The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  The appearance of the soldiers, it turned out, was nothing more than a gesture of Cavaliere's protectiveness. Even in this time of great turmoil, they had been dispatched to ensure Harkness's safety. Cavaliere really would, she wrote, “turn the world upside down to help you.”

  Harkness felt an immediate fondness for the men, most of them barefoot and wearing weathered clothes in shades of faded blue. There would be two separate and equally congenial groups to accompany the team over the next several days. They shared cigarettes, swapped pleasant conversation, and drank tea the country way—a pinch of leaves at the bottom of a bowl, with boiling water poured over them. With Harkness, the men held an impromptu target practice, all laughing when she tumbled over backward from the recoil of a rifle.

  She was touched when their leader made her a present, both practical and poetic, of two perfect eggs—a simple gesture, but one of great importance for the people here. Later, in a distant village, when the soldiers brought Harkness to meet their wives, she would sit with the tiny women drinking tea and eating sunflower seeds, delightedly spitting the husks onto the floor as the other women did.

  The soldiers kept pace with the expedition as the week of travel after Guanxian marked a drastic change in the terrain, and in the bond between the American widow and her Chinese expedition partner. The ascent was beginning.

  Harkness and Young rose each morning with the sun, stopped for three breaks a day, and turned in at about the time Harkness would have been headed out for early cocktails in Manhattan. They shared everything, including a battered washbasin. Evenings often saw them together on her cot, reading or writing letters.

  As they climbed through higher elevations—up toward the eight-toten-thousand-foot zone where the pandas thrived—the world around them grew heavenly. There were deep gorges and tumbling streams, shrines and temples, Chinese girls carrying magnificent hundred-pound loads of tea, peasants bearing medicinal herbs on their backs and leaving fragrant trails behind them. At one point, Harkness and Young stumbled upon a country funeral, complete with drums and cymbals, and large banners that cast their dancing shadows on the dusty village streets. Skittering along cliffs, Harkness could faintly hear the rushing waters of the Min far below. And early one morning, appearing like ghosts out of the fog, came a group of wild young men from the mountains. Wearing fur-trimmed leather coats and curled-toe shoes, they led a string of shaggy Tibetan ponies whose silver bells jangled with each step.

  Harkness and Young were meeting their goal, covering twenty or thirty miles a day, most of it uphill, much of it rutted or rocky. It was a rougher life than Harkness had ever known. Yet she felt alive in a way she never had before. She walked and scrambled over miles of cliffs and forest and tumbled rock. Always petite, she now grew fit. The surroundings were beautiful, the air was clear, the company ideal.

  Everything seemed better to her here, even the simple food. Somehow a handful of dry grape nuts eaten while marching, she said, “tasted just as good to us as though they had been served in a china dish with bananas and cream.” She feasted on local fare—corn cakes and turnips, cornmeal bread, cabbage, and peanut candy. She once used chopsticks to eat fried eggs in front of a crowd of two hundred. Sometimes she and Young dove into their own supplies, making breakfasts of English biscuits smothered in Tasmanian jam, or crabmeat and boiled eggs. In every village, they filled their enamel mugs with cup after cup of freshly brewed tea.

  All things around her deepened and changed in her eyes—including her partner. The shy boy she had met in Shanghai seemed like a man now, and a very protective one. Every night, no matter what the accommodation, Young guarded Harkness, setting up his own bed close to hers. His impulse would prove sound one evening when he foiled a band of robbers as she slept.

  Wherever they went, Young took care of everything. He dealt with the soldiers, he managed the porters, he kept the expedition on course and safe. He was also great company, and their intimacy grew, as they discussed the day's events, wrote letters, and reviewed plans and expenses together, almost always on the comfort of her cot.

