A Lapful of Leopard by Peter Capstick

This is the author's introduction to this chilling true story: Carl Ethan Akeley is considered the “Father of Modern Taxidermy, a title not lightly earned. I first saw his work in New York’s American Museum of Natural History in 1947, a small boy in hot flannel, dripping ice cream over his Buster Browns in the July heat. His bronzes of lion spearing, taken from his adventures with the Nandi of British East Africa, are still my favorite sculptures on earth. Perhaps I always related to Akeley because he was an American who proved that my own dreams of going to Africa were not in vain. Akeley, at heart a sculptor, caught better than anyone else the action and reality of his still-unspoiled Africa. Yet he paid a very high admission fee for his exposure, killing a wounded leopard with his bare hands and being left for dead in the icy heights of equatorial mountains after being savaged by an elephant. At last, in 1926, Carl Akeley paid his final dues for his lifestyle, dying of pneumonia on the high, chillingly wet slopes of the remote Virunga volcanoes of what was then the Belgian Congo, where he had collected specimens of the mountain gorilla for the museum. Should you walk into the Museum of Natural History in New York City, you will see a magnificent diorama of the mountain gorilla, which actually is more than a memory to Akeley. It is an exact depiction of his grave, in the saddle between Mount Karasimbi and Mount Mikeno. The peaks in the background, behind the spot where his wife laid his tired and African-worn bones, are the volcanoes of Nyamlagira and Nyiragongo. In creating his works for the museum, Akeley was the most generous of men, naming the display area after his close friend Theodore Roosevelt. He also dedicated his only book, In Brightest Africa (1920), to the ex-president. The years have a way of saying thanks in kind: the Roosevelt Hall is now the Akeley Hall, and small boys like me from around the world still thank him." -- Peter Hathaway Capstick, Death in a Lonely Land.

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