February 26
Ban Nameuy
Competitive roosters start crowing in the wee hours. At first light, competitive boom boxes join them. The racket is constant, the air cool.
Puppies seeking a warm place to nap climb atop a pile of sleeping black pigs. Packs of children swarm through the open spaces of the village. Voices call house to house. A steady thump, thump resounds from a rice mill, I can’t tell where. Ducks harharr. An emaciated dog limps by, one of its legs footless in a gory stump: another snare amputee. A young man with a rifle heads down the trail to the river, a carry basket belted to the small of his back. A troop of girls takes the same trail, burdened with plastic water jugs tied in bundles. Some carry a water bow, an ancient implement consisting of a sturdy curve of bamboo that balances easily on the shoulder. Notches at either end allow heavy burdens, such as full water jugs, to be hung from it.
One such water bow leans against the rail of Kong Chan’s porch. The bamboo is hard and dense, burnished with age. Its arc is elegant, as is the taper of the ends. I am admiring it as Robichaud appears.
“How’d you sleep?” I ask.
“Okay, but tonight I’m gonna find the switch for the light Kong Chan left burning,” he says. “And you?”
“Fine. I went out to take a leak and didn’t get bitten.”
Simeuang and the boys are already in the kitchen, where Touy is roasting scraps of meat on a paddle of steel mesh. The fire, smoldering on a bed of clay, consists of three small logs arranged like the spokes of a wheel. The hub is a mound of embers. For a hot fire, you push the logs into contact. For less heat, you pull them apart.
Simeuang has skewered three small fish, mouth to tail. He cut the skewers from a length of bamboo, except that the material in his hands is no longer considered bamboo. Once bamboo is cut and put to use, it becomes tok, a material so universally useful it receives a new identity. Now, with a stroke of his machete, Simeuang splits a slender two-foot section of tok lengthwise, but not all the way. He lays the skewered fish crosswise between the parted rays of the tok and closes the open end with wraps of still narrower tok, which he twists into a knot. He scrapes a quantity of embers away from the center of the fire and props the array above them. Meanwhile, Olay pounds chili and greens in a mortar to make paste. Breakfast is almost ready.
Ban Nameuy: ban = village; na = paddy; muey = gaur. Somewhere nearby is the paddy where somebody encountered a gaur, or a herd of gaur, the immense, curved-horn wild cattle native to these forests. I have also seen the name of the village spelled Namoy and Namouy. Given that NNT is a place of oral culture, few but outsiders worry about spelling, and the results vary widely.
Not twenty minutes’ walk from Ban Nameuy is Ban Nameo. Again, na is paddy; meo, perhaps onomatopoetically, means “cat.” Cat Paddy. Robichaud was told that someone once saw a tiger there, but since it is bad luck to name a place for a tiger (because a name is a way of summoning the thing that’s named, and you don’t want tigers paying visits), they named it for a cat. That was long ago. The people of Ban Nameo, according to their astrological calendar, can pinpoint when their ancestors founded the village. It works out to about three centuries ago, within years of 1700.
The people of Ban Nameo, Ban Nameuy, and Ban Beuk are Sek, and the Sek are one of more than a dozen ethnic groups found in and around the watershed of the Nam Theun. Each group has its own language, with Lao being the lingua franca. Sek—also the name of a language—belongs to the Tai-Kadai family of languages, which includes Lao and modern Thai. Not many years ago, linguists who puzzled over the origins of modern Thai hypothesized the existence of a protolanguage from which the dialects in current use evolved. Following well-established principles that predict how vocalizations shift over time and how words and usage change, they postulated the sounds and grammar of this hypothetical proto-Tai, ancestral to modern Thai and its sibling tongues. Then somebody took a look at Sek, and there it was: Sek had the lineaments of the proto–mother tongue, just as predicted.
Some centuries ago, on the Vietnamese side of the mountains, the Sek occupied lowlands beside the sea. They have a folkloric reputation for being good at finding gold, and possibly the Vietnamese or Chinese masters of the area (who battled to and fro) had placed the Sek there as miners and prospectors. Something—probably a persecution—prompted them to decamp and cross the mountains to the Lao side, settling near Golden Mountain, Phou Vang. It is also likely that, a century or so later, as Thai warlords from west of the Mekong did their best to lay waste to the region, the Sek then recrossed the mountains to Vietnam for safety. It seems that during the mid-1800s the Thais concluded that their best defense against a possible Vietnamese or Chinese invasion was to render much of what is presently Laos uninhabited and uninhabitable. Armies could not cross scorched earth, and so they stripped the area of its people and crops. They also enslaved many of the tribesmen whose villages they destroyed and sent them as forced labor to distant mines. Not all the Sek made it out to safety or returned after their captivity: there remain today several Sek communities in northeast Thailand whose occupants, in their oral tradition, remember such places as Ban Nameo and Ban Nameuy.
From the look of Ban Nameuy, the Sek are now on a demographic upswing. Every young woman seems to be nursing an infant, and every girl, down to the youngest child able to walk and carry, lugs around a baby brother or sister. At times the village sounds like a squalling maternity ward.
In the early 2000s, when the baseline data for “sustainable development” of the watershed were being collected, a census counted 5,800 people living within the protected area. There were gaps in the count, and the true number was surely higher. At the time, in some communities the curve of increase was already bending upward, raising questions about the capacity of those communities to support themselves agriculturally over the long term.1
The Sek comprise about 15 percent of the population of the watershed, or somewhat in excess of 870 people. Far more numerous are the Brou, who represent 60 percent. Ban Makfeuang is a Brou village, as is Ban Kounè, which lies a kilometer or two upriver from Ban Nameuy and belongs to the cluster of otherwise Sek villages headed by Kong Chan. As much as any permanent village, Ban Kounè lies nearest to true saola habitat. It is not clear when the Brou came to the Nam Theun watershed, although it was probably late in the nineteenth century. As sedentary farmers, they moved in among bands of hunter-gatherers, just as the Sek had done, sometimes cohabiting an area with them and sometimes, no doubt, displacing them.
