by Roland Smith
Alessia looked like a different person after Nick’s third cup of antimalaria tea. She wanted to join us in our search for specimens, but Nick nixed this: “You are confined to camp until further notice. We don’t want you to have a relapse while we’re cutting our way through the tangle, as Peak has so aptly named the Burmese rainforest.”
Nick lived in the center of Australia in Alice Springs on his family’s cattle station, or ranch, but both of his parents had been born in Burma. His mother, Mya, was Burmese; his father was British. They had lived on Nick’s grandfather’s teak plantation in southern Burma in a house his great-grandfather had built named Hawk’s Nest. They were there when the Japanese invaded Burma during World War II.
“My grandfather was put into a Japanese POW camp,” Nick explained. “My father and my mother managed to get him out, but it was a close-run thing. They escaped to Australia. After the war my father decided to sell Hawk’s Nest and remain in Alice Springs. But I have been coming here two or three times a year since I was a kid. My mother’s family still lives here. If it weren’t for the political problems here, I would have moved to Burma long ago. There is so much yet to be discovered. So much to see.”
“Too much to see,” I told Nick one day when we were out collecting. “I think that’s been my problem with the tangle since I got here. I’m used to cold alpine environments and mountaintops where you can see for hundreds of miles, without a tree in sight. The rainforest is hot and claustrophobic. Everything is grabbing at you.”
Nick slapped an insect on his neck and laughed.
“I hear you, mate. I was never much of a mountain climber, but I did summit a few mountains in my youth, so I can give you a reasonably accurate idea of how to view rainforest and alpine ecosystems. When you look at a mountain, you don’t see the details. You see it in broad strokes. It isn’t until you start climbing that you see the minutiae. A rainforest is too complex for a broad view. To see it you must look into it. From a distance, it is incomprehensible. It is a living organism with millions and millions of moving parts, most of them interrelated and dependent upon each other.”
After hearing this, I started climbing trees in slow motion, pausing between each handhold, looking closely, looking into the tangle I was clambering over. I collected interesting plants, amphibians, and insects. I was able to avoid snakes and hornets’ nests. I took the time to watch monkeys climb with admiration. I was a pathetic climber compared to them. When I got to the top of a tree, I’d swing around the trunk, then climb down as slowly as I had climbed up. It took me hours to explore a single tree. My collection bags were bursting when I got back to the ground. Most of what Ethan and I collected was of little interest to Nick, but he appreciated the effort.
“You cannot discover something new if you aren’t looking.”
After a couple of days, he allowed Alessia to help him in his portable laboratory cataloging the specimens we collected. A day after this, he announced that she was well enough to travel.
“We’ll pack tonight and leave early tomorrow morning before it heats up,” Nick said. “It will take us a week to get to Hkakabo Razi.”
“A week?” Ethan said. “By my calculations, it should only take us three days.”
“Correct,” Nick said. “If we were walking on a cleared path, but there are no cleared paths here. During some stretches, we will have to cut our way toward the mountain with machetes. There are several rope suspension bridges to cross, provided they are still suspended, which several will not be. And don’t forget the porters. They’re carrying double loads, to say nothing of the fact that I am on a collecting trip. I’m not your guide. I’m here to work. We will be stopping to collect, and—”
Nick was interrupted by one of his porters running into camp, shouting. He listened to the porter for a moment, then turned to us. “Apparently, we’re going to have visitors in a few minutes. A platoon of soldiers claiming they have been trying to catch us for days.”
“Why?” I asked.
Nicked shrugged. “Are your papers in order? Do you have the appropriate permits?”
I looked at Ethan. I hadn’t even thought about permits. All I had was a passport with a Myanmar visa stamped on it.
“We’re squared away,” Ethan said.
It turns out that we were not exactly squared away.
Five
A bedraggled group of mud-splattered soldiers came marching into camp in camouflaged fatigues, carrying assault rifles. They surrounded us in complete silence.
“Uh-oh,” Nick said quietly.
A full minute ticked by without a word, then an officer marched out of the jungle into the menacing circle. Unlike his men’s, his fatigues were starched and immaculately clean. It looked as if he had just stepped out of a military clothing store. He inspected his men, one by one, very slowly. The men were all sweating in the afternoon heat. The officer was not sweating. After the inspection, he turned his attention to us, examining each of us closely as if he were committing our faces to memory. When he finished, he asked in perfect English, “What are you doing here?”
Nick answered. “My name is Dr. Nicholas Freestone. I’m a botanist. Why are your men pointing weapons at us?”
The crisp officer said nothing.
Alessia spoke up. “My name is Alessia Charbonneau. My mother is the French ambassador to Myanmar.”
Ethan grinned. “I’m Ethan Todd. I am Alessia’s security detail. I’m here to protect her.”
“Protect her with what?”
Ethan didn’t answer. He could protect her with his bare hands if necessary. He was a former marine sergeant who had spent a couple of years in Force Reconnaissance, then several more years as a military policeman.
“Are you carrying a weapon?” the officer asked.
