Tuesday 13th (I think). I have been working really hard and drinking a lot of coffee. I need to keep working but my brain won't do it. I head out instead up Nui Quyet. It is dark already. A toad flops away through the grasses. I can see the city and now the Muong Thanh Hotel is covered with gold striplights which constantly worry my vision; the serenity of the city view is lost.
I try and explain, to myself, why being on the hill feels better: the lack of such constant visual stimulation, the cool breeze, etc. It suddenly is obvious that there is such a thing as reductionism. Because I have to find some variable to explain why being up here makes me feel better. I refuse to acknowledge it's real until I've explained it. Nothing rational about that. How could science even happen if we all did that? I did it, though. I’m always doing it.
Wednesday 14th.
Đồng Hới. From the 9th floor of hotel. Everything seems like a great greyness. It did all the way down. Sky and land. Keo-clad hillsides and... I don't know what. We stopped for a car wash, I remember. I photographed the pylons. Was there anything else to it? It seems like trying to describe an empty spreadsheet, or a piece of chipboard. Or some of the blank paper that the keo will end up as.
Here in Đồng Hới the patched-up painted boats in the harbour seem alive, vividly so. Not just because they have eyes painted on their prows. Great greyness otherwise. Why do the boats seem alive?
Road up to Trường Sơn. Again we're travelling through nothingness. Scrub and keo. Keo is the hybrid acacia that state programs suddenly began planting everywhere in about 2008. It was touted as Vietnam's successful reforestation of 'bare hills' (i.e. old swidden fields). As I understand it, it was really a way of making money out of the terminally infertile land created by the sedentarization of an agricultural system that relied on movement. I believe Vietnam went to the World Bank for a a loan to support its paper pulp industry and the guys at the Bank said "well we don't really have anything for that right now, but we do have this environmental grant; if you call it a reforestation programme, we might be in business." I don't know if that's true. I heard it back in 2010 or so from someone who worked at the Bank. It sounds true and, in fact, I can't help but feel a sense of vicarious satisfaction on behalf of the WB staff who worked out that ruse. Finding clever ways to achieve their objectives and build something that worked in a world constructed primarily of haphazard bureaucratic mandates: it's satisfying. An Italian great uncle of mine once got government money to repair his commune's rooves after the earthquake. The rooves had all fallen in, years before from general neglect but now they're neat red tiles, the diaspora have returned for holidays and the place has been thriving.
Anyway we're driving through this empty land where the hills are all combed into keo rows neat as those Italian rooftiles and I'm trying to remember what it would have looked like before. I remember the old road to Prao from Đà Nẵng. How the forest would begin to crest the hills in bronzed reds and greens. There was forest then, I do remember. And then, suddenly it’s not in my memory but outside the window; that's the landscape we're driving through, just like the old road to Prao. By the road it’s all still bottlebrush-thick keo stems but on the hillsides there’s forest. Not good forest, exactly, there are plenty of gloopy vine carpets, but not so bad either: the trees have elbows, they have gloss, and they give the hills texture. Trunks are blotched with lichen, hillsides are blotched with red patches of young leaves and buff patches which are flowering crowns. It's hard not to believe there are elephant in there. Saola, surely, could be happy there too if it weren't for the snares. Have we covered this area?
And by the road it's still keo. The opposite of the situation you get in Thetford forest and, as you read in The Overstory, along American highways. Rather than a strip of natural forest left along the road as a facade for the plantations, we have plantations seeded along the road where it’s opened up patches through the forest.
Keo isn't an attractive tree; its bark looks like the crust of a dried-out puddle, its leaves look like they've been sat on. The occasional specimen that is allowed to reach maturity can achieve an ash-like grace, but for the most part they don’t get much above reedy saplings. I recently read Sophie Chao's "In the Shadow of the Palms" in which the oil palms, as described by the Marind people of Papua, have a menace about them that's frankly Lovecraftian. I can't see the keo in that way; they're just so young. Huddling little missionaries. School groups. When you see their bodies, stripped of bark and tumbled in heaps for the trucks, they look like matchsticks.
