March 15
Nam Mon, Camp 2
Robichaud is up by half-light and packing at high speed. He says he’s skipping breakfast with the rest of camp—“gonna burn a Clif Bar instead”—the better to see what he can see. “You are welcome to come if you want,” he tells me. I say I hate to miss my portion of sticky rice, but yes.
The river narrows between steep walls, forcing us to cross and cross again. We try to avoid water deeper than mid-thigh, but the possibility of doing so declines with every twist of the channel. In the water or out of it, the footing is bad and the banks often impossible to climb. The Nam Mon in this reach is as heavily scoured as the tributaries we explored on the Nam Nyang, and there are few patches of sand or light gravel that might show a track. We find scraps of otter scat, conspicuous on boulders, but little else. The usual birds clamor, and the heavy green weight of the jungle leans over us.
By nine I am worn. The river flows in a rock cradle, and we cling to its sides, inching along toehold ledges, seeking the slightest concavity or moderation of slope to belly along the wall. Failing that, we go into the water or tempt fate by jumping boulders. For some there is no challenge. Olay and Simeuang, who will soon catch up to us, dash balletically across such boulders, caroming without pause from angled face to angled face. Were I to try to match them, I would crash on the third landing.
I joke to myself that river crossings now come more frequently than Don Giovanni ever had sex. The algae on the boulders is a miracle of lubrication. More and more I stick to the water, wading belly deep across submerged, shin-banging boulder fields until finally there is no choice but to climb the exposed rocks (an exhausting task) and leap across some fast channel or bottomless pool. The difficulty wears on Robichaud, too. He calls out that the rock hopping is “very stressful,” an understatement of the first order. I cannot help reflecting that every step made today will have to be won back tomorrow or the next day, when we head for the villages.
A racket-tailed drongo screeches and churrs as we wait by a long, flat pool for the others. I wash down two caffeine-and-analgesic pills, noting with concern that only a dose and a half remain in the vial. I would rather run out of food than those pills. Soon Simeuang, Olay, and the guides come up, and we start again, but we gain only a few hundred meters before Robichaud and Simeuang, in the lead, simultaneously freeze.
High above the river’s edge, in the top of a spindly tree, a bulky black ball is stirring.
The creature is so uniformly dark that I cannot tell head from rump. Then a leg moves, separate from what now appears to be a bushy tail. Two eyes shine dully from a mass of hair. The movements are ponderous, as of a creature barely waking from slumber, or stupidity.
“Binturong,” announces Robichaud.
The word means nothing to me. I ask him to repeat it.
“Binturong. It’s a kind of civet.” The animal is backlit by the sky, almost impossible to see in detail, but Robichaud nevertheless takes photographs. He explains that the Lao call the binturong a perfumed bear because of its heavily scented musk and ponderous, ursine behavior. Zoos, I later learn, sometimes use them for school education, for if unprovoked, they remain nearly somnolent, even in a noisy classroom. To North American eyes, they are as improbable as a Dr. Seuss creation. The binturong has a bearlike head, the body of a wolverine, the claws and temperament of a sloth, a prehensile tail, and double-jointed ankles that allow it to descend trees headfirst. Much like a human, it eats anything: fruit, eggs, small mammals, fat insects, and birds. Once Robichaud came upon a group of hunters who had killed one. The meat, he said, was heavily aromatic, as though seasoned with Indian spices—not bad at all.
We watch the binturong lurch above our heads from one frail, sagging limb to another, remarking that although we are lucky to see it, the binturong is luckier still. Any other group of humans on the Nam Mon would have shot it instantly for their supper pot. Or cut down its tree and clubbed it to death. Slowly and awkwardly the binturong clambers away into denser treetops, branches bobbing, until finally it fades from sight, never having uttered a sound.
We resume our upriver march. I flounder, wet to the waist, while others spring from rock to rock. The day grows hot. We keep going, back and forth across the river, then up a vertical bank, thrashing along a ledge of jungle, and down another bank to the rocks. I’ve made it a point of pride on the Nam Nyang and here never to ask for a halt or rest. Keep moving, I tell myself, just keep moving. I do not want to make myself an issue, for I fear the concern of the group will shrink around me like a smothering shawl and that their attention, ticklike, will suck out the last of my strength.
