March 14

Nam Mon, Camp 1

In the birdcall racket of first light, Thii and the other boys tromp past my rock to check their nets upstream. Thii peers in the tent, a cheeky act, and smiles cheerfully when he sees I am awake.

We linger over breakfast and take our time packing tents and gear. The boys stoke the fire and smoke the fish they’ve caught. Robichaud stitches up a tear in his trousers. I write some, doze some, and wash a shirt.

We wait for Khamdy and the replacement guide.

I again attempt to sketch the tree that towers above the downstream bluff. The result is unsatisfying, but the effort to see the forest, in the slanting morning light, excites me. For whatever reasons of illumination or clarity, the textures and hues of the trees seem suddenly exclamatory. Vines wreathe the treetops in bold, strong lines. The forest today seems a sea in which every figurative wave and whitecap possesses an identity distinct from every other. Yet oddly, the strongest impression I have is one of unity, of the whole forest existing as a single, enormous organism, a blanket of life, a factory of photosynthesis, enveloping the geologic ground. The competitive energy within it seems to me no different from the manic pulse of Mumbai, Jakarta, Hanoi, or New York: the Darwinian clawing for light and space, the constant churning of mutual aid, aggression, and injury, the ceaseless experimentation in form and function. And then I realize the irony of the construct I have made. In earlier times, when large conurbations were new, people compared cities to the jungle. Now, as an emissary of a city-driven world, I have built the image in reverse.

At ten o’clock, still no Khamdy. Had he started early, traveling light, he and his new recruit would be here by now. Our plan was to reach the poung today, work there tomorrow, and return downstream the two days following. This now appears impossible, and Robichaud has the look of a man in pain.

Finally, at nearly eleven, Khamdy marches into camp, his grin lascivious and triumphant. Mr. Voy, the new recruit, blinks shyly behind him.

There was a wedding party in Ban Navang last night, explains Khamdy. Much to drink. Slept late. All is good.

Suddenly he is staring at me, peering closely at my neck. He steps close, still staring. Our faces are inches apart. His fingers probe my throat. His immense brown-toothed smile seems momentarily carnivorous. He has spotted an insect bite, and he tweezes it with his fingernails. Then he attacks another on my elbow.

The bites must be burst and squeezed out quickly, he says. Otherwise they fester into boils. They are the work of the cat-tailed fly and another anesthetizing biter, neither of which exist in the village. But they are here, and very vexing. One must be careful.

“Khop chay,” I say, grateful if I have been spared a minor grief yet still uncertain if the bites were as he said, for I never felt a thing. Either way, Khamdy has diverted everyone’s attention from the lateness of his arrival.

The canyon has narrowed, and the river collides now with this wall, now with that one, so that we must cross it with increasing frequency. We jump from boulder to boulder, and the boulders are like ridge-backed tortoises, except that their shells are greased, and—I swear—when they feel my tread upon them, they shrug. I am soon well bruised and excessively bathed.

At one crossing I find a pole to steady myself, but Simeuang looks at it with disapproval and draws his machete. He chops through a green stalk of bamboo at the river’s edge, and a pint of clear, fresh water runs from the hacked cylinder. He hands me the walking stick with a tolerant smile that says, Good luck; you’ll need it.

The pole is light and strong, a pleasure in the hand. I stump along more steadily now, and more amused: the staff is like a physical koan. When it strikes the rock, its hollowness makes the rock sound hollow, as though the staff were not.

We come to a waterfall fifteen feet high and climb it on a ladder of faint toeholds and brittle vines. At the top we pause to watch finger-size silver fish shoot up the cascade like missiles, flailing desperately, none succeeding in topping the falls.

The cobbles of the river channel have changed. Many are pocked with igneous bubbles and shot through with air holes, signs of volcanism. Soon we encounter a lava flow that presses the river against the opposite canyon wall, enclosing it in a chasm. We climb away from the river, scaling the face of the lava, and work our way in and out of timber along a narrow bench of tilted, broken bedrock. The rock crumbles underfoot, and fragments clatter into the nerve-tingling void. Each challenge seems a little harder than the one before, but each brings us closer to the poung—and, we hope, to saola. Our journey feels like a poker game, with the stakes rising hand by hand, the possibility of gain and loss racing upward.