And then we round a corner and the keo by the road stops too. A rucked green velvet landscape with a serpent eagle, bow-backed and split fingered, turning over the mouth of a valley. In the distance a great chunk of mountain, like the back of a hatchetfish. We've ratcheted up a notch. Still 9km from the highway.
The straight arm of a vine reaches out over the road in a salute. Is it the American one1? I don't know. I stopped acquiring this kind of knowledge.
And then the hills behind switch to karst; a long ridge like a dragon's head (there's always a dragon's head in there somewhere) and we're round the corner into white Chinaberry fountains, little hidden sunset bursts of lantana and arcing plumes of bamboo; in other words, trash. Dark board-flanked houses, hanging red flags and dogs in the road. "Dog for lunch" D- jokes when they won't move. Under another karst dragon a huge combed carpet of keo accurately reproduces the bare earth’s contours 4 or 5 metres up.
In a landscape which reminds me of Cao Bằng in the north, a bottle-green river winds through fields where buffalo move. Huge karst mountains frame it, far vaster than the pillars of Ha Long bay or Ninh Bình. On the verge of the road as it sweeps round the valley, I can see a slew of multicoloured rubbish bags, like a compound eye melting on the slope.
Why am I drawn to that one detail? Once it was in a spirit of generosity that I spoke about litter and sewage and dead birds; giving them the right to be beautiful too, or at least part of the tapestry. Now it's a defence against the beauty of the mountains. Or, rather, against the reflex of drawing conclusions from that beauty; letting it shine on my furniture and make alterations. As if the forest we had just passed through really did still hold saola just because it was big and beautiful. Saola and clouded leopard and crested argus and gaur and why not even rhino and Siamese crocodile in the rivers? Why not? There was a serpent eagle.
For reference, I might just as well have said 'England has buzzards, so why not bears?' “Serpent-eagle” sounds cool but they’re pretty common as large raptors go.
The eatery in the commune centre has bare concrete walls but it has WiFi. There's a sign outside in English, for the tourists who now regularly pour through on motorbikes. We are brought, without our asking, a heaped bowl of serow meat. That's not normal. It looks tender; I can see the roots of the hairs in the curls of greenish fat. D- asks to take it away because I won't eat it and to bring pork instead, which they don't. Later I regret this; I'd have liked to meet the hunter.
The people there say it will take a day to walk to the village we want to reach. I had forgotten such a thing was still a possibility. Stupid.
So, when D- goes into the custard-coloured palace that's the border army office, I spread my sarong out on the grass and try and weigh these things up under an even sky. This distant village we want to get to is the closest to a certain mountain. The village is on the south side of the mountain and, last June, we were talking to people who lived on the northern side. Those people, for the most part, had never heard of saola, although one old sorcerer and one slick young party secretary were exceptions. From the old man it turned out I had recorded the name of the beast in one of the world's most endangered languages. I didn't know it at the time and I'm still not sure if I should do anything about it.
It might seem that it would be a bad sign that people have never heard of saola and, 20 years ago, perhaps it would have been. Now, though, given that it's the middle of the saola range in eminently suitable habitat (though the top of the mountain is rather high), it's actually vaguely encouraging. Saola are now so rare everywhere now the only reason people in other places have heard of them is very likely because conservationists and the media have made them famous. One hunter I know in the north told me that he decided on hunting as a career when he came back from the war. When he and his brothers caught a saola, none of them knew what it was and they had to ask the village elders who, of course, are now all long gone. That was some time in the 70s and he was reportedly one of only 4 or 5 hunters of his calibre in the area. Had saola not been ‘discovered’ in 1992, those 4 or 5 men and their families might be the only people in that area who remembered them now. In a couple of days interviewing in a similar-sized area last June, we weren't necessarily going to find the people with equivalent expertise; assuming they even existed. What we did find was a description by a young man of a dead animal being carried out of the forest by a group of hunters. He didn't know what it was but it did sound like a saola from the description. Unless this man was being very clever to no obvious purpose, this was a believable report precisely because he didn't know what he was talking about. He couldn't have been telling us what he wanted to hear.