The descendants of those hunter-gatherers comprise NNT’s third major population group, the Vietics, who are marvelously diverse. As the name implies, the various tongues the Vietics speak belong to a family of languages that includes Vietnamese. (This is the Vietic branch of Mon-Khmer languages; Brou, by contrast, belongs to the Katuic branch of Mon-Khmer, a group that includes Cambodian.) Kong Chan’s wife, Chan Si, is Vietic. She is a Kri from Ban Maka, one of the remotest of NNT’s communities, which nowadays is actually three settlements: Ban Maka Neua (Upstream), Ban Maka Kang (Middle), and Ban Maka Tai (Downstream). Kong Chan met her there in 1968, when he was a soldier. Today the Kri, at more than forty-five households, are the most populous settled group of Vietics in NNT. When Chan Si’s generation was young, in the 1950s, they had become part-time swidden cultivators but still moved around a good deal. Other Vietics, like the Phong of Ban Tong, meanwhile, had by then become entirely sedentary, while still others, like the Atel, continued to roam the forest until the late 1970s, when they finally succumbed to government pressure to settle in permanent villages.
Governments like their people to have fixed addresses, not least so that they can be counted and “governed,” if not taxed. Nomadism smacks of anarchy. From the government’s point of view, the relocation of nomadic people is both necessary and just, because no group of humans can develop economically without staying in a fixed place where they can build and accumulate things. In exchange for settling down, the government promises economic improvement.
The contrary view is metaphysical and fraught with pain for people like the Atel: the spirits of the old places don’t agree with the move to settled villages. Nor do the spirits of the people’s ancestors, who remain in the places where their mortal forms dwelled and died. When forest people depart their home ground, they become separated from the invisible but animate world that nurtures and defines them. Torn from their home ground, they can no longer “feed” or honor its spirits, and with the spirits no longer available (or willing, because of a lack of offerings) to protect the living from sickness and misfortune, life goes out of balance. Happiness departs. Hearts break. They languish. They get sick. They die.
The situation bears considerable similarity to life on Indian reservations in the western United States in the late nineteenth century. In fact, a lot about Nakai–Nam Theun recalls the Old West: ostensibly “wild” people are settled in fixed places and urged to become farmers; a central government strives to extend its hegemony to new lands; and manufactured goods increasingly penetrate economies that have never seen them before. Industrially produced alcohol is one of those manufactured commodities, and in copious amounts it joins the flow of traditional local brews, resulting in significant negative consequences for health and social relations. The aggressive harnessing of natural resources is another obvious similarity. So is the cultural condescension of the national society toward the “backward” inhabitants of its undeveloped territory. Less obvious but no less emphatic is the war on wildlife. Subsistence hunting—taking deer, wild pigs, or equivalent species for the local pot—is part of any economy in which people live in tight reliance on the land, but the transborder poachers of Nakai–Nam Theun, the resolute and determined men who cross from Vietnam and labor under heavy packs to harvest virtually every vertebrate creature that walks or crawls, have much the same motive and method as the fur trappers and buffalo hunters of that other time and place. The trade in animal parts is marking Laos as heavily as the quest for beaver hats and bison robes did the American West.
Even the names of people and places, in translation, evoke a western ring. Phoukhaokham Luangoudom, for instance, directs the WMPA’s ecotourism program. His first name, Phou-khao-kham, would be rendered “Golden Horn Mountain” in English. Many an Apache would be happy with that.
Porters and guides for the big trek to the Nam Nyang won’t be ready until tomorrow, at the earliest, so today we’ll visit Ban Kounè and call on a certain hunter, Mr. Ka, whom Robichaud regards as a particularly far-ranging and capable woodsman. If there is valuable information about the backcountry to be had, Mr. Ka will likely have it. Olay has put on leech socks, but Simeuang advises that they are unnecessary and will only get wet. So Olay takes them off. Simeuang, meanwhile, wears under his cap a dish towel that hangs in folds over his ears, a sight that amuses Robichaud. The towel cannot be for sun protection—the sky is thick with clouds. Robichaud believes its purpose, notwithstanding Simeuang’s advice to Olay, is to fend off leeches, one variety of which drops on its victims from leaves overhead and has been known to crawl into any available orifice. The towel is a new strategy, Robichaud says. Simeuang used to stuff his ears with cotton.
To my mind, leeches are one of nature’s least savory features, and I have dreaded our entry into their habitat. In my daypack I have a pair of leech socks Robichaud has loaned me. I also have disinfectant swabs and a sheaf of Band-Aids—leech bites easily become infected. The leech socks consist of minimally tailored tubes of heavy material that reach to your knees and have a drawstring to keep them up. You wear them inside your shoes or sandals, and they ensure that once a leech gets on you, you have a chance to pick it off before it can climb past the sock and sneak into your shorts. Leeches inject a small dose of anesthetic as they puncture your skin, so most people never feel the bite. Leech saliva also includes an anticoagulant to keep you bleeding. By the time you see them—or someone sees them on you—they can be as big as your little finger and bloated with blood. Robichaud tells a story of sleeping on the forest floor and flopping around in the night so that his arm fell outside the protection of his mosquito net. When he woke up, he was aghast to see that his limb looked like the site of a botched transfusion. Blood everywhere. Fat leeches crawling away. It was the stuff of nightmares, but relatively mild ones as far as leeches are concerned. Although the tale strains credulity, I have read of a leech making its way up the urethra of a man’s penis, requiring field surgery of the most terrifying delicacy.
Saola habitat is leech habitat, and that is where we are headed. Leeches and saola like moisture. Most of Nakai–Nam Theun has a two-season climate, dry and wet, with the rains usually starting in May and lasting into September. But some of the forest is wet year-round, especially where low passes in the chain of the Annamites allow monsoons and other moisture-laden systems to blow through from the Pacific. The damp forests of the range’s middle altitudes may be a remainder, or an approximation, of habitats that spread more extensively over Southeast Asia during earlier epochs. Saola, which depend upon those habitats, now cling to the shrunken islands that remain, which extend like an archipelago down the spine of the Annamites.
