February 24
Nam Theun Reservoir
We strike out across the drowned forest in a narrow, battered launch that draws no water except when heavily laden, as it now is with our camp gear and food. A white sky silvers the surface of the water. We squat in silence among the bundles, wrapped like Bedouins against the sun. There is no point in talking. The chainsaw racket of the engine drones tonelessly, incessantly.
Our quarry is an animal known only in a small, remote patch of the planet, an animal known mainly for being unknown. We have no idea if we will find it. The odds, we know, are against us.
The boatman steers through treetops that puncture the surface of the reservoir, down lanes known only to him. We skim the forest at bird level, scraping the edges of canopies whose branches supplicate the sky in a final leafless gesture. We pass a copse of bamboo, its stems arcing upward like antennae. The woody shafts dance and clatter in our wake. Farther along rises a solitary dipterocarp, a hardwood tree considered majestic even by the standards of this timber-rich region. Its thick trunk is charred by fire from years earlier, before the forest was drowned. I shout a question to Robichaud. He yells back, “Not much lightning around here. Probably villagers collecting resin started that one, and it got away from them.”
Robichaud sits against a bag of rice in the bow, binoculars at the ready. A rule of expeditions like this one holds that the best observer goes first in line, on water or on land. You never know what you might see. Maybe the next bird in the sky is the last white-winged duck in central Laos. Maybe it’s a fish eagle never before reported for this particular place. Maybe you will have no more than a second to bring up the glasses and make the ID. For the habitat where we are headed, you can count on a carpenter’s hand the other people in the world who might have a quicker or more knowledgeable eye than Robichaud, and none of them is in the boat. Robichaud has been wandering the forests on the far side of this lake for decades. We are days away from saola habitat, but he is tense with pleasure on this morning of new beginning. Behind him in the boat, I see only his back, but he is sitting as straight and attentive as a bird dog on its way to a hunt.
I am next in line, assigned to a low, bare thwart, vainly seeking comfort among the backpacks and bundles piled fore and aft. There is no extra room and precious little freeboard. The boat is tippy, easily rocked. I am learning that if I stretch out a knee, my back soon complains; if I bring in my leg and lean back, the knee begins to ache. The only thing to do is move the pain from place to place.
Crossing drowned forest, Nam Theun Reservoir, William Robichaud in the bow.
We have two, maybe three hours to cross the reservoir and ply our way upstream along a narrow river to Ban Makfeuang. Ban means “place” or “village.” Makfeuang, to me, is indecipherable, a mouthful of sound without meaning. I have never been there, nor, I imagine, anyplace like it. From Ban Makfeuang, we will hike some hours to another village, Ban Tong, where we hope to hire other boats to take us up a second river to Ban Nameuy, beyond which we will sleep in the forest. The names of these places sit on my tongue like the seeds of an exotic fruit. I do not know whether to swallow them or spit them out.
Behind me, side by side on another thwart, are the boys, Olay and Touy, both of them Lao. They are not boys, really, but young men, one just out of university, the other in his last semesters, though both are younger than my own children. Jammed together in the narrow boat, they have zipped their rain jackets to the chin, although there is no threat of rain. They are as new to each other as they are to me, and it is good to see in their glances and gestures that they are becoming friends. While Touy hails from a royal family of prerevolutionary Laos, Olay is the son of a man born with no social advantages. Now they pass a small camera back and forth and smile modestly when I twist around to look at them.
Behind the boys is Simeuang—lithe, athletic, and ever smiling. Also Lao, he is nearly as young as they are yet possesses a soft and centered gravitas. His presence makes our journey official—and permissible. Hailing from Pakxe, a city on the Mekong River in the south of Laos, he works for the Watershed Management and Protection Authority, the WMPA, which came into being as part of the colossal hydropower project that inundated the forest and created the reservoir we are traversing. The WMPA decrees what may and may not be done in the forests on the far side of the reservoir, which stretch away to a mountainous, cloud-hung horizon we cannot see, past which lies Vietnam. These forests are rich with wildlife and also with people.
Last of all is the boatman, whose face, shrouded by a towel he drapes beneath his hat, is as grave as Charon’s. The din of the engine hammers upon him; the long tiller vibrates in his hand. His work is to ferry people and their freight from the dusty town of Nakai, possessed of electricity and a cacophonous market, across the glassy lake and up its tributaries to villages that perch on sandy riverbanks, their houses built on stilts even where floods are not in prospect. These are the homes of “hill tribes,” in the terminology of an earlier time; the people of the villages are nowadays—and no more helpfully—referred to as “ethnics” or “ethnic people.”
The boat that carries us is a blunt-nosed pirogue, about twenty-five feet long, with a squared stern, where the engine hangs. In design, it is a direct descendant of the dugout canoe, good for navigating the twists and turns of shallow rivers. Sturdy planks have replaced the tree trunk of the original, and a gasoline engine endows the new creation with speed, commotion, and a name: this kind of craft is called a chak hang, which translates as “motor tail,” a term that aptly describes the long driveshaft slanting backwards from the engine, which ends in a two-bladed propeller hardly bigger than your hand. The shallow slant of the driveshaft keeps the propeller only barely submerged, the better to avoid the rocks and sandbars of the riverbeds. When the boatman opens the throttle, the engine screams, and the prop shoots up a gleaming rooster tail of water, which is the first thing you see when you sight a chak hang at a distance.
Once upon a time, certainly years before the dam was closed and the forest flooded, our chak hang sported a handsome coat of royal-blue paint, which age and abrasion have since faded to the color of worn-out jeans. The color seems not so much painted on the boat as infused into the fibers of its wood. Were an artist to paint this scene, with its hard-boiled sky, the mirroring water, and forlorn treetops, the weathered boat would give the canvas its only life. Chased by our rooster tail of spray, we are a lone dash of color advancing into the dissolving distance. Soon we, too, will be absorbed by the hazy land.
As the trees grow fewer in number, the watery prairie opens. The reservoir has now deepened past the height of even the tallest dipterocarps; or, more likely, the trees that used to grow here were felled and hauled to a sawmill before the waters came. In the shimmering distance, the outline of a wooded shore begins to emerge.
The river that was dammed to form the lake is the Nam Theun. Nam means “water,” also “river.” Saying “Nam Theun River” is redundant, like saying “Rio Grande River.” Theun, in one reading, expresses a wry humor. The word is ancient, coined by some long-vanished ethnic group, and its original meaning may have vanished with them. Among the subsequent connotations that have attached to it over the centuries are “opposite-flowing” and even “wrong way.” Nam Theun: Wrong Way River. Before it was drowned, the Nam Theun flowed roughly northwest across the Nakai Plateau, a direction opposite that of the region’s other major rivers, which trend southeastward, including the great Mekong, sixty kilometers to the west. The Mekong marks most of the boundary between Thailand and Laos. Or not Laos: officially we are in the Lao People’s Democratic Republic—Lao PDR. Along with China, Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, it is one of the world’s last self-described Communist governments.
