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And wondrous is the yellow moon that peeps between the trees;

While soft sounds the lullaby of waves upon the bar,

Of the grey lands, the coast lands,

The dream lands, the ghost lands,

The lands that steal from Smithton away to Marrawah.

Except for our headlights, the road had gone completely dark.

“I think Dorothy's going to be pissed,” Alexis said from the gloom of the back seat.

“We're getting there.”

As we drove, flecks of white began softly striking our windshield. At first, there were just a few, but then the intensity began to increase.

“This is the strangest thing I've ever seen,” said Alexis.

We peered into the darkness. Small, delicate white moths in swarm numbers were fluttering, falling through the black sky. It looked like it was snowing.

We wondered where the moths were coming from. Had a migration blown in off the Bass Strait? Or maybe they had just emerged from their cocoons en masse. When Geoff had told us that young Tasmanian devils could live off moths, we thought that was pretty slim pickings. Apparently not. This would be a feast.

Pale wings thwacked softly against our windshield, coating it with body parts.

“Roadkill,” said Alexis each time one struck. “There's another roadkill. You killed it.” We tried to turn on the squirter to spray them off, but the windshield wipers came on instead, smearing insect gore across the glass.

As we drove through the nocturnal moth-storm, it was as if we had entered a combination carnival ride and shooting gallery. It was almost like a cartoon. Strange little animals kept popping up on the side of the highway, threatening to run out in front of us. A young pademelon tried to cross the Pajero's path and then leapt back to safety. A Bennett's wallaby dashed out and managed to get past before we smashed it. We clenched our teeth: We will not kill a marsupial, we will not kill a marsupial …

“Hey, do you think you could drive any slower?” Alexis asked.

Although Geoff had recommended sixty kilometers per hour as a safe nonlethal speed, we were barely pushing forty.

By the time we rolled up to Geoff's house, it was 10:30 P.M. We apologized for coming by so late to pick up the rest of our gear, but he seemed thrilled to see us—or at least Alexis. During the day, he had looked up Alexis's artwork on the Internet and seen some paintings Alexis had made of Pleistocene creatures such as saber-toothed cats and the American mastodon, using tar from the La Brea Tar Pits. They were shadowy, fossil-like impressions. Geoff had also located some Rockmans of cockroaches, seagulls, and a Norway rat. The paint had been made using leachate from a garbage dump in New York City.

“They're absolutely fantastic, mate. I was stunned,” Geoff said. Alexis's plan was to use similar materials to paint Tasmanian wildlife. In the spirit of things, Geoff presented Alexis with two half-gallon-sized plastic bags filled with animal scat. “It's probably more than you can use …” he said apologetically.

One bag was filled with cube-shaped wombat scat. The other bag contained Tasmanian devil shit, and it was pretty fresh—oily and covered with what we took to be white mold. “That's actually bone fragments,” Geoff said.

We knew Alexis had asked Geoff for these materials, but we wondered if he had been high at the time. The idea was that Alexis would mash the scat up and mix it with acrylic medium, thereby creating a unique pigment. We imagined Geoff out on his beautiful seaside property, picking up pieces of wild animal dung and inspecting them to see if they were painterly.

Alexis's reason for drawing the island's wildlife with forest soil, river mud, and animal by-products was surprisingly academic. “The materials,” he had explained, “have a relationship to the history, geography, or direct interaction I have with particular organisms. They come out of the tradition of diaristic travel. They have a sense of intimacy.”

They also smelled. We buried the bags of scat deep beneath our gear inside the Pajero, and Geoff said he would see us the next day.

It was still another ten miles