March 1

Thong Sek

Robichaud says there was commotion in the night. Neither he nor I heard the ruckus, because it started on the far side of camp.

Since this was a one-night bivouac, the guides did not string their tarps. By 4:00 a.m. falling dew had chilled them, making sleep impossible, and so they gathered around the fire. When headlamps came down the trail from the mountain, the three militiamen scrambled for their rifles and with a few others gave chase. But the interlopers—undoubtedly poachers—sprinted back up the mountain and vanished like deer. No one glimpsed more of them than those first small lights in the darkness.

Now it is dawn, and the gibbons are just starting to find their voices. To be as exact as possible, the gibbons we are hearing are southern white-cheeked crested gibbons (Nomascus siki), but exactness does not come easily in the taxonomy of gibbons. The boundaries between species and subspecies are dimly understood, and the field-checking of assumptions about which species live where has been sporadic.

Yesterday Robichaud recounted to me an obscene and misogynistic Lao folktale explaining how the gibbon got its call:

A husband and wife are living by their rice field. A thief comes and enters the hut. He fights with the husband. In their struggle, the husband pins the thief on his back, and the thief’s loincloth gapes open, revealing his privates. The wife likes what she sees. And so when the husband shouts to her, “Give me the knife!” she hands it to him backwards. In the fury of the fight the husband can only hammer the thief with the handle, but the thief gains advantage of the knife and presses the blade into the husband’s chest, piercing his heart. The wife now says to the victorious thief, “Take me with you,” but the thief tells her, “Wretched woman, you just killed your husband; I want nothing to do with you!” Whereupon the wife realizes the horror of her actions and is overcome with remorse. She goes mad, and for the rest of her life she roams the forest, grieving for her husband, her phua. When she dies, her great sin causes her to be reincarnated as a lower life-form, a gibbon, and today all gibbons repeat her cry: phua, phua, phua.

Now, knowing the story, I hear more phua in the gibbons’ call (pronounced with a hard p: púa to English speakers), but the song nevertheless retains a tinge of European police siren, a delicious taste of lunacy.

I walk again with Robichaud to survey birds and whatever else we might encounter. We perform another teetering (on my part) reenactment of Simon says. We log more drongos and barbets, an owl, a warbler, and some sly frogs that call to each other in the pitch range of birds. Robichaud says Thong Sek looks like northern Cambodia. Its scrawny, narrow-topped trees violate the arboreal rule that a tree will spread as wide as crowding will allow. These trees have lots of room and plenty of strength, yet they stay skinny. I am more than ever convinced that both Thong Sek and Thong Kouang are maintained in their open state by burning and that, for want of lightning, humans must be the source of ignition. Robichaud agrees, yet he says the guides and every villager he has asked disavow knowledge of people starting fires, notwithstanding that the effect of the fires is benign and adds much to the diversity of habitats. I wonder if they fear interference from the authorities if they own up to fire-starting.

The yellow sun of dawn is now high and white. Robichaud said he wanted to take this walk at 6:00 a.m.; we started at 6:45. He said he wanted the whole group ready to hit the trail at 7:00 a.m.; it is now 7:10, and we are out watching birds. Robichaud is unafflicted by the hobgoblin of foolish consistency that Emerson decried. Our unpunctuality even brings a prize: on our way back to camp a mob of white-crested laughingthrushes envelops us in their raucous party.

Everyone has eaten. The group waits only for Robichaud and me, and they have been good enough to leave us a breakfast of a few morsels of grilled meat—which I fear may be the last we will see—and a skewered rice cake apiece, heavily salted and roasted to crispness. We take to the trail, munching.

Our order of march has changed. Robichaud goes first, as ever, but because an encounter with Vietnamese seems likely, Meet and Sone (who says his fever has abated) follow next with their weapons. Then me, and then the rest. We climb again as we did yesterday, up to and now past the sprawling poachers’ camp, and along a trail strewn with decaying plastic bags and other litter. Obviously the Vietnamese crews feel no need to conceal their presence. They act as though the land belongs to them.

Bit by bit, Robichaud has been telling me the story of his two-week sojourn at Lak Xao with a living saola. After his trek across the Nakai Plateau, he joined a cadre of expat biologists bent on making an inventory of the country. One of the nonprofits supporting their efforts was the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the renamed New York Zoological Society, based in the Bronx. Gradually, WCS folded Robichaud into its operations, and late in 1995 he was asked to coordinate its fledgling Lao country program. His boss was Alan Rabinowitz, an adventuring field biologist whom George Schaller had mentored and brought to WCS.

