The Lady and the Panda (18 page)

Young and Harkness hashed out their game plan. There would be three camps. Base camp would be one day's travel from the castle into the mountains. Wang, Yang, and Harkness would be stationed there. Camp Two was to be Quentin's, positioned one day from base camp. The third would be managed by Ho, who had been a member of the Sage expedition.

The travel coming next would sorely test the city girl. Sage had written extensively about the area they were about to enter. “The climbing we had hitherto done was nothing to what now confronted us,” he wrote, “for the trail led up over ledges and crags whose abruptness was fairly staggering.… Up and up we struggled, inching a laborious way over slides and ledges and around precipitous slopes, with often a sheer drop from the narrow trail into the abyss of clouds below.”

At 8
A.M.
on November 4, Ruth Harkness's expedition headed into what she called “the lonely lost world of tumbled mountains.” The morning sunshine in this province noted for its rains, she felt, was auspicious. Overall, the expedition had been experiencing great luck with clear weather. The team climbed and climbed. There were cliffs and bamboo forests, each turn providing a more stunning vista of snow-covered peaks. This “lonely, wild and unutterably beautiful place” made her wonder why anyone would choose to live in civilization. She continued to refer to the mountains as lonely, a complex sensation of many shadings that she and Bill knew well. Here, she embraced solitude, luxuriating in her reflective mood and continually comparing the life she had left behind to this glorious new one.

When she arrived, Harkness was thrilled. “New York has nothing like this,” she said. Because Young sped on ahead to prepare the camp, the comforting smell of wood smoke hung in the air, and on one of the few level spots in the whole area stood a cooking lean-to and her lightweight tropical white tent. Her quarters contained a cot, a trunk, and a canvas case. Best of all, it provided privacy, something that had been in short supply throughout the journey.

Just before dusk, when all the porters were accounted for, Young organized a ceremony in which the American flag was raised in her honor.

Harkness enjoyed a meal in the warm lean-to with the men. And, later that night, bundled up in her silk sleeping bag on the cot, as rain and wind beat against the canvas of her tent, Harkness closed her eyes, listening to the reassuring murmur of the hunters in conversation nearby.

The next day, Young was off to settle his own camp, but not before
expertly bringing down a goral—a husky and robust goat-antelope. It would provide a great deal of fresh meat, starting right away when they ate the liver for tiffin.

In Young's absence, Harkness sat in the field kitchen, banging out letters to friends on her portable typewriter and chatting with Wang in pidgin English. He was working his magic. Stripped to the waist in the steaming shed, he busied himself with the fire, making delicious scones for her while recounting his time as assistant to the cook of the French consul in Chongqing.

The next morning, a dispatch from Young arrived, along with a packet of mail he wanted sent off. The snowline, he said, descending further and farther down the mountain, had reached his camp. It was thirty degrees, foggy, and still snowing as he penned his note. At base camp, while a raw rain fell, Harkness stuck close to the fire, reading letters from Chengdu, Shanghai, and the United States, which arrived by runner just before nightfall. She relished the contact. Dan Reib cheered her on: “Hurry up and get your Panda and be back in Shanghai for Christmas,” he wrote. Harkness laughed at the thought—wouldn't that be something? It was much more likely that she'd be right here for months to come.

Young strode down to her the next day, announcing his approach with two shots of a gun. He was full of energy and high spirits. And he carried with him a gift—two beautiful tragopan pheasants. All the plans were going forward at tremendous speed. His camp was completely ready for her stay, traps had been set, log bridges constructed. As soon as he checked on the third camp, run by Lao Ho and Lao Tsang, he would be back to base camp to pick her up.

Before he was off again, he found waiting for him a letter from Diana Chen. Tucked into the envelope was a newspaper clipping—a photograph of her in a recent triumph. She had won events in javelin throwing, shot put, and the broad jump. It was a strange circumstance for Young, reading the letter of his girlfriend in front of his lover. Harkness wrote that he was smiling as he told her that she herself looked like an athlete now too. In Harkness's New York set, a woman who could
drive a standard shift might be considered athletic. Young's bar was quite a bit higher, and she was flattered. It was a sweet moment between them, and Harkness assured him that the pheasants would not be cooked until his return the next day.

Tethered to the small camp, Harkness, for the first time on the entire trip, grew impatient. While the panda hunt was so close, she wanted to be with Young.

She didn't have to wait long. On the afternoon of November 8, Quentin Young returned to guide her upward into panda country.

The terrain was as formidable as most adventurers would face in a lifetime. Not only were they climbing steeply at high altitude, but every step held another obstacle: dense stands of head-high bamboo, great dead logs covered in slippery moss, fields of knee-deep sphagnum moss engorged with icy water, and snow slipping off branches onto cheeks and down into coat collars. The constant fog kept everything wet, conspiring with the moss to make the footing as slippery as if it were oiled. They made their way through forest, over tumbled rock, and across icy churning streams. “Picture, if you can, a world of up and down,” Harkness said. “Where the best refuge you may hope to find from icecold rain, chilling ghostly clouds and razor-edged wind is a space hardly bigger than a bridge table in the mountain crags under overhanging rocks.… Where you grope your way through thickly standing spruce, interwoven forests of rhododendrons, walls of bamboo that virtually grow stem to stem, with here and there a sprinkling of moss-covered rocks and clumps of ferns and other vegetation.”