The Annamite Mountains themselves are a kind of island, a Madagascar surrounded by terrestrial seas—not of salt water but of low plains that isolate the biota of the mountains just as decisively. It seems that, although the boundaries of habitats have undoubtedly shifted, their core conditions have been stable for a very long time. Like Madagascar, where lemurs have branched into scores of species, the Annamites are home to an extraordinary amount of endemism—plants and animals that evolved there through deep time and that are found nowhere else. A curious feature of the Annamites region is that many of its most singular creatures—Edwards’s pheasant, the crested argus, the Sunda colugo, and at least a dozen more—find their closest relatives southward along the Malay Peninsula and on the islands of western Indonesia. These close genetic relations testify to repeated instances over the last two to three million years when glaciers bound up much of Earth’s water and caused the level of the oceans to drop. At the last glacial maximum, about eighteen thousand years ago, sea level was as much as 120 meters lower than it is today, eliminating many water barriers that now exist. Not just land bridges but whole territories emerged from the sea. Under such conditions, islands like Borneo, Sumatra, and Java became linked to the mainland, enabling the fauna of the region to spread and mix across a vast landscape, as biology and opportunity permitted.2
Ban Kounè lies slightly downslope of a mountain pass where rains from Vietnam blow through. A forest partridge chants its call as we climb a trail that on this day is mercifully dry and free of leeches. Still, we feel the humidity rise, as though we are climbing into a low, thin cloud. We pass a recent swidden. At least a hundred acres have been cleared, and much of the felled timber and slash is piled along the edges of the swidden to fence out wild pigs. A crude hut, where the farmer sleeps when he tends this patch, stands toward the center.
Swidden agriculture excites considerable controversy among the mavens of international development and conservation. Many characterize it as a scourge of natural habitats and a threat to biodiversity. Reality is more complicated. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of swidden systems that vary according to the amount of land cleared, the thoroughness of the clearing, the duration of cultivated and fallow periods, and a host of other factors. As a result, these systems vary enormously in their environmental impacts. The swidden agriculture practiced by the Hmong in Laos is especially damaging. It typically results in the long-term conversion of forest to grassland and helps account for the territorial restlessness of the Hmong as they abandon exhausted lands and seek new opportunities to farm and hunt. Other swidden systems, like those of the Sek and Brou, permit the forest to regenerate and appear to be sustainable over long periods—indeed, it is probable that certain kinds of long-rotation swiddens, provided they are not asked to support too many people, are the only sustainable agriculture possible in tropical forests. The field we have encountered on the trail to Ban Kounè is perhaps three years old and represents a colossal investment of hand labor. It will produce steeply declining yields of rice for another few years, until the riot of regrowth chokes out the possibility of meaningful harvest. Then the forest will reclaim it, until it is cleared again, years or decades later.
When at last we reach Ban Kounè, we behold the village from the bank of a raw, garbage-choked gully, where a plank that once bridged the mud has been upset and abandoned to the mire. A generation ago, because of some kind of plague or sickness, the village moved to this location from its former site across the river. Spread beneath a gloomy sky, Ban Kounè, with its damp, faceless houses and run-down sheds and pens, has the look today of a hard-luck mountain hollow dusted by light snow. The snow is an illusion. The white patches on the ground are masses of discarded silver-white cans that once held Vietnamese beer. There are hundreds of them, lying in clusters. Also ubiquitous are innumerable deposits of pig shit that might have rained on the village as the wrath of a discontented god.
Although Kong Chan’s authority as chief of the village cluster extends to Ban Kounè, the village has its own headman, and so we go to his house. But no one is home: the ladder is pushed up. We then seek out Mr. Ka, the hunter with whom Robichaud has traveled. He is gone, too, his wife tells us, but should be back before long. So we walk another kilometer up the trail to visit an army post close to the border, in the pass that leads to Vietnam.
In the 1930s the French mined gold from river sands below this pass. According to local memory, they conscripted labor from Ban Kounè and other villages and beat those who would not cooperate.
When we arrive at the army post, the bored soldiers are playing a game of pétanque, which is similar to bocce or boules. A new but roofless wood-plank building stands behind the thatch shack that is their barracks. We meet under the naked rafters with an officer who wears shoulder boards adorned with three stars. He solemnly inspects our papers while his scribe studiously takes notes. Simeuang then gives a formal speech expressing the comradely sentiments that the WMPA desires to extend with heartfelt warmth to its esteemed friends in the provincial army, yadda, yadda. Soon we learn that thirty soldiers are assigned to this detail. Their mission is to prevent Vietnamese traders from penetrating the protected area. Secondarily they patrol for snares. Half of them stay here, half in Nakai, on rotation. While here, they go on patrol four or five days per month. Otherwise, they play pétanque.
Patrolling so little, the soldiers cannot be expected to accomplish much. Vietnam is a walk of only two hours away. The soldiers’ primary job may be to regulate the passage of Vietnamese traders crossing the border, but as long as the unit stays mainly in its barracks, the illicit traffic in rosewood, wildlife, and other smuggled goods can flow around it as easily as creek water around a cobble. Secondary goals, like projecting a forceful presence along longer reaches of the border, are entirely neglected, leaving saola, together with the rest of the biota of these extraordinary forests, perilously undefended.
Reentering Ban Kounè, we again hear the chorus “Wil-yam! Wil-yam! Sabaidee!” It is everywhere the same. Since the unlamented departure of the French, the number of white outsiders who have come to this lonely place can probably be counted on one hand. Robichaud is known and remembered, a kind of celebrity.
Kong Chan suddenly appears, calling to us down a village lane. He has chosen today to make one of his regular visits to Ban Kounè, and although Robichaud is already well known, Kong Chan takes boisterous pleasure in introducing us to everyone we encounter. My presence provides him a punch line. Robichaud and I are twins, he says. We do exactly the same things; we even share the same wife. Yes, adds Robichaud, Monday she’s his, Tuesday mine, and so forth, until Sunday she rests. The joke is macho, formulaic, and produces a laugh. Kong Chan and Robichaud are a team.
Mr. Ka is now home. He greets Robichaud as an old friend, although his warmth is hardly effusive. He gives us permission to take a bone sample from a saola trophy on his wall, and as we spread our equipment on the floor of his large house, he watches with a cardplayer’s eyes—seeing much, revealing little.