Soon after saola were discovered in Vietnam, biologists confirmed the animals’ existence in Laos. Again the evidence was a set of horns, which was spotted by biologist Bob Dobias, a former Peace Corps volunteer, early in 1993 in the village of Nakadok, just outside the northern boundary of what would soon be gazetted as the Nakai–Nam Theun National Biodiversity Conservation Area. (Designation as a national protected area came later.) Under the auspices of WCS and the Lao PDR Department of Forestry, Schaller and Rabinowitz surveyed NNT for saola in January of 1994, walking more than four hundred kilometers, examining along the way ten sets of horns, and collecting testimony from villagers about the habits of the animal. Their joint paper is one of the early scientific accounts of the species.¹

Rabinowitz returned to Laos two years later to help Robichaud organize the WCS office and to prioritize areas for future survey.

Soon, however, events dictated a new set of plans.

Late on the evening of January 10, 1996, only a few days after Rabinowitz’s arrival, two WCS contractors, Nancy Ruggeri and Matt Etter, pulled into Vientiane dirty and tired from yet another survey in Nakai–Nam Theun. Telephone service in Laos then ranged from bad to nonexistent, and they’d driven seven or eight hours from Lak Xao to tell a breathless tale: “You won’t believe it,” they said. “There’s an adult saola in the Lak Xao zoo.” It had been delivered that day. They’d seen it. They had pictures.

By chance, Robichaud and Rabinowitz had reserved a helicopter for the next day in order to make an aerial survey of forest cover in the vicinity of NNT. They even planned to land and refuel in Lak Xao.

They flew out the next morning, paralleling the Mekong, down to the lush, rugged forests of NNT. They scanned a green sea of foliage from above, noting areas of primary forest, concentrations of swidden patches, and open wounds where pirate logging let the red earth show through. At last they set down in Lak Xao.

They would have called on General Cheng, but he was away on business in Hong Kong or Taiwan. As Ruggeri and Etter had said, the saola was there, looking somewhat battered from her capture. It was a female and an adult, a sight no Westerner had previously beheld. Cheng’s people had installed the saola in a small pen about the size of a hotel room. Its previous occupant had been a serow. In the back was a shallow stone grotto that afforded modest shelter.

Robichaud and Rabinowitz began by collecting basic information. They learned that several days earlier, on January 8, a Hmong villager from Ban Nachalai, upslope from Lak Xao in Bolikhamxay Province, had captured the saola in anticipation of a reward from General Cheng. Not long before, the general, who had a passion for wildlife, put out word that he would pay the equivalent of one thousand US dollars for a live saola caught for his zoo. The villager had been hunting. His dogs scented the saola and gave chase. The saola ran to a stream, splashed into a pool, and turned at bay with a boulder at its back. The villager lassoed it. A runner was quickly dispatched to Lak Xao to notify General Cheng, and the next day the general sent his helicopter to retrieve the animal.

The saola had suffered multiple cuts, some of them possibly dog bites, on her barrel, rump, and legs, and she favored a rear foot, which might have been strained in the capture or bound too tightly during transport. One eye was also weepy, evidently injured. Otherwise she appeared healthy.

Robichaud knew what he needed to do. He told Rabinowitz that despite the administrative work that awaited him as head of a new program, “I think I should stay here and watch this thing around the clock and take notes on it.”

Rabinowitz agreed: “You get off the helicopter and stay here. Keep me posted.”

While Rabinowitz flew back to Vientiane, Robichaud took a room at the incongruous Phudoi (“mountainous area”) Guest House, which was a Communist-modernist jumble of structural triangles, a Soviet echo of Le Corbusier plopped down in Lak Xao. It lent a touch of the surreal to an already otherworldly place. Besides the menagerie, Lak Xao supported a sort of boarding school for the children of tribal ethnics, also courtesy of General Cheng. It was supposed to showcase the cultural diversity of the general’s domain, but the program was, to be polite, anthropologically incoherent, dressing up children from one ethnic group in the garb of another and demonstrating “rituals” that were cobbled together from any number of sources. One never knew how “voluntary” a child’s enrollment might be, and given that no clear boundary existed between the children’s dormitory and the pens and cages of the animals, the boarding school and the menagerie seemed uncomfortably similar. Beyond these few creations of the general, the rest of Lak Xao was as raw as a frontier town in a spaghetti western.

Robichaud set to the task of watching. His observation post was a chair about twenty feet from the saola’s pen. He sat in it day after day, observing and writing. His primary emotion was awe: awe at the rareness, the beauty, the utter uniqueness of the animal and awe that he was there to see it, not to mention study it, for as long as fate would let him.

