I caught a sight of a number of tall Chinese goral dung-hills from the first clifftop that left me struck dumb with astonishment. These dunghills were preserved in a relatively good state. The biggest reached up to two metres high. They reminded me of haystacks. Most Chinese goral dens are situated at the bottom of cliffs or in hollows facing the wind direction. Here the air is bitterly cold with little oxygen. The climate is comparable to Arctic tundra. The extreme cold and high altitude prevent coprophagous insects and bacteria from multiplying. The individual dung balls were hard to count as they were pressed together into a large dung ball. However, the texture of the finely crushed grass stems and bits of moss within could still be clearly distinguished. I ruffled through the pile a little and I could still see wisps of fur and bits of bones. I made a rough estimate that the earliest dung piles might be about one thousand years old. If my inference was correct, one can assume the following calculation to be valid: The Chinese goral normally lives for between fifteen and twenty years, which would mean that this Chinese goral clan has lived for a hundred generations (it is only very rarely that it lives up to its full life span of twenty years). It seems that this place had once been a lively Chinese goral paradise.
According to a report, a Chinese scientific research team discovered a 3000-year-old layer of penguin dung buried in the South Pole snow field. They are now in the process of using it to study climate change, the degree of air and ocean pollution and the rise and fall of the penguin population over the past several thousand years.
I heard that there were layers and layers of penguin dung deposits in Antarctica, forever concealed and protected by thick ice. These deposits were similar to the silicified forest at Changbai Shan that lay buried under layers of volcanic ash, waiting to be excavated and studied by humans. I believe that even after thirty years these Chinese goral dung piles will still be there. It is a shame that I won't be able to go back there. I have two volumes of Encyclopaedia of the Birds of China3 that I need to finish, I am afraid that my health will not last to see the end.
My father said: That book was the result of Mr. Zhao's lifelong research; he devoted the last ten years of his sixty year long life to it.
I am a big fan of Moby Dick, I really appreciate Melville's grand and powerful writing style, I even like his long winded passages. He once said: "The blue whale eludes both hunters and philosophers." It eludes hunters to save its life and it eludes philosophers because it cannot be bothered to listen to their drooling, because it is itself a master of wisdom as it underwent billions of years of evolutionary history and it was clever enough to choose to return from the land back to the sea and so to escape extinction.
It seems that the Chinese goral is also eluding us. Mammals emerged 150 million years ago at the same time as the dinosaurs. They evaded natural disaster after natural disaster and in the end succeeded in displacing the dinosaurs as masters of the Earth. The predecessor of the Chinese goral—the argali, emerged 20 million years ago during the Miocene epoch. Roughly at the time of the fourth ice age (some scientists believe even earlier) a lonely and weak branch of this phylogenetic tree wandered into North-eastern China. To start off with they prospered on richly irrigated fertile grasslands. The fate of their cousins the antelopes, Himalayan tahrs, blue sheep, ibex, gazelles, takins, agrali sheep, bighorn sheep, urials and serows is the same: because of natural disasters, especially in the form of pressure from predators, they were forced to retreat to high mountain permafrost areas with an altitude above two thousand metres where the air is thin and the ground is frozen with ice. A mountaineer once found a Chinese goral in the Himalayas at an altitude of 15,000 feet. Their fur has evolved so that it is made up of hollow waxy tubular shapes that are filled with air. This type of winter fur is based on the same principle as the winter feathers of a thunderbird. It works wonders at keeping out the cold. Moreover, the hooves have become wider; the heels possess an elastic bounce; the two hard toes resemble iron pincers that can easily get a firm grip on any protruding rocks. All of this makes the Chinese goral exceptionally suited to mountain climbing. They mainly eat extremely low-protein plants of the moss family. In order to digest such dry sustenance, their stomach can, similarly to the Arctic reindeer, secrete a special kind of enzyme. Animals that have a high capability of survival are never picky in what they eat. From this we can see that the Chinese goral has reached the maximum survival capacity of a mammal, regardless of whether we judge it from the point of view of sustenance, environment or climate.
People have massacred animals for several centuries and now they have even stepped up the offensive. In the past, there was a folk ballad in the Changbai Shan area that was passed down the generations:
Bludgeon the River deer, ladle out the fish
Let the pheasants willingly fly into the pot
It is an authentic portrayal of how full of life and vigour North-eastern China was in the past. At the same time it shows us people's attitude towards animals: eat, wear and use.
It is because of this attitude that all that is left now is everlasting bitter cold and deathly silence.
