This week, it's something slightly different. Rather than trying to reconstruct a field trip, with all the decisions and boring bits, I have just gone through 2007 for diary and description from my early field trips, concentrating more on editing each bit than finding the story through them.
A few people said they liked my rubythroat description from last week so hopefully this will be more of that kind of writing and a bit less fuss.
So I've given each little section a title. Feel free to scroll through and find one or two if you don't want to read the whole post.
Section titles are:
The rapids; Camped out on old wounds; Torture; End of the third survey; Vietnam has nothing; Artemis; A window on a mountain town; Secondary forest; A storm in Aur. Daydreams, Data, Desecration; Back in Aur; The Krait; Careers advice.
Hope you enjoy some of these.
The rapids
30/01/07 Bo Hon ranger station
Đức & I both went swimming in a pool of the rapids. He said ‘can you swim to the other side?’ and of course I could, it wasn’t far. I remembered a young guy giving me a similar challenge in a municipal pool in Hanoi and having to support him as he floundered in the middle. I guess that state-funded school swimming lessons make a difference: I can swim across a pool. As it turns out, that doesn’t necessarily translate into swimming across a river.
I should have tried to swim diagonally upstream but I aimed for straight across and so went diagonally down instead. I can remember seeing the rocks ahead and thinking “OK I can’t make it there but the water-bush that leans out from them, I’ll be able to grab its stem and pull up from there.” Then I watched the window in which I could do this evade me; it was just the same feeling as when a deadline slides past. And then the rapids had me and my body belonged to the river.
Afterwards, I realised there were things I could have done. I could have put my hands behind my head so my elbows would protect it, but I was untrained and book-knowledge could not be accessed there. It was the same once in Botswana, where I was on a paid-for safari and, for one day, we were walking. I remember the guide’s calm voice: ‘OK, the lion cubs, let’s get out of here,’ and then, gently chiding: ‘you ran. I told you not to run.’ I don’t remember what happened in between; I never saw the cubs themselves. It was the same in the rapids; it didn’t matter that the current was outside me this time and I think these are currents too small to be spoken of in such a way.
Afterwards, on the beach, I am chided again; this time by Duc. I can’t remember how he thought I should have done it, only that I am now capable of feeling irritation and I am supremely irritated that he - and Vietnam behind him - are capable of criticising even the way I am carried away by a current. I survived, didn’t I?
Duc clearly senses my annoyance and adroitly changes tack. “You went through that? Ah, I respect you.” Thanks, Duc. That maybe lacked subtlety but it was exactly what I wanted.
Duc’s such a boy. Just like the two-year old at the little ranger-station-on stilts. Incredibly cute and constantly delighted. Duc, in turn, is delighted with him; almost in love. Duc takes joy in children and dogs and he makes no secret of his joy. I’ve never been uncomfortable with boys who are happy being boys and I’ve learned not to let them know how I feel.
Anyway it’s a long journey by boat tomorrow, up this river. It’s hard to believe it’s the same glassy thing that rubs itself against the grass in Hue. The Hữu Trạch, it is called here, not the Hương. Where we’re going, though, it branches out into shorter, rougher names in a mix of Katu and Vietnamese. Khe Cọp, where we’ve heard of a saola capture has a name that apparently means tiger, though it’s not the normal word for tiger in Vietnamese; but it also has another name ‘Me’, which I guess is Katu. We won’t make it that far, though. We’re headed for the streams of Cha Linh and A Rai, the old location of the village of Bo Hon.
31/01/07 Boats to mouth of Cha Linh stream, through secondary forest. Beaches on the river are peppered with tracks of ungulates and small carnivores and there is some dung of both. Dry beaches preserve both but this is probably not saola habitat and I can’t take plaster casts in sand. As the morning heightens they begin melting in the heat.
We pass Mang Ca (fishgill) stream, where Đông declared a saola sighting. We’ll visit the place on the way back as the boatmen are concerned about the time.
Mr Tuoi pointed to a distant high hill which, he says, is near where he caught saola once (it takes a day to get there). I ask if this is near Khe Cop and he confirms, so I think this is the saola we're talking about. Hill is called something like 'A'rer'.
Camped out on old wounds
01/02/07 Camp near mouth of Cha Linh river.
There’s a huge elkhorn fern on a tree across the river. It looks like it belongs in a dragon king's ear, not alive and on land and outside. It clamps its grey-green fins onto the trees but the branching tongues dangle down; they’re just like those feathery wings that Chinese dragons have along their bodies but they hang heavy in the forest air.
Mr Nam, the ranger has three gold stars on his shoulders; I’m not sure what that makes his rank. Probably something I should care about. In A Lưới town he wore a leather jacket and looked like he’d like to be dangerous to know in the 50s. He’s been with us since A Roằng and is supposed to know all the people round about.
Duc drops a stone in the sand.
The sand is dry but cold underneath. Civet tracks1, piled on each other look like monkey feet. A fragment of orange butterfly wing clings to a river boulder. My heels are pink in the sand, my pen is white and looks a bit medical. The bushes that grow by the water have fine fine leaves. I worry I'm not convivial enough. The frogs checker-check from invisible places. Brown sandals lie tumbled on white stones by the twisted roots of the water-bushes and bring into my mind, for no reason I can place, the image of African waterbuck.
