Cutting love

Thwack! A stick leaps into the air, and the redhead covers her head.

“You’re going to hurt someone with that thing.”

I’m in a serious eye-hand-coordination-feedback-loop and on a good roll, so I turn away, center a length of the limb on the stump, take aim, and thwack. Another oak stick shoots into the blue.

How satisfying, but I can take only part of the credit.

It’s the tool. The curved blade of this axe cuts cleanly, and the haft -- made of manzanita by the way, is a bit on the long side, giving it a lever arm of added force.

Woodworking tools, especially primitive ones give me great pleasure. I like the way they look. I like to see them at work in skilled hands, and I like to use them.

I was 11 years old when I got my first serious cutting tool, a hunting knife from Sears Roebuck. The details of that gift were buried in my memory until the day my mother called to tell me my father had died.

We had a houseguest that day, and I was stoic.

But that night the memory came back in a dream. My father had overridden my mother’s veto and bought the knife for me on the sly. He needed time to talk her into it, and when that was done he would show me how to handle it.

Meanwhile it would be in the top drawer of his bureau.

“You can look at it, but don’t play with it. It’s sharp.”

Naturally, I took the knife out of the case one afternoon and drew my finger across the blade. In my dream I felt the cutting bite, and with it came the full force of his death. The memory was vivid and complete, a father’s kindness to his son. I cried like a baby.

Eight years later in Mexico I watched the chips fly as woodcutters chopped pine on the slopes of Mt. Orizaba. I was smitten with their full-sized asymmetrical axes. Hecho en Mexico. Collins. I bought one with my meager cash.

A decade later I met a blacksmith in Nepal, an untouchable who lived in a dirt-floored lean-to. He was a man with impressive skills and knowledge of metallurgy, but he was trapped by a barren birthright.



He made the axe I was swinging today.

Man Bahadur Chankar was a gifted craftsman, but you wouldn’t know it from his tools. Western blacksmiths use a large assortment of tongs, fullers, flatters, swages, punches, files, and chisels.

This blacksmith’s anvil was a mushroomed length of truck axel driven into the ground. Yet with a few tongs and hammers he could make beautiful things from scrap metal and leaf springs.

If he needed a punch or a hot chisel, he made it from scrap, but they weren't permanent parts of his kit. That disabused me of the notion that a craftsman is only as good as his tools.

When most terai dwellers napped in the blast furnace heat of the pre-monsoon afternoon, I would walk to his hut and watch him work. He was dumbstruck.

No one in the village cared about his skills. His services were good only for barter. A perfect little tweezers for plucking chin hairs earned him a couple of beedies – local cigarettes. If someone cheated him, he accepted it as a blacksmith’s fate.

One day his 10-year-old daughter dropped the hacked parts of a mynah on a piece of corrugated iron by the fire. When it sizzled she put it into a small metal bowl of water, and her father set it over the forge with his tongs.

I watched with a certain apprehension when she added a grimy mixture of peppers and later turmeric.

The meat was obviously hers. I wondered if she found it dead, but hoped she killed it with a slingshot.

I guess it didn’t matter -- even to me the questionable meat soon smelled good enough to eat.

I visited the blacksmith for several years, bought him a set of files, and paid cash for adzes, axes, and kukris. I gave him clothes for his family.

The project ended, and I never saw him again.

But when I use his axe I remember the smell of sal flowers, dust, and wood smoke and honor the gift of his acquaintance.

[N.B.: For more on axes, see Chas Clifton’s blogpiece, Where did the axes go?]

In praise of the tump line

[a villager uses a tump line to lift a load of elephant grass in Chitwan National Park, Nepal]

There is something to be said for simple inventions that work well. Like the tump line.

For me the tump line was a curiousity of remote outposts until 1985 during a trek in the midland hills of Nepal. That was when Mrs Galloway broke a metatarsal bone, and Mrs Joslyn's knees went on strike.

"We will carry them", announced Sherap Jangbo, our Sherpa leader. He wasn't kidding. He consulted with the porters, and the youngest among them stepped forward to "do the needful".

At first the lad tried to fashion a tump line from a used lungi that resembled an oversize dishrag, but then Jangbo handed him a cinch belt from a horse. This ancient piece of leather had snapped the day before, and as a result a retired school teacher from Virginia learned that she had a talent for tumbling. Equally amazing were the repairs to the belt which was about to be used as a tump line.



