P R O L O G U E He would be torn limb from limb. All the Great Men of Science said so, if this rash young man went to live with the real King Kong, Africa''s monstrous mountain gorilla. Known the world over for its crazed chestbeating and hooting, slavering scream, this ape was savagery incarnate, or worse: a creature--as the first Westerner to ever see one had warned--of that "hideous order, half man, half beast." Fearing that not even bullets would stop the demon, Paul du Chaillu had ordered his men to load their flintlocks with ragged hunks of cast iron. None ever forgot the goliath''s dying groans, "full of brutishness" yet "terribly human." George Beals Schaller had read Du Chaillu''s account when he set off for the Belgian Congo in 1959. He knew that Carl Akeley, who had killed five gorillas to stuff for the American Museum of Natural History--pausing along the way to strangle an attacking leopard with his bare hands--had called any white man who got close to one without shooting "a plain darn fool." He had listened to famed paleoanthropologist Louis Leakey argue with other "old Africa hands" over whether Schaller should wear armor or a disguise, what weapons he should carry, whether he would survive at all.

And then, without retinue or pith helmet, George went to the gorillas. Alone. When charged by a roaring silverback, he stood his ground. He couldn''t have shot the brute if he''d wanted to. Certain that it would change his bearing in ways the apes would sense, he had refused--then and forever after--to carry a gun. What emboldened a twentysixyearold graduate student to defy the scientific magi, in these jungles and for the rest of his life? How did he step free of the fear that has driven so much of human history, and into relationships no scientist had yet ventured, including with Earth''s most reviled creatures? History offered scant precedent for approaching wild animals in Schaller''s utterly unguarded way. Most zoologists had until then studied only specimens on cold tables, or broken creatures in shackles or cages. C.

R. Carpenter had observed freeliving howler monkeys in Panama and gibbons in Thailand, but even he soon retreated to the controlled environment of his rhesus macaque compound in Puerto Rico. Konrad Lorenz''s studies of animal behavior would win him the Nobel Prize, but he had met his feather-weight geese and jackdaws as near pets within the menagerie he made of his own home. The animals Schaller would spend his life with were far bigger than any of those, and sometimes truly dangerous. But they could be known, he believed, only by entering their world. So he transformed scientific practice: committing months or years to winning the trust and acceptance of lions and tigers and bears, assimilating to their rhythms and rules, endeavoring to see the universe through their eyes. Though risky for a young scientist, that meant breaking all prevailing norms. For much of the twentieth century, the natural sciences, extending a lineage that ran from Descartes to B.

F. Skinner, had insisted on a "disinterested" stance toward creatures seen to be of a distinctly lower order: insensate automatons, animated only by reflex. For the serious scientist, they were data; by "twisting the lion''s tail" (in Bacon''s apocryphal phrase) the "objective" investigator could answer a question, test a hypothesis, advance his own grand theories. Schaller stood nearly alone in claiming a radically different conception of nature and science, this one descended from the nineteenthcentury Romantic understanding that the "expression of the emotions in man and animals," as Darwin titled his final book, were variations on an evolutionary theme. If animals'' interior lives were closely akin to our own, empathy and intuition became critical instruments for understanding them, and lyricism for expressing their complexity. Nature held out a path not to cold mastery but to communion, a stepping free of the self into something far larger and more powerful. Schaller''s quest to know these others would take him into six continents and a life of high drama and romance. Unmoored from his earliest days, he never quit moving, crashing into all the darkness and light the century had to offer, piling up enough brushes with death, transcendent encounters, and grand adventures to fill a dozen lives.