Duc is copying co-ordinates off his GPS. There's a fragment of canary-yellow plaster on my knee. Mr Siêng spits sideways, wearing a yellow T-shirt. Cha Linh's water is bottle-green. Siêng’s the young one; seems a city boy at heart with those clothes and a "Trời ơi” at every third breath. It’s his father, not he himself, that caught a saola and we’re not sure he knows the place.
Calling everyone ‘Mr’ makes me feel like I’m on Star Trek.
Clouds fist pink above feathery forest turning black. K’tu conversation rumbles over supper. Mr Nam swishes tea in his mouth. An ant on a mission navigates the folds of my knee; I envy her ease, her sticky feet.
Tuoi has longish, straight hair which he combs every day. He only talks soft and low, his voice like a stretched ribbon. His lip, which is bristled slightly, seems relaxed. Đông, with his baby face, big bones and waxy features is sullen and lazy. It scares me how like the killers in the film2 they are.
The bamboo creaks as Nam sits down in his hammock. Two sandalled feet appear in my field of vision. I'm frowning slightly. The feet move off, the frogs continue. People speak with a kind of confidence that sounds like a reprimand, though I cannot understand it. Swiftlets, barely visible, flutter in a sky whose blue, come evening, makes itself felt as the frogs do.
I think through the plans, the saola sighting locations we need to visit and the way our information will best complement the 2004 interview survey in Rediscovering the Saola. The problem is that we are paying by day for the boat. Today, we didn’t go far.
Stream, slippery fuzz, rust-fuzz of algae on the stones. My feet in socks do slip. I take off my boots to cross the river. Could I have crossed it if Tuoi hadn't grabbed my arm?
Why am I scared to write about Mr Tuoi?
He showed me another hill. A Tê, where he killed the saola, is a big one; though it cannot be seen from everywhere. The little one across the river is where his mother is buried. A few months after he was born, she was raped and murdered after stealing a cassava to feed him.
“We're poor.” Tuoi tells me, again and again, like nails through this story. In the film, Truman Capote says: "it's like Perry and I grew up in the same house and one day he went out the back door while I went out the front."
Great eared nightjars sail in the brow of the dusk.
Torture.
04/02/07 Camp at the mouth of A Rai
Cha Linh stream was white and meant business; it had come a long way from the mountains and its typewriter rapids seemed to rush to the river. It’s like me on my bike on the fringe of Hanoi traffic, enjoying the speed and the weave coming home. Cha Linh is a professional stream, it enjoys the satisfaction of a job well done, and by the body. It might believe in the labour theory of value and Marx might have written like that stream with those thoughts in his heart. A Rai is a stream of tanned water which bulbs into a pool. I feel its rapids might give it a headache, though it would bear the headache. Enough arrows have been slung here, surely, on both streams and out of the streams that poured through Marx’s pen also. A Rai knows pleasure but doesn't take it the way people are supposed to; tastes it only, like the taste of a knife held in the mouth.
And A Rai is a haunt of Blyth’s kingfisher: Alcedo hercules, because it’s like a beefed-up version of the one back home, with a bill like a stick of drawing charcoal and lightning-purple, not peacock green, living iridescent in its blue. They bolt away around the corners, just like A. atthis: just flashes.
In the shadows on the Ho Chi Minh trail, coveys of Annam partridge warble from the tender, wounded forest, little trees knit themselves over the trail and finny palms blossom in the road. Down the middle of the overgrown army road a hunter’s trail snakes like an urban river between its concrete banks. The road might almost have been made by elephants but it was made by the thing that ended the elephants: plenty of weapons, plenty of hunger, plenty of desperation and worse things to fear. By the trail is a tomb, to civilians of lost villages killed in American raids. This tomb is wooden and little white bracket fungi, like babies' ears, have bloomed over half the writing thereon.
Shadows.
I find the footprint of a sambar and it starts to rain.
I went to meditate along the stones by the stream.
In the evening, they bring three big fish back to the fire, and something else that, for a moment, bewilders me. It seems like a writhing centipede, legs kicking and jointed like a cockroach on a Raid-soaked floor, and glistening the same zombie-beige. A goblin thing from under the staircase in a Clive Barker nightmare. Then I see it’s frogs. Frogs for dinner, threaded on a bamboo lance and still alive. The little legs all kick and shrivel when it’s passed through the fire.
That is the most grotesque thing I ever saw.
The thought of a throat being slit is deeply uncomfortable to me. The thought of a lifting goose lifts my soul - though not if I try to make it do so. But they’re just thoughts. People appreciate that things are beautiful but do not mostly create beauty. Eating and beauty are uneasy partners and people need to eat. So I have to live with it, that people do this kind of thing to frogs.
That’s not all, though. There’s also the leeches.
Leeches do not figure in Chinese painting; drawing them with one brushstroke would be too easy. There is nothing so pure in purpose as they are. Most predators (or micropredators) must sense food, move towards it and then feed and I suppose all must engage their whole bodies at each point in the process but where a lion might metaphorically use its body as an antenna, then as legs, then as a stomach, a leech does so literally. It makes other predators, at least in my imagination, look clunky, like Swiss army knives. I’m complementing them. As if the problem for them is our disrespect.
Salt. Leeches in salt. Writhing as their bodies shrivel. The dry ribbons their bodies are afterwards. After his eighth bite bleeds a while Duc vows vengeance against the whole of Haemadipsa: "I will kill every leech I see.”
