The Lady and the Panda (30 page)

She had her very best evening dress here at the pavilion, and for her thirty-seventh birthday, on September 21, Cavaliere uncorked a bottle of sparkling burgundy. As if to underscore how different this trip would be from the last, though, Harkness reported home that “it didn't sparkle.”

Perhaps it was this reminder of the passage of time that prompted her to shake off the indolence. In part too, it was sparked by a reunion with her cook, Wang Whai Hsin. He had been so kind and loyal to her that despite all the reasons against it, she decided to launch the expedition with him alone. He was neither a hunter nor an explorer, and they had very little language in common. Still, by muddling through together, he could serve as interpreter, and by their mutual trust, they would direct the campaign. Her first expedition had been modest; this would be far smaller—just Harkness and Wang, hiring porters and hunters as needed. The paucity of her expedition gear—it would be whatever she could scrape together from the previous year's leftovers—had one benefit: they wouldn't require as many hired hands.

Under the heading of essential items in a Harkness expedition, though, would come something others might consider a rather low priority—the wardrobe. Wang understood his boss only too well, immediately securing her a sophisticated, Shanghai-trained tailor. Harkness so
indulged herself in the task of designing, sketching, and modifying her new apparel that some days she would have to lie down for naps in between fittings.

“I have two new Chinese costumes you'll like,” she wrote to Perkie, “the sort of house lounging things that I love in the evening. One Chinese coat is regulation with embroidery—pale blue and one is a very old one, a black purple very heavy with gold and silk embroidery.” For about forty-five cents each, she also had two pairs of silk pants sewn—one red and one purple. She ordered up a sheepskin coat lined with cotton; Chinese cotton shirts; and, most outrageous, a yak-hair coat lined in green silk, “a camp tea gown thing,” she called it, for the cold nights she would be spending in the mountains.

The next step was to survey the stored gear. It was a fright. Many items were ruined and unusable. Two old coats, one army-issue, the other sheepskin, were writhing with worms; boots were moldy; a half block of cheese had grown a thick fur coat. Much worse than that was the troubling fact that critical pieces were missing. Her tent, silk-stuffed sleeping bag, wool socks, wool shirts, and raincoat, to name just a few, had simply vanished. “The devil of it is,” she wrote home, “that all the evidence turns toward Jack Young.” Ching Yu and others on staff swore that when he came through on a trip through the area, Jack had helped himself to her stash. She resisted believing it, but, damningly, in among her stored things she discovered a notebook of Jack's that must have fallen out of his pocket.

For Cavaliere, there was no hesitation. He trusted the word of his top servant. Incensed, he said he would never allow Jack Young to stay with him again. Harkness felt tremendously unhappy about the whole affair, not so much about the goods themselves, but she hated deceit, especially from someone she was so fond of.

There was too much work to be done now anyway to stew. She set about cleaning guns, something she never imagined herself doing. Mulling over how haphazard this trip was compared with the last, she thought her chances for getting another panda were just as favorable.

When she wasn't sorting and packing, she was writing. She had been
able to produce two books before she left the States, and with the help and encouragement of her agent, George Havell, she hoped to make a living as a writer. The two of them thought she might be able to earn money steadily as she traveled. So, she typed away, sending regular dispatches—travelogues, war reports, stories—back to New York. She had no idea what was publishable, or even if the letters were making their way out of the country, since she wasn't hearing back from anyone. To be a writer, supporting herself through labor that came so naturally to her, was something she desperately wanted. But as weeks passed without a response from Havell, she faced the uncertainty with humor. “I have gone on with the letters that George Havell said he thought he could publish,” she wrote to Perkie in Connecticut, “and I should so like to know if they are useable—otherwise I am wasting my genius and my very precious time (I slept all afternoon). High-ho my dear.”

Time was precious. It was something she had raced against and even transcended in the past. Now, on her second expedition, out of sorts with life, she would feel tortured by it over the long, cold, lonely months ahead.

A
MISERABLE, DRENCHING RAIN
christened the launch of Ruth Harkness's second Asiatic expedition on October 9, 1937. She and Wang and at least a dozen porters trudged through mile upon mile of slick, oozing mud as they headed for the mountains. Conceding nothing to the weather, they soldiered on for hours. By the end of the day, reaching the first inn, Harkness was in a foul mood. The rustic little place, no different from the year before, was intolerable to her this time around. Particularly when in the nighttime darkness she made her way out to the toilet, a communal pit built over a pigsty. Through the maggot-covered slats of the floor, she looked down at the animals, which greedily consumed human
waste, grunting at her with anticipation. The year before, the “terlets” had been funny; now they disgusted her. Back in her room, it didn't take her long to abandon efforts to type a letter home. Everything she put on the page was “so dam depressed” she tore it all up, and tucked in for the night.

Waking to clear skies the next morning, she stiffened her resolve for the long march, which under dry conditions turned out to be a much more pleasant endeavor. By that evening, in a better frame of mind, she reached fairly cheerful lodgings, where she could rest comfortably, indulging in a cup of hot tea mixed with wine. She unpacked the typewriter, and as she was tapping out a newsy letter home, the fact that she was truly on her own began to sink in. Pulling the page from the carriage to look it over, she added an impassioned note longhand, set off urgently across the top: “I miss Quentin terribly. I hadn't realized what priceless companionship it was.”

She probably missed him even more when she and Wang were back in their familiar old ghost temple in Wenchuan.