Born in Berlin in 1933 to an ambitious young American socialite and a pliant diplomat working for Hitler, he survived aerial bombings, American soldiers'' rough searches, and a narrow escape from the Russian zone--fending for himself much of the time, evacuated again and again as the front closed in. Completing high school in Missouri as an enemy alien, then college in the territory of Alaska, he joined the expedition that gave birth to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, writing the trip report that ultimately helped sway Eisenhower. He stayed through the violence that erupted when Belgium abruptly left Congo, witnessing the tragedy that unfolds when desperate animals and desperate people collide, and taking mad risks to protect the gorillas. Again and again, for the sake of the giant panda or Marco Polo sheep, he navigated historic upheavals--from the aftermath of China''s Cultural Revolution to the flood of Kalashnikovs, Apache helicopters, and opium dealers unleashed in Afghanistan by its series of imperial wars. Despite all the wrecked countries and tense borders, the informants, corrupt officials, and opportunistic expats, Schaller completed an astonishing run of firstever studies--of Indian tigers, Serengeti lions, Himalayan snow leopards, Brazilian jaguars, Chinese pandas, Gobi Desert wild camels, and the grand mountain goats, sheep, antelope, cats, and bears of the Tibetan Plateau, to which over forty years he was granted a nearunfettered access no other Westerner has ever had. As David Attenborough, one of his myriad acolytes, once said, "I thought he must sit back and think: What other impossible creature can I imagine that nobody else could get near?" Coming of age just as air travel became commonplace, Schaller reached far more of the planet than Alexander von Humboldt, Charles Darwin, or any of the earlier generations of adventurernaturalists. And, in this age of specialization, likely more than any since. Focused by his thirties on the unprotected and unstudied expanses where most life on Earth remained, he walked thousands of miles alone or with local companions, often traversing landscapes outsiders had never seen.

In many of those places--Pakistan''s scorched deserts, Sichuan''s iced bamboo forests, Brazil''s sultry wetlands--he stayed, sometimes for years. Settling into leopard or panda time, he endured alongside them the shrapnel of sandstorms, freezing blizzards and blistering heat, hunger, thirst, leeches, and larvae that burrow under the skin--and also their wild freedom, griefs, and loves. On occasion, he traveled even across time. Driven to know what life was like when we ourselves were still wildlife, he once spent a week living as a hominid near the site of our African origins, reliant on tools of his own making and scavenging what he couldn''t kill. Like devotees across centuries, Schaller embraced the mortifications of the flesh and extreme tests inflicted by these pilgrimages--from abandonment in a whiteout at seventeen thousand feet to venomous snakes in malarial jungles. He came to know many kinds of emptiness and aloneness. All was made bearable by his love, from age nineteen to the end of his life, for the slight, acerbic, everundaunted Kay Morgan. It was she who kept their sons from toddling into the tiger ravine, she who ran after the pet baby warthog and bottlefed their rescued lion cub, searched out vegetables to stave off the boys'' rickets, shepherded them through middle school in Lahore while their father vanished for months into Asia''s highest mountains.

Though she loved wildness as much as he, she paid her own high price for his commitment, superseding all others, to the largest idea of family. Like the Horatii swearing their oath to Rome as wives and children wept, Schaller''s code of honor seemed of another age. Those asked to describe him often reached for archaic phrases. He was a "pillar" in the world, a man of "sterling character" and deep humility, a companion one would entrust with one''s life. He was not without powerful internal drives--the explorer''s to be first, the scientist''s to know and name, the artist''s to faithfully convey, the missionary''s to save. But his own psychology never much interested him, far less, certainly, than the mystery of these other beings. Much of his power lay in all he didn''t need: not wealth, nor fame, nor even adulation--at least from humans. Lacking (as his younger son put it) the "selfie emotions," he steadfastly refused whatever might steal his time or dispirit him, including solipsism.

Instead, it was to the world that he brought his attention, as intense and devout as prayer. His patience and openness were the very opposite of the shallow, inflamed voyeurism we call our attention economy, so bent on searching out all the ways we are not "them." What kept Schaller going through decades of acute danger and misery, political chaos and heartbreak, was an urge few beyond children or poets remember: to climb inside the other''s skin, to live unalienated in the manner of a bird or caribou. To be recognized as someone others needn''t fear. If ultimately on a spiritual quest, Schaller ha.