by Hugh Warwick
It turned out there are a number of military bases in the area most likely to yield a hughi and there is a degree of sensitivity about allowing strangers to wander around with cameras and binoculars.
Plan B – always good to have a Plan B. In one of the documents I had copied from the Natural History Museum, Poppy was able to read a reference to Taiyuan. Not only did this have the advantage of being closer to Beijing, only a ten-hour train journey away, but it was also mercifully free from military complications. She booked the train tickets and I was set.
Of course, it was still a long shot. We didn’t have anyone on the ground who would be able to help. We didn’t know where to start looking. We were planning on rolling up in the city and then wandering around at random, showing people pictures of hedgehogs and trying to get a lead.
So I suggested that we formulate a Plan C, just in case. After all, it is always good to have a Plan C. But Plan C made Plan B seem like a pretty reasonable approach. Google listed a company that promised a remarkable service:
We are Chinese medicinal animal nursary ground. Mainly, we nursary centipede, scorpion. We supply a great deal of dead, viable, centipede, scorpion, leech, flour beetle, hedgehog. all the year round. We can also help you outlet.
Chuzhou, Anhui, China.
If the worst came to the worst, we would track down the man behind this enterprise Mr Liu Daming.
And so I was off. I didn’t go the carbon-offsetting route to assuage my guilt for flying. I decided to take a lead from good Catholics and, while not quite the equivalent of self-flagellation, the cramped seats at the back of the crowded plane acted as, I am sure, suitable and rather intense penance.
The agonizingly long hours gave me time to think what it would have been like if I had approached this differently. If, for example, there had been some sort of organization . . . Actually, I could leave it there – but I really wondered about being part of a large, professional outfit, backed by an institute of renown. Yet here I was, heading off on the most amateur of quests – doing it out of love and without money. Though the one time I did join a semi-organized outfit and spent three months searching for an extinct leopard in Morocco, I lost so much weight my clothes no longer fitted. Perhaps I was better on my own.
The one redeeming feature of the journey was the chance to start reading a new book. I have never delved into Moby-Dick before, but felt some kinship with Ahab and his quest, though perhaps without so much rage. Most unexpected was the early reference to a hedgehog, making it all the more appropriate, even if it was only in the mispronunciation of Queequeg that Peleg calls him Hedgehog.
The long and painful journey ended at the Lama Temple Hostel, where the silent and windowless womb of a room let me sleep for twelve and a half hours – the longest uninterrupted sleep I have had for many years. Poppy yanked me from my dreamless repose with some vigorous banging on the door – I had missed our meeting by over four hours and she was beginning to get worried.
Blearily I followed her to her favourite café and there we spread out maps like the explorers we nearly were, tried to work out the merits of Plans A–C and wondered if there might be a D, E and F in the offing. Then, leaping from the 1930s to the present day, Poppy pulled out her laptop and logged on via wi-W. And there we were: Plan A blown out of the water by bureaucracy, Plan B with many unknowns and plan C down to Google.
The café owner joined us and talked about her hedgehog memories: ‘My brother used to catch them and keep them in a cage,’ she said. This was just outside Beijing, but probably twenty years ago. She thought that they ate mice. She grinned as she made a rolling motion, showing what the hedgehog did when it was frightened. ‘He would feed them things with a strong flavour,’ she continued, ‘and then they would make a strange coughing noise.’ OK, so maybe her brother was a sadist, feeding chillies to hedgehogs. And maybe the coughing noise was rather like the beginning of self-anointing, the strange behaviour seen in European hogs.
As I paid our bill I noticed a bottle of liquid that looked not unlike some sort of rose water, but had, among the beautiful characters, the English words ‘Toilet Water’. I mentioned this to Poppy, who explained that all over China there has been a spate of companies getting their products translated into English in the run-up to the Olympic Games, but the quality of the translation is open to question.
