February 28
Thong Kouang
In dim first light, the trees hemming the thong detach from the sky. The forest becomes a misty encirclement, like an army ranged around us. Behind the lines, where darkness hangs in the trees, voices begin, breathy and haunting: Whoo-AH, whoo-AH. The calls on the left echo those on the right; there are others to the rear. Whoo-AH, whoo-AH. It is the singing of gibbons.
The slender apes summon the day, females calling to their mates, the males answering, the pairs advertising their presence to other pairs, asserting their occupancy of discrete patches of forest. Their song lies beyond metaphor, beyond the ordinary meanings of words. There is hoot in it, but it is not a hoot. There is whoop in it, but it is not a whoop. It is too joyful for a scream, too relaxed for a shout, yet the song carries great distances, even through a million leafy boughs. It is conversational, the emotion mild. The animals are not trying to find each other; they are just talking, yet their talk is not chatty. It is declarative and serious, and each utterance ends in muted shrillness, a final sharp tail of emphasis. It is a song between partners, and one is tempted to hear in it an expression of affection, a breathy cousin-primate coo of attachment. The gibbons’ song stirs my own longings, and I think of Joanna and wonder how she is faring with the death of her mother and whether she also feels the loneliness of moments like this. The feeling ebbs as the apes sing on, infusing the day with a quiet exaltation.
They have cheered Robichaud. He smiles as he emerges from his tent. “It’s my favorite sound in nature,” he says. Even better, the presence of gibbons at Thong Kouang means that “a big part of the forest here is still intact.”
Before the sun has topped the trees, the gibbons turn quiet, and we set off into the now unenchanted forest. We smell something dead by the tree line and resolve to investigate later. A grey peacock pheasant yammers its Dopplerish cry at the strangler fig tree where we set camera traps the night before. The fig is fruiting, and we had hoped it might attract a civet in the night, but the results are disappointing: none of the cameras captured images of animals, and two failed to operate even when we walked in front of them. We take them back to the tents, and Robichaud immerses himself in the operating manuals. Several guides, including Viengxai, arrive and watch us as though we are a show in a theater.
Viengxai observes closely as I roll my sleeping pad. When I set the pad aside, he picks it up and fingers the strap that holds it. He peers into ditty bags and opens other containers. When I shoo him off, he retreats with a sarcastic smile. He lifts the empty and unstaked tent and shakes it as though it were a trophy. When I take it from him, he hefts my nearly empty pack and pantomimes a great burden. Anything I set to the side he fondles as he might a toy. When I stuff my last things in the pack, Viengxai leans in closely to watch the placement of each item. I cinch the top flap tightly, sealing its contents the only way I can, and go to help Robichaud decipher the cameras.
We are testing three models of varying cost and complexity—a total of nine cameras. The cheapest ones have proved nearly worthless. Toward the end of our time in NNT, we will set the cameras in locations yet to be determined that seem promising for saola, and we will leave them in place through the coming rainy season. Somewhere near Ban Kounè seems a likely prospect, but Robichaud’s plans are constantly changing. Many factors merit consideration, the potential for theft being one of them. When Robichaud opens the back of one camera, Viengxai, who has come to hover at his shoulder, exclaims, “Look at all those batteries!” He points and counts out loud. “One, two, three, four…” Robichaud looks up from the camera. In English he says to me, “My bad feeling about this guy isn’t getting better. If these cameras disappear, I will have a prime suspect.”
As a test, Robichaud has decided to install an array of cameras at a mineral lick near Thong Kouang and leave them there until we return from the Nam Nyang. On our way to the lick, we encounter the remains of a muntjac. Robichaud determines that it is a large-antlered muntjac, a rare species about which little is known. The remains consist of little more than a black puddle of hide and bone. One of the hind hocks is skinned to the tibia, where the noose of a wire snare had closed around it. There is no hoof. The deer fought free, at mortal cost, and didn’t make it far. We follow a faint trail into the forest and find two snares; one of them, the agent of death, is sprung and broken. We disarm the other one and collect the wire, which is instantly recognizable as bicycle brake cable, a commodity universally available.
The land here is nearly flat, and the sloughs that drain it are deeply incised. One such slough now bars our passage. Its clay walls are nearly vertical, and they come undone under the least pressure. We cannot climb them. At last we find a tree fallen across the slough and continue by this bridge to the poung, which occupies a boggy wetland. Presumably its clays contain salts that the wildlife favor. It looks to be a promising location, for a set of fresh sambar tracks traverses it.
