Chapter 1
1 January. 09:00.

Mount Malu National Park: Quadrant 7.

Urs Gerhard smiled. You guys might be the first people in loincloths to make the cover of Time.
Urs stood with his companions at the crest of the hill. They watched a dirty yellow timber truck accelerate as it freewheeled into the deep valley dirt road. At the lowest point the driver madly downshifted, straining to keep the momentum as the truck reached maximum speed and started uphill.
A cloud of heavy red dust, which had been following the Komatsu truck like an obedient specter, engulfed the vehicle as it slowed on the incline, obliterating it from view as effectively as if it had been hit by a Stinger missile.
If we pull this off those government guys will really be after my ass, Urs thought. He would have laughed out loud, but kept his peace. His Penan friends seemed uncomfortable when the Swiss chuckled privately.
He settled for scholarship. "What is the word for dirt in the air?" Urs asked the Penan tribesman at his side.
"Tana marang" the smaller man replied in the Penan language. Flying earth.
Urs Gerhard reached into his woven backpack for his journal and carefully noted the phonetic pronunciation. He wrote on the back of a page that he had decorated with a detailed botanical illustration of the Comaphora mukul plant, which the Penan brewed in a tea to fight fever.
The red dust, Urs thought, was the second most obscene aspect of the loggers' invasion. It created dirt in a place that ought to be clean; it represented barrenness where there ought to be fertility. The hot dust, which he estimated would reach him in about thirty seconds, was almost as bad as the whine of the chain saw and the shocking quiet that came immediately after the felling of the huge rainforest trees. The Penan called the hundred-foot tall trees the pillars of the sky. When the trees crashed to the ground the birds, monkeys and insects went silent in a communion that recognized that something terribly unnatural had occurred.
The loggers were invading the Penan homeland. The tribesmen, ill at ease in a world run by power and money, had tried to explain their problem to a government representative, had asked that the logging be stopped. The officials smiled and sold more timber concessions. No, talking didn't work, Urs thought regretfully. Something more dramatic was called for.
The overloaded truck snailed its way up the hill. The six Penan and the Swiss stood quietly. The single female Penan wore only a faded blue sarong wrapped around her waist. She suckled an infant. The male Penan wore dark blue loincloths that crossed under their crotches before ending in front and back flaps which hung halfway down their thighs. Each man's black hair was cut in straight bangs in the front while the back portion was left to grow long down the neck. Just above their knees the men wore bracelets woven from monkey hair. They were barefoot, and had been all their lives. On each foot the calloused big and little toes spread to a width that could never be accommodated by store-bought shoes.
Urs was similarly dressed. A leaf containing a poultice of medicinal plants was tied around his ankle, healing a gash received when he had trodden on a sharp root. A six-foot long blowpipe leaned against his shoulder.
The Penan knew the purpose of the truck, but it had no place in their scheme of things. It was as alien as a microwave oven would have been.
The owners of the truck would have disagreed. It was, Urs had learned, one of a fleet of twenty-three owned by the Hong Neiyi Timber Company. Hong Neiyi was the most visible element of an international, multi-racial conglomerate. It was owned by Manusians, managed by a Korean and Manusian joint venture, and sold logs to Japan, which consumed the vast majority of Manusia's export. Like most of the 56 timber companies operating in the Sultanate of Manusia, the official owner of Hong Neiyi was a Manusian-born Chinese, a scam which provided marginal deniability to the real owner -- Aminah binte Sjam, the wife of Mustafa bin Kayu, the Manusian Minister of the Environment. She did not think it would be productive for it to be widely known that she was profiting from the destruction of the same rainforests which her husband, during a speech at the United Nations, had sworn "to hold in trust for the world."
The Penan had been coached, but Urs, like a conscientious schoolteacher, wondered whether they would remember their lines. He wasn't certain this little gambit would work, but it was all he could think of.