Beyond the lava, we stop and wait for the guides to catch up. An hour passes: still no guides. Did they stop to fish? Simeuang thinks not. Did they leapfrog us, taking a trail we missed that detoured through the forest? Simeuang thinks not. If one of them were hurt or sick, would they not have sent a runner?

Then laughing Khamdy heaves into view, the ancient carbine slung on his shoulder and hanging nearly to his heels. Thii is behind him, dwarfed by my pack and looking as lighthearted as his leader.

We climb a second waterfall, slick with moss, and then a third, where a strangler fig provides the only passage. Its tangled arches and buttresses afford handholds, and we squeeze ourselves like reptiles through its twisted apertures.

We see the tracks of a water monitor, a lizard that can grow more than two meters long. We come to a broad rock ledge heavily spotted with macaque dung. We see muntjac tracks and scat. We flush four jungle fowl, which flee in a drumroll of wing beats. We hear a crash in the forest as a large animal—muntjac, sambar, saola?—bounds away. Then comes a fourth waterfall, which we struggle past by chinning our way on tree roots.

The guides are lagging again as we reach the Houay Mrro, a drainage that joins our westerly course from the south. The lavas we have been traversing evidently flowed to the Nam Mon by the canyon of the Mrro. As soon as we cross the creek, we are back to familiar limestone.

The canyon encloses us as though it were a prison, its walls nearly vertical and the river flooding its narrow floor. Were the river a foot higher, there would be no passage. We lurch from boulder to boulder, or, forced by deep water, climb a rock face to seek a ledge swallowed in thorns and vines. When at last we come to a place wide enough to sit down, we wait again for the guides. Robichaud is restless, impatient to go on.

Khamdy arrives and flatly announces we must camp where we are. The next place wide enough for sleeping, he says, is a great distance away. Robichaud, stunned, appeals to Simeuang for a contrary opinion, but Simeuang shrugs. Anywhere else he might offer advice. Simeuang retains a nearly photographic memory of the many trails he’s walked in the watershed, but he has never before tramped this reach of the Nam Mon, above the Houay Mrro. We have no choice but to accept Khamdy’s guidance.

As though to mollify Robichaud, Khamdy makes a show of clearing the leaves and smoothing the sand of the small flat patch of ground where he bids Robichaud and me to pitch our tents. His anarchic cheerfulness is irresistible. The bon vivant who started late from Ban Navang has now become a pampering, lunatic butler. He runs back to the other guides, fetches Robichaud’s big pack, and deposits it with a flourish at the spot he has picked out. Thii, joining the farce, does likewise with mine. They stand behind the now leafless patch of sand, grinning proudly, as though to ask, “How do you find your room? Will you take tea here or in the parlor?”

Back row, left to right: Simeuang, deBuys, Khum, Olay, Khamdy. Front: Thii, Vieng, Voy, Robichaud. (Courtesy William Robichaud)

Robichaud, fighting laughter, asks, “How far to the poung?”

Chipper and authoritative, Khamdy fires back, “If we leave early, we’ll be there by ten.”

Robichaud is astounded. “I’ll believe it when I see it,” he says to me in English.

Khamdy needs no translation of Robichaud’s doubt. He points to his tattered camo shorts, which hang below his knees. “If we get there when I say, you can buy me a new pair of pants in Ban Navang!”

“It’s a deal,” Robichaud agrees.

I am pitching my tent when Khamdy skitters by in his undershorts, fishnet in hand. By the time the tent is up and I have unrolled my sleeping bag, Khamdy is headed the other way. A dozen small fish quiver in his net.

Suddenly someone calls an alarm, and Khamdy comes running back, gripping his machete. Thii is running downstream on the far side of the river, leaping from boulder to boulder, shouting and pointing at something midstream.

A small, furry head, dark-nosed and whiskered, breaks the surface. An otter! At first it seems that Khamdy and the boys, all brandishing knives, are out to slay it, but no, they only want to clear their valuable nets from its path.

In a moment the alarm has passed. The nets are intact, the dark head is seen no more, and a general feeling of elation pervades the camp. The sight of an otter confirms Robichaud’s growing sense that the biota of the river is reasonably intact. Evidently Vietnamese hunters have not lingered here. Otherwise otters would have been stripped from the streams, early targets of poaching. We’ve also encountered no snares in the forests of the Nam Mon, not that we would have expected to see them along the river’s edge. But neither have there been any when we’ve clambered up slopes seeking passage around a defile, and this is a heartening sign.

