Apologies for being a bit late with this. I ended up knocking it about a bit more. More than I should have perhaps.
If you’re joining us here, this is part of a series of posts describing my first saola-focused field trip, which starts here. It’s a re-draft of one very long earlier post, which you probably should not read but I feel compelled to signpost anyway. It’s here.
18th of December K’Nơm stream, T'Moi stream catchment, A Vương river.
I take off my boots and flick my leeches across the stream. It’s the compromise I’ve found with the kid I was, who couldn’t leave a poolside before he’d rescued all the drowning flies. I stayed away from entomology and anything else that requires collecting specimens, and I stayed away from all the fascinating islands, where conservation is mostly about exterminating invasives. I won’t kill animals if I can possibly help it, but I am not going to make myself popular by dropping leeches near our camp. The Haemadipsa leeches are so land-adapted that they can't even swim; if I get them over the water, they can't get back. Most of them do make it over.
They found us along the trail, after the rain. There were many of them, sometimes seemed the drip-tip of every leaf had a little trunk on it, waving to our passing scent and heat. I’m well used to that from Borneo, leeches don’t bother me much; it’s annoying when one gets in your clothes and you find an unstoppable blood trickle later but the bites just itch a bit, they don’t carry any known diseases and are much easier to remove than ticks. They’re easier to look at, too. The big 'tiger leeches’, with their golden chain-runed backs and magma-orange or key-lime bellies are splendid, but even the dull brown leeches are elegant with absolute purpose. Although they do actually have organs like we do, they appear to become organs in series. Their bodies become waving antennae as we pass them, then pairs of legs to walk up us and then, once they can lock on a seam of our blood, they are stomachs to drink it: absolute focus. They make other predators look like messy, like Swiss Army knives. When they are sated they drop off to be wombs in the mud. Or they do if they’re lucky anyway, I watch one belly-fall silently to the bottom, writhing silently, its one-brush-stroke dignity broken. I wonder how many blood got this one so big. "Shouldn't have picked a human this time," I tell it in my head. It's better off than the mutilated and burnt ones scraped over the rock which attacked other humans. Some people respond to leeches with a kind of genocidal rage. Our Katu companions seem to mostly execute them swiftly with machetes but, like many genuine animal lovers I have known, they aren’t above using salt or flame when there’s time to spare. Leeches are tough and it takes a while.
I’m sitting away from the camp as I flick my leeches. I expect they’ve noticed what I’m doing but I’ll do my best with body language to avoid being asked about it. The camp is a cluster of hammocks slung from a frame of slashed and lashed saplings over a patch of hacked-off foliage, just a couple of yards from the stream. Hùng is there directing cooking, Sinh chips in from his hammock and there’s also Mr Linh’s little brother Keo, a guy called Béc who showed up this morning, and there’s A’Cho himself, of course: Mr Dog.
We met A’Cho in the house of black skulls. He followed us in. It was two days ago, the afternoon after we’d heard about the saola’s two noses in Mr Hoa’s shop. In the lane, we ran into the guy from the sketch mapping with the boar’s tooth and the hunter’s smile and were taken to a little, low house by the roadside whose thatch was just heavy with skulls. I thought the man who followed us in was the owner. He was in his late thirties, maybe, with a thin soldier’s moustache and a dangerous grin underneath it. I assumed it was the owner.
The skulls were all smoke-blackened and most marked in ochre with crosses and dots. Serried serows, pigs of all sizes and all three of the muntjacs, I think. A smoke-tanned tail hanging like a light pull was probably giant black squirrel, and two dark feathers arced down over everything, longer than the firebird's from my dream.
I asked the grinning, soldierly man if we could take down some of the skulls but he pointed across the firepit to where a toothless face stuck out of a swinging hammock. It wasn’t his house. The tiny, wiry, goblin man in the hammock told us we could not take the skulls down but we were allowed to look. The nasal bones were mostly broken anyway. The little man said he had saola horns once but they were lost in a fire; he’d got them in 1970, when Uncle Ho died.
The soldierly guy name is A’Cho, a Katu name which I think means ‘dog.’ He speaks loudly and confidently and seems happy to talk. Mr boar's tooth, whose name appears to be Hồng, sits mostly nodding at what A'Cho tells us. He tells us T’mơi is one of the two forest areas people go to from here and the other, Zơ Ngai, is across the road. There are no saola there, as we expect from past interviews. It's Zơ Ngai, not T'mơi, which is the traditional area of this village. T'mơi is the traditional land of another village, Trao, which is close to the district town. This explains why the forests of this commune were a gap in WWF's previous surveys.
