Vicki Croke: November 9, 1936. Camp Two. Far up in the mountains that separate China and Tibet.

The dark and endless bamboo forest shrugged off its gloom and gave way to a luminous first light in "the land of mists." Local hunters gathered around a fire in the cook shed, preparing for another day of searching in that wild and lonely place. Their chief was Lao Tsang, an ancient but agile woodsman of Tibetan ancestry. Each day, as the snow line drifted lower, the cold was more intense, and Lao bundled himself in a battered leather coat, knotted turban and tall boots.

Into the foggy dawn an elegant figure emerged from the camp's only tent. She was a small dark-haired American woman, who had grown fond of wearing tailored riding trousers and sportsmen's wool shirts.

She was here, leading an expedition to capture the most mysterious and sought-after animal of her time - the giant panda.

How she came to be here, and what she accomplished are the elements of an incredible story that has been all but lost to us over the last 60 years.

Ruth Harkness is a true American hero. But as with most American heroes - an unlikely one.

She did not start off as a dare-devil adventurer. In fact, she was a dress designer and something of a socialite. Here is a picture of her preparing for her arduous journey.

She was rarely seen without a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. And she said there were only two things that she hated to do: Go to bed at night, and get up in the morning.

She spent her time in Manhattan designing tea dresses and taking taxis from one cocktail party to the next.

Her route to adventure was through William Harvest Harkness Jr.

She and Bill were lovers for a decade, and then finally married on Sept. 9, 1934, less than two weeks before Bill left on a wild adventure to China.

Globe-trotting adventurer William Harkness, who had captured Komodo dragons in the Dutch East Indies, was a dashing member of a very elite group.

During the 1920s and '30s, burly, rough men - like Frank "Bring 'em Back Alive" Buck and ruggedly romantic dilettantes like the Roosevelt brothers - Kermit and Theodore Jr. - made headlines and newsreels with their exploits in the wild.

Harkness was a Harvard man with a private income, and he was refined enough to list his occupation in his alumni publication merely as "Letters."

During their decade-long friendship, William Harkness and Ruth McCombs shared a wild streak. Both craved adventure, defied convention and drank hard.

Ruth was accustomed to Bill's departures, so it really wasn't so startling when he departed for China on a previously planned expedition in search of pandas, or beishung as they were called in their native land. They were the most exquisite prize of the day. The giant panda was, in the assessment of Desmond Morris, "The most challenging animal trophy on earth."

And the competition to secure one was keen. To kill one was still a considered a huge accomplishment, but now, another idea was even more tantalizing - to capture one alive. To the rakish, well-educated cowboys of animal supply, the panda represented more than just a challenge. It was a taunt: Who was man enough to wrangle with an animal this formidable and this unknown and in such a foreboding place?

As the China Journal reported in recounting the history of panda hunting, "the world was agog with expectation."

Many large, charismatic species of animals were still being "discovered" by Westerners in the 20th century - among them the okapi, a short-necked relative of the giraffe, in 1901, and the mountain gorilla, in 1902. But the panda was a whole new matter. Seasoned adventurers were falling under its spell. And soon enough the panda would simply beguile all who saw it in a way that no other animal ever has.

For William Harkness, it would remain only a dream. His expedition got caught up in red tape, and in February 1936, he died in Shanghai, apparently of cancer. He never reached panda territory.

Improbably, Ruth Harkness - within days of the news of her husband's death - declared that she had "inherited an expedition."

More in the spirit of a Hollywood romp than of a scientific endeavor, Harkness set sail from New York City on April 17, 1936, hosting a cocktail party in her stateroom, with dozens of swells juggling highball glasses and cigarettes and teasing her about her far-fetched mission.

They had good reason.

As she later wrote in "The Lady and the Panda," published in 1938, "After all, what did I know of expeditions, and hunting, working with the native trappers up-country through an interpreter; of the conditions I would have to contend with, and the work it was even to get permission to go?" Further, she admitted, "I wouldn't have known a tragopan pheasant from a tufted deer." However, she added: "I felt pretty certain that there would be no mistaking a Panda, if I ever saw one."

