Pandennas flame like torches but burn out quickly. They're called the "one-minute" tree.

Leon makes his living driving a road train--"a semi-trailer to you, Mate." He fills in transporting hunters for Peter, who runs a hunting camp in northern Australia. Leon is a history buff. "Captain Cook found Australia in 1770," he tells me, as his turbo-charged Land Cruiser skims the crushed red rock of the Central Arnhem Highway. "In 1788 the British fleet arrived, but the Dutch had come earlier. Arnhemland was named after a Dutch vessel." Leon remembers dates and names and places; he also has the mind of a naturalist, reciting scientific names of trees that whiz by at forest's hem.

Gove has no mechanics, so the old 'Cruiser must wait. It broods over a battered toolbox near a cluster of tents and a washhouse of corrugated sheet iron with no roof. The adjacent billabong harbors a croc, according to Peter. "But he's reclusive." The black water, crowded by forest, lies a stone's toss from my cot.

"Tea?" Joy is Peter's mother. She's also our cook and camp tender, a tall, pleasant woman with a bright smile and intelligent blue eyes. Tea comes on a tray of cookies. "The buffalo will wait."

We've already seen some. The hour's drive from Gove's airfield--first over the crushed vermillion of the highway, then on sand tracks--has put me deep into Australia's Northern Territories. "Only 200,000 people live in the N.T.," Joy says. "You won't see many human footprints in our concession."

That concession, it turns out, encompasses 750,000 square miles. "Call it an even million, if you like," Peter flashes a guileless grin. "We won't be bumping boundaries." He is tall and sinewy, in his late twenties, with a prominent jaw and confident eyes, a week's sandy stubble. Clad in safari shorts and shirt, he wears no shoes. "Let's look for game." Jason and I grab packs and dive into the skeleton of a third Land Cruiser. It has no driver's-side door. Exhaust finds us through gaping rust-holes in the tail.

Australia's buffalo were introduced around 1950. Now, says Leon, they abound. "Buffalo depend on a regular cycle of forest regeneration." During the dry season, he explains, the aboriginals torch the trees. Fires go unchecked for miles, but because fuel loads are allowed to build for only a season or two, burns aren't as hot or destructive as in woodland routinely protected from wildfire. "Besides, eucalyptus trees are fire-resistant. They remain to provide shade. The buffalo graze in savannahs and flood plains. They roll in the mud, which sets up like cement on their hide to block sun and insects."

The author's guide, Peter, feeds an outboard on a remote billabong. Driving around this pond was a four-hour project.

We find a buffalo almost immediately, a black bull, thick as a tank, with sweeping, saber-shaped horns. He vanishes into a jungle of pandennas and eucalyptus. "Too young," says Peter. He explains that we're looking for heavier horns on bulls at least twelve years old, animals he calls sweepers.

We motor on, the track growing more faint. Ribbons of stagnant water become sloughs. We plunge in, waves washing over what is left of the floorboards. The jungle thickens. Cockatoos shriek from towering eucalyptus; a wallaby flits through the forest, long leaps tracing arcs too quick to follow.

"True kangaroos have hairy noses," says Peter, "both the red and the gray." We don't see any of those or any dingoes. "Many predators--birds and reptiles as well as mammals--have died after eating cane toads," Peter explains. The toads, introduced during the 1930s to eliminate beetles on coastal sugar plantations, are poisonous to eat. They spread to other parts of Australia, "moving from one water station to the next," arriving in the N.T. quite recently. "An ecological disaster," observes Peter ruefully.