Even so, I have noticed that Simeuang often has me in the corner of his eye, and Olay sometimes walks close behind me, like a spotter in a gym: if the old man begins to totter, he’ll try to break the fall. His attention is comforting, and I appreciate it all the more that it is unspoken. Unfortunately, no amount of comradeship can return vigor to my legs. They feel sodden, inside and out. Meanwhile, the lightness in my head tells me that I am dehydrated. Heavy and light, both at once. Usually I find a paradox amusing, but not now.
Another crossing. Another shin-banging slide into deep water. Another field of submerged boulders. Sometimes I wonder if the guides aren’t laying bets about whether—or maybe just when—the guy with the white beard will break his neck. It takes more energy by far to walk badly than to walk well, to borrow balance instead of own it, making a hundred ungainly adjustments where others glide. At last, dripping, I stagger out of the river to face the bank, a vine-hung, nine-foot wall with no evident handholds or footholds. Robichaud lunges upward, grabs a root, hauls himself up. Simeuang does the same. My turn. I lunge for the root, grab it. It breaks. Down I go, but Olay saves me from toppling backwards. I take aim at another root and lunge again. This one holds. It takes everything I’ve got to chin myself up and grab for another, then pull again, and again, to the top. I am on my knees, winded, heart pounding, but Robichaud and Simeuang have already disappeared down an invisible path, bobbing like boxers through the trees and vines. I lurch after them. And am tripped by a vine. It is never the first trip that gets you; it is the second or third, like a series of jabs before the knockout. I catch my foot on another vine, maybe a log. Falling, I curl my shoulder into a tree, which is wreathed in the band-saw teeth of holdfast vines. Entangled now. Pausing, panting. A deep breath. Two breaths. I need to collect myself, but everyone is moving forward. Hey, Robichaud, what’s the fucking hurry? I feel anger welling up. The words to call a halt rise in my tightened throat, sure to sound peevish if I release them. Suddenly Robichaud, invisible in the thicket ahead, says, “Hey, look here!”
Up the canyon of the Nam Mon.
He has stopped. I can stop. We have all stopped.
Robichaud has recognized a campsite from a trip two years ago. He and Simeuang had come to this reach of river by a different route. Simeuang confirms Robichaud’s judgment and says we are an hour from the poung. And if Simeuang says it, an hour it will be, for we are now within the map of Simeuang’s indelible memory.
Our proximity to the poung requires a new level of care. We must not camp too close lest we disturb the wildlife. Simeuang says we can install ourselves at a good site not half a kilometer upriver.
When we arrive, Simeuang asks leave to fish while we wait for the guides. “I like to fish,” he says, grinning. “I know,” Robichaud replies.
Simeuang casts and recasts his net. Olay scratches through the last of his snack food. Robichaud looks for animal sign, then stretches out in a patch of sunlight and closes his eyes. I sit against my pack, immobile, too tired to find a spot to lie down but satisfied that from this position, I cannot fall. An Indian cuckoo chants, “One more bottle, one more bottle.”
I sleep sitting up and dream of beer.
Imagine a zoo.
It is an excellent zoo, with naturalistic habitats—the savanna, for instance, is an archipelago of tawny islands bounded by dry moats that the animals cannot cross. Gazelles on one moated island, wildebeests on another. Lions on still another. The animals drift through the savanna in seeming freedom under an open sky.
Ambling along, you round a turn on the macadam trail, and suddenly before you, across a moat, stands a copse of giraffes, treelike in their height, heads slightly bobbing like boughs in the wind. They are taller and more brightly colored—custard yellow, spangled with chocolate—than you ever imagined giraffes to be. They move with sleepy grace. One of them looks quizzically your way, blinking its long-lashed eyes. Its sides swell with breath. You see the bristly mane, the stubble on the not-quite horns. The sun, close behind its head, is a little dazzling. The tower of flesh fixes you with a birdlike stare, and you feel unsteady.