From New York, Harkness sailed through the Red Sea and to ports in Ceylon, Singapore and Hong Kong before finally reaching Shanghai, a city known as "the whore of Asia."

Visitors would be dazzled by art deco buildings and the latest European fashions. It was a place of sex and opium, of tommy guns and cocktails, men in tuxedos and women with bound feet. Old-style warlords from outlying provinces, with their partying and pillaging armies, might collide on the dance floor with American movie stars such as Douglas Fairbanks.

Harkness plunged right in. In fact, her first letter home asks two friends - "Does either of you know where my white satin evening slip is?"

In Shanghai she met her husband's quirky partner, blue-blooded-banker-turned-big-game-hunter Floyd Tangier Smith. She refers to him in her book with disdain, calling him by a pseudonym - "Zoology Jones."

Smith was patronizingly amused by Harkness's intentions. After all, he assured her she would never see a panda. "He had hunted that country over for nearly twenty years, and had never so much as caught a glimpse of one," she wrote.

He suggested they team up and then Ruth Harkness and he could just wait in the luxury of Shanghai, while his hunters did the work.

Ruth Harkness wasn't interested. She and Smith couldn't have been more different. Not the least of which was that he, like most of his peers, was scathingly critical of the Chinese people, while she saw, through them, a way to a new philosophy of life.

Harkness remained undaunted by Smith's discouragement.

From her base at the Palace Hotel in Shanghai, she hooked up with a trio that would change her life.

Jack Young, a well-known American-born Chinese hunter and explorer who had been a member of the Roosevelt expedition. His wife Su-Lin, and his younger brother Quentin.

Jack and Su-Lin Young, both American born Chinese, had gone on an expedition together for their honeymoon. That trip turned Su-Lin into the first female Chinese explorer, according to the journals of the time. Su-Lin, who is now 90, was raised in a wealthy household and was accustomed to being pampered. She told me in an interview last year, that the reason she held up so well in the rugged mountains near Tibet is that she had been a camp counselor in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.

And when Ruth Harkness met Su-Lin, she felt totally relieved. Su-Lin was petite, sophisticated, and sweet. If she could handle life "up-country," Ruth thought, so can I.

Harkness and the Young brothers discussed her expedition. Jack Young was busy with a trip of his own, but he recommended Quentin.

Handsome, handsome Quentin.

And Ruth Harkness, a maverick whose intentions were not being taken seriously by the big boys of big game hunting, did something remarkable. She decided that yes she would hire Quentin Young as her expedition partner. And she further, she really didn't want another Westerner to join them.

"I felt that I did not need a foreigner; in fact I did not want another foreigner, for by that time I had seen enough of the attitude of most Westerners in China to heartily resent it. Why, because of the difference in the colour of a skin, people sweepingly think of themselves as superior beings, I could not understand, and still don't," she wrote.

Born Yang Tilin, Quentin had taken his Western name in honor of one of the Roosevelts. Often dressed in American-style business suits, the Youngs were part of a new worldly group of Chinese youths - many of whom were as comfortable in the West as they were in the Far East.

Su-Lin Young recalls a dinner with her husband, Quentin Young, and Harkness. Quietly watching the interactions at the table, she made up her mind. Out in the field, she thought, a romance between her attractive, young brother-in-law and the wild widow was "inevitable."

Harkness and Young dedicated themselves to preparing for the journey. And they were perhaps both surprised by the respect each accorded the other.

One of the first things they did was to inventory the equipment William Harkness had left behind in storage. Ruth ordered that all of her husband's rugged sportswear be tailored to fit her. From woolen underwear to a fur-hooded army parka to 2 1/2-pound hobnail boots, everything was customized by Ziang Tai, whose business card read "Any Kinds of Ladies' Tailor and Skin, Etc."

