March 16

Nam Mon, Camp 3

We have a morning to burn. Robichaud plans to visit the new ranger post by the border, a kilometer past the poung, and to recheck the cameras along the way. I would go with him, not least to explore again the turn in the river where Phok saw the saola, but my endurance is shot. For the first time I beg off, saying I’ll stay in camp, the better to muster energy for our afternoon start downriver.

At camp the previous evening, I pitched my tent in the dark and crawled in, hardly able to move. An hour later I straggled out, famished for a cup of something hot. Khamdy, with a scarf wound around his head, was at the fire stirring rice. In the flickering light, he looked like the Sheik of Araby. Dinner was the usual sticky rice and small fish, mostly head and bones. Occasionally the wind gusted, blowing fire into the brush around us, lighting a crackling blaze. No one paid attention, and the errant flames soon burned out.

We lingered an hour in the firelight. Khamdy told us he had never seen a saola. He knows of the animal, as he knows of tigers, but he has never seen one of them, either. He was born in Ban Navang thirty-two years ago and has four children. He’d like to get married but lacks money for a proper celebration. He looked up from the fire, his lower lip drooping. “But there’s no hurry.” He grinned.

When the time came to turn in, Khamdy spread out the largest of the tarps, and he and the teenagers wrapped themselves in their blankets, side by side, on half of the tarp. They pulled the bottom half over themselves, and their bivouac was set: five peas in a tarpaulin pod.

Later, I woke to the sound of a violent wind battering the trees. I went out, scanning with a light for snags that leaned toward our sleeping places. The temperature had dropped; the weather was changing. If rain came, the slickened boulders would make our river route a torture, but I crawled back into the tent, too weary to dread it.

Come morning the wind is calmer and the sky only brooding. The temperature has dipped to the midfifties Fahrenheit, seriously chilling by the standards of the place. Robichaud, Simeuang, Olay (in his armor of leech socks and raincoat), and Khamdy, shouldering his carbine, set off for the border post at 7:30. I go back to the tent and sleep two more hours.

When I wake, Thii and the other boys are downstream fishing, pulling their nets through yet another pool. I have the luxury of time on my own. The strip of sand and brush where we are camped feels claustrophobic, hemmed in by the canyon wall. Across the river, though, I see a patch of land that looks flat, perhaps even spacious.

I pick my way across a bridge of boulders and push through a curtain of bamboo at the river’s edge. I step into cool, dim understory.

I am in an alcove hollowed into the mountain. Although the wind growls high in the canopy, all is hushed below. The ground is soft, the air musky with leaf mold. Somewhere, water is dripping. At one side of the alcove a rock bluff descends in a series of wet ledges, hung thickly with ferns and something like watercress. A tunnel of light has bored through the canopy to fall on the green cascade, like light from a clerestory.

Years ago, in the mountains where I now live, I used to come to glades like this one hoping for revelation. I especially prayed for an elk or some other large animal to appear. I knew my hopes were greedy, but I waited just the same, sometimes a long time, as a hunter would wait. The elk and the bear never came, of course, not to my summoning, but the waiting proved rich with gifts I did not seek. One time I leaned back from where I was sitting and felt something under my hand. It was a long-dried-out nugget of carnivore dung. It sounds disgusting, but it wasn’t: the dung had become a crust of crumbling earth, nothing more or less, and it contained a surprise. In it were the hock and hoof of a fawn or perhaps a bighorn lamb. The digestion of the carnivore, probably a mountain lion, had bleached the bones, but the shrunken shell of the hoof remained black. I did not know what to make of my find, except that it was a powerful token of the fierce business of the woods. I kept the relics as a talisman.

The forest of the Nam Mon.

I wait now. The fern-hung bluff glows with a shimmery luminescence. In ages past, Flemish and Tuscan painters, depicting the miracles of the Bible, tried to capture on canvas such a light. Against my will, I imagine a saola materializing from the shadows and walking into the glow by the bluff, its head high, ears forward and alert, enacting the kind of miracle I used to wish for.

