Escape From Kathmandu

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  I was just about to succeed at that when I noticed that in fact there were no night jungle noises. This seemed odd. And Sunyash had raised her big head before me, and she had her trunk extended, it seemed, and was snuffling the air in big wheezes.

  And all of a sudden she raised back her head till we almost bumped foreheads, and let out a blast like forty French horn players punched in the stomach, and then she was off. Never even noticed whatever Freds and Dawa had used to tie her up with, and for all I knew we were dragging a saal tree in our wake, but in any case we were thundering along through the jungle. I had to hang onto the front railing of the platform for dear life, and nothing I shouted at Sunyash had any effect on her rampage. She wanted out of the area, and I thought I could guess why. Tiger! Would it chase us, leap aboard and eat me? Branches slashed my body as Sunyash brushed through trees, going faster than I would have thought possible. An elephant can run hard, and when they get up to speed it is like being on a train, a train that has skipped the tracks and is jouncing badly across uneven ground. A branch caught me in the forehead and after that things were blurry. It seemed my survival depended on slowing her down, and I saw no alternative but to slip under the front railing and slide down onto the driver’s seat, straddling her neck with a boot under each ear. I managed this and found it was not a very secure seat; there was nothing to hang on to. I leaned forward and grabbed hold of her ears as they flopped up and down, and yanked back on them as hard as I could. Sunyash tossed her head and almost got rid of me, but my back crunched into the platform railing and all that was lost was my breath.

  And then she slowed to a fast walk. “Good Sunyash,” I called down to her, wishing I knew more Nepali elephant driver talk. “Sunyash,” I said, in as calming a voice as I could muster. She would recognize that. I repeated it like a mantra. She slowed her pace a little, but did nothing else. I didn’t know if she knew where she was or not. Perhaps she was headed back to the camp stables; on the other hand she could have been lost. Over my left shoulder I thought I could still see a distant glimmer of the Tiger View spotlights.

  I felt no compunction about leaving Freds and Dawa there on their hilltop, at least until daylight. But if Sunyash were just wandering, then I’d be as lost at dawn as I was now. So tentatively I tried directing her. Kind of like learning to drive a car while it was rolling out of control down a hill, but there was no immediate danger except for the occasional low-flying branch. A kick under the left ear got her to veer a bit to the right, I thought. More kicks under each ear confirmed that she would swerve a few degrees if you kicked her hard enough to convince her you meant it. So I kept belting her under the flap of her left ear until we were headed back the way we had come, at which point she slowed down, and even stopped. “Come on, Sunyash.” Not a budge. “Go!”

  She didn’t want to understand. No movement. This was where the harsher drivers would raise up their rods and literally stab their beasts in the top of the head, alternating that with broad whacks right behind the ears, on both sides. I’d seen an elephant that refused to cross a small bridge coerced by these methods into stepping straight down into the gully that the bridge crossed and running up the other side, both moves awkward in the extreme. And other drivers had used these methods on flats to get the elephants to do their version of a gallop, so the tourists could feel how fast an elephant could run.

  I suppose I would have used one of those things on Sunyash at that moment, but I didn’t have one. She was impervious to my fists and boots, and tweaking the delicate flaps at the back of her ears only made her toss her head irritably.

  Finally I leaned forward and whispered into those monster ears. “Bistarre,” I said, which means “slowly.” This is a word most trekkers learn on their first day in Nepal from their porters. “Bistarre, Sunyash, bistarre.” Meanwhile whopping my boots together on the sides of her head, like a rodeo cowboy trying to get extra points out of an unenthusiastic horse.

  She began to move forward.

  After that it was just a matter of slow navigation, using the spotlights at Tiger View as a reference point. When I got to where I thought the hillock should be, there was nothing. I just kept wandering in circles until I ran into it. The Tiger View spots even gave me an idea of which side of the outcropping we had been on when Sunyash decided to depart the area.

