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“It's gorgeous,” Alexis said, looking at the possum's thick, luxurious fur. “Too bad we've only seen dead ones.”

Geoff put the dead possum in the back of the Pajero—he was keeping this one for freezing—and Alexis took this opportunity to light his pipe. The smell of weed and the freshly dead possum combined to create a heady perfume. And it wasn't Chanel No. 5.

A little further along, the headlights illuminated something fairly large resting in the middle of the road. As Geoff maneuvered around it, lighting up a trail of blood, he identified it as a dead wombat—a big vegetarian marsupial that burrows like a woodchuck and is related to the koala. “I'll come back for that one later,” he said.

A moment after, we hit a sharp bump in the road. The possum in the back flew up and landed with a thump.

“It's ali-I-ive,” Alexis sang.

Geoff dropped Alexis and Dorothy off at his house and picked up another recycling bin. We rode back with him to where the wombat lay in a blind spot between two crests. “This is going to be a quick salvage operation,” Geoff said. “We don't want to become roadkill ourselves.”

We scuttled onto the moonlit road, and Geoff lifted up the poor beast, unveiling a pool of blood beneath the body. He placed the animal in the black bin, wound-side down. Geoff's hands were drenched in blood. It took two of us to carry the wombat over to the car. It felt like we were hauling a sack of flour. The wombat's short, bristly fur was rough to the touch, and the body gave off an intense, musky odor.

“That's not the smell of it being dead,” Geoff said, wiping his bloodcovered hands on a rag. “That's its normal smell. Smelly animal the wombat, but much loved by the Tasmanian devil—for eating.”

Back at Geoff's, in front of the house, we examined the wombat with a flashlight. In the black recycling bin, it was curled up on its side. Its husky body was covered with coarse silver-gray hairs and its thickly padded feet were generously clawed. We studied the wombat's flat furless nose and its left eye, which was small, deep-set, and closed in death. The black container made the wombat look like it was in a little casket.

Alexis came out to sit vigil with us. “I should do a drawing of this,” he said. “It's poignant.”

In fact, the scene reminded us of a drawing we had once seen by the painter and poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti. A lover of animals, the nineteenth-century artist kept a wombat at his house in London—he had obtained his pet from an animal dealer—and would frequently hold it on his lap and scratch its belly. It's said he even allowed his wombat to sleep on a “silver serving dish” at the dinner table. (Some scholars believe Ros-setti's mealtime menageries were the inspiration for the mad tea party in Alice in Wonderland.)

In a letter Rossetti wrote to his brother in 1869, he said, “The wombat is a Joy, a Triumph, a Delight, a Madness.” When Rossetti's beloved pet died just a few months later, he was heartbroken and memorialized it through a combination poem-and-illustration. Rossetti drew himself weeping, his face covered with a large hankie, with the chubby-bellied wombat lying dead on its back, looking remarkably like the specimen we were mourning. And he wrote these lines beneath his picture.

I never reared a young Wombat

To glad me with his pin-hole eye,

But when he most was sweet & fat

And tail-less, he was sure to die!

10. SEXY BEAST

The next morning we were driving with Alexis back down the Bass Highway, past pastures, cows, and the occasional sheep. He was still talking about the dead wombat and how he might make pigment from its flesh. “I'll pulverize it and mix it in with acrylic medium,” he said. Then he added, “Tell me again, what are we doing today?”

“We're going fishing for the freshwater thylacine.”

So far, we had hugged the coast. But inland, Tasmania was covered by wet forests and sliced by thousands of rivers, streams, and creeks.

“Oh yeah,” said Alexis. “Just so you know, I told Chris and Dorothy there wouldn't be room for them in the