The Lady and the Panda (32 page)

In reality, nature was now a trial. The beginning of November felt like deep winter. The days were gray and raw, with only rare breaks of sunshine. The drizzly nights were plunged into the bone-chilling cold of high mountains. By this time, Harkness cursed her decision to remain in the castle rather than join the hunters in the field. Marking time while hired men did the legwork was a strategy Smith had advocated the previous year, one that she had rejected outright. Now she was doing just
that. Not in the comfort of Shanghai, of course, but in the discomfort of the castle, and achingly within sight of the forest and the life she should have been immersed in. Why hadn't she gone? It wasn't the hardships of the field that had halted her. She craved intense sensation, which a good hard trek granted. Her only explanation was that she would have been a liability to the endeavor. She was no good at pitching tents or tying knots; she certainly couldn't shoot game.

Other things must have weighed heavily on her. Quentin Young wasn't there, and the personal and practical considerations of entering the wild without him may have been too much. She was under tremendous pressure to succeed—ironically, much more than last time. In her first expedition, hardly anyone even knew what she was up to, and among those who did, there was little expectation. This time the world was aware of where she was and what she was doing. There were high hopes. And the Brookfield Zoo had staked money on this trip. There were also Smith's charges that she wasn't a real explorer. And her own desire to make a life for herself doing this work—the need to prove to herself before anyone else that she, in fact, could. Then too there was the debt of honor in reinforcing to the great white hunters that animal capture could be kind, and soft, and feminine. Of Smith's two pandas that died, Harkness said, “I believe the spirits of Ajax's pandas were completely broken.” She felt there was a viable alternative to all the rough work of traditional hunters. There was a lot riding on this trip, and Harkness had to stick with the tactic that had the best chance of success.

At this point, it probably seemed too late and foolish, even too selfish, to change plans in order to go hunting herself. But she was at such loose ends, perceiving herself as so useless, she felt compelled to do whatever was in her power to hurry things along. For Harkness, that meant one thing—another ceremony to the gods of the mountains. She ordered the purchase from town of a large red cock for sacrifice.

Several days later, at dusk, the runners returned from Guanxian with the animal and all the ceremonial provisions. Wang arranged with the hunters that they would carry the rooster, incense, candles, and wine to the same spot that had been used for Harkness's big
joss
service last year.
She lobbied to travel with the men, if not for hunting, then at least for the rites, but Wang preferred the comforts, such as they were, of the castle. His reluctance only added to Harkness's suspicion that he was tethered by a romance in the village. Wang sometimes dressed up and disappeared for hours somewhere in the vicinity of those huts beyond the castle. One day, when he had vanished for a long time—an afternoon and into the evening—Harkness sent for him. In his embarrassment, she reported, “he came rushing back puffing and dithering up the castle stairs.” She thought he was guilty about something.

As for a trip into the forest, Wang wouldn't budge. He told Harkness that they could time things so that the night the hunters reached the ceremonial rock, the two of them could “make joss” simultaneously, close to their own protective roof.

With all the preparations in place, a few nights later, near a little peach tree, Harkness and Wang lighted their candles, burning sacrificial money in obeisance to the Tibetan gods. Staying put was a small concession to her dear Wang. He had been so good to her that she couldn't have pressured him about it.

By mid-November, the seclusion was truly taking its toll on Harkness. In letters home, she didn't even try to hide it anymore. “Slowly but inevitably I am losing my mind,” she wrote. Her distractions weren't distracting enough. She was even coming to the end of her meager reading selection, having almost completed the Dickens. She said that when she turned the last page of the book, her last vestige “of sanity will have fled.” When she wrote, she still threw in a witty line or two, but invariably her predicament would become apparent. “Patience is, I am told, a great virtue. Mine I fear is wearing thin. Not for me the years on lonely mountain tops in contemplation; I have too much to do in this world.”

Her humor blackened while inch by inch her confidence eroded. Dirty, bedraggled, and without a single in-depth conversation to steady her in reality, she began to think for the first time that she might just fail. She feared she would never see another giant panda. With every passing day, each night that closed to total blackness, it got worse. Deep inside the lonely castle, she might hear only the rushing wind, the sounds of
her own footsteps in the echoing dim halls, the sputtering of an oil lamp, or the crackle of a precious campfire. She caught the sound of her own language only inside her own thoughts.

