March 5
A Tributary of the Nam Nyang
The camp larder has become a source of mystery. Several days ago, abundance became scarcity. Now scarcity is transforming into abundance.
Simeuang has found a stash of instant noodles, which were previously reported exhausted. Perhaps, now that the idea of an early return to the villages has been quashed, we are not so poor in supplies as had been advertised. Simeuang offers me a steaming bowl in the early half-light, as though delivering an expensive present. The noodles are hot and salty, delicious and fortifying. Simeuang knows I am running on fumes, and indeed I could not be more grateful or relieved. Today we will climb Phou Vat, a lesser sibling of Phou Vang but a steep and forbidding mountain just the same, and I will need all the strength I can muster.
Our plan is to ascend the Nam Nyang tributary on which we are camped as far as terrain permits, and then, when we meet the inevitable headwall, to strike north and west, bushwhacking up the side of what we hope will be Phou Vat. If one is to believe our maps, the crest of the mountain resembles a shallow M. We will aim for the dip in the mountain crest. From there we’ll descend toward Thong Kouang and our campsite of a week ago, which we hope to reach before dark.
Our collection of snares, including the dozens Phaivanh gathered yesterday, now numbers almost eight hundred, and the guides, led by Viengxai, have lobbied Simeuang hard to let them ditch them. The coiled bicycle cables look like a bundle of abused Slinkies and probably weigh ten kilos. The guides don’t want to carry them any farther than they have to, least of all up and over Phou Vat. So far Simeuang has held firm—he wants to take the evidence of poaching back to the WMPA—but the guides won’t let up. They are still on his case when Robichaud, Touy, Olay, and I set out at 7:00 a.m. We want to get a head start on the others and cover as much ground as possible without the chatter and agitation of the larger group; otherwise our chances of glimpsing wildlife are nil.
But first the boys and I have something to show Robichaud. We lead him across the river to a gully above camp. A hundred yards up the gully, on a little bench, is the Vietnamese camp a few of us landed in two days ago when we slid down the mountain to the tributary. Robichaud made his descent farther downstream and never saw it. He is impressed. We show him the elaborate tarp shelter, which has a pitched roof, extra high, perhaps to accommodate smoking meat in the rainy season. Next to it is a crib for porcupines, fourteen feet long and as sturdy as a hog pen, the largest we’ve seen. In the bottom of the gully we find wire tethers, which must have been used for holding live animals, maybe a muntjac or two or even, God forbid, a saola. Across the gully and partway up the slope, we spy a small table, which proves to be an altar of thin poles. On it are burnt joss sticks and the stub of a candle. A cardboard tube, brightly decorated and nearly full of incense, is stored safely under a tarp. The poachers who stayed here made their place of butchery as homelike as they could. Prudently, they burned the occasional offering to keep ghosts and Lao patrols away, not that they had much reason to worry about the latter.
We destroy what we can of the camp, but there is little of value to ruin. Our efforts are symbolic and recreational. It is not often one gets to wreck things guiltlessly. But the tarps that provide shelter are already in tatters, and the wood of the structures is too damp to burn. Still, I dig out a lighter from my pack, and we set fire to what we can, coaxing from the wreckage a pyramid of orange flame and a column of greasy smoke. Robichaud has confided that he, too, is badly troubled that we did not cut down the douc yesterday—“a monumental moment of unconsciousness,” he calls it—but for now our little bonfire is diverting. He strikes a pose, and in the voice of Robert Duvall’s Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now, proclaims, “I love the smell of cheap Vietnamese plastic in the morning!”
The flicker of yard-high flames is on our backs as we exit the mouth of the gully and turn upstream. A stairway of river ledges stretches before us toward Phou Vat.
The river cleaves the forest, soft light filling the breach and settling a golden gleam on the rocks and water. Scores of birds, invisible in the trees, exult. They shriek and scream, raising a tropical hullabaloo. Robichaud identifies the calls of three different barbets, the red-vented, green-eared, and moustached, plus a blue whistling thrush and a pin-striped tit babbler, whose name is longer than its song. I listen to the cacophony like a dog watching television, fascinated but bereft of understanding. I wonder if Robichaud’s memory for warbles and chirps and his facility for languages belong to the same cranial domain. By contrast, I am a mediocre linguist, and although I know the calls of the handful of passerines that dwell around my Rocky Mountain home, the profligacy of the tropics overwhelms me. The bird guide for the region runs to three hundred pages and presents half a dozen species per page. In the forest nearly every identification is by sound. The density of vegetation surrenders few glimpses of any animal, let alone a small, flitting bird. Maybe one reason the birds’ calls are so insistent and their plumage so often colorful is that they, too, have trouble seeing each other.