It has picked up the name ‘Chinglish’ and has given rise to some delightful confusions: a cake stall with the sign ‘It is gluttonous to come quickly’; plum candies have the strapline ‘Hey, so delicious, let us try it fast’; and a toilet in Shanghai with the sign ‘Do not thrown urine around’. Though I wonder whether there might not be a temptation on the part of translators just to amuse the tourists.
Back in the world of hedgehogs, it seemed logical, but then again jet lag was kicking in, to head to the one person who claimed to know where to find hedgehogs. Poppy had spoken to Plan C, Liu Daming, and found that he would be happy to meet us and show us his hedgehogs. I tried to imagine what he would make of our interest; did he think we wanted to use them ourselves? And what species of hedgehog did he deal with? The distribution map I had photocopied back in London suggested the most likely species was hughi, but given the small number of sightings there have ever been, I didn’t want to bet on it.
We could do no more, so Poppy took me to one of the many restaurants nearby, and thus began a new love affair with food. It was all very different from the Chinese food in Oxford. My mouth was tingling from a rare combination of pain and pleasure by the time I retired to the hostel.
The next day we reconvened in a rather unexpected café, Waiting for Godot. Established by a local businessman with a fondness for Beckett, the walls were dark. I picked up a copy of the China Daily, an English-language paper, and was delighted with a story that must fill all air travellers with the utmost confidence. Needless to say, I will not be flying on Nepal Airlines.
6 September 2007
Airline sacrifices goats
Officials at Nepal’s state-run airline have sacrificed two goats to appease Akash Bhairab, the Hindu sky god, following technical problems with one of its Boeing 757 aircraft, the carrier said yesterday.
Nepal Airlines, which has two Boeing aircraft, has had to suspend some services in recent weeks due to the problems. The goats were sacrificed in front of the troublesome aircraft on Sunday at Nepal’s only international airport, in Kathmandu, in accordance with Hindu traditions, an official said. ‘The snag in the plane has now been fixed and the aircraft has resumed its flights,’ said Rajun K. C., a senior airline official, without explaining what the problem had been.
I ordered coffee and received something like a quadruple espresso. My jet-lag-induced lethargy began to lift. We plotted some more, then headed for the station. Plan C was in motion and we were off, our train heading south.
Everyone in our full compartment had brought a feast with them. We had green tea out of little flasks filled from a boiler at one end of each carriage. And while some of those around us tucked into chicken feet, we ate the largest and most delicious pot noodles, spicy cabbage flavour.
We started to chat with the others in the compartment. There was quite a gang coming and going, and it turned out that this was the annual holiday for the Beijing Meitong Printing Company, off to Nanjing, with the Beijing Cheerful Holiday Tourist Company organizing everything. They were a great bunch and thought that I was mad. But we talked and soon stories about hedgehogs began to emerge.
‘The hedgehog is treated with respect in Beijing,’ explained Zhang Bao Dong, via Poppy. ‘I have heard old people talking about the hedgehog and the weasel as spirit animals.’ The last time he saw a hedgehog was when he was fishing in the outer suburbs of Beijing. He had put his box of bait on the ground and along snuffled a little hog. His eyes twinkled with joy as he described how it rolled up into a ball when he moved.
Cai Mingyou joined the conversation. ‘I heard a cough when I was out one night and thought it was a perso
n following me,’ he said. ‘But when I looked I couldn’t see anyone. I looked around and found there was a hedgehog.’ He also repeated the story about hedgehogs being ‘spirit animals’. And then he started talking about how he was sure I was a vegetarian. This digression caused confusion until the compartment descended into laughter as it transpired he was talking about hedgehogs. This set them all off and as they continued to drink baijiu (rice wine) I could pick out references to ci wei, followed by more giggles, before everyone began to retire to their bunks and the carriage slipped swiftly into sleep.