The Lak Xao saola was the first adult but not the first of its species to be observed outside its habitat. In 1994, in Vietnam, the Forest Inventory and Planning Institute acquired two saola calves, one of them not even weaned, and attempted to care for them at its campus outside Hanoi. After a few months, both died, having given up few secrets about their species. The full-grown female at Lak Xao presented a different kind of opportunity.

On occasion, taking pains not to upset her, Robichaud went into the cage to examine the saola more closely. He recorded her dimensions. Tallest height along the back: 38.4 inches; horns 17 inches long; length, head to rump, along the black dorsal stripe of the back, 60 inches. To his astonishment, the saola calmly let him stretch his tape around her neck, under her belly, along her back. She required no restraint.

Her color was medium chocolate brown, which paled at the neck and around the curve of the belly. Robichaud noted the chocolate-brown flesh of the nose. He peered into the round pupils of the eyes, and the dark brown irises shone orange in the beam of a flashlight. He marveled at the extraordinary tongue, which was long enough for the saola to lick flies from her eyes and which was armed along its upper surface with fine, rearward-pointing barbs. Her form was thick and compact, good for pushing through dense vegetation. She had four mammae, like a cow, and white bands, like bracelets, just above her hooves. Her tricolored tail—brown, white, and black—was ten inches long. When relaxed against her body, it blended exactly into matching bands of color on her rump. She had a black chin strap and bold slashes of white across her face. Robichaud knew from the two FIPI juveniles and published descriptions of saola skins that not all these markings were fixed within the species but varied by individual.

No physical feature of the saola was more remarkable than a pair of large glands on either side of the muzzle, below the eyes. A thick muscular flap covered them, and the animal could raise and lower the flap, as though flaring a second large pair of nostrils. The glands produced a foul-smelling gray-green paste recalling the musk of weasels. Robichaud observed the saola scent-marking the walls of her grotto with this substance, and he also saw the glands flare open on the sole occasion when the saola became alarmed.

General Cheng’s chauffeur had a lapdog, a rare sort of pet for anyone to bring to rough-and-tumble Lak Xao. Robichaud remembers it as “about as big as a decent-size Wisconsin farm cat.” It was an old-lady dog, and Robichaud was in the pen beside the saola when the dog approached. The saola caught its scent and “freaked.”

Says Robichaud, “Her back arched up like a cat’s. She dropped her head to point her horns at the dog. Her eyes rolled up in the back of her head. Her tongue hung out. She drooled. She flared her premaxillary glands and started snorting and facing her horns wherever this dog went.” The air reeked of musk from her facial glands. It was her species’ inured reaction to canids—dholes and all their relatives—which hunters had reported. Oddly, although the saola was primed for battle, she paid no heed to the human standing next to her.

Robichaud cites this incident when people gainsay his most significant observation about the saola, which was her otherworldly disposition. Skeptics say that her behavior was mild because she was in shock from capture, injuries, and confinement. They argue that her abnormal state skewed her reaction to human contact. The scientific term for this is post-capture myopathy. Robichaud believes such a characterization fails to explain her surprising calmness, a trait said to be shared by other solitary tropical-forest mammals, including okapi. He argues that an animal deep in shock would have been incapable of instantly leaping to a heightened state of arousal, as the saola did when the lapdog happened by, and that it would have been comparatively numb to the perception of danger.

Yes, she had undergone the trauma of capture. Yes, she was in unfamiliar surroundings. She was certainly under stress, and Robichaud and others consequently tried to keep human contact to a minimum. But she was also eating, drinking, and monitoring her surroundings, behaving normally insofar as “normal” might be inferred for a creature about which so little was known, and, as the episode with the lapdog illustrates, she was capable of powerful responses.

Around humans she was serene. Robichaud was amazed that within a day of arriving at the menagerie (three days after capture) she showed no apprehension when he or others entered her cage, and she calmly accepted food from the hand. When he first touched her, she would jerk up her head, like a horse rejecting the bridle, but within a day or two, such resistance was gone. He could not only touch her but stroke her, and she did not flinch.

In nearby cages, a serow and a muntjac, both residents of the menagerie for more than a year, skittered away at the first sign of human approach. The saola seemed to belong to a different universe. She was already tamer than any domestic goat, sheep, or cow Robichaud had known.

