In 1965, after being released from active duty with the US Marine Corps and with a hole in my soul from the impending sale of the family ranch, I immigrated to Australia. As a natural adventurist I fell in with some of the most outrageous characters in the Northern Territory ("Crocodile Dundee" country), where I learned to excel at the dangerous game of bull catching, capturing wild bulls and buffalos on the open range wilderness. Early off-trail explorations of the wildest country in Australia, southwest Tasmania, led to a World Wildlife Fund project to determine the status of the Tasmanian Tiger, a large marsupial carnivore with stripes across its back. My favorite non-fiction authors at the time were Henry David Thoreau, Justice William O. Douglas ("My Wilderness"), and Robert Ruark. I first published in "Walkabout", an Australian geographic magazine, and then in "Animal Kingdom", the journal of the New York Zoological Society.