“Yep,” Ethan answered.
I hadn’t seen a gun. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he was carrying.
“You will put it on the ground in front of you,” the officer said. “Slowly.”
Ethan stared at the officer for a few seconds. He was obviously thinking about whether to comply. He finally reached behind his longyi and pulled out a small holstered pistol and set it gently on the ground. The officer nodded to one of his men. The man stepped forward, picked up the pistol, then stepped back into the circle.
The officer looked at me. “And you?”
“Peak Marcello. I’m from New York.”
He scanned us again one by one, stopping when he got to Nick. “My name is Major Thakin. Why have you been running from us?”
“We haven’t,” Nick answered. “Why have you been looking for us?”
“I will do the questioning,” Major Thakin said. “You are my prisoners.”
“You have got to be kidding. I’m friends with . . .” Nick named several generals with almost unpronounceable names. “I have known them since they were children.”
“I am in command here,” Major Thakin said. “Not your friends.”
“I’ll let them know that when I get back to Yangon,” Nick said. “How do you think that’s going to go for you?”
I suppose this was the point when Major Thakin was supposed to wither under Nick’s name-dropping and tell him that there had been a terrible mistake. He didn’t. Instead, he smiled and informed Nick that two of the generals he had mentioned were his uncles, and the third was his grandfather.
The name-dropping and genealogy were getting a little stupid and irrelevant. The immediate problem was that we were surrounded by nine sweaty guys pointing guns at us, who looked like they were about to collapse with exhaustion. If one of them succumbed, he might accidentally spray the camp with bullets and kill us.
Alessia must have been thinking the same thing, because she slowly put her arms up in the air in surrender. She didn’t look afraid. In fact, she smiled at Major Thakin as she raised her arms.
The rest of us followed suit, including the porters, who had no idea what was going on because they didn’t understand English.
“May we put our arms down?” Nick asked politely.
“Perhaps in a moment,” Major Thakin said. “First I have some questions.”
My dad would call this a “squirt of power.” Josh is always encountering things like this when he deals with authorities, especially from the military guarding mountain routes and borders. These guys don’t want mountain duty. They don’t have the power they would like to have, so they use every squirt of power they do have to put you in your place.
We waited for the questions, but the major didn’t seem to be in any hurry to ask them. He called the soldier who had taken Ethan’s pistol over to him. The soldier stepped up smartly and presented the gun to him. Major Thakin pulled the pistol from the holster, examined it carefully, holstered it, then clipped it onto his belt.
“Where is Lwin Mahn?” he asked.
“He and his iron bell took off a few days ago,” Ethan answered.
“Iron bell?”
“Nagathan,” Ethan clarified.
“The elephant Nagathan is not an iron bell,” Major Thakin said.
“He’s killed people,” I said. “He killed a girl in the forest outside an elephant camp.”
“Not unless Nagathan knows how to use a slingshot,” the major said, then explained.
Which is what I meant when I wrote that we weren’t exactly squared away. Lwin was the murderer, not Nagathan. He had killed his estranged girlfriend with his slingshot early one morning as she was returning home after spending the night in another camp with her new boyfriend. After murdering her, he had retrieved Nagathan and made a slow getaway on elephant back. Somewhere along the way, he exchanged Nagathan’s wooden bell for an iron bell. Like exchanging a license plate on a stolen car. He knew the sound of the iron bell would keep people away from him and throw the authorities off his trail.
“But he acted like an iron bell,” Ethan insisted, his hands still up in the air.
“Musth,” the major said.
“What is mus—”
Nick explained, his hands still up in the air. “Periodically bull elephants go through a hormonal change, where their testosterone levels spike up to sixty times above normal. It makes them very aggressive. Sometimes even homicidal. The oozies tie the bulls up out of the way where they can’t hurt people or other elephants until the musth passes.”
“Nagathan is a prime timber elephant,” the major continued. “Lwin Mahn murdered the girl, then stole the elephant. We suspect he is returning to his home in the Shan state. You have aided and abetted this criminal by hiring him as your guide.”
“If we’d known, we would not have hired him,” I said. Actually, we would not have hired him if we’d known what he was really like, but that was beside the point.
“How much money did you pay him?”
I had no idea. I looked at Ethan.
“Five hundred,” Ethan said.
“US dollars?” the major asked angrily.
Ethan nodded.
“A violation of our monetary laws. Yet another strike against you. Thanks to you, we have a criminal at large carrying a fortune in foreign currency. He will be able to buy villagers’ silence all the way back to the Shan state where it will be very difficult, if not impossible, to find him.”
He glared at us for a few moments, then allowed us to lower our hands. “But do not move,” he added. “You are to stay exactly where you are.”
He grilled us for twenty more minutes. Where had Lwin gone? What direction was he headed? What did he say when we were with him? What were Lwin’s intentions?
We were no help. We knew less about Lwin than we did before the major showed up.
Ethan could no longer stand “exactly” where he was. His upper body started to fidget, then he began to move his feet, sort of marching in place. Nick was looking at him too. He knew Ethan well enough by now to realize he was about to bolt.
