Excerpt from The Last Unicorn by William deBuys, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

He scrounged up provisions, a jungle hammock, and other gear and rode the bus south along the Mekong. He disembarked at the foot of the Nakai Plateau and hiked up the escarpment. At that time Nakai was hardly a town. He plunged into the forest.

Brazenly, Robichaud had decided to go walkabout toward saola country. His adventure did not start auspiciously. On the first night, he'd barely settled into his jungle hammock when he felt something stinging his face. And stinging his neck. And crawling in his hair. He bailed out of the hammock. Red ants clung to his hands and fell like dandruff from his head. A column of them had climbed the tree he'd lashed the hammock to, and the advance guard was marching down the lash rope, through an eyelet, and into the screened sleeping compartment. He shook out the ants as best he could and anointed the lash rope with shampoo or some other ant-repelling lotion. Then once more he attempted sleep.

The next morning he set out through a majestic pine forest. For days he walked through the pines. He stayed away from villages and slept in the forest. His solitary ways spared him contact with local police and village officials, who would have had no idea what to make of him. A lone American wandering through rural Laos? Was he a spy? A prospector hunting gold? Or was he searching for the downed pilots the Americans called MIAs? Because he had no knowledge of the country and little in the way of maps, he ultimately elected not to head up-mountain, toward the Vietnamese border and into whatever the saola's habitat might turn out to be. Instead, he stuck to the plateau proper, the very land that NT2 would later inundate, which proved unspeakably beautiful and marvelous enough. In the days before the plateau was logged and drowned, it supported one of the finest primary pine forests left on the planet.

Robichaud exited the forest at the crossroads town of Lak Xao, the same town where years later he would encounter the captive saola. He had three days left to return to Vientiane and catch his plane to the States. He inquired after the bus. Alas, the rainy season had begun, and the next bus, he was told, would not call at Lak Xao until the dry season, four months hence. Robichaud was stunned: four months! He had to get to Vientiane. Quickly.

On the way into town he'd passed an impressive private compound with a big Soviet-built Mi-8 helicopter parked inside it. This was the headquarters of General Cheng Sayavong, satrap of the region, who would loom large for Robichaud in later years. Robichaud had not quite screwed up the courage to turn around, go back, and knock on the door of the compound to ask if the helicopter might soon head to Vientiane, when a man stepped forward. He had observed Robichaud's disappointment about the bus. He said, I have to deliver my son to school in Vientiane; I will take you, too. And so by the luck that attends those who have nothing else, Robichaud joined the man on a journey by foot, truck, and boat that eventually brought him to the main highway running to the capital. He waited, caught a bus, and narrowly made his flight in time.

Early reports of the saola's discovery asserted that the last large mammal previously identified to Western science had been the kouprey, a species of wild cattle similar to banteng and gaur. It, too, was native to Indochina and had been named from the forests of Cambodia more than a half century earlier, in 1937. The last before the kouprey was the giant forest hog, which joined the bestiary of the world in 1904, and before that, the okapi, a forest-dwelling cousin of the giraffe whose existence was confirmed in 1901. The saola was deemed to have revived this impressive succession of discoveries, suggesting that the world might be younger, newer, and more blessed with marvels than anyone dared hope. The claim wasn't precisely true: a half dozen species of whales and porpoises, mammals of the sea and unquestionably large, had been identified to science in the years since the kouprey's discovery, as had more than a half dozen largish land mammals — a pig, a peccary, four species of deer, a gazelle, and a wild sheep.4 But not many observers lingered over that roster. Sure, new whales might churn the waters of the sea, and new variations on old mammalian themes might manifest themselves from time to time, but saola were not just a new species. They were a new genus, and some taxonomists continue to think their singularity might go even further than that — to the level of tribe. Saola were more than a surprise. They were a mystery drawn from a largely uninventoried habitat that promised still further surprises. They were the embodiment of a land of marvels.

Excerpted from the book The Last Unicorn by William deBuys. Copyright © 2015 by William deBuys. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company