Still Life by Melissa Milgrom (best ebook reader TXT) 📕

in World War I. He was a major in the Corps of Engineers, where he invented the first cement gun—used to fortify the Panama Canal—but he refused to wear a uniform because if he did, he couldn't call his colonel a "damn fool."

Finally, in 1925, George Eastman of Eastman Kodak and banker Daniel Pomeroy agreed to fund an expedition to Africa to collect six key animal groups for the hall. "Soon I shall be on my way to Africa, this time accompanied by artists and taxidermists, happy in the knowledge that my years of preparation are ended and my big work actually begun!" Akeley exclaimed.

He was now past sixty, a national celebrity, his daring exploits featured in every newspaper and magazine. He was also happily remarried to Mary Jobe Akeley and spending every waking hour planning the yearlong expedition. But even in a moment of repose, smoking a pipe in his studio, Akeley looked tired. Deep crevices in his face showed the strain of keeping alive his dream. His hair was now silver, his strong shoulders were slumped, and the scar from the elephant charge ran across his cheek like a river on a well-worn map. "If I die before it is finished," he said, pointing to his scale model, "the whole concept and plan is there."

Eight grueling months later, the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy Expedition had collected all the skins, bones, and habitat accessories for seven museum groups—a staggering accomplishment. Yet even with many porters, the safari was difficult. Eastman bickered with Akeley. Landscape painter Arthur Jansson had had enough of bellowing hyenas and fled. Museum taxidermist Robert Rockwell shot the wrong immature giraffe, infuriating Akeley. "The trouble with you, Rockwell," he seethed, "is that you are putting your judgment above mine." Rockwell shrugged it off: "As I looked levelly at Carl it came to me that here was a tired, aging man beset by difficulties, yet furiously intent on carrying out successfully the vision of a lifetime."

Akeley reluctantly checked into a Nairobi hospital with what he said was a fever (malaria and dysentery). The Associated Press reported a nervous breakdown caused by utter exhaustion. Before entering the hospital, he took a detour to the Rift Valley to outline Rockwell's next assignment—to hunt for buffalo on the Tana River, ninety miles northeast of Nairobi. Rockwell, having just killed and flayed five reedbucks, a Grant's zebra, a steenbok, and a hyena, also must have been wiped-out. But his fatigue was nothing compared to Akeley's. As Rockwell eyed him lying on a cot in a land cruiser, barely able to smoke his cigarette, Rockwell said, "If you drive yourself any more than you've been doing, you're liable to leave your bones in Africa."

"I don't know of any other place I would rather leave them," Akeley said flatly in reply.

Three weeks later, Akeley was ready for the final leg of the expedition. He was bringing the renowned painter of the American West William R. Leigh ("the Sagebrush Rembrandt") to a lush rain forest on Mount Mikeno in what was then the Belgian Congo—to the vista he had specifically chosen for the panoramic backdrop of the gorilla group: the eleven-thousand-foot saddle between Mount Mikeno and Mount Karisimbi. The "Kivu volcanoes," as Akeley called the part of the Virunga mountain range bordering Lake Kivu, span Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Virunga National Park, the oldest national park in Africa, which Akeley helped establish as a gorilla sanctuary in 1925, is located here. It's also the place where Dian Fossey, the American zoologist who wrote Gorillas in the Mist, was murdered in 1985 while protecting gorillas from poachers.

The place Akeley had chosen was the mossy wonderland where he had come in 1921 to film and then shoot his prized gorilla specimens: the Old Man of Mikeno, the Lone Male of Karisimbi, and his namesake, Clarence. It's also where he tied himself to a tree on the precipice of a canyon to steady himself while skinning and skeletonizing Clarence.

Akeley had already mounted these gorillas and two others in New York. He also had the footage of the live gorillas (the first ever taken), as well as footage of his beloved volcanoes. (He invented the first portable motion picture camera just for this purpose.) You might be tempted to think that Akeley already had everything he could possibly need to make a convincing diorama, but you'd be wrong. Akeley wanted the expedition to experience the place firsthand. The only way to truthfully exhale the spirit of any place, Akeley thought, was first to inhale it. That the spot was halfway up a steep, active volcano, whose slopes were covered with thick jungle, mud, and thorny nettles, didn't matter. Neither did the torrent of rain or Akeley's condition.

So once Akeley was out of the hospital, he and the remaining expedition members left their motor caravan in Kabale, Uganda, and set off, first by canoe and then on foot, to reach Akeley's old camp on Mount Mikeno. The trail followed stupendous waterfalls, thousand-foot chasms, and thick stands of bamboo that had to be struck down to clear a path. After days of twenty-five-hundred-foot ascents and descents in the pounding tropical rain, Akeley, knee-deep in mud and dressed in a Burberry raincoat, broke down and had to be carried by stretcher. Most men would have pitched camp and called it a day, but Akeley wasn't most men; he was a taxidermist.

Eventually, the group reached a lush wilderness marked by wild celery and lichen-covered vines that dangled from moss-covered canopies. Signs of gorillas were everywhere. Akeley looked up from the stretcher and said to his wife tenderly, "Mary, this is the Kivu at last. Here the fairies play! Isn't this forest the most beautiful, the most ancient in all the world?"

Conditions were dismal in the dark forest. Sheets of cold rain and sleet pounded the troupe. Akeley staggered the last two miles into his old camp. He was suffering miserably from fever-induced chills and was nauseated. He stayed in his