Past where the Nam Theun spills from the plateau and bends west to flow into the Mekong, it changes its name. It becomes the Nam Kading. Kading: the sound of a pretty bell, although this is probably another false etymology. Many place names in Laos go deep in time, bringing a sense of romance and lyricism to the present. By no means are all of them, or even a majority of them, derived from the Lao language. Lao PDR’s 6.5 million people, by most counts, are divided among more than 150 distinct ethnicities, speaking scores of different languages. As a result, Laos is one of the world’s most culturally heterogeneous nations. Perhaps nowhere else on the planet is extraordinary biological diversity so well matched by ethnic and linguistic variety.
Days earlier, on our way from Vientiane, the capital, to the frontier town of Nakai, we stopped just short of the bridge over the mouth of the Nam Kading and visited a roadhouse. It was just Robichaud, the boys, and me; we would rendezvous with Simeuang later in Nakai. The boys got soft drinks, and Robichaud and I bought cans of chilled coffee and bags of Thai snack food. Then Robichaud disappeared next door. He came back with a half dozen oranges that were the size of limes and almost as green. They looked unappetizing, and I wondered why he had bought them. A few hundred meters down the road, as we approached the bridge over the Nam Kading, he passed them out. It is important, he explained, to make an offering to the river spirits as you cross the river. You give them something, and maybe you get good fortune in return. “Try not to hit any fishermen,” he added. And so as our vehicle sped across the bridge, we rolled down the windows and pitched the little oranges over the railing. The water—and any fishermen—lay far below. We could not see where our offerings landed, but I confess I did not think about fishermen—the river gods were much more on my mind. I prayed for the kiss of luck. On the trek that lay before us, it would be a welcome thing, perhaps essential.
The Nakai Plateau, now submerged beneath our boat, was once legendary for its beauty and wildlife. Lao princes and the French colonialists who succeeded them hunted its tigers from the backs of elephants. Unspoiled forests of dipterocarps and stately pines resounded with the gabble of monkeys, the ethereal hoots of gibbons, and the chatter of birds of every hue. Rhinos snorted in the wetlands. Herds of elephants and wild cattle—banteng and gaur (which would dwarf an American bison)—and the rare and regal Eld’s deer grew fat in the savannas.
Years before the dam was conceived, but still in living memory, the tigers and rhinos were largely hunted out, and the herds of wild cattle had dwindled. Even so, the grand forests and nearly all their lesser denizens remained.
That such a land should be drowned for a tepid reservoir is a function of three things: the thirst of the world (in this case, Thailand) for electricity, the hunger of Laos for foreign currency, and the confidence, questionable though it may be, of the highest echelon of the globe’s economic and financial mavens that a defensible balance of loss and gain might be devised. (Flood control, a common rationale for the building of dams, did not apply.) The masters of the global economy determined to trade the wonders of the Nakai Plateau for the commensurate glories of the sprawling mountain slopes that drain into it, sacrificing the former for the assured protection of the latter. Those slopes are the land to which we are headed—the upper watershed of the Nam Theun, which lies beyond the lake and stretches eastward for many kilometers to the crest of the Annamite Mountains1 and the border with Vietnam. Designated the Nakai–Nam Theun National Protected Area, it is a patch of planet as pristine as any in Southeast Asia, naturally rife with wildlife, rich in aboriginal culture, and dense with undiscovered marvels. At more than four thousand square kilometers (1,544 square miles), the Nakai–Nam Theun watershed is either the largest or among the two or three largest protected areas (depending on who is doing the counting) in all of Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia—the region the French called Indochina.2
Of course, the wonders of Nakai–Nam Theun have existed through the ages. Exchanging development for preservation does not bring them into being. The purpose of the trade was to make possible the actual protection of those wonders, which were otherwise considered doomed by the usual forces of exploitation. Before the dam came along, Nakai–Nam Theun already enjoyed special status as a “national biodiversity conservation area,” but it was a park only on paper, like so many others in the developing world. It received little in the way of management or funding to defend it from hunters, chain saws, and bulldozers.
Development offered an alternative. With cash from a giant hydropower project to fund the watershed’s defense, all that would change. Nakai–Nam Theun, it was promised, would be actively patrolled and protected. A dedicated stream of revenue taken from the sale of the electricity—roughly one million dollars a year out of a much larger total, adjusted for inflation—would be directed to protecting the environment and to improving the social and economic well-being of people living in the affected area. A new agency, the Watershed Management and Protection Authority—Simeuang’s employer—would come into being to achieve those goals.
This time around—and by many reckonings, for the first time ever—a large-scale, internationally funded hydropower project would be done right. Multiple levels of checks and balances would assure quality and accountability, making the project corruption-free, compassionate to native people, and environmentally conscious. The World Bank and its peer agencies were acutely aware that virtually all the large hydropower projects they had funded in the past had produced environmental and cultural calamity. In the wilds of central Laos, they would start afresh and produce a new model for the world. In funding one of the largest construction projects then under way on the planet, they would demonstrate how economic development and environmental protection might be made not just compatible but synergistic. At least, that was the hope.
The construction cost of the Nam Theun 2 Hydroelectric Project, or NT2, as it came to be known, ultimately reached $1.3 billion. Construction began in 2005 and involved as many as eight thousand workers on-site. NT2’s army of laborers built two main dams and fourteen saddle dams (to keep water from spilling off the side of the plateau), plus two power stations, ten bridges, six kilometers of tunnels and shafts, and 140 kilometers of roads. They also erected 180 kilometers of high-voltage transmission lines, batched half a million cubic meters of concrete, and installed ten thousand tons of steel. The gates of the dam finally closed in 2008.
NT2 has a capacity of 1,070 megawatts, which puts it in the big leagues of world hydroelectric generation but not at the highest level. (Hoover Dam, on the Colorado River, for example, has a capacity almost twice as great, and the largest individual projects in India, Brazil, and China are five times larger than Hoover.) NT2 exports 95 percent of its power to Thailand, with the remaining 5 percent consumed at home in Laos. Its gross annual sales approach $240 million.3 No one can doubt the project’s value to the Lao economy: NT2 accounts for roughly 5 percent of Lao PDR’s gross domestic product.
