by Vicki Croke
Once dressed, she made her way through the frigid, damp air into the smoky, warm lean-to, indulging fleetingly in the thought that she might wrap a great wool blanket about her and stay cocooned for the day. But she had come too far and bet too much on this mission for even a moment's hesitation. She ate a spartan breakfast, and when the men were ready, so was she.
At about eight, Harkness, Young, Lao Tsang, Yang, and two native hunters marched into the thick forest. Young led the way to a trap they had set—a wire noose tied to a bent sapling—but it remained empty. Harkness was told that the wire was strong enough to hold a thrashing panda but that it would not hurt the animal. Of course, that wasn't quite true.
The visibility was poor—less than three feet—and the hiking in this unmapped and trackless terrain was precarious and slick. Several times Harkness fell, sometimes sinking up to her waist in vegetation, leaving her soaked and shivering. Even the indomitable Lao Tsang was silenced by the struggle.
Harkness tried to light a comforting cigarette, but the wet matches would not strike. The small group continued, clambering into a bamboo thicket that rained water down on them as they bumped and jostled through. Again and again they were forced to crawl on hands and knees over piles of fallen bamboo.
In the dense fog of the tento eleven-thousand-foot elevation, Harkness was frustrated, hearing things she could not see. Over the next few moments, everything would happen in a blur. There was a shout from ahead, then the sound of a musket firing. Confusion. Young was yelling in Chinese when Harkness found her way to him. She gasped, “What is it?”
“Beishung,” Young replied.
Then there was a gunshot.
Harkness feared the worst. Had the panda been killed? she asked. Though Young could not have known, he reassured her that he did not think so. Stumbling on, they heard from an old, rotting spruce a baby's whimper. Young rushed forward, thrusting his arms into the hollow of the great old tree. A three-pound black-and-white bundle of fur wriggled in his hands. When he quickly surrendered the kitten-size baby to Harkness, she felt her heart stand still. “No childhood fairy tale was more dreamlike, or more lost in a dim haze of make-believe,” she wrote.
Speechless, Harkness and Young could only fumble a sort of hand clasp to mark the moment.
As the helpless creature nuzzled Harkness's breast, the two explorers realized they must race to base camp for the canned milk and baby bottles. Young, the fastest, tucked the panda into his shirt, to gallop ever downward. The trip up had taken five hours. The return would not come close. Harkness possessed a new athleticism that surprised her. She matched Young's pace in the scramble toward camp, darting over the slippery log bridges that had so intimidated her before. For both runners, hearts and thoughts were in high gear, while the little animal who had caused all the commotion was pressed next to Young's beating chest, sound asleep.
Entering camp along with Young, Harkness witnessed Wang's reaction to the panda. As Young pulled the dozing catch from his shirt, Wang broke into a smile that seemed to take up his whole being. “How got one piece baby bei-shung,” he said, before turning calmly back to the cook shed to do his own job, preparing a meal.
At the bottom of Young's Tibetan trunk was a stout little cardboard container no bigger than a shoe box. Inside, wrapped carefully in paper and cushioned with cotton, was the fragile glass baby bottle.
It was the most important piece of equipment in their possession, prompting a rule set down then and there that only Young or Harkness could handle it.
Harkness would later recall, “In New York, Shanghai, Cheng-tu and points between, I had been told that my Giant Panda expedition was a million to one gamble. Well then, in the language of the gambler, that nursing bottle turned out to be the biggest ace in the hole that I could ever hope to have.”
Harkness and Young were like nervous and inexperienced new parents. She held the little whimpering panda while he read the directions on the side of a tin of dried milk. Young anxiously prepared the formula and poured it into the bottle, suggesting to Harkness that she feed the animal on the fur lining of his coat, so it would feel more natural.
Sitting outside the tent, looking down into the upturned face of the tiny panda, who was sprawled across her lap sucking heartily on the formula, Harkness thought he was “a very small giant, indeed.” She appreciated every detail. The creamy white fur, the silky black eye patches. The pink smudge of a nose and the delicate pink line of his lips. The roundness of face and body. The little furred limbs that twitched and shook. So beautiful, so helpless, so innocent.