It’s a common sentiment, and strongly cross-cultural.
“I haven't killed one yet,” I point out, “and I haven’t yet been bitten,” but this makes no difference. Of course Duc only believes in what he can see and so do I - sort of - I can’t make any causal link, though I am sure there is one. Anyway, it doesn’t matter; everyone at the camp teases me for not killing leeches, for trying to flick them across the stream.
Why? Hannah is writing a story about angels who want to destroy the dark warriors and turn the world to glass but she is stumped to describe their motivation. It's their elemental nature to do this, they have no motivation. What response is there to that, except equally elemental hate?
The pure white crystal creates a disgusting spectacle: writhing leeches, living leeches becoming leather as the grains all over them are burning into them more utterly than we can imagine, such that their internal organs dry up and cling together, such that their hearts cannot beat and their throats cannot swallow, such that they become only spaghetti-thin bits of gristle. Where’s all their clear intention and strong purpose now? Imagine if you could do it to humans; maybe with a blast of light from your hand. Of course with humans there'd probably be a lot of screaming, so the downside of such power would be harder to ignore.
Oh I don't know. I don't know why.
There's something I don't like to look at here, something that tastes sour and rotten.
I feel uncomfortable spending time with boys who are so happy being boys. I am reluctant to show my feelings because it makes them want to continue torturing whatever it is they are torturing. I learned that young. Tuoi told me the story about his mother. Tuoi told me he is poor. I like Tuoi. I like Duc. I can feel, in me, the desire to see someone, self-assured and together up till that point, writhing under my hand, it doesn’t matter by what power. I’m glad to feel this thing inside me since, without it, I can’t really be here because I can’t really be human without it.
It is not enough to say that people need to eat. It doesn't explain everything - sorry it doesn't. This is where we care for our own. Why kill leeches? The trees, the bare hillsides with scattered trees, the planes spraying poison in great sheets over the land, why did they do it? The war, so long, so red: why did they do it? The question is as lame as straw.
The forest gave me no lightness.
..except the indigo touch in the wings of Blyth's kingfishers belting away down the crooks in the streams. The stones in the streams raise riffles, raise sails of water…
End of the third survey.
04/02/07 Walk from A Rai to Saola capture location in To Re stream, walk along human trail, searching for tracks and traps, travel back to mouth of Khe Nghĩa, a stream whose name means ‘meaning.’ I don’t know what this means.
05/02/07 Guided walk along human trail, searching for tracks and traps, 200m transect near Khe Nghia
06/02/07 Guided walk along human trail, searching for tracks and traps, 200m transect near Khe Nghia. Possible Saola tracks encountered. A footprint in a worm cast; black, churned mud.
This track was found in secondary lowland forest in extreme southwest Duong Hoa. Plaster casts and photographs were taken and we are seeking expert opinion regarding its identification. It may not be possible to identify it with certainty.
Two lines of traps were encountered at Khe Nghia, containing a total of 46 traps. With the exception of one large snare trap, none of these were capable of catching ungulates but were aimed at catching small mammals, pangolins and civets.
07/02/07 Return to area where possible Saola tracks encountered to take measurements, plaster casts, etc.
08/02/07 Travel to Saola sighting location at Mang Ca, 200m transect at Mang Ca. Return to Bo Hon ranger station, return to Hue.
Riding the rapids back, I feel like singing; songs that sting like bees.
Vietnam has nothing.
12/02/07 Hanoi
"Do you like Vietnam?" the drunk xe om driver asks me.
That question, again. I say I do.
"Why?" he asks, swerving and looking sideways, not at the road, "Vietnam has nothing," in English: "no money." And a mean streak surfaces: "We go faster, yeah?"
I'd rather not, as he can tell.
"No money." He repeats it again and again and grabs my leg, clawing as if to see how much meat is on me. Does he want to feel the fatness of my wallet in my pocket, or is he just trying to make me listen? He wears a blue blazer, something that's supposed to be smart, but is tawdry. He'd like a flashier bike, I'm sure. But - God - is that *all* people want? Money's just something we made up, isn't it?
We're poor Tuoi tells me, again and again, like nails through his mother's story.
Christ was poor...
Thinking back again to the video in the Catholic lady's house in Song Kon.
In the hot night I hear firecrackers going off for Tet. Everyone seems to believe in the crumbling of Western civilization. Perhaps we can only try to produce, in this nasty time, wonderful things against the current.
19/02/07
Thich Nhat Hanh and the monastic sangha are in Saigon already, on a mission to help heal the wounds of the war.
Plaster casts are piled in the drain-smell bathroom, the sink is red - maroon - with the mud I washed off them. The new green sheets are patterned with purplish petals. I spilt water on them from the iron. We lay in bed long in the morning. Hannah felt exhausted and didn't want to get up.
Maybe, if I'm remembered at all, it will be for the things I say, not for the things I do; because I'm not really very organized. My feet want to plaster onto the floor. I want to practice. Compile my database, clean my plaster casts.
What I've brought back from the forest is different kinds of nothing: like the spaces included in digits; the bottom of 6 the top of 9. Nothing really held in 2. This footprint is probably a 2. Footprint in a worm cast, black churned mud. I sent a photo to Barney from the train. It took no space, was nothing. I destroyed the footprint in the worm cast and made a plaster cast, now with the others on the table in the drain-smell room.
