Land of Jade

by Bertil Lintner

  “Maybe you can catch fish like that in Europe. Our fish won’t know what it is.”

  I cast once and reeled in. Nothing. I cast again and as I wound in, it felt as if the hook had got snagged on a log. But then—the reel whirred as the line raced out. The fish was diving deep and the struggle was on. I realised from its strength it must be huge. Sinwa Naw was now excited. Each time I managed to reel the fish in, he crouched, army pistol in hand, ready to shoot the moment he caught sight of it. The fish was clearly too big and, lacking a gaff, this seemed to be the only method of administering the coup de grace.

  But before I could get the fish close enough for him to see, it turned and made off again, the line taut and the break of the reel screeching. It was hard to estimate its weight let alone see what species of fish it was. But judging from the fight it was giving, I guessed it weighed between five and ten kilogrammes. At the end of an hour, the fish seemed to be tiring—but then gathered its strength for another rush. Then the line parted with a twang.

  Sinwa Naw lowered his pistol with a sigh of disappointment. I was tired from an hour’s awkward balancing on the rock during the tug-of-war. But despite the throbbing pain in my foot, I was too fired up to give in. I put on a new spinner and cast again.

  Immediately a strain on the line signalled another bite. This one was somewhat smaller than the first and I was able to haul it in close enough to see it was a mahseer, the mighty Indian salmon. But it was not my afternoon. We fought for an hour—only to have the line snap once more.

  Infuriated, I flung down the rod in defeat. I had lost my two best spinners with at least 50 metres of fishing line—and had been bested by two fish in succession. Exhausted, I slumped down on a rock and lit a cheroot.

  “Incredible!” Sinwa Naw shouted. “Within seconds! You’ve got to send me some of that equipment when you get back to your country! But stronger ones! Stronger ones!”

  The fish I had lost. But I had at least convinced a sceptic.

  The next day’s march also took us along the Tanai. It was February 11—our third wedding anniversary—and a cloudless day. Unable to negotiate the narrow foot-path, along the steep sides of the gorge through which the Tanai flowed, the elephants followed the course of the river, advancing either along the bank, or criss-crossing the river to find the easiest passage. Hundreds of fish swirled around my mount’s massive legs, as it carefully kept its footing among the slippery rocks under the water. From my vantage point atop the howdah, I caught glimpses of Hseng Noung with Ja Reng on her back, marching with the main party. The laughter and girlish chatter of Ma Shwe and Lu Ja, two girl soldiers assigned to help out with the baby, floated through the trees.

  We reached a large village called Gaw Nan late that afternoon. Having been assured by the local people that the fish here were not nearly as big as at the elephant camp, I decided to try my luck again. To Sinwa Naw’s satisfaction, my spinners worked once more.

  “Within seconds! Not even minutes!” he shouted in delight as I lifted a floundering white carp out of the water.

  The fish weighed less than half a kilogramme, but it was big enough to share with some of our escort. Fish is one of my favourite dishes, but I was not over fond of the local way of cooking them. The only way the Kachins seemed to prepare fish was to gut them, chop them up—head, bones, scales, tail and all—and boil them. I suggested I should teach them a Swedish way of cooking fish. The news spread quickly and a small crowd gathered to watch.

  They looked as I scaled the fish, slit it open, gutted it out and then trimmed off the fins and the tail. I rubbed it with salt and put it in an enamel bin. So far, nothing really exciting had happened. But expectations rose when I asked for a fresh egg. It was brought and I cracked it into a cup and beat it, adding salt and ground chillies. There was no white or black pepper.

  “Is there any flour here? Any kind will do,” I said.

  “What for?” Lu Ja asked.

  “You’ll see,” I smiled at her.

  There was no flour, so she got out a pestle and mortar and began pounding rice to a powder.

  “What about bread?”

  “Bread? Aren’t we going to eat the fish with rice?”

  “Well, I mean mong gyut.” I thought the type of hard, dry rusks we had had at 2nd Brigade headquarters could be used as bread crumbs.