Just six years before, Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt had made a similar trip. Their book, Trailing the Giant Panda, reflected the sensibility of the time. The brothers reported that "practically all natives steal," and they described the characters around them in unflattering terms. But Harkness's perception was the opposite. As for thieving, she was astonished in Shanghai "that you can leave everything you own in your unlocked hotel room in the fifth largest city in the world and find even the little pile of coppers you have left on your dresser there to the last one when you return."

Determined to avoid the bureaucratic delays her husband had experienced, she circumvented the complicated Chinese system of permissions by not applying for scientific permits. It was also her idea to pack baby bottles in the event an infant panda was captured rather than an adult, a decision that would prove vital to the trip's success.

Most of her days in September 1936 were spent with Quentin Young, poring over maps and preparing.

On the night of September 26, the Ruth Harkness/Quentin Young expedition had its official start. The two boarded the riverboat Whangpu in Shanghai loaded with all their gear. Tucked among Harkness's possessions on board was a cardboard box containing her husband's ashes.

They began their journey by traveling 1,500 miles up the amber-colored Yangtze River, much of it aboard an oil tanker, and then, in a matter of weeks, 300 miles overland by foot. The group, joined by a small army of "coolies," marched through odd little towns and into the unknown.

It did not faze Harkness that she was the only female. "I was accepted by those men with less comment probably than a woman who rides in a smoking car from New York to Philadelphia," she declared.

She ate fried eggs with chopsticks. She traded in her walking Oxfords at one village for more practical bamboo rope-soled sandals. She found herself feeling inexplicably "home" in China, the land with "an almost spiritual tangibility," the country of "unforgettable colour."

But there were dangers everywhere - steep mountains that could send you crashing to boulder-strewn streams thousands of feet below. Warring factions of soldiers. Unscrupulous war lords. And everywhere bandits.

Yet she felt so certain of her own destiny now, that she had no fear. Even when she did run into a bandit.

Here is a small scene from the book:

Just miles out of Chengdu, other realities were closing in. Throughout the day, groups of soldiers, some carrying submachine guns, overtook them on the road. There were reports of bandits in the area, and one scrum of soldiers passed by with two prisoners tied in ropes. Young was alarmed by the steady procession, and bumping along in one of the wheelbarrows, the Sauer rifle cradled in his lap, he begged Harkness to please arm herself with any of the other guns. Not only was Harkness untroubled by the bandit report, she thought Young's concern was nothing short of adorable. What a picture he made, with the gun, the wrinkled brow on that handsome face, and the unruly lock of hair falling across his forehead. In fact, she couldn't resist getting her camera out and taking a snap of him.

But after lunch, her camera lens found a very different subject.

The scene was, Harkness would explain later, so unreal to her that she felt unmoved. There, sprawled on the road next to an open field and riddled with bullets, was the freshly slain body of one of the prisoners who had passed them earlier. He was flat on his back, legs crossed delicately at the ankle, bare feet casually resting one on top of the other. His right arm reached out and his light cotton shirt was drenched in blood. Blood pooled darkly at his forehead, cheek, and chin, it ran from his prone torso onto his sleeve and stained the dusty road. "Thirty shots fired - 7 hits, and by the look of him, most of them in the face," she wrote home. "Not very pretty."

Bystanders, including shoeless children, stood gawking, and Harkness climbed down off her wha-gar to join them. How could she have sobbed so over a dead cat, and yet stand here with others looking on impassively, she wondered. Her conclusion was that by now she had absorbed some of the Eastern belief in accepting the inevitable. Grisly as it was, this was the bandit's fate.

Everything - the good the bad and the ugly of China simply intoxicated Ruth Harkness.

She saw Chinese girls carrying huge loads of tea on their backs; Tibetan ponies, silver bells jingling, being led by "dark, wild young men in leather coats with the fur turned in, and loose high boots that curled upward at the toes." The team trudged through valleys and skittered along cliffs. They camped in a loft in the ruins of a Buddhist ghost temple that was adorned with blue life-size horses.

