Hold the Enlightenment (4 page)

In Van, we met Saim Guclu, the chief engineer of the National Forest Eastern Anatolia. Saim provided a vehicle: a small Nissan truck with an extended cab and Forestry Department decals on the doors. He was a big, jolly man in his early sixties, at a guess, with a white mustache. His driver’s name could be translated as “Mr. Security.” He was a quiet fellow in a sport coat. Neither man struck me as an intelligence officer. On the other hand, they wanted $300 a day for the car if we took pictures in any national parks.

Saim seemed to be what he claimed to be: a forestry official. He said: “I am ashamed to admit that I have never been to Uludere, where the last tiger was shot. I have never been to Shemdinli. We have done no inventory of the animals in these places. Of course, our department has only existed since 1994. Your presence here is very helpful to me, you see. We now have our permission to do something we should have done years ago.” Saim had pored over books and documents in the Forestry Department, looking for information on the Caspian tiger, and there was virtually nothing there.

We shared what we knew. There are eight subspecies of tiger, and three of them are considered extinct: the Balinese tiger, the Javanese tiger, and the Caspian tiger,
Pantera tigris virgata
. No data is available on its prey, gestation period, or rate of cub mortality. Both Saim and I had discovered that the Caspian tiger was the second largest subspecies: only the endangered Siberian tiger was bigger. Aside from that, we were both guessing about everything. Most tigers have a territory of ten to twenty miles, though this depends on the available food. Perhaps the Caspian tiger might eat wild pig
and wild goat. It might live as long as most wild tigers: ten to fifteen years, and eat, oh, forty pounds of meat at a sitting.

I was developing an overwhelming fondness for the forgotten and ignored ghost creature. Often Saim, a knowledgeable and well-read scholar, deferred to me in discussions about the tiger’s possible range and prey. There was so little credible research available that it didn’t take much, or so it seemed, to become something of an expert on the Caspian tiger.

“If we find evidence that the tiger exists,” Saim said, “it will be a great thing not only for Turkey but for all the world. Wildlife doesn’t belong to any one country.”

“How dare you,” Tommy was saying to the soldier at one of the many military checkpoints at a snowy pass along the winding two-lane paved road to Uludere. We were riding along with Saim in the Forestry Department car, with Mr. Security at the wheel.

The soldier had just said, “Why don’t you stay home? Why come here and stir up trouble?” He meant: We don’t want to read any more cuddly Kurd/terrible Turk stories in the foreign media.

Tommy said, “How dare you speak to me in that tone of voice, before you know who I am and what my mission is?” This gave the soldier pause. In these situations, and at this point, Tommy usually trotted out the papers and passes and letters we’d smoked so many cigarettes to obtain. He explained about the tiger, and this conversation generally settled down into some friendly banter and invariably led to an invitation to take tea. We found ourselves smoking more cigarettes and laughing about one thing or another. My name, for instance, was a matter of great hilarity. In Turkey no one is named Tim, but many are called Timur in honor of the fourteenth-century Mongol who conquered Persia, southern Russia, and Turkey. He was known for his deeds of cruelty: in India, for instance, he is said to have killed eighty thousand in Delhi alone. Historic mass murder was looked upon with a degree of respect. It was my last name that was the problem. Cahill is pronounced “Djaheel” in Turkish and means, I regret to report, “ignorant.” So Tommy and the soldiers sat around drinking tea and smoking cigarettes and
handing my passport from one to the other and laughing out loud at my very name. Timur the Ignorant: it was like being called “Atilla the Dope.”

The road dropped down out of the snow into flatter land and ran parallel to the border of Iraq until we reached the turnoff to Uludere. The narrow two-lane wound its way up a green, flowing creek lined with white-bark poplars, and we passed an abandoned village of quaint stone houses, all of them missing a wall or simply leveled by artillery fire. “We don’t know who did this,” Saim said. “The PKK or the military. Whoever: let Allah strike them blind.”

And then we were in Uludere proper. Homes on the outskirts were made of river rock and looked almost medieval, but the downtown was filled with newer, poured-concrete shops, and the streets were crowded with unemployed men. They were mostly Kurds: tall, generally slender people with imposing, hawklike faces.

