That moment, or something like it, played out thousands of times during Tom Abercrombie's career, which brought him into close and welcome contact with the people of more than 80 nations. He often likened himself to a one-man army when he set off into the field—in a customized Land Rover with metal gas cans lashed to the roof, a dozen or more hard cases, water jugs, sleeping bags, books, duct tape, baling wire, topographic maps, shrink-wrapped rations, mounds of pipe tobacco, and, depending on local circumstances, a firearm or two—but humanity was his secret weapon.

"Abercrombie was tough as nails, but he was incredibly gentle with people," says retired Geographic photographer Jim Stanfield, who traveled the Sahara with Tom in a 400-camel caravan. "He was a world-class listener. He'd spend hours talking to some guy in a coffee shop, smoking his pipe and yakking about this and that. He had a great mind, and infinite curiosity. He took his time with people, and they trusted him. Even when he didn't speak their language, he always found a way to connect."

In eastern Afghanistan, for example, he fell in with a group of men playing buzkashi, the traditional Afghan sport of galloping horses, calf carcasses, and bloody, horse-to-horse combat. "The way I got chummy with the players, who are not a real chummy bunch, was that I was photographing and a horse chewed one of these guy's ears right off," Abercrombie, who cursed like a sailor, told a reporter in 1998. "I had this hell of a first aid kit I carried around. I had damn near a hospital, this huge fishing tackle box full of morphine and sharpened scalpels. So I fixed this guy's ear up and made him feel a little better."

Abercrombie's medical exploits were legendary. There was the amputation, with a pocketknife, of a pilgrim's gangrenous toes in Tibet, his emergency care of survivors after an earthquake in Iran, his one-man triage and field surgery after a speeding truck piled high with passengers flipped over on a highway in Nigeria.

His expense accounts, too, elicited gasps from his colleagues, especially those in Accounting. Yet the man who listed two AK-47s as "auto insurance" on his expense report from Yemen, presented the occasional gift of a sheep or goat to a Bedouin host, or bought a Cessna 185 to fly himself around Alaska was merely being practical. An early audit of his accounts by headquarters revealed a miserly average daily expenditure on meals and hotels of $17.52. Tom, of Scottish blood, thought that a bit high. This was, after all, a man who wrote his stories on the backs of earlier manuscripts, and wore his pencils down to the nub. His home woodworking shop is a monument to thrift, littered with hoarded wood scraps and illuminated by handmade shop lights with shades of recycled aluminum pie plates.