Hupingshan National Nature Reserve, China — Bending beneath loaded packs, we trudge up endless switchbacks. Although the trail has been groomed by decades or even centuries of use, the stepping stones shift beneath our feet. They are wet too, and slick.
“My God, I forgot to buy life insurance,” my friend, Yue Jianbing, blurts out as we start up the first of four wooden ladders lashed to a cliff face. Drenched with fog and sweat, we climb until, topping the last rung, we resume plodding along the trail. The old Tujia farmer, whose house we are hiking toward, brings up the rear, contentedly smoking.
I have in mind a painting I saw in a Beijing store window — not great art, but a typical Chinese landscape. Now, I see it all again, as though we've stepped into the painting. We walk the same footpaths, stare into the same foggy valleys and climb the same humpy mountains. Too steep to be real, you might think. But weighed down with backpacks, I don't think the paintings exaggerate much at all. Everything is here — everything except the tiger perched on a jutting outcrop, roaring into a valley of fog.
So far, no sign of tigers. And, frankly, I don't expect to find any, even though Hupingshan National Nature Reserve, a swath of hardwood, conifer and bamboo forest arrayed along the mountainous border in northwestern Hunan Province, is reputedly one of the last bastions of the South China tiger. Three years ago, I walked some of these same trails with Chinese and American biologists looking for signs that the wild tiger of China's heartland might still survive. But as days passed, we began to realize the wild tiger must have fallen victim to shrinking habitat and to poaching — of the tiger itself, and more important, perhaps, of the deer and pigs it depended on for food.
Now I'm back. Tigers or not, I was seduced by the memory of Hupingshan's mountains and valleys — the scenery that informed China's “mountain-water” paintings. I wanted to make my own way through the country, to camp in the forest, to talk to people about how they live. While I might wonder if something so wild as a tiger could somehow survive, I might also temper my romance with reality.
This time, I travel with my 20-year-old daughter, Kate, and several unplanned companions. “Hey, Dad,” Kate calls out, “did you realize that this started out as the two of us and now we're up to six?”
Yue Jianbing is the graduate student of a friend in Beijing, who dispatched him to guide us safely through China. Like many Chinese, my friend is convinced that no foreigner could possibly navigate a country so incredible and complex as China. I beg to differ, but still, I welcomed Yue as an interpreter.
Then there is Xiong Jian-li, a voluble graduate student conducting a reptile and amphibian survey. We have barely begun hiking when he spots a toad the size of a hot-water bottle.
There is also the phlegmatic Huang Jian, a local guide dispatched unasked and unexpectedly by the nature reserve when word got around that we would be hiking on the mountain. He clutches a carry-on and small plastic bag as though he is boarding a plane.
Finally, there is Xiao Zunwu, a farmer we met along the trail. Xiao also works as a ranger for the reserve and, since he's travelling our way, offers to guide us up the mountain. He mentions he has seen stump-tailed macaques in this region.
I ask if it was recent. A couple of months ago, he says. But has he seen a tiger? No, he says, not for 30 years.At midday, sweaty and exhausted, we arrive at a farmhouse. The farm family brings out basins of cold water for us to wash.
The hill folk here are ethnic Tujia, who raise pigs and chickens and vegetables and tobacco in garden plots grubbed out of the mountain. Only three people live in this large house, a bushy-haired man named Mao, his pretty wife, and their son, 3, who rolls his eyes backward to impress Kate.
We eat chicken and pepper hot pot, pork and peppers, fried potatoes, peanuts, cucumbers, smoked meat and preserved eggs. The boy sits next to Kate and flirts incessantly as he deftly wields chopsticks to pluck the chicken head from the pot and pop it in his mouth. He strips the comb with his teeth and sucks on the noggin. After a moment, he spits out gleaming bone, cracks open the cranium, and sucks out the brains. Kate, who blanched at fried eels and duck feet in Beijing, gives up on lunch and takes a swig from her water bottle.
Xiao, our Tujia guide, is in his cups after two glasses of homegrown moonshine. But before we leave, he insists on another big shot and a bottle of beer — for each of us. I wave him off, but he barks back.
“It is his custom,” Xiong translates.
“Too many customs,” Yue mutters.
We trudge up the mountain. Xiao follows steadily. Neither liquor nor chain-smoking deters him. At 55, Xiao is built as solid as a stump. With a hand-carved walking stick, he climbs this mountain daily. We will stay the night in his house. He says he lives “in the middle of the mountain,” according to Xiong's translation. I like that — of the mountain, not on it, as though he is one of the Daoist immortals.
When we arrive, Xiao tells us he built his house with lumber he sawed by hand. The floor is packed earth. The following morning, his wife cooks over an open hearth and we crowd around a table beneath a bare bulb and slurp noodles for breakfast.
We set out, hemmed in by fog. Ferns and small bamboo cascade down the hillsides. The trail turns to broken rock, mud and slick outcrops. Stones roll under our feet. Mud sucks at our boots.
Hiking the trail eastward, we spot a man spraying weeds in a dirt field. He begins jabbering as we approach.
He has heard a tiger roar in the mountain, he says.
“Just now?” I ask.
“Yes,” says Xiong, 40 minutes ago.
Xiong interrogates the man as Huang takes a GPS reading. The man points to the woods at the edge of the field and makes the chuffing sound of a tiger.
I am incredulous. So is Yue. “In my opinion,” Yue says, “maybe Mr. Xiao's cough.”
We continue on, down a long muddy decline, and then come to a tree, not distinctive, except for the claw marks of a tiger or an exceptionally large leopard. The gouges, dark and weathered, are many years old. In fact, I had seen them on my earlier trip. Still, they are the freshest sign of a tiger we have seen — then or now.
As old as these marks are, they are perishable in comparison to the stories that linger about the tiger.
“The tiger dies, but his stripes remain,” goes an old Malay saying. Like the man we met earlier, people everywhere are prone to believe that a beast haunts their world. If there is a mountain to live on, a rock to stand on, the mythical beast somehow survives, the eternal spirit of a vanquished wilderness.
We hike through the day. Fog closes in. We arrive at a weathered shack. Xiong and Huang find a place inside, but the rest of us pitch tents.
The grey shapes of trees and mountains hover at the edge of sight. I imagine a deadly creature padding silently in the fog, able to live while avoiding detection, a shadow in a parallel realm. Might the South China tiger somehow survive? I've spent three years asking that question. But as I've walked this mountain, I've decided it is time to quit searching for a China that might be and instead to look for the China that is. My mind turns from tigers to more immediate dangers. We have a long way down. As wet and steep as the trail is, tomorrow may be difficult and perilous.
The fog turns to mist and the mist to a light patter. I hear birds, then frogs, and as night falls, only rain.
Special to The Globe and Mail
