To The Far nam nyang - The New York...

To The Far nam nyang

133

of horns, which was spotted by biologist Bob Dobias, a former Peace Corps volunteer, early in 1993 in the village of Nakadok, just outside the northern boundary of what would soon be gazetted as the Nakai– Nam Theun National Biodiversity Conservation Area. (Des-ignation as a national protected area came later.) Under the auspices of WCS and the Lao PDR Department of Forestry, Schaller and Rabinowitz surveyed NNT for saola in January of 1994, walking more than four hundred kilometers, examining along the way ten sets of horns, and collecting testimony from villagers about the hab-its of the animal. Their joint paper is one of the early scientific accounts of the species.1

Rabinowitz returned to Laos two years later to help Robichaud organize the WCS office and to prioritize areas for future survey.

Soon, however, events dictated a new set of plans.Late on the evening of January 10, 1996, only a few days after

Rabinowitz’s arrival, two WCS contractors, Nancy Ruggeri and Matt Etter, pulled into Vientiane dirty and tired from yet another survey in Nakai– Nam Theun. Telephone service in Laos then ranged from bad to nonexistent, and they’d driven seven or eight hours from Lak Xao to tell a breathless tale: “You won’t believe it,” they said. “There’s an adult saola in the Lak Xao zoo.” It had been delivered that day. They’d seen it. They had pictures.

By chance, Robichaud and Rabinowitz had reserved a helicopter for the next day in order to make an aerial survey of forest cover in the vicinity of NNT. They even planned to land and refuel in Lak Xao.

They flew out the next morning, paralleling the Mekong, down to the lush, rugged forests of NNT. They scanned a green sea of foli-age from above, noting areas of primary forest, concentrations of swidden patches, and open wounds where pirate logging let the red earth show through. At last they set down in Lak Xao.

They would have called on General Cheng, but he was away on business in Hong Kong or Taiwan. As Ruggeri and Etter had said, the saola was there, looking somewhat battered from her capture. It

LastUnicorn_HCtextF1.indd 133 12/2/14 1:16:22 AM

the Last Unicorn

134

was a female and an adult, a sight no Westerner had previously beheld. Cheng’s people had installed the saola in a small pen about the size of a hotel room. Its previous occupant had been a serow. In the back was a shallow stone grotto that afforded modest shelter.

Robichaud and Rabinowitz began by collecting basic informa-tion. They learned that several days earlier, on January 8, a Hmong villager from Ban Nachalai, upslope from Lak Xao in Bolikhamxay Province, had captured the saola in anticipation of a reward from General Cheng. Not long before, the general, who had a passion for wildlife, put out word that he would pay the equivalent of one thou-sand US dollars for a live saola caught for his zoo. The villager had been hunting. His dogs scented the saola and gave chase. The saola ran to a stream, splashed into a pool, and turned at bay with a boul-der at its back. The villager lassoed it. A runner was quickly dis-patched to Lak Xao to notify General Cheng, and the next day the general sent his helicopter to retrieve the animal.

The saola had suffered multiple cuts, some of them possibly dog bites, on her barrel, rump, and legs, and she favored a rear foot, which might have been strained in the capture or bound too tightly during transport. One eye was also weepy, evidently injured. Other-wise she appeared healthy.

Robichaud knew what he needed to do. He told Rabinowitz that despite the administrative work that awaited him as head of a new program, “I think I should stay here and watch this thing around the clock and take notes on it.”

Rabinowitz agreed: “You get off the helicopter and stay here. Keep me posted.”

While Rabinowitz flew back to Vientiane, Robichaud took a room at the incongruous Phudoi (“mountainous area”) Guest House, which was a Communist- modernist jumble of structural triangles, a Soviet echo of Le Corbusier plopped down in Lak Xao. It lent a touch of the surreal to an already otherworldly place. Besides the menagerie, Lak Xao supported a sort of boarding school for the children of tribal ethnics, also courtesy of General Cheng. It was



135

supposed to showcase the cultural diversity of the general’s domain, but the program was, to be polite, anthropologically incoherent, dressing up children from one ethnic group in the garb of another and demonstrating “rituals” that were cobbled together from any number of sources. One never knew how “voluntary” a child’s enroll-ment might be, and given that no clear boundary existed between the children’s dormitory and the pens and cages of the animals, the boarding school and the menagerie seemed uncomfortably similar. Beyond these few creations of the general, the rest of Lak Xao was as raw as a frontier town in a spaghetti western.

Robichaud set to the task of watching. His observation post was a chair about twenty feet from the saola’s pen. He sat in it day after day, observing and writing. His primary emotion was awe: awe at the rareness, the beauty, the utter uniqueness of the animal and awe that he was there to see it, not to mention study it, for as long as fate would let him.

