Summary

Late one evening, Edwin Rist steps off the train at Tring and walks to this town's branch of the British Natural History Museum. Perched atop a wall outside the building, he begins to cut through one of the museum's windows with a glass cutter but drops it into the ravine below. Undeterred, he breaks the window with a rock and hoists himself and his suitcase through the opening. Edwin walks the hallways as he had rehearsed in his mind until he comes to the vault where he opens one steel cabinet after another and fills his suitcase with their contents: hundreds of bird-skins "gathered by naturalists and biologists over hundreds of years [...] and fastidiously preserved by generations of curators" (3). Uninterested in the museum's most valuable skins: finches and mockingbirds collected in the Galapagos by Charles Darwin, he instead chooses the more colorful species such...