Motor howling, sun glaring, we leave the expanse of the lake and enter what appears to be a cove. But it is not a cove: the water narrows between encroaching stands of flooded trees and slaloms into the forest. We follow. This is the channel of the Nam Theun, carving its way eastward. Soon we pass a checkpoint maintained by the WMPA, part of the security apparatus for the watershed. A speedboat is tied to the crude dock, but no one is visible in the shack it serves. We neither stop nor slow down.
Raptors perch in a high treetop. Crested serpent eagles. Commonplace. Like red-tailed hawks at home. Robichaud gives them a sidelong glance, no more. Then a shrill call pierces even the drone of the engine. We scan the shoreline eagerly but cannot locate the source and so keep going. Minutes later, Robichaud waves urgently to the boatman to stop. He has seen two birds, nearly as big as pigeons, in trees on the left bank. The boatman cuts the clamorous motor, and the breeze of movement stops. Heat pools around the boat. An insect whine rushes out from the forest to embrace us. The birds Robichaud has spotted have reddish bills and a suggestion of white on the wings. Possibly dusky broadbills, new to the protected area. But no, he says, lowering his binoculars. Just dollarbirds. No big deal.
As we continue, I have the sense of entering a doomed land, like the forest of William Faulkner’s bear. The night before we departed, writing notes in my guesthouse room, I had asked myself, what are my fears about the expedition? The first thing I wrote down was that I might not stand up to its rigors. The next was that the forest might prove to be empty of all but tragedy and loss. The unfortunate reality within Nakai–Nam Theun is that the protected area is largely unprotected. Much of it is heavily hunted—by local villagers, by Hmong entering from the north, and by Vietnamese who cross the mountains from the east. The villagers have obvious rights to the forest, and their “take,” aside from certain species, may well be sustainable. Not so the others. But the WMPA’s enforcement of prohibitions against hunting and trapping by outsiders has so far proved notoriously ineffective. The impacts of the Vietnamese are especially damaging, for they are market hunters, harvesting all manner of wildlife, large and small, for sale in Vietnam and China. The demand in those countries for status restaurant foods, including wild meats of all kinds, and for animal-based medicinal treatments is both voracious and insatiable. It places a price on the head of nearly every mammal and reptile in the forest. And the price keeps rising. As the economies of the expanding East grow wealthier, more and more money chases fewer and fewer animals, and the ransacking of the forest intensifies.
Many of the seemingly wild places of the planet are lamentably empty. The old trees may still tower, and the touch of machinery may be light, but no wild animal larger than a cocker spaniel remains. Nearly all the four-leggeds of any size, along with the monkeys and apes, have been hunted or trapped or starved out. They may have been eaten in a nearby town or sold down the line to a stylish restaurant. They may have been killed for the putative medicinal power of their antlers, scales, skin, bones, or gallbladders. Or they may not have been wanted for any of those purposes but may have met their ends because they stepped into a loop of wire that was waiting for something else. A lucky few, possibly some of the big cats, might be smart enough to bypass most snares but not so lucky that they can avoid perishing from hunger (or failed reproduction, which is starvation at a species level) when the deer, sambar, and wild pigs they depend on exist no more. Robichaud has borne witness to the effects of poaching in Nakai–Nam Theun (NNT) for fifteen years. Notwithstanding the policies and good intentions of the WMPA and related organizations, the depredations of poachers threaten to empty NNT’s forests of their wildlife wealth. We would soon find out whether matters had lately grown better or worse.
A second, even stronger purpose motivates this journey: one of the rarest creatures on the planet inhabits the forests to which we are bound. Or, rather, it has inhabited them until recently. Whether the clock of extinction now reads two minutes before midnight or two minutes after no one can say. Perhaps we’ll know more when our journey is over. Perhaps, having learned to mistrust something we thought was certain, we’ll know even less.
We do know, however, that the creature is extraordinary. It is as big as a carousel pony, striking in appearance, and as elusive as a ghost. It is a grazing mammal with cloven hooves and long tapered horns that curve ever so slightly backwards. According to Robichaud, who once spent two weeks closely observing one of these creatures in a crude menagerie not far from the boundary of the protected area, it possesses a disposition both singular and mysterious. The animal that Robichaud watched did not survive its captivity, but he was with it long enough to understand that it was strangely serene and unlike any other animal he had known, domestic or wild. It allowed him to touch it, to pick ticks from its ears, to tend it. It seemed Buddha-like in its calm. Compared with other animals, this one had a different sense about it, a different way of being in the world. The little that biologists like Robichaud have learned about it suggests that its habits may be unique. It does not feed in the same way as the deer and wild goats that share its dank habitat. Nor does it respond to danger as they do. It may travel along paths of its own or along no paths at all.
The creature is called saola, a word borrowed from both Lao and the closely related language of the Tai ethnic minority in the mountains of Vietnam. It is the only Lao word that has been imported into English. Sao (rhymes with now) means “post”; la is a small spinning wheel used in the Annamites: sao la are the tapered posts that support a spool for winding thread. The posts of the spinning wheel resemble the horns of the animal.
Beyond the forest villages of the Laos-Vietnam border, no one knew that saola existed until 1992, when scientists spotted strange horns on the wall of a Vietnamese hunter’s shack. Suddenly the scientific world had before it proof of a large, new, living creature, previously unimagined. The news raced around the world.
Robichaud remembers exactly where he was when word of the discovery reached him. He was relaxing in a café in Vientiane, reading the Bangkok Post. A photograph caught his eye. It showed a scientist holding a pair of long, straight, sharply pointed horns. The scientist was John MacKinnon, then working for the World Wildlife Fund and a leader of the survey that had made the find. The word saola had not yet entered general use, and the unpoetic name initially given for the animal was Vu Quang ox, after the Vu Quang Nature Reserve (now a national park) in Vietnam, where the discovery was made. An inset map showed the location. It was just across the border from Laos, up from the Nakai Plateau, not far away. Robichaud, a naturalist still finding his path, was thrilled. At that moment, little else seemed more exciting or more splendid.
He had come to Southeast Asia in 1990 with the International Crane Foundation, assisting in a search for the rare sarus crane in Vietnam’s Mekong River delta. After the project concluded, he had time on his hands. It struck him that Vietnam and Cambodia frequently made the news, but he never heard much about Laos—so that’s where he went. He obtained a two-week visa, settled in, and soon found that he liked the people, the pace, and the feel of things. When his visa ran out, he returned to the States and began looking for a way to get back to Laos. In those days his main focus was hawks. He landed a small grant that allowed him to return in 1992, ostensibly to explore ways of conducting conservation and bird studies in Laos. When he read about the discovery of the saola and saw the proximity of its habitat to Laos, his instinct was to bend his steps in the saola’s direction.