I tell myself not to wish for something absurd. But I wonder, half dreaming, if I were capable of waiting here indefinitely, like a dryad or an ent out of Tolkien, how long would it be before a saola stole through this silent space? How long has it been since the last time? A year? Five years? Ten? Within the past decade, tigers would have prowled the canyon of the Nam Mon, perhaps lingering in this bottom, observing much, fearing only humans and their rifles. On occasion, a lone rhinoceros might have lumbered through these damps, the rhinos of these parts being forest animals, unlike their African relations. A clouded leopard might have lounged on a low, thick branch, might even have hunted from such a perch, staking out a trail, although nobody really knows how clouded leopards hunt. For that matter, nobody really knows, in depth, how life goes on here. This alcove being a place of deep waiting, the clouded leopard might have waited for a muntjac, or a young saola, or any living thing to pass near. Perhaps a pangolin trundled into view. The pangolin wears an armor of horny scales and possesses the digging claws and humpbacked posture of an anteater. It zaps insects with a gluey tongue and, when attacked, rolls into a ball and exudes a vile stink. No more improbable an animal exists anywhere.

The progress of creatures through the alcove, in slow time, would have delighted Darwin and astonished Noah. Furtive civets would have slinked by, and the tiny spotted linsang would stalk lizards and other prey. Overhead, I imagine a binturong bumbling in the crown of a tree, and on the forest floor a python, like an animate log, gliding through the tangle. My imaginings play on as badgers and pigs of various species snuffle by, rooting in the leaf rot. The treetops hum with the gossip of doucs and macaques. A gibbon comes looping through the branches, lank arms fast and deft, and a slow loris blinks sleepily at the commotion. Suddenly, out of the firmament falls a bundle of light as a silver pheasant flutters to the ground like a ball of fallen moonbeams, there to scratch in the duff. Periodically, packs of dhole course through the alcove, a half dozen or more ranging together, lean, tireless, and always hungry. And people, too, a band of Yellow Leaf People, as lean and hungry as the canines, who perhaps shadow the dhole in the manner of the Atel, hoping to claim a haunch of muntjac. Perhaps hunters or honey seekers from the settled villages drift by, hardly leaving an imprint, at least in generations past, for their numbers and firearms are few and they lack wire for “modern” snares. They also lack connection to distant markets, so they kill only for local use. At intervals long enough to try a dryad’s patience, the alcove may even witness the ghost of the forest, the little red phi kong koy, shuffling bowlegged through the half-light and uttering his unearthly shrieks.

The abundance and diversity of the past seem magical today, although such wonders are scarcely past. Fifty years ago, when I was a boy learning to fish and shoot in tame old Maryland, the Annamite Mountains still brimmed with an almost full complement of native biota: only rhinoceroses might have been ecologically extinct, though a few no doubt hung on here and there. Years later, these mountains remained mostly intact when, fresh from college, I tried to learn the ways of the southern Rockies, which by then were generations removed from their grizzly bears and wolves. Sad to say, even the diminished diversity now found in the Annamites may well seem magical in some near tomorrow.

The bald facts bear repeating. About half the world’s people live in Southeast Asia or the adjacent countries of China, Bangladesh, and India. Southeast Asia (including Indonesia and the Philippines) leads the rest of the world in the proportion of its birds and mammals that are found nowhere else. It also leads the world in the proportion of its biota in grave, current danger of extinction. No part of the region has a tradition of effective biological conservation.¹

Within this matrix of value and loss, the Annamite Mountains, as one conservation manager put it to me, are “up there competing for the number one spot” in terms of their importance to biodiversity. Within the Annamites, Nakai–Nam Theun is similarly superlative, being the largest and most species-rich protected area in the range. It also has good, if unrealized, prospects for effective management, thanks to the assured twenty-five-year income stream from NT2 power generation. Doucs still troop through its treetops, and the diligent searcher, with a modicum of luck, may yet hear the outlandish cry of the crested argus. The sambar, binturong, and colugo remain. A cacophony of birds prevails. The large-antlered muntjac sounds its bark in the night. The python, although lamentably rare, keeps its place, and at least a few streams, like the Nam Mon, retain their otters. Surprising to relate, in a far corner of NNT, elephants continue to wear paths through the forest. Despite the riot of wildlife wealth, however, a theme of loss plays on.

