March 6

Thong Kouang

Gibbons call in the dawn haze. All manner of owls, barbets, and laughingthrushes hoot, thrum, chunk, and whistle. Touy, by his tent, sings softly.

Viengxai, the human toothache, appears by the tents and ruptures the morning peace. He says phi kong koy, the wild man of the forest, was calling in the night. Robichaud hears him out and thinks he might be genuinely spooked, not just putting on a show. I don’t care. If he had conversed with the Virgin of Guadalupe or the living Siddhartha Gautama, I still would not care.

We retrieve the camera traps from the poung where we left them a week ago, and Robichaud returns across the veld of Thong Kouang with the cameras in a plastic bag emblazoned with the Australian flag and the word SALE in giant red letters. He looks like a vagrant fleeing a shopping mall.

We remove the memory cards and place them in our digital point-and-shoot cameras for viewing. The guides are intensely interested and crowd close to see. I step out of the throng for a moment to put my camera’s memory card in a safe place, and Viengxai immediately seats himself on my camp stool and starts tinkering with one of the cameras. When I return, I take him by the upper arm and lift him from the stool. For someone who has weighed us down so heavily, he is surprisingly light.

Robichaud loads the cards from the first and second cameras, but neither took a picture. This is a disappointment, not just for want of game but also because of concern for the reliability of the cameras. I load the card from the third camera, and it has something. I need a moment to read the picture. There is glare on the screen, then too many heads blocking the light, too many fingers pointing.

The camera snapped two images. In each, a long, snakelike thing crosses the field of view. It barely enters one picture, but in the second, which was taken within an instant of the first—before or after is not immediately clear—it extends across most of the scene. The lighting is poor and the focus fuzzy, but the creature appears to be a big snake, a cobra or python. The guides whoop. It must be a python, they say. Only a python is that big. A dozen heads strain to see the tiny screen. A python would be a weighty portent. A dream of a dangerous animal, especially a snake, is considered a powerful harbinger of good fortune. A picture, especially one taken remotely, as this one was, is something like a dream. The guides are jubilant.

Robichaud is not so sure, however. The camera sensor responds to heat. It is supposed to detect warm bodies moving across a cooler background. A snake is cold-blooded, the temperature of the environment. How would it trigger the sensor? “We’ll figure it out in Nakai, on the computer screen,” he says. In the meantime, the guides celebrate the advent of the putative python as the best possible news.

The patter is merry as we set out for the villages. Tonight the guides will sleep under their own roofs. They are horses headed for the barn. We all are.

Robichaud has taken a separate route down the length of the thong, cruising the east side of the grassland while the rest of us follow the trail on the west. Years ago he flushed a covey of quail there. He wants to see if he might find the birds again. But meanwhile he has spotted a crested goshawk cruising the forest edge. He whistles for us to stop and be quiet. Raggedly the line comes to a halt, but not the noise. Viengxai jabbers loudest. The goshawk flies out of sight, and Robichaud resumes walking. So do the guides. Soon we reach the edge of the thong, and the guides continue into the forest without waiting for Robichaud.

He waves at them and double-times to catch up. He shouts for them to come back. They assemble, indifferent, at the entrance to the forest. Robichaud’s outward calm contains a vibrato of anger. “I only ask two things: silence, and that the person most capable of identifying birds and other animals goes first.” The veins stand out on his neck. “This is a wildlife survey. You never know what you will see. It could be something important, something we need to see. But we won’t see it if people are talking, and we won’t see it if the right person isn’t where he needs to be. In this group, I go first. It’s that simple.”

We start again, but within a kilometer, a hubbub of chitchat rises from the line. In frustration, Robichaud sends the guides ahead. “We’ll let them go as fast as they want and hopefully create a gap of peace and quiet between us and them. By the time we get down the trail, maybe the birds and critters will have settled back down.”

If they did, we didn’t see them. The next fifteen kilometers are hot, strenuous, and empty of wildlife or diversion.

