Friday 16th.
Getting back to the village, the kid and I go through the empty wedding dinner tent to wash in the stream. D- is already there. Then we leave, avoiding the wedding. I connect to WiFi in a roadside cafe. Weirdly, I see Paul Kingsnorth has posted something that talks about Scott's 'Zomia', which I suppose is where I’ve just been. Where I am now, even. It’s comically governed now.
We head on southward to the next place where we get put up in the police station. Dinner with one policeman and one local resident (Đ-), his relative. Fried fish and frogs legs and slightly bitter greens. It's good. H- jokingly asks if I'd like chips with the fish and, to be honest, they would be pretty welcome. Fish is very good though. Usual big round stainless steel table. Usual cans of beer.
Saola, Đ- says, are still present but rare. This is encouraging. We just came down from the south side of the northern mountain in this area. Now we're to the north side of the southern one. Previous interviews by the team on the south side of that mountain gave the strongest indications of saola presence anywhere, but those from the north side were much more ambiguous.
Now that I was here, it was clear that, at least for this one man, common knowledge was that saola were rare but still present rather than, as in the place we'd just left, a beast from the past. So that is encouraging. That is the main thing I came here to get a sense of because the general perception of saola survival seemed different in the interview reports from either side of the mountain.
He himself caught saola in khe S'kai which we don't have on our maps but, apparently, it flows down to C.M. village, meaning the A.R. catchment. It was "more than ten years ago" which appears to be the third of four categories of time that people use round here: "last year", "3 or 4 years ago", "more than 10 years ago" or "in the old days." He's not really old enough himself to use the last one. As to description, he says that it had long horns: 70 or 75cm long; which is fine but everyone knows that. He also says that he's seen them a total of 3 times but is thoroughly vague about the other two occasions. He says their footprints are more pointed and their strides longer than those of serow: "40cm long" he says, spreading his hands to about 80cm. This could be any levels of true or any level of not. He could be making it up on the spot to sound convincing, it could be knowledge passed down which he can't apply personally or, just possibly, he can actually identify saola by their footprints. The last is not probable, though; identifying footprints of ungulates is a real skill and not one that, even under the most generous assumptions, this young man can have had much chance to practice with saola. It's why I give more credence to some claims about dung or feeding sign than about footprints. I suspect the two other encounters, if they exist at all, of actually being with putative sign rather than living saola. He's not willing to say anything more about them anyway.
This is as much as we’re able to get in a lot of cases; snatched interviews with nervous farmers who don't really want to talk. But we're having dinner with this guy so we have the chance to dig deeper. Also, we're having that dinner in a police station with his cousin the policeman so he's clearly not worried that he'll get in trouble for having killed a saola once. Rather, the danger here is that he'll exaggerate his knowledge, perhaps in the hopes of working with us and perhaps just because of the beer.
We're talking about our families and he says he was married in 2006 "the year after I came back from Lao, where I caught that saola." OK, so now we have a date. We also have an update on the capture location; if Khe S'kai is in Lao, then it can't be in the A.R. catchment at all, though it might be nearby. I'm pretty clear this is what he said but, when we go over the conversation again, the next day, H- can't remember it. Still, he and the policeman were both talking at once so it would make sense that she missed it. We also get to quiz him more on what the saola - and saola in general - look like. That's where the blow comes: "they’re black, just black, like serow. Apart from the long horns, they're exactly the same as serow." That's as bad as further north, a description worse than you could get by Googling it. And it gets worse still; apparently they're serow from the neck down "except they have a longer mane." That's the opposite of the truth because serow have a mane and saola don't.
A horrible realization trickles in. Isn't it likely that, in this area, the word 'saola' has come to be applied to some serow. This kind of thing is not unusual; in our earlier work on bears we found that people usually know the names of "horse bear", "pig bear" and "dog bear", probably because these names appear in old Chinese medical texts. They apply them to the bears they see even when most or all are probably the moon bear, Ursus thibetanus1. Some French hunters and naturalist assumes this meant sloth bears occurred in Vietnam.
