hour at a time. They were also going to hire local helicopters.”

C. had shown up in Tasmania just months before for some preexpedition scouting. “The bloke was an overweight sort of guy. I took him for a walk on an asphalt path and he fell flat on his face and broke his nose. Here's a guy who reckoned that he went into the South American desert and lived with the natives. He said he was a Vietnam vet.”

Bit by bit, other elements of C.'s story didn't add up. For example, the supposedly wealthy American was driving an '84 Mazda. And C. let it slip that he lived with a roommate and had to go to the library to check his e-mail. “I thought, this guy's a fraud. He's not a rich man.” He sighed. “You get all sorts bashing your ear over this tiger.”

“Yeah, cryptozoologists have adopted the tiger, too,” we said.

This reminded Col of another hoax. “That's stunning about your Bigfoot,” he said. Not long before we