Off the Beaten Track by Frank Kusy

Author:Frank Kusy [kusy, frank]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: PublishDrive
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

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Half an hour off the jeep, a few clicks west of Mae Hong Son, we entered a beautiful old prehistoric forest. Everything was larger than life, like Conan Doyle’s The Lost World. Massive banyan trees loomed up all around us, encrusted with fossils, and the air was alive with the cries and shrieks of baboons and wild birds.

‘It is best,’ said Swit, ‘to be at the front of the line. Many leeches in forest. First person walk past, leech prick up their ears. Second person, leech on the move. Third or fourth person, leech get inside your shoe!’

I wished he hadn’t told me that. Beforehand, I had been obsessing about spiders – wildly batting the little swagger stick Swit had given me against overhanging webs. Now I was dancing around, slapping my legs and squinting at my feet anxiously for leeches. ‘Aaargh! It’s got me!’ I gave a strangled cry. ‘It’s squirming inside my boot!’ But Swit was unsympathetic. ‘You must walk faster,’ he said sternly. ‘Back of line is bad.’

‘He’s like the Yogi Coudoux, isn’t he?’ puffed Dave as our tiny guide skipped ahead. ‘He’s slowed his heartbeat down to 15 beats a minute and has entered some kind of mystic trance. Look at him go, and look at him veer off in different directions with every shift of his Yogi Coudoux mind!’

And it was true, because Swit appeared to have no idea of where he was going, but at the same time doggedly certain.

Three hours later, weary from slogging through the jungle, I gasped ‘Where is the village?’

‘Oh, one hour, two hour,’ said Swit, slowing down to a trot. ‘Local guide tell me “When you come to one dog, or maybe two dogs, you are near.”’

Dave and I stopped to listen. Eventually, in the distance, we could hear three dogs barking.

‘Is that it?’ I cautiously enquired.

‘Two dogs, three dogs, no difference,’ sniffed Swit. ‘We stop here!’

‘Here’ was a wide clearing with a scatter of ramshackle log cabins on stilts ranged around it. If this was a village, it looked like a pretty poor one.

How poor it was, and how little food it had, became apparent minutes after we arrived. I was sitting outside a hut, at the top of the stairs, looking over a beautiful sunset, when the lady of the house appeared and chucked a bucketful of slops over my shoulder. It landed in a big, deep hole which had been dug just below the hut. What happened next was unbelievable. I heard this thundering of footsteps, and a whole gang of pigs turned up and flung themselves into the pit. They fought over those slops like it was their last meal on earth, and the smaller ones – who couldn’t get near the food – began shovelling up more earth with their tiny little tusks and eating it! The pigs were closely followed by a pack of wild dogs, who also jumped into the hole and began foraging. Roosters, hens, goats and a stray cow also made their way into the hole.

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