Sure, this guy mentioned the saola’s long horns were 75cm long but that could be received wisdom from the old days. It's amazing what we'll claim is true because we've heard it, even if our eyes say something different. What’s more, his description of the stride length didn't fill me with confidence. In contrast to other areas, where people conclude saola are gone, people here have maybe just assumed that some of the serow they see in the forest must be the 'la giang' they heard about from their parents: "yeah, now I think about it,” people probably convince themselves “I reckon those horns were as long as my arm - they curve backwards, so it doesn't look like it at first but they were. Definitely."
It suddenly seems certain to me that this is what’s happened. It would explains why this mountain, with nothing obvious to recommend it, is the only place in the country where ordinary people still report seeing saola. My ability to resist the conclusion's magnetism has been weakened by the beer. It's just me and H- left drinking now with these two and I'm ready to call it a night.
Still, this guy did tell us to talk to an old guy he knew - a Mr C-, and gave us his phone number. At least we have something to do tomorrow. We'd better get there early, though, he says, or Mr C- will be off to the forest.
Early, in Vietnam, probably means about 6.
Saturday 17th.
I slept badly. Dreamed about a mouse in our house, eating popcorn. Cheery morning music is playing in the police station. An empty bird cage, hanging under the water tank; a downed moon moth in the damp. Things like that don't matter, just finish the mission and go home like you said you would. I hear black-throated laughingthrush calls at preternatural volume but I haven’t seen a cage. Turns out the policeman is playing them on his phone for some reason.
I step over frog roe and severed toes. Little chicks, scraggly, gang together in the yard and make sallies. One snips up a grey, spangled longhorn beetle, dopey from the lights.
I wait and I wait. We were supposed to meet this guy early. Where is D-? For the first time on this field trip, I am actually itching to go; the lassitude of the last few days is gone; I'm on the trail. It will probably turn out to be a serow trail but it's still a trail. Can't let it go cold. Where is D-?
OK apparently he's arranged to meet the other guy first. Q-, who was my first priority when we arrived. OK OK... We are in the car at last and heading back up the road. We stop at a little shop with a chainlink screen. Mr Q- is the old thin guy but it's the serious-looking younger man who engages us while setting his 'phin' up on a mug. He offers us only tea and I watch the tar-like coffee drips enviously. While I try and answer the guy's questions in my most reassuring tones and D- leaps straight in asking about saola again, Mr Q- jumps onto a motorbike and zooms off. "Where's he going?" H- asks.
"I don't think we handled that particularly well" I say as we pile our maps back in the car. It's the kind of understatement I can only say in English, so only H- hears. What is wrong with me on this trip? After having talked this area up in Hanoi, my confidence has really been bruised from the "long mane" comment last night. Assessing whether 'saola' really are saola has long been the aspect of the teams skillset I've worried most about and it's exactly the one critics will pick up because they're all biologists and think about identification first. If Mr C- has gone to the forest and we spend the morning hanging about, then I am liable to start dangerously tearing strips off myself.
But Mr C- is at home. In his tiny, dark house, hung with wedding photos of his children, his tiny voluble wife holds forth on their grievances while he himself, sits silent and satyr-like beside her. I can only understand a portion of what she says but it's clear their grievances are very real; the children who made it to the photos are not all the children there were. How exactly she feels the authorities failed their son, I cannot grasp and it is maybe not my business to enquire. Still, I feel like a bastard for waiting to turn the conversation towards wild animals. Last year I was better about being a good human.
Still, eventually we get the man talking too. I said "satyr-like," but there's nothing mischievous about him, no guile. His thin cheeks make his face pointed, his hair is wild about the ears and he has a little beard, that's all. He tells us straightforwardly about the animals and he says they are 'hết.' It's a word I hear a lot, but then everyone does in Vietnam, especially in restaurants with an overambitious menu. It means gone, used up, finished, no longer available. Sorry. Not only are things gaur hết, even muntjac are hết. There used to be lots of them, but now they're no more. Of course we've heard that before, it means they are no longer calling on the hills by the fields. Often this kind of litany means someone just doesn't want to talk to you: "Nope, no animals, don't know anything about animals. They're all gone. None left. Goodbye." Doesn't seem to be the case here, though. The couple are speaking openly and seem quite pleased to have visitors. He's just telling me simply that, sorry, they're all gone. Then we get the map out.
If there's one thing I'm proud of about the interview methods I've developed, it's the maps. They change everything. We talk about the streams and tributaries, sketch out mentally the areas this man knows about. The top of the mountain too. Oh well, of course, if we're talking about there then muntjac aren't hết at all. Still plenty of muntjac up there. Gaur too, come through over the far side he's heard. And, yes, he knows la giang, he caught one in Khe S'kai back in 2007.