There was a quick change in Nanjing, shortly after dawn, and on to Chuzhou. This journey gave me more time to mull over a worry that had hatched during the night. I wanted to find Hugh’s hedgehog, and ideally I would do that in the company of expert field ecologists. I wanted to see my hedgehog out in the wild, doing natural hedgehoggy things. But here I was, following the only lead I had, heading towards a very different sort of hedgehog expert: someone who employs people to hunt for them so that the hedgehogs can be killed and used to make lotions, potions and pills. I was worried about what I would be confronted with. Battery-farmed hughis? Cages of hedgehogs being fed slugs and beetles on a conveyor belt? And if this was what I saw, what would I do? I couldn’t very well rescue a shed full of hedgehogs.
I was on the verge of getting a little sentimental about this – but it felt so wrong that I might be about to have my first meeting with a hedgehog I had fantasized about for so long and find it stuck in a cage like an unfortunate chicken. Did I want to see hughi so much that I would be content to let one suffer?
Chuzhou does not have many Western visitors judging by the attention we received on arrival; people took photographs. We walked away from the station and at random stopped at the third hotel we came to, booked in and dumped our bags. There was a great weight on my shoulders that remained even after removing my rucksack.
We had to decide what to do, so headed for brunch in a café around the corner. Yang Yang Xiu was so helpful. While her staff giggled and hid every time I looked towards them, she told us about Feng Le market and, while we relished her noodles, she mentioned that sometimes hedgehogs were seen there for sale.
Midday is probably not the best time to visit a market: everyone has shopped for lunch and evening business is a way off. But we took a walk around and Poppy started to ask questions. We walked by mounds of vegetables, great buckets of chillies, dried fungi, pyramids of spices and boxes of eggs. Pretty ropey-looking eggs too. I asked Poppy about them. These were, she told me, thousand-year-old eggs. My eyes widened, but she deflated my amazement by pointing out that the duck eggs were rarely more than 100 days old and had been buried in a large pot, covered in ash, salt and tea to aid fermentation.
Apparently my bilious reaction to the thought of eating the blackened egg was just the same as that of many in China to a plate of delicious blue-veined cheese. There are some delicacies that do not travel so well.
Through the meat section: this would give a Health and Safety officer nightmares. Cages of chickens packed close together. Chickens in a heap with their legs tied together looking up at other chickens having their throats cut, being boiled and plucked. A still-life of limp, pale ducks’ necks. Then we were pointed further on, to a separate building: the fish hall. Fish are kept fresh by being kept alive. Boxes of eels writhed, crayfish hunched and carp pouted. In the very last corner we were told that it is extremely rare for someone to have a hedgehog, but we should try at the far end of the market, where we had just come from. So we trudged back, narrowly avoiding a squabble between two people busy gutting fish and kicking a large, glassy-eyed head back and forth.
On our way through the meat hall I slipped on some carelessly dropped intestines, much to the amusement of the massed ranks of butchers. And then we were back on the roadside. There was a woman selling chickens and eggs. She explained that sometimes someone would pitch up next to her with a hedgehog, but only early in the morning. I showed her the photographs I had taken in the museum back in London. Could she identify the sort of hedgehog? No. Maybe a long-eared one, maybe not. So we had to return before seven the next morning and hope our luck might change.
But this had all been a distraction from what I knew we must do. Here was a chance of seeing hughi and I was looking for ways out of it. I just did not want to deal with the horrors of intensively farmed hogs that I was picturing. However, I was a man on a mission and so we flagged down another taxi.
I imagine that Zhai Xiao Ming is still eating out on this fare. She was clearly surprised to have two English passengers, more surprised that one spoke fluent Mandarin and not entirely sure why we were heading thirty minutes out of town, up into the hills to pick up a man from a meat-roasting factory. That is where Liu Daming had a new business and it left me wondering in what form I would be finding my hedgehog.
We pulled up in a village and a stout man smiling broadly walked over and got in with us. Liu Daming did not strike me as a hedgehog torturer, but then what would one of those look like? He seemed really kind and enthusiastic, if a little confused. We carried on west until he pointed us off the main road and up a dirt track. We pulled up beside a large pile of charcoal and a very small compound. It did not seem that Liu Daming had quite the enterprise the Internet had promised.