Many friends called upon her over the next several days, allowing her once again to laugh with people even when there was no shared language. It seemed that everywhere she went, she ran into old friends. She and Wang had already begun to attract their former employees as they traveled. One night, a familiar hunter appeared like some apparition out of the gentle rain, placing a handful of dark walnuts in Harkness's palms as a gesture of good faith. By the time they reached Chaopo Valley, she and Wang had reconnected with every comrade from the first expedition, and had enlisted more men as well.

As a staging area for many panda seekers, where native hunters and trackers could be hired for about $3.50 a month, Wenchuan was an important stop. Here Harkness and Wang happily reunited with their old crew leader. Whang Tsai Hsin, a holy man who Harkness said measured “no bigger than a boy,” had led the expedition's sacrificial ceremony the previous year. Seeing him now, she was struck once again by his “beautiful calm and gentle face.”

It was vital to be as clear as possible with all the men about the decisions
Harkness had made. Through Wang, she informed them that she wanted not just one panda this year, but two: a male and female. She even had their names picked out: Yang for the male, and Yin for the female.

In order to accomplish such a thing, she had made another crucial determination—that she would forgo hunting in the mountains herself, instead holing up in the old castle at the entrance to the kingdom of the giant panda, two days' journey from here. She would sit tight in a central location while as many as one hundred hunters radiated out and scoured the forests. Though tactically astute, this decision would wreak havoc on her personally. Abstaining from what had given her great pleasure last year—the hard marches and rough travel—she would instead force herself into the kind of isolation she always feared.

Before leaving the cheery confines of Wenchuan, Harkness, with Wang's help, made
joss
for the coming journey. In the shadow of the great green mountains that rose up behind the old village, she bowed to all the gods, burned the paper money, and lighted candles. She summoned her dreams, sending prayers upward in the smoke of fragrant incense to mingle with the low-hanging mist.

With that sacred duty done, on the morning of October 19, she and Wang and a group of porters began their short journey to Chaopo.

NO HOMECOMING
was ever so like an exile. Early in the afternoon of October 20, Harkness, sick with a stubborn flu that would last weeks, Wang, and the porters reached the grim walls of the castle. Though familiar, it remained imposing as ever with its high stone ramparts and bulky wooden top stories. Set against a stubbled, nearly barren slope, and crowded by other desolate hillsides, it was flanked by the ruins of two watchtowers. They scrambled up the steep, crumbling stone stairs, picking their way through deserted rooms filled with the neglected artifacts of the old monks who had long since fled. There were battered prayer wheels, boards used to print prayer strips, and thousands of the strips themselves. Though its days as a lamasery were long gone, the “ancient,
spicy odor of incense” still lingered in the air. Inside, there was no escaping the wind that howled down the mountains, plowing through the gaps in the walls and racing in frigid streams through the rooms.

The adventurer and the cook staked out a corner of the castle high in the upper reaches: Harkness would have one large room, the least blighted, as her living quarters, and Wang the one adjacent. A small terrace overlooked the disintegrating wall and staircase below, allowing a view of the stark countryside. Containing a small, shrinelike enclosure in the corner, the balcony would make a perfect kitchen for Wang, who began unpacking his pot and frying pan, chopsticks and other utensils, producing much of it from underneath his coat. His little oven, complete with tiny door and rack, was made from a ten-gallon Standard Oil tin. In a niche high up in the little shrine, Harkness noted something protruding and questioned Wang. “Tiger bones, goodee
joss,
Master,” he replied.

The ruined castle was Harkness's uncomfortable home during the cold months of 1937.
COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

Harkness rummaged through her bags for the several sets of oil sheets, which she began stringing across doorways and windows for some semblance of privacy and perhaps a bit of insulation. She would
decorate as best she could with what little she had, tacking up the picture postcards of Su-Lin she had gotten from the Brookfield Zoo.

As night fell, Harkness, sniffling, and blowing her raw, red nose, tried to make her camp cot snug with heavy wool blankets. She and Wang fought against the chill every way they could. A shallow plate in a little cookstove held one of the fires they kept going in the rooms, while Wang wore padded pants with several coats.

It wasn't just the intensifying cold but the desolation that would seep into Harkness's veins over the coming months. She steadfastly warded off the inevitable for the first few weeks by setting tasks to keep herself busy. Some days Tibetan or Qiang villagers stopped by with their wares: rings, paintings of strange-looking gods, old prayer wheels caked in grime. Often they came to sell food. “A Jarung man would put his hand into his homespun robe and proudly produce a packet of wild honey wrapped in leaves,” she reported. Industrious local women, with children hauled in slings on their backs, would spin wool as they walked up to the castle—“A little basket of raw wool hung from their belts, and deftly they shredded and twisted it into yarn, which, with the flip of the wrist, wound itself on the spindle that hung dangling and swinging rhythmically.” They would bring vegetables, the likes of which Americans had never seen before. Harkness would always purchase something—stock for the larder, or a few gadgets, as she said, for friends back home.

Sometimes people would hike in for medical attention, imploring the castle-bound explorer to do whatever she could with the few supplies in her medicine chest. Through it all, a surprising number came from a nearby circle of huts, too small to be called a village, just to look at her. “They come, lift up the curtain, which partially covers my door, talk, giggle, spit on the floor, blow their noses on the floor, snuffle in your ears, etc. etc. etc.,” she said. The people were achingly poor, and no doubt they appreciated Harkness's hospitality—“In our kitchen in the lamasery shrine there was always tea,” she wrote.