By putting GPS and VHF collars on cats, scientists all over Australia have realized how little they understand about the creatures they are trying to control. Pat Hodgens, an ecologist on Kangaroo Island, tracked dozens of cats, including one orange cat named Vladimir (after the Russian president) that learned how to hunt for wallabies equal to him in weight. Hodgens’s cats carved out home ranges that he mapped by plotting their movements, but occasionally one of the cats would embark on a long journey to a remote area, only to turn around and come back. Moseby’s cats would occasionally do the same. Neither scientist could figure out exactly what was prompting the quests or how the cats knew their destination — often dozens of miles away. They speculated that the cats might be going to mate or to look for other hunting grounds. But the cats would often undertake the journeys only once, never to conduct an expedition to the site again after returning to their established territories. Perhaps the cats were using their advanced sense of smell, which is powered by a large olfactory bulb in their brain and something called a vomeronasal organ, to detect messages left in the traces deposited by other cats — a system described by the animal-behavior expert John Bradshaw in his 2013 book, “Cat Sense,” as allowing the solitary animals to communicate.

Mostly, though, cats don’t stray beyond their territory for much other than mating. After the first six months of their lives, which they spend first nursing and then learning how to hunt with other kittens in their litter, they usually remain alone. They are wary of new things and have extreme environmental awareness that extends beyond their home range. The size of their territories depends on their hunting prowess, the area they need to acquire enough food and the number of other cats competing for space nearby. They hunt no matter what. Even if they don’t need to eat, they are programmed to stalk available prey. If they kill when they aren’t hungry, they will either eat the most attractive part of the prey animal, usually the soft tissue, try to cache it for later or abandon the carcass altogether. A pristine snout or severed feet missing their corresponding body is a telltale sign of cat predation.

People who hunt and trap cats are convinced that they learn immediately. Once trapped, they are nearly impossible to capture again. Once shot at, they elude the hunter’s tricks. One of Hodgens’s cats, named Barnaby (after the former deputy prime minister of Australia), managed to evade recapture for months after he was collared. “I have the utmost respect for that cat,” Hodgens told me during a scouting mission on Kangaroo Island to locate Barnaby using a radio antenna. At one point, on a seaside crest as dusk fell, we heard Barnaby’s collar beeping. He was just over the beach dunes. “He’s like my nemesis!” Hodgens said. “I know him inside out, and I’ve got enormous amounts of respect for him. He’s smarter than I am.”

One night in the desert, I went with a team of ecologists who were checking traps inside the Arid Recovery sanctuary to collar bettongs for the predation study. In the spectral beam of the truck’s lights against the dark, the canted succulents and bowed branches of hakea trees looked like the waving spindles of a deep-sea reef. Moseby and her colleague had their radio tuned to the frequency of Quoll No.9, which had been missing for a few days. They kept their windows open to the sharp air to observe what was out in the dark. At one point, Moseby stopped the truck and peered out into the middle distance. She had seen a pair of glowing eyes. “You sure it’s a cat?” her colleague asked. She wasn’t sure. It had just been a flash against the silhouette of a shadowy hummock. “You look for so long,” Moseby said, “you start to doubt they’re there.”