He scrounged up provisions, a jungle hammock, and other gear and rode the bus south along the Mekong. He disembarked at the foot of the Nakai Plateau and hiked up the escarpment. At that time Nakai was hardly a town. He plunged into the forest.
Brazenly, Robichaud had decided to go walkabout toward saola country. His adventure did not start auspiciously. On the first night, he’d barely settled into his jungle hammock when he felt something stinging his face. And stinging his neck. And crawling in his hair. He bailed out of the hammock. Red ants clung to his hands and fell like dandruff from his head. A column of them had climbed the tree he’d lashed the hammock to, and the advance guard was marching down the lash rope, through an eyelet, and into the screened sleeping compartment. He shook out the ants as best he could and anointed the lash rope with shampoo or some other ant-repelling lotion. Then once more he attempted sleep.
The next morning he set out through a majestic pine forest. For days he walked through the pines. He stayed away from villages and slept in the forest. His solitary ways spared him contact with local police and village officials, who would have had no idea what to make of him. A lone American wandering through rural Laos? Was he a spy? A prospector hunting gold? Or was he searching for the downed pilots the Americans called MIAs? Because he had no knowledge of the country and little in the way of maps, he ultimately elected not to head up-mountain, toward the Vietnamese border and into whatever the saola’s habitat might turn out to be. Instead, he stuck to the plateau proper, the very land that NT2 would later inundate, which proved unspeakably beautiful and marvelous enough. In the days before the plateau was logged and drowned, it supported one of the finest primary pine forests left on the planet.
Robichaud exited the forest at the crossroads town of Lak Xao, the same town where years later he would encounter the captive saola. He had three days left to return to Vientiane and catch his plane to the States. He inquired after the bus. Alas, the rainy season had begun, and the next bus, he was told, would not call at Lak Xao until the dry season, four months hence. Robichaud was stunned: four months! He had to get to Vientiane. Quickly.
On the way into town he’d passed an impressive private compound with a big Soviet-built Mi-8 helicopter parked inside it. This was the headquarters of General Cheng Sayavong, satrap of the region, who would loom large for Robichaud in later years. Robichaud had not quite screwed up the courage to turn around, go back, and knock on the door of the compound to ask if the helicopter might soon head to Vientiane, when a man stepped forward. He had observed Robichaud’s disappointment about the bus. He said, I have to deliver my son to school in Vientiane; I will take you, too. And so by the luck that attends those who have nothing else, Robichaud joined the man on a journey by foot, truck, and boat that eventually brought him to the main highway running to the capital. He waited, caught a bus, and narrowly made his flight in time.
Early reports of the saola’s discovery asserted that the last large mammal previously identified to Western science had been the kouprey, a species of wild cattle similar to banteng and gaur. It, too, was native to Indochina and had been named from the forests of Cambodia more than a half century earlier, in 1937. The last before the kouprey was the giant forest hog, which joined the bestiary of the world in 1904, and before that, the okapi, a forest-dwelling cousin of the giraffe whose existence was confirmed in 1901. The saola was deemed to have revived this impressive succession of discoveries, suggesting that the world might be younger, newer, and more blessed with marvels than anyone dared hope. The claim wasn’t precisely true: a half dozen species of whales and porpoises, mammals of the sea and unquestionably large, had been identified to science in the years since the kouprey’s discovery, as had more than a half dozen largish land mammals—a pig, a peccary, four species of deer, a gazelle, and a wild sheep.4 But not many observers lingered over that roster. Sure, new whales might churn the waters of the sea, and new variations on old mammalian themes might manifest themselves from time to time, but saola were not just a new species. They were a new genus, and some taxonomists continue to think their singularity might go even further than that—to the level of tribe. Saola were more than a surprise. They were a mystery drawn from a largely uninventoried habitat that promised still further surprises. They were the embodiment of a land of marvels.
In short order the saola’s presence in Laos was confirmed, again by the presence of trophies on hunters’ walls—not by live sightings. As more scientists began to probe the Annamite Mountains, a series of stunning additional discoveries ensued. Within years of confirmation of the saola, more new mammals were identified, including several new species of muntjac, or barking deer. The taxonomic validity of one of these, Muntiacus vuquangensis, the large-antlered muntjac, is beyond question; other proposed species are still debated because not much evidence about them is available, and the little that exists fails to fit in neat categories. The effort to solve the riddles of the Annamites’ biology continues undiminished to this day; indeed, that is why we are here.
One reason the saola so captured the imagination of scientists is its “phylogenetic distinctiveness.” That’s a fancy way of saying that the saola has no close relatives in evolutionary or genetic terms. It is not a late-branching twig on the tree of life; it is a stub off a major limb, and it grows close to the trunk. From the large, strange scent glands on either side of its muzzle to the bands of color on its tail, the saola resembles no other animal. Classifying it was a puzzle. Was it an antelope? A goat? It looked more like an Arabian oryx than anything else, hence its genus name, Pseudoryx. Another datum in favor of the antelope hypothesis was its habitat, which was similar to that of the duiker, a small, furtive antelope of African rain forests. DNA analysis of the bone of its horns, however, indicated a greater affinity with wild cattle and suggested that the saola was a very ancient kind of ox that had diverged eons ago, perhaps in Miocene times, from the ancestors of aurochs, bison, and buffalo. In the subsequent seesaw between moist and dry environments, the saola’s cousins grew ponderous and spread through the region’s grasslands, savannas, and dry forests. The saola, meantime, remained physically nimble but environmentally cramped. As the moist evergreen forests on which it depended ultimately retreated to the Annamites, the saola necessarily retreated as well. Today, among the large mammals on Earth, few, if any, possess so small a habitat.
So distant is the saola from the lumbering ruminants with which it shares the greater part of its genes that it seems closer, at least in a metaphorical way, to a creature of myth. In its spirit—or perhaps only in the spirit that the Westerners pursuing it imagine it to have—the saola seems kindred to the fabled unicorn of medieval lore. Like the unicorn, it is as rare as the rarest thing on Earth. It is shy and elusive, hard to find and harder to capture, the same as the unicorn was said to be. Also like the unicorn, it seems to possess an otherworldly disposition, different from that of other beasts. And its horns, up to half a meter long and elegantly tapered, are as beautiful as the unicorn’s. When seen in profile, the saola’s horns merge into one, and the animal becomes single-horned—a unicorn by perspective. Like that other one-horned beast, it stands close to being the apotheosis of the ineffable, the embodiment of magic in nature. Unlike the unicorn, however, the saola is corporeal. It lives, and it can die.