  LIKE SOMETHING out of a book of Chinese fairy tales, Harkness wrote, they came upon the old village of Wenchuan. It sat at the foot of great green mist-enshrouded mountains that looked like coiled jade dragons, complete with serrated spines and smoky breath. As symbols of good luck in China, the mythical beasts were forever appearing just as they did now—in the outlines of fog-bound mountains and hills.

  The enchanted hamlet of stone and timber-and-mud houses, lighted at night only by the warm glow of candles and encircled by “crumbling, crenellated walls,” seemed little changed since the fifteenth century, when foreign princes from Tibet, at the urging of the troubled Ming Dynasty, came to quell local rebellions. Their odd, semiautonomous empire-within-an-empire, Wassu, stretched over some twenty-eight villages, and when Harkness arrived it was still ruled by the princes' heirs, known as Wa-ssu tusi. The royal men and their descendants had built huge Tibetan-style fortresses and great stone watchtowers throughout the area.

  Wenchuan, it turned out, this afternoon could offer no rooms to the travelers in the village proper, so Harkness and Young made their way to a fantastic, if ruined, Buddhist ghost temple at the outskirts. Soldiers, in a “revolutionary tornado,” had come through the year before, dismantling it along with many other buildings in the town for firewood. Even so, what was left was remarkable. Blue life-size horses, one headless, stood at attention in a courtyard whose walls were painted with scenes of souls in purgatory. A barren loft, open to “three corners of the compass,” was quickly converted into a comfortable camp with all the equipment and cots dragged up a wooden ladder.

  Settling into the temple, Harkness installed a makeshift curtain for herself. After a sponge bath, she changed into her beautiful quilted Japanese dressing gown, an indulgence, perhaps, but at least it was warm.

  The ghost temple in Wenchuan. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

  That night, Harkness and Young wandered into the village center for a hearty meal. The town—the last they would see before the mountains—would mark another pivotal point on the great journey. Over the next several days, emotionally and logistically, there was much to square away.

  One evening here, as a bright moon filled the courtyard with a pearly light and a cold wind moaned, the soldiers argued with Quentin Young. Young wanted the recruits to part company with them so that he and Harkness could get on with the expedition into the mountains. But the military men were concerned about their culpability if something should happen to the American. The discussion unnerved Young as he began to think about the consequences he himself could face if Harkness were harmed.

  He came to her, agitated and fretful, with a sense of rising panic she had never seen in him. She tried to convey her unshakable confidence that this expedition was blessed. She concluded, as did a character in a Chinese novel by a favorite writer of hers, that “when you yourself are right, nothing that ever happens to you can be wrong.” She knew they could walk through an avalanche, emerging unscathed. “The utter impossibility of anything but the peace and beauty of the last few days of travel was so unthinkable to me that I believe I finally conveyed a little of it to Quentin,” she wrote.

  The soldiers were dismissed, but still, as a precaution, Young again issued strict orders for Harkness to carry the revolver with her at all times. She would never really comply. With a gun, she wrote, “I felt and looked so silly.” And, “besides,” she said, “the people were all gentle and friendly.” The results of target-practice sessions had only reinforced her feeling that she should not be trusted with a weapon of any kind.

  One morning, though, when Young was especially adamant, she acquiesced. Dressing in riding breeches and boots, strapping a big .38 Special police revolver to her thigh, she strutted out, feeling pleasantly ridiculous, and mock-saluted Young.

  He was jubilant.

  Saluting her back, he addressed her as “Colonel.” She called him “Commander.” The pet n
ames stuck for the remainder of the journey.

  AFTER YOUNG PAID off the old set of coolies from the city, he set about hiring a new staff of local hunters and porters. A man who was one of Smith's hunters came to the temple looking for work. What his motivation was would always be a mystery. Like Russell, he may have had in mind some spying on Harkness. He might have wanted to create a little mischief. Or he might simply have been looking for a way to double his salary—already being paid by Smith, he came for a share of the Harkness expedition's payroll. Whatever it was, Young and Harkness agreed that they wanted nothing to do with him.

