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We began to comb the ground for tiger shit and encouraged Alexis to assist us. We figured asking the millionaires on the team would be out of the question.

“What am I supposed to be looking for?” he asked.

We didn't know. “Something that looks tiger-ish?” We consulted the book again. “Triggs says that, in general, the scat of carnivorous marsupials has an unpleasant odor.”

“Great.”

The scats came in a bewildering array of shapes, shades, and sizes. Most were clusters of dried brown pellets in groups of four or five—which we had learned to recognize as wallaby and pademelon droppings. Some were remarkably tiny, probably the output of the broad-toothed mouse. There were also crusty, ovoid pellets containing animal fur, perhaps deposited by a predatory bird. And there were long, thin whitish scats that may have been squeezed out by a tiger snake. But nothing we found looked large enough or smelled bad enough to suggest a tiger had been walking through. Soon it was too dark to keep looking.

We took stock of the scene around us. There was no sign of habitation anywhere out to the horizon. No lights coming up from houses or towns. No headlights streaming down unseen roadways. As the nearly full moon cast its icy light over the far-reaching landscape, it reflected brightly off the reedy trunks of white-barked eucalyptus trees. They looked like tall, thin ghosts rising from the dark ground.

“This landscape encourages you to think that anything's possible. Don't you think?” Alexis said.

We started listening, straining our ears to pick up even the slightest vibration. But all we heard was the wind rustling through the buttongrass. And the sound of Alexis flicking his lighter.

Everyone was silent. As the night wore on, we began to feel like UFO buffs sitting in the desert beneath giant radio telescopes, listening for sounds from the stars: Is anybody there? We looked up at the Milky Way, and in the sky we saw Orion the Hunter. The constellation was upside down from the way we were used to seeing it. Mars glowed, low on the horizon.

In the silvery darkness, everything—the grasses, the trees, the sky— had turned monochromatic. We thought about the famous flickering black-and-white film of the last Tasmanian tiger and in our minds superimposed them over this scene.

If there was a tiger moving through the gloom somewhere below us, we wondered if we would be able to pick it out. Its sandy-colored body would blend in with the pale grassland and its stripes might look like shadows cast by the moon. Striping is said to be the most ancient form of camouflage. Yet in photographs, the fifteen or so deep black stripes on the tiger's back are what leap out at you. But maybe that's because the only pictures of tigers were taken in zoos, outside their natural habitats. Maybe in a place like this, tigers were invisible.

After what seemed like hours of silence (but was actually exactly twenty-three minutes), a voice suddenly rose from the darkness.

“I wasn't really into those beets on the sandwiches,” Chris said. “That's one thing I'm not going to do when I get home.”

“Beets are actually really good for salads,” Dorothy responded.

“I know. They're just a little sweet on a sandwich.”

We found ourselves unable to resist weighing in. “Yeah, maybe they should try sprouts now and then. And what's with the butter?”

Oh, well. Silence is to New Yorkers as roadkill is to Tasmanian devils. It has to be dragged away and devoured.

We heard the sound of a coughing bark behind us, but it was just Alexis clearing his throat. He began using his flashlight to scan the landscape for wildlife. Nothing.

After a while, Chris decided to head back to camp. His light slowly slalomed down the hill until it disappeared.

We took turns illuminating the buttongrass plains, hoping to catch some sort of animal on the prowl. But it was like a ghost prairie. No predators. No prey. No owls. No night birds. Not the slightest sight of life. The only sound was