Unreasonable hope.

In which my heart insists I believe things in the darkness, and I betray a snake.

This is the last in a series of posts about my first saola field trip.

19th of December. K’Nơm stream, T'Mơi stream catchment, A Vương river.

T'mơi is white. We go up it. Sharp, black boulders which we struggle over somehow, drenched in the rain and spray, and cold with the wind of the falls. The wind comes down the river like the wind through the black Northern Line on the Tube back home. We have to strap-hang here also: straggly vines and struggling saplings in crumbly soil. Stems are set with thorns like cats-claws, protruding from pustules. Stems that bristle with needles like lionfish: dark and light bands. The worst ones are the the smooth ones whose roots are showing. Five men have swung off them before me and I don't know they will hold.

Today we are following the guys, and they're seeking serow sign; or that's what I asked for. They don't know saola sign from serow anyway; they hunt in Zơ Ngai and don't know the beast. If nothing else, I will see how they search for some kind of sign. There isn't much of anything. Béc finds a print by some very fresh bitten stems (they're still oozy) but has been almost obliterated by falling crud. Wet soil's good for forming tracks but the rain erases also, I can't make plaster casts.

The bitten plants themselves are interesting, though. Neat, clipped petioles like Bill Robichaud mentioned, but Keo is sure they're serow. Keo might not know much but he's clearly seen this kind of thing before and, unless the south side of the road has saola after all, this can't be reliable sign of them.

The best thing to find would be dung, which would yield DNA and certainty, but they say that they never find any. I can believe it. There are powerful earthworms in the wet soil, thick as my thumb. When I returned to my own spot on the slope this morning, I found towers of their casts where I'd crouched the previous evening. Thankfully no other trace.

My head pounds. I will admit it's exhilarating, though. In other conditions, with a hard-hat, some sunshine, and some really slow tourists behind me, I could find it fun. I first tried to stand atop stones, then accepted my boots would be soaked in the shallows, and finally I'm up to my waist in the plunge pools. Toes of my wet boots seek purse-size cracks in the stones as I scramble; round bag whirls my gravity out. My vision closes in, I don't see the treetops. Above the falls are little, intricate bushes with purple berries, a little like blackcurrants, shivering in the constant wind.

Apart from the wind, T'mơi is like the Northern Line in another way. It is part of a local transport network. The ridges are the main-lines but near our camp we must follow the streams. Streams are supposedly good places for saola, or at least that's an idea that floats around. It might be a misapprehension of scale: saola live in stream-cut country rather than actually keeping to streams. There are streamside sightings, but it could be because the people follow streams, as we're doing now, and see saola when their paths cross. Even if saola really do use the streams, do they just use them as roads like we do? They won't be swinging around on saplings, but goats can manage far wilder terrain. One thing is certain, though: they don't keep to streams because they have a hard time finding water, unless they're as weak-stomached as I am. I didn't bring a big water bottle and I am actually worrying about dehydration while climbing the waterfalls in the rainy-season of this ever-wet forest in the constant drip.

A few feet past one foothold, I see a snake on a stone and Keo does not. It's a lime green pitviper with gold eyes made mad by the shape of its skull. A pretty serious snake. I shout out, Keo jumps and then - obviously - whips off the snake's head with his machete. He had been in no real danger, from feet away. Why did I tell him? I wanted the hit of camaraderie, really. I could say it was calculated, to build trust and get information, but it wasn't really. I jumped at a chance to feel like less of an outsider, so I sided against the snake.

And then we do find dung.

Right by the water, a soaked, greenish slug of it with no discernable shape. It's on a rock, so it's safe from worms, I suppose. "What's this?" I ask the others and they say they don't know. There are plant fibres in it and otherwise nothing, so it's herbivore dung, but what kind of herbivore doesn't make pellets? Serow use middens, so Barney says; they don't drop by the trail. Robichaud's captive saola made 7.5cm boluses "formed of an accretion of moist but distinct ovoid pellets." Maybe they could run together in the rain, though. Dung consistency depends on diet as I'm viscerally aware; rain or worms might have reduced the bolus. "Not serow," says Keo, "not muntjac, not pig. Must be that one: Sao la."

Misplaced confidence. But every biologist has a rueful tale of the newbie or tourist who saw the ground cuckoo or pangolin or whatever on their first day. I said I'd collect any dung which might be saola and that includes this, so. I scrape a little into a phial of alcohol. Then I measure the dung itself and four trees in a compass rose around me, so some data accrues to the record, whatever it is.

Lunch is "dry rations," vanilla-scented bricks of sweet mung bean flour, or I think that's what they are. It's good to be reminded it is possible for anything to be that dry. I don't want to spare a corner but I do, and flick it into the bubbling stream. "You don't need to do that," says Hùng.

We take another route back, clambering up the defile and down a steep fold of the ridge. It's equally exhausting but less dangerous. At the evening fire, Béc and A'Cho somehow still want to go frogging. Keo holds forth in earnest about spirits but Hùng doesn't want to translate. "This is a thing from our imagination," he says. The same would be said about the saola if we hadn't seen the horns. That’s what I think anyway, but nobody asks me.

