That was enough for one vigorous lifetime, right? Not hardly. Did you ever hear of the River of Doubt? You can be excused if your answer is negative. It no longer exists on any map. On February 27, 1914, at the request of the Brazilian government, Roosevelt and his party set off to map the River of Doubt. It turned out to be not quite the triumph that the African safari had been. Early on they began running short of supplies. Then Roosevelt developed a severe infection in his leg. It got so bad that at one point he urged the party to leave him behind. Of course they didn’t, and gradually his leg and his health improved to the point where he was finally able to continue the expedition. Eventually they mapped all 900 miles of the river, and Roosevelt, upon returning home, wrote another bestseller, Through the Brazilian Wilderness. And shortly thereafter, the Rio da Duvida (River of Doubt) officially became the river you can now find on the maps, the Rio Teodoro (River Theodore). He was a man in his mid-fifties, back when the average man’s life expectancy was only 55. He was just recovering from being shot in the chest (and was still walking around with the bullet inside his body). Unlike East Africa, where he would be hunting the same territory that Selous had hunted before and Percival knew like the back of his hand, no one had ever mapped the River of Doubt. It was uncharted jungle, with no support network for hundreds of miles. So why did he agree to map it? His answer is so typically Rooseveltian that it will serve as the end to this chapter: “It was my last chance to be a boy again.”
“Bully” — Asimov’s, 1991
“The Bull Moose at Bay” — Asimov’s, 1991
“Over There” — Asimov’s, 1992
“The Light That Blinds, the Claws That Catch” — Asimov’s, 1992
“The Roosevelt Dispatches” — F&SF, 1996
“Redchapel” — Asimov’s, 2001
“Two Hunters in Manhattan” — The Secret History of Vampires, 2007
“The Unsinkable Teddy Roosevelt” — Oval Office Oddities, 2008