Ah ha - well Đ- from last night said that this man was the one who taught him and that his saola was in 2006 or 2005 in the same place. We can pretty much assume they were the same one.
What was it like? Quite like a serow, but big and round like a cow. Long horns, of course. The feet and the tail, they're like serow's, nothing special about them. It had white marks on his face like serow do. "Does it have a mane?" I asked. "A mane? No."
OK that wasn't a great description, but I'm somewhat reassured.
We can't quite get Khe S'kai on the map (though we do work out that it's name means neither brush-tailed porcupine "Se'kai" or Malayan porcupine "S'koi") but we get the approximate area. He thinks it would still be the best place to look, though he can't give a reason and I'm always very dubious about this kind of claim. I'm not at all sure I'm rendering the stream names at all right, by the way.
Out of the village we get a flat tire turning round but we change the wheel easily. For the first time on this trip, things seem to be working OK.
After lunch we go to the ranger station. We had a report from a ranger, a Mr Th-, about some people from a certain village having reported saola sign. People from that village, we already knew, visited areas over a large spread of forest and it mattered where this record occurred, even if it was only sign. D- offers to drive on to get a look at the forest. It's noonday so we only get tourist views and, in fact some tourists do power through on enormous motorbikes2. I can assess forest views under the blazing sun but I can’t really love them except in a 'sure I love them' sort of way. Morning and evening are when the clouds and beasts are moving and at this time of day it all seems rather flat. The only visible animals are the little swifts that cloud around the bridges where they nest. The species should really be renamed 'bridge swift'; there's a 'house crow' and a 'house sparrow' so why not? I never see them anywhere else.
Back at the ranger station, the standard photos of all the species hang. Some are from camera traps and some are from zoos. The round-faced ranger, Th-, is holding court, he's in charge here. There is too much beer, of course, but ranger stations have their good sides too. The dogs tend to be friendly, and the food tends to be good. This time we get aubergine which is welcome. At home I'm vegetarian and mostly I don't drink.
So Th- has his ideas about where to look for saola. Units 35 and 36, he says, because "that's where local people say saola are." It's a reasonable location (I check the map later) but I'd need more than that. Is that because those people you mentioned saw sign there? No, it's unrelated. He also says that camera traps photographed a saola in September but it hasn't been made public yet. That clearly isn't true.
A young guy in a white shirt is introduced as being from the village and has, in fact, seen a saola. It's not the sighting D- heard about before; he saw it just a week or so ago, a little way up the road. D- asks if he could show us the place after lunch. After all, if we could find some dung, he could save us a whole lot of trouble; no-one's definitely recorded a saola for ten years. The young guy gets a shade more reticent after that; I don't think he appreciated what a claim he was making. On questioning he says it looked like the picture hanging on the wall above us; exactly like that and no difference and no further questions help. It’s the same picture that hangs in the stairwell in the office in Hanoi, the little calf with the Bidens daisy by it. Almost no horns. The sighting sounds so certain to be a muntjac that we don't even bother going up the road. As we're leaving there's a discussion about what animal is depicted on the badges on the rangers own sleeves. Th- says it's a serow, then changes his mind and says it's a saola but the tailor messed it up. It's a large-antlered muntjac. I don’t say this, of course.
But we went to the rangers because of who they knew, not what they knew, and we did find out who it was that supposedly saw the saola; not sign, an actual saola now - though D- thinks perhaps he misunderstood the first time. Anyway it's the same people that the team interviewed last time, so tomorrow we'll try and find them again.
Sunday 18th
I dreamed I was in the church where my grandfather used to preach and I ran straight into him when he came out of a side-chapel. "What's the matter?" he asked, as the occasion demanded, "you look like you've seen a ghost." He was wearing a black cassock which I don't think I ever saw him wear in life.
After that, I was in Plum Village, the monastery in France founded by Thích Nhất Hành, and I'm in some sort of queue. I can hear the master's voice among the chanting, or perhaps it's a recording. The chanting is strangely disharmonious; it turns out some people are singing the old version and some the new. A tall, soft-spoken black man is talking to a friend of mine who is a monk. Cards change hands, business cards or identity cards, I'm not sure. Finally it appears my friend does not want whatever the man is offering, at least not yet, and the man comes over to me. "So you're in Vietnam, are you?” he says, “Quảng Trị? Quảng Trị’s very nice."