With mime and broken English our Sherpa informed the ladies how to sit in the sling. We watched dubiously as Mrs Joslyn assumed the take off position and wonderboy squatted. Then the moment of suspense. . . wonderboy slowly straightened his legs. Someone whispered "hernia" and then the tumpline's mechanical advantage became evident. Mrs Joslyn piggybacked up the trail on two adolescent legs in slow motion. For the rest of the trek the two ladies took turns riding the remaining horse with a saddle and wonderboy, who became a celebrity among his fellow porters.



This was the first and last tour I ever guided, but I was much taken with the tump line, and I commend it to any game readers who have hauled logs in a one-handed firewood carrier, and now suffer from one elongated arm, a lateral sigmoid deflection of the spine, a wrenched neck, or other orthopedic quirks.

Our ancestors invented several ways of hauling heavy loads, and probably long before beasts of burden were harnessed to the travois or fitted with panniers. You can balance the load on your head, suspend the load from your head using a head band and tump line, or hang the load from your shoulders using a back pack. You can also suspend two loads from a spring pole on the shoulder or on a yoke. Each method has its own mechanical stresses and energetic costs.

Recently a team of Belgian physiologists shed light on the energetics of hauling loads with tump line. Their subjects were Sherpa, Rai, and Tamang porters who trek weekly from Kathmandu to Namche, a distance of about 100 km. To reach Namche at an elevation of 3500 m requires 8000 m of ascent and 6300 m of descent. The porters are men and women aged 11 to 68 years, and they do it all in 7-9 days, barefoot.

Now get this. Men haul an average load that is 93% of their body weight, and women carry 66% of theirs'. My hat is off to the porter whose load was 183% of his body weight.

The eight porters who were the subjects of the energetics study were most accommodating. Not only did they agree to wear the 3 lb face mask and analyzer that measures oxygen consumption and carbon dioxide production, but they packed various loads up to their own body weight at different speeds (0.5 to 1.5 m/sec) on a 51 m flat track. A drillmaster kept them in step at the various assigned velocities.

For the sake of comparison the investigators used control data from previous studies in which Europeans backpacked, and African women head-balanced similar loads at different walking speeds.

The results showed that Nepalese porters were "far more economical energetically than the controls at all loads and more economical than African women at all except the lightest loads." Loads that were lighter than 20% of the porter's body weight had a negligible energetic cost, and were carried "for free", while loads that exceeded 20% gave Nepalese porters an energetic advantage that increases with increasingly larger loads. Consequently, they can carry loads with tump lines that are 30% heavier than the maximum loads African women carry on the heads. Both methods by the way are energetically superior to backpacks.

Two years ago I started to haul firewood with a tump line and canvas sling, and found it far more comfortable than schlepping a log carrier with one or both arms. My Sherpa hauling kit consists of a canvas head band (a homemade swing seat with grommets), and quarter inch cords hooked to a log carrier.

I can haul 60 lb loads, a third of my weight, like a very tired Sherpa porter. I feel more stable with a low hanging load, and find that gripping the head band eases the backward force of the load. When my head feels like it is twisting off, it is quite easy to jerk the load and adjust the headband.

The biggest challenge is lifting the load. Old codgers with bird legs just can't lift 60 pounds from a squat. You need a helper or you should load the wood on an elevated position. The amazing thing is that it isn't a big deal hauling such a load up a hill. You can only walk slowly, but amazingly you soon find your slow-motion stride and don't run out of breath.

I guess I'm a bit of a wuss, since I don't intend to try it barefoot.




References

Bastiene, G.J., B. Schepens, P.A. Willems, N.C. Heglund. 2005. Energetics of load carrying in Nepalese porters. Science, 308:1755.

Heglund, N.C., P. A. Willems, M. Penta and G. A. Cavagna. 1995. Energy saving gait mechanics with head-supported loads. Nature 375, 52 - 54.

Maloiy, G. M. O., N. C. Heglund, L. M. Prager, G. A. Cavagna and C. R. Taylor. 1986. Energetic cost of carrying loads: have African women discovered an economic way? Nature 319, 668 - 669.