Harkness would report later that she was amazed at how women, especially mothers, would “take” to the animal. “There is something about [the panda] that arouses the maternal instinct,” she said. Intuitively, she saw what science would quantify many years later: even adult pandas get to people. They possess exaggerated features that trigger a nurturing response in human beings. Most of us are genetically disposed to react emotionally to the sight of human babies, and pandas have what they have but amplified: large heads, flat faces, chubby limbs, rounded bodies, small noses, and big eyes—in the panda's case, exaggerated by black patches. Pandas sit upright and can even hold food in what look like little hands. They have hardly any tail at all, and their genitals are hidden from view. They look clumsy and vulnerable and sweet.
The baby panda drinking from the expedition's most crucial piece of equipment—a baby bottle. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO
This woolly little baby pulled at Harkness's heart with enormous strength. She would forever be referring to him not as “it” or “the panda,” but “Baby.” The panda “behaved like a baby and was treated as any human child would have been,” Harkness wrote. He was, she said, “absurdly baby-like in everything” he did: “in the aimless way” he waved his paws, “or sprawled, feebly kicking the little hind legs that were not as strong as the front ones.” Even his whimpering cry sounded so human. From that moment on, wherever she went, whatever she was doing, Harkness would either have the panda with her, touching her, or be compelled to steal herself away to where he was sleeping and gaze on his placid face. She would check on his safety, make sure he was breathing, and feel sweet relief in the simple rhythmic rise and fall of his warm, furry chest. He was, she believed, “the most precious thing I ever possessed.”
No matter how closely held or examined this tiny creature was, however, Harkness and Young would make a couple of mistakes about him that many others—including veterinarians—would repeat not only in his case but in that of many others for years to come. Because there was no external scrotum in the young ones, and the penis was so tiny, many male baby pandas, including this one, were assumed to be female. The adventurers also, along with the experts of their time, believed the panda to be younger than he was—“a week or two old”—when he was actually about eight or nine weeks. With better-known mammals, their assessment of his stage of development would have been correct, but pandas are born nearly furless, weighing just a few ounces, and much less developed than anyone at the time imagined. While puppies start to open their eyes at ten or twelve days, for instance, panda babies keep theirs closed for about six weeks.
There was no doubt about the baby's hunger. He was so eager to nurse that Young enlarged the hole in the nipple so he could take more in. When the feeding was over and the panda dropped back into the hard slumber of a baby, Harkness and Young fashioned a comfortable cradle for him out of a canvas case. Over time, it would be lined with flannel shirts, a warm wool Hudson Bay blanket, or any scrap of clean, dry clothing they could find. They did everything to keep the animal snug—tearing up shirts, handkerchiefs, even underwear.
That first day, Baby was brought into the shaded safety of Harkness's tent to sleep. Then the two panda hunters sat outside in the morning sunshine. It had all gone to their heads like wine, Harkness said. They touched hands. She was teary. “The thing I most wanted in the world was mine,” she wrote. She asked Young if he realized what had just hap
pened. There was no way then to envision the full scope of it.
A part of Harkness didn't want to anyway. Life was so good here, it was hard to contemplate leaving for the world beyond this one. “I wanted to stay in our little camp, and watch the Baby grow up in that lovely valley,” she wrote.
It was as though she had joined the Immortals of Daoist belief, the perfect beings who inhabit the mountains and walk among the stars and clouds. She was as close to heaven as a mortal can be, slipping into a sublime orbit straight out of the pages of a timeless text. As one Daoistinspired poet wrote more than a thousand years earlier:
Heaven is my bed and earth my cushion,
The thunder and lightning are my drum and fan,
The sun and moon my candle and my torch,
The Milky Way my moat, the stars my jewels.
With nature am I conjoined
In China, Harkness had finally found what she was searching for. If in a single moment there is eternity, then in this one she was experiencing a lifetime of bliss.
