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By Root 729 0

with his camera while inside the tiger enclosure at the Hobart zoo, when the tiger snuck up behind him and took a bite. For the rest of his life, Fleay treated his tiger scar like a badge of honor, and he went on to become a renowned wildlife expert. He was the first person to successfully breed platypuses in captivity and one of the first to milk tiger snakes for their venom, so that an antivenin could be produced. In the 1940s he launched a full-on expedition to find Tasmanian tigers in the wild. He thought if he could capture the last ones and breed them in captivity, he could save the species. After months of futile searching, he found what were identified as Tasmanian tiger prints in an area called Poverty Plain. He also reported that he nearly caught a tiger in a trap, but that it escaped, leaving hair and feces behind. And he believed he heard Tasmanian tigers calling at night. He likened the sound of the tiger's call to “the slow opening of a creaking door.”

After a few minutes, the flat trail began to ascend, and as we climbed (“this is better than a StairMaster,” Alexis said), the vegetation began to change. The woodlands around the trail started to thin out. The thick greenery gave way to scrubby tea trees and then disappeared completely. It was a curious landscape. Outcrops of white rock peeped over hummocks of low-lying grasses and sedges that ranged in color from light brown to yellow-green to pale, fizzy blue.

We were hiking through a type of grassland known as a buttongrass plain. On the map, there were plains like this on the peaks of hills all around us. Buttongrass plains are strange ecosystems with acidic soils, muddy and boggy during rainy periods and intensely flammable during droughts. And though they don't look like they can support much life, they're populated by creatures like burrowing crayfish, ground parrots, tiger snakes, and quolls. The main vegetative feature we saw was the buttongrass itself, a tan sedge that grew in tussocks with long shoots that sprouted out and ended in round brown seed heads. Filled with tannin, the buttongrass plain smelled pleasingly antiseptic.

According to the experts, this was good tiger habitat—open country surrounded by forest. For thousands of years, as soon as it got dark, Tas-mania's herbivores would come out of the forest and out of their burrows to dine on grass and plant shoots. And the tiger, which was built for open-habitat hunting, would come out, too. Then it would begin to chase its prey—a medium-speed, trotting chase—until the pademelon (Mangy!) or potoroo was too tired or frightened to keep going. Then the tiger would pounce and administer a crushing, piercing bite to the back of the skull or neck.

When we finally reached the top of the hill, we looked out in the remaining light. We had a 360-degree view from our grassy perch and were surrounded by rolling hills covered with forest. A low-lying mist in the distance blurred the edges of the horizon. To the south was the Tarkine, one of the most intact temperate rain forests in the world. (We thought about what the owner of the Backpacker's Barn had said on the first day we arrived in Tasmania: No humans should go into the Tarkine. Humans are dirty, dirty, dirty animals.)

In the Milkshakes, there was not a single animal stirring. But the grassland was covered with scat, suggesting there was plenty of prey. We decided to make the most of the lingering daylight. Maybe we would find some evidence.

We took out our scat guide, but it was strangely silent on the issue of tiger droppings, given that the author, Barbara Triggs, went pretty far against conventional thinking when she wrote that the tiger “is probably extinct on the mainland, but there may still be a small number in forest areas in Tasmania.” Probably extinct on the mainland? (The most recent fossil bones of Tasmanian tigers from mainland Australia were at least 3,000 years old.) Despite her optimism, Triggs didn't include a photo of tiger scat or even a description. That's probably because none existed. When the old trappers were snaring