Stalwart pariah dogs -- Part 2

Bishnu Bahadur Lama in 1984

Sauraha, Chitawan National Park, Nepal. March 5, 1984


"Load the capchur gun with ketamine," stammered Hemanta. "We're going to get that bloody yellow dog in the hatisar for leopard bait."

"Hazoor!", replied Bishnu with a wag of his topi-capped head, then hurried off to his task.

It wasn't a death sentence. The dog would be caged within a large box trap. Its captivity would give us a break.

Yellow pie was the leader of the pack, and we were tired of his game. Whenever we walked through the hatisar (the government's elephant camp), he and his pack of snarling curs dashed in and barked with raised hackles and puckered bungholes. They would back off if we reached for a stone, but stones were few and far between, and in desperation we'd throw dirt or weeds which showed how ridiculously harmless we were. Canine attitude adjustment required a stone and good aim.

About an hour later the sentenced dog had the audacity to prance into our project compound wearing a grin. He was smooth-coated, fit and confident -- not one of those mangy half-starved worm-riddled pie dogs that snarls one minute and cowers the next.

Hemanta took the dart gun, stepped out the door and deftly approached. Suddenly yellow pie remembered something, and turned around to retrace his steps. The dull pop of the gun was answered with a single soprano yelp, and the dog dashed toward the hatisar with the dart dangling from his shoulder.

Bishnu and the shikaris ran after the dog in their musical flip flops, while Hemanta cursed them for letting him get away. A few minutes later they were bearing our tormentor's limp body in a sling of muslin. It was a hot afternoon, and the men stashed the dog in the shade of the bungalow.

An hour later Hemanta was again reading the riot act. A shikari had just discovered the dog stumbling toward the hatisar, but instead of catching the escapee, he decided to report it. The chastened man took his medicine well, and then ran through camp cheerfully calling his fellows for assistance.

A few minutes later I watched the smiling shikaris perform a feat almost as remarkable as the Indian rope trick. They had managed to balance the limp dog on a bamboo pole. Not to worry, Sahib, they reported. The kookoor (dog) had gotten only halfway to the hatisar when he conked out again from the ketamine.

From the bungalow's porch I watched them plop yellow pie in the shade. He was again in slumber, but periodically he raised his head and looked about like a bleary-eyed drunk.

A half hour later we had retreated from the afternoon heat. A brain-fever bird called like a broken record as Hemanta dozed in his room, I wrote notes on the porch, and the crapulous yellow pie lay in the shade.

Then a barefoot middle-aged Tharu woman from the hatisar came striding into the compound with the confidence of George C. Patton. Yellow pie struggled to his feet and stumbled toward his mistress with a crooked smile and wagging tail. The lady halted in front of Hemanta's bungalow, and my colleague meekly presented himself.

The moving discourse that followed was in Nepali and lasted 10 minutes. Kookoor (dog) was the only word I understood, but I could read the body language and saw the tears. The lady was turbulent with emotion, and to say she was pissed doesn't do justice to her mood. Her discourse had a terribly humbling effect on me, and it transformed Hemanta in a way I had never seen before. Between her pronouncements he simply mumbled like a parishioner at mass.

When she was finished she marched away with yellow pie at heel.

"Well," I said. "I don't know about you, but I feel like a real turd. So you might as well give me the details."

Hemanta spoke very slowly with long pauses and a frozen grin, as if in shock.

"Well, the kookoor is her dog. She fed it from her own breast, cleaned up its shit, and loves it like one of her children."

"Is that all?" I asked.

"Well, she also used a lot of expletives."

"And that's it?"

"Okay, she said Brahmins like me should be used for leopard bait, and not helpless dogs."

The old office building of the hatisar, His Majesty's Government
of Nepal (under King Birendra), 1984 (building now gone).

Stalwart pariah dogs -- Part 1

"It is on record that in the station of Gumsoor not a single dog escaped, and nearly every resident of India who has ever camped out in the jungle where leopards are, or has lived in 'the hills' has had some tragic experience of this mania of the leopard for dogs." Belgravia, 1883

Back in my Nepal days, there was a small patch of scrub jungle in the dusty town of Narayanghat. It was on the west side of town not far from the Tikoli Reserve Forest. Like a lot of Nepal's terai it looked rough and scraggly. In fact, it mirrored much of what had happened to that exotic belt of jungle when foreign aid and DDT opened the area in the 1950s. With the threat of malaria gone, the local Tharu people, who were resistent to the disease found they had new neighbors from the hills, and the land started to change. Men and boys had long since lopped and cut down the trees, women had gathered the sticks for firewood, and goats and cattle had stripped the forbs and grass. The remaining thicket was a thorny wasteland.

