Wild Things, Wild Places

by Jane Alexander

  In Putao, the local market and almost every household revealed animal skins and parts that people were eager to show him. When word got around that the Westerner was interested in animals, hunters came and opened sacks filled with deer heads, turtle shells, hornbills, monkeys, and Leopard and other big-cat skins. They said they didn’t find Tigers anymore. They dried their catch and waited for traders from China. They talked freely, having no idea there were hunting laws.

  It disturbed Alan that he had to buy the animal parts; it made him as guilty of the trade as any Chinese merchant. But he justified it because there was no reference collection of the species anywhere in the country and he had promised the government he would help with a biodiversity exhibition. He also needed to study the animals in detail.

  Still, I thought, was it necessary any longer to be collecting species at all, as museums across the world were still doing? There seemed to be no coherent policy, since each museum sought its own collection and paid little heed to the killing of threatened species in the last strongholds on earth. Nor did they seem to investigate fully whether another institution might have the animal already. I once asked to see the presumed extinct Ivory-billed Woodpecker in the drawers of the American Museum of Natural History and was stunned to learn that they had thirty of them squirreled away. There are more than four hundred of them in museum collections. (Oh, so that’s why they went extinct!) For all their scientific value, I respond to Thoreau’s description of these bastions as “the catacombs of nature.”

  If it hadn’t been for the hunters Alan probably would not have discovered a species new to science. A little twenty-five-pound deer with orange fur was placed in front of him one day and he immediately sensed that it was different. He bought the carcass, and many months later, back at the Bronx Zoo, George Amato determined the DNA and substantiated Alan’s suspicion: this Leaf Deer might have been known to the people of northern Myanmar, but it was new to the world of science.

  As the team continued its journey north, past the transition zone and into the Himalayan region, the party left behind the leeches that made their feet and ankles bloody, and the biting insects that welted their bodies. They began shivering in the cold mountain air. The sheer number of animals they saw in huts and in hunter’s sacks attested to remaining populations in the wild, even if the Tiger, Elephant, Takin, Serow, and Red Goral seemed headed for extinction like the Sumatran Rhino. Alan began to envision it all as a protected area with hunting regulations and strict enforcement. The animals would thrive if given half a chance, just as the Jaguars had in Belize’s Jaguar reserve.

  The trade in animal parts in northern Myanmar had been going on for as long as anyone could remember. The most coveted commodity being traded for animal parts was a complete surprise. It was not exactly greed that was driving the trade, but necessity. This part of the world lacked a vital mineral: salt. Alan said it was like going back in time thousands of years. Roman soldiers had been given salt for their work; it was called their “salarium,” or salary. Mark Kurlansky wrote an entire book, Salt, about the history and value of the mineral.

  Human beings need less than a gram of salt daily to keep the nervous system working properly. Most of the salt we need is ingested in the food we eat. Because the Myanmar staple is rice, which is naturally low in sodium, and the northern Myanmar diet adds meat only sparingly to dishes, it is possible that the people Alan encountered were truly sodium deprived. Whether the northern Burmese actually needed additional salt or whether they simply craved it, as human beings and many animals do, the trade existed and was decimating wildlife. If the area became a park and the people were supplied salt in exchange for not hunting endangered animals, might that be a solution?

  As the weeks went by and the team trekked higher into the lush mountain valleys, everyone suffered from exhaustion and physical ailments. The stress of talking to every village about the animals they hunted took its toll. One of Alan’s knees was killing him, and he spent sleepless nights when his thoughts turned constantly to Salisa. The porters were mostly teenagers, and despite the toughness of the journey they told Alan they were having a great time. The boys were getting to see a world beyond Putao, and the girls laughed, saying they were happy to be away from their husbands.

  In northern Myanmar, Christian missionaries had converted most of the people. Still, the awesome power of the young Himalayan Mountains inching ever skyward, the rivers tumbling from them, and the lush green valleys failed to quell an innate animism. In his book Beyond the Last Village, Alan wrote:

  I always feel both strengthened and humbled by the almost palpable energy of truly wild places such as this one. It never surprises me that human beings feel a need to worship and appease the power of raging rivers and the indomitable presence of towering mountains. To me it is a manifestation of the intuitive understanding that one has to live with nature, instead of constantly pitting oneself against it, in order to survive. What saddens me, however, is when people learn to suppress such feelings, becoming convinced that humans are apart from nature.

  The Christian interpretation of man’s dominance over animals refers to Genesis 1:28 in the King James version of the Bible: “Replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.”

  Alan met Christian preachers in many countries, including Myanmar, who took this biblical quote as a license to kill indiscriminately. More than once he argued with them and their followers, especially when they took pregnant or lactating females and young. But in these Himalayan villages there were also Christian leaders who were wise, who looked instead to the verse from Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them.”

  Alan made more trips to Myanmar in the late nineties. He and Salisa trekked new routes in the north where he talked about a future when the villagers would have salt and other needs met and animals could thrive. He made friends with the final generation of a tribe of pygmies known as the Taron, twelve little people who had decided not to have children because of inbreeding. He witnessed these human beings make a conscious decision to go extinct. Perhaps they had been caught, like so many of the unique mammalian species in these remote mountain outposts, many thousands of years ago with nowhere to go and no escape.