Robichaud takes his time selecting positions for the cameras. He adjusts the angle of view by sliding wedges of wood between the cameras and the tree trunks to which they are strapped. He adjusts the bungee cords that hold them in place. Olay, hopping past the camera like an oversize rabbit, does his best to imitate a quadruped, but the camera doesn’t fire. Consternation. Robichaud guesses that Olay’s ever-present rain parka shields his body heat from the camera’s infrared sensors. Olay slithers out of the jacket as though it were a dress (the zipper is broken) and tries again. Success. Robichaud checks and rechecks the settings, pressing menu buttons with his thumbs: sensitivity level, field of view, still photograph versus video, interval between photographs, flash on or off, and more. Finally he is satisfied. One camera done, two more to go.
We don’t want to disturb the area with an excess of trampled plants or scent, so I stand on hard ground at the edge of the bog with the guides who have accompanied us. Viengxai is at my shoulder. He looks almost dashing today. While most of the guides wear nylon trunks or cutoff sweatpants, he sports a pair of tight-fitting blue jeans with fashionable embroidery on the back pockets. Alone among the guides he also wears leech socks—a khaki pair, freshly laundered—which give him a high-booted, uniformed look, further accentuated by his trim-fitting camo-green jacket. His small machete—a bamboo knife, really—hangs from a loop of plastic twine at the small of his back, and this morning he has borrowed (or commandeered) a rifle from one of the militia. Fully fitted out, he’s the NNT equivalent of a cowboy duded up for Saturday night, and he stands with hips cocked, weight on one foot, the rifle slung barrel-down over his shoulder, as though it always lived there.
As I write in my notebook, Viengxai edges closer to peer over my shoulder, staring hard at my runic scrawl even as I jot his description. His face is inches from mine. I am breathing his exhalations, thankful that his breath is fresh. On the ground before us a sambar track is pressed into the mud. Viengxai vigorously points to it. “Yes,” I say. “I see it.” Then he points even more emphatically, as though I am blind. “Yes,” I repeat, but he is not satisfied, for I have not yet done what he is bidding me to do. Probably he wants me to photograph the track, as he earlier saw me photograph the decomposed muntjac, but in a photograph the hoofprint would show only as a black hole in the ground; moreover, the last thing I want to do is start following his meddlesome prompts. Our not-quite conversation, however, provides a kind of satisfaction. Standing almost cheek to cheek with Viengxai, I’ve deciphered the tortured script on the rhinestoned visor of his ball cap. It says LOVE YOU FOREVER, which strikes me as fitting: Viengxai, who once promised slavish cooperation, is as sincere as his hat.
In an hour the camera traps are set, and we head back. When we pass the carcass of the muntjac at the edge of the grassland, Robichaud stays behind. He draws his machete and begins hacking at something. He is amputating the remaining back foot.
“Collecting a sample?” I ask him.
“No,” he replies tersely. “Something for me.” End of conversation. Head down, he continues hacking at the dead leg.
Although I have stayed at his home in Vientiane and he has stayed at mine in New Mexico, and although we have spent cumulative days in conversation and have traveled this past week together, I realize that I have far to go in learning who he is.
Once, at a meeting of conservation biologists, I watched one of Robichaud’s colleagues draw a visual guide to the antlers of the several species of muntjacs found in the Annamites. He sketched the different sets of antlers freehand and quickly, with no wasted strokes. Then he labeled them. The result was a handsome key to identifying male animals within the confusing taxonomy of the genus Muntiacus in Indochina, which few people understand past a rudimentary level—none better than the author of the guide, whose name is Rob Timmins.
Timmins’s coworkers acknowledge him as the best field man in the region. Said one, “Timbo can learn more about a protected area’s wildlife in a week than most others can in a year.” On another occasion Robichaud said to me, “If you got paid for wildlife survey the way you get paid in international soccer, Timmins would be up where David Beckham used to be, taking down twenty million pounds a year.” Timmins is a Cambridge graduate with a heavy Midlands accent. In his telling, the sites where animals are found become “soites,” which he “disgusses” with his colleagues. Timmins confides that as he studies or travels through a habitat, he builds a mental map, which is ever in his mind’s eye. The map, like a GIS database, is layered with information—or informed intuitions—about climate, topography, vegetation, species sightings, and so forth. The richer he can make the map, the more predictive it becomes, sometimes leading to conspicuous success in deducing where a certain animal will be.1
The grail of a survey biologist is the identification of new species, and Timmins has logged an impressive list that includes the Annamite striped rabbit (Nesolagus timminsi);2 the bare-faced bulbul (Pycnonotus hualon), Asia’s only bald songbird; and the kha-nyou (Laonastes aenigmamus), a rodent that dwells in holes in karst limestone and that is even more distant from its surviving evolutionary relatives than the saola.3 Amid competition for first identifications, however, the meticulous Timmins is sometimes slow to publish and does not always get the credit he is due. This was the case in the discovery of both the large-antlered and Annamite muntjacs (Muntiacus vuquangensis and M. truongsonensis), which came to the attention of Western science soon after the discovery of saola.
