Travels (22 page)

Dennis tells me aboriginal shamans are highly respected, and often consulted by prominent Malays when they become sick. The Semai call
their shamans
berhalak
, meaning someone who can go into a trance. The Semai believe everyone in their tribe can go into a trance, and therefore everyone is a shaman to some extent, but certain individuals are especially good at trances and therefore become accomplished shamans who combat evil spirits and heal people. A person is generally called to become
berhalak
by a dream of a tiger, and the most powerful shamans are believed to be were-tigers.

Dreams are important to the Semai, and even the dreams of a young child will be exhaustively discussed, and further dreams directed and encouraged. The Semai believe they can control their dreams.

That night we sleep in a hide a half-mile from Kuala Tahan. The distance from even that much civilization is exciting. I am certain I will see a tiger tonight. I feel it. I stay awake for hours, watching the heat lightning flash over the landscape. I never see a tiger.

In the morning I wake stiff and cold in the hide. Dennis is gone. I look out the window at the salt lick. He is bent low, inspecting hoofprints in the mud.

“Tracks of a wild pig,” he says. “We missed him.”

A wild pig does not sound exciting. Privately I am glad I slept instead of waiting all night to see a pig. “No tigers?”

“Not last night.”

On a boat, we go up rapids to Kuala Trengganu, where we see a monitor lizard near the river edge, and a hornbill flying overhead. Then we see tiger tracks in the wet riverbank. Everyone is enthusiastic about the tiger tracks, but if anything, they make me feel more frustrated: I am seeing the signs of everything, never the thing itself.

From Kuala Trengganu we had planned to go up a smaller stream, but the boatmen tell me that, this late in the dry season, the streams are low and we cannot make it up.

Still frustrated about the tiger, I suggest we try.

They shrug, warn me it will not be possible to get up very far.

I
insist
we try.

They shrug and smile, and we start up the river. Almost immediately, we strike a dry rapid. The boat must be ported upstream past it. We get out, the boat is dragged, we climb back in, scrape along the rocky bottom, manage another hundred yards, until the next dry rapid. Again we get out
and carry the boat. We do this three more times, until I suggest there is no point in continuing, the river is too low.

They shrug and smile, and we head back. Nobody says anything.

On the way back, I find myself newly interested in the tiger tracks and want to stop to inspect them. But the wake of our passing boat has washed the shore clean. The tracks are gone.

That night after dinner I am walking back in the darkness toward my cottage with Dennis. He shines his light around the woods and says, “Mat is here.”

“Mat?” A pair of gleaming eyes, a heavy, dark shape on the ground.

“Yes. And one of her children.”

I see a second pair of eyes.

Dennis sets out, and I follow. Pretty soon I see that Mat is a pregnant deer, sitting calmly on the ground. As we approach, Mat stands. She is six feet high, and beautiful, and she remains calm even when we come close.

Dennis explains that “Mat” is the Malay word for “Friday,” which is the day, many years ago, that this deer wandered out of the jungle and into the settlement. The villagers fed her, she stayed, and when she had offspring some of them came into the settlement, too.

“Mat is why they don’t have goats here,” Dennis says. “In every village, the Malay people like to raise goats and eat them, but once Mat arrived here, they found she did not like the goats and would kick them to death.”

“So what did the villagers do?”

“They didn’t keep goats any more.”

“But if they are so fond of goats …”

“I know. But Mat came, so they didn’t have goats any more.”

In the end, the story of Mat and the villagers came to symbolize the trip to me. The village people had encountered a deer, and the deer stayed, and so they didn’t eat their favorite food any more. That’s all.

I could think of a dozen alternatives. I would have built an enclosure for goats. I would have tried to train Mat to tolerate goats. I would have raised goats at a nearby village and brought them here at the last minute. I would have gotten a freezer and kept frozen goat meat. Maybe I would have discouraged Mat from coming any more.

In short, where I would have struggled, the villagers simply accepted the situation and went on with their lives.

I began to realize how many times the trip had repeated that lesson for me.

The bees—I didn’t like them, but I had to tolerate them, there was nothing I could do.

The low water on the river—I wanted to go upstream, but there was nothing I could do.

The absent animals—I didn’t like not seeing them, but there was nothing I could do.

I couldn’t make it rain; I couldn’t fill up the rivers, or stop the jungle from flowering, or make wild animals appear. These things were beyond my control, and I was forced to accept that. Just as I was forced to accept the couple that wouldn’t stop talking.

In fact, I began to realize that, although they couldn’t stop talking, I had a much greater problem. I couldn’t stop trying to control everything around me—including the couple. I couldn’t leave things alone. I was an urban, technological man accustomed to making things happen. I had been taught countless times that you were supposed to make things happen, that anything less implied shameful passivity. I lived all my life in cities, struggling shoulder to shoulder with other struggling people. We all were struggling to make something happen: a marriage, a job, a raise, an acceptance, a child, a new car, new life, new status, the next thing.

I’d lived in that frantic, active way for more than thirty years, and when I finally began to crack, when I tried to control everything about my life and my work and the people around me, I somehow ended up in the Malaysian jungle and experienced a solid week of events over which I had absolutely no control. And never would. Events that reminded me that I had my limits—rather severe limits, in the greater scheme of things—and I had no business trying to control as much as I did, even if I could.

When I went home, I noticed I felt much better. Not rested, the way a certain kind of vacation rests you, but literally better. I couldn’t figure out why for a long time.