Robichaud and I have been joking: we acknowledge a problem inherent in our efforts. In the year 1250, when the high vaults of Notre-Dame de Chartres were still under construction, it was common knowledge that none but a virgin of impeccable purity might approach a unicorn or persuade one to approach her. It was believed, in fact, that only the pure of heart might hope to glimpse a unicorn. I will not speak for Robichaud, but if the same purity of heart applies to saola, I am immediately disqualified. Besides, unless some army ranger glimpsed one decades ago along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, no Westerner has ever seen a saola in the wild.
Robichaud says he is detached from the idea of being the first, that it is not a particular goal he pursues, yet I am certain he would very much relish it. As for me, I would like nothing more than to behold the glint of horns and the flash of a white-splashed muzzle through a weave of lianas, but the odds of finding buried treasure are better. I will be thrilled simply to make it into saola habitat. I want to be where saola are. Once there, we’ll set up camera traps—stations near trails, water holes, and salt licks where we’ll strap cameras equipped with infrared sensors to trees. If the equipment works correctly, the body heat of passing animals will trigger the shutter, and the resulting photographs will constitute a record of the wildlife of the area. Our expedition has additional goals: we will discuss saola protection with the village elders, evaluate various conservation schemes, and collect DNA samples from the saola heads and horns that hunters have saved as trophies. Most important, we will survey a little-known watershed—that of the Nam Nyang, which no Westerner has previously explored—for saola and other wildlife. Possibly in the Nam Nyang, possibly elsewhere, we will leave the cameras behind to do their work unattended after we are gone. We are hunting not just scat and other marks of saola passage but also the animal’s lasting digital image.
We are at a disadvantage, however, compared to the unicorn hunters of yore. We have no bait. Leonardo da Vinci, a man of his time, knew that the best way to catch a unicorn was not to beat the bushes but to lure it in and let the unicorn come to its seeker. According to Leonardo, the lure of choice was a virgin: “The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it.”5
Leonardo does not explain how the virgin simultaneously preserves her purity while also betraying the unicorn, yet in the classic accounts, betray him she does, although she weeps sweet tears for doing so. Her remorse comes after the fact. From the start the beatific maiden has been in cahoots with the hunters, plotting against the unicorn. In oft-told tales, her malice aforethought goes unexplained.
Logic and unicorns, however, seldom inhabit the same domain. The Greeks wrote of unicorns when writing was still new. For them the beast was not a mythological creature but a denizen of natural history. It lived beyond the horizon and even further beyond verification. The Old Testament, in the King James Version, mentions unicorns at least eight times, although each appears to be a mistranslation. The Hebrew word re’em probably referred to aurochs, the now extinct ancestor of domestic cattle. But the translators found the word unicorn more evocative, so unicorn it was. By the time of the King James Bible, unicorns had bowed, pranced, and laid their heads in virginal laps for centuries, and no one doubted their existence. A brisk and long-standing trade in “actual” unicorn horns had attested to their physical reality—notwithstanding that the horns were in fact narwhal tusks gathered from northern waters by Vikings and their successors and sold into the same eager market that gobbled up saints’ bones and pieces of the True Cross.
Not even Marco Polo, upon his return from Asia in about 1300, managed to dampen enthusiasm for unicorns when he described them as “ugly brutes” with hairy legs, prone to wallowing in mires. In all likelihood Polo had glimpsed some species of Asian rhinoceros. (Indian and Javan rhinos have one horn; the Sumatran has two, but the second horn is small and often hard to see.)
The image of the unicorn adorned innumerable coats of arms as an avatar of courtly love: the noble lover was irresistibly attracted to his lady as the unicorn was drawn to the virgin. Because a unicorn’s horn was believed to neutralize poisons, kings and queens (and others with reason to fear those close to them) paid handsomely to obtain cups made from the miraculous material. In Christian iconography the lamb may have stood for the baby Jesus, but the unicorn, in its goodness and transcendent power, became an animal analog of the adult Savior, a symbolism evident in its devotion to the Virgin and its sacrifice at the hands of hunters.
Vietnam has its own tradition of something near to a unicorn—the ky lan, which seems to have revealed itself to a number of ancient rulers when their victories over enemy armies were particularly impressive. Most depictions of the ky lan, however, more closely resemble a dragon than any creature of flesh and blood. The same might be said of its antecedent, the Chinese qilin, which in Japanese became kirin. The logo of the beer of that name looks like a mescaline-induced vision of a fiery quadrupedal demon.
The unicorn remains a marketing tool for more than beer. These days, on Amazon.com, you can buy a 5.5-ounce tin of “unicorn meat” from “Radiant Farms” for $14.95. Inside is a stuffed toy. Don’t expect to eat it.
The river we are following has narrowed but remains slack. It is an arm of the lake, its water the color of cola. A palisade of slender trees crowds the shallows. Behind this scrim extends the enfolding forest, which we feel as a brooding presence. Now we spot another raptor, and Robichaud takes interest. It is an osprey, a new arrival to Nakai–Nam Theun. Its presence is another indication, albeit an unsurprising one, of the changing habitat the lake has produced. Ospreys elicit Robichaud’s admiration. Excluding house sparrows and European starlings, which spread and thrive in humanized environments, ospreys, together with peregrine falcons and barn owls, may be the most widespread bird species on the planet.
The boat wails onward. Din and discomfort have numbed us, and the sun is a heavy drug. Another half hour passes. Finally the water begins to clear. Bubble lines on the surface suggest the beginning of a current. The river begins to look like a river. A pod of water buffalo lazes on a sandbar, their gaze stupid and faraway. A chak hang much like ours heads past us downstream. Its passengers watch us deadpan, without a smile or nod. Then we round a bend, and a fresh swidden—a patch of newly cleared forest—appears on the right bank. Piles of slash smolder. The smoke rises in wisps, the air suddenly acrid. Another turn of the channel, and three sun-dark boys in midriver pause from fishing to stare at us gravely, their wet nets gleaming in their hands. Swiddens now line both sides of the river. Trails angle to the river’s edge. Then more buffalo, one of them on its back, legs up, rolling in sand, another one shitting. At a boat upturned on a sandbar, a boy kneels, caulking. The river bends again, and in the flat water of an eddy, a slender woman, hair long and straight, wades thigh-deep in an eddy, hitching up her sarong, which is as green as the forest. She is bathing, the water calm around her, and she stares back with dark eyes.
The river, now shallow, flows on a gravel bed, the current strong. Past another bend the boatman suddenly kills the engine and glides onto a spit of sand. Robichaud and Simeuang speak in Lao. I hear what might be “Makfeuang.” On cramped legs I hobble to shore. No buildings are in sight, just sand and scrub. After three hours, we have escaped the boat, but there is no time to savor our relief. We still have far to go.