There, she and Young, for the purpose of economy, she said, shared a basin to bathe in. She teasingly called him "Commander" and he addressed her as "Colonel."

"It was always Quentin," she wrote, "who was smart in his well-cut breeches, red-topped socks and little cap that matched." And, she wrote, "very often we found ourselves eating out of the same plate, drinking from the same cup."

"It" finally happened here, in this ruined castle near the border of Tibet.

Though she never acknowledged a physical relationship, Quentin Young has. Now nearly 90, frail, reclusive and long retired from his life of adventure, but in 1990 he told San Diego Weekly Reader reporter Michael Kiefer of Harkness's earthy, lusty pleasure in life. During the trip, she tried opium, he revealed, and, yes, the two had become lovers.

This would have been a shocking relationship in 1936, even by Shanghai's jaunty standards. When I told Stella Dong, who wrote the wonderful book Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City, about the romance, she actually gasped.

Throughout Harkness's journey, she was on dangerous ground - and that's precisely where she wanted to be.

Not long after the start of the affair, Harkness and Young found themselves high in the mountains Northwest of Chengdu.

Ruth Harkness had felt all along that she was walking with her destiny. And in no time at all, she was proved right.

On November 9, the group woke to an icy-cold, wet morning at Camp Two. Harkness longed to linger by the campfire, wrapped in woolen blankets. Nonetheless, she rallied herself and marched up into the bamboo forest with Young and the hunters.

The visibility was poor - less than two feet - and the hiking in this unmapped and trackless terrain was treacherous and slick. Several times, Harkness fell, sometimes sinking up to her waist in vegetation, and she was soon soaked and shivering.

At one point, she tried to light a comforting cigarette, but the wet matches would not strike. Her small group clambered on into a bamboo thicket that was "like a shower-bath at every touch." In many places they were forced to crawl on hands and knees over piles of fallen bamboo.

In the dense fog, Harkness heard much more than she could see, and what happened next went by in a blur. There was a shout from ahead, then the report of a musket. Confusion. Young was yelling. Harkness caught up to him and gasped, "What is it?"

"Beishung," Young replied.

Harkness was afraid that the animal had been shot. But Young reassured her that it was not. They stumbled on. From an old rotting tree, a baby panda whimpered. Young ran forward to retrieve a fragile panda cub and handed it to Harkness.

As the three-pound black-and-white ball nuzzled her breast, she and Young realized they had to race back to base camp for the milk and baby bottles.

Once the infant was settled in, Harkness and Young plotted a quick departure. But first, Harkness had a duty to complete, here in the place called the Mountains of the Immortals. Surrounded by snow on green bamboo, she buried the ashes of her husband beneath the gnarled roots of a great rhododendron.

The cub, whom they (and later the scientific community at home) mistook for a female, was named Su-Lin. He was nursed nearly round the clock, even as Harkness and Young hiked quickly during the next week to reach the city of Chengdu, where a contact of Harkness's could provide food, supplies and modern transportation.

From there, Harkness boarded a shiny Douglas plane, riding swift wings over an ancient land, as she put it, and leaving Young behind. Describing her feelings to a New York Times reporter weeks later, Harkness said, "I had two months of complete happiness on the expedition."

Despite a raging cold, and efforts to keep her catch a secret, Harkness was the toast of Shanghai. Here she is on the day before her intended departure as she fielded questions from the press.

In Shanghai, with no official permits for capturing or transporting wildlife, Harkness was detained overnight in a rough customs shack and prevented from sailing. But with friends pulling strings, she managed to board the liner President McKinley on December 2. She was headed for San Francisco with the cub and an official voucher for "one dog $20.00." As Harkness sailed the high seas in high style, on December 7, 1936, TIME magazine ran a lengthy item on her, calling the capture of a giant panda "a scientific prize of first magnitude."