  A search failed to find any mong gyut but I was offered a packet of biscuits instead. Although they were slightly sweet, I decided they would do. Once again, the pestle and mortar were brought out. All my ingredients were assembled. There were murmurs of fascination as I dipped the cleaned fish in the egg mixture, rolled it in the rice powder, coated it with biscuit crumbs and placed it in the sizzling frying pan on the fire. The audience had giggled and laughed throughout these elaborate proceedings. But once they had tasted the fish, it was generally agreed to be it was grai mu ai—delicious. As the chef, I was certain this was not mere politeness.

  While the fish was being cooked, news reached us that more government soldiers had been moved into the hills surrounding 2nd Brigade headquarters. They were not yet close, but should support be sent from Tanai town, our intended route might lead us into a head-on encounter with the reinforcements. As a precaution, one section of KIA troops was sent ahead to scout for any government forces that might be approaching from the opposite direction.

  On leaving Gaw Nan next morning, we crossed the Tanai River and swung eastwards, up into the Kumon Range itself. We also parted company with Sinwa Naw as he considered we were now safe.

  “From here on, Khun Nawng will be your guide. I have to get back. There might be fighting.” Sinwa Naw shook my hand.

  “I won’t forget your fishing gear,” I assured him with a grin.

  “When the war is over, we’ll go fishing every day.” He laughed and rode away on his elephant.

  Water was scarce on the flanks of the range and we came across no more villages. The steep slopes were not easy for our elephants and the mahouts slashed their way through the bamboo thickets with constant swings of their machetes as we progressed slowly uphill. Bamboo groves planted on the outskirts of villages, always manage to impart an impression of neatness and harmony. A forest of wild bamboo, however, is the scrappiest type of vegetation imaginable—and no easier to negotiate for being on elephant-back.

  The track snaked its way up the steep hillsides, narrowing to a path along ledges of the rockfaces. At one point I looked down and could see nothing beyond the elephant’s bulging flank other than thin air and a long drop. Hole or no hole in my foot, I decided it was time to walk. I gestured to the mahout to stop and let me down. The elephant knelt, I grabbed a walking stick and slowly placed my feet on the ground, testing to see how much weight my injured foot could support. It was painful but not excruciating. I began walking uphill, staff in hand.

  It was in fact an immensely invigourating sensation to be walking again—for the first time in a month. But I needed to stop every few hours to clean the wound with medical spirits as the bandages soaked up dust and mud from the path. It now followed a very narrow ridge and signs on the trees warned of tiger traps in the surrounding forest.

  According to Khun Nawng, the local people catch tigers and sell their skins and bones to China—the former for decorations and the latter as an aphrodisiac. The poverty of the local communities and the iron law of supply and demand combined to sustain a deplorable trade. It was a state of affairs that Khun Nawng, with his university background, understood all too well.

  “The war must stop first. Then we can develop the country and the people won’t have to resort to means like this to survive.”

  We reached the Daru Pass at the crest of the Kumon Range after some extremely difficult walking. My night vision is bad even under normal circumstances. With my wounded foot, stumbling over roots and rocks had been an ordeal. Lean-tos were built, dinner-fires lit and I sat down under a sheet of plastic to update my diary. Ja Reng turned five months that night and we covered her with our Na
ga shawls and slept close to a fire; the air was freezing at the pass. The cold woke me several times during the night and I was forced to get up and blow life into the glowing embers of a dying fire.

  I woke finally at six—to find a small supermarket outside the bivouac. The runners from 2nd Brigade headquarters had arrived before sunrise and laid out their wares: new sport shoes from South Korea, Japanese socks, two big tins of Lactogen powdered milk, smaller tins of condensed milk, a jar of Nescafe, three bottles of Mandalay rum, a carton of Benson and Hedges and a bundle of plastic baby bottle teats. The rum bottles were stamped Tatmadaw or “army” in Burmese, while the labels on the powdered milk tins proclaimed the contents had been donated to Burma by the Danish government.