If she took stock of her life, she would see no safety net below. She was a thirty-seven-year-old widow with a lust for adventure and a nebulous hold on underwriting it. When she lost her husband, she sidestepped a family fortune. If she failed on this trip, she would have trouble supporting herself. She would have to find a way to earn her keep. Furthermore, she wasn't even sure which side of the world she wanted to call home. At times it could seem that her life was at stake: “This year I'm afraid will end in failure… and what will I do if I fail?” she wrote. Too easily, she would seek solace in corn wine. It took some of the sting out of the tortured hours, which always worsened at sundown.

Some nights she abandoned any effort to sleep, and when Wang would hear her moving about, or coughing with the cold she had trouble shaking, he would rouse himself to boil her a bowl of pale tea. He would give her tiger balm and stoke the fire in her chilled room.

But that didn't always bring her peace. In this wild, desolate place, she began to have strange dreams of Bill. Sometimes it was comforting to sense his presence and to feel protected by his spirit, but she was also distressed by a recurring nightmare: horrible images of Bill in terrible condition, “ill and penniless.” He must have been reproaching her in some way, because over and over, in the nightmare, she would have to defend herself, laying out the whole story of Su-Lin to him, explaining why she had to leave to bring the panda back a mate. In this castle where she had first made love to Quentin Young, and with nothing to occupy her mind, she began to drown in despair.

It opened the door even wider to the mysticism and spirituality she had always craved. She felt that she was in the presence not only of Bill's spirit but of “other forces too.” The previous year, she had ascended these mountains into the realm of the gods. Now, paradoxically, from this great height, she seemed to be descending, ever downward, into perdition, fueled by local corn wine and dark thoughts, into a netherworld where dreams would become portents, and opium and mysticism would call to her.

The mountains seemed to erupt with mystical signs. Their silhouettes, blacker than the night they were enveloped in, would sometimes emit mysterious twinkling lights. They came from areas where no people could possibly be. It seemed so far-fetched that when she wrote of the sight to friends back home, she assured them that she “wasn't tight.” What she saw was real, and would be observed by a man of science many years later, who would attribute the phenomenon to something more prosaic than sprites—phosphorescent fungi or the like.

To Harkness, she was seeing the unexplained. And she was hearing it too. An almost indescribable sound seemed to lift right off the slopes. It wasn't the wind, or the cries of wild animals. One night, the rhythms were particularly strong. “Their cadences of three tones were endless,” she wrote home. “It is a very difficult thing to explain but it's like silent music, if that makes sense. Sometimes it's like a harp, the zing, zing, zing of fine drawn strings; then it's a bell and then it's a drum—deep toned like the Ghost Temple's drum-bell.” Out here, she had faith in a way she never had been capable of in a church. “I'm not fooling,” she wrote. “I believe in the spirits of these mountains.”

In this mood, she could mull over the pages of her fantasy story of the forest girl. Her agent would end up calling the work “tripe,” and in fact its premise was as clichéd and simplistic as its author was original and complicated. But it did seem to allow her to distill her roiling emotions. Her fictional world mirrored her own dilemmas. Did she belong in the United States or China? Could she, in fact, love a man like Quentin Young, or would it always be Bill? “Jungle Magic” was no roman à clef, but bits of Harkness and the people around her were woven all through the characters and plot.

BY THE MIDDLE
of November, there was suddenly hope—good news had come in from the field. The hunters had sent back carefully wrapped packages of panda dung. It was fresh, and judging from the size of the droppings, the men believed the animal to be a good-size young adult. Overjoyed, Harkness reaffirmed her trust in the gods, and in Whang, the
holy man who was leading the trackers. He came to see her a short time later to deliver his assessment. Sitting down for a cigarette and a cup of tea, Whang communicated his belief that within a week they would have a panda.

