I decided to tell two stories. The narrative follows the travels that Tim Plowman and I pursued over a fifteen-month period in 1974-75, a Journey not only inspired and made possible by R.E. Schultes but infused at all times with his spirit. Wrapped around this account are biographical chapters, identified by year, that describe the most extraordinary period oI Schultes’s life, a stretch of near continuous fieldwork between 1936 and 1953 that took him from the peyote cult of the Kiowa and the pursuit of teonanacatl and ololiuqui, the long-lost sacred plants oI the Aztec, to the Northwest Amazon of Colombia. There, while searching for the identity of curare, he became engaged in one of the most important botanical quests of the twentieth century: the hunt for new sources of wild rubber, an investigation given urgency by the outbreak of World War II.