  The sight of this cornucopia spread out on grass still shrouded in morning mist was as welcome as it was incongruous. We could not but feel concerned over the cost of it all, however. The goods had apparently been bought on the black market in Hpakan, where prices were notoriously high, and we had no wish to burden our hosts with this sort of extravagance. We decided to share as much as possible of the groceries with Ma Shwe, Lu Ja and the other soldiers in our column.

  After breakfast we began our descent down the eastern flank of the range. To my satisfaction, I was able to walk all day and we spent one more night in the jungle. Ma Shwe was quick as usual. Almost before we could turn around, she had dinner ready, Ja Reng washed, wrapped up in a dry cloth and put to sleep. Lu Ja, who was a little younger, nimbly assisted her.

  I invited Khun Nawng over to our lean-to that night to sample the army rum, which apparently had been bought from a poorly paid junior officer in Hpakan. We had understood from our conversations with him that he had left his wife behind in Mandalay when he had joined the underground in 1978. She was Burman and Buddhist and thought the Kachin guerrillas would be suspicious of her. It was a fear that Khun Nawng was assured us was misplaced.

  “We’re not against the Burmans as people. It’s the government.” Khun Nawng was missing his wife no little, it transpired, but the rum revived his spirits. With the liquor we dined on wild peacock, shot by one of the soldiers. Before stretching out to sleep, I scribbled in my diary by candlelight:

  “It’s somehow incredible. We have walked over the Naga Hills, crossed the Chindwin River, the Hukawng Valley—and now the Kumon Range. Next: the Mali Hka River and the Triangle, the Nmai Hka and, eventually, the Sino-Burmese border mountains. Sometimes it’s difficult to grasp it all. We’re moving through territory which to most people who have ever heard of it belongs to World War Two, the Chindits and the Wingate expeditions. And now, as Khun Nawng laughingly put it: ‘the Lintners’ Expedition’.

  The following day, we reached the first village since the banks of the Tanai River. It consisted of only ten thatched bamboo houses but traditionally hospitable, the villagers began making rice beer for the officers. As special guests, we were treated to a few boiled eggs. But we were somewhat disquieted to learn that aeroplanes had flown over the village twice that day. Did the Burmese authorities somehow know we were coming? There was no way of telling. But shortly after we had left the village, we heard an aeroplane approaching and spotted it in the distance—an ancient Dakota of World War Two vintage, slow and unbelievably noisy.

  Hiding ourselves and the elephants under the trees, we waited until it had flown over us, and then marched on. Half an hour later, it returned. We rushed for cover again. It was becoming almost like a game.

  “Let them waste their petrol. They won’t see anything this way,” Khun Nawng laughed as the plane passed overhead where we stood beneath the forest’s thick blanket of foliage.

  But it soon became apparent the government had wind of something. In the next village, people told of troops patrolling the next government-controlled area along the Myitkyina-Sumprabum road. Was it because of us? Or was it perhaps in preparation for a convoy which was expected to leave Myitkyina for Sumprabum soon?

  Like most other towns in Kachin State, Sumprabum is supplied by a few convoys each year. Forced by fear of KIA ambush, these heavily guarded convoys consist of 40-50 vehicles carrying daily necessities for the townspeople and munitions for the army. The 215 km journey from Myitkyina to Sumprabum took two days before the civil war broke out; today, lorry convoys make the trip two or three times a year and it can take anything up to 18 days. Lacking money for everything save military operations, the government has not maintained the road properly for years.

  “Wait till you see it. It’s just a dirt track,” laughed Khun Nawng. “Even the elephant trails in our area are better.”

  It rained all that night and thunder rumbled across the heavens until late. Under these conditions, it was a relief to have a proper bamboo house to sleep in rather than a jungle shelter and as we set out the next morning, we felt refreshed and thoroughly rested. Because of the aerial activity and unusual troop movements along the road, the commander of the 1st Brigade had sent a full company to escort us across the danger zone. We linked up with this force in a village near the road where we also spent the night.

