The Ragged Edge of the World Read Online Free Page A

and becoming more easily perforated by roads, humans, including scientists, are having a much easier time penetrating formerly impenetrable places.
    To a degree this was the case in Vietnam, whose forest cover had been reduced from 50 percent to 10 percent during the previous half century. War played a complicated role in the discovery of these new species. One of the ironies of war is that while actual fighting takes a gruesome toll on both humans and wildlife—think about defoliation in Vietnam or guerrillas machine-gunning wildlife in the Congo—to the degree that animals can retreat beyond the reach of the troops, roaming armies do keep poachers away. Civil war in Nicaragua likewise stopped deforestation in its tracks for a number of years; in Suriname the presence of insurgent Maroons in the forests kept intruders out for decades, and whatever depredations the guerrillas themselves caused were more than compensated for by the recovery of its fauna and flora. The most intact ecosystem on the Korean Peninsula is in the demilitarized zone (DMZ), which is a perennial contender for the title of the place with the most land mines on the planet. (During the past fifty-five years the DMZ’s big animals seem to have figured out ways of sidestepping the explosives.) The mention of such findings is intended not as an endorsement of war as a conservation strategy, but rather as an observation that nature takes her opportunities anywhere she can find them.
    On the one hand, it could be argued that, but for the war, the new species in Vietnam might have been discovered years earlier, as the country’s cadre of well-trained zoologists systematically explored its forests. In fact, biologists sometimes accompanied soldiers along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and some of the boxes of bones lying around in the Institute for Ecology and Biological Resources had been collected on these forays. There is no question, though, that the war interrupted the cataloguing of these bones as more pressing matters (e.g., survival) demanded the attention of the scientists. Casually stored, the bones gathered dust for decades before reports began coming in that Vietnam might host a wondrous collection of large animals previously unknown to science.
    One of the earliest indicators that Vietnam might play a special role as a refuge of ancient and archaic species came in 1990 when the skeleton of a poached Javan rhino was found in the south. The most endangered of all the rhinos, the Javan subspecies had been thought to be extinct in Vietnam. (Only a few dozen remain in Java itself.) The Vietnamese rhino population, which separated from the Javan group between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago, somehow held on, and now, with protection, a handful survive in the Cat Loc Reserve in a patch of southern lowland tropical forest.
    That discovery whetted the appetite of field biologists to see what else existed in Vietnam’s remaining forests. A particularly tempting target, revealed by a survey of satellite imagery, was the area surrounding Vu Quang, which constituted one of the last pristine patches of lowland evergreen forest in Asia. In May 1992, biologist John MacKinnon and a team of Vietnamese researchers set out on an expedition sponsored by the World Wildlife Fund to survey the animals of these moist, dense forests.
    The area was especially active during the war, since its forests offered cover for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, by which the North Vietnamese moved men and matériel to the south during struggles with both the French and the Americans. It is hellishly hot, very steep, and, I was to discover, one of the most slippery places on the planet. Add leeches, malaria and the omnipresent threat of downpour, and it is easy to understand why the region was uninhabited until the 1950s, and not even the Vietnamese ventured there after the war wound down. Hmong and other tribes sometimes wandered in to hunt, but they had little interaction with the ethnic