The tributary we ascend has carved its way through the same limestone that we encountered on the main channel of the Nam Nyang. We clamber up the same kinds of water-smooth boulders and broken ledges. We peer into similar gravel-drilled potholes. Still, there is a difference. Where the main stem, in the rainy season, was broad and powerful enough to sweep away every fallen tree, on the tributary we find ourselves slowed by mounded debris dams and jackstrawed logs of prodigious girth. One toppled giant, roots on the bank, crown in the river, lies festooned with white orchids twining down its length. Over it we scramble and onto the next, which is a logjam of broken limbs and canted trunks twice as tall as any man. I find a kind of chimney within it and begin to climb, amused when the term jungle gym springs to mind.
Gradually we approach the upper limit of saola habitat, about one thousand meters above sea level. (Phou Vang tops out at 1,890 meters.) The lower limit, defined by increasing dryness, is close to four hundred meters in Laos but considerably lower in Vietnam, where the northeast monsoons keep more of the mountainsides moist. The upper limit of saola habitat (as far as anyone can claim to understand it) may also be determined by moisture, but in this case by an excess that produces a shift away from the suite of plants on which saola depend.
I can feel changes in moisture underfoot: humidity rises as we ascend, the canopy becomes shadier, and the microscopic algae on the river rocks thickens and grows more slippery. As the footing worsens, four steps on level ground without sliding or teetering begin to feel like a state of grace.
Far ahead, we hear—what? The murmur of disturbance. Up in the canopy, two hundred meters away, a billow of green leaves quivers. Robichaud already has his binoculars up. “Doucs,” he says. “They haven’t seen us yet.” As I bring my glasses in focus, we hear a commotion to our rear. The guides are arriving, chattering gaily. The doucs vanish in a shimmer of boughs. The guides swarm toward us, up the rocks. Viengxai, no surprise, is in the lead. This is the first day of the expedition that they have set out at an early hour and the first day Robichaud did not want them to. The delicate intactness of the morning has fractured. We’ll see no more doucs today. Crestfallen, he looks at me and shrugs.
The headwall blocking our progress has a niche in it, like the sill of a recessed window. Dropping his pack, Viengxai climbs into it. Around him, the headwall is streaked with rivulets of water, hung with ferns and clumps of moss, but the niche is dry. He reclines, stretching his legs, head propped on one hand, the other hand saucily poised on his hip. “Take my picture!” he calls. “Take my picture.” I cannot bring myself to train a camera on him, but Robichaud plays along with Viengxai’s vanity, coaching improvements to the Lao-beefcake pose. As he snaps a photo, he mutters to me, “I’ll never take him on a trip again unless I cut his nuts off first.” He snaps another. “If he allows me to do that, he can come.”
We take more pictures framed by the dripping headwall: the three militia with their rifles; the Ban Beuk teenagers. Robichaud studies the map. He estimates the top of Phou Vat is six hundred meters above us. We retreat from the headwall a short distance, hunting for a patch where the slope leans back. We find something we think we can climb. Then we plunge from the open ground of the river into the trees and thrash our way into the tangle, clawing for altitude. Upward we flail and flounder.
The border with Vietnam lies a dozen kilometers east of us. It follows the crest of the Annamites, and because the axis of the mountain chain slants to the north-northwest, we would also intersect the border if we flew, crowlike, northward for about fifty kilometers. Then the remotest headwaters of the Nam Theun would be beneath us, and across the mountain divide, on a clear day, we might see the high ridges of Vu Quang National Park, in Ha Tinh Province. It was there, in May of 1992, that John MacKinnon’s Vietnamese colleagues discovered saola. Unfortunately, their discovery launched a wave of captures and killings that, in retrospect, appear to have been a calamity for the animal they introduced to the world.
