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By Root 619 0

from his mouth as we tried to picture what Alexis would be like as a traveling companion. On the one hand, he was superconfident, talented, and successful. Just over six feet tall, he had lanky, model good looks and magazines such as Vogue and Elle were nearly as likely to print a photo of him as they were one of his paintings. He was also athletic. He played highly competitive basketball and might have played college ball if Manhattan's School of Visual Arts had fielded a team. Over the years, he had produced hundreds of paintings—oils, watercolors—that had sold through his Chelsea art gallery for millions of dollars. On the other hand, he oozed vibes of selfdoubt, and his moods were unpredictable. He was a New York neurotic with a twist: George Costanza in the body of Narcissus. Nothing was ever enough. If he had a solo show at a gallery, he wanted a traveling museum retrospective that focused on his entire career. He was a workaholic, simultaneously driven and racked by anxiety, and at one time had smoked two and a half packs of Camel filters a day to calm himself down. Lately, he had switched from cigarettes to marijuana, and this self-prescribed after-hours hit of pot really seemed to do the trick, bringing his jittery brand of ambition down to the level of the average superachiever.

“Tasmania,” he said slowly. “I don't know …I have to prepare for a big show in London next year.”

We had brought over our laptop and clicked on a forty-second black-and-white film of the Tasmanian tiger taken in 1933. Filmed at the Hobart zoo, the footage had a creepy air of unreality. The tiger—the last one confirmed to be alive—paced back and forth in its cage, showing off rangy, muscular legs and zebralike stripes. After a few seconds, it yawned, revealing a set of razor-sharp teeth, and extended its jaws almost impossibly wide. For a moment, it looked like a crocodile. Then it flopped down and lifted its big head like a dog.

“Holy shit,” Alexis said. “I would have killed to see that.”

Alexis pulled down a beat-up old atlas and opened it to a page showing a map of Australasia—New Guinea, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, and Malaysia. Tasmania was a little triangle floating near the bottom, about 150 miles south of the Australian mainland. A dotted line ran through the blue ink of the Indian Ocean. It arced through the Malay Archipelago and cut a swath between the islands of Bali and Lombok, between Borneo and Sulawesi. It was marked “Wallace's Line.”

Alexis traced the line with the tips of his fingers. “This is what makes it interesting,” he said.

Alfred Russel Wallace was a naturalist, a contemporary of Darwin's, who in 1856 had traveled from Bali to Lombok—a space of just fifteen watery miles—and been in for the surprise of his life. It was as if he had passed through a veil into another world. Species were more different between those two islands than they were across oceans. While Wallace primarily focused on birds in his study of the region, the most obvious difference to us was that the mammals on the other side of Wallace's Line had pouches. Australasia was filled with odd creatures such as kangaroos and koalas. And Tasmania was home to some of the strangest of all the re-gion's animals. Many species that had died out or were barely hanging on elsewhere survived on the island: the Tasmanian devil, the spotted-tailed quoll, the long-nosed potoroo. The idea that Tasmania could still be a haven for the thylacine was tantalizing.

“So do you want to go to Tasmania?” we asked again.

“Sure, as long as I can paint some fucked-up critters.” Then he added, “And I'll have to be able to get some pot.”

Our decision to go to Tasmania was made in the spring—the Northern Hemisphere spring. Since we wanted to go to Tasmania in the summer, we would have to wait for our winter—December, January, February. That gave us plenty of time to think about the tiger.

What was the likelihood that the thylacine survived, we wondered? It depended upon who we talked to and what we read.

Most scientists were fairly emphatic that the tiger's time