Field trip diary 3

"I failed that kid"

Sorry this is a bit delayed. Last week was full-on report writing and I didn’t have the time to flesh out these notes.

21st March

Today we are going to head to the southern side of the southern mountain. Last week we were on the northern side.

I have 2 salt coffees in a cafe outside the hotel, trying to get my head around the workload. I look at the little cup with its layers of white, black and cream, standing on the wooden shelf above the racing street. Ever since I first spent time in the forest on my gap year, coffee has meant civilization to me. I'm not making a value judgement about either, I think, just noticing how close they are in my mind. Coffee and civilization.

Unfortunately for my equanimity we then head uphill into a coffee growing area. Unlike any other crop I can think of, coffee is really forest-coloured, nothing like the keo. The sprawling bushes in the red soil hold their own darkness round them, dancing slowly in the fissures. They wear their cherries like stacks of bracelets on their outreaching arms and each big crinkled leaf holds its unique landscape of shadow. The redness of the earth they grow in makes it clear what their dance is breaking. You know I can think of another crop that's forest coloured: oil palm.

D- stops at a roadside cafe because it has a beautiful view. Looking out over distance and mist, I see pylons, crop rows and adverts on the hills. The break is very welcome though, and there are white-eyes in the tree.

We stop in Khe Sanh for com binh dan. Spiced aubergine makes a good change. Drinking bitter ice tea at the steel table after, I remember the last (and first) time I was here, many years ago. There were yards with stacked racks of filleted bombs, dug out by detectorists and brought back for sale. In this part of the country alone, scrap metal was a forest product, like honey. Although you could only really get stung once.

A line of wind turbines on the ridgeline! Dragonfruit tendrils spilling over garden fences. Brick-red rashed earth. Agricultural patchwork over it. Heading uphill.

Is that a Liquidambar growing in the scrub?! Not something I'd expect to be a successful invasive here.

The roadsides are thick with pink-flowered Melastoma bushes and behind that there's a bank of low-thick forest, grown thick as a privet hedge from thinning. It's liberally seeded with slender bamboo but the bamboo's not forming stands. Behind that the forest rises older and taller but something seems off about it. So many landslides leave clefts of red dust; there's something almost flamboyant about the wounds as if, like the slow-dancing coffee plants, the forests are participants rather than victims in the drama. The weather is low, close and grey and I'm listening to an In Our Time episode about 1984 on my headphones. Perhaps that's why the landscape seems hostile, unhomely. One of the panellist claims that, according to Orwell, it is in our bodies that we will know Fascism is wrong while another counter-claims that, according to the last third of the novel, the body is the great betrayer. Are my 'gut feelings' about this forest worth anything at all? My education says very firmly that they aren't; I should weigh up the indicators or shut up. Of course there's always the problem of choosing the indicators in the first place.

The soil coming down the slope is yellower already. There's a misty patchwork of a new commune down below, waters which flow towards Lao. I can see the pinkish offices from miles up here, squatting innocent by the river.

A little later, H- and I are sitting in the heavy shade of a strangler fig in the compound of one of those offices while D- and Hi- are inside again. I take photos of the dust and cake wrappers, thinking they might come in useful for a Powerpoint background someday. If I'm to keep on doing Powerpoints, that is.

Paperwork done, we head off to the village. We pass the new village of Cuoi, still under construction. "What pretty houses." Hi- says.

There's a sign about Ha Tinh langurs. D- says they found just 2 in the area but they attacked someone on a bicycle so the FPD caught them and took them off to Ha Tinh. How much of this is true, I don't know. It sounds pretty improbable but a lot of true things do.

We head off down a really bad bumpy dirt road; not a particularly common thing in Vietnam these days.

I'm no longer listening to podcasts. I'm supposed to keep my attention on the world outside the windows. However, perhaps because that world is bouncing around so hard, I found that my mind has drifted off into a weird fantasy of what we will find.