In those days, an obligatory stop for any biologist working in central Laos was the wildlife market at Lak Xao, close by the northern border of the Nakai–Nam Theun protected area. (Lak Xao translates literally as “kilometer twenty,” and some Lao maps show it as B. LAK 20, or “Ban Lak 20.”) In the 1990s Lak Xao was merely a widened gash along one of the few highways to Vietnam, twenty kilometers from where the French used to maintain a border post guarding the route. It was a frontier town, rough-hewn and dusty. Illicit, big-money timber deals were rumored to take place there, as was heroin manufacture. Wildlife trafficking may have been the least of its evils. At the town market, trade in large animals was mostly under the table, but on a typical morning one might see twenty-five species of songbird and plenty of small mammals laid out among the chilies and vegetables. The Lak Xao market produced the first record for Laos of the strange, arboreal colugo (Cynocephalus variegatus), a relative of tree shrews that is sometimes incorrectly called a flying lemur (it is not a lemur, and it glides rather than flies). It was also there that Timmins first spotted the Annamite striped rabbit.
The potentate of Lak Xao at the time was General Cheng Sayavong, whose helicopter Robichaud had once looked on with envy. Cheng headed Bolisat Phathana Khet Phoudoi, the Mountainous Areas Development Corporation, better known by its initials, BPKP, which was a military-run, government-owned enterprise. BPKP dominated all nonsubsistence economic activity for a hundred kilometers in every direction. It cut timber for export and brokered other commodities. It built roads, relocated villages, and did whatever else General Cheng cared to do.
The general’s interests included wildlife, and he caused a small zoo, really a menagerie, to be built in Lak Xao. It was at Cheng’s modest collection of pens and cages that Robichaud spent two weeks observing a captive saola in 1996. It was also there that Timmins and Robichaud together examined a small, dark muntjac that they realized was neither the widely distributed red muntjac (M. muntjak) nor the large-antlered muntjac (M. vuquangensis), which was named from the Vu Quang reserve in Vietnam two years after the discovery of saola. Timmins and Robichaud backed up their discovery with a skull of the anomalous animal, which they obtained from a nearby Hmong village. Although others, under strange circumstances, were first to publish a description of an animal that was probably of the same species, now identified as the Annamite muntjac, or M. truongsonensis, most people interested in the barking deer of Laos and Vietnam defer to Timmins on matters of taxonomy. The puzzles are many and ongoing. For example, while the species status of large-antlered muntjac is generally agreed, one might ask whether others—the proposed Annamite and Phuhoat muntjacs (M. truongsonensis and M. phuhoatensis)—are truly separate species or instead races of the same line.4
At the meeting in Vientiane, after the antler sketches of various species were shared, parsed, and thoroughly discussed, Timmins popped a quiz. He showed a series of camera-trap photographs of various muntjacs and asked his colleagues to identify them as to species. The gambit was not for sport. As Timmins’s friend and collaborator Will Duckworth explained, the large-antlered muntjac was likely next in line for extinction, after the saola. Therefore, correct identification and preservation of camera-trap photographs was vital in documenting the animal’s status and distribution before it vanished. Tellingly, as a measure of the difficulty of the subject, and of survey work in the Annamites generally, performance on the quiz was abysmal. Duckworth led with four right answers out of five, but several experienced field-workers scored none.
Later that day, I asked Timmins about a population estimate he had made for saola years earlier. In 1996, based on a patch-by-patch analysis of saola habitat and informed guesses as to species density and threat factors, he calculated an estimate of between seventy and seven hundred saola remaining in Laos. He said if the higher number was right, saola might still exist. If the lower number was correct, by now they are gone. “There might be a few here or there, but as a population they may already be past the point of recovery. We don’t know.”
