A Moveable Feast (18 page)

They shot agouti; these small, cute rodents were too gamey in stews but their flavour was moderated by lots of
couac.
They also shot tapir, a delicious animal that tasted like pork in a rich stew with
couac
and was big enough to last for days. Tapir was an endangered species but we were eating a lot of endangered species – to people who live in the rainforest, they themselves are the only species that is in danger.

Along the river with its cooling breezes, fuchsia water hyacinth bloomed on the water’s surface. The trees on the bank were flecked with yellow and blue from flitting butterflies, and the black ebony trees, known locally as
gringon fou
or wild fantasy tree, had bright yellow leaves that glowed in the distance. In the hot light it looked like a green fauvist canvas of dazzling beauty.

But when we pulled over to the shore, we entered a world of complete hostility. After we sank into the mud, stinging flies attacked us and butterfly-like creatures dropped stinging darts; the grass had razor-sharp edges that cut our legs and if you lost your balance and grabbed a branch, chances were it had sharp thorns or thistles or was covered with some type of aggressive insect. Everything seemed to single out the photographer for attack and he was becoming red-eyed, swollen, itchy and grumpy. Sooner or later, every outsider who ventures into the green hell, from Sir Walter Raleigh to escaping French political prisoners to curious European Union officials, cries out, ‘Damn this place!’

The Ndjuka boatmen made their only mistake at Abounasanga falls, a treacherous stretch of white water and rocks. We had ventured beyond Ndjuka territory into the protected area of the
Vayana Indians, and at one point the pirogue was see-sawing on a pile of rocks in the middle of the river. We all jumped out into the shallow water. The dugout could not be rocked out of this situation because the log would split and that would be the end of our return ticket. So carefully and anxiously, following instructions from the two boatmen, we lifted it back into the water and were on our way.
‘Danki, Danki!’
– Thank you! Thank you! – we gratefully cheered.

The Indians lived in thatched structures built above the ground on stilts. The grouchy swollen photographer, who did not like the Bush Negroes because they were camera shy, absolutely hated the Indians, who completely refused to be photographed. He cursed them and barked at them but they kept their faces hidden from his lenses.

Trading was more difficult here. Alcohol was forbidden by the French and devastating to the Indians. But I had my cigars. I traded a Montecristo for one of their hand-rolled leaf smokes, and we agreed that I had the worse of that trade. More cigars yielded some fish to cook up with the
couac
we had brought. When it was time to go, the four-foot chief spoke with a gentle, soft voice to the French guide, who translated for me. We could leave but they had decided to kill the photographer. With heartfelt candour I explained to him that they couldn’t because I wanted to kill him myself, which the leader understood and we quickly shoved off.

As we headed swiftly downriver, the dark water rushing towards the Atlantic, my mind turned to dreams of banal things – a drink that had been chilled in a refrigerator, a bed to stretch out in, a shower, air-conditioning. I would not go to my favourite game restaurant in Cayenne. I was through with game. Instead, my fantasies turned to Chinese food in St Laurent. I would order the duck. With imported rice, not
couac.

Simon Winchester is the author of twenty-three books, including
The Surgeon of Crowthorne
(also published as
The Professor and the Madman
),
Krakatoa, A Crack in the Edge of the World
and
The Map that Changed the World
. His most recent book is
The Man Who Loved China
. His
Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories
will be published in late 2010, and
The Alice Behind Wonderland
in early 2011. Simon was made Officer of the Order of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II in 2006. When not travelling, he divides his time between a farm in the Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts and a flat in Chelsea, New York.

Seldom has anything that I have written over the years ever brought forth from readers a truly violent reaction. Of course, like any scrivener, I manage from time to time to get things wrong, and people have sent notes, couched in tones kindly or occasionally less charitable, to correct me. A few people get quite rude. And to be sure, once in a very long while, things have become a little more heated.

One book I wrote was so loathed by a particular critic that he said he wanted nothing more than to drop-kick it out of his back garden. And once I offended so many people in the Cayman Islands that a group called the Tradewinds wrote a calypso about me with a charmingly melodious chorus that included the words: ‘If you get a dog call it Rover; if you get a cat name it Tabby; if you get a parrot call it Polly; but if it come to pass that you get a jackass, call it Simon Winchester’. (The calypso, by the way, got to Number Three in the Caymanian hit parade, and is still whistled at me by cheeky reception clerks when I check in to hotels in George Town.)

But, as I say, generally speaking, nothing truly awful, nothing violent. No hexes or public curses. No threats of enforced exile or public maiming.