Behind my eyes in the hammock, I see endless snakes and centipedes and little vines creeping through moss, moving like screensavers with amoral grace.

20th December.

No use describing the forest again. There was a ridge in the clouds, a weird bird call. Asia reminds me it's there, but I'm working. Did good work today.

I woke to a wet bag - the tarp had leaked. A'Cho and Béc were by the fire, loudly carousing. A'Cho was belting out war songs. I get handed rượu. The frogs bits in the porridge were sparser, they had had a bad haul. A'Cho blames it on the weather, rather than the fact that they cleared the rocks of frogs the night before. This thought puts me off and I'm glad to know I care that much, at least. After a bit, Hùng got up and shouted at them off for not looking after me properly. I'm too bedraggled and tired to be annoyed at him fussing. They hooked my bag up to dream dry and found me some blankets for the rest of the night. It was still cold. Pretty hard this morning even to get out of the hammock, let alone stick with the plan.

The plan was transects. Five tracks, 25m apart, off from a central machete-line starting at a pseudo-random point on the stream and heading up to the ridge-crest. No machete-use on the transects themselves, we'd never get them arrow-straight anyway, but at least they shouldn't cross. We found clear animal trails, easy to see and follow, a ruined trap-line on the ridge-crest and, back at the stream, another piece of dung, just like yesterday's.

Scary though the stream is, it makes sense as a road after the slopes. The vegetation is haphazard, all sharp, stabbing tongues. A great rash of bamboo, an old landslide; we ducked, crept and smashed, and slid more than a little, half-shattered stems looped round our ankles, tripping us into the dirt. Red mud all over me and itchy fibres down my neck.

But it was daytime, the work was hard but my life made sense. I was trialling an ecological survey method. A lot had happened to get me here applications and emails, library days and shopping day, leaps of faith taken by me and in me and months and months of waiting. I'm not sure that all that would have got me on the slopes without the morale boost of that little nugget of greenish fibrous dung. Not that it could realistically be saola.

I didn't measure the trees around that one, though. It really didn't make sense as a measure along the stream and I was soaked and shivering under my waterproof. Also a worrying thought was growing. The guys had not liked the machete ban, unsurprisingly, but they'd not liked having to cut a new trail either. I remembered that for the Katu, cutting new forest was dangerous because the local spirits might turn out to be hostile. Or, even worse, lonely. Even if it's 'a thing from their imagination,' as Hùng claimed, what would happen if I got people cutting transects on every hill that might have a saola on it, and then nothing bad happened to them after that. Everyone would know those places were safe for hunting. Should I worry about rolling out a method like this.

Lunch was bags of rice this time. Again, I threw some aside for the spirits and, again, Hùng protested.

"I think this is their country," I said, "if they give rice to the ghosts, we should too."

"No," he said, "The other day, Mr A'Cho threw some rice in the stream because he had a bit of dirt in his rice. He said about the ghosts as a joke."

I look at A'Cho and he's smiling.

Huh.

I decided we didn't need the streamside transect and could head back to camp. The habitat isn't comparable. I can pretend that I never intended to do one.

On a tree leaning over the stream I counted seven kinds of fern. They shivered in an old old way, in respect to the wind. I sit alone to throw the leeches over. The water is black now: obsidian. A rock supports my feet, frogs keep up their conversation. I take out my notebook. Flecks at the edges of vision may be mosquitoes. Hùng and Sinh think we failed because we didn't clearly find saola. I had no idea they had such high expectations. The water rustles urgently by and the cold wind keeps coming. The tuft of dark sedge in the lee of this rock is strangely still. Béc tastes the noodles he is cooking. "Vot!" says a frog.

Everyone must make his own spirituality. The forest gets leeched as we all seek it, looking the other way. I felt today I was walking on bones, and I keep dreaming of vampires.

That frog sounds like a vampire: "Terribly sorry to bother you, Count, but would you mind.."

"Vot?!"

That's silly.

This is not the point at which I achieve enlightenment. This is not the point at which she walks towards me down the stream. So that's settled.

And now it is too dark to write.

22nd December. Reunification express. Đà Nẵng to Hà Nội.

Now, when I look out of the window, I do not see torn mountains and empty fields. Or rather I do, but there is beauty nonetheless, maybe even peace. Even the JCBs in the karst crater, little yellow dragons, ambitious fleas. It is awful but perhaps there is a kind of grandeur in it? And there are mountains behind mountains and, up their boulder-strewn streams, white ankles are moving in dark water somewhere. I have started moving towards her, maybe, but it's bad luck to talk like that. Keep mum.

And maybe there is something behind those mountains too. I don't know what. Something like a great bronze gong, I think. Its face shimmering with a layer of water. One day it will sound; or perhaps it has always been sounding, all along.

Why do I see things differently from the way down? I have nothing I did not have then except two bags of greenish dung, swiped from a slick black rock and sealed in a tupperware box.

A white-winged lapwing twists and falls into its field, where the clods of earth sit proud of the water, in their ranks. I head home in unreasonable hope.

---

That was sixteen years ago now. I really should have realised then that it was monkey shit.