Out of this reverie, the practicality of survival took center stage when the men shouted that a wild boar was nearby. Young raced from camp in a chase that would keep him and the other hunters out for the balance of the day. When the group returned after dark, they were exhausted, disheveled, and dirty. There had been a close call with the wounded boar, apparently, but even then it had eluded them.
There was much to celebrate anyway. Dinner for ten that evening was as opulent as they could manage—roasted pheasants, native wine, a bottle of old brandy from Dan Reib, and a camp-concocted chocolate pudding for dessert.
Young had observed that Americans liked to be the first at everything. So the two decided that even the smallest panda-related moments would be memorialized as “firsts.” Harkness was the first woman to sleep with a panda, and Young the first Chinese to feed one. It became a running joke.
After dinner, everyone, completely spent, turned in. Rain and sleet, gentle at first, soon became a deluge, which caused a kind of comical entanglement between Young and Harkness. The incident would be recounted later in Harkness's book, but no doubt in a sanitized version. She would write that because they had left Camp Two in such a hurry, they had forgotten bedding for Young, compelling them to drag an air mattress and heavy blanket for him to the very entrance to her tent. It's just as likely that he was in the tent to begin with. In any event, later, during the night, while she was trying to fix a bottle for the crying baby panda, Harkness tripped over something. As if in a scene from a screwball comedy, she landed on the sleeping Young and managed to tip the flagging above, sending rainwater in a torrent over both of them. The upshot was that Young was then “forced” to sleep inside the tent.
Whatever the details really were, Harkness and Young did spend the night of their great victory together, cozy and alone in her tent while a snowy rain pummeled the canvas from above. The panda was cuddled next to Harkness, sucking the lobe of her ear as he fell asleep. Waking later, the panda was fed by both his guardians, and in the dim circle of light inside the tent, Harkness glanced over at Young, thinking how “paternal” he looked with the baby on his lap.
THE NEXT NIGHT, carrying torches, Harkness, Young, and the hunters gathered by a massive rock near camp. The gentlest among them, Whang, held a great handsome red rooster. He chanted and lighted rods of incense, or “joss sticks,” whose rising smoke would carry their prayers heavenward. He stamped his feet and lanced the neck of the rooster, all in rhythmic sets of three. Blood and then wine were poured over the earth, and using the warm, viscous blood, Whang pasted three feathers to a board. A pile of sacrificial paper money, which had no monetary value, only currency with the spirits, was ignited into a little bonfire. Firecrackers exploded in the still night, and Harkness, who normally hated handling guns, felt inspired to fire off three rounds into the air from Young's revolver.
The ceremony was to thank the gods of the mountains for their generosity in bestowing upon them the precious baby giant panda. The American was not patronizing the men, for she was a believer—not in religion or rules but in a larger mystery. She felt this from the Chinese themselves, who did not compartmentalize their spirituality but kept it close and intimate. They sometimes lived in temples, she noted, while “in America, no one would ever dream of camping or living in a church or cathedral even if it were partially ruined.” Here, gods, spirits, belief, were not relegated to Sundays, she said—“The Chinese feel differently about religion. It is an everyday matter, and perhaps they think their gods are everyday people.”
THE DEPARTURE PLAN was soon set. They couldn't afford to waste a bit of time in getting Baby out. Young would accompany Harkness as far as Chengdu, then trek back to the camps in pursuit of his own panda to shoot. There were, however, two pieces of important business to square away.
First, Harkness thought they should name their baby panda. Because he was curled up on Young's lap, cushioned by the sheepskin coat loaned by Jack Young's wife, she thought of “Su-Lin.” One interpretation of the name—“a little bit of something very cute”—was perfect for the tiny baby.