“The attrition is that aggressive?”
“Yeah, and it applies to all large mammals, anything bigger than a dog or a porcupine.”
“It’s like they’re falling off a cliff?”
“Off a cliff—even the pigs, and pigs will always be the last to go.”
The day has warmed. Simeuang and I go to find the source of the death smell on the path to the strangler fig. The intense buzzing of carrion flies, to say nothing of the stench, draws us quickly to the source. It is another large-antlered muntjac in a wire snare, tangled in brush, its hindquarters dangling from the wire, the head and shoulders dissolving into a pool of grease on the ground. The death grimace reveals the teeth of the upper jaw, where one of the long, distinctive canines of the muntjac has fallen out. Nearly a fang or a tusk—an incongruous feature in a family that includes Bambi—the ivory tooth lies in the rot seeping from the carcass. Like an elk tooth in North America, such a relic is a kind of prize, a symbol of longevity, the last part of the animal to decompose. I consider taking it, cleaning it, and keeping it as a souvenir or talisman. Earlier this morning I similarly pondered the shed skin of a king cobra, which lay beside a path between the thong and camp. Five or six feet long, it was translucent and bore the lacelike imprint of the scales. I debated rolling it up and stowing it in one of the rigid containers in my pack or simply cutting out a sample. In the end I did neither, and I also now leave the muntjac tooth where it lies. I have no business taking anything from this forest. To be honest, I am a little intimidated by the juju of these things, or, more to the point, by not knowing what kind of juju they have or don’t have. I imagine my friend Mary, frail and wan, whispering in my ear, “Leave them alone.”
Mary should know. Long ago, at the ruin of an ancient Indian village in New Mexico, Mary took something she ought not have taken. Or one of her young sons may have taken it. Or maybe her memory deceived her and nothing happened, and there was no connection to what happened later. But she recalled that as soon as she arrived at the ruin, led there by a man she should not have trusted, she knew she should leave. And as soon as she picked up the shiny object—a fetish, a jewel, a sacred stone?—a wave of foreboding swept through her. She dropped what she was holding. She turned to the children and said, “Don’t touch anything. Don’t take anything. Go back to the car. Go now!”
Days later, at home in the cottage behind her grandmother’s house, her dreams appalled her. Strange dancing figures demanded the return of something she could not find. The spirits were violent and adamant, unappeasable. She woke in a fever of anxiety: Had she taken something from the ruins? Had she put something in her pocket? Had William, the younger boy, possibly picked up what she put down?
She wanted to believe that all of it was a dream, but her older son told her it wasn’t: “Mama, I remember going to the ruin.” She thought of these things again, replaying them in her mind, in the terrible autumn when her father died, William was murdered, and she was diagnosed with cancer.
The morning is nearly spent when at last we shoulder our packs, and our line of fourteen burdened travelers begins to snake along the trail toward Thong Sek, another big gap in the forest, fourteen kilometers away. From there we will climb a tall mountain, nameless on the map, and after descending the far side, we will drink the water of the Nam Nyang.
We walk almost double time, at a pace too quick to allow true observation. It is as though we are late for something, rushing to catch up, the way one might exit the subway after a delay, still hoping to make a meeting on time. But here the hurry does not last for a block or two. Robichaud wants to make up for our late start, and so we scurry onward, even though we have no particular destination. We’ll just see how far we get. The trail is rough, broken by roots and rotting logs; sometimes it is not even a trail, only a crease through the vegetation. I keep my eyes on my footing lest I trip, and so the miracle forest streams by unnoted and scarcely sensed, a continuous collage of leaves, green and brown, and angled stems scrolling at the edges of my vision. A Tarzan sound track of lunatic birdsong and insect screech resounds in our ears as we hustle, hustle, hustle forward.
We do not slow for gullies, which as often as not are bridged by two or three thin poles laid close together. The guides dance across them. Robichaud teeters forward like a tightrope walker. I cross, my heart pounding like a trip-hammer, less afraid of injury than of the shame of falling in front of everyone. Where poles cannot bridge the gullies, our predecessors on the trail, quite likely poachers, have hacked shallow steps into the clay banks. Where there are no steps, or where the earth is too loose to hold a shape, we scramble up, pawing at the bank, feet churning.