He showed us into a room and disappeared briefly, before returning, gingerly holding . . . By this stage my mouth was dry as adrenalin surged through my system. Could it be this simple? I had been in China for just sixty hours and I had found a hedgehog that had been recorded just twelve times in the last 100 years. If someone from China had called me asking to see a hedgehog, apart from taking them to a hedgehog rescue centre, I doubt I could have guaranteed them such a swift result.
I am skirting around this to avoid the climax. It was like Christmas, getting a present from someone who knows exactly what you want but manages to get it not quite right.
It was clear, from the first glance, that this was not hughi. As Liu Daming opened his hands I could see that the spines were generally dusty brown and there was none of that distinctive dark tip I was so hoping for. But I had to smile like it was the Christmas present I had really wanted; I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. He handed me the hedgehog. There was such a sense of familiarity. I had been expecting it to feel rather alien, but she – I checked, and showed Liu Daming how to tell – felt very like a hedgehog. Which, of course, she was. But you understand what I mean – sometimes familiarity can be a bit of a shock in alien surroundings.
She looked dehydrated and underfed, her nose was very dry and there was a ‘narrowness’ to her that looked unhealthy; but she was still perky enough and weighed in at 550 grams (important not to leave home without a spring balance, you never know when you might need one). And then it was time to take some photographs. I had, for as long as I was aware of Hugh’s hedgehog, longed for a photograph of me and hughi. However poorly framed and exposed, I did not care, I wanted that photograph. Now I was going to have to be content with what appeared to be a Daurian hedgehog, Hemiechinus dauricus, as my partner. But first I got some pictures with Liu Daming and then I scrabbled around in the dirt, getting nose-to-nose with this little beast; nose-to-nose and nose to lens. She was really rather sweet. Not massively dissimilar to hedgehogs I have seen in the UK. She bristled like she should and slowly relaxed. Perhaps she had a more pronounced parting on her forehead? Her spines were different too. UK hogs tend to have a fairly similar sort of spine covering most of their back, but hers had a sprinkling of all cream ones. Her skirt of fur was pale as well, and this spread to her face, making her beady eyes stand out all the more clearly.
Poppy took over the role as photographer and this gave me a chance to pick up Dora, as she became known, for a closer look. Yes, there was a general hedgehoggy smell, very mild, but definitely similar to ours in the UK. I looked into her eyes and felt a slight shift in my motivation. I had done, to a certain extent, what I had come to China to do – get a pho
tograph of me with a hedgehog. And I know it was not the right hedgehog, but I was not even expecting to manage this, so I was thrilled. But I wanted more – and I was not even thinking about hughi now, but this individual. Throughout my work with hedgehogs I have shied away from ‘individuals’ – well, apart from the ones I named in Devon . . . OK, this is not entirely consistent, but I like to think I have shied away from sentimentality. So why was I now thinking of taking drastic action?
But what would Poppy think? She would undoubtedly dismiss me as a bit of a lightweight, getting soppy about a hedgehog. I handed Dora back to Liu Daming. Poppy came over and told me that while I was photographing her, he had turned to the taxi driver and said, ‘He came all this way just to photograph a hedgehog? Next time he should just call me and I’ll email him a picture.’ Hardly the cutting edge of mammal research that first brought hughi to the attention of Oldfield Thomas. I got her to check and yes, this was the only hedgehog he had and he really did not get that many and he didn’t breed them and, well, he really was not the enterprise the Internet suggested. What of the other animals? He beamed again and led me through to a dark and dirty room. He lifted a plastic lid on a box of muck and a few things scuttled. He reached in and showed, with great pride – in fact, with more excitement than when he revealed the hedgehog – a centipede with a bright red head. About 5 centimetres long, it sat on his palm as he continued beaming.
We went back out into the bright daylight and I was just wondering how I was going to break it to Poppy that maybe we should just buy Dora and then release her somewhere away from here, when she said quietly, ‘We can’t just leave her here. We must buy her and release her somewhere away from here.’