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“Meet Scratch,” he said. “I'm Geoff King.”

Geoff was a sturdily built man, with wavy, auburn hair graying slightly at the temples. His face was red from being out in the sun, and it was immediately noticeable that he was blind in one eye. The blind eye drifted to the left, and it gave him a waggish expression—as if he was thinking of a good joke.

He ran his good eye over us. “You look a bit done in,” he said.

We explained that we weren't used to driving on the left side of the road, and were actually feeling a bit dizzy. He congratulated us on not crashing. “Good on ya. You did a wonderful job.”

We had heard Geoff King was an expert at finding Tasmanian devils in their wild state. In the absence of the tiger, the devil earned the title of being the largest marsupial carnivore in the world.

He inspected our four-wheel drive. “That's a lovely bus,” he said. “If you're not too tired we could take a ride over to my property.”

“Would you want to drive?” we suggested.

“Absolutely …mind if we just put this in the back?” “This” was a black plastic recycling bin—the size of a big milk crate—covered by a tarp. Dozens of flies swirled around it. We looked at it apprehensively. “It's for the devils,” Geoff explained.

As he lifted the mysterious black box into the back of the Pajero, we attempted to ignore the rank odor emanating from inside.

Geoff drove the Pajero down to a T where the highway ended and turned left onto a narrow strip of blacktop. “This lonely outpost is the Arthur River Road,” he said. At first the road was paved, but it soon turned to gravel. As we crunched along, Geoff explained that he hadn't always been a devil specialist. He had been a cattle farmer. In fact, the King family had been running cattle in this far corner of Tasmania for more than one hundred years. Geoff and his brother, Perry, were the fifth generation of Kings to work the land.

Geoff, however, was a strange bird by the standards of most people in this farming community. For one thing, he was more interested in wildlife than livestock. For years, he tried to run cattle on his family's coastal property with an eye toward conservation—attempting to reduce the cat-tle's impact on the fragile foreshore and sensitive seaside plants. But in 1997, he decided to go his own way. He gave up on running cattle, split the family property with his brother, and turned most of his half (830 acres) into a wildlife preserve. Once the cattle were removed, the habitat started to revive—and all sorts of creatures moved in.

Geoff would camp out on his property at night and watch wallabies, wombats, and devils. With income from the cattle gone, he started offering wildlife tours—and he focused on devils, black-furred, four-legged marsupials that screamed like banshees in the dead of night. These fierce animals lived only on the island of Tasmania, having been driven extinct on the mainland several hundred years ago—probably, like the thylacine, by the dingo. Geoff learned the devils' habits, what they liked to eat, and how best to observe them. Until then, he had never really seen a devil up close. “Most of the time you only see them dead on the road or running across the road very quickly. Just being able to sit down in the darkness with these animals and learn the males from females has been terrific.”

We decided this was a good time to raise the tiger question. “You don't ever see any tigers while you're out looking for devils, do you?”

“Nahhh,” he said. “But you are in tiger country.”

Northwestern Tasmania had been the location of some of the most credible tiger sightings in recent years. It was also the place where a bounty was first put on the tiger's head.

In 1825, Geoff said, the Van Diemen's Land Company—a Londonbased concern—was granted hundreds of thousands of acres on which to raise sheep by the British crown. The company's main holding was Woolnorth, a huge parcel that made up the entire northwest tip of the island. Convicts from the island's jails