At last Robichaud calls a pause for water and rest. I sit against a tree of massive girth, the bark of which peels off in giant flakes, as though it were clothed in potato chips.5 Several guides crowd around to watch me write in my notebook. They seem never to have seen writing before, but, recalling the school on the trail to Ban Nameo, I say to myself that this cannot be true. Perhaps it is only that they have never seen Roman script. Then again, the school was nearly a ruin. The guides watch with broad smiles, their eyes focused on the point of the pen as it marks the page. Not far away, a lineated barbet chants ti-tonk, ti-tonk.
A short distance down the trail Robichaud investigates yet another abandoned poachers’ camp. He comes back with the skull of a large-antlered muntjac, our third in two days. A female. Perhaps only antler-bearing male skulls are worth lugging back to Vietnam. Simeuang frowns as he examines the skull. Despite the heat, he is wearing a thick brown turtleneck, torn at the shoulder, and he looks as fresh as he did at breakfast. Touy and Olay, both in their raincoats on this rainless day, are cool and relaxed, too, without a single bead of moisture on their foreheads. My thin shirt, meanwhile, is soaked, and I have sweated through the disintegrating sweatband of my hat.
Moving again, we hurry but soon stop to identify a bird, then hurry and stop again. The sights of the forest are trumping Robichaud’s haste. Now he points out a black giant squirrel—not merely a black squirrel of large size, he says, but a member of the genus Ratufa, known as Asiatic giant squirrels; the black giant squirrel is R. bicolor. He mentions that the population of the squirrel is declining, as it is heavily hunted. We stop also to examine a pitted clearing of bare red earth, littered with chunks of yellowing sapwood, the site of rosewood diggings. Poachers carted off the aboveground portions of the area’s rosewood trees months or years ago; now they dig for heartwood in the roots. One shard of stump is signed in Vietnamese, as though it were a work deserving authorship: THE ONE WHO DUG AND CUT THIS—TAM. Farther along, at a similar excavation, the message and signature end in a cryptic series of numbers. We ponder the mystery until Mok Keo, the only one among us who reads Vietnamese, laughing, bursts out, “I know what it is!”
“What?” asks a surprised Robichaud.
“A phone number!”
“Jesus,” says Robichaud. “They’re advertising. These sonsabitches have the balls to advertise!” He withdraws from his pack a plastic bag, from which he extracts a small sign printed in Lao and Vietnamese. He proceeds to tie it to a tree with red plastic twine.
When I ask what it says, Robichaud replies, “It’s a WMPA notice that says it’s illegal for outsiders to cut timber or hunt here, and anyone caught faces arrest.”
“That sounds pretty futile, under the circumstances.”
“Times like this, I just want to leave a message. We at least need to let them know that we know what’s going on. To not be silent. Of course, nobody has bothered to reprint these things. This is the last one I’ve got.”
A kilometer farther along we come to a stand of stately trees, of which six or eight of the largest have been felled, another violation of the limp safeguards of the protected area. Close to the villages, there are zones where residents have rights to harvest trees for houses, boats, coffins, and other noncommercial uses, but we are miles from any such area now. Robichaud and Simeuang look for clues, walking the logs from the hacked stumps to the former canopies. They gesture much and discuss the scene in Lao. “Rattan,” Robichaud finally announces. “They cut down the trees to get the rattan.”
The term rattan embraces hundreds of species of palm, but not the signature trees of island beaches and desert oases. Most rattan palms are climbing vines, and here the rattan has laced itself through the tops of old-growth trees. This particular variety has fierce, hooked thorns, like a rose on steroids, and its palmate foliage is intensely green, still fresh. Some of the guides busy themselves snipping sections of it. Most people know rattan as a source for woven furniture and baskets. Here it is also a food. The growing tips of the vine are tasty and nutritious. The trees lying jackstrawed before us were sacrificed, says Robichaud, “for a couple of meals.”
We are making good time toward Thong Sek when hubbub erupts among the guides. The three militiamen drop their packs and race into the forest, rifles in hand, closely followed by Viengxai and one other. The vegetation swallows them, and then the sound of their movement fades away as well. One of them spotted a trail, freshly used, where a trail should not have been. Perhaps it leads to a Vietnamese camp. We wait. In ten minutes they come back. Nothing.
It is getting late, and we have still not reached Thong Sek, which can only be a kilometer or two ahead. Robichaud confers with the senior guides. There is no reliable water on the mountain divide that lies beyond Thong Sek, and if we attempt to cross the mountain, we won’t reach the Nam Nyang until hours after dark. The guides agree: it is probably better to camp at Thong Sek. I cannot say I am disappointed. I will be glad for a long drink of water and a quiet place to pitch my tent.
