Read Light at the Edge of the World for Free Online

timepiece. One had to move through geography, telling the tale as one proceeded.
For Alex and his father, this sense of place, this topography of the spirit, at one time informed every aspect of their existence. When, at the turn of the century, a Catholic missionary arrived at their village at Bear Lake, Alex’s father was completely confounded by the Christian notion of heaven. He could not believe that anyone could be expected to give up smoking, gambling, swearing, carousing and all the things that made life worth living, in order to go to a place where they did not allow animals. “No caribou?” he would say in complete astonishment. He could not conceive of a world without wild things.
    Alex lived for more than 90 years; his wife Madeleine reached 103 , passing away a few seasons before Alex followed her to the grave. A year before he died, Alex gave me a small gift, a tool carved from caribou bone. Smooth as marble, though stained from years of use, it fit perfectly in my hand, the rounded and slightly serrated spoon-like tip protruding neatly from between finger and thumb. I had no idea what it might have been used for. Alex laughed. He had carved it more than eighty years before, following the lead of his father. It was a specialized instrument, used to skin out the eyelids of wolves. Only later did I realize that the eyelids in question were my own, and that Alex, having done so much to allow me to see, was, in his own way, saying good-bye.

    PERHAPS BECAUSE I never knew my grandparents, who died before I was born, I have always been drawn to elders, enchanted by the radiance of men and women who have lived through times that I can only imagine: an old school-master who scrambled out of the trenches on the first day of the Somme; a family doctor who treated the wounded along the partition line between India and Pakistan, when rivers of blood divided the Raj; Waorani shaman who knew the Amazonian forests before the arrival of missions. I am enticed by their memories, and, in a culture notably bereft of formal modes of initiation, I find comfort in their advice. From men like Alex, I have learned of a world without form, infused with spirit and prayer. But equally important to me is the landscape of the concrete, the formal realm of science.
    In the early 1970s, a time of few heroes, there was one man who loomed large over the Harvard campus, Richard Evans Schultes, a kindly professor who demanded nothing but devotion to knowledge. In time, mountains in South America would bear his name, as would national parks. Prince Philip would call him “the father of ethnobotany.” Students knew him as the world ’s leading authority on medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, the plant explorer who had sparked the psychedelic era with the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1938 . Three years
later, having proved that teonanacatl , the flesh of the gods, was indeed a mushroom, and having identified ololiuqui , the serpent vine, the second of the elusive Aztec hallucinogenic plants, Schultes turned his imagination to the forests of South America. Taking a semester’s leave of absence from the university, he disappeared into the Northwest Amazon, where he remained for twelve years, mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen indigenous tribes, all the while in pursuit of the mysteries of the rain forest. He collected over twenty-seven thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand medicinal plants and over three hundred species previously unknown to science. For his students, he was a living link to the great naturalists of the nineteenth century and a distant era when the tropical rain forests stood immense, inviolate, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents.
    By the time I met Schultes in the fall of 1973 , it had been some years since he had been capable of active fieldwork. I found him at his desk in his fourth floor aerie in the Botanical Museum, dressed