In that moment, something shifts. The moats disappear. All barriers fall away. Now suddenly the lions are free to prowl the territories of their prey. The gazelles wheel as a group, scanning for threats. The wildebeests trot beyond the horizon. The giraffes, whose number includes a wobbly youngster, lose their zoo-bred complacency and become hyperalert. Their new attention is electric, and they seem suddenly larger, necks and bodies rocking as they begin to lope away, their animal architecture exquisite, surprising, sublime. For the first moment in your life you feel you are really seeing giraffes, and the intensity of their beauty is almost unbearable.
You continue through the charmed zoo. You marvel at the china-blue feet of the blue-footed booby, the limpid eyes of the snow leopard, the shaggy beard of the bison. Part of the charm of this perfect day is that you—only you—are safe from predation: no lion or bear will harm you. Equally, you pose no threat to the other creatures, so you can linger by the gorillas and admire their prehensile feet. You can stroke the stiff and bottomless white cloak of the polar bear, and when you later find yourself among the antelopes, you can read, close-up, the painted face of the oryx and marvel at the sculpture of its horns. For once your mind is not cluttered with borrowed images. You are seeing each animal de novo, as though you had never before beheld its likeness in a photograph or painting, let alone in cartoonish advertisements. You are eye to eye with the real thing.
But this is just a fantasy.
We are rarely so lucky as to see things unfiltered by memory and experience. A lifetime of television and issues of National Geographic helps us paint our expectations. And where the documentaries leave off, Tony the Tiger, Simba, and Babar nudge our sensibilities more than we know or dare admit. And if not they, then the Chicago Bears, Panda Express, Curious George, and the whole bestiary of popular culture. We rarely slip free of our baggage. In the field, I catch myself bending the images of the birds I see to match the pictures in my field guides. I cannot seem to help it.
Once, though, I blundered into a kind of freedom. It was almost forty years ago, but the memory remains vivid. I was at home, in mountain country. A wet snow had fallen, and a heavy sky blotted the sun. No shadows betrayed the passage of time. No wind disturbed the silence. I was prowling around, purposeless, binoculars in hand. I glimpsed a bird darting into the canopy of a snow-covered juniper. I circled around to approach from the opposite side. A jiggle of twigs told me the bird was still there. I crept nearer, but I could not see through the foliage. I ducked under the first branches and crouched within.
Inside was dim space, leaving the outside world muffled, suddenly distant. From a branch four feet away, the bird watched me with a cold black eye. I did not recognize the species. It was new—a find! I held still, on bent, trembling knees, and I marveled that the bird did not fly off. Perhaps the strange day had cast a spell on it, as it had on me. Close-up, the bird’s dorsal feathers gleamed like satin. Their hue was part gunmetal, part tree bark, a shade of dusk. The beak was the dun of deer antler, and a white ring encircled the eye. From the throat to the downy feathers of the belly, the bird seemed nearly to glow. Its breast was the orange fading to russet that you see in the last moments of tropical sunsets, a color lurid yet delicious, like the flesh of an exotic fruit.
The bird stared at me and I at it. It twitched its head and hopped one branch farther away, the russet of its underside still shining in the half-light. A minute passed, and I realized I had ceased to care about what species it was. The bird was so profoundly there, so close and alive. I began to feel the hard completeness of the bird’s separate being. The feeling was strong because I could not place the bird in a category—it was neither sparrow, finch, nor dove. I had no name and no template for it, and so it was just bird, fresh from creation and marvelous.
Then, with a cackle, the bird burst from its perch and flew away. The sound and movement woke me from my trance, and I realized what sort of bird it was. It was an American robin, Turdus migratorius, the commonest of the common. I felt embarrassed and thick-witted—I’d become a satire of myself! But then I recalled how striking and vivid the bird had looked and how it felt to have that black eye bore into me. Never before had I sensed the presence of another creature so strongly, and, I am sorry to say, I rarely have again. Oddly and eerily, in that moment an ordinary robin seemed as great a miracle of nature as a saola, a tiger, or a bird of paradise.
The last push. We drop most of the gear and leave the guides at the sandy riverbank where we will camp. Only the four of us go on. No need for extra trampling at the poung.
