Hold the Enlightenment

by Tim Cahill

  Unfortunately, the colonel could not allow us to travel down the gravel road to Yaylapinar and especially not to Ormancik. That was where the two PKK insurgents had been shot a week ago. The PKK was all over the area, and there would be a military strike against them within a week.

  Still, the colonel thought it would be a grand thing if tigers still existed, here, in the midst of war. There was, he said, thinking aloud, a military exercise the next day. Several village guards, armed Kurds loyal to the government, would be meeting in Yaylapinar. “So, you could get to Yaylapinar,” the colonel said. He didn’t think we’d be in much danger.

  “And tonight,” the colonel said, “you will please be my guests. Sleep here, in the barracks.”

  And so I spent a night in a Turkish military barracks, which, I know, sounds like a fantasy out of a John Rechy book. In fact, we were given private rooms set aside for visiting officers and they were better than those in any hotel we’d seen: two beds to a room, clean sheets, a hot shower, and a sit-down toilet that actually flushed.

  The next morning, we were finally on our way, searching for the tiger … with a military escort. There were two trucks, one of them full of uniformed soldiers, and the other inexplicably empty. An armored personnel carrier brought up the rear. We rode in a Jeep Cherokee with a Captain Milbray as the convoy made its way along a road cut into the side of a ridiculously steep slope. There was a river far below, and burned-out military vehicles littered the banks.

  In these mountains, or so the colonel had said, some trails are so narrow, the slopes so steep, that a mule cannot turn and back up. People embarking on such a section of trail signal one another with whistles, because you do not want to meet another traveler coming your way. This circumstance would involve a negotiation about whose mule must take the long fall.

  Our gravel and dirt road was not that narrow, but it was tight enough that the story had the ring of truth. The river bottoms were at perhaps three thousand feet, while several of the mountains rose to eight thousand. The valleys themselves were intensely V shaped, as if Allah had hacked them out of the high ground with one great whack of his mighty ax. There was only a thin sliver of sky visible between the slopes above. It was the first time I’d ever felt claustrophobic in the mountains.

  Captain Milbray didn’t buy our tiger story, not even a little bit. “I’ve been out in these mountains for four years,” he said. “I’ve seen bears and wild goats and wild pigs, but never a tiger. And none of my men has ever seen one.”

  “Have you ever looked for one?” I asked.

  “No,” the captain said. “Well, two days ago I shot one. But I ate it. Even the skin.”

  “What a good joke, Captain,” Tommy said.

  Presently, the road branched off to Yaylapinar. We stopped for a moment, and suddenly over a dozen heavily armed Kurds and several soldiers appeared out of nowhere. They came pouring down the slopes at a dead run, the Kurds in tribal dress—baggy pants and turbans and cummerbunds—and armed with knives, grenades, and automatic weapons. We were surrounded by armed men in the space of thirty seconds, and even though I knew they were with us, it was an acutely menacing display. This is how fast it can happen to you out here, I thought. And then the Kurds and the soldiers piled into the empty truck and we were moving into another V-shaped valley on our way to Yaylapinar.

  The road dropped into the valley of the Pison River. There were patches of snow on green grass, and cows grazed in the fields. The town itself consisted of perhaps forty houses, and dozens of people surrounded us as we stepped out of the Jeep. Someone put out white plastic lawn chairs. Tommy and I interviewed a man named Zulfir, who had shot a tiger, a female, perhaps ten years ago. “The mark of this animal,” Zulfir said, “is that when he walks, he seizes the snow. The talons are as long as my first finger.”

  Other men were butting in now, talking about tigers in the old days, and now Captain Milbray seemed to be caught up in the interview.

  “When you shot the tiger,” he said to Zulfir, “was it before or after your military service? Before or after your first child was born?” In this manner we ascertained that the tiger had been shot not ten years ago, but more like forty.

  Captain Milbray was no longer mocking us. “Why,” he asked Zulfir, “did you shoot the tiger?”

  “In those days, he who shot a tiger was a hero.”

  “These are not those days,” the captain said. “Today, he who shoots a tiger is my enemy. I will see that he goes to jail.”