Mr. Ka.
Ka means “crow.” He is Mr. Crow. He is sixtyish. He professes not to know the location of a mineral lick, or poung, we have heard about, which we would like to evaluate as a possible location for setting camera traps. The matter is slightly awkward. We know—and Ka knows we know—that if anyone can tell us where to find the poung, it is he. Mr. Ka has ranged these mountains all his life, and the trophies on his walls attest to his prowess as a hunter. There are multiple antler sets from muntjac and also sambar, which is a larger species of deer comparable to North American elk (or, more particularly, wapiti).3 There is also a saola frontlet, a patch of skull bearing horns that are half a meter long. Deer and other cervids grow and shed their antlers annually. Goats, antelope, saola, and cattle, on the other hand, produce horns, which remain with the animal for life.
Robichaud removes the saola frontlet from its place of honor on the wall and places it on the floor in a patch of sunlight. Kneeling, he slides off the dark keratin sheath that is the “skin” of the horn. This reveals the bone beneath. He pulls a small cordless drill from his pack and readies a vial into which he will place the flecks of bone to be drilled from the horn. He dips the bit in alcohol. The moment is an anxious one for me. I bought the drill for Robichaud at a building-supply store in New Mexico and in the haste of trip preparations was never satisfied that the battery had fully charged. If it fails, we have no backup, except perhaps to whittle off a sample with a knife. When the tool whines and the bit begins to turn, I feel a flood of relief. Olay and Touy huddle around Robichaud to catch the drill dust on a piece of paper and pour it into the vial. Robichaud will send the sample to a laboratory in Portugal, where advanced work on the evolution of wild cattle and their genetic relatives is under way.
When the sample is secure and the tools stowed, we move out to Ka’s broad veranda, where he and Kong Chan have been chatting. A faint aroma of fermentation hangs in the air. Ka apologizes that he has no rice wine to offer us. He hosted a hiit yesterday, and his stores of drink are exhausted. Holding the saola frontlet, he poses for pictures. A toddler wobbles from the kitchen waving a machete as long as he is tall. He takes a few whacks at a porch post. Ka’s wife scurries out to take the big knife away from him, but the child won’t give it up. She pries his fingers off, one by one, as the child wails. Now Ka asks for a photograph of himself with his pretty, bucktoothed wife. He calls for his children to be part of the event, but they hide in the kitchen. So it is just the two of them, sitting two feet apart, not touching. Robichaud, teasing, tries to get them to move closer to each other, but neither budges. They are like matching newels at the foot of a stairway. Neither betrays a hint of emotion until we show them their images on the screens of our digital cameras, and then they point and smile.
Ka has told us that the others in the village who possess saola frontlets—there are several—have gone this day to their swiddens. They won’t return until dark or later. If we want more samples, we should come back after our journey to the Nam Nyang. We say we will, then make our good-byes and take the trail for home.
As we walk, Robichaud is pensive. The saola horn we sampled, he explains, was decades old, probably a family heirloom. The last time he visited Ka, a couple of years ago, there were three other saola frontlets in the house. He asked Ka what happened to them, and Ka’s answer was evasive: “I just gave them to friends and relatives.” The exchange caused Robichaud to suspect that perhaps Ka sold the frontlets to a trader. Maybe a market for them has begun to develop.
One of the few things in the saola’s favor—and a strong indication of the animal’s historical isolation—is that it is unknown in traditional Chinese medicine. Because TCM commands an otherwise encyclopedic inventory of Asia’s natural world, the omission is noteworthy. TCM values hundreds of animals and thousands of plants for the specific medicinal properties they are believed to possess. A central concept of TCM is that the qi of an animal—its essential energy, or spirit—inheres in its physical body and can be beneficially transferred to humans through ingestion of its parts. A turtle’s longevity, an elephant’s strength, a tiger’s vitality and power—these qualities can prolong or enhance the life of the human who incorporates the material of the animal into his or her own being.
Accordingly, TCM and its cousin pharmacologies throughout Asia commodify the animal parts they deem potent and offer them for sale. And millions upon millions of people buy them. Demand for TCM’s highest-priced items—turtle blood, tiger bones and penises, bear gall, rhinoceros horn—drives the wild creatures that provide them ever closer to extinction. Not even taxidermied museum specimens are safe: in 2011 thieves made off with rhino horns and skulls from as many as thirty European museums, galleries, and private collections.4
No doubt some of the substances used in TCM produce actual biochemical effects, but many claims are preposterous. Rhino horn, for instance, is all keratin, essentially the same material as fingernails, horse hooves, and hair. Despite serious laboratory experiments conducted to identify active biological agents in rhino horn, none has been found. And yet those grand, unlikely animals are being driven to extinction.
Demand is equally insatiable for many lesser-known animals, including some of the world’s strangest—the furtive pangolin, for instance, which resembles an anteater but is clothed in scales considered potent in treating urinary disorders and other ailments. The antlers of every kind of deer also have uses, as do otter skins, python fat, monkey hands, and a macabre catalog of digits, genitalia, protuberances, and inner organs belonging to a host of other creatures.
Surprisingly, the saola, despite its massive, pungent scent glands and horns as singular as a narwhal’s tusk, somehow escaped the list. One presumes the cause was the saola’s age-old isolation. The far-ranging traders of antiquity seem never to have learned of it. The saola lived in a land whose people were too obscure and too poor to bring their straight-horned mountain goat to the attention of a remedy-hungry world. Moreover, even in the distant past saola were probably never plentiful. Like unicorns, they were at most an evanescent presence.
As long as no new market for saola develops, the gravest threat facing it is the danger of being taken incidentally as bycatch, like a sea turtle in a shrimper’s net. The hardworking snare-setting hunters who cross the mountains from Vietnam want muntjac, wild pigs, sambar if they can find them, and pangolin and porcupine—the money species. The occasional saola is a bystander, felled in the general mayhem. Or so the kindest reading of the facts would have it.