Unfortunately, we couldn't get the location of this report pinned down on a map and, anyway, that saola was dead now; the question was whether there were likely to be more. The mountain was generally seen as a stronghold of wildlife over that area and, though high, was well watered rather than being karst limestone. What's more, on a similar mountain to the south, we had relatively common reports that saola survived. Reviewing the data, I wondered if the two mountains could really be that different. If the southern one was a high priority site, shouldn't the northern one also be considered? I had to consider negative as well as positive evidence. All things considered, it seemed likely that, if saola were living on the north side of the mountain, we might be quite unlikely to hear about it. This was the opposite of Vu Quang, site of the saola's discovery, where everybody knew that there were saola in the park but no-one could give any reason why.
So the northern mountain gets bumped up the ranking. Not as high as the southern one where we have positive evidence. Not reliable evidence; it's only what some people say, but positive as opposed to negative. The fact is that, from what we'd heard from the villagers on the other side of the mountain, if saola were living on it, we would be unlikely to find out.
When quizzing - or interrogating - me about the principles of just talking to people to find out about saola, people tend to focus on the positive evidence. The first question tends to be whether people are going to misidentify saola and the second tends to be whether they are lying to us. Both of these things happen all the time; which doesn't mean I don't get caught out by them. However, I think the predominance of these questions has something to do with our hypothesis-testing approach to evidence. We are encouraged to think that the null hypothesis is that the beast is not there and we must get evidence of sufficient quality to show that it is. But there's no particular reason it has to be that way around. You could say "well it was there twenty years ago, so let's assume it's still there until we can prove otherwise." That's a particularly appealing view if you happen to be, say, the director of a nature reserve who doesn't want to be accused of losing a species; but it isn't inherently wrong. A long time ago, I arrived at the idea that the only sensible approach was to abandon hypothesis testing in this case and consider instead what the probability was that saola were present in any part of the landscape. When you look at it this way, it's often the places without reports that cause headaches. It's easier to ask: "could this guy be lying?" than "if they were here, would we know?"
Rather uncomfortably, this attitude to evidence has made me rather more sympathetic to conspiracy theorists. Debunkers can argue 'there's no real evidence for any of this' but the conspiracy provides an explanation for why such evidence wouldn't be expected to exist anyway. While, from a hypothesis testing framework, young earth creationism and the lizard people are both things I don't believe in and belong in the same box, from a subjective probability framework, the former is astronomically less likely than the latter. And there aren’t any boxes.
..That's not what I was supposed to be thinking about...
Was it worth the two or maybe three days to visit this village on the south side of the northern mountain? We had other places to get to and precious little time. In the decision analysis formulation of the value of information I had to ask whether the things I might learn in that village would be likely to change my actions. That meant whether they'd change the site prioritization which I'd hand on to the NGOs involved. Not only that, but I had to think whether the knowledge we might get from other places might be more likely to change my actions. I'd already prioritized this mountain, including its southern flank; so changing my actions would mean de-prioritizing it. Therefore, information that saola were absent was, in theory, more valuable than information suggesting they were present. In practice, of course, it didn't feel that way at all.
Really, at the end of all that, I didn't have much more to guide me than 'let's stick to the plan.' I have a terrible weakness for restrategizing and it's cost me a lot. I wandered off to have a piss by the fence, watched some unusual ants and then came back and read Charlotte DuCann's After Ithaca; a truly beautiful melancholy chapter about leaving London. H- under the tree was reading a book too, protected from the sun by her red hoodie. D- still hadn't come out of the office.
But in the end, whatever had been going on in there was concluded and we were in the car to the large village that the team had briefly visited before. We arrive2 at the headman's house and his wife greets us; a lady who, as she's keen to tell us, has 20 grandchildren. Her house is also opposite the school so there are always kids running into and out of the yard. D- says he's been trying to call and she says her husband has two phones but she can't get him to use either. Round the side of the house an older girl is whacking some medicinal plant to bits on a wooden slab. They've also been collecting Anoectochilus ground orchids which are grown, not for their flowers, but for their intricately patterned leaves. The price has skyrocketed, she tells us, over tea. Used to be 5, became ten, became 15, became 50 then 200. Now it's 250. D- says that's still cheap. He knows people in the city who sell it for 700 if it's the very fine young ones, though 400 or 500 is more normal. "Ah they buy it from us cheap," says the headman's wife. It's always been a concern for discouraging trade in forest products at the supply end; the traders take such a cut that they can always slash their overheads. I think it's Anoectochilus they're talking about.