  The villagers gathered in our house, eager to know who I was and what I was doing. I explained I was a journalist and intended to write about the war between the Kachins and the Rangoon government. Everyone was happy—except for Lu Ja. She had been ordered to return to 2nd Brigade as only Ma Shwe was to accompany us all the way to 1st Brigade headquarters and Pa Jau.

  We did our best to console Lu Ja who over the weeks had become immensely attached to Ja Reng. But she wept openly when we left the next morning and asked to keep one of the baby’s tiny knitted caps as a souvenir. Having discovered that the rebels maintained their own postal service all over the Kachin state, we promised to write to her as soon as we reached Pa Jau. There were, of course, no postage stamps or postmen on bicycles. But letters were regularly carried by supply convoys to various destinations within the rebel-held zones, and by underground agents to the government-controlled towns.

  Some villagers, eager to help after the previous night’s discussion, volunteered to go down to the nearest Burmese Army camp at Htingbai on the road itself and pretend they were there to sell bananas. They returned after an hour, assuring us there were only 15 government soldiers there and they were soon going to cook dinner. We set off but slowed our pace as we got closer to the road. The elephants had been sent back to 2nd Brigade and soldiers carried our luggage instead—making it easier to rescue valuable belongings should fighting break out during the crossing. The wide track we had been following divided into a labyrinth of narrow jungle paths, a deliberate rebel device aimed at making pursuit difficult. On the other side of the road, all these paths eventually merged to become one wide trail again.

  We halted on a small forested hillock. Below us, easily visible, the brown scar of road wound through the trees.

  “Front section!” the column commander barked.

  Eight soldiers, rifles at the ready, moved off to take up positions a few hundred metres north of the point where we were going to cross the road.

  “Rear section!”

  Another group of troops peeled off to position themselves on the road at the southern end of the “block”. Then we were told to move down with Khun Nawng following closely behind us, pistol in his hand. The crossing point was now effectively sealed off by sections at both ends of the “block” and by smaller machine-gun and bazooka squads scattered throughout the jungle behind and in front of us. Another ten-man section provided our immediate escort.

  The soldiers were familiar with what was clearly a standard operating procedure even before orders were given. Hseng Noung and I glanced at each other as we descended quickly to the road. Ma Shwe came a few paces behind, carrying Ja Reng on her back. It appeared a Burmese Army patrol had passed only minutes before us, leaving still fresh footprints in the mud. Khun Nawng’s ridicule for the lack of maintenance had not been empty: the road was merely a rutted dirt track that would have been difficult going for any motor vehicle. />
  To confuse possible pursuers, we did not take the track directly opposite that from which we had emerged but first walked down the road for a few hundred metres; then we turned off into the bush again to follow another narrow trail which led into a dried up stream bed. To prepare myself for any eventualities while crossing the road, I had swallowed two strong painkillers before coming down from the hillock. My foot was devoid of any sensation; if necessary, I could have run.

  We walked for a few hours into the forest east of the road, slept by a small stream and the following morning pushed on up into the mountains. The mood of the column was now perceptibly more relaxed. This, it seemed, was the pattern all over Kachin State. The government controlled the main towns and the roads between them; on either side of the roads, there were a few kilometres of no-man’s-land, and the rest belonged to the guerrillas. In the distance, we could see smoke from the Burmese Army camp at Htingbai. But it soon vanished from sight as we trekked deeper into the hills and ever closer to the Mali Hka.

  We reached the deep and slow-flowing river on February 19. The water sparkled emerald green in the sunlight, reflecting the rolling hills that rose from both banks. This was the beginning of the mighty Irrawaddy that flows the entire length of Burma, down through the central plains and the delta south of Rangoon to debouch into the Bay of Bengal. The column—some 80 strong—was ferried across in bamboo rafts and dugout canoes. Then the climb began again and we toiled uphill for several hours before reaching a large village called Panlawng Yang.