Dragon Lizards of Komodo (An Expedition to the Lost World of the Dutch East Indies)

Follow Boone and Crockett Club member W. Douglas Burden and his wife on their expedition to the lost world of the Dutch East Indies in the 1920s in search of what many considered direct descendants of dinosaurs and what others thought may be true dragons—the impressive and fierce Komodo dragon (Varanus Komodoensis). Not only did their party find the giant lizards, they were able harvest many for display in museums as well as capture live specimens, which became a tourist attraction in New York City. Much like the movie King Kong, which was inspired by Burden's book. An excerpt from Chapter VI...




...at 9:30 a.m., at the foot of the pinnacle country on a gently sloping talus cone, covered with short grass and a few palm trees, I saw my first dragon lizard in the open. He was a monster—huge and hoary. I scrambled up to a point of vantage, taking great care, however, not to expose myself, as the eyesight of these beasts is much keener than that of deer. The lizard was working his way slowly down from the mountain crags. The sun slanted down the hill, so that a black shadow pre­ceded the black beast as he came. It was a perfectly marvelous sight—a primeval monster in a primeval setting—sufficient to give any hunter a real thrill. Had he only stood up on his hind legs, as I now know they can, the dinosaurian picture would have been complete. He stalked slowly and sedately along, obviously hunting for something in the grass, his yellow tongue working incessantly, his magnificent head swinging ponderously this way and that. In my glasses he filled the whole field of vision, and, as there was nothing at hand with which to compare his size, I knew that I could easily and quite faithfully imagine him to be twenty or thirty feet long...

Dragon Lizards of Komodo is a part of the B&C Classics series launched in 2012 by the Boone and Crockett Club. Each book in the series was authored by a member of B&C in the late 1800s or early 1900s and was hand-selected by a committee of vintage hunting literature experts. Readers will be taken back to a time when hunting trips didn't happen over a weekend, but were adventures spanning weeks, months, even years.

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