We stepped out of the car and were immediately surrounded by dozens of people, mostly men, all of them answering our questions at full volume and at the same time. No one knew the man who had shot the tiger in 1970, but there was a fellow who shot one in the sixties. He was dead. Forty years ago, the paved road we’d driven had been a mule trail. Uludere was now a big town. No one had heard anything about tigers for years.

An old man said there had been lots of tigers about in the early sixties. He heard them at night, while he tended his sheep. They made a sound a little like the whinny of a horse, like the bray of a donkey. Not the hee-haw sound: the “ahhhh” sound they make. Someone else said the animal was so heavy it took three men to carry a dead one; that its track looked like that of a domestic cat, but bigger, with the talons as long as a man’s index finger. The big cat, he said, seemed to “seize” the snow: when the pads of its paws flexed, it left a little snowball in the middle of the track.

We had been talking with the men for about ten minutes when the subgovernor of the province arrived along with several cops. This self-inflated little turd threatened to confiscate our film and “detain” us until he could ascertain for sure the nature of our business in Uludere. Saim, the Duck, and I retreated to the truck behind
a solid wall of Tommy talk while Mr. Security fired up the engine. A cop put his hand on Tommy’s shoulder, but he shook it off, jumped into the truck, and said, “Go, go, go.”

Back in Van, we were out of ideas. But it was a nice, sunny day and we drove to a dock about twenty-five miles outside of Van and hired a boat to take us to the old Armenian church of Akdamar Island.

We’d heard rumors of a Loch Ness–type monster in the lake and asked the boatman, Recp Avci, about it. “There are no monsters,” he said, “but there are some very large snakes.” I assume he meant eels. “I have never seen one. My father did: he said it was as big around as a fifty-five-gallon oil drum and as long as this boat.” The boat appeared to be forty-five feet long.

“But,” Saim said, “you are describing a monster.”

The island was rugged and rocky and it rose out of the clear blue waters of Lake Van like a shattered sculpture. The church, built in 915 by the Armenian king I. Gagig, was surrounded by almond trees, the branches bare and gnarled in the winter sun, and looked like a combination cathedral and mosque, a central dome set on four axes in the Byzantine style. The lower walls were covered over in bas-relief. There were depictions of a naked man and woman in a garden, and another of the same man and woman eating something that looked like an apple. There was a knight on horseback spearing something that looked very much like the Lake Van monster. Another sculpture showed a man being tossed from an open boat into the mouth of what could, once again, only be the Lake Van monster.

More to the point, there were tigers all over the walls. After the Armenians were driven from the church by the Turks, the place had become a mosque. The Muslims had painted animals around the upper dome: goats and wolves and, once again, tigers. Lots of tigers.

I sat in the sun, looking out across the lake at the shining, snow-clad mountains and thought: “At least, in historical times, there were tigers here.” Also apparently present were Saint George, Adam and Eve, along with Jonah and the Lake Van monster.

That night, we walked through the maze of cobblestone alleyways off the main street of Van and finally found a shop where they could resole one of Tommy’s boots. The cobbler, Mustafa, talked as he worked. He had never seen a tiger, or any evidence of one, around Lake Van and he hunted birds in the mountains quite often. Still, Mustafa said, if we liked, he could call the most avid hunter he knew and invite him down to the shop to talk. Halim was a man of fifty-six, a Jack Palance look-alike with long arms and hands the size of canned hams. He agreed that there were no tigers anywhere nearby, and hadn’t been for many years. He had heard rumors about tiger sightings to the east, however. We should talk to his hunting partner, a baker named Hamiz Kaya.

“Where does Hamiz Kaya live?” Tommy asked.

“Shemdinli,” Halim said.

We drove southeast, passing from checkpoint to checkpoint, and moving ever deeper into the mountains. The road took us over a pass in what might have been the Swiss Alps, with the snow several feet deep. Far below, a narrow valley stretched out as far as the eye could see, and at its farthest extent, hard up against the mountains rising abruptly behind, was the little town of Shemdinli. Tiger town, terror town, take your pick.