In the early 1980s the local jemandar or headman decided to make use of the land and hired villagers to slash the thicket. In the center of the thicket they found an opening littered with bones. The Smithsonian Nepal Tiger Ecology Project was going full tilt at the time, and word of the find reached the American and Nepali graduate students working on the project.

The bones were of pariah or pie dogs, and there were many. The villagers had found a leopard's lair beside a dusty road in a busy little town. The number of bones was testimony to the leopard's many successful forays into the village, and the thicket had been the perfect hideout.

It seems no one had seen or heard the cat, and if anyone heard the cries of dying dogs it probably didn't register, because dog noise is the night song of the Nepalese village. Rarely does anyone notice a missing pie dog -- they are more or less communal property. Dogs come and go, and in Narayanghat they were a sustainable resource. If the smell of carrion drifted from those scraps of dog meat in the leopard's lair, they blended well with the town's organic ambience.

The leopard's fondness for dogs is well known in rural Asia, and baiting leopards with a village pie dog was an acceptable practice of colonial sportsmen like J.A. Duke, who nearly 80 years ago was moved to pen his experience with one. Indian civilian's like Duke, a policeman and a hunter, were frequently sought to shoot maneaters, rogues, crop raiders, and other forms of nuisance wildlife.

In this case, the villagers had appealed for relief from a leopard that had been killing livestock.

It worked like this. If the hunter couldn't find and stake out a fresh kill, he had his shikaries peg a live bait animal to a short tether in a small opening in the jungle. Then he hid in a machan or tree stand within close shooting range.

Success depended on procuring a suitable bait animal. Suitability meant that the creature would make enough noise to lure the quarry within shooting range, that it was readily available, and that it could be had for free or at minimal expense.

Duke didn't have the heart to use a tail-wagging half-grown pup. So next he tried a goat. It assumed a "statuesque attitude beside the peg to which it was tied and remained absolutely silent". So much for that one. Another goat attempted suicide by hanging on the rope and "never opened its mouth". Then a pie dog was found, but it's muteness also earned it dismissal.

In Duke's words, "...I was getting a bit fed up and pessimistic. . . .However, I said another dog must be produced."

Finally the shikaris found a stalwart pie dog that showed promise, but it revealed its suitability only after they whacked it a few times with a cane. "The dog was naturally furious and expressed his feelings in fierce growls, and, thank goodness, two or three loud barks." The dog was tethered to the peg and Duke took up his shooting position.

"Not long afterwards the silence was rent by a series of howls, growls, and barks from the dog...," which Duke saw dancing about on its chain facing off the invisible foe lurking in the shadows. With the next uproar the leopard revealed itself in the torchlight. It was circling and swatting at the defiant dog, "but it was obviously deterred from going right in and killing with his teeth by the dog's galant and terrific defence".

Duke shot the leopard, which dashed off and died, while the dog watched its disappearance into the brush with vociferous bravado. As he climbed down from the tree, the dog "...managed to detach the chain and bolted off into the jungle, naturally in the opposite direction to that of the leopard."

Duke noted, "I am glad to record he rolled up in his village alright and complete with chain. He had lost a good deal of skin from his face and chest, but so far as I know is alive and well to this day."


Reference

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9405E4DA133BE033A2575AC0A96F9C94629FD7CF

Duke, J.A. 1929. A stalwart pariah dog. Journal of the Bombay Natural History Society, XXXIII(2):428-430.

Vile epithets and the dangers of learning foreign language

"The men of mixed blood jabbered in French, Cree, and Chipewyan mainly, but when they wanted to swear, they felt the inadequacy of these mellifluous or lisping tongues, and fell back on virile Saxon, whose tang, projectivity, and vile epithet evidently supplied a long felt want in the Great Lone Land of the Dog and Canoe."
The Arctic Prairies, 1911, Ernest Thompson Seton

The need to use virile Saxon comes at a young age. We were highly amused when a friend's son, wrought with angst over a childhood vexation told his parents he wished he could swear. He made it quite clear that his limited English was simply unequal to the task of expressing his frustration. I always thought that Zachary might have already known of a few tangy words, and was discretely asking permission to use them.

