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anthropological wing, or the speculative trip to the moon at Hayden Planetarium. There was a diorama of mountain gorillas against the volcanoes of the Belgian Congo, painted to re-create the spot where the museum’s Carl Akeley had succumbed to tropical disease. In adjacent halls were Carter’s mounted animals from the upper Zambezi, Inca relics from Bennett’s explorations of Peruvian ruins, and stuffed birds from Burma’s Irawadi River. And there was the magnificent bharal , or blue sheep, brought back and mounted by the Benjamin Hood Expedition of 1934. The horned male looked eternally over a high, rolling plateau toward the distant snowy crests of the painted Himalayas, school children viewing the Roof of the World through glass.
    Hood’s office was in the prestigious southeast tower overlooking Central Park, just one floor below the museum’s mercurial director, famed Gobi Desert explorer Roy Chapman Andrews. Hood’s family had the money to finance his explorations and contribute to museum coffers, meaning that he’d been given a higher ceiling and better view. Less favored (or less rich) curators sweated in tighter, darker rooms. The favoritism made Hood feel guilty, but not enough to give the office up.
    The flamboyantly self-promoting Andrews perched above them all. The museum director had led the first Dodge trucks into Mongolia and protected his dinosaur bones in shoot-outs with bandits. Since those cowboy days he’d proven to be as bad an administrator as he was good at finding bones and attracting publicity. He was erratic, demanding, and forgetful. It was no surprise, then, that Hood reacted with distrust when his boss telephoned to say he was sending down some government functionary to confer. The director had wasted Hood’s time before with political errands and donor meetings that came to nothing.
    “Can’t see him,” Hood lied. “I’ve got a meeting with a Rockefeller Foundation man on that Hudson Bay expedition I proposed.”
    “Forget Hudson Bay,” Chapman said in his brusque manner. “Hudson Bay isn’t happening. Even if you can afford it the rest of us can’t. The Depression won’t let up and our budget is bleeding. We need to gear up for next year’s world’s fair here in New York. You know that.”
    “Roy, I’m not a world’s fair type of guy.”
    “Which is why you need to speak with Mr. Duncan Hale. Don’t close doors just when they’re opening for you, Ben. This one will get your blood up, I promise.”
    Hood remained suspicious. “Then why’d you send him to me?”
    “Because it’s Agent Hale and you’re the expert he wants on loan. Oh, and by the way: we don’t have a choice.” Andrews hung up.
    The director asserted his authority over Hood because in truth he had little leverage; the millionaire had no need for a curator’s job. Hood’s family was rich from lumber, paper, and real estate. Ben could have been like a thousand wealthy sons, rampaging his way through private schools and plowing nubile debutantes before marrying the proper pedigree and managing an empire he’d not created.
    But Hood was different. He stayed outside even in foul weather while growing up at Palisade, the family estate in the Hudson Valley. He was fascinated by the natural world. His father taught him to hunt and fish—they’d hiked the Rockies and gone on safari in Africa—and he climbed and hiked on his own. Rich people were boring, he decided, knowing nothing but money, while scientists, who worked for pennies, were pursuing the secrets of the universe. The least rewarded had the most fascinating jobs.
    There’s snobbery in the sciences, as in all professions, and it was a reverse snobbery that would have discriminated against a rich man like Ben. But Hood bludgeoned his way into their fraternity by contributing to others’ causes and financing his own expeditions to unknown Tibet. He took along British, German, and Swiss companions and bore hunger, thirst, and insects without