The truck, carrying seven twenty-yard long tree trunks, each a yard and a half in diameter and weighing as much as 200 men, groaned up the hill. The Penan walked into the center of the sun-baked dirt track which the timber kampeni had hacked out of the jungle. Urs slipped ten feet into the foliage and virtually disappeared. He did not want to be visibly part of this operation. His pet macaque, an infant whose mother had been barbecued for dinner three weeks before, nibbled on Urs' ear and climbed onto Urs' head to groom the man. The tiny monkey, which he called Liebchen, worked her way carefully through her master's light brown hair, which gleamed reddish in the dust-diffused light. She picked out more than a few lice and ate excitedly.
The issue seemed so simple: forbid logging and let the Penan keep their forest. Urs understood simple issues; he had always considered himself a simple man, like the uncomplicated Penan he had befriended. But his mother had told him that a simple man with a passionate cause equals a dangerous creature, not unlike the European brown bear from which Urs got his name.
Urs watched the truck climb. The last time he had been in a car or truck had been two years earlier, when he had taken the bus from the Anjing International Airport to the port, where he had boarded a coastal steamer to Bohong, the first stop on his return trip to Mount Malu. Since then the Manusian security forces had been chasing him, angry that a foreigner had scoffed at their immigration laws, furious that he had been able to survive in the rainforest, and apoplectic that he had befriended the disenfranchised Penan, tribesmen on the bottom of the Manusian pecking order.
Soon they'll have a real reason to want my head, Urs thought, when he watched six of his Penan friends stand at attention directly in front of the chugging truck.
"Shit," the young Chinese driver said in English as he braked.
"What the fuck is this?" he mumbled in Hokkien as the truck skidded to a stop just before flattening Urs' nearly-naked friends. Everyone was quickly engulfed in a red cloud.
The tiny monkey found a particularly juicy louse and offered it to her master. Urs allowed the monkey to put the gift in his mouth, and he chewed mechanically, not taking his eyes off the confrontation.
A teenage Penan named Avalon approached the driver. Avalon, who had received his name from classmates at a government primary school he had attended for four years, spoke a little Malay. The driver spoke a little Malay. They had a little conversation in which the Penan explained, politely, that the driver was cutting down their home forests, would he be so kind as to please stop, and tell his colleagues to stop as well.
"What the hell'" the driver shouted. "I've got a job to do. Who are you, anyway?"
"Avalon."
"No, who are you?" he asked exasperated. "You're Penan," he said immediately, answering his own question. "No Penan is going to tell me I can't drive along this road. It isn't your road. It belongs to the kampeni," he shouted as he stormed back to the cab and turned on the engine.
Five Penan remained in place blocking his exit. The sixth, acting on a signal from Urs, mounted the truck's mudguard. The driver turned off the engine when he saw that the end of Laki's blowpipe was two feet from his neck.
The Penan gave the acne-faced young driver a gourd of water and some smoked squirrel meat to ease his twenty-mile trudge back to the timber company base camp.
He had gone no more than two hundred yards when Avalon, suddenly remembering his instructions, ran after the terrified Chinese.
"Excuse me," Avalon said breathlessly.
"What?"
"I forgot to ask you for the keys."
The Chinese thought of slugging the guy but noticed that he was still within sight of the Penan, who could catch him with little effort. He slammed the keys to the ground. "Jungle bunny, probably can't even drive," he mumbled in English as he slunk off.
Urs joined his colleagues and showed them how to pry off the oil sump and put sand inside. He watched with satisfaction as his students sliced the worn tires with their machete-like parangs. Urs showed them how to start the engine, how to release the emergency brake, how to put the vehicle into reverse, and, most important, how to jump out of the cab just as the behemoth started rolling backward. It made a spectacular sight as it gained speed, rammed into an embankment and jack-knifed as the cab plunged into the forest. The truck fell on its side, blocking the road and littering ten-ton logs like pick-up sticks. Urs took out his sketchpad and pencils to record the scene of his first battle. His friends were calm, but not entirely joyful. The monkey Liebchen whined as the red dust stung her eyes.