Search for the Golden Moon Bear by Sy Montgomery

Author:Sy Montgomery
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781603582438
Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing
Published: 2011-01-26T16:00:00+00:00

— 9 —

The Kingdom of a Million Elephants

Perhaps in the Pleistocene, the Cardamoms were an upland refuge when the lowlands were too dry,” Gary mused. “It’s hard “ to believe that before people got here there was anywhere that bears couldn’t live.”

The great sociobiologist E. O. Wilson once said that a successful scientist thinks like a poet but works like a bookkeeper. In pursuit of the lyrical vision of a vanished refuge for bears during the Pleistocene drought, Gary was as meticulous as any bean-counter. At every available moment, from every available angle, he thought and rethought his hypotheses. “Or perhaps the gradations between the separate lineages were wiped out by people,” he continued. “Or possibly, have sun bears confined moon bears to the mountains? Maybe in the Pleistocene we should think of lowland tropical rain forest sun bears competing with the moon bears, and restricting the moon bears to these refuges . . . ”

We discussed these ideas endlessly. In the minivan taking us to Bangkok’s airport, we passed fruit markets under tin roofs, herds of blue pickups, stores selling spirit houses and lawn furniture, junkyards, Kentucky Fried Chicken outlets, and forested hills where bears should be living but they have all been kidnapped or killed. But, in the same way that the monk saw multiple incarnations—the dog who was once a wife, an elephant who was once a king—Gary saw, outside our windows, the landscapes of multiple pasts: dry scrub, lowland rain forest, mountain refuge.

Now we were going to widen the scope of that lost geography. “We’re going to Laos today!” I announced to our fellow passengers as we neared the airport.

“We are if the plane ever takes off, and ever descends in anything other than a vertical dive,” Gary muttered under his breath.

Investigating the best way to get to Laos, we had considered several forms of transportation. “Slow boats,” known as heua sa, we had read in our travel guide, “are hammered together with ill-fitting pieces of wood, the gerry-rigged engine coaxed along by an on-board mechanic . . . do not have any seats . . . landing involves ramming the boat into the riverbank . . . a process that can be very wet and muddy.” Speedboats were faster. Powered by Toyota engines, they jet along at fifty miles per hour. We discarded that option when we learned that crash helmets were handed out before journeys. Train, often the best way to travel in Europe, was also out: very little was left of the tracks, installed early in the previous century, and none of them led to or from Thailand. We could enter Laos by plane, of course, but airfare was expensive—except for the national airline, Lao Aviation. Several Western embassies, including our own, had issued travel advisories against it. We had asked Gary van Zuylen what he thought:

His answer: “They crash.”

How often?

“One crashed last week.”

Is this a regular event?

“They crash a lot,” he replied. He added, “They’re very cheap.”

Would you take it?

“It wouldn’t worry me.

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