One fall morning in New York I spoke to Joe Walston, a Brit who directs the Asia Program for the Wildlife Conservation Society. He remarked that someone from Roman times glimpsing the dewy hills of contemporary England would shed many a tear, appalled at the transformation of the land. The vast, primeval oak forests have all been cut. The big mammals, from bears to pigs, are gone. In their place are red foxes, hedgehogs, and a largely nonnative environment, which nonetheless has been immortalized in the literature and music of a great culture. If anyone cries over the English landscape nowadays, it is over injury to the storied green hills, not to the biota they replaced. Transformation now similarly sweeps the developing world, although much faster, and it affects ecosystems that are incalculably richer. What took the Romans and ancient Britons several centuries to accomplish now gets done in decades. “Our role,” said Walston, “is not to prevent change but to guide it.” The best that can be hoped is to effect a sort of triage, painful though it is to watch. A country that today has 60 percent of its land in forest may soon be whittled down to 20 or 15 percent. “Our job is to guide where that remainder percent is going to be, to keep those areas representative of the indigenous flora and fauna, and to assure that they are of a size suitable to protect those species.”

Triage is a principle of emergency medical care. After a battle or a great disaster, attention and resources go first to those who are badly wounded but have a chance of surviving. The mangled dying are left to die. The politics of extinction assert similar priorities, and on the battlefield of the present, unlimited crises, finite funding, and uneven government capability and commitment force a torrent of anguishing decisions. George Schaller decided long ago to stop working in Laos. “The government is not serious about conservation,” he concluded, and so today he devotes his energies to places such as Tibet and other areas of western China, where good intentions, in his view, have a better chance of translating into facts on the ground.

The fate of the saola hangs by a thread, and by the principles of triage, it might be abandoned. Yet a fragile, hopeful logic favors it. Its genetic distinctiveness places it in a special category: it is its own species, its own genus, and perhaps even its own tribe within the subfamily Bovinae. Moreover, so little is known about the animal that no one can say for sure that its game of survival is past winning. For nearly a century, Edwards’s pheasant, another denizen of the Annamites, escaped detection in spite of much looking. Many gave it up for lost. And then, in a desperate last effort led by WWF, it was found again in hidden retreats, where it still presumably clings to life. The saola, like the pheasant, may yet have a surprise for its advocates. More important is its significance to its biome. The saola’s defenders like to say that it is the “flagship species” of the Annamites; if its mystique and charisma can be used to rally support for vigorous protection of large tracts of the mountain range, then many other species of mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians—the whole remaining Noah’s ark of the region—will benefit immeasurably.

And finally there remains the fact, which is enough for me, that the saola fascinates. It enthralls. Like the unicorn, it combines enigma with beauty, which are perhaps two sides of the same coin.

The alcove is still. The winds in the canopy have paused, and the only sound is the drip of water down the face of the green bluff. Imagining the past of the forest has felt filling, like a deep inhalation, a breathing in. My flight of fancy leaves me invigorated, and in a way more hopeful, as though it filled the forest itself.

To imagine the future yields the opposite sensation. It is a breathing out, a long exhalation, an emptying of the land. At the thought of it, the alcove seems to darken.

Breathe in, I think; breathe in.

Hours later, it is raining enough to darken the river rocks. Then Robichaud and the others reappear.

At the ranger post, a modest rectangle of poles supporting a corrugated roof, they found no one and not much sign of recent human presence, only a sleeping bag hung out to dry. Optimistically, one might conjecture that the rangers were out on patrol, a prospect more cheering than the idea that they had retreated to another location while their current excuse for not patrolling expired. Ironically, the kilometer from the lick to the ranger post, the one walk I did not take, turned out to be a pleasant stroll on level forest trail, the easiest going of the journey.