A Buddhist monk from a nearby temple came to see her, and he and Robichaud fell to talking. The monk said local people had a nickname for saola. It was not a term that Sek or Brou or Hmong would use, but certain Lao speakers in the area called the creature sat souphap, which translates roughly as “the polite animal.” Saola, according to the monk, move slowly and quietly through the forest. They are never khi-deu, which is how you might describe a mischievous child. They even eat politely, cleanly nipping off the leaves they select, never tearing the foliage with a yank of the head, as other browsing animals do. Various hunters have confirmed this trait. They say, in fact, that where a certain plant that saola favor is found with its leaves cleanly and uniformly nipped off, saola are sure to have been present. The monk said that Hmong villagers had captured two other saola the previous August or September and without difficulty had kept them virtually as pets for two weeks before undertaking to walk the animals sixty kilometers to Lak Xao. Unfortunately, the saola died along the way.

Days passed. Robichaud kept his vigil. On the rare occasion when he entered the pen, the saola let him pick ticks from her ears. She conveyed a sense of stoicism, seeming to Robichaud almost Buddhist in the way she reconciled herself to her situation. Because of her calm, he decided to name her Martha, after Martha Schwartz, head of finance at WCS in New York. The human Martha oversaw the flow of money for fifty programs scattered around the globe, some of which were led by acknowledged “silverbacks”—alpha males who never doubted that their priorities should top everyone’s list. Amid storms of clamorous urgency, Martha Schwartz remained imperturbable, cool, and patient. In Robichaud’s view, Martha the saola, except for her agitation when the dog came near, seemed equally serene.

But serenity did not guarantee health, and no one anywhere in the world, let alone in Lak Xao, had more than a rudimentary understanding of the animal’s needs. WCS could have dispatched a highly qualified veterinarian from Thailand, but the global significance of the situation prompted the organization to send out its best from New York. After several days of hard travel, Billy Karesh, the head of the WCS field veterinary program, arrived in Lak Xao and examined Martha on January 22, exactly two weeks after her capture. He noted “two 3-mm corneal ulcers and corneal edema on right eye” and applied antibiotic ointment. Her cuts and abrasions “on head, neck, thorax, flanks, rump, and legs” were healing well. It looked as though the Hmong, or someone, had treated Martha’s wounds with a topical powder, possibly gunpowder. Martha also occasionally coughed, and through the stethoscope Karesh heard “increased respiratory sounds throughout both lung fields”—she was wheezing, a result of a mild pneumonia. He discontinued the antibacterial injections of Rocephin that a local self-styled vet had started her on and shifted to a combination of different antibiotics, administered orally.² In one case he smeared medicine on her muzzle and allowed her to lick it off. Other drugs he dissolved in water and syringed into her mouth. In his notes, he wrote, “Animal accepts readily.” He also wrote, “Animal is poorly muscled, thin.”

“Martha,” Lak Xao, 1996. (Courtesy William Robichaud / WCS)

General Cheng had wisely ordered local Hmong near Lak Xao to bring in a steady supply of food appropriate for saola. All subsistence people know their environments intimately, but even by the standards of the subsistence world, Hmong are acknowledged masters of nature observation. The Hmong regularly delivered browse for Martha. Robichaud noted at least three plant species among the bundles. It seemed to be the right stuff. Martha ate it, and Karesh wrote, “Animal bright and alert. Feces and urine normal, good appetite for browse.”

Karesh observed Martha for three days, during which her lungs cleared up and the corneal swelling in her right eye subsided. Unfortunately, some damage to her eye appeared to remain, and she may have suffered partial loss of vision. Before Karesh left, he and Robichaud met with General Cheng. Keep doing what you are doing, Karesh advised, keep feeding native vegetation, but try to increase both the volume and the diversity of the food. Martha appeared healthy, but Karesh was worried. Carried on foot from saola habitat to Lak Xao, the foliage delivered to Martha was hardly fresh. And the feeding protocol followed by General Cheng’s staff consisted merely of tossing a mass of greenery into her cage, where it lay on the ground, wilting more. Martha ate, but retrospectively everyone agreed that she did not eat enough, either in quantity or, probably, in quality.

Years later Robichaud spoke with a zoologist who supervised a captive-breeding program for okapi, another forest-dwelling browser. Steve Shurter of the White Oak conservation center in Yulee, Florida, told him that okapi eat at least 130 different species of plants in their native Ituri Forest, in the Congo basin, and in the absence of advanced dietary supplements they require at least thirty of these on a monthly basis to maintain health. If the saola’s requirements were remotely similar, Martha would never have prospered on a diet of three species of plants. In addition to wasting away from too little food, she probably suffered nutritional deficiencies.