After a while the headman himself shows up; a rather gloomy fellow, though a wedding's being planned. It will only take 3 hours to the village we want to reach, if we go slowly. We'll need a guide, though. Anyway there's no-one up there but women, children and old men. Everyone else has gone away to work.
Well the headman gets some people over for us to talk to. Previous interviews in this village were perfunctory and did not follow the vaguely comparable methodology I'd developed last time. There's a rascally old eaglewood collector with a monkey-skull grin and a rather better groomed old chap who looks a bit like Nigel Hawthorne. We spread out the map and it causes a surprising degree of confusion. Some streams very close to the village and the road they struggle to name. I've never seen anything like it really. Nonetheless, the monkey-skull guy casts a wide net of red buttons on the map to mark the span of his eaglewood trips from the old days. It reaches up the mountain but not down the other side, suggesting it was a boundary. Perhaps people from this village do not know the heights of it. D- asks about saola first - which I think he really shouldn't do - using the local name "La Giang." They are gone, we're told unequivocally. Then we're told also that muntjac are gone, which seems unlikely. "You don't hear them any more." Well we've been told that before. It means people used to hear them barking from the scrubby hills above the fields and now those days are over; muntjac in the deep forest might be another matter. Still, these old guys insist there are none. There were two kinds once and they really do sound like red and giant muntjac, with no mention of the sleeker, darker mountain form. There aren't 'gaur' or 'banteng' but there are 'wild buffalo' - the kind with the white in the middle of their horns - i.e. gaur, they don't use the Vietnamese standard name. They're there, easy to see. We might see them on the walk up, in fact. I've never seen one but I don't expect to now either.
We circle back to saola. What are they like, apart from the long horns? They're black, we're told, just like serow. Black all over. That's it. We're told about a Mr Quyen down by the bridge who has a pair of the horns. That was from an animal caught downstream, decades ago. So in those same forests that we drove up through to get here and which still looked so good.
I'm wondering. I'm feeling a bit silly now for fixating on this mountain. I was falling into the trap of thinking saola distribution must be predictable; that if one remote mountain had them, another remote mountain also must. Yet, one of the most basic lessons in species conservation is that, when numbers get low, survival is a stochastic process, i.e. unpredictable.
Also, in the last prioritization meeting, in fact, we had the mountain divided into its northern and southern slopes. D- spoke out against prioritizing the southern slope where we'd never even been and I said it wasn't realistic to put the northern high but not the southern. Saola would move between them if they were there. I insisted on this and now it's looking dubious. Looks quite likely from the geography that people on this southern side might well be using forest intensively right up to the top of their catchment but not much beyond. So there could be quite a serious difference.
These people from the outer village, though, say they only ever crossed over the saddle of the mountain down into Lao. It doesn't seem like they ever went right over it into the Vietnamese commune where we were last June. The in-between space remains intriguing for the initial reasons, even if I might have exaggerated its importance.
I guess we will go.
Despite protests that I'll be cold, I sleep in my hammock in the garden. There's a little altar and a white flower whose name I do not know. I'm not cold but the dogs won't stop barking at the weird man-shaped fruit so I go in to sleep on a mat on the floor. It does rain briefly after that.
I wake in the night full of worries from my life back home. I could have done without that.
Thursday 15th
The morning is a grey one and shaking with frog calls. A young woman in a long embroidered skirt is sweeping the yard. The dogs are quite friendly now.
I want my tea (left it in the car) or my phone (not connected) or my family (far away). "The empty mornings on a quest," I say to myself, and I think how it sounds. It might apply to Gawain, or someone, dragging himself up out a bramble into a drizzly morning, stiff from the night and with no idea where he's going. No matter what I say to anyone else or to myself in the future, it's still going to seem romantic. "The empty mornings on a quest," all part of the story. But my story might just peter out.
