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Geoff was in a foul mood. He quickly explained what had happened: In the freezer, he stored a small supply of roadkill. That way, if he did a devil viewing, he would always have meat for creating a scent trail or feeding the devils. The day before, in preparation for our arrival, he had removed a Bennett's wallaby, a medium-sized type of kangaroo, from the freezer and placed it in the sack to defrost. But something had gone wrong. Some kind of carnivorous animal had gotten into the barn, torn through the top of the sack, and gorged itself on the wallaby meat. The attack had been ferocious. Geoff pointed to the wallaby's head. Its face had been eaten off. To add insult to injury, the ravenous beast had crapped all over the wallaby's corpse.

Geoff 's anger was rising. He knew who the perpetrator was. The key evidence was the distinctive shape of the turds on top of the dead wallaby. It was cat shit.

A cat?

“Ferals,” said Geoff bitterly. In Tasmania—all across Australia—house cats had gone completely wild. There were tens of thousands of feral cats living in the bush. They were the same species as the domestic cat (Felis catus), but these feral cats survived without the help of people and preyed on native wildlife. “They're savage,” Geoff said. “Horrible.”

Alexis surveyed the carnage. It was a bloody mess. “That was one bad pussy,” he said. “Was it marking its territory?”

“No, it just shitted it out, so it could eat more.”

To thwart the cat's returning for another meal, Geoff had hung another frozen wallaby from the barn's rafters. Hopefully out of the cat's reach. That explained the creature swinging by its neck. But it also presented a new problem. The hanging wallaby wouldn't be defrosted for hours. What would we use for devil food?

As we had learned, roadkill was not exactly hard to come by in Tasmania. Early that morning a visiting biologist whom Geoff had befriended had deposited the dead bodies of a wallaby and a possum outside his barn. Thought you could use these.

The donations were fresh and ready to go. Geoff quickly retrieved them and put the carcasses into a familiar-looking black bin, which he loaded into the back of the Pajero. Chris offered to bring his car, too. Fitting all six of us plus the carcasses into the Pajero was a bit of a squeeze.

As we caravanned out to Geoff 's property and turned onto the Arthur River Road, Alexis pulled out his wallet. “Hey, Geoff, do you want to see a picture of my girlfriend?”

Dorothy rolled her eyes. When Alexis handed over a small photo, Geoff 's face instantly lit up.

“Ahhh, she's lovely,” he said. “What's her name?”

“Beatrice.”

It was a photo of Alexis's pet cat stretched out Cleopatra-style on a faux leopard-skin rug. She was a Maine coon with thick, luxuriant gray fur and tabby markings. It was hard to believe that this pampered pussy was the same species as the wild beast that had savaged the defrosting wallaby.

A few years ago, Alexis had spent $5,000 to save Beatrice's life. She had fallen from the window of his third-floor loft apartment in Manhattan and suffered a collapsed lung, a broken pelvis, and two broken legs. She had to have her left front leg amputated and was now a three-legged cat.

As Alexis stared at the photo, he curled his right hand into a paw and made a batting motion. Then he said, “Meeeew, meeew.”

We gave him a look.

“What?” he said. “I miss my puss-'ems.”

When we arrived at the edge of Geoff's property and the start of the narrow dirt track that led to the coast, Geoff advised Chris to abandon his car and join us in the four-wheel drive. The only way Chris could fit was to cram into the luggage area and sit on the floor next to the dead animal bin.

As we squeezed through the tea trees on the bumpy track, our vehicle began, more and more, to fill with the rank, sweet odor of decaying flesh.

“How're you doing back there?” we asked Chris.

His voice had taken on a resigned quality. “It's really humming,” he said.

We felt bad for him. “Have you ever seen a Tasmanian