“I’m going to use the latrine,” Nick said, heading toward the tangle. “You can shoot me in the back if you like.”
Major Thakin looked displeased, but he did not shoot Nick in the back. Ethan walked over and got a couple water bottles and handed them to me and Alessia. Nick reemerged from the tangle.
“My men are hungry,” Major Thakin said.
“I’ll be happy to have my cook make some tucker for them.” Nick said something to his porters, and they began to unpack the food boxes.
The soldiers set down their rifles, unslung their packs, and started talking to the porters. There was even an occasional smile and laughter between the two groups. Ethan grabbed the camp chairs and set them around the smoky fire. The major sat down. We joined him. Apparently the major believed our story about Lwin and we were no longer his prisoners. Green tea was served. I was kind of amazed at the shift in mood. If Ethan hadn’t gotten antsy, I don’t think Nick would have risked taking a toilet break and we would have still been standing where we were.
Nick spent a few minutes explaining the reason behind Lwin’s abrupt departure. The major said the reason he had thought we were complicit in Lwin’s escape was that his trail had vanished.
“He entered a stream, and we were unable to find Nagathan’s tracks again. Elephants are easy to follow. They do not just leave footprints, they leave wide paths. We eventually picked up his trail again, but the tracks were older. They led us to your camp. You obviously were not sheltering him, but we still have the monetary law violation.”
This hung in the humid air for a moment.
“That’s my fault,” Ethan said. “It wasn’t planned. I didn’t have enough kyats to pay Lwin, so I offered him US currency. I realize now that I shouldn’t have, but we were desperate. Is there a way I can pay a fine directly to you to pass on to the appropriate authority?”
It was obvious to me, and probably to everyone else, that Ethan was attempting to bribe the major. By the way he was handling it, this was not the first time he had bribed an official.
Major Thakin appeared to think for a second or two, then said, “Yes, I think that can be arranged.”
“How many kyats do you think it would cost?”
“Probably more than you are carrying. Do you still have US dollars?”
“Some.”
“Three hundred dollars?”
Ethan shook his head. “Not quite.”
This wasn’t true. He had over a thousand dollars hidden in his money belt, half of which was mine. I’d asked him to stow it for me because I hadn’t thought to bring a money belt with me.
“If it is close to that amount, I think that will cover the violation. I will have to exchange the dollars for kyats, but that will not be an inconvenience, as one of my cousins is a banker.”
“I really appreciate you taking care of this for me.”
“Think nothing of it.”
“The money is in my tent. I’ll get it.”
The money was tied beneath his longyi, but he couldn’t very well pull the wad out in front of the major, or the men, although they were happily chowing down with the porters at the edge of camp and paying no attention to us. Ethan returned with a roll of money hidden in his fist. He slipped it to the major like a magician making a card disappear. The major glanced over at his men, then slipped it into his tunic pocket with the same sleight of hand that Ethan had used to give it to him, and our legal problems were over, or so we thought.
“I suppose I should look at your passports, visas, and permits while I’m here,” the major said pleasantly. “May I have another cup of tea? And it smells like the rice is done.”
Our papers were in Alessia’s tent. We gave the major the stack of documents. He looked them over carefully as he sipped his tea and ate his rice. When he finished, he set them to the side and examined Nick’s papers.
“Dr. Freestone,” he said, “your papers are in perfect order, but I’m afraid th
ere are some issues with your friends’ papers.”
Here we go again, I thought.
“Your permit says that you have permission to explore the area around Hkakabo Razi. There is no mention of climbing the mountain, and yet you have a lot of climbing equipment.” He pointed to the climbing gear stacked outside our three tents, which we’d been about to sort through and pack when he and his men marched into camp.
How much is this going to cost us? I thought.
“You never know what you’re going to run into getting over to Hkakabo Razi,” Nick said. “As you know, there are several suspension bridges on the way. Every time I’ve been there, one or two of them have been down and had to be restrung. The climbing equipment they brought is not for mountain climbing. We are using it to climb trees. These young people volunteered to help me collect specimens.”
“Are you saying that your meeting out here was pre‑arranged?” the major asked incredulously.
“Yes.”
I wondered if there was a national law against telling big fat whoppers.
“Ethan and I met at a party at the French embassy. He said he and some friends were coming out this way to do some trekking the same time I was going to be here. We didn’t have a firm date, or even a specific place to meet, but I told him that if he and his friends wanted to lend a hand, I would be very grateful. I told him to bring climbing gear. We never seem to have enough rope.”
I hoped Nick hadn’t just given the major enough rope to hang us. Major Thakin was clearly skeptical of Nick’s explanation, but there was no way to prove or disprove it out here in the tangle, or even back in Yangon, for that matter. Nick was well connected, and even though Major Thakin had blown off Nick’s generals earlier, I think he’d had time to reconsider. And we had all seen him pocket the bribe, which I’m sure he didn’t want his commanding officers to know about.