  We were just settling down when suddenly Sunyash jerked and I cried “No!” thinking we were off to the races again; but it was just Dawa, climbing up her trunk. Freds hauled himself up the platform straps on her big round sides.

  “Hey bro,” Freds said. “Sorry we took so long, but we did find what we were looking for. Hope you weren’t bored.”

  “No,” I said.

  IV

  THEN ON THE WAY back Freds decided he wanted to take a look at the Tiger View operation. “Hey we’re right next to it and aren’t you curious? I mean we might get to see one of the tigers they get visiting.”

  “Sunyash doesn’t like tigers near her.”

  “We’ll keep our distance. Here, right over here.” He spoke briefly to Dawa, and slowly Sunyash moved through the night toward the gleam of the spotlight. We stopped when a gap between saal trees gave us a view of the lit clearing, spread below the vague shapes of the big camp’s viewing towers.

  In the clearing was a young sheep, a lamb really, tied to a stake in the middle of a swath of trampled and bloody grass. The dismembered and half-eaten body of another lamb lay at the edge of the circle of illumination. The lamb still alive huddled in on itself miserably, reaching down with its head from time to time to nibble at the broken grass. The rope tying it to the stake was taut; it had pulled away as far as it could.

  “My God,” I said, repelled. “Bait?”

  “Guess so,” Freds said. “I’ve heard that’s how they guarantee you’ll see tigers if you stay at Tiger View. They do it almost every night, and the tigers know it and come by for a snack. Pretty sick, eh?” In the dim light Freds’s grin was fierce. “I remember one of the guys in my frat house kept a gar in a big fishtank, and he fed it little minnows or goldfish or whatnot, and that gar would be laying at the bottom of the tank and then suddenly there’d be a swirl and one of the goldfish would be missing, you know, and we’d get high and sit around watching it and feel like Nazis. But this!”

  “People are in those towers watching?”

  “Sure! That’s the whole point! And tigers are messy killers, too, they’re liable to commence eating before the little thing is completely dead and all.”

  “Yuck. Let’s get out of here before we see it.”

  “Yeah okay. Although it just occurred to me that we oughta … you know what we oughta do is we oughta…”

  “We oughta what, Freds?”

  But he was already involved in a conversation with Dawa, at the same time leaning far over the side of the platform. “Freds!” I whispered sharply, pulling him back up by his belt. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “Looking for a rock or something.” Dawa interrupted him with a quick stream of Tibetan, pointing all the while at the spotlight.

  “Freds,” I said warningly, “I don’t care what you have in mind, I don’t like it.” But Freds was listening to Dawa, and nodding, and muttering “Great, great, good idea, I shoulda thought of that myself,” and I don’t think he even heard me.

  When Dawa started Sunyash off in the direction of the big camp, I seized Freds in both hands and shook him. “Freds, what are you doing?”

  “We’re just gonna give these sickos a little scare, George, it won’t take but a minute. I was gonna throw rocks at the lights, but Dawa suggested going for the generator which is a much better idea. Come on, jump down here with me, use the straps to let yourself down partways.”

  “No, Freds!” But he was hauling me over the side behind him, and there was no alternative but to grab onto the platform straps and let myself down as gently as I could. When I hit the earth Freds was already reaching up to get something from Dawa. A dagger the size
of a machete. Maybe it was a machete. “Oh my God,” I said.

  “Shh!” Freds said. “Follow me.”

  Dawa and Sunyash were lumbering away, and I had no choice. “Freds you tell me what you’re doing or I’ll tackle you and hold you down till you do.”

  “Shh, George, we gotta be quiet now.” He was really whispering. “Dawa’s gonna circle around and cut off their generator, and when the lights go out we’re gonna rescue that little lamb and give them rich folks something to think about.”

  “Shit.”

  “Shh.”

  “You’ve been spending too much time around Colonel John, you know that Freds?”

  “Sshhh!”

  We stopped in the darkness just outside the illuminated area. Once again I noticed that there were no animal or bird noises in the surrounding jungle, and I punched Freds in the arm and whispered into his ear, “Freds, listen! There’s no sound! There’s probably a tiger around here somewhere!”