Back in Shanghai, Floyd Tangier Smith read of Harkness' success and fumed. He quickly claimed that Harkness had made off with a cub reserved for him. That she had poached from his territory. Within the week, The New York Times was carrying his accusation that Harkness had merely bought the cub from Chinese hunters.

In an article headlined "Charges Hunters Took Baby Panda by Deception," and datelined Shanghai, December 3, the paper reported: "Mr. Smith alleges he has received word from Chapoo, Szechwan, his headquarters, that his hunters had located the mother panda three months ago and watched her build her nest. They knew the baby panda had been born, Mr. Smith said, and they were only waiting until the little panda had been nearly weaned, when they intended to attempt to capture both."

There are many reasons to doubt Smith's claims. First, in light of today's more advanced understanding of panda behavior, what he had to say seems ludicrous. Pandas are quite sensitive to human presence, and prone to flee an area if disturbed. A close monitoring of this female through pregnancy, nest building and then labor, birth and maternal care would have been highly unlikely.

Furthermore, Smith who said Harkness had trespassed his hunting grounds, had had no such objections when Dean Sage and William Sheldon had shot a giant panda the year before in the same area.

Arthur DeCarle Sowerby, a noted naturalist in China and the editor of the China Journal, always defended Ruth Harkness and dismissed Smith's charges as sour grapes.

Smith's accusations were of no consequence to most Americans.

On December 18, 1936, when she carried the first live panda onto U.S. soil, Ruth Harkness caused what punning writers invariably called "Panda-monium." Waiting for her in San Francisco were throngs of reporters, photographers and cameramen who recorded the historic moment. She did interviews for magazines, newspapers, radio and film. In hotel rooms from coast to coast, with windows kept wide open to the chilly air "to preserve the native Tibetan climate" for the cub's comfort, it was reported, Harkness, wrapped in a gray Chinese otter coat, held court with "shivering newshawks."

We actually have two of the newsreels of the time. The coverage was vast. But no matter how much credit Harkness gave Quentin Young, the American press put him in the background. In the case of this illustration - literally so.

Harkness picked up a little money from endorsements.

One of her appearances was in a breakfast cereal advertisement. "Famous Explorer Discovers Nerve-Bracing Breakfast!" it read. "Quaker Oats wins praise of Ruth Harkness, great American Explorer, and discoverer of only Giant Panda in captivity!" The ad included cartoon frames depicting her "thrilling story." From her letters it appears she was paid $500 for the endorsement.

Historian Susan Ware says, "I'm always surprised by how positive the images of women in popular culture were in the 1930s. There was a popular audience fascinated by women who were breaking new ground. It could be patronizing, concerned with what shade of lipstick they wore out in the desert, but generally the coverage was very positive." (In fact, one account written by an English aristocrat who had run into Harkness in the frontier did mention Ruth's lipstick.)

Though she was embraced and admired by the general public, Harkness experienced a problem that faced all female adventurers of her time: she was coldly dismissed by the all-male institutions that governed her field.

Harkness' accomplishment was so high profile, however, that the prestigious Explorers Club made her the very first woman allowed to attend a dinner with the gentleman members. But an important distinction was made: at the banquet hosted by Lowell Thomas, it was Su-Lin, not Harkness, who was listed as guest of honor.

Despite all the publicity, Harkness had trouble finding a home for Su-Lin. She had assumed zoos would clamor for the animal, but the slights from the natural history world were building. So she simply settled into her swanky Manhattan apartment with what the New York Times had dubbed "the rarest quadruped in the world," and waited.

According to the Times, the Bronx Zoo groused that it had not made plans to house the panda because, "Aside from a cable to the effect that Mrs. Harkness was on her way, the institution had had no word from her since she left China." Though the zoo had been the expected destination for Su-Lin, it quickly rejected the panda, saying the animal, with naturally bowed legs, was an inferior specimen. Considering that no vet had ever seen a panda before - and this one was perfectly normal in conformation - their objection probably had more to do with the fact that Harkness wanted the zoo that took Su-Lin to fund her next expedition to China. The Bronx was just plain spoiled. It was accustomed to rich men donating their catches to the zoo.