I imagine that we will arrive in the village and found that someone has a saola that they have just captured, bound and dragged out of the forest, still alive. I imagine I'll be able to send emails titled "request immediate assistance" and that, this time, it won't be an embarrassing false alarm. Then I imagine someone from some organization in the city turning up to say they will do nothing and cover it up somehow. Gets to the point where I am imagining them threatening to kill me and and me threatening back to haunt them forever.

What was that? That was embarrassing

The river winds glassy through the gateways towards Lao. Spiced with another kind of distance. The haze seems to promise. I’m looking west through a shift as big as the Bosporus. A different kind of distance from the kind the mountains promise.

The area seems specially poor but, again, I wonder. Am I biased by the red soil. Red soil was in the background on Oxfam ads when I was a child. Does it make everything in front of it's backdrop look “third world?” Then I see a thin and doleful old man, listless as a captive langur himself, on the verandah of a bamboo-walled stilt house and I think: no it's not just the colour of the soil.

Walls of woven beaten bamboo. The largest building is the school. Concerned and serious faces at our white car.

The village head’s house. A tiled floor. We have the map out and are talking to a guy in a green pith helmet. A fat little puppy finds a place behind the flower pot. A truly huge wasp searches the ceiling joists. Kids look in on us. A bright pink hose is stretched across the yard. In the kitchen shed, pans are strapped like scales on the wall. A baby, strapped to its gran, reaches out for the bamboo counter-top; makes to grab but can’t hold against her moving. Gran’s skirt is black and silver. After they’re gone, a mouse pushes through the space where they were.

It's hot. First day it's proper hot, though still not very.

Incredible humbug striped orchid on a dead tree by the washing line. Big soft woman washing up in shirt that says “comic sans is my enemy.” She's pregnant. Our host’s wife, I think. H- has been on her phone for ages!

So there is a lot of lazing around. Someone is booked for this evening, but not someone I have met. D- and I go down to river to see the border. They're embanking it. We meet a guy who introduces himself as the ‘king of the forest’ of the area. He Googles it for us. He’s a successful businessman whose business is various plantation crops and with a vision of helping the local economy. I want to talk about the real forest, though. On the Lao side people are able to hunt more, where there’s still less gun control. People go over there to hunt. Lot of serow being hunted.

The man that comes over in the evening has two names, one Vietnamese, one Lao. Saola? Lots in the past; about 10 years ago they caught lots. He himself has hunting dogs and he keeps them at his house which is in Lao. Saola now? They’re gone. A typical answer except that elsewhere it was 20 or even 30 years ago. Bears? sure, gaur? sure, about Crested Argus there’s confusion and he seems to be describing peacock pheasant but then at the dinner table after he describes argus clearly. A discussion also about using serow dung as medicine. It might explain something from an old report…

Dinner is a big spread. Green tablecloth over a silver table out in the yard. Barbecued ca mat; only here they call ca xanh. Lots of other fish. Ruou too, and I have too much. The village head, who knows D- since 2019, is a well-nourished, friendly man. Disarmingly un-guarded as these things go. The story emerges, and it seems it’s a story that D- already knows but which I’ve come late to. A young saola with no horns was apparently caught by people in a nearby village in Lao. They didn’t know what it was and they killed it. A couple of place names are given - streams we have mapped, beginning with ‘x’. This was after some of our team had already visited the area and the people knew we were on the lookout for saola. But it was covid- time and the border was closed. The headman couldn’t go over there and check it out. And those guys don’t have smartphones, only Nokias. They couldn’t take a picture. What did it look like? It had white marks on face, yes, but the main thing is that they didn't know what it was. Those guys know serow.

Well I say, raising another shot, that I hope next time that’s not what will happen. The headman says earnestly that he hopes not too. If it does, though; if someone else does kill a saola and he gets to hear about it, which bits should they keep to show us? The head and the horns, supposedly? The question catches me off guard. I say ‘well this species is much more precious alive’” but he already knows that. “I suppose,” I say if another one is caught, and it’s dead, and it’s a male and an adult, then it would be best to keep the reproductive parts. I say this because I know that Pierre in Washington, who has long talked about cloning, wanted to get the testes of a male that was killed a while back in Lao. Well they all laugh: “the black box!" I’m not at all sure I should have said that.