  “Better hurry,” he muttered.

  We crouched there for what seemed to me several years. The sheep out in the clearing stared around wide-eyed, occasionally letting out a bleat. I sympathized with it completely.

  Then all of a sudden the big spotlights went out. Voices from the viewing tower exclaimed unhappily. Freds ran out into the clearing and I followed him. The sheep was bleating with fear. Freds cut the rope, then tackled the sheep before it could move. “Here, George,” he said in a quick whisper. “Hold onto it for a second, I’m gonna just sling some of the dead one up onto the tower steps so they can get a real close-up on any tiger that comes by later.” He giggled like Colonel John and slammed a live lamb into my chest. I held onto it and heard more than saw Freds picking up some pieces of the slaughtered sheep. It occurred to me that the sheep and I made a very nice two-for-one package deal for any tiger who happened to wander by and wanted to take advantage of the dark, and so I hurried after Freds just to keep near his dagger, or at least make sure that he too got eaten if it turned out that way; but the sheep had other ideas. It struggled furiously to escape, and just as I reached Freds it pushed away from me with all four legs and we pitched forward into Freds and all three of us went down in a heap. I landed on a squishy spot that appeared to be the entrails of the sheep Freds was carrying to the tower, then was yanked out of it by the live sheep, whose rope had gotten wrapped around my middle and my right arm. “Just about ready here,” Freds was whispering under his breath, “no need to be so impatient,” and I would’ve screamed but I couldn’t be sure it wouldn’t increase our risk. So I hauled the lamb back to my side and avoided its fierce kick; in fact I kicked it back, right behind the head, and picked the poor bleating thing up and tried to squeeze all the air out of it as I stumbled after Freds toward the viewing tower.

  Up above us there were still a number of voices: high voices complaining, low voices reassuring. Freds tossed whatever he had recovered right up onto the steps, and they landed thump thump, completely killing all noise from above. In the dead silence we could hear distant jungle noises, and a rustle that I fervently hoped was Sunyash; and above us in the viewing tower, furious whispering, and a couple of clicks and thunks that sounded to me suspiciously like shotguns or rifles being deployed over the railings above. No doubt if we tried for sanctuary in the tower they might shoot us. If we didn’t and tried to run they might shoot us too, and if not we were wandering around on foot at night in a jungle containing tigers, covered with sheep blood and carrying a live lamb in our arms.

  It was not a good situation and I was ready to try calling up to the people in the tower and asking for sanctuary, but Freds was already off, and so with a moan I punched the lamb behind the head again to subdue it and took off following him. Try as I might I still felt like I was making noise like a car crash, and Freds was no quieter, and my shoulder blades were rigid with the expectation that bullet or claw was about to smack between them. Then there was a noise in the bush to the right and I opened my mouth to scream my last scream and swung the sheep back to throw it forward in sacrificial offering, when the big black bulk of the approaching thing revealed it to be Sunyash, lumbering right at us. Dawa didn’t even have to stop her; Freds leaped up onto the platform with what looked like a single bound, and then I threw the lamb up to him and leaped aboard myself, hauling up the platform straps and vaulting over the rail. I landed on the sheep so hard I was sure I had killed it, but it bleated and kicked me to show it was all right.

  And we were off full tilt through the jungle.

  V

  “HA!” FREDS SAID WHEN he had caught his breath. “Wasn’t that great?”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say to him.

  He started giggling. “Any tigers go by Tiger View later tonight, hopefully they’ll climb right up the steps and scratch on that tower door. Give those sickos inside a close-up. Maybe one’ll even try to rip down the door, give them some cardiac arrests in there.”

  “You’ve been hanging around Colonel John too long.”

  “Maybe so.”

  Then Dawa reached back with a hand and gestured for silence, at the same time that he got Sunyash to come to a halt. We sat there silently. We were out from under the saal canopy, in elephant grass and on the edge of a meadow. “What now,” I breathed, but Dawa waved at me again, vehemently.