The situation led to accusations that Harkness was a gold digger. She was asking for $20,000 - a huge amount of money at the time, but far less than others received. For instance, the Roosevelts were given anywhere from $50,000 to $100,000 for their trip. And rumor still floated that Harkness had obtained Su-Lin through what at the time was referred to as "feminine subterfuge."

Through it all, Harkness did a remarkable job of keeping her fragile charge alive - an accomplishment that is only enhanced with time, as today, even with our more sophisticated knowledge of panda biology, we experience terrible mortality rates for pandas in captivity. (Hua Mei at the San Diego Zoo is the first panda born in a U.S. zoo to survive.) The unschooled Harkness was able to keep Su-Lin healthy as they traveled from the Chinese interior to the coast, to the United States, across this country, to a New York apartment, and eventually to Chicago.

One of the most important factors, no doubt, was that she always kept Su-Lin close to her. But also, we know now that infant pandas need a milk formula with the correct balance of fats and sugars. And Harkness - and the pediatricians she consulted seem intuitively to have cooked up that balance. She fed Su-Lin, who was only about 10 days old at capture, a mixture of powdered milk, cod-liver oil and syrup.

Ultimately, Chicago's Brookfield Zoo agreed to pay Harkness $8,750 - enough to underwrite another expedition. The first day Su-Lin was displayed, in August 1937, the zoo had its highest attendance since opening day. Over time, many celebrities were to pay visits, including Sophie Tucker and Helen Keller.

That Harkness accomplished what she set out to was amazing enough, but once back in the States, she accomplished even more. Harkness, it appears, helped cause a dramatic shift in the collector mentality. With such a feverish reception for Su-Lin, it now seemed unthinkable to invade China to gun down pandas. Remarkably, three of the successful panda hunters - the Roosevelt brothers and Dean Sage - visited Harkness in New York shortly after she returned from her expedition. They cuddled Su-Lin, then each vowed immediately never to kill another panda.

In fact, the whole country fell in love with this baby panda. And as Desmond Morris says, the notion of killing one now, was quite unpopular.

Undeterred, and against all the odds, Harkness would return to China and secure another panda.

War was breaking out between China and Japan, in fact, Harkness was in Shanghai during "Bloody Saturday," in which 729 people were killed and 861 injured by bombs in the city. Unable to contact Quentin Young, Harkness went to Western China by herself - circumventing the fighting along the Yangtze by heading to Vietnam, or French Indo-China, and coming into China by the back door.

She spent a cold and lonely winter in that ruined castle where she and Quentin had once made love. And she waited for hunters to bring a panda.

The second, "Diana," or "Mei-Mei," another male mistaken for a female, was taken in December 1937.

The panda was then transported to the Brookfield Zoo to be exhibited with Su-Lin.

Once back in the States, Harkness decided to go again to the country she loved. The New York Times reported on February 27, 1938, "despite the natural obstacles of war, illness and economic reverses experienced by exploration in war-torn territory," Harkness "has already made definite plans for another expedition."

Before Harkness departed, Su-Lin became ill on March 28, apparently after choking on a stick, and died just three days later. By then he had grown to be a strapping 150 pounds. Though Life magazine reported he died of quinsy, or a tonsil infection, an autopsy failed to reveal the cause.

"Of her countless mourners," Life reported, "none wept more bitterly than Mrs. Harkness who had planned to leave for China next month to find Su-Lin a sturdy male mate." Now, Harkness said, the goal of the expedition was, according to TIME magazine, "to save Mei-Mei from loneliness." (The article also reported the recent arrival of Floyd Tangier Smith in Chengdu with four pandas.)

Harkness's third and last trip to China was a watershed.

