My son, Luca, and I were perched in a basket high on the back of a towering Asian elephant, swaying rhythmically back and forth to its lumbering gait. The driver, or mahout, straddled the animal's neck, calling out frequently in a secret language of shouts, moans and pleas.
We were 10 minutes — as the elephant walks — outside a village on the edge of the Xe Pian National Biodiversity Conservation Area in southern Laos. We had left the Mekong for a few days and traveled into the hills on the eastern edge of the basin, dusty and parched, as the dry season settled in.
The trail had just left a teak plantation and entered thick forest when we heard it.
Deep, guttural, almost menacing. I swung my head toward Luca and whispered, "Did you hear that?" He nodded excitedly. A thrill spider skittered down my spine. We were in tiger country, and the sound's source had clearly been close.
"Was that a tiger?" Luca whispered.
"I don't know… But, wow, I don't know what could have made the sound."
I was sure it wasn't an elephant. We were last in a line of three elephants, and though I couldn't quite pinpoint it, the sound had definitely come from either directly beside or close behind us.
The mahout seemed relaxed, lost in thought. Clearly he must have heard the sound, but he didn't register any response. I pointed this out to Luca: "He would have said something if that had been a tiger."
Because the mahout didn't speak English, we waited until we'd caught up with the guide, who had halted his elephant to point out a crested serpent eagle in a tree. "Can you ask the mahout about a sound we just heard?" I asked him.
They conferred, and the guide shook his head. "Not sure about a sound … but there's a crested serpent eagle," he repeated.
Still, we were in a forest that harbored tigers, so in theory, it could have been a tiger.
I soon learned just how narrow that sliver of possibility was.
A half-hour later, the three elephants, including one carrying my wife, Paola, and our daughter, Wren, gathered around a strange square pit in a small clearing.
"This was a trap for elephants, many years ago," our guide explained. "They'd cut boards and place them over the pit and cover them with leaves. When the elephant was about in the middle, the boards gave way and they fell in. An adult elephant could work itself out, but a young one would be trapped. That's one of the ways they got these elephants."
We were riding elephants that had previously been used in logging operations, hauling thousand-pound teak logs out of the rugged and roadless forest.
"Are there any wild elephants left in Xe Pian?" I asked the guide.
"No wild elephants have been seen for a long time," he replied. I then thought about the amazing list of animals in a guide book that had drawn me to Xe Pian in the first place.
"Tigers?"
"Almost certainly not."
"Gaur, banteng?" I asked. (Two species of huge wild cattle.)
"People say, oh, that guy has seen one, but you can never find anyone who actually has."
"Gibbons?"
"Not here, maybe very deep in the forest, by the border of Cambodia."
"Siamese crocodile?"
"No."
"Rhinoceros?"
"Hmmph," he said, shaking his head with a rueful smile, seeming amused that I would even ask.
I stopped asking. The guidebook list that had stoked such excitement had just abruptly collided with the reality of the "empty forest syndrome."
From Google Earth, Xe Pian is a vast landscape of unbroken dry evergreen forest and savanna. On the ground, various drivers — from people's hunger to the insanely lucrative markets for animal parts — have drained that list of its relevance to Xe Pian's natural history.
Now it just describes the landscape's history.
We were staying at Kingfisher Ecolodge, on the edge of Xe Pian. It is is run by Massimo Mero, an Italian married to a Lao woman who has made a considerable bet on this park, investing his savings to create an absolutely lovely spot with a lodge and bungalows that overlook a vast wetland stretching toward distant forests and ridges.
We had arrived the previous day. As we stood at the front desk, Massimo entered to greet us, and Paola (who was born in Rome and has an Italian father) switched from speaking Lao with the staff to speaking Italian with the owner. I stood there feeling wholly inadequate, at least linguistically.
I'd had some misgivings about riding elephants, so I asked Massimo about it. He assured us that, at least for these elephants and for the village adjacent to Kingfisher, the elephant riding was beneficial.
"Because they're no longer needed for logging, these animals would be unemployed," he said "They'd probably be sold to more intense tourism places that don't treat them well."