22nd March.

We go to the next village where we can meet these people who caught the little saola. And this village - it’s like the old days, like Aur. It isn’t strung out along a road with houses aligned. The houses cluster in a companionable herd. Bamboo-slatted houses, woven walls, stilt-standing. In the middle a metal lamppost that turns out to be strangely flimsy. The kids like kicking it and watching it wobble, like constantly ribbing an awkward outsider. The village has harmony.

It also has house sparrows, I notice as we’re waiting. The urban sparrow in most of Vietnam is the one that, back home, we call the tree sparrow - with its coffee bean beauty spot and chestnut crown. Tree sparrows are much slighter than house sparrows - it’s instantly noticeable when you see one up close - and the house sparrows seem to simply muscle them out of the urban space where they’re otherwise perfectly happy. From my hotel room balcony in Vinh, I’d watched tree sparrow families ducking in and out of the tunnels under the green corrugated iron roof of the school across the way. Their days, it would seem, were numbered. I’d seen house sparrows on the streets of Vientiane last time I was there, and I’d found a colony in a little temple in the fields outside Tam Ky once. There could still be many generations of urban tree sparrows in Vietnam, just slightly smaller generations each time.

Anyway, we’re ushered up into the house of this village’s head - a slighter, more serious man whose bamboo wall is hung with a neat array of framed government certificates - one of which is from Lao. “Organized house” H- says. “More organized than my house.” I say, which is entirely true and so shouldn’t be funny, but she laughs.

Two older guys come in, one tanned and jovial and one with a sparse grey beard and a look to him that makes me pay attention; call it an apolitical look, he’s here because of what he knows, not who he knows: a hunter. When he moves his hand, it’s as an orangutan does, like the hand is heavy but must nonetheless must go where it must go. This is Mr P-, the drunk guy who didn’t want to give away his saola dung. Also the guy who killed the little saola we heard about at lunch. We’re talking about it pretty quickly. The other guy is Mr Đ-, he also joins in. The headman, unusually for a headman, doesn’t say a word.

My job, here, is really to assess as best I can if this really was a saola and… well… it sounds likely that it was. White on the face - OK that’s clear but serow also have diffuse white markings. What about the legs? White on the legs, yes. Mr Đ- indicates to halfway up his forearm. Oh. But then P- says no, it was just a little bit of white. Any horns at all? None. It was a newborn. It’s not that easy to get details. When asked the colour they say it was black but ‘a different black than serow’ but they cannot describe this ‘different black’, even by indicating objects in the room. H- thinks they do not have the vocab. “A little line of hair on the back of its neck”, says P-. He doesn’t say a mane and anyway a newborn wouldn’t really have one. It’s not a helpful feature, though it makes it sound more like a real thing that he witnessed rather than made up. Both men seem familiar with saola in general, having caught them in the past. But not with newborn ones. Are they familiar with newborn serow, though? Oh yes. P- has killed lots and Đ- brought one home once and kept it for weeks until it escaped. I guess this must be true. Why use ‘escaped’ as a euphemism if you’ve just told me you’ve killed lots. All in all. If it’s not a saola, then it’s unlikely to be a case of mistaken identity. Not impossible, by any means, I can totally imagine heading to a village to see a captured animal with exactly this description and ending up with a serow, but not that likely. Deliberate misdirection is a lot more likely. It was, reportedly, just after D- had visited the area, and in the same high stream he went to.

Just after that.

There’s more to the interview. Lists of captures. Inventories. Who knows the forest and who doesn’t. Not only the look of the village but the character of the information is nostalgic. Everyone knows everyone and the village has a story. It has a story of how many saola it has eaten over the years. Meat brought back and shared, animals goggled over and divided. In the strung-out villages the traders can come in their cars, stop at a point, conduct a transaction and leave. I had a good shirt on. I felt in control. I imagined I was conducting myself professionally. It’s just that I was looking forward to the point where I could close the car door and then pound it from the inside and swear. Maybe that, also, seemed like a professional thing to do.