  Alan Rabinowitz with one of the Taron pygmies headed for extinction, in the remote mountains of Myanmar, 1990s Credit 3

  Khaing and Alan drew up plans for protected areas, larger than any already existing in Myanmar because the big animals needed space to become viable populations if they were to survive. They presented the plans to the government, only to learn that their supporter General Chit Swe was gone, perhaps under house arrest. No one seemed to know what was happening as the government reorganized once again. Alan waited for a response as he and Khaing educated villagers about animals and how to protect them from poachers. Khaing was eager and ready to take over the responsibility of the leadership role. He had been by Alan’s side for most of the 1990s, through hardship and hope. He learned from Alan’s passion despite their differences. He often told Alan to learn to accept the things he could not change. Alan would reply that he had to try to change what he could and that he “reserved the right to rage against even those things I can’t change.” Besides, he added, “It reminds me that I’m still alive.”

  He returned to his country home in New York to be with Salisa for the coming birth of their first child. He went to the Bronx Zoo and ran the Asia program while waiting for news from Myanmar. On the cusp of the new millennium, November 4, 1999, Salisa gave birth to a beautiful baby boy with the dark hair and eyes of his mother. Alexander Tyler Rabinowitz exhibited the fortitude of his father from the very beginning of his life.

  Finally, on April 3, 2001, word came that Myanmar’s ministry of forestry had created the protected area Alan
had proposed, the Hukaung Valley Wildlife Sanctuary. This, along with the Hkakabo Razi preserve authorized earlier, and almost double the size Alan suggested, made this the largest protected wildlife area in all of Asia.

  7

  India

  It was not possible for me to travel to Myanmar in the years Alan was there. The military government probably would not have issued me a permit even if I had been able to go. Besides, I was in Washington fighting to keep the NEA alive. In 1995 the first Republican Congress in forty years was elected, with Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House. Their “Contract with America” included the complete elimination of the NEA, as well as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Public Broadcasting System, and the Pell education grants. I went on the road, bringing my case to the people. I traveled to all fifty states, and districts such as Puerto Rico, meeting and talking to people about the arts the NEA helped fund in their neighborhoods—everything from craft and music festivals to museums, dance, theater, and war memorials. It was not a hard sell. People love the arts: it gives their community identity, entertainment, and a spark of imagination. Once they connected the NEA to the places they frequented, they didn’t want to lose the endowment and the grants it gave. Most people didn’t care about the controversial grants that disgusted some members of Congress and forced us into the headlines too often. As long as people were told beforehand what to expect of an exhibit, they were content to make their own choices. It was a matter of education. In the end the people saved the agency by pressuring their legislators to vote for it to continue. But it was a tough few years in the trenches of politics before the battle was over.

  Senator Alan Simpson was one of the few Republicans who supported me, the First Amendment, and the NEA through thick and thin. And we had Buffalo Bill in common: Al’s grandfather was Buffalo Bill’s lawyer, and my grandfather was his doctor. Here we are celebrating at a fund-raiser for the Buffalo Bill Museum in Cody, Wyoming, in the 1990s.

  Alan Rabinowitz and I would compare notes on weekends in our kitchen, when he was home from his mountain battles. You couldn’t second-guess politicians; they had their own agenda and sometimes, like the conservatives we were both dealing with, they would do an about-face and surprise you. We were both high from our victories but weary as well.

  Alan was physically weary. He is one of the strongest men I have ever known and keeps fit through daily weight lifting, boxing, and wrestling. His muscles are taut, and an invitation to punch his abdomen is more likely to hurt the puncher’s fist than Alan’s gut. His global travels take an enormous toll. He has had parasites in his system for months on end, broken bones, infections, and injured knees that would not heal, but he always recovered and went back out to face the newest challenge in the wild. If he was taking longer than usual to recover, it was simply a matter of time before he was his old self again.

  He was not prepared for the diagnosis his doctor gave him just two years after Alex was born. Chronic lymphatic leukemia is an incurable cancer. Alan was told he had four to twelve years to live. He was forty-eight, and Salisa was pregnant again.

  Alan was remarkably composed for a man living with a death sentence, but he had escaped death numerous times already—plane crashes, truck accidents, mountain ledges, fierce animals, and men with guns. Perhaps he thought he’d beat the odds, and if not, it had been a pretty great ride.

  Tears clouded his eyes when Alana Jane Rabinowitz was born on May 23, 2002. Ed and I, the children’s godparents, were present at her birth, as I had been at Alexander’s as an unofficial doula. Salisa’s slim hips closely cradled her baby girl, and her labor was long and hard. Alana Jane finally arrived, beautiful like her mother, with a head of lustrous black hair and deep brown eyes. She began to wail. She did not want to be washed or wrapped or fussed with. Alan stroked an exhausted Salisa as Ed took the baby into his arms. He gently rocked her, walking around the sterile hospital room and toward the light streaming through the window. Alana quieted instantly and gazed at the bright new world she had become part of.