You might have passed that way, but I can’t be sure.
Artemis
29/03/07 Huế City
The long dining room of the Green Hotel, near the station. Standing at a table talking to a woman from the ‘lay delegation,’ the western practitioners in pearly robes who have joined in the tour. We are standing because we don’t have a table, because we are not really part of the lay delegation and we are staying in our own hotel. I can join here and there, where my work lets me.
She asks me what my work is and I tell her. Outside, the river that caught me in its higher reaches pushes its way past the flowered temples and the citadel, whose red flank looms like a tanker on the further shore. In the headwaters of that river, I say, there’s an animal that was recently discovered by science…
She has a wide Alice band, so broad that it makes her grey hair look like a houseplant in a pot, spilling down from the ring of the band. She talks like someone who is interested in things, not in a Buddhist way: “In ancient times, hunters would go into the forest hoping to meet the goddess of the forest. To meet Artemis.”
I rather doubt this is true. Wasn’t she the last thing the hunters hoped to meet? I know Nikolas is interested in this stuff but I say: ‘Well I’m not just trying to see one. I could spend all my effort trying to see a saola and then, at the end, what would I be able to say: “I saw one.” That wouldn’t help save it. I’m trying to develop a method that will produce some comparable data, so we can say: these are really the important areas where we can focus our efforts to conserve the species.”
We have more of a conversation about it, of a familiar kind where my main concern is to stop people talking about me as if I’m some kind of hero. At the end she just says “well I think you’re searching for Artemis,” as if that settled it.
I am mindful of my annoyance. She probably thinks she’s breaking me out of my materialist mindset, or something. How exactly does having a new name for the problem help? Maybe I am ‘looking for Artemis,’ point is, I haven’t found her.
We have been in the temples today. In the root temple, Tu Hieu, where Thay was ordained. Palm leaves nod over the lichen-starred plaster balustrade. On the top of a pillar, a blue lion prances and out of his back, hand over hand, leaves reach for the sky. In the pool behind the gate, catfish rise to gulp raindrops and green water. They are alive still, because this is a temple. There is enough power in the Buddha’s words to hold a garden still. People drop food in the water and it churns, a whirl of blades twist out of the depth, rat-tail whiskers break the surface first, gut-deep torque in them; the fish come when they’re fed and come in multitudes. The hovering snakeheads, all primeval, eye the morsels and advance in stabs but the catfish, together, raven as a swirl from before ghosts existed.
In the funfair, a dragon has fallen in half. Children still laughing. Children press against the world; ghosts try to join in the singing. Children stamp on bugs, ghosts pass butterfly-winged. Children, unsteady, hold two black eyes in smooth faces and the curve of the nose to the mouth is old while they are young; not old like the curves in the catfish, though. Suddenly everything seems more urgent. The children become a sort of deadline, or they bring immediacy anyway. I like spending time with the sangha but how good a Buddhist am I anyway?
This morning, I got up and switched off the alarm. Hannah and I had slept deep and sound in our single bed; we must hardly have moved during the night. Since hearing Dylan and Natasha’s news, it’s been hard to know how to hold each other. “We are under no obligation to each other,” Dylan said and “our love must be free of all attachment.” Only a year or so ago, in Plum Village, Dylan said we were brave for going to Vietnam. I wasn’t sure he thought we were right, though. Now they are ordaining as monastics while we hide in hotel rooms on the edge of the sangha and the edge of the river.
A window on a mountain town
06/04/07 Prao
Off to the right, the smiling peach-plaster fronts of buildings; behind them the big TV tower on the little hill; behind that, the patches of swidden-burn and banana on the hills; behind that, the hem of the clouds trails through the standing forest. The trees seem small from here, a line in a curtain-fold of hill, now seared to grass; all vine-lumpy and branch-sprayed with their enclosing matrix lost they stand in a line on the crest and look along the opened highway. Smoke from the town makes a hand in the great clouds.
Across the road is a computer and copy shop cut to look like a temple. Next to it a woman with an old black watering can is tending a vegetable patch. The water falls perfectly from the rose.
Four women and a little girl come walking down the road past the hotel. The little girl is wearing a green shirt and a white hat and is holding the hand of one of the women. Two of the other women carry woven back-baskets with a couple of farming tools in. Traditionally the management of the rice harvest is the defining role of women in Katu society; or so I have read.
As they pass a great hole in the pavement, the little girl casts a look down it. The hole is in a red carpet of mud, slicked over the pavement and down the kerb to let the construction vehicles past. There are two holes, the second one with great trailing iron cords like teeth barring it. A little boy in a red cap, holding a young man's hand jumps over this hole. In a town where so many come to get drunk and where the streetlights are so dim, you do have to worry a bit about these holes.
On the other side of the road two men are changing the tyre on a small Kia truck.
Two affluent middle-aged men walk past, one in a pink shirt, one in white. The pink shirt man has his arm round the other's shoulder. The white shirt man is smaller, he has a smaller moustache; he seems less worried. They part and the pink man goes into the concrete school-shaped building behind the vegetable patch. The white man turns and, picking up a little more swagger, comes back down the road on this side. He wipes his face with his hand as he passes the hotel.