Thong Sek is brittle with heat. It is less grassland than scrub savanna, a scattering of scraggy, angular trees with narrow crowns walled in by forest. Like Thong Kouang, it has recently burned. The char on the trees suggests flame heights of six feet or more, and the fresh grass sprouting underfoot cannot be older than one or two weeks. Now we conference anew. Robichaud is laughing. The guides say they are willing to push on up the mountain—we ought to be able to find water somewhere along the way—but we won’t make it if Robichaud “keeps stopping every three hundred meters to look at birds.”
It’s true. Perhaps because we agreed to make camp early at Thong Sek, Robichaud, always at the head of the line, has been stopping more frequently. We halt just now at the edge of the thong as a flock of robin-size birds dives and darts through the scrub. They cackle loudly and merrily. “Laughingthrushes,” declares Robichaud. “My second-favorite sound in nature.” Oddly, laughingthrushes are not closely related to thrushes but are a genus of their own: Garrulax, as in garrulous.
Robichaud agrees to keep moving, and so we cross a lazy, warm-water slough on bamboo poles, then climb a slope that recedes in successive benches: a steep pitch followed by a flat, then another pitch, and a flat, and so on up the mountain. On one bench we encounter a poachers’ camp of at least five recent fire circles, each with several pole frameworks for tarps and hammocks. At eight men per fire (a manageable number for meals and cooking), the camp when fully occupied held a sizable platoon. I pick up a discarded cigarette package, one of several scattered about. The writing on it is Vietnamese. It still smells of tobacco.
As we depart the big camp, a new chorus of murmuring arises from the guides. They have concluded that the Vietnamese carried their water to this place, and confidence that we will find water anywhere on the mountain is now lost. They want to turn back to Thong Sek. It will be dry, they say, until we descend the far side of the mountain to the Nam Nyang.
Robichaud asks, “Why didn’t you say this before?” He grimaces and stares at the ground. Then he hunches up his pack and starts walking down the slope the way we came.
A couple of guides call after him, “Okay, we can go to Nam Nyang. We’ll only be an hour and a half in the dark, but all our water will be used up.”
“No: we go back,” says Robichaud, and he motions for everyone to follow.
Thong Sek is not one grassland but several, divided by corridors of trees and small declivities. We camp beside the largest of the open areas, where a warm-water slough laps at the edge of the forest. As soon as we have chosen our site and thrown down our packs, Mok Keo begins cutting spinachlike leaves from a plant at the slough’s muddy edges. He brews the leaves, along with the rattan gathered earlier, into a delicious, briny soup. Robichaud breaks out a flavored paste he especially covets. His girlfriend, Akchousanh Rasphone, brought it from Luang Prabang just before we left Vientiane. It tastes of ginger, citrus, and garlic, and it makes the sticky rice worth having in your mouth. As we eat, sitting on the ground at a tarp folded long and narrow to serve as a legless table, yellow butterflies cluster on the straps and other sweat-damp places of my daypack. I assume they are drawn to the salt.
When the bowls are put away, Robichaud calls everyone together and formally enrolls the guides, entering their names in his record of the expedition. Most senior is Mok Keo, brother of Mr. Mang, a small, wiry man in a hat and shirt that appear borrowed from a uniform. I had thought he was a district or provincial policeman, but no, he says. Although he was long a soldier, he is now retired, a civilian pure and simple.
The two older militiamen are Meet and Sone. Both appear to be in their early thirties. Meet, like Mok Keo, hails from Ban Nameo. He is the more assertive of the two, his manner serious, almost dour. He is dressed in tattered camo shorts and an olive-drab jacket. He knows well the lay of the land, at least the portion we have traversed thus far. It is Meet to whom Robichaud turns when the trail grows faint or splits into multiple routes. Sone (pronounced “sawn”) is Brou, from Ban Kounè, and married to a Sek woman from Ban Nameuy. He lives with her there, close to Kong Chan. He sports a wisp of a mustache and a blue watch cap. His automatic rifle is particularly old and battered, and he lovingly wipes it clean of dust at our rest stops. A fever has dogged him from the beginning of the trip, and this evening it is worse. His gaze is wan and bleary, but all day he carried the most ungainly of our packs without complaint. It was a rice sack with only a doubling of plastic twine to serve as shoulder straps. The twine was tied to the neck of the sack and also to the pigtailed bottom corners. It must have cut his shoulders fiercely. Sone retires to his hammock as soon as Robichaud puts his name in the book.
