The Lady and the Panda (16 page)

Tomorrow, she would press north for panda country.

A
S HARKNESS TRAVELED
, her movements were being noted, and the information eventually relayed to Shanghai. Gerry Russell, up-country himself, was able to track her whereabouts, reporting them to the by now quite sickly Smith back in the city. The American woman's progress was of considerable interest to the two men she had spurned, and checking up on her would be easy. The local people knew what Harkness was doing “almost from hour to hour,” and the hunters “kept tabs on her movements from minute to minute,” Smith would say later. Beyond field-intelligence gathering, though, there wasn't much Russell could do to thwart her except beat her to the punch, something Smith would have liked to have done himself—if he had been up to it. Smith, the collector who didn't think a woman could be equal to the job, was presently checking himself in to a sanitarium in Shanghai for a week's “rest,” which would be followed by a month of more recuperation at home.

Unaware of any espionage, Harkness and Young had started their climb toward the mountain passes. Harkness was out in front in the
wha-gar
and Young was bringing up the rear, with about a mile of road
between them. The only sound she heard was the soft, steady shuffling of marching feet. Suddenly, there was the sharp report of Young's revolver—three pops in quick succession—which prompted Harkness to command the coolies to halt. What could it be? A swarm of bandits? She waited in utter anxiety until Young came around the bend of the crooked path accompanied by a Chinese officer, Captain Chien, and a group of fourteen soldiers, all armed. Overjoyed that the signal hadn't been fired because of bandits, she then feared these men had come to suspend the expedition. Perhaps it was her nightmare come true—that she would have to return home, defeated as Bill had been.

The appearance of the soldiers, it turned out, was nothing more than a gesture of Cavaliere's protectiveness. Even in this time of great turmoil, they had been dispatched to ensure Harkness's safety. Cavaliere really would, she wrote, “turn the world upside down to help you.”

Harkness felt an immediate fondness for the men, most of them barefoot and wearing weathered clothes in shades of faded blue. There would be two separate and equally congenial groups to accompany the team over the next several days. They shared cigarettes, swapped pleasant conversation, and drank tea the country way—a pinch of leaves at the bottom of a bowl, with boiling water poured over them. With Harkness, the men held an impromptu target practice, all laughing when she tumbled over backward from the recoil of a rifle.

She was touched when their leader made her a present, both practical and poetic, of two perfect eggs—a simple gesture, but one of great importance for the people here. Later, in a distant village, when the soldiers brought Harkness to meet their wives, she would sit with the tiny women drinking tea and eating sunflower seeds, delightedly spitting the husks onto the floor as the other women did.

The soldiers kept pace with the expedition as the week of travel after Guanxian marked a drastic change in the terrain, and in the bond between the American widow and her Chinese expedition partner. The ascent was beginning.

Harkness and Young rose each morning with the sun, stopped for three breaks a day, and turned in at about the time Harkness would have
been headed out for early cocktails in Manhattan. They shared everything, including a battered washbasin. Evenings often saw them together on her cot, reading or writing letters.

As they climbed through higher elevations—up toward the eight-toten-thousand-foot zone where the pandas thrived—the world around them grew heavenly. There were deep gorges and tumbling streams, shrines and temples, Chinese girls carrying magnificent hundred-pound loads of tea, peasants bearing medicinal herbs on their backs and leaving fragrant trails behind them. At one point, Harkness and Young stumbled upon a country funeral, complete with drums and cymbals, and large banners that cast their dancing shadows on the dusty village streets. Skittering along cliffs, Harkness could faintly hear the rushing waters of the Min far below. And early one morning, appearing like ghosts out of the fog, came a group of wild young men from the mountains. Wearing fur-trimmed leather coats and curled-toe shoes, they led a string of shaggy Tibetan ponies whose silver bells jangled with each step.

Harkness and Young were meeting their goal, covering twenty or thirty miles a day, most of it uphill, much of it rutted or rocky. It was a rougher life than Harkness had ever known. Yet she felt alive in a way she never had before. She walked and scrambled over miles of cliffs and forest and tumbled rock. Always petite, she now grew fit. The surroundings were beautiful, the air was clear, the company ideal.

Everything seemed better to her here, even the simple food. Somehow a handful of dry grape nuts eaten while marching, she said, “tasted just as good to us as though they had been served in a china dish with bananas and cream.” She feasted on local fare—corn cakes and turnips, cornmeal bread, cabbage, and peanut candy. She once used chopsticks to eat fried eggs in front of a crowd of two hundred. Sometimes she and Young dove into their own supplies, making breakfasts of English biscuits smothered in Tasmanian jam, or crabmeat and boiled eggs. In every village, they filled their enamel mugs with cup after cup of freshly brewed tea.

All things around her deepened and changed in her eyes—including her partner. The shy boy she had met in Shanghai seemed like a man
now, and a very protective one. Every night, no matter what the accommodation, Young guarded Harkness, setting up his own bed close to hers. His impulse would prove sound one evening when he foiled a band of robbers as she slept.

Wherever they went, Young took care of everything. He dealt with the soldiers, he managed the porters, he kept the expedition on course and safe. He was also great company, and their intimacy grew, as they discussed the day's events, wrote letters, and reviewed plans and expenses together, almost always on the comfort of her cot.

LIKE SOMETHING
out of a book of Chinese fairy tales, Harkness wrote, they came upon the old village of Wenchuan. It sat at the foot of great green mist-enshrouded mountains that looked like coiled jade dragons, complete with serrated spines and smoky breath. As symbols of good luck in China, the mythical beasts were forever appearing just as they did now—in the outlines of fog-bound mountains and hills.