Going up the road, a soldier in emerald green with scarlet epaulettes has an AK47 strapped to his back. I’m not too keen on watching him. Another little girl, in a black shirt way to big for her accompanies her mother down the road. She looks behind her a lot and goes out of her way to kick bits of litter. Two no-entry signs face each other ceremonially across the gap in the central reservation. Five men and two motorbikes loiter on the corner of the big building's drive.
All destruction is nostalgic because of the pace we move. We only had the view up from the road because the villages were moved there.
I just remembered it’s Good Friday.
Secondary Forest
308/08/07 Easter day. T’mơi.
Sunbird with a bronze mantle, long tail, dark head, white belly - or pale yellow.
Duc won’t believe that Easter follows the lunar calendar. The Lunar calendar is an Asian thing and Europe follows the solar calendar. Everybody knows that. “Look,” I say, “whose culture is this, we’re talking about?”
“So next year, easter will be on the 8th of April,” he says. Maybe he’s winding me up.
09/08/07.
On this side of the river, I can see the fresh green of scrub and vine tangle, a sodden blue cigarette box lies decomposing along with a hack of browning vine leaves. They’re the colour, now, of green tea leaves left in the pot. One is flipped upside down, showing delicate brittle-yellow veins that remind me of an ear. Pearls of water stand on the silk-glossed underside, the stems and petioles bristle with auburn hair. A tiny bar-bodied fly navigates haphazard arches of the burgeoning spear-grass. Sprays of fresh green plants with straight stems and heraldic leaves display themselves over the little ridge: the bank of T’moi on which stands this little bamboo house with the tin roof against whose raised floor I’m resting my shoulders. I’m sitting in the dust, kept dry by the eaves. The colour of the dust is hard to describe; there’s red in it but grey, yellow and brown would all do. In Strange tales from a Chinese studio there’s an old word translated as ‘green’ but the notes state that it just means ‘the colour of nature.’ Rob Timmins is frustrated, in print, by description of the colour of muntjac fur. The Lao word for ‘white’ literally means rice-coloured and mountain people use it, apparently, just to mean ‘a neutral tone.’ Anyway, there are many colours of rice in the mountains in Lao. Our way of describing colour is supposed to be more precise but this dust tends to belie that. It’s gathered into little dry lumps. It’s from a similar colour palette to ungulate fur.
On the way here, we found a footprint and I heard the guys name every single locally occurring ungulate species in the Katu names, which they don’t know I know, before Mr Đình turned to me and confidently said '“Saola” in Vietnamese.
I can hear voices in the house behind which I expect means breakfast. No, not yet. My head doesn’t have anything to lean against but the space of an open doorway. Off to the left, a coucal toots. A bamboo leaf descends a staircase of its own describing to the river; the only dance it makes in all its life alone. It makes the most of it.
The voice of T’moi is always behind the voice of the coucal and the typewriting cicadas. Behind T’moi, the slope is thick with ferns and, over the mushrooming trees, hang tresses of trailing bamboo whose knife-blade, brush-stroke leaves hang like combs or hands. The tree is displaying textured terraces on spreading hands and burns lightly with brown flowers. One diagonal stem of bamboo hangs on its umbrella and is dead. Dead, it stands frozen, as if selected by a mouse click, from out of the panoply of green hands watching the water. Some of the little ferns look like claws. At the top of the ferny patch , a thin tree squirts an arc out to hang its bulb of a head heavy over the slope. The tree sticks its neck out dangerously, as if unable to stand straight and stable in itself and having to interfere in the ferns and the river for that reason. Dead vines hang like earrings from a little pioneer tree with palmate leaves; growing alone, it grows its own geometry yet its stem inclines slightly towards the forest. The scars on that stem are the scars of its own leaves, now fallen - though one is caught by the vine.
A phrase of birdsong is announced from this thicket-forest. Coffee smell dances in my nostrils. I should go.
Other things on this trip to T’Moi with Mr Dinh
We have an argument about politics, in front of the guys from Trao. I say that our leader follows the American leader like a dog. Duc takes exception to my talking about my country in this way. If I understand him right, he thinks it’s a kind of pampered arrogance to nurture opinions that your country is at fault. Going on marches doesn’t mean anything. If you’re against their wars, take your own war to them and put your life on the line, otherwise shut up. I think that’s what he means. What he says is “Maybe your country is very big and you are very small.”
Duc suggests that we could collect leeches and extract from their stomachs the DNA of the creatures they’d fed off. I say that the leeches would surely digest the DNA.
I see a fat green mantid fall from the vegetation like the bamboo leaf and spiral down to struggle in the shallows. As I watch, a long, threadlike worm emerges from its anus and wriggles off into the stream. Had the worm given the mantid ‘the abdabs’ as my tutor at Oxford put it, so that it would seek to drown itself. I fish the mantid out on a stick. It looks shaken; its ninja dignity compromised.
We show photos and when we get to Annamite Striped Rabbit, Mr Dinh laughs and launches into a story. It’s clearly a trickster tale about a rabbit ending up setting fire to someone’s house, but I cannot get distracted collecting trickster tales.
17/04/07 Hanoi
Six monks from Plum Village walked into to the cafe while I read my trashy book. Phap Khi said hi. Much later, they walked out. Tomorrow the thing called ‘my life’, the one where GIS is involved, kicks back in again. Under the table, my foot taps to a tune I don’t quite dare listen to. I am thinking of old old stories.