Another reading lends a different perspective: there are no nontarget species, no accidental or incidental victims. Everything that can be taken will be taken and ipso facto becomes a target. If it has flesh and can be gotten, the getters want it, whether it walks, crawls, flies, or slithers. If an animal can be eaten, if it can make a cure or a house ornament, or if it can be passed off as something else with appreciable value, market hunters want it. In any case, their snares do not pick and choose. The trigger snaps, the bent sapling springs up, the noose of wire closes on the leg, and the animal flips upside down, there to struggle until the foot comes off or merely to hang for days or a week until fatal thirst has its way. By this accounting, it might not matter much if Mr. Ka sold his saola frontlets to a Vietnamese trader. Equally, it may not matter if government posters and word of mouth about the saola’s endangerment have sparked the notion that saola, rare as they are, may have a special and therefore commercial value. Once the war on nature reaches a level at which nothing is safe, it doesn’t matter if the intensity increases. The increment of greater blood thirst will be no more noticeable than the slight acceleration of a jet already streaking through the sky.
Mr. Ka has seen a saola in the wild, not once but several times, although he is vague about specifics, maybe because he shot several of them. The last time he saw one was in 2005 in the watershed of the Nam Nyang, where we are headed. A small but substantial number of other village hunters and forest travelers in NNT have also glimpsed the living animal, as have residents of saola habitat throughout the creature’s range. But as far as I have been able to determine, not a single Westerner and only one scientist has ever glimpsed a saola in the wild, and the scientist who did so—not once but three times—was not yet a scientist at the time. Cao Tien Trung, a genial and energetic professor of biology at Vinh University, across the border from NNT in Vietnam, was eighteen and only a second-year undergraduate in biology when he saw his first saola and watched a hunter bring it down. It was 1994.
Trung grew up in the town of Quy Chau, in the north-central portion of Vietnam’s Nghe An Province. Being drawn to the mysteries of the forest, he frequently tagged along with hunters who plied the environs of what would later become Pu Huong Nature Reserve. Sometimes the hunters used dogs, and dogs were the key to encountering saola. Saola are strikingly but protectively colored; the bold, irregular splashes of white on the face, for instance, no doubt create a camo effect in the vegetation of the forest. Saola make no loud noises, and they are wary. Even when their numbers were healthy, they probably existed at low density, as suggested by their omission from the lore of TCM. All in all, not even the most experienced hunters, like Mr. Ka, manage to find them unless they use dogs.
When a hunting dog scents quarry, its voice rises in pitch and its yaps become excited—“very sharp,” in Trung’s words. Hearing such a yelp, the hunter and his companions press forward as fast as they can, scrambling up and down steep slopes, through dense vegetation, to join the chase. Trung remembers many such pursuits. Crossing the rocks of the streams was treacherous, the mud bad, the leeches worse. “I was very young, very strong then,” Trung told me when I visited him in Vinh. He had to be. Saola habitat is severe. It is wet, steep, and jungled. Sometimes a saola might escape by bounding up a rock face, where dogs cannot follow. More often, the saola, quite unlike a muntjac or serow, will stop and make a stand. Its behavior is distinctive. Robichaud and others have corroborated from dozens of villager interviews what Trung personally witnessed: when the saola senses that dogs are in pursuit and it cannot elude them, it races to the nearest stream and takes a position in belly-high water. If possible, it selects a pool with a steep bank or large boulder to back up against. Defended by water and with a wall at its rear, the saola lowers its formidable horns and awaits its adversaries, be they one or many.
This defense probably results from thousands of years of predation by the dhole, a wild dog of Southeast Asia. Dholes hunt in packs and are hard to outrun. By facing them in water a half meter deep, the taller saola deprives its attackers of their agility and can use its horns to deadly effect. Interestingly, the cattlelike bovids—bison, water buffalo, musk oxen, even domestic cattle—will also often stand and face a threat. Most antelopes and goats prefer to run.
Unfortunately, an ingrained habit that worked at least middling well against dholes became a death sentence when dogs and their firearm-toting masters came into saola habitat. An embayed saola is an easy kill for any kind of marksman (or an easy capture, if that’s the goal). The three saola that Trung saw shot and taken during the mid-1990s were three animals that the saola population of the greater Pu Huong ecosystem could ill afford to lose. There have been no further confirmed records of saola from that district in more than a decade.
At Ban Nameuy, the dogs bark us in. We gather soap, towels, and fresh underwear and take the trail to the river to bathe. More barking. One slat-ribbed cur has a fresh wound on her muzzle. Nearly all the dogs are the same—about the size of a border collie, yellow, and disagreeable. Many have grime-encrusted sores. The exception is Kong Chan’s porch bitch: she is chunky, dark, and healthier than the rest. Also less yappy and more broodingly hostile. She glares from her nest beneath the house.
The etiquette for bathing is simple: one strips to one’s undershorts and washes what one can; then, using a towel or sarong to preserve modesty, one strips the rest of the way and washes what remains. The river is broad and tree-hung. I put my things on the prow of a derelict boat lodged on a sandbar. Robichaud banters with several young women who are washing their hair. They are not used to seeing men with farmer’s tans, whose unruddy parts are nearly as white as pig fat. They find us amusing. Touy audits Robichaud’s flirtatious back-and-forth admiringly, and Olay, off a little way on a sandbar of his own, is doing rapid push-ups. I stop counting at twenty, for he shows no sign of slowing.
Not speaking Lao, I am always late picking up the general news, but word has reached us that someone in Ban Beuk recently found a small golden turtle, weighing perhaps three hundred grams. He sold it to a Vietnamese trader for the equivalent of four thousand US dollars. There is now jubilation in Ban Beuk. Many hiits lie ahead, as well as a motorbike or two and possibly a satellite dish and a great many Thai soap operas. Unfortunately, the promise of festivities makes it harder to recruit porters and guides. We need ten men. We are offering the standard rate, set by the WMPA before the recent inflation, which is forty thousand kip per worker per day—about five US dollars. We want to start tomorrow.
In his best Wolfman Jack growl, Kong Chan says not to worry. He will find the porters. A couple of men from Ban Kounè said they will come. There are others in Ban Nameuy and Ban Nameo. Be patient, he says gruffly. He’ll work on it tonight.