Two days after Karesh departed Lak Xao, on the evening of January 26, Martha suddenly experienced an episode of diarrhea. Previously, her stools had been normal. Robichaud remembers the evening as dark and cold. Martha looked glassy-eyed. He had seen her lie down many times, but always with her legs tucked beneath her, like a camel. She would put her muzzle on the ground straight ahead, her posture precise and composed. Now, however, she lay down and flopped to the side, head on the ground.

General Cheng brought in a local vet, who may have given Martha fluids. They got her back on her feet, although she looked unsteady. Cheng returned to his house, and the vet and everyone else departed, while Robichaud alone remained. It was late afternoon. He watched as she again lay down and rolled to her side. He watched the rise and fall of her belly. He continued to watch as the movement gradually slowed, and then, at dusk, it stopped. Robichaud went into the cage to confirm that she was dead. Then he walked to General Cheng’s house, thirty meters away, to deliver the news. It was a Friday in January, and Eastertide was, of course, months away. Nevertheless, Robichaud remembers it as Good Friday, the end of a passion.

In the morning he returned as members of the staff were taking Martha out of her cage.

“What are you going to do with her?”

“We are going to cut her up. Cook her. Eat her.” They also said they would preserve the skin and head, as General Cheng intended to have a standing mount of Martha prepared for display.

Robichaud continued to observe. The Hmong had said she was pregnant, and Karesh had agreed it was possible but was not certain. The Hmong proved to be right. Robichaud watched as Martha’s butchers removed a male fetus from her abdomen. It was white and hairless and beautifully formed, even to the bony cranial buds, where horns would have grown.

Rumor soon compounded the misfortune of Martha’s death. The Hmong had warned that injections would harm a pregnant saola, and word spread among General Cheng’s staff that Martha had died because of injections Karesh had given her. But Karesh had given her none, and he stated so in a pair of apologetic faxes to General Cheng. Opinions, however, did not change. Perhaps Karesh had been seen taking a blood sample or squirting antibiotic solution into Martha’s mouth with a syringe, and the wrong conclusion was drawn. Observers also might have confused him with the earlier vet who had injected Martha with Rocephin. In any case, the outsider from far away made an inviting target for blame.

About six months later, General Cheng acquired a second saola. He kept it in a larger pen, back at the edge of the forest, away from prying eyes and meddling foreigners, but this one failed to survive even as long as Martha. After the death of the second saola, the general announced he was withdrawing his offer of reward. He wanted no more saola captured and brought to him. It was the right thing to do, lest more animals perish.

Robichaud eventually calculated that, in addition to Martha and the two juveniles in Hanoi, at least ten other saola were captured in Vietnam and Laos in the mid-1990s. All died, except for one that was released back to the wild by its captors. Both Vietnam and Lao PDR soon banned further captures.

In the WCS office in Vientiane, I saw Martha’s baby. It was in a large jar atop a bulky cabinet in a back room. Someone had double-sealed the lid with duct tape, but the tape was dry and cracking. No doubt the intent had been to prevent evaporation of the dusky preservative in which the fetus swam. Based on photos of the fetus, Karesh and others estimated that Martha was in her second trimester when she died. The baby was about the size of a rabbit, pale and compact. Its nose was inexpressibly delicate, the hooves sharp and perfect, the soft eyes eternally closed. Notwithstanding dust and casual storage, the contents of that jar represent the most complete specimen of Pseudoryx that humanity possesses. All the organs and soft tissue are there. Every other saola specimen—and there are only a few—is literally skin and bones. Given the endangerment of saola throughout its range, Martha’s baby may turn out to be the most complete evidence that humanity will ever possess of the species’ presence on Earth. It abides behind a barrier of peeling duct tape in a dusty jar, unborn and forever floating.

It is impossible not to admire the Vietnamese. They work hard for what they take. Our journey up the dry mountain out of Thong Sek follows the best trail we’ve yet encountered. It is marked with blazes and even directional signs, which are written in Vietnamese. It is also well worn, and, on high alert for poachers, we speed along.

When we stop near the top of the mountain to rest, I discover that Viengxai has monkeyed with my backup water bottle. He may have opened the bottle to investigate its filter, which rattles slightly, and failed to screw the top back on securely. Nearly half a liter has sloshed out. I transfer the bottle to my daypack, as I should have done from the start.

After the trail crosses the spine of the mountain and dips down toward the Nam Nyang, it takes us through a south-facing dipterocarp forest with trees as stately as any we have seen. But again, we do not tarry to appreciate them.

