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He's also careful to keep people's names quiet. Even in Tasmania, where a large percentage of the population believes the thylacine is still around, you are liable to be branded a nutter if you report seeing one.

Strangely, that was also the Tasmanian government's longtime excuse for considering records about tiger sightings exempt from Freedom of Information requests. Although the Parks and Wildlife Service maintained they were protecting the privacy of people who made the sightings, the refusal to release any information about the locations and types of sightings for many years made tiger enthusiasts suspicious. As James put it, “The authorities in the Parks and Wildlife Service, they'll tell you they're extinct, but they know damn well they're not.”

James is not bothered by the lack of conclusive physical evidence, nor the fact that the tiger is officially “presumed extinct,” nor the fact that most scientists disagree with his position. He made the leap of faith more than fifty years ago when he was thirteen years old and heard what he believed was a thylacine calling in the bush.

“That's probably the worst thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

“What did it sound like?”

James threw back his head—sending his thick mop of gray hair flying— and gave off a high-pitched “EeYIP! EeYIP!” It was a variation of the call Murph had produced.

“That was the end of me,” James said. “That's why I started looking for this jolly tiger.”

When James was nineteen, he started interviewing hundreds of old bushmen and trappers. How had they snared the tigers? What did tigers eat? Where did they live? James became a one-man thylacine lore encyclopedia.

Based on his research, he concluded that Tasmanian tigers had taken to eating sheep because fur trappers had emptied the bush of game. “The bounty came on because the natural tucker was taken away from them,” he said. Thousands of thylacines were killed for the bounty, and it's theorized that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a disease went through the already depleted tiger population, pushing it over the edge into extinction. Many trappers reported seeing weak, ill-looking tigers with thinning hair that made little attempt to fight when trapped in their snares. “They reckon there's a disease that went through them. A lot of the scientists think it was distemper. But the old-timers say it wasn't a disease at all. When the tigers came down to the coastal areas, they looked poor from lack of food.” If there had been no disease, that meant tigers living in more remote areas, where the trappers hadn't penetrated, could still be around.

He also learned that a surprising number of Tasmanians had kept captured tigers as pets. “Ones taken at an early age made a hell of a good pet. There was no wagging the tail—they're physically incapable of it—but they would sit by the table while you were eating and they would follow you along. Very loyal.” Of course, there were limits to what these wild predators would put up with. “There was a guy at Balfour, he had one. He thought he would take him out on a lead and the tiger bit him on the backside.”

Then there was the tiger's incredible nose. “Evidently their brain— there's so much of it used for their smelling capabilities—they can smell further than any animal on the earth. One fellow had a pet tiger that he brought up with his dogs. It could smell nine kilometers down the track from where he lived. As soon as someone started on the track, the tiger's hair would bristle up.”

Alexis's nose crinkled skeptically. “That's a helluva schnozz,” he said.

And finally there were the tiger's culinary habits. “They're a blood feeder,” James told us with obvious relish. “They always opened their prey up around the heart where the main of the blood was. They folded the skin back very neatly. Then they ate across the stomach down to the leg.”

We got a little chill at the thought of a tiger lapping up our blood and wondered if the old bushmen that James had interviewed had been prone to exaggeration. We had read that tigers actually