It is nearly dark, but Robichaud wants to go to Ban Nameo to visit a friend who has been hurt. I check to be sure I have a headlamp and first aid gear in my pack and follow him up the trail. We hear the village before we see it—the usual over-amped music pulses from several dim homes. In the half-light, Ban Nameo is a pretty place. Whereas Ban Kounè looks slipshod and Ban Nameuy erupts suddenly from behind a screen of trees, Nameo seems premeditated and intentional. It straddles a long, grassy slope, its houses generously spaced like trees in an orchard, with paddies and tidy gardens spread in an apron below them.
We head for the lower end of the village, but in the rapidly falling darkness Robichaud cannot find Sai’s house. Sai was with him on a memorable earlier expedition, years back, when Robichaud led an impetuous, unplanned attempt to scale Phou Vang. In the effort, Sai proved a diligent and reliable companion.
Suddenly a young man steps from the shadows and asks who we are looking for. He leads us to Sai’s ladder, scrambles up, and asks permission for us to enter. Permission granted, he goes in with us. I am guessing he is Sai’s cousin or younger brother.
It is dark within. Sai sits in the weak glow of the cooking fire, his wife beside him tending a pot of rice. A child huddles in shadow against her. Sai and his family have no separate kitchen; their means being modest, they cook in their single room. At the sight of Robichaud, Sai manages a smile. His right thigh is wrapped in rags. His face is drawn with pain, worry in every feature. We learn that three months ago, as he was transporting a load of sheet-metal roofing up the river to the village, a stack of sheets broke free and shot back, slicing into Sai’s legs. The lacerations tore deep. They missed the femoral arteries, sparing Sai’s life, but the injury to even his left leg, the healed one, forms a gutterlike depression in the flesh paved with a gnarled scar.
Slowly, gingerly, Sai unwraps the rag bandage from his other leg. In the light of our headlamps we again see a divot where the meat of his quadriceps has been lost. The depression is deep enough to hide a golf ball, and it is hard and red with infection, oozing at the bottom. Sai’s wife explains that she has been cleaning the wound and washing the rag dressing. Robichaud digs into his pack and produces a tub of salve, which he holds in the firelight. I have noticed that he travels with the sparest of medical kits, so he must rate this stuff very high. He explains to Sai that it comes from Australia and is marvelously effective in drawing out infection. He has used it many times with good results. He thinks it would help the wound to heal. Would Sai like to try it?
Sai nods anxiously.
Robichaud cleans his finger with a swab of Betadine, then delicately applies the salve to the wound and spreads it as evenly as he can while Sai’s eyes tighten in a sustained wince. I pass Robichaud a patch of sterile gauze, which he places over the wound, then tapes it down. We make a little pile of the things we are leaving: more gauze patches, the tub of salve, and a roll of tape. Robichaud instructs Sai’s wife and the young man who showed us in about the importance of changing the dressing and reapplying the salve. Do it every day, he says. Robichaud also hands out packets of Ovaltine and candies (his pockets never seem to empty of treats, which he dispenses wherever he goes). Nevertheless, the atmosphere inside the shack remains morose as we gather our things. If Sai’s infection worsens, it may kill him. Or he may end his days a cripple, unable to work, impoverishing himself and his family.
There is little question of his leaving the village and seeking medical attention. Thakhek, the closest source of medical care and antibiotics, lies several difficult days away, and the journey would cost a small fortune. Moreover, according to ancient rules, if he were to die outside the village, his body would not be allowed to return for burial. Worse, if his body were not buried within the domain of the village, his kinfolk could not or would not “feed” his spirit at their family altars, and they would not remember him in their prayers. He would be forgotten. In the villages of Nakai–Nam Theun the advantages of modern medicine must be weighed against the risk of eternal oblivion.
But Robichaud is optimistic. The infection appears low-grade and local; anything worse would have already finished him. The salve will work, he says. “With luck, Sai, you will soon be back on your feet—hobbling, perhaps, but gaining strength all the time.” Such is Robichaud’s departing message. And then we are on the porch again, finding our sandals, negotiating the ladder, and walking in the dark. Orion burns overhead. It is time to get back to Kong Chan’s and eat a late dinner, I think, but no, there is someone else Robichaud wants to visit—he was on the same expedition as Sai, years ago, when a few of them reached the top of Phou Vang in near darkness and then, with their water gone, dangerously descended the cliffs by flashlight.
Bounthai’s house is up the slope, at the other end of the village. It is brightly lit, the source of the loudest music. A hiit is under way. As we approach, we hear a new bass line under the dervish melodies. It is the chug of a generator.
On the porch a clot of men surrounds a large ceramic urn similar to an amphora of ancient Greece. This one, too, contains wine, rice wine. The circle opens, and the men shoo me into a place beside the urn. I am given a long bamboo straw. Music thunders from the house. Between fits of laughter and fast quips to the assembled throng, Robichaud instructs me. There are four drinkers. The idea is to suck wine through your straw, as the other fellows are doing. As the urn is drained, a referee replenishes it using a water buffalo horn that serves as a dipper. You keep drinking until four hornfuls have been poured into the urn. In the present instance, the traditional buffalo horn having gone missing, a plastic jar is in use. In theory, each man drinks one hornful, but there is strategy to consider. Some drinkers hold back so that others will suffer the effects of the alcohol. Still others, hungry for those effects, might willingly drink more than their share. My motivation is different: I drink fast in order to bring the rite to its close and to escape the sodden communal straw that is now in my mouth.
Unfortunately, the master of the ceremony—the referee holding the horn-equivalent plastic jar—seems not to count the scoops of wine he pours into the urn. He ladles and ladles, with a dazed grin, while I suck down the vapid, slightly astringent liquor. It tastes more like flat beer than any wine I have met. With the drinking in its late innings, everyone is too potted to keep track of the rules. One sucks on, no end in sight. Hope dwindles. At last, I see out of the corner of my eye that Robichaud has broken free of a conversation and is heading into the house. I relinquish my straw and rise. I make a smiling nop—a little bow with hands together, as though in prayer—mumbling excuses in a mishmash of English and mangled Lao: “Khop chay, khop chay”; thank you, thank you. My fellow imbibers look at me askance. Clearly, in their eyes, I am a barbarian, acting barbarically, for I have broken the rules of their drinking game. My gaffe, I pray, is to be expected—and forgiven.
