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BASS STRAIGHT KING ISLAND FLINDERS ISLAND TASMAN SEA SOUTHERN OCEAN TASMANIAN WILDERNESS WORLD HERITAGE I hear the clatter of a cooking pot in the front seat of my van. My sleep-addled brain tries to identify the source of the disturbance without opening my eyes. Then a series of snuf- fles and throaty growls three feet from my head wake me up like a shot of espresso. I fumble for my flashlight, open the curta ins between the front seat and the back, and cast a light on a somewhat unabashed Tasmanian devil, who reluc- tantly pulls his head out of a bag of trail mix to give me a closer look. With indifference, he returns to his meal. "Hey!" I shout. "Hey!" He (or she) stares at me again with deep black eyes, not visibly irritat- ed that I have interrupted a free meal. I jump out of the van, open the front door and start yelling at the intruder to leave my food alone. There must be some nice carrion out on the highway just waiting for a devil, a small viscious carn ivore, to gnaw on it. The devil stands on its back legs, regarding me quizzically, but I don't really want it to leave. I'm fascinated by this snuffling, snorting creature. It hisses, and not wanting to make it feel cornered, I take a few steps back, leaving it a wide exit strategy. Being nocturnal, the devil doesn't seem to like the spotl.ight I have tra ined on it, so it ambles down to the ground and heads for cover. A few moments later I hear a racket in the bush, a louder hiss, followed by a high-pitched squeal, cut short by a horrible gruntin g. Was it the devil happening so soon upon a replace- ment meal? Or was it some random spotted quoll, a small marsupial predator, killing a hapless young wallaby? The darkness of the Tasmanian bush offers few clues, and I head back to the van for a few more hours of sleep. Tomorrow I start the Overland Track, a week's hike from Cradle Mountain in the north to Lake St Clair 48 miles to the south. The track cuts th rough an ancient landscape of mountains, temperate rainforests, buttongrass plains and highland tarns, right through the heart of one of the world's largest conservation areas, the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. I've come to hike the length of the trai l, and with any luck, see the elusive thylacine, a mar· supial thought by scientists to have vanished 65 years ago. "You've got two chances of seeing a thylacine, mate," said a bushy- bearded trucker next to me in a pub in Deloraine, Tasmania. "Bugger all and none." But that's exactly what I've come 10,000 miles, half a world away, to do. The thylacine, known locally as the Tasmanian tiger or wolf, was the highest pred- ator in the food chain of this island state 150 miles south of mainland Australia. Tasmania's wi lderness is untracked and reports of its history are dark. Spotted by Abel Tasman in 1642, Tasmania was one of the earliest settled parts of Austra lia. Its remoteness and isolation made it an ideal penal colony for the British, who sent nearly 74,000 prisoners there during the 19th century. The island was already home to a distinct aboriginal population, separated by rising sea levels from mainland Australian aboriginals for 12,000 years. At one time Tasmanian Aborigines were the most southerly peoples in the world , hunter-gatherers living in one of the most remote wildernesses on earth. Over the course of a few decades, they were systematically slaughtered by white settlers; hunted for sport and rounded up in reserves where they died of disease and malnutrition . In 1830, the settlers formed the notorious "Black Line," a human chain of all the able-bodied men in the territory, to drive the last aborig- inals out of the settlement and corner them in the Tasman Peninsula. They captured only two, shot and killed two more, but the ball of destruction was rolling. By 1876, the last full-blooded Tasmanian had died. A small group that escaped the slaughter lived on, mixing with the sealers of Flinders and Cape Barren Islands in the Bass Stra it and preserving remnants of their culture to this day. But their language, re ligion and most traditions have been nearly wiped· out, preserved only in word lists and published accounts of early contacts. And the thylacine, the wolf which lived with the natives for millennia, barely lasted a century after the wh ite people arrived. They simply hunted it out of existence. It is a mind·bogglingly difficult story to get your head around when confronting the wild beauty of Tasmania's southwest, a prehistoric landscape of giant ferns and bizarre rock formations. But I sensed that any epiphany would be even less likely in the sleepy, forgetful English rose-garden villages of the east coast. Fortunately, if there's one thing you have on a weeklong walk, it's time to think. Tasmania's history washes over me like a tide. Already tired from the previous night's encounter with the devil, I set out in the morning along the Overland. My pack is heavy with food for the week- long trek: trail mix, tahini, falafel mix, oatmeal, soup, all sorts of reconstitutable delights. I wish I could travel as light as the Tasmanian aboriginals had, build- ing too ls and shelter where they went and leaving them behind for the archae- ologists when they moved camp. Even their clothing was light. They wore kan- garoo-skin loincloths or nothing at all, and coated their bodies with a mixture of ocher, charcoa l and kangaroo grease to stay warm in the severe climate. As I breakfast on some Vitawheats (a delicious Aussie cracker), a huge black bird hops onto the picniC table and grabs one right out of my hand. It then retreats to a fence and glares at me with yellow eyes. "That's a currawong," an Australian hiker sitting nearby explains. "He' ll steal food right out of your mouth if you don't look out." The walk begins gently enough, a slow rise up through a gum forest to a plateau, skirting a crater lake. The track is extraordinarily well-kept, with graded gravel and boardwalk over sections of wetland. The air is clear and smells of euca- lyptus leaves and mud. It is March, late in the summer, so I've avoided the large groups that walked the track earlier in the season. The trade-off is Tasmania's unpredictable weather, what the locals call "four seasons in a day." It rains here 275 days a year. Hopefully I'll catch a few of the lucky 90 that remain. The plant life varies Widely, from myrtle, sassafras, fern trees, leather- wood and celery top pine in the ra inforest, to dry eucalyptus and open button- grass moorlands. After a steep rise I get my first view of Cradle Mountain, a mas- sive saddle-shaped peak. The Overland Trail was laid along va lleys and plains, and crosses through several mountain passes in its way south. Side tracks offer day hikes to the highest peaks in Tasmania. I leave my pack at the base of Cradle Mountain and scramble up the reddish, boulder-strewn flanks of the mountain, reaching the summit, a cluster of massive broken pinnacles of dolerite topping off above 5,000 feet. From there, the view is clear far to the south toward Mount Ossa, the island's highest peak, and the Du Cane range which obscures the track's southern terminus, 48 miles south. The World Heritage Area was established in the 1980s after a fierce battle between conservationists and hydroelectric and logging interests. Roughly the size of Connecticut, crossed by a single highway and almost totally unpop- ulated, it is one of the world's last great temperate rainforests. It contains some of the tallest and oldest trees in the world (the 300-foot swamp gum and the 2000-year-old huon pine), and takes up a fifth of the 26,000-square-mile island. Its terrible weather (11 feet of rain a year), swamps and numerous mountain 31

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