The two week expedition into the rainforest ended with a committee meeting around the campfire.
Here, the word ‘committee’ was used purely out of habit, for, with the exception of the tracking dog always at his side, there was only he and Katy, a wildlife researcher from Australia. Vietnam’s head representative, a professor of forestry, had left two days before to attend a conference in South Africa, and their mahout, Y Bham, had been gone since noon to prepare his elephant, Y Tun, for the trip back to town the next morning. Each time the group set up camp, Y Tun was released into the forest with a pair of loose shackles around its front legs.
In the end, there wasn’t much to report about the failed expedition. Until now, Katy and her hidden cameras had not caught a single shot of the Vietnamese red wolf apart from a few scattered pawprints. As for him, he was an interpreter and guide, and had nothing to do with budgets or science.
The foreigner’s blond hair and tan skin, the sleek, speckled gold coat of the dog nimbly pacing under the lemon moon, and the flickering amber fire all blended together into a snapshot of wild yellow hues on the stage of his imagination. His fingers gently flexed open and closed, though the rest of his body looked perfectly still, his camera in its leather case holstered at his hip. He understood the image in his head could never be captured on film, and the magical sight before him would be forever distorted with the click of a button.
The present thought led him to another; that is, whether or not Katy had kept that video from the day before.
Yesterday afternoon, Y Bham moved one of the cameras without telling Katy. He faced it out toward the stream and hung a small salt pouch on a branch to entice them to return to the place the pawprints had been seen on the bank. Perhaps Y Bham had wanted to play a part in documenting a species that was almost extinct. But this morning after breakfast, when Katy and he went to check the results of their last day of work, they realized the camera had filmed her bathing in the stream, then drying herself in the setting sun. Katy was struck dumb with shame, so he reached over and shut off the screen, muttering something about there being no wolves as he stepped out of the tent and lit a cigarette.
“If I ever get the chance to come back, I hope you’ll help me again, just like you’ve done so well these past few weeks,” Katy said, in a voice both grateful as well as determined to set the right mood for the evening ahead.
He nodded and smiled politely, his thick moustache curving along the contour of his lip.
“You don’t have to be so self-conscious, you know. In fact, you’re exactly the kind of person the international research community needs more of.” After a pause, Katy asked, “Where did you learn English?”
“University,” he replied brusquely. “If only you knew what that language put me through, and at the same time, what it means to me,” he silently thought to himself.
The campfire died down and softened like delicate strips of silk undulating toward the sky. A large bird sleepily flapped its wings in the treetops nearby, and the shrill concert improvised by the crickets, geckos, and cicadas was reaching its climax, heightening the deep silence between them. The expectant look on Katy’s face—honest, even pitiful—drew him to clear his throat and explain a little more: He had taken up his studies the moment he returned home from ten years of border patrol and the fragment of an artillery shell lodged in his skull.
“It’s still there,” he said as he tapped the back of his head. Her expression of helpless concern moved him deeply, and warmed him to the girl’s request for a late-night story.
“The first thing I saw when I awoke was a white silhouette at the foot of my bed. It murmured a succession of words, like the recitation of a prayer. The figure slowly came into focus and I realized I was in an army hospital, and the silhouette before me was a young nurse in uniform reading a book to herself. She told me I’d been unconscious for more than a week, so long that she could study for her English night classes while she watched over me and not get in trouble. Nobody there believed I’d survive. Now, what was the word they’d used to describe me …?”
Katy suggested a phrase, but he shook his head and said he didn’t understand. She explained its meaning, then gave him the medical term, which he uttered in Vietnamese, “Yes, ‘clinical death’.”
“The nurse asked if I knew any English. I told her I’d studied a little in high school, but forgotten most of it since then. She giggled and showed me a graduation photo from her beginners class before. I froze when I saw who her teacher had been …”
Katy leaned forward, “A lover”?
He nodded and continued, “As soon as I could walk again, I signed up for the class. I felt nervous and eager to meet my high school sweetheart again, like I was back at the trigger and ready to fire. However, I saw in the eyes of the married woman with two children I was just a fond childhood memory. Unable to escape the draw of the past, I accepted her invitations to dinner like a guest in a strange land. Each time I came over, I endured games of chess with her dry husband as we waited for her to finish cooking. Shortly after I passed the class, my medical evaluation came back: I’d been discharged as a war invalid. With one disappointment after another behind me, I sought out a change in the bustling streets of Saigon. Still, I often thought of that rainy season in the mountains, which had awakened in me a desire for English I’d never before felt. After four years of university, I returned to Tay Nguyen, but by that time she was already gone.”
