David W. Macdonald, now Professor of Wildlife Conservation at Oxford University, was 18 when he led his first overseas expedition - to study bird flocks in the hills of Kashmir - and 20 when in 1972 he led the zoological expedition to Borneo that is the main story of this book. His youthful passion to write expressed itself in copious diaries scrawled in the mangrove swamps by the light of a Tilley lamp - these diaries, the substance of this story, tell not only of wondrous places, people and animals, but also of how the world seemed to a young man seeing it for the first time. David Macdonald had founded Oxford"s Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, published over 300 scientific papers, twice won the Natural History Author of the Year award, and made prize-winning TV documentaries such as The Night of the Fox, Meerkats United and the Velvet Claw; he still travels widely, although the world is a different place.