What I don't want.

This is from the 17th of May.

Up to the mountain town confusingly called 'Trung Tâm' which means 'the centre'. Trung says that there are buses in Vinh which say 'Trung Tâm' on the front and they're coming here. I wonder if any hapless visitors hoping to visit the city centre get increasingly confused as their bus heads out over the big bridge and through the paddyfields, heading for the mountain road. Unlikely. People don't trust text much here; the grapevine still seems stronger than the web.

Anyway we check into a hotel again because it's the weekend and the offices that would handle the paperwork for a foreigner in the border zone are closed. Đ- & H- head off to join D- in the village. Trung has to go back to Vinh. I'm alone.

Really alone.

The hotel's a massive wedding cake affair, entirely empty but for me. There isn't even anyone at reception, just some phone numbers on a piece of paper sellotaped to the desk. I have a big swish room with its own desk and can look across the multicoloured rooves to the black peaks beyond. Mist wreathes them. The mountains John MacKinnon saw from the plane. I have a Zoom call to make: opportunities for rewilding the Annamites, but first I take a stroll around the town. At the bottom of the palatial steps they're installing a storm drain so I have to skip around the wet cement. It's a town that got rich from the trans-border trade in wildlife; timber and maybe some other stuff, a node of Vietnam processing the fat of Lao's forests. There's a symbol for a forest product company on a big house up the road; an elephant head on a tree over, for some reason, the Red Bull logo. I eat Korean Spicy Noodles in a stylish little shop. There's a box with holes in on the other table and, as usual, I don't even ask. Bamboo rat probably.

Today is ungulates and it isn't good news. There's only three of us left at the end of the call. I say that news about saola in the first two provinces doesn't look good. I have some hopes for the next one south. One of the rest of the three has recently been there. Maybe it was good 30 years ago, he says. Imagine 10 big groups of hunters going into and out of the forest every day, 1000s of snares. That's what he says. Well looks like I did have quite a bit of hope still skulking in the furrows of my brain because I can feel it leaving me now.

The humidity is creeping up again after the storm the other day. The clouds have rolled down over the empty mountains. They look like condoms, I think.

They sky yields up its light. Slowly but not that slowly. Quicker than you could boil a frog.

It occurs to me that I might have to end this by announcing the probable extinction of the saola in Vietnam.

Who can I tell? What if I just have to get on the plane thinking that?

What film will I watch?

I had just spoken about treasure meaning the view from the window of a plane. Like the treasure John Mackinnon saw in those same mountains. Like a sword lost in a lake. We called it a 'lost world' and proceeded to lose it.

"Once the westerners discovered the saola," someone told us, "they did something that made them disappear". The tone implies dark magic but it was just the spark of interest, the prices paid for specimens, living or dead. Our ears just have to prick up and a population is all but destroyed. Two young males end up in Hanoi and die after a few months. They weren't twins and we never saw their mothers; or at any rate, we never saw them alive. The dead youngsters were then reportedly eaten by, as I remember being told by a white conservationist, 'the Vietnamese.'

I thought then that was wrong because it wasn't 'the Vietnamese' who collectively ate them, just a bunch of guys who decided to do so - that is if the story is even true.

I think now that the story is wrong for the opposite reason. Homo sapiens ate them. That's all.

I can't prove any of this, by the way.

Out of the loudspeakers on trees and buildings the warbling starts.

I close the window and, after a while, a moth lands on the outside.

Sweet little moth plastered showing me the patterns he has underneath him. Familiar patterns: ochre and eyes. Wouldn't look out of place among oak leaves. Among the eggboxes of a Suffolk moth trap. Something highlandish about it. A northern species, perhaps, with its range extending a finger down the mountain range. Spiralling out of their darkness and onto this square flat moon.

To me, there's night behind him. Still, for him, a world of it. His mouthparts work, his antennae, earnest to the glass.

Little moth get off my window.

Get..

Go away and stop trying to taste it, it isn't the moon.

Stop trying to talk to me.

GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE I WILL KILL YOU

i can't do anything but kill you.

I can turn out the light.

..and turn on my laptop, Anything to shake in my mind. It's not my family, not my suffering, not my leg in a snare. And there's still plenty of...

.. plenty of tricks to block out my feelings. I could do this the rest of my life.

I don't want to know that the hills are full of fascinating biodiversity. I don't want to know they're full of spirits or are the breasts of a goddess or are a functioning ecosystem.

I don't want a functioning ecosystem

I don't want to hear how it's all is just an eddy on the stream that's the universe. And entropy carries us anyway and they all go extinct.

That 'nature' has no meaning anyway. Who says what's 'natural'?

I don't want to reframe this in light of a growth mindset.

I don't want to know if we're in the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene or the Plantationcene or the Chthulhucene. I don't want to point at the bug in the world that's to blame. I can't believe in a bug I can fight.

I don't want to hear that the hills aren't mine anyway. That they belong to the people whose ancestors’ graves are on them or to the people whose offices own them or to any people at all. Or to spirits either, not spirits from books or with 'isms' around them.

I don't want to hear how interest in charismatic megafauna is an extension of a colonial tradition rooted in big game hunting. Is the obsession of those who will never have to scrub pots and carry bundles and pick snail after snail off the river rocks to have enough for the men to drink beer with. Is Orientalist. Is childish. Is something I've latched on to to keep me feeling interesting.

I don't want to hear that I'm doing good work either.

I don't want to ask if she'd prefer the hunters' bullets to my whining or to wonder about communication or what a 'species' is. My dreams matter nothing if she's dead.

That there is, that there isn't such a thing as love. That it can, that it can't be applied to non-humans. That species are, that they aren't, real things.

I don't want a new million-dollar project. I don't want to understand hunting and hypocrisy. I don't want to help people sell bamboo shoots, show tourists monkeys or seed the idea of restoring the lost world from the old drums, even.

I don't want to help people.

I don't want that map with the lotus-leaf patches.

I don't want hope if it comes in a box (but I’d probably take it).

I want the saola alive on those mountains. That's all.

Well that and I want all these voices to leave me alone. "But do I really want that or is it just..."

Ugh.

Well the WiFi isn't good but I do have WiFi and I can’t simply sleep.

She probably doesn't even like mountains.

Shut up.