  It did ignite Harkness's resentment once again, reminding her of her strong conviction that she had been cheated. Back in Chengdu, some missionaries had told her that Smith channeled funds through them to keep hunters in the area working for him. She believed Bill's bank account was continuing to fuel Smith's operation. Now she felt that if she hired Smith's hunter, her poor dead husband would be paying the man a multiple salary: one from Bill via Smith, the second from Bill via Ruth.

  She didn't linger long over the thought, though, because a very different character looking for employment presented himself at Wenchuan too. With two mountain dogs loping by his side, he seemed as old and wild as the great mountains he had emerged from. His name was Lao Tsang, though Lao was an honorific meaning “old,” and Tsang could have simply been a variation on the word for “Tibetan.” A member of the Tibetan-related Qiang people, he wore a leather coat with fur lining, tall leather boots held high by suspenders tied at his waist, and a garment of coarse, homespun cloth. His brown, weathered face was set off by a white turban, wispy strands of snowy hair straggling down from it, and a sparse goatee. He had a squinty expression, as if appraising everything before him. His gun, made of silver, turquoise, and coral, seemed more ancient artwork than formidable weapon.

  He was the headman of his village, about a day's walk westward, deeper into the mountains. He had heard from what outsiders called the “bamboo telegraph”—some uncanny system of fast communication among mountain people—that they were hunting the giant panda. He told them matter-of-factly that he was the man to do it. He spoke of his hunting prowess, his knowledge of good panda habitat, and he informed them of what he would expect in the way of payment, which amounted to just a few dollars a month.

  They hired him without hesitation, and the newly constituted group was soon on its way. Harkness, Young, Lao Tsang, and two porters were to travel fast and light to scout out the promised hunting area. Wang was left behind with the heavy gear. On their departure, the entire town, including barking dogs and squealing pigs, saw them off.

  At a tiny hamlet came evidence that they were on the right track— not panda tracks or dung, but a pair of tweed trousers left behind by the Sage expedition, which had traversed this very route the year before.

  The small group would spend the first evening of its trek on the roof of Lao Tsang's home, departing in the morning with the old hunter's son-in-law, Yang. For two days they battled their way upward along cliffs and through thick bamboo and beautiful spruce forest. The ancient Lao Tsang was as talkative as he was agile, keeping up a constant dialogue over the long miles. At sundown they camped outside, packed so tightly together on a rock ledge that Harkness awoke during the night to find Yang's head on her feet and Lao Tsang nestled against her stomach.

  In the morning, she opened her eyes to a sunrise of spectacular beauty, with fog lifting in ghostly wreaths from the valley below. Harkness would later write of coming into consciousness in that moment. There was, she said, the “miracle of the sun coming over the mountains—and then it was time for that other miracle, trying to put on a pair of pants in a sleeping bag.”

  The team was looking for fresh signs of giant panda, and, for efficiency, it was decided that the foursome would split up into two teams— Yang and Harkness, Young and Lao Tsang. The day was arduous for the American as she lurched over fallen trees, struggling to advance through the never-ending stands of bamboo, which can grow taller than a man, and in patches are dense enough to shut out sunlight. It created what Harkness described as “a perpetual twilight even when the sun is high at noon.” In addition, the altitude made it hard for her to catch her breath. She took it all like a soldier, until she realized she had no matches to light a cigarette, and then she nearly cried.

  By the end of the day, the only reward was some panda dung Harkness had discovered. New droppings, which would indicate the recent presence of an animal, would smell like fresh-mowed grass, but these desiccated, nearly odorless specimens were too old to be of any use. The team moved on, heading for new ground westward in the beautiful peaks and valleys of Chaopo, or what was then called Tsaopo-go.