Every hour we stop briefly to rest. Simeuang, despite the heat, wears his usual turtleneck and wool pants. Touy has stripped down to a T-shirt, but Olay, lest the sun darken his already dark arms, remains enveloped in his broken-zippered raincoat as we toil up and down the hills. Late in the afternoon, when finally Olay steps out of his coat, his T-shirt is completely dry. Robichaud’s shirt is damp in patches, betraying the heat only modestly. My saturated clothes, meanwhile, have become a badge of ill adaptation.

At the first rice paddies, we hear the cry of a baby from a distant thatched hut. We come to a fence, a planting of cassava, a patch of banana trees. We come to our guides, sitting under a shade tree by the trail, playing cards.

Phiang, the quietest of the Ban Beuk teens, is said to be related to someone in a nearby hut who is alleged to be boiling a pot of cassava. The guides, all but Viengxai, are waiting for their snack. Viengxai has gone off on his own. He has taken my pack. It is ninety-one degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.

Robichaud sits. We all sit. A half hour passes, and nothing changes. “These guys are supposed to be working for us,” he says. “They said they needed an early start this morning so they could get home, and now look: they’re having a picnic.”

Mok Keo has just won a hand. “You go ahead,” he suggests. “We’ll bring the packs later.”

Robichaud has had enough. He had intended to continue on to Ban Kounè today, but precious time is slipping by. We won’t make it now. He thrashes through the piled equipment, searching for his gear, which has been distributed among several loads. Finding his tent and sleeping bag, he rams the missing items into his larger pack, which he quickly shoulders, then puts on his daypack backwards, across his chest, and sets off, muttering that this is the worst crew he’s ever had. Simeuang, the boys, and I follow.

“Where’s my pack?” I ask. Touy says Viengxai has it at the house of the woman cooking cassava. Simeuang says he’s taken it to his paddy. Robichaud says he’s gone to the village with it. The pack could be anywhere. If Robichaud is frustrated, I am ready to strangle Viengxai, or anyone.

A kilometer down the trail, a woman in a conical hat tends rice stalks in a flooded paddy. A naked, muddy toddler with red insect bites stippling her chest stands in the trail, staring at us in bewilderment, not sure whether to cry. Beyond the paddy is a house. My pack leans against a house post. Simeuang calls to Viengxai. We hear him shout back something that includes the words kin khao, then he hurries from the door and across the porch, hopping on one foot as he pulls on his pants. Soon he is trailing behind our moody group with my pack on his back, singing incongruously, unable as ever to remain silent.

When we arrive at Kong Chan’s, the porch bitch is guarding the top of the stairs. I have a pole in hand ready to whack her. She calculates the odds and, as we march up, dashes down the stairs and disappears, growling, under the house. We unpack a little and drink tea. We rest. Soon Kong Chan appears. He already knows about the photograph of the python. In his loudest Wolfman Jack voice, he proclaims the appearance of a great snake to be an omen of success. “The next animal that camera photographs will be a saola!”

Bone with snared ferret badger. (Courtesy William Robichaud)

Eventually the guides straggle in with the rest of the gear. Last up the stairs is Bone. The vile bitch darts from ambush and attacks him, avenging her displacement. She gets him on both legs. The bites streak his legs with blood but do not bleed enough to cleanse the wounds. Touy administers first aid, and I contribute a Betadine swab and some surgical wash, although neither is effective against a closed puncture. The danger of infection looms, for the bitch no doubt has mouth flora to match a Komodo dragon’s.

At the other end of the veranda, Simeuang and Robichaud hold court as paymasters. Each guide gets forty thousand kip per day, plus a share in the aggregate reward (at fifteen hundred kip per snare) for collecting 970 snares. Split nine ways, the snare bounty equals pay for four extra days’ work—about twenty US dollars—and brings each man’s total to almost half a million kip, or slightly more than sixty US dollars. Smiles are broad and the banter lighthearted as bills are dealt like playing cards. As soon as each man has his wad, he takes off. Everyone has a family to see and beers to buy. Tonight will be a night of celebration.

When the porch has emptied, one of Kong Chan’s daughters goes under the house to collect the sulking black bitch that bit Bone. She hauls her up and locks her in an airless cabinet on the porch. The dog intermittently howls and scratches for a span of hours, then nothing.