  Alan’s leukemia did not bring him down. He had too much to live for and too much to do to let the cancer stop him. His doctors at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York gave him a cocktail of drugs to combat the disease, although there was no known cure. Hedging his bets, Alan also consulted a Chinese shaman in the heart of Chinatown. He sat in a tiny room facing an intense little man who spoke no English, who stared at Alan, transferring an energy that made Alan feel better after each session.

  His fiftieth birthday was celebrated at a rousing party given by his sisters, who jumped the gun by a year. When your birthday is December 31 you can get mixed up. Alan was really only forty-nine, but it didn’t matter, we needed to celebrate his life. He was feeling okay and was ready for travel.

  As head of the Asia program, Alan was going with George Schaller, other staff, and us trustees to observe the Bengal Tiger programs that WCS funded in India. India has forty-two Tiger reserves and the most Tigers in the world. The historic range of Tigers extended through eastern China and Malaysia south to Indonesia, and north and west through Russia and Turkey. Today they live in only 7 percent of their former range. All subspecies, from the Amur (or Siberian) Tiger in Russia, with only 400 animals, to the South China Tiger, which hasn’t been seen in the wild in China for ten years, to the Sumatran, with about 400, are being pushed into smaller and smaller areas as the human population advances. Wild Tigers today, optimistically estimated at about 3,200, are highly endangered.

  There is probably no animal on earth so heralded, feared, and revered as the Tiger. Their veneration is exceeded only by their slaughter. Tigers preceded Homo sapiens on earth by as much as a million years, but once we made our way out of Africa the need to triumph over the top predator of Asia must have been overwhelming. Like two heavyweight champions in the ring, we have been circling each other throughout time. Tigers were captured and pitted against Lions in Rome’s Colosseum, the Asian outlier against the North African regular. The only report of a battle between these two greats—in 80 AD, by the historian Martial—said the Tiger won. The Romans decimated much wildlife with their bloodthirsty shows, but it is doubtful that they made much of a dent in the Tiger population, because the Tiger’s range was so great. Rome’s use of mammals, including human beings, as commodities for entertainment paved the way for sport hunting by India’s Mughals, who ruled from 1526 to 1857. The Mughals, intent on bringing down the Tiger with sword or arrow, subsumed the divine power of the animal by killing it. The Tiger might escape the sword or the arrow, but when guns took over the hunt, and beaters drove the animals from their lairs, they had no chance.

  The massacre of Tigers in the late 1800s was not unlike that of Bison in North America at the same time. The maharajas prided themselves on showing their European guests a good time, especially their British masters. They increased their own status with each Tiger they killed. One maharaja boasted that he shot 1,100 of the great cats. There are photographs of the beautiful animals lined up on the ground like so many logs, their killers behind them as proud as if they had exterminated vermin, which is, indeed, how the cats were viewed. Between 1875 and 1925 it is estimated that 80,000 Tigers were taken, although no one knows the exact number. Journals complain of fewer cats as the years went by. With India’s independence in 1947, trophy hunting became the rage. The ordinary man in the new democracy, as well as sportsmen from the United States and Europe, could each have their Tiger. High-powered rifles, scopes, and jeeps ensured them that they would.

  Then things started to change. Indira Gandhi became prime minister in 1966. She was a huge champion of her country’s wildlife and was alarmed to learn that the Tiger population had plummeted from 40,000 in 1900 to just 1,800 in the 1960s. Soon legislation imposed strict hunting laws and it became illegal to export Tiger skins. She appointed a task force in 1971 to study the situation, and Project Tiger was launched in 1973. Nine Tiger reserves were established, guards were brought in to patrol, and entir
e villages were moved. Indira Gandhi understood the whole complex interaction of Tigers and men and the need for healthy habitats for the species’ survival. The numbers of Tigers more than doubled, to 4,000, in the ten years that followed. Then, in 1984, Indira Gandhi was assassinated by her own Sikh bodyguards and the brief bright light of the decade was dimmed again, never to fully recover.

  Dawn in Kanha was golden. Rays of sun crept across the pastures and illuminated the Sambar Deer, its majestic antlered head alert to our approach, and the smaller Swamp Deer bounding from the pond’s edge over the fields. These prey animals keep the Tiger alive. The Swamp Deer, or Barasingha, is found only here and two other places in the world, but it shares Kanha’s lush swampy lowland with the little Spotted Deer (or Chital), the Muntjac (or Barking Deer), and the Wild Boar. The ancient villages that once dotted this area are all gone and their cultivation has now reverted to mixed grasslands edged with forest. It is one of the most beautiful of the Tiger reserves.

  Kanha at dawn with the Tiger’s favorite prey—grazing Spotted Deer

  Our birding team of four, plus Raj Singh, the naturalist and bird guide author, was up and at ’em before all the rest, as is usual with birders. We go slower. Those who are mainly interested in seeing mammals are hot to race around and find them. We amble. We search the trees and the sky, as well as the ground. We take our time, but we miss very little, and at the end of the day we invariably have as many mammals, if not more, than the others, in addition to a hundred birds. This morning was no exception.