Pinholes in the bamboo-mat gable shine yellow. And yellow light leaks between the planks of the walls. The gauze of our mosquito netting grows luminous. The rain has stopped, and gusts of the wind that chased it away roll through the village like breakers across a reef. In darkness a half hour earlier, Robichaud and Simeuang left for Ban Beuk to hire boatmen, resolved to employ whatever combination of entreaty, cash, and promises proved necessary.
Notwithstanding the insect bites covering my torso, a result of warming myself in one of Kong Chan’s quilts the day before, the luminous morning feels joyous. Robichaud and Simeuang presently return with two boatmen close behind. “We can go as soon as we are packed.”
By 8:00 a.m. we are on the river, alternately floating past flood-torn banks or shoving our two boats, scooterlike, through shallows. We see crested kingfishers, common kingfishers, wagtails and forktails, two species of heron, and, perched in a towering snag, a crested serpent eagle. The sky lifts, yielding hints of blue, as we speed downstream. A male jungle fowl flies across the widening channel, the red of his comb and mantle brilliant, his wing strokes powerful and bold. It is hard to believe that a bird nearly identical to the chicken can look so good.
The river rocks us, and the chak hang screams. The odds of meeting our boat in Ban Makfeuang improve every minute we are in motion. Nakai beckons. The Nam Mon and its mineral lick are waiting.
In two hours we reach Ban Peu. We muscle our gear in double loads to Ban Tong, where we hire motorbikes to carry it to Ban Makfeuang—Star Fruit Village, as I now have learned. We follow the motorbikes at a quick march. The rain was light here. The footing is good.
The boatman from Nakai, true to his word, awaits us at the appointed place. By a quarter past one we are stowed and settled in his craft, headed for the reservoir. Even above the engine noise we hear the whistle of hill mynahs from either shore.
I am facing backwards, reclining into the V of the bow, watching the forest recede. How different to see it from a boat! Where the forest climbs the hillsides, it reveals its now familiar variations of texture and color. But as the river broadens, the forest that was so large when we were in it seems to shrink. The sky swells with volume, dwarfing the trees that earlier seemed majestic. With distance, the forest becomes a fragile thing, its span from soil to treetops no more than a coverlet on the undulating hills, a membrane between rock and air.
We pass stands of dead trunks by the water’s edge—the beginning of the drowned forest and a reminder of the unrequited treasures that the forest has surrendered. For a moment I picture the exodus of those marvels as a parade in a children’s book, a Disney procession of exotic animals in single file, head to tail, exiting the forest. Some of the species are gone for good; some are going; all are on the march. Rhinoceroses, banteng, and tigers lead the throng, then golden turtles, leopards, elephants, and gaur. White-winged ducks flurry overhead. Pangolins sniff the air as they waddle onward, otters and big-headed turtles awkwardly trailing them. Now come the clouded leopards, padding furtively, and golden cats and marbled cats, packs of dholes, and herds of at least three jumbled species of muntjac. Ragtag gangs of doucs and gibbons chatter as they pass. On a snaking line of a thousand bearers, an overburdened train of eaglewood and rosewood also follows, raising dust that dims the day. The dust has not settled when ghostly figures appear within it: saola, half seen and nearly incorporeal. They might have taken their place far up the line of disappearance, but they tried hard to stay behind, hidden from all but a lucky few. Shy and exquisite, they trot in the wake of the others. Then a cloud drifts before the sun; the light shifts, and the saola, too, are seen no more.
The forest pours out its wealth, emptying in spite of an alphabet soup of managers, experts, and monitors—WMPA, POE, IMA, ADB, WB, WCS, WWF, and plenty more—a modern equivalent of all the king’s horses and all the king’s men, charged with repair and maintenance of the now fracturing ecosystem. The king, of course, is the NTPC, the sovereign of hydroelectric commerce, which indeed commands its realm with monarchical power but whose reign, like that of every sovereign in the history of Earth, will not last forever.
The boat plows downstream, engine roaring. Behind the racket, I hear a plaintive, desperate wail, a cry of grief, coming from the forest. Probably only cicadas, I tell myself. It can only be cicadas.
Some conservationists argue for the preservation of places like NNT on the basis of the value of biodiversity. They maintain, for instance, that the chemistry of Earth’s biota may hold the key to new chemicals or cures for disease. There is truth enough in this, as many studies make clear—the story of Taxol, derived from yew bark and effective in treating breast cancer, is one of them—but such breakthroughs are episodic and unpredictable. They make a frail foundation for a muscular ethic of protection.
Another, stronger, utilitarian argument centers on “environmental services”—the prevention of erosion, moderation of climate, purification of water, and other benefits that healthy ecosystems provide. The society that drains its wetlands or levels its forests soon finds that it must pay handsomely to replace the flood protection or water yield it formerly received for free. Or, more commonly, it learns to scrape by in a degraded, more miserable, and more hazardous world.
All true. But a forest does not have to contain tigers and saola in order to fulfill its vital hydrological functions, and a wetland need not harbor a white-winged duck in order to modify a storm surge. There are other functions, pollination being one, that more clearly rest upon a foundation of diversity, but the arguments that make the case for ecological complexity, notwithstanding the wonders they recount, put the rank and file of humankind to sleep. A defense of the intricacy of the web of life demands another banner.
Some religionists will say that God’s creation is a sacred thing and must not be diminished. By this reckoning, “Thou shalt not kill”—an injunction common to all great religions—might be thought to apply to the protection of species, too. But the contrary view, voiced loudly in certain corners of Christianity, but known, as well, from other monotheisms, is at least as widespread, namely, that God put man at the center of creation, giving him dominion over all else, so that if a species flickers out it is His will. Unfortunately, God has remained lamentably silent on the subject and appears unwilling to break the tie.
If you probe deep enough among the people who labor in the vineyard of species protection, you find another answer, another motivation. It goes by many names, and it often goes unmentioned, ceding primacy in formal publications to the usual quasi-economic analyses of costs and benefits or to the unprovable umbrella argument that small tears in the fabric of life will lead to big rents that endanger humankind. Robichaud, like many others, says that what gets him out of his sleeping bag in the morning is something different and simpler. It is beauty.
No matter how it is parsed or how much it resides in the eye of the beholder, no matter how its elements might be divided among delight, awe, surprise, or inspiration, beauty moves the heart as reason moves the mind. Imagine a world deprived of the tanager’s colors, of the hummingbird’s whirr, of the mad shrieks of a rookery of seabirds. Imagine the Arctic without its fearsome white bear, Bengal without its tiger, the Serengeti without its prides of lions (pride being an ancient and meaningful term). We are entranced by beautiful creatures not just because they give pleasure and inspire awe but because they carry a charge like an ionized particle. Beauty excites and glows. Put a horse in an empty meadow, and the meadow becomes animate. Put a saola, even a saola you cannot see, in a forest, and the forest, as though it held a unicorn, acquires an energy that cannot be named. It becomes numinous; it gains the pull of gravity, the weight of water, the float of a feather.