If indeed the hills are free of snare lines, the causes may be multiple. Perhaps the army post at the head of the river is effective in keeping Vietnamese out of the watershed. Perhaps the notorious murder of a Vietnamese poacher counts for even more. Or perhaps the big, organized hunting and trapping gangs mustering out of Nghe An and similar places haven’t yet targeted the Nam Mon. Whatever the reason, the result is good for otters, for saola, if they are here, and for all the other creatures of the forest.

Consider extinction: It is an abstraction, unexplorable by the senses. It is an absence, a vacuum, a negative space. Although the fact of extinction is more durable than diamonds or steel, it is as incorporeal as smoke.

For people to care about extinction, it needs to have a face. For many, that face is the tiger’s.

Tigers are extinct in 93 percent of their historical habitat. Their wild populations in China, Cambodia, Korea, Laos, Vietnam, and Myanmar are, at best, in the low two digits. Of the roughly 3,200 wild tigers believed still to exist, approximately half survive in India.

The threats to this remnant population are the work of humans. Demographers tell us that India will pass China as the most populous nation on Earth within a year or two of 2030. Forty-one people are born there every minute. The pressure to find space and resources for the country’s swelling population dwarfs most other concerns and produces habitat fragmentation and degradation, encroachment on protected areas, and depletion of prey species (which, if it does not result in starvation or reproductive failure, leads to predation on domestic livestock, with ultimately disastrous consequences for the tiger). Most pernicious of all is the omnipresent trade in animal parts. In the folk medicines of East Asia, tiger bone is penicillin, interferon, and Viagra rolled into one. The hunger for it has left vast swaths of viable habitat bereft of its most stunning denizen.

The saola, as Robichaud likes to point out, does not have a price on its head. The tiger, by contrast, is “most wanted” on every poacher’s list, rivaled only by golden turtle and rhinoceros. A few ounces of its bone, or a claw or a tooth, can fetch thousands of dollars. With prosperity increasing throughout East Asia, the ranks of those who can afford high-priced “treatments”—or merely flaunt their wealth—swell year by year. Demand only rises, even as the source animals grow scarcer.

These days, the conservation of the world’s most charismatic species, in many places, is won only at the point of a gun. Animals such as tigers, rhinos, elephants, and many more, all with bounties on their heads, require the protection of armed guards—squads of militia, rangers, and wardens on constant patrol.

A tenet of modern conservation is that community support is key. If elephants are to survive in Kenya, say, then the Maasai, Samburu, and other tribes who live in proximity to them and bear the difficulties of that closeness must want them to survive. They have to think of elephants as assets, not just as crop raiders and competitors for badly needed land. And so shared revenue from ecotourism becomes a priority, along with quick-response management, democratized decision making, and, where necessary, elephant-proof fencing.

Community support remains vital wherever people are in contact with wildlife, which includes every place where important wildlife populations can be found, including Nakai–Nam Theun. And yet far too often, it is not enough. When gangs of armed men infiltrate an area to strip it of its tigers, ivory, or other animal-based riches, they have to be met with force. They and their masters, who may include international criminal cartels, have to be defeated. This means encircling the animals in a metaphorical ring of guns.

It is not hard to imagine a dystopian future in which the great forests of the world become empty of the species that earlier generations referred to as their “royalty.” No more King of the Jungle. Instead, one day not long from now, children may think of T. rex, tigers, and elephants as co-occupants of a single, distant Lost World, accessible only in dreams and storybooks. The prospect is desolate. Sure, some of the megafauna will be bred forever in zoos, or for as long as society produces enough luxury to maintain zoos, but even the best zoo is a faint simulacrum of wild habitat and a zoo animal a ghost of its free-roaming forebear. Uncounted species—not just charismatic animals like tigers, gorillas, rhinos, and saola but an even larger number of obscure rodents, amphibians, birds, and reptiles—have been pressed to the brink. We hardly know them, and yet within the vastness of the universe, they and the rest of Earth’s biota are our only known companions. Without them, our loneliness would stretch to infinity.