She did meet up with Quentin Young and they spent weeks together in and around Chengdu.

He secured a large panda that he ended up shooting during a lightening storm. It was an agonizing event for Harkness.

Further, whatever their feelings for one another, reality seems to have caught up to romance. After another young female was captured, Young departed, leaving Harkness in the walled estate of a friend in Chengdu.

Harkness recognized something of herself in this panda. She - if it was a she - railed against her captivity. Harkness saw the summer out trying to habituate Su-Sen to human company. But the spirited little bear would have none of it.

Despite the animal's substantial value, Harkness couldn't bear the thought of her in a zoo. Harkness and her good friend and cook, Wang, made the trek back into the mountains where the little panda had been caught, and set her free.

Harkness' own life would spiral downward from here after her last great heroic effort.

In the aftermath of World War II, the realm of the natural historian would become more scholarly, a discipline of academic rigor. That shift would end up excluding many who, like Harkness, were remarkable but uncredentialed. This older style of explorer was gradually going out of favor.

After she returned home from China, and without a private income, Harkness would struggle in her attempts to shape her own life. The Lady and the Panda, however, received some very important and favorable reviews. So, at a literary agent's urging over lunch at the Algonquin Hotel in New York in the early 1940s, Harkness decided to head to South America. She told The New York Times she was going to Peru "to study the descendants of the Incas for comparison with the inhabitants of Tibet."

Once in Lima, however, Harkness did no work and only halfheartedly joined the frivolity of the American colony society. She was bored living in a little pension, filling her time with cocktails and dinner parties, what she called "an elaborate nothing." The other Americans, she reported, were interested only in bridge, tennis and golf. But one day, her Spanish teacher intrigued her with a fanciful story of a little silver bear, seen only once, years before in the jungle by a British scientist. Then, Harkness met a handsome Basque/Indian naturalist named Sandoval who would be her guide to his village in the mountains.

An article for Harper's and a subsequent book, Pangoan Diary, revealed a woman completely changed from the one in The Lady and the Panda. Calling herself "an unemployed explorer," she wrote, "Sometimes [explorers] even get to the point where they aren't quite sure what there is left to discover. Then indeed is the world a bleak and unromantic sphere." She hardly disguised the fact that she spent her "expedition" in a small village where her dwindling financial resources could still buy her a room, some domestic help, daily meals and all the wine she could drink. The bulk of the book was taken up with village life and her conversations with Sandoval. She wrote of being gripped by an intense sense of "deep and ultimate loneliness." And she revealed, "Often it seems to me that I have lost my destiny and am hunting to find it again."

From the publication of Pangoan Diary, in 1942, until her obituary five years later, there were no more New York Times articles. Nothing in TIME or Life magazine about her. In the mid-'40s, she wrote of life in Mexico for Gourmet and True magazines, but otherwise she disappeared from public life and vanished from the public record. Papers from the Chelsea Hotel in New York, her last known address, were destroyed in a basement flood. The apartment building she mentions in The Lady and the Panda was torn down long ago. Her family still has her old photograph albums, and a portion of one letter Harkness sent from Bombay, but no diary or journal exists. None of her siblings is alive. The Bronx Zoo has no remaining correspondence from her in its archives; neither does the Brookfield Zoo.

At age 46, Harkness was found dead by an assistant manager, in a partly filled bathtub in a downtown Pittsburgh hotel on July 19, 1947. According to her hometown paper, the Titusville Herald, she "had opened the bed, removed her clothing and put on nightclothes. She then went to the bathroom, where she was stricken." The official cause of death was listed as "acute alcoholic gastro-enteritis." Perhaps more from optimism than evidence, the newspaper would report that she had been in Pittsburgh to negotiate terms at long last for another expedition to China.

Even in death, Ruth Harkness was not given the credit she deserved. In describing her historic adventure in China, the obituary in the Times sniffed, "A baby panda fell into their hands almost at once."