Well we set out, tramping over the shucked ropes of keo skin, on the track up through the scrub. The headman's wife, one daughter and a 16 year old kid in a black jacket are escorting us. "Scrub" back home is a dark thing, at least in my mind. The purples of winter hawthorns and brambles, crabbed and hunkering shapes. Here scrub means fresh growth, salad tones but crinkled and glabrous textures to the leaves so you wouldn’t want to eat them. The slope is long. I'm out of shape. D- is too. H- isn't coming. I'm not entirely happy about this but D- insists she cannot do it and so does she. I've left her and Hi- to investigate Mr Quyen's pair of horns, if they can find them. Up we slog. At the top of the hill we rest on some boulders and the headman's wife decides, based on our pace, that it's going to be 5 hours.
Well we get over the hill of keo and down to a proper Annamite stream, all slippery banks of dark stone. There's no hush above it, of course; squirrel-haunted vine tangles and ginger slicks, I shouldn't wonder. Still, down here I feel my spirits lifting despite my foolish decision to have set out in walking boots with no grip. These streams look like Scottish highland burns with jungle over them. This is the kind with lots of slippery banks of dark stone. "Precambrian gneiss" I always think when I see it because I read that the Annamites are founded on a base of that and have mentally applied the name to this stone to distinguish it from the granite. I wouldn't actually know a piece of Precambrian gneiss from Precambrian Adam.
The streams full of ốc, the water snails that people like to eat steamed with chilli and lemongrass. Whatever happened to those guitar-shaped ballitorid loaches with the golden reticulate patterns? I don't think I've seen them since my first swim in an Annamite stream not so far from here. Pollution or exploitation or they were never that common in the first place or my memory's at fault.
Why did I wear boots?
At a little fall, the women stop to pick snails and the boy is left as our sole guide. He's never actually been to the village before, 3 hours walk from his own, so he doesn't make much sense as a guide. "How old are you?" D- asks,
"16"
"16 and you've never been to the next village?"
"I don't go to the forest much. I go to school."
He's small, with a round face and big square eyebrows. Big, earnest eyes. D- asks him if he has a girlfriend, which is a perfectly normal question for middle aged Vietnamese men to ask teenagers they've just met; kind of like ruffling a smaller child's hair. Literally, the word is 'lover'. The kid says he doesn't. Why would he want to love?
Sometimes he gets his phone out and plays music on the trail. This is normal also.
He wears a black T-shirt and jeans and a black sports jacket, this last sometimes backwards. That’s less normal. I used to do that.
Well we come upon a vegetable garden by an abandoned camp and two rangers who have arrived on motorbikes. So you can get here on motorbike, eh? Apparently it's "hard." Hmph.
It's not like the walk won't do me good but I can't really spare the time. The next hill is actual forest. Halfway up we find a broken motorbike. It’s hard to legitimately get enough certainty to feel angry around here.
D- tells me that this trail was part of the wartime roads. Before the war, this was Lao country, after it became Vietnam. “So where was the border before the war?” I ask. “There wasn’t one,” he says, “this was all Van Kieu country.” In other words, this used to be ‘Zomia’3. I bet the French put a border on their maps, though. Wonder if it’s the same one we have now.
We pass the rangers at their new camp and have tea with them. Pass through a gate and then we're out of the forest and quite quickly into the village. Wooden houses, jackfruit and tamarind trees. Black bullocks and trampled litter. The kid asks me the English word for 'cow'.
It was only three hours after all.
The headman's not there. We sit on the verandah of his big, empty house, listening to cowbells and the kid's music. When I say the house is empty, I mean it's literally empty. Nothing in it but sleeping mats. The kitchen is a separate, much more ramshackle house on its own stilts, accessible by a separate ladder. Probably where the home is. There are a lot of young men milling around in the village. Clearly they haven't all gone off to the cities at all.
