Like mystics and soldiers of fortune, field biologists are fond of exotic, far-flung places. It's partly scientific: the study of wildlife requires wilderness. Yet sometimes there's an irrational, almost addictive edge to the attachment. Joe Slowinski, a curator of herpetology at the California Academy of Sciences, had such a bond with Myanmar—or Burma, as much of the world still calls that Southeast Asian nation, preferring tradition over a name foisted on it by a military regime. Burma is about as far from San Francisco as it's possible to be flung. In eleven trips beginning in 1997, Slowinski led expeditions throughout the country. To biologists, he is probably best known for his identification, with herpetologist Wolfgang Wüster of Bangor University in Wales, of the first new species of cobra to be described since 1922: Naja mandalayensis, the Burmese spitting cobra. Slowinski also cofounded, with the Smithsonian Institution's George R. Zug, the Myanmar Herpetological Survey, one of the country's few stable scientific institutions.

Late in the summer of 2001, Slowinski led an expedition into Burma's extreme north, in the foothills of the Himalayas near the frontier with China, to conduct the first large-scale survey of the region's life-forms. On September 12, while the world was reeling from the attacks on America, Slowinski died from the bite of a many-banded krait, Bungarus multicinctus, the deadliest land serpent in Asia. He was only thirty-eight. It was a tragic loss to science and an exemplary tale of grace under pressure. A few hours after the bite, when Slowinski could no longer breathe on his own, his colleagues began mouth-to-mouth respiration. They kept him alive that way for more than twenty-four hours, waiting for a helicopter rescue mission that came too late.

In January 2005, I began researching a biography of Slowinski with a journey of my own, tracing the route of his expedition from Putao, a small district capital in the north of Burma, to the village of Rat Baw, about thirty miles from the Chinese border, where he died. It was my fourth visit to Burma in twelve years, but the first time I ventured beyond areas ordinarily open to tourists.

I began in Yangon, the nation's capital, also known as Rangoon. The decrepit airport terminal was typical of the dilapidated infrastructure I saw everywhere, the ravages of more than four decades of dictatorial military rule. Also evident was the watchful eye of the junta. Posted on the way into the city were scarlet signs proclaiming in Burmese and English: “Oppose those relying on external elements acting as stooges holding negative views” and “Oppose foreign nationals interfering in the internal affairs of the State.”

My first call in the capital was at the Forest Ministry, whose primary mission seems to be to look the other way while foreign loggers clear-cut Burma's ancient hardwood forests. On the other hand, the ministry's Nature and Wildlife Conservation Division, which sponsored most of Slowinski's field expeditions, makes a valiant effort to protect what remains of the nation's natural heritage. I met the division's director, U Khin Maung Zaw, a courtly, soft-spoken zoologist, in a dim office lined with glass-doored cabinets full of scholarly books and old maps. He and Slowinski had been friends; in fact, in 1998 Slowinski had named a new species of wolf snake after him, Lycodon zawi.