The river runs flatter now. Although the crowding forest hides the shape of the land, we seem to be on an immense shelf of the mountains, and the way grows easier. Robichaud moves stealthily forward. At a screen of trees he motions for silence. Slowly rounding the trees, we stand before a broad, abraded bend in the river. Light floods the scene in an abundance we have not seen in days. I feel a cool, mild breeze. At the apex of the river’s arc, past several twining sandbars, the bank is steep and raw and stained with minerals. It was here, whispers Robichaud, that Phok, with Sai behind him, glimpsed a startled saola. It bolted up the bank and dissolved into forest. The men stood in stunned silence where we now stand, the image of horns, hindquarters, and a burst of movement fading in their mind’s eyes. Shocked, they stood right here, their feet on these stones, as the last pebbles kicked up by the saola drizzled down the riverbank.
We stare at the place where the saola disappeared. No fleeing ghost has broken the stillness. All is quiet. There is only the shadow of a saola long gone, the rain-erased hoofprints, the echo of borrowed memory. Still, we stand awhile and contemplate the place where the vision was glimpsed. Each of us, I suspect, prays in some way for the moment’s reenactment, for the return of saola to this bend of river, if not now, then after we are gone, and forever and ever, amen.
A red ooze, evidence of mineralization, seeps from the raw bank that the saola dashed up. Trails of bubbles rise through the river pools, and mats of scarlet algae paint the rocks, gas vents spitting at their center. The place feels charged, electric.
One more bend of the river, and we sight an immense tree rising double the height of the surrounding forest. Below, sloping to a shelf of rocks at river’s edge, is an oddly barren patch of ground, which we approach. The dust is thick with animal tracks and the occasional turd. “Macaques,” announces Robichaud. “This place is their clubhouse.”
To one side of the macaque playground and still within the shadow of the great tree, a thin rivulet angles to the river. In the present dry season it is a mere seep, a corridor of mud and fallen leaves at the bottom of a draw. Here, close to the river, it brings salty water to the surface, an upwelling from the dark earth that wildlife travel far to sip. The bitter liquid is a candy, a vitamin pill, an answer to a craving. This bath of muck is our money spot. We have arrived at the poung.
It appears to be a busy place. The heavy presence of macaques affirms its attraction. So does the game trail that follows the rivulet down from the hills. Where the seep is wettest, the hill trail meets a second path that parallels the river. Robichaud will concentrate his cameras on this junction. We set to work.
The plan is to aim the two Reconyx cameras, our best and most reliable, at the intersection of the trails. We’ll also set a Bushnell to take ten-second videos of the intersection and place another Bushnell back some distance to take stills across one of the approaches. Robichaud and Simeuang set about barbering the site with their machetes, trimming any plant or branch that might grow or droop into the cameras’ view. While they are at it, Simeuang finds the shed exoskeleton of a large cicada and places it on his nose, giving him an elephantine proboscis. Olay hugs himself to stifle his giggles, but Robichaud, intent on work, notices nothing. He places large stones in the ooze at the foot of one of the trees where a camera will be strapped. Nothing must take root that might grow up to obstruct the lens. At last he looks up, sees Simeuang, and acknowledges the comedy of the cicada shell with an unwilling, exasperated smile. The joke has failed.
I inspect the enormous tree that lords over the place. Its trunk is easily six feet in diameter; it looks to be 120 feet tall or taller. “What kind of tree is this?” I call to Robichaud.
He briefly glances my way. “It’s a Big Tropical Tree,” he says. Evidently I am not alone in feeling tired.
Fastening the cameras to trees is a slow process. Simeuang cuts wedges to adjust their aim. We stage walk-throughs to confirm that camera alignment and trigger sensitivity are correct. Again and again, we take down the cameras and program them anew.
I record the coordinates of the site:
Latitude 18° north and so many minutes and seconds.
