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We headed in, too. As we walked inland, the ocean sounds receded. Geoff led us along a two-foot-wide path that cut through the coastal grasses. The path was sandy, and along the edges the grass was tramped down. “This is a wallaby run,” Geoff said. “Once wallabies settle on a trail, they tend to stick to it. They could have been using this same track for ages. It may be hundreds of years old.”

We thought about the Tasmanian tigers and aboriginal people who had lived and trafficked through here hundreds of years ago. There were several aboriginal sites on Geoff 's land—middens along the foreshore, mysterious arrangements of stones and depressions where huts had once stood. But Geoff wasn't completely comfortable talking about them. “It's not appropriate for Europeans to interpret aboriginal sites,” he said. “But I do think they're important. It connects me to the past going back six thousand years.”

Aboriginals lived on Geoff's land and all along the northwest coast until the early 1830s when a missionary named George Augustus Robinson came through and convinced the people to follow him and resettle on islands in the Bass Strait. His idea was that if the aboriginals were rounded up, they could avoid deadly confrontations with the white settlers. Robinson thought he was saving them, and he wanted to convert them to Christianity. Their destination was a concentration camp on Flinders Island—and almost all the aboriginals he took there died within a short time.

Tasmanian tigers lived and hunted on Geoff's land, too. Robinson wrote in his diary about seeing a mother “hyena”—one of the early names for the tiger—and her three cubs on a beach a few miles away. They must have stalked pademelons and wallabies along this very path. According to the recollections of old bushmen, tigers would follow their prey on a slow chase, trotting after them relentlessly until their victims got tired, at which point they would chomp them on the neck with their mighty jaws.

Along the ancient wallaby track, there was a fork—a natural wallaby crossing—that was strewn with dozens of cylinder-shaped scats in various degrees of decay. We studied one of the fresher ones closely. It was gray and white, and made up of fur and bone fragments. It looked familiar.

“It's a devil latrine area,” said Geoff. “They leave their poo here to communicate with each other.”

We waited quietly to see if the devil poo would communicate anything. Then underneath the sound of rushing wind and the muffled crash of waves, we began to hear something. It was a slow-rhythmed whirring noise. Whzzz … Whzzz… Whzzz. The sound was rising up from the ground all around us.

We looked at Geoff inquiringly. “Native dung beetles,” he said.

Tasmania has many species of native dung beetles—and they're all programmed to dispose of the scat of Tasmania's native creatures. Devils, wombats, pademelons. It's a natural solid waste management program. And it worked pretty well until the settlers brought in cows and sheep. The native cleanup crew turned up its mandibles at the huge, sloppy dung of these introduced beasts. Over the years, cow and sheep patties built up. They would dry out and sit there, turning fertile pasturelands into giant muckheaps. To prevent the loss of grazing land and the resulting proliferation of flies, a visionary entomologist came up with the idea of bringing in cow-patty-loving dung beetles from Africa. The scheme was successful— but given the volume of dung generated by livestock, new dung beetles have to be imported all the time.

We continued inland, walking through tufts of grass, across old pastureland, and short-cropped marsupial lawns. Geoff's land was vast, and dusk was a long process. Colors and shapes changed moment by moment. The sky was enormous, and as we walked, it subtly shifted from ultramarine to gray-purple.

Alexis pointed to a grassy rise topped with skinny, windswept tea trees. “What is that?” he said.

A creature was moving slowly toward us, its body black against the tan grasses. It looked like a bear cub cut off at