The enchanted hamlet of stone and timber-and-mud houses, lighted at night only by the warm glow of candles and encircled by “crumbling, crenellated walls,” seemed little changed since the fifteenth century, when foreign princes from Tibet, at the urging of the troubled Ming Dynasty, came to quell local rebellions. Their odd, semiautonomous empire-within-an-empire, Wassu, stretched over some twenty-eight villages, and when Harkness arrived it was still ruled by the princes' heirs, known as Wa-ssu tusi. The royal men and their descendants had built huge Tibetan-style fortresses and great stone watchtowers throughout the area.

Wenchuan, it turned out, this afternoon could offer no rooms to the travelers in the village proper, so Harkness and Young made their way to a fantastic, if ruined, Buddhist ghost temple at the outskirts. Soldiers, in a “revolutionary tornado,” had come through the year before, dismantling it along with many other buildings in the town for firewood. Even so, what was left was remarkable. Blue life-size horses, one headless, stood at attention in a courtyard whose walls were painted with scenes of souls in purgatory. A barren loft, open to “three corners of the compass,”
was quickly converted into a comfortable camp with all the equipment and cots dragged up a wooden ladder.

Settling into the temple, Harkness installed a makeshift curtain for herself. After a sponge bath, she changed into her beautiful quilted Japanese dressing gown, an indulgence, perhaps, but at least it was warm.

The ghost temple in Wenchuan.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

That night, Harkness and Young wandered into the village center for a hearty meal. The town—the last they would see before the mountains—would mark another pivotal point on the great journey. Over the next several days, emotionally and logistically, there was much to square away.

One evening here, as a bright moon filled the courtyard with a pearly light and a cold wind moaned, the soldiers argued with Quentin Young. Young wanted the recruits to part company with them so that he and Harkness could get on with the expedition into the mountains. But the military men were concerned about their culpability if something should happen to the American. The discussion unnerved Young as he began
to think about the consequences he himself could face if Harkness were harmed.

He came to her, agitated and fretful, with a sense of rising panic she had never seen in him. She tried to convey her unshakable confidence that this expedition was blessed. She concluded, as did a character in a Chinese novel by a favorite writer of hers, that “when you yourself are right, nothing that ever happens to you can be wrong.” She knew they could walk through an avalanche, emerging unscathed. “The utter impossibility of anything but the peace and beauty of the last few days of travel was so unthinkable to me that I believe I finally conveyed a little of it to Quentin,” she wrote.

The soldiers were dismissed, but still, as a precaution, Young again issued strict orders for Harkness to carry the revolver with her at all times. She would never really comply. With a gun, she wrote, “I felt and looked so silly.” And, “besides,” she said, “the people were all gentle and friendly.” The results of target-practice sessions had only reinforced her feeling that she should not be trusted with a weapon of any kind.

One morning, though, when Young was especially adamant, she acquiesced. Dressing in riding breeches and boots, strapping a big .38 Special police revolver to her thigh, she strutted out, feeling pleasantly ridiculous, and mock-saluted Young.

He was jubilant.

Saluting her back, he addressed her as “Colonel.” She called him “Commander.” The pet names stuck for the remainder of the journey.

AFTER YOUNG PAID
off the old set of coolies from the city, he set about hiring a new staff of local hunters and porters. A man who was one of Smith's hunters came to the temple looking for work. What his motivation was would always be a mystery. Like Russell, he may have had in mind some spying on Harkness. He might have wanted to create a little mischief. Or he might simply have been looking for a way to double his salary—already being paid by Smith, he came for a share of the Harkness
expedition's payroll. Whatever it was, Young and Harkness agreed that they wanted nothing to do with him.

It did ignite Harkness's resentment once again, reminding her of her strong conviction that she had been cheated. Back in Chengdu, some missionaries had told her that Smith channeled funds through them to keep hunters in the area working for him. She believed Bill's bank account was continuing to fuel Smith's operation. Now she felt that if she hired Smith's hunter, her poor dead husband would be paying the man a multiple salary: one from Bill via Smith, the second from Bill via Ruth.

She didn't linger long over the thought, though, because a very different character looking for employment presented himself at Wenchuan too. With two mountain dogs loping by his side, he seemed as old and wild as the great mountains he had emerged from. His name was Lao Tsang, though Lao was an honorific meaning “old,” and Tsang could have simply been a variation on the word for “Tibetan.” A member of the Tibetan-related Qiang people, he wore a leather coat with fur lining, tall leather boots held high by suspenders tied at his waist, and a garment of coarse, homespun cloth. His brown, weathered face was set off by a white turban, wispy strands of snowy hair straggling down from it, and a sparse goatee. He had a squinty expression, as if appraising everything before him. His gun, made of silver, turquoise, and coral, seemed more ancient artwork than formidable weapon.

He was the headman of his village, about a day's walk westward, deeper into the mountains. He had heard from what outsiders called the “bamboo telegraph”—some uncanny system of fast communication among mountain people—that they were hunting the giant panda. He told them matter-of-factly that he was the man to do it. He spoke of his hunting prowess, his knowledge of good panda habitat, and he informed them of what he would expect in the way of payment, which amounted to just a few dollars a month.

They hired him without hesitation, and the newly constituted group was soon on its way. Harkness, Young, Lao Tsang, and two porters were to travel fast and light to scout out the promised hunting area. Wang was
left behind with the heavy gear. On their departure, the entire town, including barking dogs and squealing pigs, saw them off.

At a tiny hamlet came evidence that they were on the right track— not panda tracks or dung, but a pair of tweed trousers left behind by the Sage expedition, which had traversed this very route the year before.