At the poung Robichaud, Simeuang, and Olay rechecked the cameras while Khamdy watched, ever amused. They installed one more camera, a fifth, on an approach trail. Almost reluctantly they shouldered their packs and filed back toward camp. The expedition’s mission had been accomplished. There was nothing more to do except await the retrieval, weeks hence, of the data cards from the cameras. The time had come for us to go.

We paused for a lunch of the usual rice and fish bone, and as we ate, the sky miraculously cleared and the sun striped the land with shadows. By the time we were packed, the color of the river rocks had lightened. Above waterline, the boulders were blessedly dry.

Even so, as we proceeded downstream, I presented a spectacle to the others at every river crossing. Weaker than before, balance eroded, progress glacial, I negotiated the boulders like a geriatric mantis. Olay eyed me with pained concern. Thii smiled wryly, then danced away. After several ungainly splashdowns, I told Simeuang, with Robichaud interpreting, that I should charge him money to watch me cross the river: “I shouldn’t provide so much entertainment for free!”

Simeuang hooted with delight.

And then the unthinkable occurred. Simeuang, the acrobatic master of boulder ballet, missed a step and splashed into the river. Everyone, including Robichaud, himself already wet to the hips, had a good laugh, but the fun was bittersweet. Simeuang’s fall was like seeing a star pitcher lose his no-hitter to a bloop single in the ninth.

The crossings, bank scrambles, and waterfall scarps of our ascent of the Nam Mon now unfold in reverse, arduous but tamer than before. The trail hides no surprise: every steep that has been climbed can also be descended. The kilometers begin to blur. We examine otter tracks and scats, sight hornbills, and even spot a pair of fish eagles, giant straight-winged soarers, which Robichaud says are globally rare and have been recorded only a few times in NNT. I walk robotically, unanxious and relieved to be heading home, that ambiguous place of many definitions. Were my legs less wooden, I might feel a sense of elation. As it is, I try to make my mind smooth, a concept borrowed from Apache lore. The idea is to keep the flow of awareness open, not to let extraneous thoughts and feelings intrude, to think only I will place my foot on that rock and will leap from it to that one. And not to allow the dissent of countervoices, like I haven’t spring enough in my legs to do it or They are watching or I cannot bear another dunking. The smooth mind is purged of distraction and self-consciousness. As though refusing delivery of a letter, it rejects the complaint of the inflamed knee, the empty stomach, the weary spirit. If the mind is smooth, nothing unwanted can snag on it.

Easier said than done.

On our last evening on the Nam Mon we camp by a still, deep pool. Robichaud and I place our camp stools so that we command a view downriver, gazing into the late glow, where insects hover and dart. We bring cups of wan tea to our vigil—the best our stores can provide—and the drink is warm and welcome. The evening air tastes of the forest, and the river exhales its moisture around us. We talk little, sipping our tea amid the music of barbets and a few restless owls. Before us, the silvered river vanishes in the sunset haze, and on either side, the profligate forest broods. Breathe in.

That night at the campfire, Olay asks about getting lost. He contemplates a naturalist’s career and knows the time will come when he will lose his way in unknown country. What to do? Some say stay put. Some say follow water to people. Some wags say go home and get a GPS! Olay asks Robichaud’s advice. In so many words, Robichaud says the key is controlling your mind, and although he does not use the term, he talks about making it smooth. Ever the aficionado of film, he quotes The Edge, a tale of travelers stranded after a plane crash in the Alaskan wilderness, in which a character asks, “Do you know what lost people die of?” In answer to his own question, he says, “They die of shame.” Having lost their way, they judge themselves failures, and their sense of failure infects their decisions. They let the rescue of their pride hinder the rescue of themselves. Their minds are not smooth.

Smoothness of mind: in any kind of flow, the cobble produces less turbulence than the sharp-edged fragment. I can talk about the smooth mind better than I practice it, and I don’t talk about it terribly well. Nevertheless, much can be said for a quality of smoothness that time and difficulties fail to roil. If the saola is to survive, it will have to be a smooth thing in the mind of nature, washed over by a world of difficulty. This is fanciful thinking, I know.