  As quick as that. I found the captain’s conversion rather inspiring.

  We went to another village, Otakar, then returned before dark to the army post at Shemdinli, where the colonel debriefed us in his office. About that time, there was a knock on the padded door. A young officer stood at attention and reported that three village guards, of the village of Umurhi, had seen a tiger. Word about our visit had apparently spread. “When was this?” the Colonel asked.

  “Five days ago.”

  “Ah, I don’t believe this,” the colonel said. “I was there three days ago. They would have told me.”

  “Not,” I suggested, “if they were out hunting and not guarding the village.”

  “Just so,” the colonel said. “I’ll have the men come to Shemdinli.”

  There were three of them, the village guards from Umurhi. And yes, they were hunting goats instead of standing guard, which is why they didn’t mention it to the colonel. All three men were wearing Kurdish native costume, and sometimes they spoke Kurd, which would have made it difficult for me to write a cuddly Kurd story about how the Turkish military was suppressing the dress, language, and culture of the people. We were sitting in the officers’ club.

  The men had been out hunting wild goats in what are called the Honeycomb Cliffs, about six kilometers north of the village. It is a labyrinthine area, very steep and rugged. They had taken the central gate into the mountains. The youngest of them, a thirty-year-old named Nuri Durmaz, moved off to the west, alone. “There was a little snow,” he said, “not a lot. I was about halfway to the peak. There was an overhanging wall, like a cliff, and I saw something one hundred meters away. I couldn’t see its head, but it was big. It would have taken two, maybe three men to carry it.”

  “What color was it?” Tommy asked.

  “Like my pants,” Nuri Durmaz said. He was wearing beige pants. “It had black stripes on the legs and resembled a large cat.”

  “Did you shoot it?” I asked.

  “No. It was in a bad place. If I only wounded it, it could have torn me apart.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went to get my friends.”

  And here Nuri’s friends chimed in with descriptions of the tracks: talons as long as a man’s finger, the little ball of snow in the center of the track. There were other such animals up in the Honeycomb Cliffs, said a man named Bedri Geokalp. He’d seen the same tracks in about the same place almost exactly a year ago.

  I brought out some pictures I’d copied for just this purpose. There was a depiction of the Anatolian panther, a kind of leopard, also thought to be extinct; a photo of a lynx, which exists in these mountains; and another photo of a Caspian tiger taken many years ago in an Iranian zoo. Nuri discarded the panther and the lynx. “This one,” he said, holding up the picture of the tiger.

  “What do you think,” I asked Saim, of the Forestry Department.

  “I’d say fifty percent credibility.”

  The Duck and I both thought it was a 70 percent sure thing. The colonel said, “I don’t have an opinion to be expressed in a percentage, but I believe in nature. This is a wonderful thing for Turkey and the world. I will inform my lieutenant in charge of the area to monitor the situation. I will give him a camera and ask him to use his night-vision goggles whenever possible.”

  Nuri said, “The next time I see this animal, I will kill him for you.”

  “I don’t think you should do that,” the colonel said. This opinion was expressed as an order.
But then the colonel softened his voice: “If these men publish an article, and if peace is established, you will find that people with cameras will come here, and, to your delight, they will put much money in your pocket.”

  “This is true?”

  “This is true.”

  “I can almost smell that tiger,” Tommy was saying. We were on our way to Iraq, in an effort to enter the Honeycomb Cliffs from the south side of the range. The colonel had been kind enough to give us a glimpse of a classified map. The Honeycomb Cliffs were a tangle of closely spaced topographic lines stretching about ten kilometers east to west, and four kilometers north to south. The highest point was 2,173 meters, and the tiger had been sighted at about 1,200 meters, call it 3,600 feet.

  The colonel had told Saim that—if he were ordered to do so—he could use military resources to search for the tigers: super-night-spotting scopes, sensitive remote cameras, helicopters, and—most important—manpower. If Saim, acting as a Forestry Department official, were to write to the colonel’s superiors, that order could come through in as little as three or four months.