The house is packed with people, including many children. Everyone faces the same direction, expressions rapt. On a crude ledge jutting from the wall stands a hissing television, the screen unwatchable, a blizzard of electronic snow. A second TV beside it shows no sign of life. Bounthai is fiddling with wires and controls, trying to conjure magic from the boxes.
Robichaud and I are directed to seats on the floor near the hissing television, beneath one of four muntjac trophies (all of the large-antlered species) that adorn the walls. We join a circle where Bounthai’s vivacious and attractive wife holds court. She is hosting a round of beer in the Lao manner. As hostess, she pours a small glass, toasts the group, and drinks, draining the glass. Then she fills the glass again and passes it to the man on her left. He toasts, drinks, and drains, then returns the empty glass to the hostess, who refills it and passes it to the next in the circle. And so it goes, a single glass making a circuit of the group, of which we are now members. The large bottle runs dry. A second one is fetched. The glass comes around again, followed by the getting of a third bottle and a third circuit, with our queenlike hostess dispensing every drop and monitoring our progressive inebriation with ravenous enthusiasm.
A tiny man to my left is talking in a sweet, gentle voice. Robichaud, to my right, leans our way occasionally to translate. The man’s name is Mang: Mr. Mang, if you please. The glass has come around for the nth time, and as I drink Mr. Mang tells me that he has spent a lot of time in the forest, as we will be doing. He likes the life of the forest, the life of the camp. He has traveled many kilometers on hard trails, some of them not far from the Nam Nyang, where we will head tomorrow. But regrettably, he says, his days of roaming the forest are over. He can no longer take to the trail.
Mr. Mang pauses to take a drink, and I look at him closely. His rueful admission makes sense to me, for he appears to be the oldest person in the room, unless I am. But then Mr. Mang, having finished his beer and passed the empty glass back to our hostess, rolls up his left sleeve.
He holds before my eyes an arm that seems to have two elbows. There is the expected elbow joining the upper and lower arms, but there is also a second, almost right-angle bend in the middle of his forearm. When Mr. Mang holds the upper part of his forearm level, as he now shows me, his hand points nearly south. The radius and the ulna have been broken and never reset. The broken radius, in fact, bulges against the skin, like a false elbow set on a disturbingly different plane from the true one. A small cage of bamboo, with cuffs at his biceps and his wrist, splints his forearm in its grotesque position and prevents the broken wing from flopping about. The splint is exactingly made and fiercely strong, with slender, rigid bamboo rods; it is the finest piece of workmanship I have yet seen in the villages. His arm has been this way a long time, he explains. Once, he even made the journey to the hospital in Thakhek, but the hospital lacked an orthopedic surgeon and so could do nothing for him. He came home, still married to his exquisite bamboo cage.
Robichaud inquires how the injury occurred. I was in the forest, says Mr. Mang. On a journey, and traveling up a river. The rocks were wet and slippery. I fell.
As Robichaud translates, I have an unhappy sense of recognition. Back in Vientiane, prepping for the expedition, Robichaud reviewed with me the dangers that might beset our journey: “I don’t worry about bad water, dengue, malaria, or animal interactions. If anything bad happens, it’s gonna be on those streams.” He was speaking of the cascading side streams that drain into the Nam Nyang and of the main channel of the Nam Nyang itself. The streams run on beds of boulders, and if rain is falling or the air is dense with mist, the rocks become astonishingly slick. You step on them, he said, and whoosh—you are on your back. If a boulder is behind you and you hit your head, well, that could be that. A colleague of his at the Wildlife Conservation Society hunted up a pair of rubber shoes that Japanese fishermen wear to keep their footing on wet, rolling decks. They have cleats that resemble shallow tacks, and they work well on the forest waterways. The villagers just wear flip-flops or cheap Vietnamese sandals with soles of soft rubber or plastic. The spongy materials let them grip the rocks as though they were barefoot, and their feet are strong and flexible. The worst thing is the hard Vibram found on the soles of many expensive hiking boots.
I was not happy to hear this. Although the soles of my boots and sandals are not as hard as Vibram, they are only slightly softer.
“Sometimes the guides push the pace from behind,” he said, “and you hurry to keep ahead of them, so you can see things. That’s when you fall. The key thing is, don’t hurry.”
Besides having the wrong footwear, I have foot problems and fall problems, too. Age takes a toll on one’s balance. I am less steady now than I was at Robichaud’s age and a far cry from the rock hopper I was in my twenties. Last spring in the Grand Canyon, descending a ravine in the dark, I had a fall that sliced my knee to the depth of the bone. The patella was only bruised and the tendon uncut, but the injury was tricky to close without stitches and also tricky to keep closed. A surgeon who happened to be on the trip, along with the trip leader, a wilderness medic, gave excellent care. There was no lasting difficulty, but the event remained a humbling confirmation of the erosion of my abilities. Unfortunately, no such medical expertise (let alone the capacious medical kits we had in the canyon) will accompany us on our trip in NNT.
Robichaud and I had planned to bring along a satellite phone in case anything serious occurred. In theory, the phone would enable us to call in a helicopter if a situation proved life-threatening. But something went wrong with Robichaud’s Internet order, and no phone was delivered in time for me to bring it from the States. We went to plan B, which was to borrow a sat phone from the local office of the Wildlife Conservation Society. We stopped at a telecom store on the morning of our departure from Vientiane, expecting to open an account, buy an adequate store of minutes, and receive final instructions on the phone’s operation. Instead we learned that the phone was broken and useless, and that no, the store could neither sell nor rent us a replacement. That was that. Apart from a fistful of painkillers, our resources for meeting calamity as we plunged into the forest were approximately the same as those that had comforted Mr. Mang.
Mr. Mang has rolled down his sleeve, and the beer has come around again. Is this the fifth time or the sixth? Our conscientious hostess now sets before us a low woven table replete with the fixings of dinner: little baskets of cold sticky rice and bowls of various pastes and sauces. In a flurry of rapid-fire speech she excuses herself again and soon returns with the pièce de résistance, which she places at the center of the table: a dish of fresh pig’s blood, fortified with chunks of raw liver. Or maybe heart. The concoction is redder than lipstick. “Kin khao,” she says. “Eat, eat!”