I may be distracted by the open grace of the forest or by the call of a silver pheasant, when I embarrass myself. We are clipping along at our usual running-late-to-a-meeting pace, and I have just congratulated myself that I am holding up, feeling good, doing my part. Then boom. I trip on a root and go down like a redwood. Fortunately the ground is soft. I land in a push-up position, with no injury except to my pride. I hear Viengxai crack some kind of joke in Lao or Sek, which looses a ripple of tittering down the line. Robichaud whips around and casts him a glare, then sees that I am nearly back on my feet, and keeps marching.

Finally we hear the sound of water, and the trail breaks into sunlight. We crowd onto a low bluff overlooking the Nam Nyang, which dashes before us down a channel of gunmetal boulders. “Look at the fishing!” cries Meet, and there is a happy murmur of agreement. Robichaud is smiling but regretful. “It is only a quarter to ten,” he says. “We could have made it here yesterday, easy. As it is, we are now almost a day behind where we need to be, and it all goes back to that late start from Ban Nameuy.”

Robichaud’s words hang in the air as we take in the walls of intense green, bright in the sunlight, that line the limpid river on either side. The water-smooth rocks gleam. Stream babble and the chirr of insects fill our ears. Robichaud juts his chin toward the river and its verdant canyon. “Apart from a downed US pilot or a totally lost Soviet timber cruiser,” he says, “ours are probably the first blue eyes ever to look at this place.”

I want to drink it in and also have a drink, maybe fill my filtered water bottle. But there will be no pausing here; we must make up lost time. Meet gestures toward a felled tree that bridges the river, and Robichaud leads off, muttering over his shoulder, “Not many villagers come here. Wish I could say that about the Vietnamese.” He points to the stump of the tree, which has been axed down to make the bridge. “Out here, only Vietnamese work that hard.”

The span is forty feet long and the tree trunk roughly sixteen inches in diameter. Two thick lines of ants swarm along it, one going, one coming. They almost cover the walking surface, and we cannot help but trample them, making the narrow span slippery with their remains. The bridge is sited high above the river—to avoid flood stage in the rainy season—and a fall to the boulders and water below would have ugly consequences. An image of Mr. Mang’s arm flashes through my mind. One ant-crushing step at a time, I wobble across, sensing that I am not alone in trepidation. Should I fall, everyone will be affected, for the care of a serious injury would require group effort. Happily, everyone crosses without incident.

On the far side, the trail bends east, destination Vietnam, and begins to climb the canyon wall. Before the day is out, we will call it the Rosewood Highway. For now, we hope that it might drift northward, to our left, contouring the slope and maintaining contact with the river, but with every twist it disappoints us. It keeps climbing, climbing, veering well south of the river’s line.

The day has warmed considerably. My pocket thermometer reads just shy of ninety degrees Fahrenheit. Everyone else seems unaffected by the muggy heat, but my shirt is as wet as though I had dived into a pool. Olay, as usual, is enclosed in his rain jacket. Simeuang wears his brown turtleneck with the torn shoulder, looking as refreshed as when we broke camp. I am like an Arctic sled dog among coyotes. At home in the arid lands of New Mexico and Arizona, I count on being at least as water-thrifty as anyone I travel with, but here my thermostat is confusingly out of kilter. I am overheating and streaming water from every pore, and I begrudge Viengxai the water he has wasted.

It would be easier to pace myself if I knew when we might again reach water or take a rest. Not speaking Lao, I understand nothing of Robichaud’s periodic discussions with Simeuang and Meet and so never learn of such expectations or, for that matter, of where and when we will camp. But today I am not alone. Today no one else has the least idea, either. We will find water when we find it; we will rest when we must; we will camp when we camp.

A fly buzzing at my left ear joins the expedition. I prefer its company to that of Viengxai, who follows me only inches behind. The fly, always on the left, hovers close by me for a kilometer, maybe farther. The trail keeps bearing away from the river. Every forty minutes or so, Robichaud calls a halt to check our position. He has a problem. We have two sets of maps, at two separate scales, and the data from his GPS places us in substantially different locations on each one. There is evidently some problem of calibration. One location is right; the other is wrong, but we don’t know which, and the difference matters. The trail we are on, the Rosewood Highway, is preferable to any kind of bushwhacking, but unless it soon bends northward, it will take us ever farther from our destination, which is the upper Nam Nyang. At some point we will have to forgo the convenience of the trail and plunge into the tangle of forest on our left, through which, down precipitous slopes, the river lies. Picking the right point of departure requires knowing where we are.