My first awareness of virile Saxon came when I was in Kindergarten. My grandfather and father had a fascinating language of their own. They used special words whenever they worked together. I thought I was entitled to use "the man's language". I never knew my mother was capable of such swift and decisive movement until the morning I exclaimed, "You dumb bastard!" It was probably one of the rare instances of single trial learning in my youth.

Somewhere I heard that biologists, the earthiest variety of scientist-- are more prone to use expletives than say, physicists or geologists. Among biologists, they say zoologists use racier language than botanists.

I am not sure any of this is true, but I always assumed that Steinbeck sanitized his portrayal of Ed Ricketts as Doc in Cannery Row. If Ricketts was as "concupiscent as a rabbit" he must have seasoned his speech.

Now the flashbacks:

ca 1979: Yenching Palace (a Chinese restaurant), Connecticut Avenue, Washington DC
We are zoo staffers prepared to celebrate the kind of personnel change that makes you sing, "Ding dong the witch is dead". The management knows us and seats us on one side of the room among a few other diners. We order steamed dumplings and beer while our mentor, who opts for Wild Turkey begins his catharsis -- a one-man passion play of sweeping erudation, surreal outbursts, and brooding pathos -- richly seasoned with expletives. An hour passes before we order food. Three hours later we are burned out, and it's time to go. That's when we notice that all the other customers are dining at the farthest corner of the room.

And now the faux pas of learning a language.

August, 1965: a hut on the banks of Rio Coatzacoalcos, Veracruz, Mexico
I am learning vernacular Spanish from the natives (mainly a working guy named Ruben), and am much taken with slang words, like cabron (billy goat). We refer to each other as cabrones. I know it means more than billy goat, but I'm clueless to its nuanced and vile usage. Reno, and Dave and I are dining at the home of a humble family of campesinos, when Ruben announces that I have taught myself Spanish. This is a cue to perform. I do my little routine (all in present tense) and then lightly refer to Ruben as "un cabron". I am on a roll, and fail to notice the family's mortified body language. Ruben apologizes and explains that I don't know what I am saying.
"No, no, no, no no!" I insist. "Es verdad. Ruben esta un cabron muy grande."
When I realize how furiously Ruben is backpeddling, the damage has been done, and the rest of the meal is as solemn as a wake. I now know that cabron is not a word of mixed company.

1980s: an airport following the annual conference of the American Society of Mammalogists
Recognizing two gals from the meetings, I buy them coffee as we wait for our flights.They are grad students from Louisiana State University, with field experience in Brazil. "What about language problems?", I ask. They tell of a fellow student studying bats who approached a young woman at an airport to practice his Portuguese. (Yeah, right). The turning point was when he told her, "There's a fly in your hair." The lady politely replied he was mistaken, and the conversation quickly fizzled. Later he learned there are two words for hair: pele (fur) and cabelo (hair). The young man understandably used the word for fur and pelt -- pele. It was just bad luck. It also means pubic hair.

December 1, 1982: Delhi Airport, Security Check line (RNAC flight to Kathmandu)
I strike up a conversation with a couple of young Indian architects boarding the same flight. At the body frisking stop, one of them has an altercation with the security officer. "What happened?", I ask afterwards. "He is a silly old bum." He explains that the customs inspector was obviously from Haryana, so he addressed him in Haryani as "friend". The customs inspector correctly identified the architect from the Punjab, and assumed the architect was being a smart ass by using the Punjabi word that sounds the same. "What does that word mean?" I innocently ask. "It means the '(mammary) glands of a prostitute'!"

January, 1990. Casino Hotel, Trichur, Kerala
"Can you tell me what he's saying?" the redhead (my wife) asks with an embarrassed look. Our Keralite friend smiles and patiently repeats "How was the bed wetching?" (His accent is Malayalam, not the Hindi we hear mimicked so often.) I translate. "He wants to know, 'How was the bird watching?'" Later she tells me she thought he was asking, "How was the bed wetting" I admit it sounded a lot like that.

April, 1998. Chatthin Wildlife Sactuary, Burma
The premonsoon heat is terrible, and the redhead is not having fun. When the boyish Aung Moe delivers the cool drinks and notices her forlorn look, he timidly asks. "Scuse me, are you boring"?