All of a sudden, people far and near, people with ready cash, wanted a “Vu Quang ox,” preferably alive. They wanted one to observe and study, film and exhibit, or, in the event of death, dissect and mount. They wanted whole, live animals if possible but would settle for parts. They wanted saola for all the reasons that people want anything that is rare: vanity, novelty, scientific understanding, profit. It was as though the saola had stepped from the mists of anonymity into the glare of celebrity, but not the celebrity of an idol. It was the celebrity of a glamorous commodity. Competing Japanese television crews offered hunters in Vu Quang rewards that far exceeded their annual income just to bring one in.1 The hunters responded by targeting their hunting efforts—“with alarming intensity,” in the words of one observer—on an animal that they had seldom seen and rarely pursued. Previously it had constituted an infrequent supplement to their diet. Now, like tigers and golden turtles, it offered a path to wealth.2
In Vu Quang alone, WWF personnel documented seven saola killed from May through December of 1992 (six males lost to foot snares, one female hunted by dogs). Ten more were taken in 1993 and six in the first eight months of 1994 for a total of twenty-three dead.3 Another estimate for the 1993–94 period placed the total even higher, at thirty.4 These animals likely represented a substantial portion of the total saola population of the district. Certainly their loss materially depressed the capacity of the population to reproduce itself. And there were no doubt unreported losses as well. The goal in most of these instances was to capture a saola live, but the saola, whether snared by the foot or chased by dogs, failed to cooperate, and died. Many went down fighting. WWF researchers were shown two dogs that had lost eyes to saola horns and heard of others that were fatally gored. The hunters, too, had to respect the saola’s fury, and more than once they resorted to the expedient of killing a mother saola in order to seize her undefended calf.
Forestry officials on the outskirts of Vu Quang appropriated one of these orphans in May of 1994.5 The calf was female, four or five months old, and weighed forty pounds. It stood about two feet high at the shoulder and had large eyes, a fluffy tail, and stubs of undeveloped horns. The saola calf was quickly conveyed to the eight-acre FIPI campus outside Hanoi, where Do Tuoc and his colleagues installed it in an airy shed. The campus doubled as a botanical garden, and after the juvenile saola settled down and adjusted to its new surroundings, its handlers sometimes opened the door of the shed and allowed it to roam the gardens, feeding as it wished. Little was known (then or now) about the saola’s preferred diet, but one plant saola were believed to eat was identified as Homalomena aromatica, an herb with heart-shaped leaves belonging to the Araceae, or aroid, family. Because of its medicinal properties, Homalomena was grown in some abundance at FIPI. The saola’s caretakers found additional sources of Homalomena and experimented with other browse. The young female began to put on weight.
Meanwhile, a second juvenile saola was captured, possibly near Pu Mat, in Nghe An Province. The authorities seized this one, too, and took it to the provincial capital at Vinh. A WWF contractor, Shanthini Dawson, and Pham Mong Giao, a specialist in large mammals with Vietnam’s Forest Protection Department who had participated in the second Vu Quang survey, traveled down to Vinh to supervise its care. This calf was male, younger than the first, and much smaller. Giao and Dawson fed it milk from a bottle. Eventually it, too, was brought to FIPI and placed with the older female.
They were mild creatures, “not very aggressive,” said Giao. Together they wandered the FIPI gardens, and when a train rumbled past on the tracks that abutted the entrance gate, they dove for cover in the shrubbery. Unfortunately, the young male never prospered. Perhaps he had been injured when captured; perhaps he was too young to thrive without his mother’s care. The female, however, kept growing. By October she weighed close to seventy pounds, a thirty-pound gain. Then both saola fell sick. The FIPI caretakers summoned veterinarians and called as far away as London for advice. The little male died first. The female followed it, having survived since capture four and a half months, still a record for saola. Members of the FIPI staff wept.