In the end we give up on the headman and proper procedure and go and meet some people. We do one interview with a somewhat elderly, somewhat groomed guy who has guided the border army in their patrols across the mountain and who has the uniform and certificate to prove it. There's another guy there too but, while he says a lot, not much of it is about the topics we're interested in. What he says, mostly, is "they've forbidden everything. How do they expect us to eat?" The answer is that they expect you all to go and get jobs in the factories or construction sites, as the headman of the village below said you had done. Stop being peasants and become workers. So many people fought with full hearts and spilled them over these mountains, all so this could still happen?
Saola, the army guy says, are gone. Long gone he says. Also, like the guys down below he says they are entirely black. Not only are there no saola, there are no muntjac either. And not only that but the gaur, which everyone knows are present, have all gone to Lao. There aren't tigers but the tigers haven't been gone all that long. Muntjac have been gone longer. The crested argus, a pheasant, is also gone. Oh they've been gone a long time. The other guy says. Twenty, thirty, fifty years.
There's no way that's true. Twenty years ago they were common. One on every hill.
Overall, an unsatisfying interview. Negative, but so pessimistic that its hard to give it credence. Turns out it will be the only proper interview we get to do in this village it took us so long to reach.
The men are busy making a house. Timber has been felled, planed and varnished, with notches cut to fit the beams together. There's nothing rough about it. It looks like an IKEA kit for a house. The work seems to be orchestrated by a guy who's clearly a natural comedian. His mouth is actually set into a slight Joker smile by years of being sardonic. We chat here and there but it's hard to strike up a conversation. Someone asks me how old I am and I feel a sudden horror at the answer. I've been doing this so long now. After so many declarations that this was the last final push.
Back at the headman's house. Still waiting. I don't feel I'm really bringing my A-game to this village. Maybe it's because I don't 'feel in my gut' that saola are present. Maybe it's something else. I should be out there striking up conversations despite the awkwardness but I tell myself we must wait for the headman and organize something this evening.
A pig has arrived in one of those cylinders of wire mesh that are used to transport pigs on motorbikes. They are shaped like ants' eggs and are just big enough for the pig. When the cylinder is hoisted up, she squeals. She knows its bad but not how bad; still snuffling inquisitively at the hands that hold her. They will have a hog roast for the new house. They're hauling her out by her legs now and I can hear her deep grumbles of protest but protest is all she does, really. The little puppies and children want to see.
A woman is washing under the water tanks but hastily finishes so they can throw the pig down on the concrete floor. They tie her feet to a pole. The headman's back. A young, handsome guy with a big loop of rattan on his back. They have the pig over the rock now and a big bowl for her blood. I can still hear her but it's suprisingly subdued. All the men have a hand on her. Holding her tight. We are having tea with the headman and he seems almost pathologically distant. I manage to engage his eyes for a few seconds, telling him that our work is easy, we just want to chat to some people about animals. "They've killed the pig" D- says and I say not yet because she's still twitching. The bowl is full of her blood though so I suppose she's properly killed. The headman goes inside without really having agreed to anything. Cue more waiting on the verandah.
"I'm so bored without internet," says the kid our guide. "I'm used to always having internet." He sounds quite plaintive.
He thinks that America's maybe a better place to live than Britain because in America you can make millions on YouTube. He pronounces it "Zoo Too Beh." He hasn't heard of any British people making money of YouTube but Americans clearly can. Like that Mr Bean; he's very rich.
He's a sweet kid and you couldn't make it up.
Vietnamese hog roast starts with just chucking the whole pig carcass on a brush fire and then scraping the burning hair off with a machete. It's not a big fire so they keep hoinking it out by one leg and chucking it back on at a different angle. We go down. All the village men are there, still very much engaged in tasks. D- is talking to the schoolteacher, though, who's obviously from the lowlands. I try to join in but find it hard to ignore the fact that the dead pig's vulva seems to be looking at me.