Harkness continued to struggle along in a reflective mood, particularly when she came upon what looked like nature's confirmation of yin and yang, the entwining of opposites. “A stranger thing I have never seen,” she wrote, “than snow on green bamboo.” It was proof that opposites coexisted, were part of each other, and gave each other life force. Evidence too, according to early philosopher Ko Hung, of the possibility of everlasting life—for bamboo showed that not all plants are bound to wither in winter. Scientists took note of the phenomenon as well. To them, the year-round life of bamboo, which provided a steady if not
terribly nutritious food source, represented the twist in the road of giantpanda evolution.

In this foggy region, there were places where Harkness could see but a few yards ahead. She wrote, “Then suddenly, there would be a rift in the ghostly mass and, often as not, we would find ourselves clinging tooth and nail to a mountain-side with a dead fall of many thousand feet right below us.”

Harkness and Young were drenched and tired when they reached Camp Two. Like Camp One, it consisted only of a cooking lean-to and a white tent in a cleared area, though this tent was Young's, and the flag flying above it was Chinese. Nonetheless, Harkness spent the night in that tent. Young, she wrote for public consumption in her book, slept with the hunters.

All along the route, they had seen “Panda signs. Droppings on the ground, claw marks on the trees, and bamboo stalks that had been ripped open and chewed.” Ruth Harkness was finally in the realm of the giant panda.

THE BIG BEARS
had lethal power in bulk and muscle, in their sharp claws and powerful bite. But what they wanted most was to be left alone to live a quiet life. And, strangely, it seemed they had accomplished that.

The giant panda, or
Mo
as it was often called, had been mentioned in ancient texts since before the birth of Christ, but not always in recognizable form. The
Shan Hai Ching,
or
Classic of Mountains and Seas,
a book on geography, and the
Er Ya,
or
Explanation of Words,
China's first dictionary, were just two that spoke of an animal that seemed very much like the giant panda. The
Shan Hai Ching
described the animal as living in what are now the Qionglai Mountains and having a taste for copper and iron. But the book could be confusing. Full of natural history data, it also delved into mythology and fiction, describing fantastic creatures like a horse with serrated teeth that ate tigers and leopards. In the various ancient references to the panda, it is often described as something like a white leopard.

Here in the mountains, of course, the local hunters knew of
beishung,
and they sometimes shot it for its wiry, coarse pelt, which was believed to ward off evil spirits in the night. In general, though, the hunters sought more valuable or useful game, and people in the area might live a lifetime without ever seeing the animal. Giant pandas hearing the approach of humans could disappear into the thick bamboo with amazing agility.

All around Harkness this chill night were those silent, vanishing pandas. Spread throughout this mountain chain, they were patiently enduring the late fall and facing the oncoming winter. Now, in the cold of November, they would be concentrating their consumption on old stems of arrow bamboo as well as some leaves.

For a male in the vicinity, this would be the rhythm of life—eating different parts of the bamboo seasonally, sticking to a home range of two to four square miles that overlapped with that of other pandas, posting claims and advertising his presence on trees by urinating and also rubbing secretions from a gland just under his short, broad tail. He would be eating and sleeping mainly, relieved of the mating pressure he would feel in spring. Then his masculinity would rally, his testes enlarging in preparation for the few days a female would be in heat. Precisely who she was and when she would be receptive would have been clear to him from the chemical signs she would be posting for him through her own scent marking.

On this night, not far from Camp Two, a female panda was nestled down in the hollow of an old tree with her two-month-old baby. He had been born, like most pandas here, in September, blind, nearly naked of fur, and utterly helpless. If he had had a twin, and there was a fifty-fifty chance he had, it was by now dead—an unbending rule of fate in the wild. Next to his mother, who was perhaps nearly two hundred pounds, he was truly tiny at birth, only the weight of a stick of butter. Small, slowgrowing infants were just one of the consequences of the panda's lowenergy diet. She suckled him as many as twelve times a day on her high-fat milk and dotingly licked at his belly and behind to stimulate him to relieve himself. For weeks, she had cradled him in her arms as she sat
upright, delicately picking him up in her mouth when she needed to shift position. He would be gaining weight, growing hair, and beginning to show the telltale black-and-white markings of his species. Driven by the need to eat, the mother panda would start leaving the nest without him for increasingly longer periods to feed on bamboo. By this time, his coat was thick enough for him to stay warm during her temporary absences. To leave him in the nest alone for any length of time was to leave him vulnerable—to golden cats, to the big tree-climbing yellow-throated martens, and now, even, to humans.

That night, as Ruth Harkness drifted off to sleep in these darkened mountains, she couldn't possibly have dreamed just how close to her goal she was.

W
HEN HARKNESS FIRST AWOKE AT SIX
, the dark and endless bamboo forest was just shrugging off its gloom and giving way to a luminous first light. It was Monday, November 9. The hunters, led by Lao Tsang, had already gathered around the fire in the field kitchen, preparing for another day of searching. Harkness had two luxuries here—the privacy of the tent for dressing, and a trunk full of clean clothes that included tailored riding trousers and sportsmen's wool shirts.

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.