The official cause of death, said to be based on an autopsy, was reported as liver flukes, the explanation holding that saola, being native to high mountains, could not tolerate the parasites of Hanoi’s low, hot, delta environment. Le Van Cham, however, does not agree. He worked at FIPI in those days and followed the progress of the young saola closely. He felt a personal interest in the fate of the species, for it had been he who first spotted saola horns on the wall of a hunter’s shack in Kim Quang, when he and Do Tuoc went looking for vegetables. The two young saola did not waste away from parasites, he says; they were accidentally poisoned. Cham heard (and this was confirmed to me separately by one of Cham’s colleagues) that someone fed the saola juveniles Annona fruit, familiarly known as custard apple, the black seeds of which are sufficiently toxic for a powder made from them to be used to control head lice. Cham believes that Annona seeds poisoned the two young bovids.
Juvenile saola at FIPI, Hanoi, 1993. (Courtesy J. C. Eames)
The skins and at least parts of the skeletons were retained as specimens. No one openly discusses the fate of the soft tissues, but the assumption, attested to by various reports, is that they were eaten. On a visit to Hanoi, I asked around. At best, answers were oblique, but one of the cognoscenti allowed that “young saola meat is soft, better than older, better than muntjac.”
Imagine a ladder that stretches upward until it disappears. Imagine that half the rungs are broken or about to break, but you cannot tell which ones because they are wreathed in vines that bristle with thorns. Such a ladder is the side of Phou Vat we are climbing. The guides, understandably, are unhappy. We are off trail, on an absurd route. Their packs, although lighter than when we set out from Ban Nameuy, are still heavy and snag easily in the crisscrossing growth that riots on the mountain. But no matter: Bone or Meet or Phaivanh, at the first tug of a restraining vine, halts midstep in perfect balance, rocks back an inch or two, and ducks or tilts to slip the momentary tether. Then he completes his step, steady as an acrobat, and engages the next with metronomic poise. I watch them enviously, when I can steal a glance, as I flail and bull upward, lighter-burdened but expending far more energy, a cart horse among Lipizzaners.
We have not battled the slope for long when to our surprise we crest a knifelike ridge. Even here, a snare line follows the blade. Meet says he hears voices. As he speaks, something in the near distance crashes off through the brush, and the three militiamen, shedding their packs, rush to follow. The other guides commence collecting snares while Robichaud stands puzzled, squinting at his maps. We are at the top of something. We aren’t supposed to be. Robichaud looks for a vantage point from which to see beyond the ridge. There is none; the trees are too thick. He aligns the maps with his compass and compares them. He looks up, grinning sheepishly. “Maybe I need glasses,” he says. “Down there, I read this slope as six hundred meters tall. It is only sixty.” Turns out he’d read the close-packed contour lines on the map as a single slope, mistaking those that represented scarps on the far side of the mountain as belonging to the near side, which we had just climbed.
Before the news can sink in, the militiamen are back, winded. Again, nothing. The noise was probably a muntjac or sambar bolting. Robichaud is laughing. Our six-hundred-meter vertical ordeal has shrunk by nine-tenths, and the climb lies behind us. We will soon go down what we had thought we would climb up. I am slow to believe him. Phou Vat cannot be through with us. It is only noon. The day has been too easy. I expected to suffer.
We attack the snare line with more than usual energy. The guides collect the cables. The boys and I rip the bamboo trigger rods from their concealment in the ground, and with their machetes Robichaud and Simeuang hack the spring poles so that they cannot be used again. We encounter the remains of various animals, but most are too decayed to identify. The feathers of yet another male silver pheasant shine from a litter of leaves and rot.
Skidding and sliding, we descend the far side of Phou Vat in little time and strike the headwaters of a lazy brown-water creek, which we follow toward our old camp beside Thong Kouang. The creek deepens as we go. A mile downstream it has become a flooded U-shaped depression sixteen feet deep. We come to a chainsawed stump. A tree has been felled as a bridge. Some kind of camp lies across the stagnant water.
The tree is too long and narrow for me to trust my balance. While the guides glide across, not even breaking stride, I slide down the crumbling bank and wade the thigh-deep, paint-thick water. Robichaud opts to wade, too. We head for steps cut into the far bank, probably the camp’s water trail, but Simeuang, who has crossed by the felled tree, looks down and calls our attention to a decomposing carcass, angular with bone, breaking the surface of the water, two meters downstream of us. Simeuang’s face is contorted with disgust. He motions to Robichaud to stay away.