18/05/07 Hanoi
I'm back by the stinking shore of the half-drained lake. A broken palm-frond moves like a mourning elephant hunkered, rolling.
The smell of coffee is a godsend.
A pondskater stalks through the raft of flies.
A storm in Aur.
17/06/07 Aur village
Kerroom is K'tu for thunder, I am told, as my eyes can't help shining at the view. Slowly the walls of rain round out the village, curtain it off from the hills with their strips of eager buzzcut. The white tree trunks stand out, trickles of enamel in the toothed green fog. The storm stands over the hills and it makes the hills seem small. Though they are small, they are old; and knowing.
Then storm folds the village to itself, makes the government-issue tin rooves the drums of a music too big and too unengaging for us to care about in any ordinary way. A man and a boy sit by me, looking out. Both their faces are bright, like mine. The man tells me the K'tu words: Kerroom, T'luk, bo, puc bo. The boy laughs as I try to repeat them.
The storm rounds off the village and gives us an arena of trooping pimples in the mud. They mass under the volleyball net and troop off to the south in a great stream. They leave behind them high, resistant crags of slippery, hardened mud. The storm is kind to its little revolutions. The storm, in general, is a kindly storm.
Under the eaves of a tin roof, Nuong slash-chips away at the ribs inside slit bamboo tubes, so they can be used as gutters. It's a slightly unpleasant sound, making me imagine somehow that black spadelike thing crunching, cutting through cartilage, or skull into my brain.
The hills are open for business again. And chickens dare the gap between two houses. A clutch of banana trees worries as usual. Then the storm snaps back, this time with a steady flow. Getting on with the business of raining now. Show’s over. Mist shadowizes the further hill of trees.
We went to see Mr Tren and he said he’d seen a saola just ten days ago
- wonderful thunderclap! -
He said the area of Gia Vua was less hunted now because of FPD action, whereas Nam Dong people hunted in the north branch of M’Rang and Ch’Ke. We were told that Nam Dong people were the ones hunting in Cha Linh and Nghia too. I should get to Nam Dong sometime. It’s different from Song Kon where it’s the Quang Nam people crossing into Nam Dong, not the other way around. I expect population density and distance from the border are the main factors.
Is there a core zone of a saola population, or are saola just scattered widely across many areas where no-one happens to have caught them yet?
Daydreams, Data, Desecration.
20/06/07 J’Lua stream.
Sitting by the streams there are still frogs in occasional stereo and stalk-eyed flies play over the stones. I feel very sleepy, as I do every day here. I am not going to be like Barney: respected for hard work. And I'm ready to change the survey method again, just in search of something practicable. I'm as drowsy as... well as the forest is right now. It's no hour to be working.
Isn't there something else I ought to be doing? An orange fuzzy caterpillar sways as it eats on a vine hanging from a dead tree-fern stem. Well I am doing this. A tiny springtail, or maybe a psocid, rounds the corner of my notebook cover and decides to breast the white cliff and strike out over the page. He runs straight for the point of my pen, then stops in the shadow of the nib and grows confused, wandering over the white spaces in fits and starts under the shadow of my hand. On the opposite page, he stops and then turns very slowly, monitoring with his tiny antennae the great space filled with my breath. Around me in the cloak of forest, frogs break their breath evenly with rubber sound. The waterfall rolls - or is it an aeroplane? Gnats bounce in the spaces under tree fern stems. The forehead of a river boulder bulges, lichen carpets it, in another colour suggestive of the moon. Someone's hand sways like a snake in front of his sleeping face, illustrating memory. I'm a scribe at a desk in the jungle. Only small things - busy things - know how I feel. I open my book at a back page to find the springtail and, with a pure jet of breath, blast him back into the leaf-litter where he belongs. He could be dessicated in the silica gel box where I keep this book. Never again will he know such whiteness.
In the forest, if I am trembling before the immensity of it all, that’s probably my deepest experience and, after that, I'm distant to human company. Why is that? Because I’m scared of going back to the harbour, or scared of deeper water?
Thắng sneezes three times, loudly. And a fourth. I am cataloguing only. A fifth time. A sixth. Yes, the frogs are still cronking, my mind looks for something new. Something undiscovered, like the saola. Here there's nothing romantic about saola, it seems. Beleaguered, isolated, almost destroyed. Hold warm water in your cupped hands: can you keep it or does it drain away? That’s all there is to the saola question. In the sounds of the cicadas I can hear striking. Flat white patterns, broken on the water. A yellow thing lies sideways next to some other things. Noisy. A bird makes noisy noises. That’s all. This isn’t very funny.
21/06/07 J’Lua stream.
It seems unlikely that looking for dung is a valid strategy.
I have only found dung of any animal in dry hard places, on rocks mostly, once on a beaten trail out in the sun. Here, human dung disappears entirely within 24 hours. So finding dung isn't going to be that much easier than finding saola.
Here around Aur, the spirit hauntings are taken very seriously. There are some places where it's not OK to go and also, I think, as Nikolas suggested, the default position is 'no'. This will make covering a predetermined area very difficult. It will make maps very useful. But the maps need to show the small streams, not just the big ones.