We later learned that the elephants here work only a few times a week and spend most of their days out in the wetland, free to roam and graze.
On the night we arrived, we sat at a table on Kingfisher's deck overlooking a small pond and read the menu by candlelight while being serenaded by an orchestra of cicadas and frogs. Thus far we had faithfully eaten only the local cuisine, but Massimo's menu tempted us with bruschetta and pasta fatta in casa. Homemade pasta in Laos was quite unexpected, as was the decent bottle of … Bordeaux! (Insert sound of scratching record.)
Before dinner, I'd used my limited Italian to ask Massimo if he had a good selection of "vini rossi Italiani."
"Alas, no," he replied, wincing and putting his hand on his stomach as if he'd just been hit. "Italian wines are impossible to get. I have only French."
Knowing my father-in-law's passionate zeal for his native reds, matched only by his disdain for those of France, I understood how this admission must have pained Massimo.
Nevertheless, the mostly Italian flavors were a delicious break from the steady parade of fish sauce and lemongrass.
The next afternoon, after our elephant ride, we relaxed on the deck of our bungalow and watched the sun slide toward the far ridges.
The setting was glorious, but I kept thinking about the empty forest.
It's easy to feel disappointment, or disapproval of the Lao hunters who have cleared the forest of wildlife, particularly in a protected area. But in the United States, we're not that far removed from a time when wildlife had a different name: dinner.
It's hard to believe today, with animals like white-tail deer, turkeys and beaver so abundant as to be a nuisance in many suburbs, that only a few generations ago, the "rural villagers" of the United States had nearly eliminated those animals across most of the country. When food security is low, the value of large animals as protein is high.
"You know," I said to Paola, "Massimo basically has the equivalent of an amazing lodge at the edge of Yellowstone, but Yellowstone in 1880. The wolves and cougars are nearly gone, and even the herds of buffalo and elk are hammered by poachers."
An elephant slowly ambled by, 50 yards from where we sat drinking a Beer Lao. Then a herd of water buffalo streamed onto the scene, like tanks entering a battlefield with an air force of cattle egrets providing cover.
At that moment, I put aside my purist's expectations and just enjoyed the spectacle of massive mammals grazing right in front of me in the golden late-afternoon light. (A slide show is here.)
This recasting of expectations was fairly easy for the elephant, but even the domestic water buffalo are nearly indistinguishable from their wild brethren, which are among the rarest wild bovids on the planet.
The tether of domesticity is fairly weak on all of these animals and, if abandoned, they would quite easily cross back into their wild form.
With a vivid spectacle in the foreground framed by a stunning backdrop, it was like watching a staging of a Sophocles play in a beautiful Greek theater. Sure, they weren't the original actors, but who was I to complain?
And while, absent time travel, we'll never see the original theater actors, Xe Pian's lost characters could reunite for a comeback performance. Yellowstone has wolves after decades of absence. Bears were absent from Ohio for more than a century but, beginning when I was a toddler, they began their reprise.
Last spring, a young black bear took up temporary residence in the local riverside park where my son plays baseball. Think about it: black bears roaming the edges of a Cleveland suburb.
And I thought about the possibility that Laos could follow a similar trajectory. It seems bleak now, but a lot can change in a few decades. One day someone could be sitting on this deck watching wild elephants in the distance, with gaur and banteng and deer mixed in with the buffalo. And perhaps even tigers will reclaim Xe Pian, slipping invisibly through the forest but thrilling bungalow sleepers with a nocturnal roar.
Speaking of tiger roars, I did learn the source of the guttural sound that we heard on the elephant ride.
Later that day, we dismounted from the elephants and stopped for lunch. We sat on a boulder eating rice and chicken and watched our elephant rip branches off a tree. Then he took a break from his pruning, paused, and ever so slightly lifted his tail.
The menacing sound of elephant flatulence rumbled low through the forest.
Luca and I exchanged a sheepish grin, now that we'd pinpointed the source of our "tiger growl."
Jeff Opperman is a senior freshwater scientist with The Nature Conservancy.