The camp is larger and more elaborately outfitted than any we have seen. Essentially it is a processing facility for poached wildlife. It has a chest-high butchering table decked with planks and a roasting pit large enough for an entire muntjac. It has a smoking rack two yards square woven from bamboo slats and set above several charred logs and a deep accumulation of fire ash. Other logs, four inches thick, are laid up like a small cabin to form the walls of a live-animal crib. The usual frames for hammocks and tarps, however, are absent. Instead there is a proliferation of posts, tables, stands, and rails, high and low, that radiate backwards from the slough and the fireplaces. Some of these skeletal structures no doubt served domestic purposes while some served the processing work, but there is no time for further analysis because Robichaud, Simeuang, the boys, and most of the guides, machetes in hand, are slashing the bamboo wraps that bind the joints of the structures and are rapidly throwing them down, pole by pole.
Our wrecking of the butchering camp gave vent to our anger, but the damage we produced was trivial. A returning crew might rebuild the camp in hours. Nevertheless, we walked away convinced that the carnage we had seen in the Nam Nyang was equally virulent on the north side of Phou Vat, even though we were now much closer to the villages.
The guides hurried ahead to make camp, leaving the slow foreigners to look at birds and odd features of the land. Simeuang and the boys lingered with us. Phaivanh, ever bemused, kept guard.
Our dawdling brings a reward. In a seasonally flooded wetland, now a dry meadow, we find the tracks of at least two gaur, one large, one small, presumably a mother and her calf. Seeing the big one’s track, preposterous in its size, is like seeing the print of a Kodiak bear or some other remnant of Pleistocene megafauna. It harks back to a time when nature’s most extravagant experiments shook the ground; when only insects, not humans, numbered in the billions. The tracks are weeks to months old, perhaps as old as the ashes in the fire pits of the butchering camp, which lay no great distance away. Gaur are a dwindling reminder of the former abundance of big animals in NNT. We wonder if these two giants succumbed to the smoking rack.
When we reach camp, Bone is stirring a pot of rice pudding with a stick. The pudding, which Mok Keo has seasoned with a handful of herbs, is made from regular (dry) rice, not sticky rice, a staple we earlier believed had been consumed. The magical reappearance of food continues. I feel pampered to arrive in camp, hot and hungry, and find a meal waiting. Even better, the meal consists of something other than fish bones and a cue ball of sticky rice.
As we did on our outbound journey, Robichaud, Simeuang, the boys, and I will camp apart from the guides. Lugging our gear to the thong, we check the death site of the snared muntjac that Simeuang and I had inspected a week earlier. Jungle fowl crow cock-a-doodle-doo from the forest edge. The body, foul though it was, has been removed. Only a black, maggoty grease spot and the shanks of two hind legs remain. Simeuang reminds us that there is value in the antlers, head, and larger bones. The lone bicuspid that I had considered taking is also gone.
We realize that we have been circling poachers, and poachers have been circling us, for a week.
A pair of brown hornbills yelps from distant treetops as we pitch our tents, the sky vast above us, the claustrophobic forest held at bay. Robichaud comes over. His shirt is plastered to his torso with sweat. He is gaunt, and the dishevelment of his hair recalls snarled fishing line. In a voice borrowed from Humphrey Bogart in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he growls, “I know you’ve got a half bottle of Scotch in that pack. Viengxai told me so.”
If only it were true.
Guides drop by. Bone says he lately turned fourteen and claims to remember Robichaud passing through Ban Beuk when he was five. He beams with goodwill. He says he wants to continue guiding until he gets old. We make tea. Phaivanh and Viengxai arrive, the former amiable and silent, the latter brimming with complaint. Viengxai scolds us, particularly me, for failing to appreciate what a nuisance my pack is, how it catches on the vines, how hard it made the journey for him. No one pays him attention, but we give both him and Phaivanh cups of tea. Bone has left, and there are now seven of us. We pool what we have: a small bag of dried cranberries, a handful of nuts and raisins, and some dried mushrooms from Luang Prabang. We are far from replacing the calories we spent this day—or any day in NNT—but the morsels amount to a feast.