Later
I am sitting against a moss-covered tree with some mosquitoes. It is threatening to rain. Back at camp Duong is killing flies. I am angry with Truc for wanting to go home. Hammer-headed purpose. Is that acceptable and does it help? To seek answers, I'm awaiting the next survey with Barney. I want to see how he handles things. I also want to know know if it's my fault that things go wrong so much. Is it possible to have a plan you stick to? How have other surveys dealt with malicious spirits?
That we should give up on dung surveys seems pretty clear. Thoughts about alternative formats for the project manifest, transform, like Meccano, but do not really excite me. I have to deal with human beings. Should I be a good Buddhist & just seek out the company of the best ones?
In general, on this trip, I feel that, where things have gone wrong, it’s not because I messed up but simply because of the innate difficulty of the situation. Of course I’m not 100% sure of this and I’m waiting to see how many things go wrong on the next survey when Barney ought to be coming along as well. We’ll see how he handles it.
Actually, it’s not just that; the way that I feel fear is different. Rather than something heavy and shameful, my fear felt charged and light, like a tight silver mesh beneath everything. Well I have been reading Rumi so that might have had something to do with it.
I need a plan for tomorrow and Sunday but I haven't the energy - haven't the faith - to make one. And the reason I haven't got it is that I'm not with the others here. They are, to differing degrees, against my direction. This is no way to think about people but what other way is there? Rosie says she thinks we should try and free up the system, be a part of it, but keep nudging. But how can you plan a scientific project under these circumstances?
The world feels, not exactly hostile, but intolerant of me. That means I'm set against something. This writing is so boring. I'm worried about what to do.
Admittedly I make one truly stupid mistake today in picking up an interesting-looking piece of pottery on our way down the hill. Of course I knew that people who have died bad deaths were buried far out in the forest and that the places where they died are considered very badly haunted after that. This knowledge was just not in a part of my brain which was firing this afternoon. I caught up with the others with the sherd in my hand, innocently asking ‘what’s this?’ and the two boys pegged it back to camp. Now they want to go home, of course. I haven’t quite grasped whether the spirit in question is either is actually the ghost of a madman, or if it’s expected to send people mad, or both. Duong and Thang assure me this is not going to be a problem although I have to admit it does sound like one.
What we should do tomorrow is return to Mr Tren's house, and then to Aur. I'd like to know about streams and trails. I'd like to know about saola sightings. I'd like to know how many saola sightings this year - where in Gia Vua he thinks saola might persist. I'd like to know more about the area to the north.
For each stream, I'd like to know about its accessibility, its history of clearance and hunting and spirits. I'd like to ask generally about where it is and isn't OK to go: stream sources, slopes, unexplored areas.
Think: what do we need to know now and what can wait till next time?
I am thinking about future sign surveys
And about the upcoming camera trap survey.
If we cannot search for saola dung
well we have 2 remaining possibilities. 3 actually
we find a really knowledgeable hunter who can tell us where to find it
We use a dog to find it.
We instigate surveys for other sign, which would have to incorporate the species and traps so as to not bore the people conducting the surveys, overmuch. But these would have to be very cleverly designed to cover enough saola habitat. Then, if these surveys do find dung - by searching near bitten leaves - then so much the better; but we can't just gamble on that.
In which case we're on to:
Probabilistic thinking and paradigm-shifting stats :-)
Interview data,
Comparison with other species.
If we can show: validity of interview data for saola presence/absence OR for other species, AND if we can compare sites of known saola presence against sites of probable saola absence in terms of habitat features, THEN we might be able to predict saola Presence/Absence in other areas. But how soon can this be done? Perhaps it could be started and continued in a Bayesian style?
So here's an ultimatum: come up with a plan and run it past DICE: see if they accept it.
Back to Aur
21/07/07 Train to Da Nang
We pass again blue sea, smooth stones, ravaged stories. I think again of conversations with Rosie. She’s back in from White Oak, which hasn't changed at all. She sends me a .ppt suggesting all sustainable use is a precursor to intensive use and the world will be eaten away to nubs of Protected Area in a sea of white fields, if that. Also she sends me an invitation to her wedding.
There are little groups of sticks standing in the bay. I already forget what I dreamed in this chair. The grid of shadows from the window mesh moves like a portcullis down my page. I wish I could smile at a child and be satisfied with my life.
23/07/07 Aur
Bright sun on the brown village yard. A kid cries in spurts. We've emptied the place. I have a box of shortbread, bought at the airport, but we've hired even the headman as a porter and they’ve all set out already. There’s no-one to present it to without it being awkward.
It's been a slow day. All I've done is witness our failure to make the right arrangements. Perhaps I have not been forceful enough in saying what I want.. I did not insist we saw Mr Tren yesterday morning so instead someone went in the afternoon so we only got his insistence that he be paid 200,000 and that we go past his house and let him take us to the site.
I think people here are tired of foreigners. We are a nuisance and the harvest is waiting. We may pay money but - well, people in Hanoi will pay me money to teach English and they get confused when I refuse good money. The little boy with the chubby grubby face - Nuong's son - is talking to the dog with 3 legs under the house. A bigger boy in a green bush hat offers him water in a long plastic tube. It squirts out all over him. Most of the dragonflies have disappeared and the sky is painfully blue.
If we want to work with local people on the camera trapping we need to give them the traps and let them set them. Pay for saola photos. We can't dictate. But how standardized then, can our results ever be? These people need to see something back from us.
