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“I've seen the cartoon.”

“Good on ya,” Geoff said. “This will be far more terrifying.”

A few minutes later, Geoff stopped the Pajero on a grassy rise, and we all got out. He pointed to a few devil footprints in the sand. This suggested devils had followed the scent trail we had laid the night before.

Geoff took the top off the bin, removed one of the limp carcasses, and dropped it on the sandy ground. “That's a brushtail possum,” he said.

Despite the odor, we bent down to take a closer look.

“There's nothing quite like the smell of marsupial braised in its own enzymes,” Alexis said, plugging his nose.

The opossums that lived back in the United States (the only marsupials that lived in North America) were unattractive animals. They had naked scaly tails, ratlike mugs, and hoary white-and-gray fur. But this possum was beautiful. Its slinky body was two and a half feet long, and it was covered with a plush black coat that was thickest on its bushy tail. Chris and Dorothy wisely kept their distance as Geoff tied a rope around the possum's dead body and attached it to the back of the Pajero.

“So why exactly are we doing this?” Chris asked.

“We're going to lay down a scent trail to attract Sarcophilus harrisii, the Tasmanian devil,” Geoff said. “The species name harrisii refers to Harris, the man who first scientifically described the devil. And the genus name, Sarcophilus, means lover of dead flesh.”

Geoff knelt down in the sand and slit the dead possum's belly open. With his one clouded-over eye, he looked like a cross between the Grim Reaper and a deranged pirate.

“We want to drag the guts along the ground,” he said, wiping his gore-covered knife on a patch of ferns next to the track. “Hopefully, a devil will follow the scent.”

“So,” said Alexis, “we're chumming terrestrial-style.”

With Geoff at the helm of the Pajero and the possum dragging behind us, we drove out across old pastureland and scrubby heath. On the way, we passed some landmarks of King family history, including the spot where Geoff's great-great-uncle first ran cattle in 1880. “My old uncle Charlie set up camp here for the first two years,” he said. “You can still see an old chimney.”

After a mile or two, we reached the sea. The waves of the Southern Ocean were bigger than they had been the night before and crashed mightily against the rocky outcrops that lined the shore. The rocks, made of pink quartzite crystals and covered with patches of orange lichen, glowed molten red in the rays of the setting sun. There wasn't another human being in sight.

Geoff drove up to a tiny house about one hundred feet from the shoreline. It was slightly dilapidated, made of weathered asbestos siding, with a small brick chimney. The ground around the structure was sandy, covered with beach grasses, small wind-stunted trees, and massive outcrops of jagged rocks. Friends of Geoff's family had originally built the house as a fishing camp. Geoff called it “the shack.” And he used it as a blind from which to observe devils after dark.

While the other members of Team Thylacine went to look at the seashore, we watched Geoff detach what was left of the possum from the back of the Pajero. He threw the remains in the bush. Then he took the dead animal bin and heaved its contents onto the ground behind the shack. “We'll use this little morsel of flesh to attract the devils,” he said.

It was a roadkill wallaby. The body was still largely intact—muscular jumping legs, soft gray fur. However, its head was missing. Severed in the collision? Eaten off ? We never found out.

Geoff took a two-pronged metal stake and pounded it—thump, thump— through the furry animal's back and belly to hold it in place. We were reminded of a passage from Dracula when Professor Van Helsing destroys a gang of beautiful female vampires by driving wooden stakes through their hearts and cutting off their heads. It was “wild work,” the vampire killer wrote in his diary.

Although devils don't come out until after dark, Geoff wanted us to be concealed