Robichaud has formed a decision over the past days. Originally he thought we might set up one or more camera traps near Ban Kounè and leave them in place to last through the upcoming rainy season. But now he’s not so sure. No site in that area seems particularly promising, and the cameras would be vulnerable to theft. Robichaud also considered establishing traps in the Nam Nyang, but the Nam Nyang’s remoteness would make servicing the cameras—renewing batteries and memory cards—too difficult. Another site, instead, has come to the fore. He wonders why he didn’t think of it weeks ago. It is a mineral lick, a poung, high up on a river called the Nam Mon—Mulberry River—in the northern reaches of NNT. Saola are said to frequent the place, and two years ago Robichaud may even have bagged two camera-trap pictures, seconds apart, of a saola there. He’s not sure.
The pictures show a large mammal, certainly an ungulate, with its head down, nearly facing the camera. Unfortunately, a large, broad leaf has spread in front of the camera, screening the animal’s head so that no horns or antlers or any facial markings can be seen. Is it a sambar? A muntjac? A saola? The camera was installed, at Robichaud’s direction, in March of 2009, but he was elsewhere in the protected area when the work was carried out. The camera snapped the pictures on the afternoon of April 20, after plenty of time had passed for a plant to grow into view and spread its leaves.
With Rob Timmins and Will Duckworth, Robichaud has pored over the images, comparing the mystery animal to shots of sambar and two species of muntjac taken at the same location during the same period. The rounded withers and thick barrel of the animal seem to favor a saola more than any of the local deer, which have a rangier build. Timmins, who has squinted at many thousands of camera-trap photographs, says he is 95 percent sure the animal is a saola: “I can’t think of it being much else.”
If it is a saola, the animal at the poung of the Nam Mon is the first of its species to be photographed since 1999.
Moreover, when a joint team of villagers and WMPA staff approached the poung in March of 2009 to install the camera trap, they claim to have surprised a saola at a bend in the river. The animal quickly bolted for the forest, but at least one, maybe two members of the group got a fleeting look at it. The first in line says he saw the extravagant horns. He swears it was a saola.
Robichaud wants to retrace their journey. Since we are nearly out of food, we will return to Nakai, where Touy, unfortunately, will leave us (so that he can bid good-bye to his Java-bound girlfriend). We will obtain fresh supplies and return as quickly as possible to the protected area, this time traveling to the Nam Mon by way of Ban Navang. We’ll install multiple cameras at the poung. It will be a good test of the cameras and our best chance yet to photograph—or to glimpse—a saola.
The saola’s discovery in 1992—on the evidence of horns and hides—launched a race to capture the first photograph of the living animal in the wild. But the inaccessibility of saola habitat and the cumbersome equipment then available guaranteed that the race would be slow. Early camera setups were clumsy contraptions. The first system was deployed in Vu Quang, site of the initial discovery. Its trigger was a pressure-sensitive mat, modified from a burglar alarm. A footfall on the mat sparked a flash unit, specially altered to conserve battery power, and caused a motor-driven 35mm camera to expose several frames of film. All the gear was off-the-shelf consumer stuff, good quality and dauntingly expensive, but hardly designed for the rigors of a Vietnamese rain forest.
Six of these contrivances were installed on game trails in the Vu Quang forest. And pretty much everything that could go wrong did. The units leaked. Moisture shorted and corroded the batteries, even though they were packed in silica gel. The energy-conserving flash conserved too much battery power, and nighttime photographs were uselessly dark. The burglar mats, meanwhile, stayed dry, thanks to encasement in rubber sheeting, but termites found both the sheeting and the mats to their liking and ate holes through them, shorting the mats and causing the cameras to use up their film on rapid-fire pictures of nothing. To top matters off, the rubber sheeting emanated a pungent, durable stink that seemed to keep wildlife away.
Vu Quang researchers also experimented with systems triggered by sensors that responded to sound or touch, such as that of an animal brushing by. It turned out that a good breeze and dancing, scraping leaves were sufficient to set them off. More nothing.
In January of 1998 a saola was cornered by dogs and photographed only fifteen kilometers from the citadel of the ancient Vietnamese capital of Hue. Some might argue that the incident produced the first image of a wild, living saola, but the dogs had chased the saola into a rice field—hardly its natural habitat—and it did not survive the ordeal.