The hunters we heard about in T'mơi weren't from the next province but from Trao, and they caught 5 saola in the area. This is worrying from a conservation perspective. While T'mơi might belong to Trao under the traditional system, the Ba Nai people have more rights to it in the eyes of the government, but no rights to their own traditional forests in Zơ Ngai. Stable property rights, a foundation of the kind of community-based conservation approach that Barney's MOSAIC project rests on, look hard to establish. I should be feeling depressed by what I am being told but I’m ashamed to realise that I’m just happy to be getting some clear information at last. A'Cho says there are still animals in T'mơi: macaques, pigs and serow, maybe only 2 or 3 gibbons, one or two sambar deer and maybe five bears. That’s not reliable information, of course, but it’s better than hearing the place is cleared out.
As we talk, my gaze is constantly drawn to the arcing feathers, hanging like the lures of anglerfish in the black roofspace. Their mahogany blades are full of tiny white stars, pouring among the force-lines of silty gold and grey. 'Her' colours. Crested argus are found only in remote parts of the Malaysian peninsula where mega-rich birders get helicoptered in to see them, and here in the Annamites where Barney jokes they are common as muck. This distribution is seen as supporting the idea that these mountains are a refuge for 'primitive' hothouse relics, while the real players rough it on the stony plains of the world.
We left the skull-house grateful and with a clear direction: we had to go to Trao.
After that, it all went wrong again. We couldn’t go to Trao because my paperwork only covered Ta Lù commune so we were resigned to hiring people from Ba Nai who didn’t know the area well. Except that meant going through Linh who said we couldn’t go because it was raining. Hùng reported this to me as if it was fact, rather than just something Linh said, which infuriated me. Linh said we could go to Đội Aboui, where it turned out there was no forest, or to Zơ Ngai, where everyone agrees there were never any saola. When we refused these, he got serious and told us that, to get here, we’d need to walk for seventeen solid hours. I say fine, we'll do that. At lunchtime he says that his have special food and so we wouldn't be able to eat with them. An amazing spiced smell was rising from the kitchen. We ate at a Kinh-run place near Hoa's shop and then I go to my phone signal spot and called Hannah, then Barney.
"Are you in the village?" Barney asked me over the phone, "Wow, this is the future, I guess.” I immediately felt useless; he had no way of calling anyone from his own field trips. I explain how I'm doing.
“Huh,” said Barney, “I’ve been doing fieldwork in Southeast Asia so long that I forget how hard it is.” My previous southeast Asian fieldwork was at a big research station, far from any village, with a coterie of professional research assistants.
“You just have to get out of the circle of the headman’s friends." Barney told me, "The poorer people in the village. They're the ones who are hunting. Find the quiet guy in the corner, at the party.”
I say the party isn't happening because the headman wants to invite all the bigwigs if we're having any kind of meeting.
"Yeah it's not a meeting," says Barney, "it's a party to say thank you for their help."
Except it clearly isn't, because it's really an opportunity to find the real hunters. Why can't anything ever be just what it says?
We tried visiting the people who were at the sketch mapping, but they were all out. Hùng went to Trao with Sinh. Lack of papers is less of a problem if there’s no foreigner there, and they got a photo of a fine pair of saola horns, attached to the skull this time. Linh remained adamant. I wondered if we should just give up on getting to the forest and concentrate instead on mysteries like this, and then we met A'Cho on the road with his wide wide smile and told him our woes, he said he could easily take us.
We set out at 7:40 from Mr Linh’s house, and got here at three, slow compared to A’Cho’s estimate of a three hour journey but closer to that estimate than Linh’s seventeen. If Linh had believed his own estimate though, we really would have set off at five when I’d been up at his insistence. Apparently it was a negotiating strategy to tell us it was impossible, because he was furious when we told him he didn’t have to worry because A’Cho could help us instead. Fortunately, the logic of Linh’s ploy had been lost on me; it still is. Linh managed to get his little brother on the trip and that's fine; I like Keo, even if he was hungover this morning. I managed to avoid most of it myself; my guts are still squitty and I feel weak. I suspect Béc’s presence is also Linh's doing as A'Cho's friend was going to be one of the party but didn't show up. A'Cho himself was clearly undaunted.
It was not pouring with rain today but it drizzled and it was chilly when I got up at 5, taking Linh at his word. We set out up a hill, empty as a seaside dune: just alang-alang grass with the path a red runnel through it, slippy with the damp. It was like walking up a water slide. Katu paths need no switchbacks. My big red rucksack put me in danger of tumbling like a ladybird and maybe plummeting like a bobsleigh. I tugged myself upward by the alang-alang stems with the sharp blades of the grass slicing my pasty hands.
On the far side of the hill were woods clotted with vine tangles, like the more logged out places in Borneo. I could see no squirrels in these vines, though. We had lunch by a little stream which, coincidentally, is called Alang. I GPS-ed the location as it was clear the local place names weren't the same as the ones on the maps. The lunch was wrapped packets of xôi - sticky rice - and A’Cho threw a bit of it into the water. "For the spirits," he said, 'con ma.’