  “What is the best way to word such a request?” Saim asked.

  And the colonel dictated the letter for him.

  For now, however, our search was over. The Honeycomb Cliffs were ground zero in the war against the PKK, and there was no way we were getting in there. On the other hand, both Tommy and I had noticed that the cliffs stretched into northern Iraq.

  So we bid good-bye to Colonel Eshrem, then rode with Saim and Mr. Security to the town of Sirnac, where we parted in an orgy of embraces and kissed cheeks. Saim refused to take any money, despite the contract we’d signed. He was a man of great honor, and high emotion, and he wouldn’t take our money “for the sake of the tiger.” He said: “You have done a wonderful thing.”

  We rented a car and driver in Sirnac, then made a run for the border. There would be no problem getting into the Kurdish-held territory: Tommy had worked with several aid agencies, helping Kurdish refugees when Saddam Hussein rolled his tanks on his own people after the Gulf War. He still had friends among the Iraqi Kurds, and, in fact, the Kurdish cap he wore, the one I always thought of as a yarmulke, was a treasured gift from one of those folks.

  At the border, however, a Turkish official refused to stamp us out of the country. We spent two days there while Tommy worked the public phones calling his friends in Ankara in an effort to, in his words, “find someone who’ll squash this little prick for me.”

  For two days, I sat against a wall while Tommy stood at the phone, talking Tommy talk as only Tommy can talk. “Look,” he was saying to some English-speaking Turkish official in the capital, “we’re not actually going into the mountains.” (Not unless we could get into Iraq, he failed to say.) “We’re just doing what we did in Turkey. We talk to the police and to the military and to the people in the villages. We raise people’s consciousness, get them thinking about what it means if this animal still exists.”

  Day two at the border was now slipping into day three. “All we really want to do is make people aware of this magnificent creature,” Tommy was saying.

  Sitting there, listening to all this, it occurred to me that maybe that was enough. For now. Maybe, as Saim said, we had actually done something wonderful. People should be made aware. Because, in my almost expert opinion, the tiger is out there.

  Bug Scream

  The bug scream is a distinctive human sound. It is not characterized by volume, or intensity, or duration, but by the very sound itself: a kind of high-pitched, astonished loathing that combines the “eeewww” of disgust with the “waaah” of abject terror. Eeewaah. Every human has produced a bug scream at one time or another and every human has heard someone else generate such a sound. Here is the First Rule of Vermin Shrieking: When a human being not oneself bug screams, the sound is, by instinctual definition, funny. Cahill’s Corollary to the First Rule is: Bug screams screamed by individual human beings are not funny to the individuals screaming.

  Not that I consider myself squeamish. Quite the contrary. I’ve actually eaten bugs. More frequently, bugs have eaten me.

  Not too long ago, for instance, I was walking across the Congo Basin in company with an American scientist, a filmmaker from National Geographic, three Bantu villagers, and sixteen pygmies. It was hot, and the forest contained what I imagined to be the better part of all the noxious bugs that have ever existed upon the face of the earth, including bees and wasps, which I found particularly annoying, because all the creatures with stingers tended to congregate on me to the exclusion of my expeditionary colleagues.

  Why me?

  The scientist Michael Fay, of Wildlife Conservation International, said, in effect, “Because you’re a big fat sweaty guy.” He explained that all living organisms need salt, and that one of the factors limiting the abundance of life in the swampy forest was the lack of salt. The fact is, I was taller than Michael by several inches, over a foot taller than the biggest pygmy, and I outweighed everyone by fifty to one hundred pounds. Also I sweat a lot. I was, in effect, a walking salt dispenser, an ambulatory fountain of life.

  There were at least half a dozen different kinds of bees in the forest, and every time I stood still for a minute or more, dozens of them took up residence on my drenched and sweaty T-shirt. Here, I thought, is an opportunity to observe nature in action. One interesting bee fact I learned is this: the little bastards generally only sting in response to dorsal pressure. If, for instance, you happen to be setting up your tent, and there are fifty or sixty bees sucking salt off your T-shirt, they will not sting unless you touch them on the back. For this reason, I found it necessary to walk with my arms held stiffly out from my sides, and to move slowly, in an angular and somewhat robotic fashion.