Photographic success finally came in October and November of 1998 with camera traps set near a presumed mineral lick in the Pu Mat Nature Reserve (before Pu Mat was a national park), in Nghe An Province, Vietnam. Five separate photographs, three of them taken at night, show either one or two animals. The triggering device was an infrared beam transmitted from a generating device to the camera. The camera fired when an animal stepped into the beam.
Even better images appeared a few months later in Laos. Robichaud, then working for WCS (with support from IUCN), instituted a program in a proposed northern extension of Nakai–Nam Theun under which five participating villages stood to receive rewards of approximately two hundred dollars for each camera-trap photograph of saola they secured. The camera-trapping began in late 1998, but for reasons never made clear, the governor of Bolikhamxay Province soon banned Robichaud and his colleagues from returning to the study area. (Most likely the governor did not want them to see something—perhaps logging trucks where logging trucks should not have been.) Robichaud then entrusted care of the camera traps to two young men who had been assisting him, Saykham and Kambai, both from the Toum ethnic group. They rendezvoused each month in Lak Xao, one or two days’ walk from the young men’s village, to exchange film and replacement batteries. The cameras they used marked another step up from previous models—their sensors could detect both motion and body heat, and they were self-contained; there was no separate beam generator that had to be installed.
Late in the dry season, only four cameras still operated, but Saykham and Kambai kept at it. They placed the cameras according to their own judgment and not, says Robichaud, “where I would have placed them.” In April, at the conclusion of the project, the cameras were duly retrieved and delivered to Lak Xao. Their developed film showed two excellent images of saola, taken in separate locations, including one shot that has since become iconic in the small world of saola conservation. The photograph shows a burly animal, probably a pregnant female, hock deep in a pool of water. The saola, standing broadside, has turned its head to face the camera and appears regal, defiant, and supremely wild.
Camera-trap photograph of possibly pregnant saola, Bolikhamxay Province, 1999. (Ban Vangban Village / WCS, courtesy William Robichaud)
After that, a decade of nothing. No camera-trap photographs, no captures or sightings save for the reports of village hunters. Granted, only a handful of field biologists were plying the dank habitats of Vietnam and Laos, but they all came up empty. The long drought of information made saola conservation seem, more than ever, a futile enterprise.
Finally, in August of 2010, word raced from the Bolikhamxay hills to Vientiane and thence to the rest of the world that a saola had been captured alive. According to sanitized reports, a group of men were walking through the forest. Their dogs caught scent of a saola, gave chase, and brought it to bay. At the risk of goring, the men wrestled the saola, bound it with vines, and held it in a hastily constructed pen.
Not everyone believes this. An alternative interpretation holds that the story about the dogs was invented to obscure the fact that the men caught the saola in a snare. In any event, a runner was dispatched to alert the authorities, but heavy rains slowed communication. The area of the capture being closed to Westerners, district officials, with support from WCS, rushed to the site. When they arrived late on the fourth day of the saola’s captivity, the traumatized animal was already in steep decline. It died the following morning. Someone, however, took a picture. It shows the saola lying belly down on folded legs, in a small corral or sty, tethered by several thin cords. The saola looks abject, but it is a fine specimen, with horns twice as long as its head. Although the capture proved fatal, it nevertheless demonstrated that saola were still out there, that the long-horned will-o’-the-wisp remained corporeal, that there was something yet to save.
A short time later a second report came in from Bolikhamxay. A hunter, checking a trapline only fifteen kilometers from the previous incident, found a live saola in one of his snares. He raced back to his village for help, but returned to find that the saola was gone—broken free, he said. One hopes it escaped with all its feet intact. The patch of forest separating the sites of the two encounters is regarded locally as a “spirit forest” and rarely hunted. It was subsequently declared a protected area, and since then, Olay, in conjunction with a WCS-organized survey, has documented tens of additional saola encounters in the vicinity.
Evidence exists that saola survive. Exactly where and in what number no one knows. After the Nam Nyang, perhaps the most promising location in NNT is the poung of the Nam Mon, where the frustratingly ambiguous images of 2009 were captured. Finally, we are mere days from getting new cameras into this old place and perhaps days from our own best chance at seeing the animal itself. The Nam Nyang may have disappointed us, but our hunt has far to go.