We walk the little way towards the ford. I encourage H- to come: “walking is good for the brain” but she is not feeling well. “I have my period,” she says, simply, which - again - is not something I have ever heard anyone say in Vietnam before.

I clench my fist as I swing it. My knuckles are white and I dig my fingernails in. I cannot dig them in enough.

The headman of the lower village, the friendly guy, is talking about a rumour of a tiger that was camera trapped the other year. It sounds so convincing.

A male and female Troides helena flutter past together low. He seeming to pester her. Her legs hanging down. Under the blossom trees by the marker posts. The other village across the stream.

It was so close. Just after D- came. Of course, there was nothing to do about covid but if I hadn’t been giving up, burning out, wondering what to do with my life, trying to find a way out of saola and failing. Getting time to myself to write, talking about myths in manor kitchens, sleeping out, writing poetry. It all seems incredibly selfish now.

And the mother might still be out there. Might be coming back again to that curtained place on the hill. That serowish wet wood up away from where humans come, except that they come everywhere. Looking again for a place that is safe to raise another child. Being out of options.

What about my children, though? What about this being it? One last job, get it done, write the report and go home. Spend the summer writing, working outdoors if I can swing it. Not trying to make this work any more because it’s hopeless. How can I decide it’s hopeless now? And writing? How self-centred can I get.

My Hanoi equanimity is no longer a thing and I am no longer just doing my job. In fact, perhaps I am not doing my job so well at all. Instead of beating myself up I could have found other questions to ask, could I not? That ‘different kind of black’ is pretty dodgy, isn’t it. Perhaps that would have been the time for a little ‘trick question’: “spots on the haunches, yeah?” something like that. Why didn’t I?

In the car, quietly biting my hands, punching my leg. No outburst though. Not professional, just small and sad.

Back in the first village. I sit at the plastic table in the little Kinh-run stall. A sack’s thrown onto the concrete floor and I can see fur through the gap. “Saola” D- says laughing. I can see the hair is brindled and I know it’s a joke but still it’s a bit much. It’s a small boar with the head cut off. A border army guy comes to buy it.

Reviewing H-'s notes and talking to D-. I understand that I have seriously misunderstood something from the interview. I had thought that Đ-, the ‘other guy’ was talking about the dates of the capture of the little saola; saying first that it was last year, then “3-4 years ago” before P- himself said that it was 2019. In fact, H- tells me, he was talking about an entirely separate capture, in a different stream. And at last, he says it was actually seven years ago. So perhaps the mother - or the father - has also since been caught. Pushing captures back in time is a common tactic for someone who thinks perhaps they’ve said too much.

The green tablecloth again and beer this time, instead of ruou. Jokes about “the black box” again. Lying on the floor waiting again.

I failed that kid. I failed her mother. Someone should saw my feet off. And how can I be forgiven? I ask myself. Who will recognise it as a sin, except an oblique one against humanity? I realise that I do not want to be forgiven because I am so intent on proving that the calf’s life and the hope for the species mattered. Or just on proving that my failure matters and I am therefore important. I hit my feet repeatedly with phone. It’s foolishly inadequate.

We have one more interview, with a much more farmerish wiry guy in a buttoned shirt who comes to the table and is clearly far too freaked out to say anything. Previously he claimed a saola sighting. Now he denies all knowledge.

And that’s it. We drive out. And yes, that probably was the best area we’ve seen yet.

H- and I have a conversation in the car about what the best fruit is. She turns out to be a durian fan. I am too, but I wouldn’t want to durian every day. It’s like Christmas pudding. For versatility, you can’t beat a good mango, I say. I have got my face back, though it’s rather strained.

Driving back through the same forest where I’d heard the ‘1984’ podcast, I think it looks fine. It looks great actually. Scrappy by the road but that's to be expected. So much for gut feelings.

And they weren’t Liquidambar but native maples. Something quite French about the shape of them, over the bananas and the Imperata. Like those big poplars with lots of elbows on some invisible bar.