Longitude 105° east and so many minutes and seconds.1
An hour passes, and still not one of the cameras is set to Robichaud’s liking. His standards are necessarily exacting. The effort to get here has cost days of hard travel, and now the worth of all our time, sweat, and not a little treasure (our hard-won grant funds) hinges on the operation of a few quirky and expensive instruments. Even when we get them set, the labor will only have begun, because after the coming rainy season, someone—probably Simeuang—will have to return to this place and, at a minimum, swap out the memory cards and batteries. Then he will return at least one more time to retrieve everything, or multiple times if the project continues. Camera-trapping is an expensive means for collecting data. Even so, it offers only one-sided information. When it works, it can confirm that an animal was present, but it cannot confirm that the animal was absent, for a camera’s view is limited. In the case of saola, which are so thinly distributed in their territory as to be virtually undetectable, getting no pictures will change nothing. If we come up empty-handed, we will know only what we knew before. The one thing that will materially boost our knowledge is to capture a photograph of a saola. We’ve come all this way to hit a home run. Nothing else will do.
I asked Simeuang what would happen if we got lucky and landed a photo of a saola. He said the WMPA would certainly organize a big celebration in the nearby villages, a festival involving all the headmen. On the heels of that bash, the agency would greatly ramp up its protection efforts, probably establishing a restricted area around the poung and declaring new rules for the broader surroundings. Patrol efforts would intensify, making it between hard and impossible, at least in theory, for poachers, whether Vietnamese or Hmong, to penetrate the area. If they did, penalties for violations would likely be made more severe—perhaps comparable to the twenty-four-year mandatory prison sentence for killing an elephant elsewhere in the protected area. Beyond that, the WMPA would certainly show more support for saola research and protection throughout NNT. He said he personally would relish an opportunity to go into Bolikhamxay Province, beyond the boundaries of NNT, and find out who the Hmong are who hunt the upper Nam Mon in the rainy season.
One of the savvier apparatchiks of the WMPA later confirmed Simeuang’s forecast. Phoukhaokham Luangoudom, who directs ecotourism for the agency, thought a saola photograph would be an immense and much-needed blessing for NNT. It would rekindle enthusiasm at all levels of management for wildlife conservation in the protected area. In fact, he said, everything depends on that. In a grave voice he asserted that we only have “a few years” to stem the tide of destruction. After that, he said, “It’s over.”
Rob Timmins expressed a mumbling pessimism about saola when we rendezvoused at an airport after my return to the United States. “I might be the only person who thinks that the chances of us detecting saola are less than fifty percent at this stage.” Which was to say that “with whatever means we try to detect saola, it is more likely that we won’t detect them.” Saola are that much a will-o’-the-wisp, that much a phantom, even in the places most hospitable to them. “And that’s kind of scary,” he said. “Because without detection of saola I just don’t think there’s a chance in hell we can save saola.”
Or at least not save them intentionally. Another school of thought maintains that the saola’s best prospects for survival may lie with the general protection of nature reserves—the removal of snares and enforcement of hunting prohibitions that benefit all species. Perhaps saola, left alone to steal through the twilight background, will enjoy peace and relief enough to carry on unbeknownst to their admirers. Such a proposition may be consoling if unprovable, a sort of last stand for the advocates of hope.
Nevertheless, the value of detection remains immense. With proof that saola are present, the odds of securing enforcement of protective policies, not to mention public support for those policies, rise precipitously. But saola hardly make their cause easy. They occupy some of the most difficult terrain on Earth. They are preternaturally (and justifiably) skittish. And now they are so few that, like the unicorn, they seem to have melted into the air. They are the quarks of the wild world, particles so small and fleeting that they defy our powers of seeing and measuring. We know them better in theory than we do in fact, and in our effort to detect them we may even nudge them away from us in a macro demonstration of the “observer effect”—the distortion of data by the act of measuring. What we know, compared with what we want to know and have convinced ourselves we need to know, is pitifully small. At the poung specifically, and in saola research generally, we have come a long way and striven hard to place a few large but doubtful bets.
Fortunately, however, we are not at the end of our options, and new detection possibilities remain. The Saola Working Group has investigated using dung dogs like those that sought out the last rhino of Cat Tien in Vietnam. The dogs would have to be trained to locate other scats in addition to those of saola, for they cannot search the forest day after day without reward. Perhaps they might be trained to seek out serow or muntjac scat to keep their motivation strong. Their trainers would still face a difficult challenge in keeping them interested in saola dung when they seldom or never encounter it, and unfortunately, not much saola dung is available to support the training. Only a small amount was collected from the few animals that were briefly held captive. Most of it was swept away or mishandled. And saola dung surely does not persist long in the muggy forests where it is likely to be found. Overall, the prospects for such a program are at best fair—an effort to find saola with detection dogs could wear out a lot of dogs and a lot of handlers—but if funding can be found, it may be worth a try.