"Mostly Quảng Nam, actually," I say, which isn't true. I'm flustered; I have a suspicion who he is - or what sort of thing. I don't think he's a Buddhist.
"Are you coming with me?"
Am I? But what else can I do? Stay here in this queue with this confusing chanting coming from I don't know where? We're walking out to a car and I ask where we're going.
"Outchurch."
"Outchurch?"
"Come and find out."
I am terrified but I have to decide. I have to go. And that means I wake up.
It's early. I decide to write up my fieldwork diary from the previous days. I spend quite a while looking on the internet instead. I read "Questions for Wild Christians" posed by 'Flat Caps and Fatalism' which I appreciate and then I finally get down to it. A deafening noise comes from all the walls at once. A cicada is in the room somewhere. D-, who clearly has better directional hearing than me, finds it behind the TV and glares at it till it stops.
After a while, I can hear gibbon voices and I wonder if it's a recording or if someone has managed to teach the caged laughingthrush3 to imitate gibbon calls. For a while it goes on in the background of my typing until I realise it's actually gibbons. Behind the roosters and the dogs and the odd bikes on the roade on the hills opposite behind - behind the shop. How is that possible? I go out to the road. The hills are all fog but I can clearly hear them, the falling-rising loops of their wolf-wild, man-happy calls; they're actually out there. Then the tower starts its announcements, drowning them out and immediately I doubt. My directional hearing is poor as we’ve just established. Were they a recording all along coming from the tower, before the announcements? Sentiment in the Voice of Vietnam? It seems more probable than the alternative.
But no, there they are again, behind the shabby whitewashed house, the little creek with its bevvy of white ducklings. A woman and her dog scowl and bark at me in confusion as I sit on the bridge listening, then turn back and go the other way. The gibbon calls die away. A grey wagtail zip zip zips down to the creek under the taro. Frogs insist at the duckpond, their calls like elastic creaking. Quacks and crows and clucks and puppy whimpers. I heard them, though, the voice that is the song of the wild in the old poems of this place. That Thích Nhất Hành missed in the tamed forests of New York. That have long vanished from the Chinese gorges where poets heard them, that are so goddamn easy to shoot, damn them. How can they possibly be back?
I'm bewildered for a while. The world has been restructured in the night. Humans weigh 10 times all wild mammals and still I heard gibbons. I don't know what to do with myself.
After breakfast, I am able to reason. It's guns that threatened gibbons and guns are now effectively controlled in Vietnam so, despite their nuclear families and slow population expansion, it makes sense that gibbons are no longer just in the high haunted hills. Did they ever get as rare as saola? It's hard to say because saola don't sit at the top of trees whooping for hours every morning. You get to notice these distinctive behaviours when you work on a species for a while. They often turn out to be surprisingly relevant to ecological survey design.
Well we go to meet Đu-, the headman of Ho. He doesn't talk much at first so we do some correction of stream names on the map while he says he doesn't go to the forest any more. He soon opens up, though and says that M- with the missing fingers and Tr- have both seen saola. Also a man who they call 'Man' because his name could be taken to mean 'Woman' who we should definitely go and visit because he's the best. Can he put us in touch with these people? He hesitates, then shouts out his window. The guy with the missing fingers comes up and the conversations begin in earnest; he tells us about a recent sighting, though a dodgy one, and a capture that perhaps is quite recent too.
After a while we all decamp to Mr Tr-'s, a nice place clearly set up as a homestay for tourists. Over beers - well our beers and his tea - he tells us about a famous capture from the old days and we chat more generally about animals and then our team leave the rest of them and go on to 'Mr Woman's', sitting round a white table under his house with all various dangerous-looking implements shoved into the charred rafters above. Mr Woman really does seem to know about the forest, answering efficiently and, for the most part, accurately, though he does say some odd things about pheasants. While we are there, his little boy accidentally kills a chick. The boy's mother comforts him as one might if he'd broken a glass and puts the stricken chick on top of a box in the corner, where it stays.
