The Lady and the Panda Read Online Free PDF Page A

was a bit of a sponger and a pretentious one at that. She also may not have cared for the way he took Bill away for such long periods on adventures that excluded her. She wanted to jump into the action herself. Alone, maybe Bill would have capitulated, but the team of Bill and Larry wouldn't budge: it was boys only.
    The first Harkness-Griswold expedition targeted the Indonesian island of Komodo. They were in search of the biggest lizard on the planet, the elusive Komodo dragon, which had been introduced to the world in a scientific paper the decade before, and was one of the most soughtafter creatures in existence. Weighing up to three hundred pounds, the Komodo has huge, curved, serrated teeth, perfect for tearing flesh. Great head and neck muscles and a jaw hinged for extra-wide opening aid the animals in bolting massive amounts of meat. The modern-day dinosaur would be a provocative prize.
    Through the campaign, Bill and Larry depended on each other, confident enough in their own fortitude to always find humor in the face of mortal danger. Gaining success with their particular style of careless rich-boy swashbuckling, the team came away from the island in possession of several fine live specimens. But in Shanghai, on the way home, there were more high jinks to come.
    Too busy romping in the most notorious city in the world, Bill was not aboard the ship, the
Empress of Asia,
as it pulled away with the rest of his party. Realizing the clutch he was in, he cabled Griswold with a one-word message—SKILLIBOOTCH—which reached the
Empress
as she entered the harbor of Nagasake. It was “Bill's own invention,” Griswold would explain later, “and used to indicate an attitude of encouraging nonchalance.” In a series of maneuvers worthy of Errol Flynn, Bill Harkness quickly grabbed an express boat out of Shanghai and hopped a train at Kobe, calmly materializing in Yokohama in time to meet the ship.
    Bill was at the top of his game. At thirty-two he was fit, happy, and,having pulled off the trapping of the great Komodo lizards, successful. He had now established himself as a gifted hunter.
    Back in New York in May 1934, showing off what
The New York Times
called three “Big Dragons,” the Ivy League adventurers found that the experience had only whetted their appetite. They began plotting their next collaboration.
    With “a yearning desire to blaze new trails in the field of zoology,” Ruth said, Bill next made a plan as dangerous and exotic as they come. He and Griswold intended to travel to the other side of the world to capture the biggest prize of them all—a live giant panda. Very few people had ever seen one of these animals alive. Most of the population beyond the Tibetan borderland had never even heard of one. The animal was so little known, in fact, that when Bill first mentioned it to Ruth, she thought he had intended to say “panther,” not panda.
    HE MEANT PANDA all right, and that summer of 1934, he brought Ruth up to speed on the animal that was the hottest treasure in the world. Even in its native haunts, where animals were seen as sources of medicine and myth, symbols for poets and artists, little had ever been written about the panda. It was a living mystery in a mysterious region, a place that in the twenties and thirties was absolutely fascinating to Americans. And as intriguing as China was, high Tibet tantalized imagination even more, seeming as much fancy as fact. Everything related to the search for the giant panda appeared rather otherworldly, as decade after decade, the animal dodged Western stalkers with an uncanny, some would say supernatural, skill. Yet each passing year, the brutal and punishing competition was becoming more of a siren call, one that often led to death, ruin, or disappointment.
    It had all begun in the spring of 1869 with the journey of a French Lazarist missionary, Père Armand David, through Baoxing, or what was then known as Muping. The holy man, who was also a naturalist