A trail leads up a sandy bluff. I grab a pack and follow the others.
The first sign of the village is a stack of twenty-five yellow crates of empty Beerlao bottles, freight awaiting a downriver trip. Amplified music blares in the distance, a new thing in Ban Makfeuang, says Robichaud, thanks to the arrival of photovoltaics. While Simeuang goes to recruit a hand tractor—another new arrival—to haul our gear to Ban Tong, the rest of us hump the remaining packs, duffels, and bulging rice sacks up the bluff. We stow the gear nearby in a shack on stilts that is half filled with bags of rice—perhaps it is some kind of warehouse, but before I can ask its purpose, Robichaud beckons me to come along. He wants to see a friend.
We walk rapidly down a village lane between houses raised on stilts. Unsmiling women lean from the windows to watch us pass. I imagine that they and their mothers have been frowning at passing visitors for centuries. Yellow dogs growl in the shadows beneath the houses, and weird Lao music throbs up ahead. At a solitary spigot, a mother washes her naked daughter. Gaunt cows, under clouds of flies, shuffle from our path. More houses, more windows, more solemn women leaning out, their small children peering over the sills, craning to see. Two paces back, beyond range of a kick, dogs trail us, teeth bared. A pig squeals. I realize I am walking closer to Robichaud than I mean to.
Paa Ket—Auntie Ket—is not at home, but we are invited by persons I cannot see to come in and wait for her. Ket’s house, like every other one here, is raised off the ground, a neat separation of the domain of humans from that of pigs, dogs, and other critters, both wild and tame. It is reached by a five-foot ladder of thin poles. Seeing Robichaud kick off his sandals at the top of the entry ladder, I shed mine at the bottom and climb the rails barefoot, a decision I instantly regret because my shoe-spoiled feet are soft and the skinny rungs shoot stabs of pain up my legs. The word tenderfoot lights up in my mind like a neon sign, adding embarrassment to the anxiety I feel as an alien on a new planet. Inside, the house is dark and cool. We sit on a bare, swept floor in an unadorned room. Someone has gone to fetch Auntie. Robichaud chats easily in Lao with a youngish man. A little girl toddles over to inspect me. With her standing and me sitting, we meet eye to eye. I softly say, “Sabaidee,” hello, one of my few Lao expressions. She stares at me with a blend of incomprehension and disapproval.
Robichaud has told me about Paa Ket. He saw her in action at an economic development meeting in Thakhek, the provincial capital. Dozens of big shots and professionals, both Lao and Western, filled a modest hall. Paa Ket was the village representative of the Lao Women’s Union. When it was her turn to speak, everyone expected the usual shy, mumbling deference that hill country “ethnics” typically show their lowland “betters.” Instead Paa Ket strode to the lectern and stood at stiff attention with her shoulders back. Unblinking, she surveyed the room, and in a loud, confident voice began, “I am so happy to be here and I want to thank everyone. I am almost fifty years old, and this is my first visit to the capital of the province.…” In seconds her intrepid warmth won over the room. She went on to speak frankly about the difficulty of small-scale economics in the villages and the failings of development projects designed from afar. Against their instincts and inclinations, the jaded audience embraced both her and her message.
Now we hear movement on the ladder outside. Paa Ket enters. She is graceful and sinewy. Rapid of gesture. Gray hair tied back. A sculptured face. Her black eyes light up as she greets Robichaud: “Sabaidee, Wil-yam!” Introductions are quick. Her warm, dry hand feels fleetingly sensuous. The genial young man Robichaud has been talking to turns out to be her husband. He is easily twenty years her junior—and there is no surprise that the lively Paa Ket, widowed by her first husband, sought youth in the second. Paa Ket explains that a hiit—some kind of ritual celebration—is under way at another house. She must return. And we must come, too. There can be no objection. Oh, and we should make a small contribution for the hosts. Twenty thousand Lao kip—about $2.50—would be appropriate. We dig out the money, and with the bills balled in her fist, she is gone.
Robichaud slips on his flip-flops and skitters down the ladder before I have touched the first painful rung. At the bottom, rushing to keep up, I hop on one foot to pull a sandal on the other, yanking so violently that I break the loop that is supposed to help me pull it on. Then I hurry behind Robichaud, and reinforce, with every step, the anthropological cliché of the bumbling white neophyte newly arrived in the thrumming village. A hundred meters down the lane, the giddy Lao music reaches a crescendo. Another entry ladder, another sandal shedding. The porch is crowded with glassy-eyed men sucking rice wine through bamboo straws from a giant urn. They gesture for us to join them. We slide past and enter the house.
There is one large room. Thirty hard-drinking men are on one side. Twenty shy women, some of them also hard-drinking, sit with their children on the other. Between them, Paa Ket kneels at a line of large beer bottles arrayed as a low fence across the floor, dividing the sexes. Robichaud and I have entered on the men’s side, and we pick our way through the crowd that is seated and lounging on the floor. Everyone reaches up to shake hands. Like a politician at a barbecue, Robichaud has a warm word for everyone. I stumble behind, trying not to step on anyone, a task made harder by the inexplicable little judo tugs that come with the handshakes. “Sabaidee.” “Sabaidee.” Finally we settle on cushions at the head of the room.
I find myself next to an old man with sunken cheeks who seems not at all disappointed that I am incapable of understanding a word he says. Evidently he is hosting the hiit, and by the look of his bright eyes, he has abundantly enjoyed his own hospitality. Notwithstanding my incomprehension, he has much to say to me, and his open-mouthed animation affords many a glimpse of his gums, which are toothless except for a single, bulbous, coal-black object, smooth as a river stone, that appears to have erupted from his lower jaw. It gleams like onyx. I can’t tell if it is an actual tooth or a perversely located jewel. He is amused when I take his picture and delighted when I show him his image on my camera. He reaches out and takes the eyeglasses from my head. He puts them on. I take another picture. His delight is unrestrained. He rustles out a jug of homemade whiskey from the forest of bottles at his side. Dark things marinate in the bottom of it. The liquid tastes like lamp fuel. “Delicious,” I say. Drink more, he gestures, and the music blasts on. Someone makes a loud statement. Laughter. Paa Ket makes a reply. More laughter. She is the only woman on the men’s side of the beer-bottle fence. I try to capture her angular beauty in a photograph, but the room is dim and she is swaying, gesturing, always a blur.