We hear a lot in these interviews but what we don't get is the definitive real story behind what Th- the ranger told us. I have a distinct impression that a saola was killed, not just seen, "3-4" years ago, within the nature reserve but I cannot be sure.
I can be sure, though, that these people, most of whom the team have already interviewed definitely know what a saola is as they describe it well enough. My 'saola means serow here' worry has been thoroughly dispelled. Describing saola well in general doesn't mean that all sightings are necessarily reliable. I hear about a sighting made in the company of an NGO staff member that seems rather improbable. I imagine a fleeting glimpse of something that M- later convinced the NGO guy, and probably himself, was a saola and not a serow. Đu- later said that, in the company of the same guy, he saw a tiger which seems really improbable. I try asking if it was a normal tiger ‘or a black one or something' but he just says 'it looked like a tiger.' You can't really get people to describe something that iconic, or rather you can but it makes it obvious you don't trust them and breaks the flow of talk.
Mr Woman says that, while bears are certainly still there, tiger haven't been around since the 70s. But then he corrects himself, noting that a gold-seeker was apparently mauled by a tiger just recently. I hoped to use people's beliefs about bear and tiger, among other species, to 'calibrate' their beliefs about saola. It hasn't worked that well because of the mythic status of tigers and the fact that people say bears are commoner than saola pretty much everywhere. Crested argus pheasants, though; a once-common species. Here people say 'oh yeah sure', when in other areas they're universally either 'gone' or 'maybe in the headwaters' like saola. That's a good sign, surely. Although, like gibbons and muntjac, they reveal themselves by their calls. You don't get 'sure they're still in there somewhere' with Crested Argus so much.
There are saola in the nature reserve because, although people don't hunt there any more, they were still trapping saola when the reserve was established 3 or 4 years ago. It was nearly six years ago actually but I'm not sure when things got real on the ground.
In the old days. Or, rather "more than ten years ago" people often used to say no-one went to the forest any more and you just had to wait till they were all a little drunker because the forest was full of snares set by villagers. I haven't been in to the forest recently, though, and not into this forest at all. It's possible that this is actually a fantasy that slowly got truthed-up from behind, like the national border after the war. There are definitely still plenty of snares in the nature reserve forest but it's possible they're being set by a stubborn rump of diehards. As the gibbons showed, I'm somewhat out of touch.
Still, I asked for funds to do forest based interviews. There wasn't the money.
I wonder how I'd feel if saola, the species, just managed to bloom again without any special help, as the gibbons have done. I'm relieved to feel sure that I'd be simply happy. Perhaps it's the beer but I don't think I'd care much that I was wrong.
It's definitely the beer that lets me consider it as a likely scenario, though.
Well, probably.
Anyway, another thing I've got from these interviews is that these people, for the most part, are clear that there's more chance of saola on the mountain than in the area to the east. That confirms what I'd thought - or what I'd thought that they thought. So that's good. We have totally failed to track down old Q-, the guy who zoomed off on his motorbike which was an embarrassing screw-up. However, even without him, I think I have the answer I wanted to get. People on the north side of the mountain are less optimistic about saola presence than those to the south because the mountain is a smaller part of their area. When asked specifically about the mountain, they seem to agree that saola are present. Overall it is quite different from the place we just left.
Beer and barbequed crayfish in the evening at the police station. A new, more senior policeman arrives and gets us drinking so he can check if we're spies. I leave to do some work after a while but promise to rescue H- at 9pm. I go to sleep off the beer first on one of the beds. The policeman chases off the assembled women and children outside the door by telling them I'm from Interpol.
At 9pm I go to rescue H- and get her sitting in front of a laptop pretending to work until the policeman goes to bed. I stay up late myself, writing up diary.
Next stop is the south side of the mountain but we have to head down to the city first for more paperwork.
The sun bear is the only other one in the country. I’m not dismissing the possibility of sloth bears out of hand but there really are good reasons to think they’re unlikely and really nothing tying the ‘pig bear’ name to them except that it would kind of make sense as a name.
It's a route established based on war relics but appreciated for other reasons now Vietnam means more in the West than just war. I hope the forested hills are among those reasons, though doubtless I overestimate their importance to the average visitor.
There was a real one, after all.
Field trip diary 2.
Enjoyed this much. I have to dive back into your older posts as I’m new here. But I was sitting on the edge of my seat.