Here is the third part of my re-worked section about my first saola field trip.
If you’re finding this stuff interesting, I do recommend having a look at Sam Turvey’s second non-academic book: The Tomb of the Mili Mongga, which was published by Bloomsbury this February, and which I have just finished reading. Sam’s first book was a memoir of his doomed search for the baiji, with which I began this series of posts. If you only know about that book, you might be excused for thinking professor Turvey would be a depressing person to talk to. The Tomb of the Mili Mongga will absolutely dispel that entirely false notion; reading it is rather like spending a day talking to Sam. That is about how quickly I read it.
Anyway, this part of my own story begins with a flashback.
Figure 5, page 400, issue 2, Volume 79, Journal of Mammalogy, Library of the Zoological Society of London, Regent's Park. About 18 months before I arrived in Ba Nai (see previous post).
A white thumb and forefinger pulling open a slippery, bristly pocket in a sea of white-splotched fur. The article's title is 'Physical and behavioural observation of a captive saola.' I'm used to thinking in terms of populations so it's strange to see this level of technical attention devoted to a single individual. Endearingly, the author of this scientific article refers to his subject as 'she' rather than 'it' throughout. His name is William Robichaud, and I suppose it's his hand in the picture. The caption reads: "Maxillary gland of the deceased saola." 'She' is deceased like all saola that have been kept in captivity. 'Maxillary' refers to the upper jaw and cheek.
It's not her vagina in the picture but a slit in the side of her face. What I had taken for an anus with a black bolus unvoided, is actually an eye. The same eye, in fact, that was wet, worried and alive as she stared out of a rough stone shelter in Figure 1, facing left like she was posing for the field guide. I recognise the stones of the shelter, from the poster in Cambridge. Few saola have been photographed and no wild saola observed by researchers or photographers. Pretty images are at a premium and are used and re-used.
Figure five is not pretty. That face-pocket was coated, according to the text, with "a thick paste-like grayish-green secretion with a very pungent and foul odor." A line of pores down the innermost seam presumably pump out this gunk. The seam is between the cheek itself and the muscular flap - a unique structure - which forms the lid of the gland. When she scent-marked twigs in her compound, Robichaud says, she could lift up this lid 'like an awning.'
16th December, Ba Nai Village.
We're sitting in the village shop because the shopkeeper is the only person we can find to talk to. His name seems to be 'Hoa', which I'd thought was a girl's name, but perhaps I misheard the tone. If you say 'Hoa' flat, like a dalek, it means 'flower' but 'Hòa' with the heavy, James Bond tone is 'peace.' If you say it with chirpy affirmation it implies transformation, with an annoying childish whine it means 'fire' and with a parent's firm reply it means 'art'. Any of those could be names. There's a sixth tone which sounds like Homer Simpson falling over, but I don't think it has a meaning on this syllable.
However, in no language, does 'Tùng’ sound anything like 'Nói,’ which is what the headman told us grumpy-welly-man is actually called. Also it was his grandfather, not his son, who got those horns. Hùng just reports this to me as if we had never been told anything different, so dedicated is he to avoiding any kind of disagreement. He's a student in a the most bombed-out city on earth and I can hardly blame his culture for being conflict-averse but I feel solely responsible for holding all the uncertainty in my own head. Even something like a man's name flickers as we talk about it. How can anything these people tell us connect to anything solid or real? They can't even tell me where to shit.
Mr Hoa is friendly, anyway. He'd have to be, I think. The shop has a chainlink screen across the counter and cigarettes in lockable wooden cupboards. No security on the handpump full of greenish petrol that is standing outside, though. It looks like the energy drinks which the shop also sells.
Scratched on the wood by the till is a message in English: "I am Hắng. I hate mother and father. I wish mother and father don't so terrible." I suppose Hùng and I are the only ones around who can read that and, luckily for Mr Hoa's daughter, I'm not going to tell him what it says. In fact, I rather relish being able to keep a secret of my own.
Has Mr Hoa seen a saola ever? I ask Hùng to ask.
Well, Mr Hoa doesn't know very much about animals.
Of course he doesn't. Mr Hoa is a shopkeeper and he isn't even Katu. He's Kinh guy from Nam Định
Mr Hoa isn't sure if he's ever seen a saola. He does go hunting with Katu friends sometimes. Places near the Lao border, mostly, where they are still lots of monkeys and also stone mountains like back home.
He saw an animal three years ago in B'Halêê which had turned-up feet. Was that a saola?
Turned up feet? I have no idea what that even means. Maybe. I don't know.
"What about the one with two noses?"
"What?"
"Yes, it was in A Nông, near the Lao border. It had a normal nose in the front of its face and another one in the side of its face. Was that a saola?"
"Yes!" I exclaim "Yes it was!"
Hùng looks up in surprise, as well he might; now it's me leaping to conclusions. But, unless Hoa really had, like Bill Robichaud, held a dead saola's face in his hands, how could he possibly have known? It's not data we can use, the capture was off near the border, a place outside the scope of our current survey. What matters is that I got a signal, clear as young Hằng’s scratched message. She's out there somewhere, flaring that flap like a nostril, smearing greenish pungent ooze on the end of a twig, making signs that can be read.
I ask Hùng about the toilet landscape and he says I should just squat on the bank of whichever of duckpond takes my fancy. Little perfect water lettuce clustered there and a tiny dainty drowning damselfly, still too big for a baby skater. I couldn't dump on that.