The Lak Xao saola was the first adult but not the first of its spe-cies to be observed outside its habitat. In 1994, in Vietnam, the For-est Inventory and Planning Institute acquired two saola calves, one of them not even weaned, and attempted to care for them at its cam-pus outside Hanoi. After a few months, both died, having given up few secrets about their species. The full- grown female at Lak Xao presented a different kind of opportunity.

On occasion, taking pains not to upset her, Robichaud went into the cage to examine the saola more closely. He recorded her dimen-sions. Tallest height along the back: 38.4 inches; horns 17 inches long; length, head to rump, along the black dorsal stripe of the back, 60 inches. To his astonishment, the saola calmly let him stretch his tape around her neck, under her belly, along her back. She required no restraint.

Her color was medium chocolate brown, which paled at the neck and around the curve of the belly. Robichaud noted the chocolate-brown flesh of the nose. He peered into the round pupils of the eyes, and the dark brown irises shone orange in the beam of a flashlight.


the Last Unicorn

136

He marveled at the extraordinary tongue, which was long enough for the saola to lick flies from her eyes and which was armed along its upper surface with fine, rearward- pointing barbs. Her form was thick and compact, good for pushing through dense vegetation. She had four mammae, like a cow, and white bands, like bracelets, just above her hooves. Her tricolored tail — brown, white, and black — was ten inches long. When relaxed against her body, it blended exactly into matching bands of color on her rump. She had a black chin strap and bold slashes of white across her face. Robichaud knew from the two FIPI juveniles and published descriptions of saola skins that not all these markings were fixed within the species but varied by individual.

No physical feature of the saola was more remarkable than a pair of large glands on either side of the muzzle, below the eyes. A thick muscular flap covered them, and the animal could raise and lower the flap, as though flaring a second large pair of nostrils. The glands produced a foul- smelling gray- green paste recalling the musk of weasels. Robichaud observed the saola scent- marking the walls of her grotto with this substance, and he also saw the glands flare open on the sole occasion when the saola became alarmed.

General Cheng’s chauffeur had a lapdog, a rare sort of pet for anyone to bring to rough-and-tumble Lak Xao. Robichaud remem-bers it as “about as big as a decent- size Wisconsin farm cat.” It was an old- lady dog, and Robichaud was in the pen beside the saola when the dog approached. The saola caught its scent and “freaked.”

Says Robichaud, “Her back arched up like a cat’s. She dropped her head to point her horns at the dog. Her eyes rolled up in the back of her head. Her tongue hung out. She drooled. She flared her pre-maxillary glands and started snorting and facing her horns wherever this dog went.” The air reeked of musk from her facial glands. It was her species’ inured reaction to canids — dholes and all their relatives — which hunters had reported. Oddly, although the saola was primed for battle, she paid no heed to the human standing next to her.



137

Robichaud cites this incident when people gainsay his most sig-nificant observation about the saola, which was her otherworldly disposition. Skeptics say that her behavior was mild because she was in shock from capture, injuries, and confinement. They argue that her abnormal state skewed her reaction to human contact. The sci-entific term for this is post- capture myopathy. Robichaud believes such a characterization fails to explain her surprising calmness, a trait said to be shared by other solitary tropical- forest mammals, including okapi. He argues that an animal deep in shock would have been incapable of instantly leaping to a heightened state of arousal, as the saola did when the lapdog happened by, and that it would have been comparatively numb to the perception of danger.

Yes, she had undergone the trauma of capture. Yes, she was in unfamiliar surroundings. She was certainly under stress, and Robi-chaud and others consequently tried to keep human contact to a minimum. But she was also eating, drinking, and monitoring her surroundings, behaving normally insofar as “normal” might be inferred for a creature about which so little was known, and, as the episode with the lapdog illustrates, she was capable of powerful responses.

Around humans she was serene. Robichaud was amazed that within a day of arriving at the menagerie (three days after capture) she showed no apprehension when he or others entered her cage, and she calmly accepted food from the hand. When he first touched her, she would jerk up her head, like a horse rejecting the bridle, but within a day or two, such resistance was gone. He could not only touch her but stroke her, and she did not flinch.

In nearby cages, a serow and a muntjac, both residents of the menagerie for more than a year, skittered away at the first sign of human approach. The saola seemed to belong to a different uni-verse. She was already tamer than any domestic goat, sheep, or cow Robichaud had known.

A Buddhist monk from a nearby temple came to see her, and he and Robichaud fell to talking. The monk said local people had a nickname for saola. It was not a term that Sek or Brou or Hmong


the Last Unicorn

138

would use, but certain Lao speakers in the area called the creature sat souphap, which translates roughly as “the polite animal.” Saola, according to the monk, move slowly and quietly through the forest. They are never khi- deu, which is how you might describe a mischie-vous child. They even eat politely, cleanly nipping off the leaves they select, never tearing the foliage with a yank of the head, as other browsing animals do. Various hunters have confirmed this trait. They say, in fact, that where a certain plant that saola favor is found with its leaves cleanly and uniformly nipped off, saola are sure to have been present. The monk said that Hmong villagers had cap-tured two other saola the previous August or September and without difficulty had kept them virtually as pets for two weeks before undertaking to walk the animals sixty kilometers to Lak Xao. Unfor-tunately, the saola died along the way.