We travel. We stop. We travel. We stop. At each stop the maps fail to agree. Meet says, “I never went to school. I can’t help you with your maps.” He draws his own map on the ground, scratching the Nam Nyang and the arc of the trail with a stick, placing a rock to represent Phou Vang. “But from where we are—here,” Robichaud asks, “does the trail get closer to the river or farther away?” Meet doesn’t know.

Robichaud has been hatching and rehatching plans all the way up the ridge. One scheme involves an early break down to the river, with time for the guides to fish before sundown, setting a comfortable camp, and, after a day of recon, taking a smaller group to establish a fly camp and reconnoiter farther upstream for another few days. It happens that Touy needs to return to Nakai and Vientiane before the rest of us to say good-bye to his girlfriend, who is leaving for law school in Indonesia. Even this contingency fit the plans. Robichaud would send Touy back early to Ban Nameuy with Viengxai guiding him, thereby sparing the rest of us Viengxai’s increasingly disruptive company.

But the attractions of the Rosewood Highway have pulled us too far from the river for that scheme to work. We’ll do well to get to the river today, and it appears we must do so, for we have found no water on the mountain. This is a matter of concern for me, for my water bottles, save for a pair of swallows that I refuse to touch, are now both dry.

Robichaud ventures another idea: we’ll send scouts, without their loads, in two directions—up the trail and down to the river—and base a decision on their reports.

Meet doesn’t like that idea. He says we shouldn’t split up. We should all go forward, on the trail.

Everyone edges closer to hear the discussion.

Robichaud counters, “We made it to the Nam Nyang easy this morning in only a couple of hours. Last night you said we wouldn’t get to the river until eight o’clock.”

“We wouldn’t as long as we stop and look for birds all the time.”

“Viengxai says I go too fast. You say I go too slow!”

Laughter erupts. Simeuang points out that the Vietnamese built the Rosewood Highway to get rosewood to Vietnam. The trail is not going to sacrifice altitude or direction to curve down to the river. Nevertheless, the decision is made: we’ll go Meet’s way, forward, keeping to the trail.

We travel, but the distance and conditions begin to blur. Have we gone fifteen kilometers since we crossed the Nam Nyang or twenty? Thirst has dulled my mind and tunneled my vision. All I can do is move my feet, which I do robotically, as half hours and hours accumulate. Then suddenly I almost collide with the man in front of me. Robichaud has stopped at an unremarkable twist of the trail. He does not consult the arguing maps. After exchanging a few syllables with Meet and Simeuang, he steps off the trail into the deep bush, and we follow.

All through the trip I have been trying to purge the word jungle from my mind. Robichaud never uses it. He speaks only of the forest, although when I asked him about it, he conceded that jungle might refer to a patch of forest particularly dense and entwined. He also said jungle sounded to him a trifle melodramatic, as though it made the woods more hostile than they had to be. Certainly, in the literature I’ve read from the Vietnam War, I cannot remember anyone writing about a forest—everything that was not paddy or village was described as jungle.

The same seems true of most Western accounts of central Africa, Amazonia, and any other wooded, tropical place. During many a dull hour plodding up the Rosewood Highway, I have wondered if a jungle, beyond Robichaud’s definition of a bad tangle, might simply be “a forest not your own.” Maybe it is analogous to an unappreciated swamp or bog, which through a different lens becomes a wetland. In a jungle the observer feels alien; his apprehension draws the trees closer, enlaces the vines more tightly, blots out the guidance of the sun, and shortens the field of view. On this trek I want to travel in forest, not jungle, and to resist apprehension. I want to make the forest if not my own then at least a sibling of other lands where I have felt comfortable.

For days we have been journeying through stands of trees that are sometimes inspiring and grand, other times dense and overgrown, a patchwork much like bottomlands I have tramped along brown-water rivers in the Carolinas. Plagued by mosquitoes and water moccasins, nemeses we are mercifully spared here, those woods nevertheless became forests for me. But not these, not yet.

Robichaud arrows across the slope and down. The group spreads out, each man clambering as best he can. The mountainside, like others we have traversed, is a series of sloping benches with steep pitches between. The benches are well soiled and give good footing, but where the land breaks, the scarp proves no more than a mound of rubble masked by a carpet of leaves. Dehydrated and fatigued, I stumble drunkenly. The trick on a slope like this, as in chess, is to see as many moves ahead as possible, but in this mass of lianas and saplings and fallen debris, I foresee nothing. When I choose my own path, the trip logs and garrotes of thorned vines stagger me. And so blindly I follow now Meet, now Sone, whoever is closest, and try to mimic that person’s slalom down the slope. But where he strides, I slide; where he ducks, I lurch. Reaching out to steady myself and check my momentum, I realize, too late, that the slender trunk I am about to grab bristles with thorns. At the point of falling, I lunge for a different sapling, a different shade of bark, surely a safe one—and sink my hand into a living skin of ants.