We drove down the main street, an amalgam of two- and three-story buildings of the type that collapse during earthquakes. Small patches of sooty gray snow lay in the street. We parked next to the bakery, and asked if Hamiz Kaya, the bread maker, was there. Once again, we were surrounded by townspeople, a dozen or more of them: tall, slender men with hawkish faces wearing baggy pants and cummerbunds. Kurds.

Were we here to talk about the terror? they wanted to know, and we said, no, we were here to talk about tigers. We had read reports that there had been several recent sightings. Hunters, the paper said, had seen the animal in these mountains.

“Then they lie,” one man shouted. “No one hunts here.” The dangers, men on all sides explained, were simply too great. The mountain trails were mined. A hunter could be mistaken for a terrorist and shot by the military; or he might be mistaken for a military
commando and shot by the terrorists. Since the insurrection began in 1984, more than thirty thousand people had been killed. “No one hunts here,” a man insisted.

“I have been in the mountains,” said a distinguished-looking older man wearing a wool sport coat over a pink sweater.

Musa Iren, seventy-two, said he had seen a tiger in the mountains not far away, near Yaylapinar. That was eight years ago, and he had tracked it through the snow for two days.

“Do they make a sound?” Tommy asked.

“Like a donkey,” Musa said. He made an “ahhhh” sort of sound. “Describe the tracks.”

“The tracks were like that of a cat, but as big as my hand, and the talons were as long as my index finger,” Musa said. Tommy and I passed a significant look.

“Anything else?”

“Yes,” Musa said, “when the tiger walks, he ‘seizes’ the snow and leaves a small ball of packed snow in the middle of the track.”

“This is true,” said another older man named Cirkin, who said he shot a tiger, also near Yaylapinar, forty years ago. It required thirteen rounds from a shotgun to kill the animal, and it took three men to carry it.

“These animals are not extinct,” Musa said. “I guarantee you they are up there. Not just one or two, but many.”

There was some general scoffing about this. Another man came to Musa’s aid: “Because no one hunts—it is sixteen years now—the animals are coming back. Even here, near town, we see more bears and wild goats and wolves and wild pigs. Why not tigers?”

There were now fifty or sixty men gathered about, all shouting out their opinions, mostly negative. “Listen to me,” Musa said, “you know the village of Ormancik, the little forest, on the border with Iraq? Four years ago a man of that village, Haji Ak, killed a tiger. He brought me the skin, and I had it in my shop for two years. I could not sell it and gave it back to him.”

I was, I think, wildly excited as I wrote place names in my notebook—Yaylapinar, Ormancik, Otakar. At precisely that moment, of course, we were arrested by the police.

Tommy the Turk refused to get in the cop car because he wanted to begin this whole interrogation process by exerting some measure of control. “We’ll walk, thanks,” he said, as if the cop was a pal who’d just offered him a ride. The crowd had melted away, and we trudged slowly behind the police car as it moved past a green army tank and down a steep hill toward a two-story cement bunker that was the police station.

Inside the gray unpainted cement building was a maze of corridors, with cops coming and going every which way, but down the largest and longest hallway, there was a central office where a man in a stylish suit sat behind an imposing wooden desk. This had to be the chief, and Tommy bulled past the cop who had detained us, rapped once on the open door, and strode into the chief’s office. “Please tell me exactly what is going on here,” he said in Turkish. Better to be the complaining party than a meek detainee.

“We need to know,” the chief said in near perfect English, “what you are doing in our town.” The name plaque on his desk read: Mustafa Sahin.

The chief was a sucker for Tommy talk, and we left with his own personal phone number in case there was any more trouble. He had also called the commanding military officer of the province, Colonel Eshrem.

There was, it seemed, a military checkpoint at the gravel road on the edge of town, the road that led to Yaylapinar and Otakar and Ormancik: tiger country, or so we had been led to believe. We needed to talk to the colonel to pass, and were escorted to the army post and then through a leather-padded wooden door studded with brass tacks, and then a second padded door, like a kind of air lock.

Certain military and police officials we had met regarded our mission as a highly laughable cover story for some nefarious activity or another, but the colonel not only believed us, he thought the search for the Caspian tiger was a worthy goal. He was a man given to folksy aphorisms: “You search for the tiger,” he said. “We say time spent searching for treasures lost is never time wasted.”