Robichaud, beaming with helpfulness, joins in. “Kin khao, Bill! Don’t you want some of that strawberry shortcake?”
We are not the first outsiders to be offered so inviting a dish. Some months later, I will discuss saola with George Schaller, the famed naturalist who over the course of almost sixty years has studied nearly every charismatic animal on the planet: mountain gorillas in central Africa, lions in the Serengeti, snow leopards in the Himalayas, jaguars in Brazil, antelopes in Tibet, and more. He has also searched for saola in the Annamites. He will say, “The first thing the villagers do is bring you pig’s blood, because they know Westerners don’t like it. I always just go ahead and have some. Then they leave you alone.”
Schaller’s strategy is undoubtedly a good one, and I might have tried it but for the rumor we’d heard earlier in the day that the pigs of Ban Nameo and Ban Nameuy were dying for no apparent reason. People were concerned. Now I was concerned, too. If a mysterious distemper was killing local pigs, it hardly seemed advisable to consume the blood, let alone the liver, of an animal snatched from the portals of organ failure.
I notice that Robichaud has also declined the ruby-red delight. With both of us publicly in default of proper guest behavior, our hostess presses forward, with obvious relish for the headlock of etiquette she has us in. “Kin khao, kin khao,” she badgers. “We Lao eat pig like this all we can. It makes us strong. Day after day, we go up the mountain to clear the fields and work hard. We work hard all our lives. When we get old, the government doesn’t help us; we just keep working, we keep eating like this, and still we don’t die, so you won’t die, either. Have some! Kin khao!”
Her speech is much longer than my rendering here. It is also vehement, seamless, and impervious to objection. As Robichaud translates, I feel a wave of sympathy for her husband, Bounthai.
Suddenly a disturbance erupts elsewhere in the room. Attention mercifully shifts from the pig’s blood (which no one else in our circle has sampled). Or maybe we have simply run out of beer. The details of the evening are getting hazy. In any event, our hostess soon reclaims command of the situation, having returned from the kitchen with a jug of rice whiskey.
We follow the same procedure and use the same glass as before. Our hostess pours herself the merest taste and downs it in one swallow, then fills the glass about an inch deep for each guest in succession. The rice whiskey has the fruity bite of tequila and far surpasses the kerosene I drank in Ban Makfeuang. An inch of it delivers a solid jolt, and when a second round of equal quantity reaches Robichaud, he shows reluctance.
“Drink up!” says our hostess. “It’s New Year’s!”
“But our New Year began two months ago,” Robichaud protests. (When he translates this for me, he says “two years ago”—a sign that he, too, is losing ground.)
“That doesn’t matter. It’s the New Year of your host that matters. It’s New Year’s here. Drink up!”
“But Tet was three weeks ago.”
“We’re still celebrating!” she says gleefully, and fixes him with a stare.
Robichaud now resorts to a new stratagem. With a smile for our hostess, he pivots slightly to face the wall, kneels, and, in an attitude of prayer, pours a small amount of whiskey through a gap between the floorboards, mumbling inaudibly. Then he turns back to the group, gestures a toast to all, and downs the rest of his whiskey. Our hostess is frowning as she accepts the empty glass from him. Robichaud has made an offering to the house spirits and the souls of departed ancestors, sharing a little whiskey with the spirit world. Our hostess cannot protest.
The next glass is mine, and what the hell, I throw down the firewater once more. Another destabilizing jolt. The pig’s blood, meanwhile, appears to be coagulating. No one has touched it or much of anything else. The members of the circle, including the petite Mr. Mang, have scarcely eaten. We are drinking straight whiskey on empty stomachs. At last the glass completes its circuit.
Expressing thanks, good cheer, and best wishes for the New Year, Robichaud starts to rise. “So good to be with you, but we must be going…”
“Oh, no!” exclaims Lady Torquemada. “We must have one last round.”
“Thank you, but we have to…”
“We have to drink to good luck for your journey!” She knows she has him now.
“Just a little one, then.”
“A very little one.”
“Okay.” Robichaud sits down.
She pours less than a centimeter of whiskey in the glass and drinks it, then pours another centimeter and passes it to the man on her left. The drinks are indeed small, and the glass moves quickly around the circle until it is Robichaud’s turn. All eyes are on our enabler. She shoots a glance at Robichaud, bats her lashes coquettishly, and fills the glass two inches deep. Deaf to Robichaud’s objections, she extends the glass.
Robichaud knows he’s licked. No offerings this time. The spirits of the dead will have to go sober. He slowly drinks his medicine. He looks pale. The glass goes back.
Now it is my turn. I am already uncertain of my ability to stand up. She pours another two inches. I cannot possibly. To my horror I see that, where I am sitting, mats cover the floor all the way to the wall. There are no floorboards exposed. No cracks. I am given the glass. “Tell them my mother-in-law just died,” I say to Robichaud. It is a small lie. I am not married, not quite. But I think of the message from Joanna, back in Nakai, minutes before we took to the boats to cross the lake, telling me that her invalid mother, Nancy, had passed away.
Robichaud is explaining this as I half rise and lurch across the room to a patch of exposed flooring that looks to me like the promised land. Lady Torquemada shrieks her objection as I make a generous offering to Nancy’s newly liberated spirit, and I really do say a prayer, or at least I feel prayerful, now that words are not coming easily. When I return to the circle, the eyes of my hostess are bright with anger, but everyone else appears sympathetic, and they mutter what can only be condolences.
Lady T’s enthusiasm has suddenly waned. Mr. Mang, who may have wanted more, now gets a niggardly drink, and the circle is quickly completed. Robichaud and I begin our escape. He is snared by conversation multiple times on his journey across the room and out the door, but my idiot grin of incomprehension opens a path through the throng. Soon I am down the ladder and into the welcoming darkness, with bright Orion spinning overhead. I lie down on the dewy grass. Orion stabilizes and shines still brighter. The Pleiades gleam, and the moist night settles like a caress.