I am trying to aim for the doubt - do I want to be doing this, to feel invigorated by a dive into that doubt?
These shoes, empty, point towards one another. A longan stone, like a dog’s eye glints on the earth. Skeletons of rivulets are visible. A fly turntables on my belt-loop, looks at my page, lands on my wrist, then whines off. Thang shuffles cards with a slippery sound, sort-shuffles then ruffles the pack. There’s a chicken in the shadow of a table built for drying grain.
Last night I dreamed I was outside an English estate, a long wall punctuated by ragged yew trees leaning over but, beyond, you could see big cedars. And then I found, as the estate owner’s voice coming through me as if I were a radio. The voice said it was actually Minh Mang’s mausoleum in Hue. I looked over the walls and saw that it was and, what’s more, it was built of breeze-blocks because it had been restored to look like half ruined. I tried explaining this to a young girl - a Japanese-American girl, I think. She finds it hard to understand me. There’s more to the story but I can’t remember. At the end she rides off on her bicycle in the sunlight. Down the lane, clusters of little red plums are growing.
The Krait.
25/07/07
Our campsite is in quite dark forest, a little cliff across the stream. When we arrived here, the guys killed a snake, a krait, black and white banded about a metre long. I don't know if Barney or Jeremy would have tried to stop it but in any case there was no time. It was see krait, machetes out, whack. They are very deadly. Jeremy says they're docile in the daytime but aggressive if you meet them at night. They hunt frogs on streams like this and, well, so do people round here.
I'm tired. I go down to the stream to, very slowly, wash and change my clothes. As I'm trying to position myself a land my clothes around a slippery black rock at the stream edge, something tumbles down the slope and I am in the water. I am in the water because the thing that tumbled down was the krait; the dead krait from the night before. They must have stashed it's body somewhere and it just slipped out and rolled down the hill in a bundle.
"Well," I think, "at least my reflexes aren't so bad."
I'm still kind of shaken, though, so, even though I know this snake is dead (live snakes don't just tumble down hillsides, tied in knots), I reach for a forked branch and hook my clothes out, away from the dead krait.
Partway through, I notice the head is protruding from under the bundle of snake; like the tip of a tongue sticking out of a reader's lips. It wasn't doing that before.
Holding my clothes, wearing my bathing trunks, I edge round the rock, through the water, without breaking eye contact with the snake. It doesn't blink, of course, and it doesn't even give me a tongue flicker but there's no doubt those are living eyes.
I go barefoot back up the muddy path to camp.
"Jeremy," I say, trying to sound conversational, "what do you do when a krait nearly falls on your head?" I want to make it sound, to a non English speaker, that I've just found a naturalists curiosity that the white guys can go nghien cuu over. Inevitably, though, people come down to look. Jeremy is moving fast, they think there's something wrong. When we get to the stream, the krait's awake and moving and for Jeremy, this is an opportunity for a photo, and the way to get the photo is to tire the snake out so that it stays still and the way to do that is to keep picking it up on a long stick and placing it back on the beach where it just was.
We all watch him work. "Jeremy really knows what he's doing with snakes." Barney says, "I find them really hard to deal with. With mammals I feel I have an idea what they're going to do but snakes I just don't know, but Jeremy does.
It turns out, though, that the two Katu guys are not OK with this. They didn't want to be here anyway but know that the snake has been harassed it will seek revenge. It would be OK to kill.it, or to leave it alone, he says, but now it's going to come into one of our hammocks in the night and kill someone.
Everything comes back to "can we keep this going another day."
Careers advice.
28/07/07
When we’re nearly back at camp, and the others have gone ahead, Barney and I squat chatting on the slopes. Barney tells me that his aptitude test at school told him he should be a mechanical engineer and is indignant. I share his indignation: mine told me I should be an artist. Both of us were told by careers advisors that working with animals, working in nature, wasn’t for us. Just because we didn’t want to be vets or golf course managers. It’s good to share this moment of indignation on the slopes.
But then I think Barney does take to conservation like an engineer: he says what he likes best is when things work. And he has energy and confidence: he does his job. And I take to it like an artist: it's not possible for me to just do my job, in the way that I perceive Barney does. I am ever at risk of being undercut by realization, pain, truth, or dreams. and I'm on a quest to learn, not to achieve.
Or maybe I’m just crap at this.
Ok next week: my plan is to write up the work in Nam Dong, which I did already cover last summer, but as a single, simple coherent and chronological story.
On Monday I'll just review that, though. The alternative is more like I've written above, for the rest of 2007 and 2008.
Or otter?
Capote
I’ve titled this ‘secondary forest’ because that’s obviously what this is from the description - i.e. forest that had previously been cleared (the existence of a house with a tin roof is also a clue). I think that Mr Dinh had told me this was a place where he had formerly lived. I am not sure, though, how much I knew this at the time. I am pretty sure I could see signs that this was secondary but I might have ignored them because I was not sure. Ignoring things seems to be a bit of a theme for this field trip, in fact.
Breaking down the old categories of primary and secondary was a major concern in literature and I was suspicious of circularity in the diagnosis: people confidently identifying forest as ‘secondary’ when they had no idea of its history…
…basically, I may have been trying to be polite to the forest. Not trying to make any assumptions about it based on aspects of its appearance.