  Harkness was in for the roughest hiking yet. Her predecessor, Bill Sheldon of the Sage expedition, would maintain that his youth—he was in his early twenties—and his recent employment in a rain-soaked logging camp in Washington were the only reasons he had been able to cope with the terrain. Nevertheless, he often found himself crawling on hands and knees or falling thirty-five to fifty feet, feeling lucky he hadn't tumbled in areas where a misstep would have sent him crashing more than two thousand feet. Others in his party were not so fortunate. Sage's wife wrenched a knee early on, and another member had a mild heart attack. It was always a possibility that Harkness could die out here, but if she sustained even a relatively small injury it would halt the whole operation, and she might never get the chance to return to complete her mission.

  Over the course of three hours of snaking around barriers, the team dropped twenty-five hundred feet, mainly down a boulder-strewn dry creek. It was here that the heavy hobnailed boots, which had seemed ridiculous in Shanghai, began proving their worth.

  The party met a medicine digger of the Qiang people who was awestruck by Harkness, having never seen a foreigner before. Everyone had questions. Turbaned herb hunters, in their traditional brilliant blue gowns, knew these mountains in a way that no one else could. The diggers lived a reclusive existence, tapping into a fantastic side of nature, gathering such strange items as the “grass-worm”—a short ambercolored stalk made up of a predatory fungus and its prey, the captured caterpillar itself.

  Most of the panda lore dispensed by the root digger's party was culled from evidence left behind: shredded bamboo stalks, pressed vegetation where they had lain, and scattered dung. Like many others from the area, these men claimed that pandas ate iron pots and pans. It was a popular tale, inspired, no doubt, by pandas chewing on food-encrusted cookware left out at camps. The hungry and strong-jawed animals would end up puncturing the thick iron as they gnawed.

  The travelers enjoyed the talk, and after a lunch of hard-boiled eggs and sardines eaten near a tall stone watchtower in a tiny village, they went on, passing little shrines set out to the spirits of the mountains.

  The terrain became even more difficult to negotiate, especially with temperatures nearing a hundred. By the afternoon, Harkness was unraveling. Her blue sweater had torn, and Bill's cut-down riding breeches began to fight her, simultaneously bunching up and tugging downward. Despite her efforts to hold them up with scarves tied about her thighs, at one point, the pants actually fell down to her ankles. As usual, Young looked neat, clean, and pressed, nimbly leaping from spot to spot.

  Harkness, trying to keep up with the lanky athlete, could only watch as his red cap moved farther and farther away till she lost sight of it altogether. A long while later, at the bottom of an incline, perspiring and breathless, and with no Quentin Young in view, she gave up the pursuit, sitting down to light a cigarette with newly procured matches. Just then, Young popped out and teasingly claimed to have had time to take a nap as she descended. Harkness asked him how he had ever learned to negotiate the rough, rocky terrain with such fleetness. He replied that it was by observing blue mountain “sheeps.” Whatever frustration she might have felt disappeared: Harkness found Young's occasional slips in plurals nothing short of charming. The two shared a smoke
and a good laugh before setting off again.

  Harkness felt like a “sissy” in dealing with the log bridges that the porters crossed so nimbly. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

  There would be many more physical trials for Harkness before the day was done. Over and over again, the team crisscrossed the strong running mountain streams, which despite providing them with cold, clean drinking water also made travel so troublesome. The slippery “bridges” were merely knotty logs spanning the water. Harkness found herself growing more and more wary with each crossing, until she became, as she said, an absolute “sissy” about them.

  By dusk, after having traveled thirty arduous miles, they reached their destination. Festooned with Tibetan prayer flags and ringed by lighted huts stood a crumbling castle, said to be five hundred years old. It was bleak and imposing, set high on a barren hillside. Its massive walls, ramparts, and towers were made of stone, giving foundation to a wooden structure three stories high, with whitewashed walls, dark wood beams, and a belt of balconies. Although truly Tibetan, having been constructed in the early days of the ancient Wassu kingdom, it looked like it had arrived straight from the Alps. At once stern and magical, the castle was a perfect setting for a Grimm story.