The Ragged Edge of the World (4 page)

When he saw the skull for himself, MacKinnon experienced the thrill of witnessing hard evidence of an animal heretofore unknown to science. Later, a Danish geneticist named Peter Arctander analyzed a specimen of its DNA, which revealed that the 220-pound animal was not only a new species but also a new genus, and had split from cattle-like relatives sometime between 5 million and 10 million years earlier. According to Colin Groves, a noted paleoanthropologist and taxonomist at Australia's National Museum, tropical forests tend to house more primitive forms of mammals, but this strange new creature was not just primitive, it was archaic. Its ilk, with small brain cases, primitive horns and long canines, had shuffled off the evolutionary stage millions of years ago. The discovery of what MacKinnon deemed “a whole new type of animal” suggested there might be something special about the dense, mysterious forests surrounding Vu Quang.

MacKinnon and other scientists soon uncovered two other deerlike species: one dubbed the giant muntjac, and the other identified by hunters as “slow-running deer,” a name that immediately made MacKinnon fear for its future. Even more exciting, all of these creatures seemed to have primitive features, which suggested that they had remained unchanged for eons, and that the region had been both safe from outside influences and remarkably stable. Once I heard about it, I knew I had to get there.

In 1994, Hanoi still retained a good deal of the colonial charm and tropical clamor described by Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham. Mature trees shaded broad, bicycle-choked boulevards, and on many streets I encountered more carts than cars. Eschewing sightseeing, however, I made contact with David Hulse, the local representative of the World Wildlife Fund, and made plans to drive down to Vu Quang to meet up with the research team.

Before heading south, I met with MacKinnon, and we stopped by Hanoi's Institute of Ecology and Biological Resources. He showed me the boxes where skulls of the slow-running deer had been gathering dust since the late 1960s, when they were picked up during a Vietnamese collecting expedition. While we were there he took a quick look through some containers that had not yet been thoroughly examined. As he came upon a strange set of antlers—quite distinct from those of slow-running deer or the other new finds—he was pulled up short and remarked to himself, “Hello, what's this?” A fourth species? It defied the odds, but he set the bones aside for further investigation.

The trip to Vu Quang took several hours, at first along Vietnam's equivalent of I-95, and then on ever smaller, twistier and less-trafficked roads, as we headed west toward the foothills of the Annamite Mountains. At first glance the research station looked like paradise. Set in a clearing, the facility consisted of a group of simple thatch-roofed buildings. While sweltering, the air was clean, and a nearby stream offered relief from the heat. The stream and the vegetation, however, were festooned with leeches. Moreover, the supersaturated climate provided ideal conditions for slick algae that added a treacherous coating to virtually every surface. In this very steep terrain this provided the opportunity for continual slips, slides and misery with the constant threat of exsanguinations by leeches and mosquitoes.

The challenges of the terrain were one reason that all these wondrous creatures had survived in one of the most densely populated nations on earth despite forty years of civil war, and even local tribal hunters did not pursue game into the steep forests. The pseudoryx itself had developed sharp, narrow hooves, which were the best footing for the terrain, and they sported a short-haired, fast-drying coat.

We humans had none of those things.

Having been warned about the slickness, I'd brought along some reef walkers that turned out to be pretty good for getting a purchase on the ground. MacKinnon, who for years had found nothing that worked on the surface, was impressed. I left the reef walkers with him—with some trepidation: While it was fine to help MacKinnon do his research, I didn't want to come back in ten years and find that reef walkers had become the footwear of choice for local poachers.

MacKinnon was ensconced in Vu Quang with his new Chinese wife, Hefen Lu (also known as Monica). At that point the two of them were stuck in Vietnam, since she did not have a passport that would allow her to leave. An attractive and sophisticated woman with a wry sense of humor, Monica took her predicament with equanimity. Also in the camp was Shanthini Dawson, a vivacious biologist from India and the object of affection for one of the Vietnamese guides.

With some glee, MacKinnon told me about an earlier incident in which the guide, unable to write, asked a visiting journalist to help him compose a love letter to Shanthini. As MacKinnon told it, the crucial paragraph went something like this: “Clearly you are a woman of high station since you are fat, while MacKinnon's companion is clearly of low station since she is thin.” It was not the kind of letter to endear the guide to many women in the twentieth century. MacKinnon's wife seemed to enjoy the retelling and her consignment to the lowest rungs of humanity.

MacKinnon himself was delightful company. To some degree he fit the stereotype of the eccentric British naturalist who had rejected a comfortable existence as a member of England's privileged class (he is a grandson of Ramsay MacDonald, the first British prime minister from the Labour Party, and is also a descendant of the sixteenth-century mathematician John Napier), but there was nothing eccentric about the distinguished body of work he had amassed during his years in Asia. After decades of dealing with physical discomfort and bureaucratic roadblocks, he remained affable and enthusiastic.

From the research station we set out on a few hikes—not with any expectation that I might see one of Vu Quang's rare creatures, but more to get a sense of how they might have managed to remain hidden for so many years. On one of our trips we stopped by an army facility that had been a hidden North Vietnamese base during the war. The post was neat as a pin and still manned. With undimmed memories of the violence of the war in my head, it was eerie to visit this absolutely peaceful encampment, which had more the flavor of a Boy Scout camp than a key mountain base for one of the most brutal and disciplined armies in the world.

