A landslide has blocked the cliff-hugging road into the Pu Mat National Park in northwestern Vietnam. To go farther, we must abandon our car and wade across a shallow river. My wife, Mutsumi, a photojournalist, and I roll up our jeans to the knee and look uncertainly at our two young boys. Do Tuoc, a 63-year-old forest ecologist, reads our minds. "I'll take the bigger boy," he says, hoisting our 6-year-old onto his shoulders.
Before I can come to my senses and protest, Tuoc plunges into the current, sure-footed, and reaches the opposite bank safely. I wade out with our 3-year-old clinging to my neck. I stumble like a newborn giraffe on the slippery rocks of the riverbed. My jeans are soaked. My son, asphyxiating me, crows with joy. Both boys want to do it again.
I shouldn't have been surprised by Tuoc's nimbleness: he knows this primeval wilderness better, perhaps, than any other scientist. It was near here in 1992 that Tuoc discovered the first large mammal new to science in more than half a century, a curious cousin of cattle called the saola. The sensational debut showed that our planet can still keep a fairly big secret, and it offered a reprieve from the barrage of bad news about the state of the environment.
If only humans had reciprocated and offered the saola a reprieve. A decade after coming to light, the unusual ungulate is skidding toward extinction. Its habitat in Vietnam and Laos is disappearing as human settlements eat into the forest, and it is inadvertently being killed by hunters. Saola appear to be particularly vulnerable to wire snares, introduced in the mid-1990s to snag Asiatic black bears and Malayan sun bears, whose gallbladders are used in traditional Chinese medicine. For the saola, "the situation is desperate," says Barney Long, a World Wildlife Fund conservation biologist, who is working with local scientists to protect forests in central Vietnam inhabited by saola. The Vietnamese government created Pu Mat and nearby Vu Quang national parks in response to the saola discovery, and this past fall designated two more nature reserves in the saola's dwindling range and banned all hunting in critical saola habitat. Neighboring Laos, the only other country in which the saola has been spotted, has pledged similar action. But no one knows whether these eleventh-hour efforts will succeed.
That's because the saola is so rare that not even Tuoc has spied one in the wild. Estimates of their numbers are based on interviews with villagers who have glimpsed the animal, and on trophies. Tuoc, who works for the Forest Inventory and Planning Institute in Hanoi, first beheld a partial saola skull mounted in a hunter's home in Vu Quang. He knew he was seeing something extraordinary. DNA tests confirmed that the saola was a previously unknown species, the first large mammal discovered since the kouprey, a Southeast Asian forest ox identified in 1937. The saola's horns, one to two feet in length and slightly diverging, inspired its name, which means "spinning wheel posts."
Tuoc calls himself "very lucky" to have discovered the saola—and to be alive. Forty years ago, his older brother volunteered in the Vietnam People's Navy, which ran supplies to forces in the south on a sea version of the Ho Chi Minh Trail. His brother's service exempted Tuoc from the military and allowed him to focus on science. With his keen powers of observation, he has discovered two other species in addition to the saola.
The best guess is that a couple of hundred saolas are left in Vietnam, Long says. "Very little is known about the saola. We don't know exactly where it occurs, or how many there are. There's a big question mark surrounding it," says Laos-based William Robichaud, who is leading a working group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature that met in June to draft a strategy for protecting saola. "The last incontrovertible evidence we have—a photograph from a camera trap—was in 1999," says Robichaud.
Since February, Robichaud and his staff have placed about 20 camera traps in Laos' Nakai-Nam Theun National Protected Area—historical saola habitat, according to hunters' sightings. But neither the cameras nor interviews with locals have yielded evidence of saola activity. "Villagers seem unsure if it's still hanging on or not," he says.