Supper on the trail. Touy is closest on right.
Phaivanh, from Ban Beuk, is the third militiaman—courteous, in his midtwenties, with a broad and open smile. I do not believe I’ve seen him frown during the course of the trip, unless it was a time when everyone else was frowning, and so he did, too. His pink T-shirt shows an outline of the Statue of Liberty with the words New York duplicated hundreds of times around it.
Bone, Kham Laek, Phiang, and Thong Dam, all teenagers, also hail from Ban Beuk. Bone (“bawn”) exudes a bright, joyous charm and an alertness suggesting quick intelligence. The others are withdrawn, shy with a foreigner such as I, and apt to sit behind each other, hiding a little. Sometimes when I look up from my rice bowl or notepad, I find solemn eyes in a blank expression focused on me. How strange I must look to them: blue eyes, white whiskers, eyeglasses, a skull built from European genes, the top of it furred in gray. How much I wish I could converse with them. We could entertain each other a long while.
Last of the nine guides is Viengxai, so unlike both the gentle and industrious boys and the experienced and focused men. He is scornful when I broach a word or two of Lao, and he is always fiddling with things, usually my things. He has the sharp eyes of a thief on the watch for unattended treasure, no matter how small, and he is always working his angle, complaints at the ready, a jailhouse lawyer.
While the enrollment progresses, I ask the boys to write their full names in my notebook. They seem surprised and a little flattered, and each writes slowly in round, clear letters, not omitting the honorific:
Mr. Soukphavanh Sawathvong (Touy)
Mr. Chamthasome Phommachanh (Olay)
Simeuang is busy recording a parallel enrollment to Robichaud’s, but I will soon get his full name: Mr. Simeuang Phitsanoukan.
Formalities concluded, Robichaud chats further with the guides in Lao. After a little while, with several of them looking at me, I get the sense that I am the subject of their conversation. I shoot Robichaud a glance. He explains, “I am telling them that in the United States you live in a protected area like this one, where there are bear and deer and animals like sambar, dhole, and even a big wild cat like a leopard.”
He’s right, although I’d never thought of things that way. I live in a village in the southern Rocky Mountains surrounded by national forest. Our elk, or wapiti, are like sambar; our coyotes analogous to dholes. And the mountain lion, I suppose, is a very distant cousin to the leopard. The comparison goes deeper. In its early days, the protected areas of northern New Mexico had many holes in their “protection.” The first decades of government stewardship saw local extirpation of such big mammals as grizzly bear, wolf, white-tailed deer (but not mule deer), bighorn sheep, and elk. Both the predators and many of the game species they fed on were hunted and trapped until none was left. Game managers eventually reintroduced elk and bighorn sheep from distant populations, but the local genes were lost forever. Nakai–Nam Theun now tumbles through a similar decline, but with its greater diversity, it has much farther to fall.
When we pitched camp at Thong Sek, the birds were in full concert. A barbet sang, “Half a lump, half a lump,” its liquid notes a steady cadence, the timbre hollow, like the sound of blowing in a bottle. Against that rhythm a second chimed in, chanting the same notes in identical cadence but a split second out of phase. And a third barbet joined the others, and then a fourth, each bird singing the same song and rhythm but never in unison, so that the repetition of their competitive notes sounded like an airy, modernist composition by Philip Glass. Overlaid on the chorus of barbets came the chattering mimicry of a drongo, lively as a mockingbird on amphetamines. The drongo’s melodies danced in and out of the chorus. The result was not better than Glass’s work, but neither is the most masterly of Glass’s compositions better than what we heard at Thong Sek.
After supper, as the light wanes, so do the barbets, and the thong is quiet when Robichaud and I make a last recon. Robichaud leads, stepping carefully and softly across the brittle ground. At the least movement in the trees, he freezes in place and raises his binoculars. He insists that I stop as quickly and as silently as he, so that what ensues is a clumsy version of Simon says, with me on tiptoe stalking behind Robichaud, stepping where he stepped and struggling to maintain balance at each unadvertised stop. We see some of the birds we’d been listening to, hear a bar-backed partridge, and glimpse what might have been a pigeon of significance, but the light is poor and the bird streaks by too fast to confirm its identification. In the distance the pop of several isolated gunshots reminds us that we do not have the forest to ourselves.