  The problems occurred when salt-thirsty bees crawled up the sleeves of my shirt, toward the armpits, going right to the fountain of life, as it were. Then, no matter how robotically I moved my arms, there was some small dorsal pressure involved. It was worse when they crawled up the legs of my shorts.

  Aside from the bees, there were tsetse flies, which can cause sleeping sickness, a disease characterized by fever, inflammation of the lymph nodes, and profound lethargy. Sleeping sickness is often fatal. And the insects that carry the disease are intensely annoying creatures.

  They are long, thin, malnourished-looking flies, with skinny iridescent wings, and the ones I encountered moved so slowly I could actually bat them with a palm while they were in flight. Occasionally, I’d get a really good whack on one, and it would seem to falter in its aerodynamics, then wheel about in a lopsided loop, as if woozy and staggered. But it would stay on me. I could sometimes pop one I’d dazed three or four times using both hands—whap, bap, whap, bap—just like working out on a speed bag. The fly might back off, lose altitude, and then, as through an act of will, it would seem to straighten up and fly right, zeroing in on me again, and willing to take any amount of punishment simply to gets its filthy, disease-ridden, blood-sucking proboscis into my flesh. It was like fighting Rocky in the movies. Tsetse flies never quit.

  Worse, you can’t swat them on your skin, like mosquitoes. They have some kind of dorsal radar and, when threatened from above, simply fly away.

  A pygmy who looked a little like a short, dark version of Jerry Lewis showed me the way to kill tsetse flies. Simple thing. Put a hand on your body some small distance from the fly and roll right over the son of a bitch from the side, like a steamroller. This process produces a nasty swatch of blood and bug guts. It is immensely satisfying.

  Aside from the tsetse flies, we often encountered aggregations of fire ants, which are small and red and prone to swarming, gang stings. They frequently looked like pizza-sized hillocks of fungus on downed trees that lay across our path. Sometimes, walking along a nice, wide elephant path near such a tree, I’d see pygmies in the column ahead suddenly break into a strange hop-step sort of polka as they attempted to shake the fire ants off their bare feet and legs by stom
ping their feet. The convention was to yell “Formi,” or “ants.” In fact, watching someone out ahead do the Fire Ant Polka was all the warning anyone ever needed. It’s awfully funny. When someone else is dancing it.

  There were also driver ants, of the type with two-inch-long pincers. It is said that various native people in Africa use driver ants to stitch up wounds. It’s supposed to work like this: The ant is held in the fingers and positioned with a pincer on either side of the wound. The ant then pinches, as ants will. Driver ants will not let go. At this point, one simply twists the nasty little body off the pincers. Instant sutures.

  I don’t know if people actually do this or it’s just one of those oft-repeated travelers’ tales. I do know that a driver ant bite hurts a lot, and that once they grab onto flesh, you can’t shake them off, say, a sandaled foot, no matter how hard you stomp. I had to pick driver ants off my flesh, one by one.

  Among the most unbearable of the insects was a kind of stingless bee, like a fruit fly, actually, called a melipon. Michael Fay said the word came from the Greek: meli, meaning honey, and pon, meaning, I think, incredibly annoying little sons of bitches. They arrived out of nowhere in clouds, so that, suddenly, every breath contained hundreds of melipons. They crawled into my ears and nostrils. Every time I blinked, there were several melipons ejected from my eyes, all rolled up and kicking their fragile little legs, like living tears rolling down my cheeks.

  Sometimes, we crossed orderly columns of termites, thousands of them, marching along on some destructive mission or other. At night, they sometimes crawled in formation under my tent, and I could hear an unnerving clicking and clacking sound: termites, moving under my body in their thousands, all of them snapping their hideous little jaws.

  None of these creatures ever caused me to produce a single distressed sound beyond “oww.” Halfway through my Congo walk, I believed myself almost immune to that universal human frailty, the bug scream. Vermin shrieking was something other people did, and they did it for my personal amusement.