  Freds put his mouth to my ear. “Jeep there, see it?”

  He pointed, and I recognized the squarish mass to one side of the meadow. I nodded.

  “Poachers,” Freds whispered. “Be real quiet—this could be dangerous.”

  This could be dangerous? I mouthed.

  Freds was over the side before I could stop him. I moved to his side of the platform, but Dawa put a hand on my arm and shook his head. We sat there for three or four minutes in silence. Then Freds was back. He held up a large conical object; I took it from him, finding it heavy and with a weird texture, and lifted it onto the platform next to the stunned sheep. “What the hell is this?” I whispered as Freds climbed up to me.

  “Rhino horn,” he said under his breath. “They chopped it off, see?” He had a quick conversation with Dawa and we took off again, retreating as slowly and as quietly as Sunyash could, then circling around the poacher’s meadow.

  “Bastards,” Freds said. “It was an Army Jeep, too. Nepali Army.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  “I slashed all their tires and the ignition wiring, and snatched this horn out of the back. And took down their license plate number.”

  “They kill the rhinos just for the horns?”

  “Yep. It’s the damn Chinese again—they think ground rhino horn is an aphrodisiac.”

  “An aphrodisiac?”

  “Yeah. I guess the Chinese don’t think they reproduce well enough.”

  “And it was a Nepali Army Jeep?”

  “Yeah, but that could mean anything. Coulda stole it, borrowed it—could be Army folks out on the sly.”

  Suddenly there was a shout in the trees to our right, and a bang! bang! bang! We were being shot at. One bullet zipped overhead like a fast horsefly, and then Sunyash was off again, running full tilt. Even when she ran from the tiger she hadn’t gone as fast as this; Dawa was leaning over shouting into her ears and she really pounded along, faster than anything but a rhino could have been in terrain like that. I could still hear shots behind us, but we seemed to be leaving them behind.

  Then I noticed that our platform was listing to the left, sliding farther down Sunyash’s broad flank with every surging step. “Straps loose,” Freds exclaimed, hanging onto the downside rail. “George, grab the rope next to the strap and hold on!”

  So I leaned out under the platform rail and reached down, and located a rope that apparently circled Sunyash front to back. With a hand clenched around the rope and a knee hooked over a corner post, I was able to keep the platform from listing any farther down her side. Once in position, however, I had no choice but to stay there. And Dawa, worried about the poachers, ran Su
nyash all the way back to our camp, with me hanging head down, draped across the elephant’s right side, scraped hard by every passing branch. Above me the sheep bleated, and Freds called out “That’s it, George—hang in there—almost home.”

  Eventually we reached our camp, and slowed to a silent walk. At the mounting tower they disentangled me from the platform and the straps, and slid me down and caught me. Dawa took care of Sunyash and the sheep, while Freds got me to our cabin. I fell onto my bed, and soon descended into the deep sleep of denial.

  An hour later the camp attendants came around banging on all the doors to wake us up. Daubahal stuck his head in our room; the rising sun ringed his smiling face.

  “Elephant ride!” he announced.

  That night we had mutton for dinner.

  VI

  THE FOLLOWING DAY WE turned the rhino horn in to Nepali policemen that Daubahal had called in, and gave them the license plate number Freds had memorized: 346. I couldn’t help but wonder if the rhino horn wasn’t going to end up in China anyway, but by a different route.

  I peered in the busted mirror in our shower, and saw that I looked like the martyr who had tried to convert the Malays and had been flayed alive with whips of bamboo; and felt worse. But we returned to the Land Rover on the other side of the jungle river, in one last painful elephant ride, and drove away. And that evening we were back at the Hotel Star in Kathmandu, and so far as I was concerned, our jungle adventure was over. Finished. No more. All things considered, it hadn’t been too bad. Compared to the previous outings with Freds, where I had been ground up like a human sausage, it was nothing. A night out. Big deal. End of story. Great. Happy me. Sorry this one was a little bit short.