Days passed. Robichaud kept his vigil. On the rare occasion when he entered the pen, the saola let him pick ticks from her ears. She conveyed a sense of stoicism, seeming to Robichaud almost Buddhist in the way she reconciled herself to her situation. Because of her calm, he decided to name her Martha, after Martha Schwartz, head of finance at WCS in New York. The human Martha oversaw the flow of money for fifty programs scattered around the globe, some of which were led by acknowledged “silverbacks” — alpha males who never doubted that their priorities should top everyone’s list. Amid storms of clamorous urgency, Martha Schwartz remained imperturbable, cool, and patient. In Robichaud’s view, Martha the saola, except for her agitation when the dog came near, seemed equally serene.

But serenity did not guarantee health, and no one anywhere in the world, let alone in Lak Xao, had more than a rudimentary under-standing of the animal’s needs. WCS could have dispatched a highly qualified veterinarian from Thailand, but the global significance of the situation prompted the organization to send out its best from New York. After several days of hard travel, Billy Karesh, the head of the WCS field veterinary program, arrived in Lak Xao and examined



139

Martha on January 22, exactly two weeks after her capture. He noted “two 3-mm corneal ulcers and corneal edema on right eye” and applied antibiotic ointment. Her cuts and abrasions “on head, neck, thorax, flanks, rump, and legs” were healing well. It looked as though the Hmong, or someone, had treated Martha’s wounds with a topical powder, possibly gunpowder. Martha also occasionally coughed, and through the stethoscope Karesh heard “increased respiratory sounds throughout both lung fields” — she was wheez-ing, a result of a mild pneumonia. He discontinued the antibacterial injections of Rocephin that a local self- styled vet had started her on

“Martha,” Lak Xao, 1996. (Courtesy William Robichaud / WCS)


the Last Unicorn

140

and shifted to a combination of different antibiotics, administered orally.2 In one case he smeared medicine on her muzzle and allowed her to lick it off. Other drugs he dissolved in water and syringed into her mouth. In his notes, he wrote, “Animal accepts readily.” He also wrote, “Animal is poorly muscled, thin.”

General Cheng had wisely ordered local Hmong near Lak Xao to bring in a steady supply of food appropriate for saola. All subsistence people know their environments intimately, but even by the stan-dards of the subsistence world, Hmong are acknowledged masters of nature observation. The Hmong regularly delivered browse for Mar-tha. Robichaud noted at least three plant species among the bun-dles. It seemed to be the right stuff. Martha ate it, and Karesh wrote, “Animal bright and alert. Feces and urine normal, good appetite for browse.”

Karesh observed Martha for three days, during which her lungs cleared up and the corneal swelling in her right eye subsided. Unfor-tunately, some damage to her eye appeared to remain, and she may have suffered partial loss of vision. Before Karesh left, he and Robi-chaud met with General Cheng. Keep doing what you are doing, Karesh advised, keep feeding native vegetation, but try to increase both the volume and the diversity of the food. Martha appeared healthy, but Karesh was worried. Carried on foot from saola habitat to Lak Xao, the foliage delivered to Martha was hardly fresh. And the feeding protocol followed by General Cheng’s staff consisted merely of tossing a mass of greenery into her cage, where it lay on the ground, wilting more. Martha ate, but retrospectively everyone agreed that she did not eat enough, either in quantity or, probably, in quality.

Years later Robichaud spoke with a zoologist who supervised a captive- breeding program for okapi, another forest- dwelling browser. Steve Shurter of the White Oak conservation center in Yulee, Flor-ida, told him that okapi eat at least 130 different species of plants in their native Ituri Forest, in the Congo basin, and in the absence of advanced dietary supplements they require at least thirty of these on



141

a monthly basis to maintain health. If the saola’s requirements were remotely similar, Martha would never have prospered on a diet of three species of plants. In addition to wasting away from too little food, she probably suffered nutritional deficiencies.

Two days after Karesh departed Lak Xao, on the evening of Janu-ary 26, Martha suddenly experienced an episode of diarrhea. Previ-ously, her stools had been normal. Robichaud remembers the evening as dark and cold. Martha looked glassy- eyed. He had seen her lie down many times, but always with her legs tucked beneath her, like a camel. She would put her muzzle on the ground straight ahead, her posture precise and composed. Now, however, she lay down and flopped to the side, head on the ground.