The other task was much more solemn. The next morning, when SuLin's breakfast bottle was finished, Harkness and Young headed back up the mountain, knowing they had a window of about six hours free from panda feeding. (Wisely, Su-Lin had been allowed to establish his own schedule. “Since no one had ever brought up a baby of that kind before, we decided that she knew more about how much she should have and when she should have it than we did,” Harkness said.) This expedition had been above all else a matter of honor. Now, climbing upward until mountain met cloud, Harkness placed the ashes of her dead husband in their permanent resting place. She couldn't bear lilies and conventional funeral parlors, so she laid Bill's remains beneath the twisted roots of a towering rhododendron, high in the cold, sacred mountains he had struggled toward but never reached.
When they were done, Harkness and Young left the site for nearby Camp Two, where they shared a cup of tea. Quickly, though, Young went on ahead to give Baby his next feeding. Alone with one of the porters, Harkness later took a tumble climbing down the mountain, wrenching her hip badly in the process.
She limped back to camp and, despite the injury, kept to the next day's schedule. Though it must have been grueling for her, the party reached the ruined castle that evening. Besides the panda, they carried with them bamboo from the capture site, which they hoped would help scientists in the United States distinguish which type Su-Lin should feed on.
It was a drizzly, miserable night. Harkness's sore hip, exacerbated by the hiking, ached, so at 3 A.M. she gave up trying to sleep and held Baby in her lap for a feeding. She felt comforted by the creature, and by the sight of Young, eyes closed, a few feet away.
With little rest, and her hip throbbing, Harkness nevertheless agreed the next morning to another long, hard march. Retracing the route to Wenchuan, which had taken them five days out, they walked steadily, making it in ten hours. Stopping only for a tiffin of canned sardines, they were able to reach the swaying bamboo bridge that crossed the Min and led into the city just before sundown on Friday, November 13.
Nightfall again brought a drop in temperature. Inside the nowfamiliar ghost temple, before a great roaring fire, Young and Harkness bundled close together beneath a single wool blanket. After her days in the mountains, she said, the ghost temple now seemed “truly palatial.” There was a mound of mail, retrieved from the local postmaster, which they read in the flickering light.
Their time together was coming to an end.
That evening, as usual, Harkness brought Su-Lin into her sleeping bag. She kept Baby close to her whenever possible, despite his sharp claws, which often cut her. A vigilant mother, constantly sterilizing in boiling water the things the panda would touch, she also had given up most of her remaining clothes to provide soft bedding. Harkness's efforts were working, for Su-Lin was thriving.
In the morning, everything was a little out of sorts, as oft
en happens when separations are looming. Here in Wenchuan they had their first taste of the tremendous curiosity the rare animal would arouse around the world. Harkness had the protective urge that comes to most new mothers, yet she understood the interest. While she never minded crowds gathering to watch her eat, or brush her teeth, or type, or even bathe, she would not allow throngs of people to disturb the sleeping panda—though keeping them at bay was hard work.
Added to that, Young was cajoled into leaving her to attend a feast held by Smith's hired hunter, Wang. In Young's absence, Harkness grew anxious, even beginning to believe that Wang was plotting to detain them.
When Young returned, their departure was made all the more chaotic by two bungling porters who slowed them down over the course of the day and had to be fired by the evening. For the journey to Guanxian, it was Harkness, Young, four hunters, four porters, and one shaggy brown Tibetan pony. Over two cool, crisp days, they hiked hard and slept in smaller villages, avoiding the attention that would come in larger ones. To that end, they stopped just short of busy Guanxian, sending one of the men ahead with a message to be telephoned to Cavaliere asking that he send his car for them the next day at noon.
As rough as the travel was, and as uncomfortable and dirty as the inns could be, Harkness was melancholy as she watched the last moments of her happy expedition slip away. She would come back to China, she knew, but these had been the happiest days of her life and it was hard to let go. Her success in proving wrong all those patronizing people in Shanghai and New York would seem so much smaller a contentment than that of a hard march, of picking herself up when she thought she couldn't walk another mile and walking two more miles, of watching the sun burn away the fog from a snowy peak, of sharing a good laugh over a cup of hot wine. Life here had been the appreciation of a single perfect egg, of experiencing so completely the fullness of a moment that it left no room for longing.