On November 19, late in the afternoon, the hunters arrived at the castle, summoning Harkness downstairs. In a dark corner of a lower room she saw a wretched and frightened black-and-white bear, about seventyfive pounds. It was tethered and trussed from nose to tail. The animal, which they presumed to be female, could not move, and cried out in little panicked laments. With a bamboo muzzle fashioned over her nose, she would have been unable to take food or water during the trek here. Tears stung Harkness's eyes. Though custom dictated a slow and methodical haggling with the men over price, she couldn't stand to see the animal remain this way for even another minute. She stared at the pitiful panda as the hunters conveyed the story that eighty men and several dogs had participated in the capture. They would all have to be compensated. Harkness didn't ask questions; she merely shelled out the cash. She “paid through the nose,” she said, because she just wanted to have “Yin” carried immediately up to her room, without taking the time to quibble.

Harkness ordered a cage be built so the animal could be free of her shackles, and in the meantime, she had as many of them removed as possible. The sorry state of the captive made her sick. “For the night and day,” Harkness wrote, “the poor baby crouched in a corner and sobbed. I practically did the same.” She was tortured by the animal's suffering. “This is all a miserable business,” she wrote, “and if I ever accomplish this, God help me I'll never be responsible for capturing another animal of any kind.”

Harkness, whose experience with pandas had been from the gentle Su-Lin, tried to comfort the wild animal. But Yin wanted none of it. “I tried to approach her and she'd rear and strike and hiss rather like a cat,” Harkness wrote. “My hands are still a mass of scratches bites and are badly swollen from my attempts at pacification.” She must have thought yet again about how things had been the year before. Of Su-Lin's serene
face tipped up toward her own as he greedily gulped his formula. Of the comfort of Quentin Young's body next to her own. Of the tenderness and physical exhilaration she had then.

Now, as she sat helplessly watching the poor panda, she must have had a thousand thoughts. She had finally received word from Quentin Young—he was in Macao, the Portuguese colony outside Hong Kong. She had written him back immediately, asking him to join her in her quest for a male panda, and to help her transport the animals to the States. But that was not to be. Another letter from Young would say that he and Diana had had a baby girl on November 19—the very same day Harkness got her panda. He told her that since he didn't have the good fortune to have a male, he thought Harkness would get a male panda. He also told her that he and his wife would name the baby after her, Harkness reported, though in fact, they did not.

It was clear that for this trip, Harkness would remain on her own. At least she had one panda in hand. If she could get the animal out alive, it would be the second panda to come to the West, and that would mean she had trumped Smith again. But the impending victory seemed less than hollow. Even though Harkness had her prize, she felt so disheartened that for two weeks she couldn't even bring herself to write letters.

“Really I can't describe the days,” she would write when the black spell had partially lifted. “Just endless waiting, waiting waiting with not a thing in the world to do.” It had gotten so cold that she wouldn't even tolerate stripping down for a sponge bath. “Haven't had my clothes off for about ten days now,” she wrote. “I confine my ablutions to hands face and teeth, and hate to do that, I did wash my feet yesterday and was a little appalled when I got a whiff of them.” Her hair had gone unwashed since the start of October.

As miserable as she felt, though, she wasn't quitting. She could easily have headed out with Yin, but she was still bent on getting another panda, and she resigned herself to the fact that she might just finish out the winter here, spending months more in this unhappy state.

At least poor Yin finally had a cage, which allowed her to be released from her restraints. With some freedom of movement, the animal began
to settle down. “She is sweet now,” Harkness reported, “and inflicts no intentional injury but she every now and then gives me a nip.” Fresh bamboo was brought in for her, while simultaneously, Harkness tried to interest her in vegetables so that she could survive far from these forests. The bamboo-obsessed bear would not touch them. And, though giant pandas must eat almost constantly, the disoriented animal slept most of the day through, eating pounds and pounds of tough bamboo in the still of the night. “How I'm ever going to shift her diet God only knows,” Harkness wrote. She was distraught about it because in no time at all, she had become very attached to the poor creature. “I love her dearly,” Harkness wrote; “she is particularly entrancing when she stands on her head,” she said, describing a common giant panda behavior.