In the little house next to the headman's, I find all the men crammed in and drinking - to my great surprise - water. The Joker is in a hammock holding court and he is literally rolling about with laughter all the time. I have never seen anyone laugh so hard and so long, not only at his own jokes, but at all. I exchange a few polite words within all the hilarity but fail to command the room. What's wrong with me? Am I just used to starting out from being the centre of attention because I'm white? Or am I unprepared to take the leap and start talking about animals because of this weird listlessness I'm still feeling? What's wrong with me?
Well dinner at the headman's and it turns out the reason he was being so weird earlier is he thought he might get in trouble for the rattan collecting. Once we reassure him, he's perfectly friendly and the ruou starts to flow. We still don't get much information, though. Apparently we ought to talk to a guy called T---, who knows the forest. Other than that, tidbits of conversation that more or less confirm what we heard before. One important thing. The headman met his wife on the other side of the mountain. It's not really much of a boundary at all; they cross it all the time. So it does seem rather like the belief that saola are gone does apply there. It's a big difference from the other mountain to the south, where we are headed next.
Then karaoke with the rest of the men. I do my best with a Vietnamese number and then someone finds a video of "Take me to your Heart" by a band called Michael Learns to Rock. It's been a Vietnamese favourite for at least 15 years. In the video 'Michael' looks sweaty, a little puffy, trying to force meaning back into lyrics that never really had much. Halfway through a bright-eyed starlet in a ballgown swoops in and begins duetting with him in Chinese. So he's big in China too, I guess. There's arm-wrestling which I obviously lose, dancing - by just one guy, and photos with the foreigner. The Joker, who was present but no longer laughing, leaves the room. I'm the centre of attention now but it is just too loud to ask anything. This would be a great thing to do if we had another day but we have to leave in the morning. I'm older than any of them.
After a while I excuse myself and go back to the headman's house to sleep.
Friday 16th
At 5am they start up the music again; they are going to raise the frame of the house at 7.
We watch that and then leave.
We got almost nothing in that village. I am tearing strips out of myself for my lackluster performance. The sight of four white winged magpies swooping over barely lightens my mood. Being a machine for ecological data collection has its satisfying elements. You go in, you perform the procedures, you get the data. If you don't then it's just a failure and you have to do it again. I'm making it seem far too simple. Just bitter, really, but it's true you don't have to show up exactly to collect ecological data in the way you have to for interviews.
We didn't quite get nothing. There's no longer a secret mountain of mystery. Just a mountain where we don't have very good information but where the information we have suggests no saola. It might still be a priority because the competition isn't great but I'm wishing we'd gone back and pinned a location on that record of a capture from last June. Too late to do that now.
But the morning forest does wash the self-criticism out of me. Greater raquet-tailed drongos, ratchet-tailed treepies, a red junglefowl trotting off into the undergrowth and a nice red headed trogon. Emerald doves too, bolting off through the understorey. These are secondary forest 'trash species' but they make me happy. Back at the old ranger camp, there's a Pallas' squirrel in the branches and the clearing's filled with that sweet waxy smell that I've never been able to place but is characteristic of the Annamite forests. It's maybe a little like vanilla.
Back on the streams and the kid tells me again that I should buy some rubber sandals like he's got. I already told him they don’t fit me. Listen kid, me and those sandals...
and I realise he’d have been six on that day when I pulled off my leech sock in a hotel room in Huế to reveal a foot that like a slab of Freddy Kruger's face. Me and those sandals have a history.
Ugh.
In the keo there's nothing but tit babblers calling.
We crest the hill. In the distance, over the keo and the broken places, great green-grey karst mountains of the kind that incite longing. No way a karst mountain holds saola but, because the walk has raised my spirits, I'm able to feel again what it was like to believe in distance. Shangri-la out there somewhere, floating in the mist. The thing is, it's easy to say there are blind spots; there's something left out, the world is wild, vast and full of hidden places. Sadly, the rats and the snares spread under the canopy, clearing them out. Hope comes mostly in the shape of mountains and I'm wise to their wiles.
I mean the vine introduced by the Americans as military camouflage. Not an American salute, whatever that is.
Ugh. Sorry about the tense change!
Scott, J.C., 2010. The art of not being governed: An anarchist history of upland Southeast Asia. Nus Press.