General Cheng brought in a local vet, who may have given Mar-tha fluids. They got her back on her feet, although she looked unsteady. Cheng returned to his house, and the vet and everyone else departed, while Robichaud alone remained. It was late after-noon. He watched as she again lay down and rolled to her side. He watched the rise and fall of her belly. He continued to watch as the movement gradually slowed, and then, at dusk, it stopped. Robi-chaud went into the cage to confirm that she was dead. Then he walked to General Cheng’s house, thirty meters away, to deliver the news. It was a Friday in January, and Eastertide was, of course, months away. Nevertheless, Robichaud remembers it as Good Fri-day, the end of a passion.

In the morning he returned as members of the staff were taking Martha out of her cage.

“What are you going to do with her?”“We are going to cut her up. Cook her. Eat her.” They also said

they would preserve the skin and head, as General Cheng intended to have a standing mount of Martha prepared for display.

Robichaud continued to observe. The Hmong had said she was pregnant, and Karesh had agreed it was possible but was not certain. The Hmong proved to be right. Robichaud watched as Martha’s butchers removed a male fetus from her abdomen. It was white and


the Last Unicorn

142

hairless and beautifully formed, even to the bony cranial buds, where horns would have grown.

Rumor soon compounded the misfortune of Martha’s death. The Hmong had warned that injections would harm a pregnant saola, and word spread among General Cheng’s staff that Martha had died because of injections Karesh had given her. But Karesh had given her none, and he stated so in a pair of apologetic faxes to General Cheng. Opinions, however, did not change. Perhaps Karesh had been seen taking a blood sample or squirting antibiotic solution into Martha’s mouth with a syringe, and the wrong conclusion was drawn. Observers also might have confused him with the earlier vet who had injected Martha with Rocephin. In any case, the outsider from far away made an inviting target for blame.

About six months later, General Cheng acquired a second saola. He kept it in a larger pen, back at the edge of the forest, away from prying eyes and meddling foreigners, but this one failed to survive even as long as Martha. After the death of the second saola, the gen-eral announced he was withdrawing his offer of reward. He wanted no more saola captured and brought to him. It was the right thing to do, lest more animals perish.

Robichaud eventually calculated that, in addition to Martha and the two juveniles in Hanoi, at least ten other saola were captured in Vietnam and Laos in the mid- 1990s. All died, except for one that was released back to the wild by its captors. Both Vietnam and Lao PDR soon banned further captures.

In the WCS office in Vientiane, I saw Martha’s baby. It was in a large jar atop a bulky cabinet in a back room. Someone had double- sealed the lid with duct tape, but the tape was dry and cracking. No doubt the intent had been to prevent evaporation of the dusky preservative in which the fetus swam. Based on photos of the fetus, Karesh and others estimated that Martha was in her second tri-mester when she died. The baby was about the size of a rabbit, pale and compact. Its nose was inexpressibly delicate, the hooves sharp and perfect, the soft eyes eternally closed. Notwithstanding dust



143

and casual storage, the contents of that jar represent the most com-plete specimen of Pseudoryx that humanity possesses. All the organs and soft tissue are there. Every other saola specimen — and there are only a few — is literally skin and bones. Given the endangerment of saola throughout its range, Martha’s baby may turn out to be the most complete evidence that humanity will ever possess of the spe-cies’ presence on Earth. It abides behind a barrier of peeling duct tape in a dusty jar, unborn and forever floating.

It is impossible not to admire the Vietnamese. They work hard for what they take. Our journey up the dry mountain out of Thong Sek follows the best trail we’ve yet encountered. It is marked with blazes and even directional signs, which are written in Vietnamese. It is also well worn, and, on high alert for poachers, we speed along.

When we stop near the top of the mountain to rest, I discover that Viengxai has monkeyed with my backup water bottle. He may have opened the bottle to investigate its filter, which rattles slightly, and failed to screw the top back on securely. Nearly half a liter has sloshed out. I transfer the bottle to my daypack, as I should have done from the start.

After the trail crosses the spine of the mountain and dips down toward the Nam Nyang, it takes us through a south- facing diptero-carp forest with trees as stately as any we have seen. But again, we do not tarry to appreciate them.

I may be distracted by the open grace of the forest or by the call of a silver pheasant, when I embarrass myself. We are clipping along at our usual running- late-to-a-meeting pace, and I have just congrat-ulated myself that I am holding up, feeling good, doing my part. Then boom. I trip on a root and go down like a redwood. Fortunately the ground is soft. I land in a push-up position, with no injury except to my pride. I hear Viengxai crack some kind of joke in Lao or Sek, which looses a ripple of tittering down the line. Robichaud whips around and casts him a glare, then sees that I am nearly back on my feet, and keeps marching.


To The Far nam nyang - The New York...

Documents

Transcript of To The Far nam nyang - The New York...