Back in Los Angeles, nobody even knew where Malaysia was, and people asked why I had gone there. I kept telling them about the deer named Mat and how the villagers stopped eating goat. This wasn’t a very dramatic story, nobody responded to it, and I wondered why I kept repeating it. “What is it about that deer and the villagers?” I wondered. And then one day I got it.

* * *

Ten years after my trip to Pahang, I wrote these notes in Los Angeles. Then I changed clothes and went to an exercise class.

In class I noticed I had put on the same blue tee shirt that I had worn in the jungle a decade before, when the bees had covered me. I had always been fond of this tee shirt, now much faded. It was one of the oldest articles of clothing I owned.

When I got home, I threw it out.

Enough is enough. One way I control myself is to hang on to things too long. My past is too present in my life. So I threw the tee shirt out. It seemed a step in the right direction.

An Elephant Attacks
 

In 1975, Loren and I were staying at the Craig Farm, a sixty-square-mile preserve in northern Kenya. She and I had met the year before, and we were now in the middle of a passionate romance. A trip to Africa seemed a fine idea. We had gone to the Craig Farm because I wanted to walk among the animals, which is illegal in the government game preserves.

I’d studied anthropology in college, and, after so many years of academic work, I hoped to have firsthand experience, however brief, of what it must have been like to be a primitive hunter on the African savanna. I imagined myself stalking wild beasts, getting dangerously close to them, until I could see the muscles quiver beneath the skin, and could observe their behavior intimately. Then, at some unknown signal—perhaps my own error, the snap of a dry twig—skittish heads would jerk up in alarm, they would look around in fright, and they would thunder away.

Well, it wasn’t like that at all.

The animals saw me from a quarter of a mile away, and calmly moved off. If I stalked them, they moved a little farther. I was never able to get within a quarter mile from them. I was never able to see them worried, let alone alarmed. Their heads never jerked up. Instead, they would glance over from time to time in a bored way, notice my pathetic stalking, and move off.

William Craig, who walked with me, explained that each animal maintained a characteristic distance from man. It was a kind of invisible perimeter; if you came within it, the animal simply moved until the distance was re-established. For most animals it was a fraction of a mile.

We spent the day hiking on open plains, among zebras and giraffes and antelopes, with the snowy peak of Mount Kenya rising in the background. It was quite exciting, but frustrating, too.

Clearly, to sneak up on a giraffe (as I had seen pygmies do, in movies) was far more difficult than I had imagined. Giraffes were not as dumb as they looked; they had excellent eyesight, and they tended to cluster with zebras, animals that had an excellent sense of smell.

I began to realize that stalking animals was a skill rather like pole vaulting—it looked easy when others did it, but if you tried it yourself you were in for a surprise.

Nothing turned out the way I expected it to be that day. I found that zebras gallop like horses, but bark like dogs: that bark is their characteristic sound. And we didn’t see a great variety of game. No elephants or lions or really exciting animals.

And all the animals seemed maddeningly indifferent to my presence. I didn’t frighten them; I bored them. Actually, it was a little insulting. I took everything that happened that day personally, and the animals in their natural setting seemed so impersonal—so fundamentally
uninterested
in me.

It was in this frame of mind that I returned to Lamu Downs Camp in the evening, to spend my first night under the African stars. I had never camped before, except one night at the age of eleven in the Nassau County Boy Scout Camp on Long Island. That was a far cry from Africa.

The Craigs showed Loren and me how everything was set up, the camp beds, the hissing gas lanterns, the open-air shower attached to the back of the tent, and so forth. It was all quite luxurious. I felt very comfortable.

Then we had dinner in the mess tent, and the Craigs talked about their ranch and the animals found there. They were concerned, because, although this was the dry season, the drought had gone on for a long time, and the elephants had disappeared. They usually had quite a few elephants on the ranch, they said, but the elephants hadn’t been seen for weeks now. We talked and ate as darkness fell.

When dinner was finished, Loren and I headed back toward our tent. It was now very dark. I found that a few more questions had occurred to me. One was about wild animals. The same wild animals I had been unable
to approach during the day might, I suspected, come and visit me in the night.

The Craigs laughed. No, no, they said, animals never entered the campground at night. Of course, there
was
the time they woke up in the morning and found a big rhino asleep in the embers of the fire from the night before, but that was unusual.

How unusual? I wanted to know.

I hadn’t yet noticed the easy way these people simultaneously gave reassurance and took it away.

Very unusual, they said. You were almost never bothered by animals. Of course, you had the occasional monkey screeching in the trees, keeping you awake, that sort of thing. But not animals on the ground, no.

By now my concerns had shifted. The fabric of my tent looked flimsy as I imagined a sleeping rhino just outside. Would an animal ever enter the tent?

Oh no, they said. Of course, there
was
the time that leopard clawed right through the tent fabric, scaring the hell out of the lady inside. She woke up shrieking, frightened the cat off. But there had been something peculiar about that incident. They couldn’t remember what, exactly. People had food in the tent, or the woman was having her period—anyway, something peculiar. It wasn’t as if a leopard would just come up and claw your tent for no reason.

Really? I asked.

Really, the Craigs said, wearying of their own game. Really, there aren’t animals around the camp at night. Animals don’t like to be around people and they won’t come near. Anyway, see these lanterns?

They pointed to three hurricane lanterns spaced around the tents. The lanterns were lit all night, they explained, and the light kept the animals away. Count on it. Never any animals around the tents. Now, you see the stream over there? Sometimes you find the odd animal on the far side of the stream. But never over on this side, where the tents and the lanterns and the people were.