Then comes the food tray, a flat-topped mushroom of woven rattan. It is the nearest thing to furniture in the house. On it are plastic bags of sticky rice, bottles of beer, and bowls brimming with brown lumps in brown puddles. A chorus rises from a dozen voices: “Kin khao, kin khao.” “Eat, eat,” they say, although the literal translation of kin khao is “eat rice,” which is a redundancy in Laos, where all eating involves rice. It would be an insult not to taste something, and I am searching for the lesser evils among the brown puddles when a figure looms, backlit, in the doorway. It is Simeuang. He has found a hand tractor. Our journey mustn’t wait. Robichaud rises to his feet. I retrieve my glasses from the old man, bidding him thanks and good-bye. The mysterious bauble in his mouth gleams anew. I say good-bye as well to Paa Ket. After a dozen jujitsu handshakes crossing the room, we are out the door, past the drunken veranda, and quickly down the ladder.
A hand tractor is an engine on two wheels. New to the watershed, it recently joined the water buffalo—and partly replaced it—as a source of pulling power. It has a single axle, and were it not for the cart hitched behind it, it would tip forward on its nose. The operator steers the vehicle by means of handlebars of prodigious length. Our operator is in a hurry. He wants to get to Ban Tong, dump our stuff, and make the return trip home before dark. The instant our last sack is thrown in the cart, he cranks the engine and roars down the yellow clay track. Olay, Touy, Simeuang, Robichaud, and I, each carrying a light pack, follow hurriedly on foot, but the tractor, which jolts along at five or ten miles per hour, is soon out of sight.
Simeuang sets the pace, a fast one. He moves lightly, as though his pack weighed nothing, as though he weighed nothing. When we met a few nights ago in Nakai, I was struck by his bright, quick energy. He wore a nylon jacket, fire-engine red. I said to myself, That’s the color for him, as bold as a siren. Now he seems to glide down the trail.
We soon enter forest, and the trail becomes a tunnel through stands of vine-hung trees. Chain saws, tools as new to the watershed as hand tractors, have recently felled many large trees close to the trail, rendering the forest as scraggly as a badly barbered head. Most of what we see is second or third or umpteenth growth, for this portion of the watershed has been cleared for swidden cultivation not once but repeatedly over generations, possibly over centuries. Patch by patch, it grows back.
After two or three kilometers, we come to a village. As in Ban Makfeuang, the people are Brou, the largest ethnic group in NNT. Again, stony faces watch us from windows. Robichaud calls out a greeting in the Brou language, “Banchouan,” and our observers crack the makings of a smile. Maybe the novelty of hearing a Westerner speak a word of Brou amuses them. Maybe it is the way he pronounces it. A young man pushing a motorbike stops to shake hands. Seeing we are not dangerous, others step away from their laundry or carpentering to experience the exotic visitors up close. We exchange greetings and keep moving, soon reentering the forest, our pace never slowing.
I do not know how far we have to go, and I am determined not to ask. Don’t measure, don’t count, don’t look at your watch, I think. Just go. But the early weariness in my legs—we have been walking only an hour—prompts the thought that the cumulative age of my two lower limbs runs to nearly a century and a quarter—122 years, to be exact—which makes the weariness more amusing if not tolerable. As Simeuang skims blithely ahead, I ask his age. He is twenty-five, although he is broadly experienced in the watershed and has traveled here with Robichaud before. The boys are each twenty-two. Touy asks my age—his English is good but limited—and both he and Olay register shock when I tell them. “Oh, you are doing well. You are strong,” says Touy. I thank him and, without much confidence, hope that he is right. Olay nods assent, smiling meekly. He can follow most of an English conversation, but partly out of shyness speaks less than Touy. His stiff, cowlicked hair and sleepy eyes give him a perpetually just-awakened look, but he has the lean, leathery constitution of a coyote. In a long march he would match Simeuang stride for stride. This is his second trip in NNT with Robichaud; he came along on a similar trek in 2009. Touy, meanwhile, seems indomitably cheerful. His name, which is really a nickname, is a common one in Laos. It means “chubby,” in an affectionate way. True to his name, Touy is fat-cheeked, but although his face is round and full, he is not at all heavy. By the way he strides down the trail, he appears more than fit.
The same might be said of Robichaud, who is fifty-two. His heritage is Acadian on his father’s side. Not Canadian or French Canadian, he would tell you, but Acadian. In the eighteenth century, the British masters of Canada expelled the French from Acadia, which included Nova Scotia and other maritime lands. Some of them went to Louisiana, where the word Acadian was shortened to Cajun. Others, including Robichaud’s forebears, took refuge in New England. His mother’s stock includes Irish. On both sides, he inherits pale skin, as do I, and notwithstanding his translocation to the tropics, he never courts exposure to the sun. He is blessed with ruddy good looks and a rugged constitution, which in Southeast Asia is as much a prerequisite for a field biologist as a sharp eye.
William Robichaud.
Our route winds through forest, in and out of ravines, along the rough path taken by the hand tractor. We cross the intermittent creeks and seeps on foot logs and occasionally a plank. We pass more swiddens and more ragged forest. We pause in our brisk march only when we encounter travelers—two kids on a motorbike, a family walking, all of them bound back the way we’ve come. Another hour passes. At last even Simeuang betrays fatigue. His pace slows. Then we hear a roar. It is the hand tractor coming back on its return to Ban Makfeuang. The driver nods to us as he roars by. Ban Tong cannot be far now.
Robichaud grew up in Wisconsin. He was the youngest of six children, all but one of whom were boys. Family life was more than turbulent. He was the silent one, the one who could hide in plain sight, the little observer perched at the fringes of the perpetual vortex, where tides of strong emotion and extreme behavior surged among the big people. The currents that ran in his veins were less destructive but no less powerful. They carried him to safety, away from the vortex, pulling him toward birds. As adolescence took hold, the attraction to wild birds—raptors, especially—grew ever stronger, and he gave it full expression: he wanted, no, he would have, he must have, a hawk, a bird of prey. He would be a falconer. No other path would do.
He identified three nests of red-tailed hawks not far from his home. He went with his father to one, but his father forbade the attempt to retrieve a chick. The climb was too dangerous. He went to another, but the young had already flown. He persisted. He was sixteen, newly licensed to drive. Days later he fit his mother’s laundry hamper into her car and drove to the third and last nest. It was raining. He was still scrawny, not yet grown into the body of a man, and the oak tree was tall. Yet hamper in tow, he climbed the slippery trunk and out onto the swaying, wind-lashed upper branches. Fear tightened his throat until he could scarcely breathe. He kept on. Only one chick remained in the nest. It was small and scrawny, like Robichaud. A battle commenced amid the rain and wind. It was runt versus runt, as Robichaud fought the chick into the hamper.
He named the red-tail Genghis. “What else is a sixteen-year-old going to name a hawk?” he will say. There was a railroad near where he lived, and he hunted the bird along the tracks, walking the ties. Genghis became the scourge of rabbits dwelling by the right-of-way. The partnership was long-lasting.
