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It's one thing to see a dead animal on the side of the road. It's another thing to be responsible for it. We had vowed not to kill any animals in Tasmania. Now we were responsible for the end of a dynasty.

Alexis pulled out his Field Guide to Tasmanian Birds. He put a checkmark next to the native hen's picture. Beside it he wrote, “KOR.” Killed on road.

When we got to Stanley, we stuck our heads into a little café called the Stranded Whale. It was a tearoom that served plates of scones with pots of jam and clotted cream. But there was something incongruous about the decor. The walls were decorated with photographs of whales—all of them dead or dying. They had washed up on Stanley's beaches, which appeared to be a magnet for strandings. By way of explanation, the waitress said the Stranded Whale was owned by an oceanographer.

“What's with the predilection for giving out-of-the-way watering holes morbid names like the Slaughtered Lamb and the Bucket of Blood?” we asked Alexis.

“I don't know. I thought that was only in the movies. Maybe we should open a bar and call it the Asphyxiated Cat.”

A little girl sitting at one of the tables—she was about three years old— pointed at one of the dead whales. “Mama, look at the big fishie!” she said.

Alexis immediately corrected her under his breath. “It's a cetacean,” he muttered. Then he pointed over our shoulders. “Hey, that's Astacopsis gouldi!”

We turned around. On the wall hung a monster-sized pair of claws. They were mounted trophy-style and posed to point menacingly toward the café's ceiling. The claws alone were fifteen inches long.

We remembered what Todd had told us about crayfish specialists and what they said the first time they saw the lobster. Fuck! we thought.

These claws were big enough to pincer us by the ears. We knew Biggie hadn't really been all that big. But these claws suggested a gargantuan lobster—one that probably measured a yard long from the top of the claws to the tip of the tail. Nothing that big could have lived in the Hebe. Could it?

“Maybe they should rename this place the Killer Crustacean,” Alexis said.

On the drive back down the peninsula, we couldn't stop thinking about Astacopsis gouldi. The giant claws spoke to us of possibilities, of phenomenal creatures and strange beasts that were just out of our reach.

We thought about the Tasmanian tiger. The evidence—or lack of it— pointed to the tiger's extinction. But on the flip side of the facts was faith—a lot of people had it. Probably half the people in Tasmania.

A few years ago, we had met a Buddhist monk. He was from the Himalayan country of Bhutan. More than most countries, Bhutan is untouched by Western influences. The king of Bhutan employs an official Migo hunter, and there is a national park devoted to this animal's preservation. The Migo is better known to most people as the Abominable Snowman or Yeti. It's a cryptozoological creature—a mystery animal—meaning that people report seeing it all the time, but there's no scientific evidence that it actually exists. We asked the monk if the Migo was real. He said of course it was real, as real as anything. It simply didn't exist in our reality.

Was the Tasmanian tiger like this? Here, but not here? Had it passed on to another realm? Or was it just hiding?

When we turned back onto the Bass Highway, nightfall began to descend. It was a slow process, a progression of flame-colored clouds parading across miles of pale purple sky, finally fading to black. In the diminishing light, the sharp forms of eucalyptus trees stood out across glowing pasturelands until they finally dissolved into darkness. This transition, from day to night, was captured long ago by Bernard Cronin, a Tasmanian writer. His poem “The Way to Marrawah,” written in 1917, included a section about evening on this very stretch, the thirty secluded miles between the regional center of Smithton and Geoff 's remote community.

From Smithton to Marrawah the shadows fall awry,

From half-light to twilight the changing moments fly;

The tea-tree and currant-bush are nodding in the