Our band develops a zigzag rhythm: head east along a bench, then north down the break, then east again, and north. The hard going gets the better of me, and I fall again, and the slick of sweat on my arms reddens along the saw marks of briars, but now there is no tittering from the guides. Although the young ones bounded down like deer at the start of our descent, now, a kilometer later, every member of our group strains with the work, panting and footsore, eager to hear the sound of the river, which will announce our reprieve. But the river does not speak.

It may be Simeuang who notices that the group has split. He calls to Robichaud, who halts. Half the guides are missing. We whoop and whistle. Silence. We sit a while, guiltily thankful to rest but worried about the others. This is no place, late in the day, to lose contact with any part of the team, to say nothing of the supplies they carry. We are short of water, daylight, and energy, and we lack the means to conduct a search safely or well. The leaders whoop again. And again. Finally we hear a faint answer from above and behind. I see the orange wink of a T-shirt through a snarl of green. It resolves into a person—Bone, I think, atop the last bench. Gradually he and the others straggle in.

With everyone accounted for, we start anew, more slowly. In forty minutes we hear the river. Soon we see its sparkle through masses of foliage, but the descent to water is nearly vertical. We reach into the tops of trees and shinny down the trunks or descend ladders of flood-torn branches and roots to reach the water’s edge. I fill my water bottle and drink a liter straight off. I am nearly through a second liter when Olay walks by. He looks a little peaked. “How are you doing?” I ask.

“Okay. And you?”

“Good,” I say, and Simeuang, two paces away and rummaging in his pack, overhears this and laughs.

“Good!” he mocks, gasping and throwing back his head. “Good!” and he throws his forearm to his brow in a gesture of exhaustion. “Good!” Olay and Simeuang laugh, and I laugh with them, not least because I do feel good, sitting blessedly still, whipped but intact, feeling the water infuse into my body and come out through my skin in a clean new rush of cooling sweat. Today by the map, at first on a smugglers’ highway and then in rough terrain, we have covered twenty-seven kilometers, including quite a lot of altitude gained and lost. For the guides, Simeuang, and the boys, and perhaps for Robichaud, it may have been just another day’s work, albeit a hard one, but for me, an oldish fellow from the cool, dry Rockies, it was a very long haul through a steamy and inhospitable—I’ll say it now—jungle.

The inner canyon of the Nam Nyang presses its walls against the river channel, offering little flat ground. We squeeze in at an abandoned poachers’ camp on an overgrown ledge twenty feet above the river. Robichaud is in good spirits. Our indecision on the Rosewood Highway, which delayed our descent to the river, caused us to strike the Nam Nyang far up in its watershed. At the cost of a grueling trek, we have returned to our original schedule, in the place and on the day he intended. The sloppy departure from the villages has been negated. We have won back a day.

Dinner—no surprise—consists of sticky rice and a few small, bony fish that Bone and the other Ban Beuk teenagers netted from the river. We eat in falling darkness. I am edging stiffly toward my tent, thinking longingly of my sleeping bag, when Robichaud steps out of the gloom. “How about a night survey?” he asks. “No moon, fair weather—conditions are too good to pass up.”

I swallow, hesitate. “Sure,” I say, having no notion of what I have agreed to.

Our survey consists of boulder hopping in the dark, moving upriver in silence, playing the beams of our headlamps on shorelines and treetops, hoping to see red or yellow eyes staring back into the light. “Two people make twice the noise of one,” he cautions, so Robichaud goes twenty yards ahead of me, promising to blink his light if he sees anything interesting. We hope to encounter a slow loris, a colugo, or some other placid denizen of the treetops. We clamber and leap on dark rocks; we walk calf deep in the shallows, trying to make no splash. I hardly look at the trees; all my energy goes to staying upright and silent, until we pause to pan the treetops with our headlamps. Sadly, no luck. In an hour and a half of wading pools and bounding from rock to rock, no eyes shine back at us.

At last comes the crawl into bed. I have pitched my tent on a postage stamp of ground sandwiched by skinny trees. Overhead a tight circle of sky pours starlight through the canopy. A clan of frogs chants from the river. Half of them croak “Heh.” Then others, as though in contradiction, croak “Hah.” It is a slow and passionless debate: “Heh,” and “Hah,” repeat, repeat, repeat. The soporific descant has the rhythm of a tired heart.