The bond between boy and hawk rarely went astray, but when it did, sweet Jesus, the results were spectacular. One day, not on the railroad tracks but on a street, Genghis cruised the treetops, and Robichaud, whose mind had wandered, suddenly sensed that the tinkle of the hawk’s bell was headed the wrong way. The Doppler effect wasn’t right. Genghis should have been coming. He was going. Robichaud turned to see the hawk diving, laser-locked on a kill. An old lady was walking her shih tzu or Lhasa apso. Genghis was on final approach, targeted on the dog. There was no stopping him.
The tableau of assault is etched in Robichaud’s memory. The bird slammed into the dog and sent it rolling. The old lady shrieked. The panicked dog scrambled upright and leapt like a salmon into its mistress’s arms. Genghis wheeled and pursued, wings flailing, and clawed at the woman’s coat sleeve, grabbing for the dog. Robichaud slid into the scene and pulled off the bird barely in time to avert physical harm. And then stood there, taking his medicine, enduring the righteous intervention of the old lady’s daughter, the bawling out, the dressing-down, the aggrieved search for wounds on the dog, the lecture about “wild animals in the city.” A crotch-tightening fear tinged his abject apology: What if she calls the cops?
Robichaud survived, as did Genghis. As did Robichaud’s fascination with birds. Fresh out of high school, he volunteered at the Cedar Grove Ornithological Research Station, home to a legendary bird-banding operation. The station occupies a gap in the forest close to the western shore of Lake Michigan, where migrating raptors funnel through a narrow patch of airspace. Volunteers trap and count the birds flying by. Trapped hawks are then banded, measured, and set free, each one adding to a cumulative record of raptor movement across the inland core of North America. Robichaud has helped out at Cedar Grove for more than three decades, and he has written of the magic that keeps bringing him back: “It’s the potential to see in a day a hundred Merlins (one of nature’s most spectacular fliers), or a thousand Sharp-shinned Hawks floating on a fresh northwest wind in a single morning (a record flight day in 1983), or a single Harris’s Hawk (in 1994, the only Wisconsin record). It’s the possibility of trapping 75 Northern Goshawks in a day (during an invasion of those gray ghosts in 1982), or finding Northern Saw-whet Owls hanging in the mistnets in the morning like Christmas tree ornaments. These are minor miracles. Some go to church on Sunday, some to Cedar Grove.”6
Robichaud refuses to call himself a birder. For him, birders are hobbyists who lavish fortunes on exotic trips and acquire sightings the way others collect beer mugs or stamps. Robichaud does not collect. Something different motivates him. He likes to quote a scrap of graffiti someone scrawled long ago on the wall of the Cedar Grove trapping blind: THE INFINITE PASSION OF EXPECTATION. The phrase is still there, he says. No one would dream of removing it.
It is midafternoon when we arrive in Ban Tong to find our gear piled beneath a tree outside the house of the headman, whose name is An. He is a short, slim, stoical man no more than thirty-five years old. And no, he says, he cannot arrange for boats to take us upriver to Ban Nameuy until tomorrow. Robichaud grimaces at the news. Today there is a hiit, or some kind of house ceremony, or perhaps a ceremony has to be prepared—the details are unclear, and I am not inclined to press Robichaud for explanation, as he is dismayed and disinclined to talk. Time matters. We have a long distance to travel, a considerable number of tasks to accomplish, and a limited store of time and cash with which to get them done.
Robichaud’s frustration stems not just from the present delay but because the tractor driver charged an exorbitant six hundred thousand kip (seventy-five dollars) to ferry our goods here, and now An is quoting equally extortionate prices for the boats we will need, when we finally get them. The costs are more than the expedition’s small treasury (funded by a modest grant from a US foundation) can bear. Price inflation, like a new virus, has evidently infected the watershed, and Robichaud did not budget for it. Mr. An, however, is not hard-hearted. He offers to let us sleep on his porch—provided we make a gift to him of a T-shirt. In this particular, Robichaud believes that An is not shaking us down. He says it is reasonable that a gift should be offered to please the house spirits, which must not be slighted.
We settle in, bathing in a nearby creek and lingering over a dinner we have brought from Nakai: sticky rice, pickled fish, a paste of eggplant and chili, and dried meat skewered on tough strips of bamboo. Sticky rice, also called glutinous rice, is grown in thousands of varieties in Laos, a different genotype for virtually every valley, but the procedure for eating it is everywhere the same: You reach into the common mound of cooked rice and grab a gooey handful, which, true to its name, is adhesive enough to hang wallpaper. You shape your clump of rice as you like, usually in a ball, so that it will not fall apart. You then mash it into whatever paste or sauce is offered, perhaps, if the pot is rich, deftly trapping a flake of fish or chunk of meat with your index finger. Then you bring the whole starchy collage to your mouth. For many people, sticky rice is an acquired taste. I have not acquired it. For me, it is like chewing a rubber ball.
An’s house is sturdy and walled with planks, a big step up from the woven mats that enclose traditional shelters. Six or seven feet off the ground, the house is reached by a steep stairway, not a ladder. The far end of the veranda gives way to a bridge linking the house to its kitchen, a mat-walled hut with a thatched roof. On the bridge is a washing station where we freshen up from a bucket, and on the handrail of the bridge a macaque sits tethered before a tiny pile of cold rice. With long, black-nailed fingers, the monkey brings the rice to its mouth, grain by grain, as though counting every morsel.
We spread our sleeping bags at one end of the veranda under mosquito nets. Government posters cover the wall behind us. One depicts a cartoonish saola and urges hunters not to shoot it. Another poster contrasts a well-tended landscape—fertile fields, abundant forest, limpid water—with its exploited twin, a scene of tree stumps, eroded fields, and mothers looking aghast at wan children. Near the door hangs a notable pair of portrait posters: one of a regal-looking Kaysone Phomvihane, the revolutionary hero and Pathet Lao leader regarded as the father of postcolonial Laos, and another of the dashing Souphanouvong, scion of the royal family, who by allying with the Pathet Lao lent stature to the Communist cause and earned himself the nickname the Red Prince. Robichaud says that Touy, as a descendant of the royals, can claim the Red Prince as an uncle of some kind.
Close to the equator, night descends like a curtain in a theater. There is no leisure in the sunset. One minute you bask in yellow light, the next you barely see your hand. When full dark descends, we retire, crawling into our bags beneath a gauze of mosquito netting. The boys stay restive for a while, but Robichaud and Simeuang are almost instantly still, and soon their snores resound, sonorous and rhythmic, like breakers on a shore.