Alternatively, advocates for saola might invest in leeches. Truly. The wormy bloodsuckers can go without feeding for months at a time, and while they are fasting, traces of their last meal persist within them. Researchers in Denmark have successfully extracted the mitochondrial DNA of leech victims from the innards of more than two dozen species of leeches—both in the laboratory and in the field. With the help of Nicholas Wilkinson, a young British doctoral candidate who has doggedly researched saola in Vietnam, the team analyzed twenty-five leeches that Wilkinson collected along the Annamite cordillera. Twenty-one of the samples yielded nonhuman mammalian DNA. Animals identified from the recovered sequences included cows and pigs (no surprise), serows (in three leeches), and ferret badgers (in six).2
Most interesting among the identified DNA sequences was that of a muntjac in one leech and Annamite striped rabbits (Nesolagus timminsi) in four. The Danish researchers assert the muntjac to be the Annamite, or Truong Son, muntjac (Muntiacus truongsonensis), but because the status of truongsonensis as a distinct species is unclear, identifications in its name remain ambiguous.3
The range of the Annamite striped rabbit, meanwhile, widely overlaps that of saola. Rob Timmins discovered the species based on dead rabbits offered for sale in Lak Xao in 1996, and a Russian team derived a formal description of the animal from collections made in adjacent areas of Vietnam in 2000. Now the evidence of four leeches, which Wilkinson gathered by merely walking through the forest, demonstrates a way of detecting the rabbits that is infinitely easier than physical capture or camera-trapping. What works for rabbits might work for saola, too.
The scientific paper describing these breakthroughs is almost gleeful in its celebration of the leech, particularly the family of jawed leeches, Haemadipsidae (the name translates as “blood thirst”), which is widespread in the Asian tropics.4 Haemadipsidae are ideal for latent genetic analysis, say the authors, “due to their diverse prey base and readiness to attack humans, making them easy to collect.”
Alas, no saola DNA emerged from the distillation of the leeches, but no one really expected there to be any. This was a first try, with a tiny sample. The point was to determine whether the method would work, and it did. If it can now be implemented more broadly, perhaps the presence of saola will be confirmed often enough and over a large enough area to suggest that one or more breeding populations exist and that so beautiful and enigmatic an animal may still have a fighting chance to survive.
The branches of innumerable saplings have been cleared away and the broad leaves of swamp plants clipped back. Stones now form a landing under each of the cameras, and each has been double- and triple-checked for the correct settings. Olay, shedding his famous gray raincoat to increase his heat signature, has hopped and crawled through the cameras’ fields of view at least twenty times, and for good measure Robichaud and Simeuang have followed with their own imitation of a wary, mineral-hungry ungulate. These rehearsals have sparked realignments of the cameras more meticulous than the aiming of a satellite dish. The wedges that effect the fine-tuning have been cut, deployed, rejected, and replaced with tedious repetition.
The sun is low. No more than half an hour of light remains. Olay and I exchange a glance. It would be nice to get back to camp and off the trail before full darkness has settled. Robichaud inspects and tightens the bungee cords that hold each camera to its tree. He doesn’t like the way one of the Reconyx models is aimed. He takes it down and straps it to another tree trunk. Then he lumbers through the field of view not once but twice. It fires both times. He checks the double set of cords that bind it. “Okay,” he says. “I guess that does it.”
Simeuang hefts the duffel, now almost empty, in which the cameras traveled and sets off on a faint trail leading downstream from the poung. It’s a trail we have not used. Robichaud leans the other way, shoulders turned toward the macaque playground and the way we came. “Hey, where are you going?”
“This trail is quicker.”
“It’s late. We don’t have time to try a new trail.”
“This trail is quicker.” And Simeuang fades into the darkening trees.
We follow. Where pathfinding is concerned, there’s no point in arguing with the woodsman from Pakxe.