He ended the story and lit a cigarette. Katy gazed at his firm, stoic face behind the thin veil of smoke, feeling content that such a reserved man had opened up. She reached behind her and pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker from her bag, and poured two shots of whiskey. He took a sip and thanked her. He hoped she wouldn’t go on to ask how he knew the forest so well. Lots of people asked that when they traveled with him, and although he hated to lie, he found it too hard to admit he’d once been a bastard of the jungle. In his years as deputy head of a logging camp, he had been responsible for the destruction of forests, and as a soldier before that, he had killed scores of animals to feed his troops, including the red wolf, whose last traces Katy had flown all the way here to record.
Katy was about to speak, when his dog began excitedly sniffing the air. It lifted its head off its front legs, then stood up suddenly, catching the firelight in its glistening eyes as its nose turned toward the head of the stream. When the scent finally passed and nothing had come of it, the dog slowly relaxed, though its tail remained curved and erect.
“She’s never given birth, has she?” Katy asked, steering the conversation away from the dog’s owner.
He nodded, knowing she could read animals just by observing their physical features.
“You call her ‘Lai’; what does it mean?” Katy asked. “I know the names given to people and things often mean something special.”
“What you say is true, though in this case I’m not sure. She was given the name by her previous owner, a Hmong man from Lai Chau newly moved to Tay Nguyen, when he sold her to me as a three month old puppy. I can only guess that ‘Lai’ with a falling tone comes from ‘Lai’ with no tone, meaning ‘mixed,’ since she’s part dog and part wolf.”
“This type of breed is especially rare because, as you know, wild dogs are now nearly extinct,” he added.
The dog wagged its tail anxiously as it looked out over the stream. It flared its nostrils, then stiffened in a state of suspense.
“She’s probably just picked up Y Tun heading this way,” he said.
Katy studied the dog, then shook her head, “I think she’s caught the scent of a male. If you look between her hind legs, you can tell. It’s the end of spring after all; breeding season’s underway.”
Turning his gaze now to Katy, he thought, “She’s so matter-of-fact, even about this. It’s not hard to tell it’s been a while for her.”
He interrupted himself and said, “The day of the press conference in Buon Me Thuot … If you hadn’t captioned your slides, I would have sworn I’d heard wrong when you mentioned the ‘dusk wolf’.”
“Really?” Katy grinned. “The red wolf is most active in the early morning and evening. That’s why scientists use that image to describe them.”
“I suppose even scientists can be romantic.” Then, he asked, “What about you?”
Katy laughed softly, “Oh, I don’t really know.”
She finished her drink and stood up. “It’s going to be hard leaving this place,” she said. “I’d like to take one last swim before we go.”
He lit another cigarette and kept quiet.
“Keep a lookout, would ya’?” Katy turned her back to him and walked toward the bank about three or four steps. She undressed behind a tree and set her clothes on a rock. The moon’s reflection shattered as she slipped her legs into the stream. When the water had reached barely over her breasts, she turned around and beckoned him in.
“No, thanks,” he said, and took one more drag where he sat.
“The water’s fine, do come in,” Katy called out again.
He replied slowly this time, “You know, I haven’t taken my shirt off in front of a woman since I was ten, not even my mother.”
“Really?” Katy was caught off guard by such an unexpected response.
He flicked his cigarette into the fire, causing the flames to blaze up a little.
“Countless people were struck with napalm during the war, but the world only knows of Kim Phuc, the UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador. I’m two years younger than her, but was burned the same year, 1972. The only problem is that Nick Ut, the AP photographer, was there for her, but not for me or the thousands of others …”
Silence pervaded until Katy spoke up. “It’s okay now,” she said gently. “Take off your shirt and come in with me. The light of the moon and the fire, shadows cast by the leaves, and the stream can soften even the most painful things in this world.”
Katy trembled as she stroked his rippled scars beneath the water, silently counting each one with her fingers.
On shore, Lai puffed and snorted, then dashed off upstream in pursuit of the scent. He stepped back, calling after the dog that could no longer be seen. But Katy pulled him close into her embrace and whispered, “Let her go.”
At that moment, a long, majestic howl filled the night air.
“There it is!” he cried.
Katy rested her head on his shoulder and closed her eyes, “Yeah, the dusk wolf …”
_____
Translated by the author and Zac Herman