We also visited the simple home of a hunter, which had the horns of a Vu Quang ox mounted over its door. MacKinnon told me that in other homes, the antlers were often used as hat racks or ceremonial altars. This particular hunter, named Bui Giap, explained that the pseudoryx was very difficult to find and that he only caught the animal at all by setting snares. Still, he talked about it as though it were just another creature of the forest, not a new discovery that had sent shock waves through zoology.

Hearing this for myself, I was astonished that it took so long for science to discover these animals, evidence of which sat in plain sight over doors and in boxes in museums for decades. Vietnam has a world-class cadre of scientists, and there are thousands of field biologists around the world whose careers would be made by the discovery of a new genus of large mammal. One of the lessons of this find is that the most dramatic new discoveries may come not from secret maps or an awed description delivered by a terrified native, but from the things we take for granted. The Vu Quang ox, the giant muntjac and the slow-running deer may be heady tonic for science, but for the local hunters these animals were just a meal.

The larger mystery lies in the clustering of all these archaic creatures in this one area of Southeast Asia. Geography and topography offer part of the answer. The mountains trap moisture evaporated from the South China Sea. During the rainy season, this moisture falls as incessant rain, while during the dry season dripping fogs maintain the moisture levels. The result is an unusually stable climate that may have persisted for millions of years. As Peter Arctander explained it, “With no fluctuations in climate, relic species can survive for a very long time.” Before the discoveries of these animals, descriptions of new large mammals were few and far between. The forest giraffe called the okapi was discovered in 1901, and over the next century a giant hog, a peccary, and several species of monkeys had come to light, but Vu Quang, as MacKinnon put it, “is a zoologists' gold mine!”

It's possible that the Vu Quang ox never encountered the environmental pressures that led to the development of elaborate antlers, and that the giant muntjac never needed to develop antlers at all. This relic creature has large canine teeth that deerlike animals used in fights before they developed antlers. Colin Groves later told me that the Vu Quang ox resembles the himbos, a now-extinct species that lived in India some 5 million years ago.

It's probable that all these animals, and the ones since discovered in the region (like the northern buff-cheeked gibbon and the cricket-chirping frog), all roamed far more widely in the past. Climate change, ecological change and human pressures gradually reduced their range to the area where they now endure. As this region shrinks, it is likely that more new species will come into contact with scientists. But for how long can Vu Quang continue as a refugium?

Remoteness, topography, algae and geophysics may have protected Vu Quang for millions of years, and war might have bought it some additional time more recently, but hunters and loggers can enter the area, and given the extreme population pressures on the Vietnamese side of the border, settlers encroach, too. Both Vietnam and Laos have taken steps, however, to protect about 1.75 million acres of the region. Moreover, one of the most revered military figures from North Vietnam, General Vo Nguyen Giap, put his prestige behind efforts to halt the unchecked exploitation of natural resources.

Hearing that Giap had lent his support to the conservation effort brought the war back into my thoughts. While the human toll of the war is well known, the bombing, the defoliation and the dropping of millions of tons of poisons inflicted incalculable damage on Vietnam's ecosystems. In no sense does the fact that conflict slowed the commercial destruction of Vietnamese nature balance the scale. One clear beneficiary of the war, however, was Vu Quang. We will see whether it can survive the peace.

B
orneo—three syllables of indeterminate origin that powerfully evoke the exotic. As is the case with a number of foreign place names, the word “Borneo” can most likely be traced back to a mispronunciation. In this case the garbled word was probably “Brunei,” which, in turn, may be a corruption of a Malaysian expression,
Barunah,
which early settlers exclaimed when they saw what is now the Brunei River. The word has Sanskrit origins, and perhaps the best modern equivalent would be “Cool!” Borneo is not the name of the island locally in any event, as the largest native tribe calls it Kalimantan. Naturally, there is dispute about what that word means, too, but the theory I like best is that it comes from the Sanskrit word
kalamanthana,
which means “an island so hot that it feels like the air is burning.” So the island is both cool and hot—very apt.

Whatever its origins, the name “Borneo” has stuck. The island is enormous: Three times the size of the British Isles, it is larger than Spain and Portugal put together. When I first flew over Borneo in 1971, it was almost entirely forested, with a central massif whose rugged peaks rise over 13,000 feet. Hidden under its canopy—or what remains of it today—are flying snakes and flying squirrels, pygmy elephants and pygmy rhinos, orangutans and several species of gibbons, the most graceful aerialists on the planet. The Borneo rainforest is one of the oldest on earth, and nature has had the time to dabble in variation at leisure. One ecologist found 600 different species of trees in a single hectare, making the rainforest one of the most diverse of all ecosystems. Large, previously unidentified animals are still being discovered. In December 2006 a camera trap set up by World Wildlife Fund scientists snapped a picture of a mammal with a very long tail and red fur that looked something like a civet, but scientists really didn't have a clue what it was, and still don't.