Until, that is, one day in the early 1990s, when I wrote a perfectly innocent little essay about the time I ate a dog.

It was, as I recall, an unexceptional and not very pretty yellow dog, of the sort one sees in the outback of Australia. It might have been called a dingo, or a close relative of a dingo, and was not the sort of animal upon which one wished to heap affection. But I am getting ahead of myself here, so powerful is the memory. First things first.

I was in Korea, and it was a cold and rainy day in late March. I had been walking in the hills to the south of Seoul with a friend, a Mr Kim, who was at the time a similarly keen hiker. We had been up since before dawn, and were by now wet through and weary of the day, when my friend – a former soldier in the Korean army who was acting as my translator – suggested that we adjourn for a good and warming lunch. He said he knew a place.

So, after a further half-hour of walking, we turned down from the hills and emerged from the trees at the head of a narrow valley where there was a village, and beside its rain-swollen stream a small market. It was far from impressive: it was little more than a network of muddy lanes lined with stalls and display cabinets and with what appeared to be cages, all protected from the sheeting rain by sheets of plastic.

Eventually, after a minute or two of head-scratching, he found the inn that he had said he knew and liked. Its owner seemed to be a large and very boisterous and motherly woman, the kind you might find in a Dickensian grog shop, and the two of them beckoned to me to come to their stall, and to an entrance behind it. To get inside we dived behind some more sheets of dripping plastic, and then squeezed through a tiny entrance into what seemed to be a hidden room lined with walls made of plaited straw. It was quite dry here, and nicely warm. Three or four of the tables were occupied; it wasn’t terribly noisy, just the normal buzz of amiable conversation. Most of the customers were men, and most were smoking. There was a cosy fug about the place, of a kind already faded into the recent past.

Two bottles of Korean beer had been placed waiting on the table, and as we sat down and started unlacing our walking boots and taking off our dripping anoraks and sou’westers, so the owner-lady, who was introduced with much smiling and bowing as Mrs Kim, inevitably, wafted in with two earthenware bowls of steaming soup.
‘Poshin-tang!’
she declared, brightly, and gave us each one of the long narrow metal spoons that the Koreans like to use, and a pair of joined-up wooden chopsticks in a small red envelope. Another serving-wench, a lady as enormous and cheery as the first, then deposited a range of bowls and saucers with salt and beans and pickles and rice – and
kimchi,
of course – around the soup bowls, and retired to an ante-room as we tucked in.

And my word, what soup! Hot and spicy and as curiously strong as those mints. There were pieces of ginseng and sweet radish and onion and garlic and chunks of a rich meat that somehow out-beefed any beef I knew. The soup steamed and raged, almost bubbling with energy. After a few spoonfuls, all the chill of the drear outside retreated, and suddenly there was fire inside and I felt as though I had been plugged-in to some kind of battery charger and was in an instant just good and ready to hurl myself outside to take on the elements once again.

I chugged my beer and spooned down more and more soup, my insides now ablaze and my vitals back in full working order, and all the muscle aches vanished clear away. I must have become different in aspect too, because my soldier-guide Kim leaned over the table and remarked on the glow in my cheeks and said that he had just
known
I’d be happy in this place and that a bowl of
poshin-tang
would do the trick.

What was on earth was it? I asked him.

And he called out to Mrs Kim – who, no, was not so far as I was aware either his mother or his aunt or his wife, but just one of a host of five million Kims in a country that allows very few family names – and asked her to explain. At which point she opened a door in the straw wall of her little café, and there in the back was a cage, and in the cage was, of course, the aforementioned yellow dingo-type non-Australian dog.

I wish I could admit that I was shocked. But I wasn’t, not at all. I am as much of a caninophile as the next Englishman. I had a beagle at the time, name of Biggles, and I adored him as if he were my own child, almost. The thought of eating a soup made of any relative of Biggles, however distant, was theoretically just beyond repugnant. Or at least, it had been, before this. But now I felt somehow altered, curious, different. Drugged, maybe.

And so as Mrs Kim was showing me the dog,
offering me the dog,
I thought it all out to myself, one point at a time. This is what they do here – they eat dogs, just as some of us eat cows or pigs. This lunch is actually pretty delicious. And besides, I’m a writer and I’m supposed to try anything and everything (subject to the usual codes of morals and decency, I feel I must add). So yes, Mrs Kim, I nodded at her – hit me with it. Yes, Mrs K. More, please! And she winked, went back out into the kitchen, did something I don’t want to think about or ever imagine, and after a few moments returned grinning, and this time with an earthenware plate that was heaped with onions, rice and, layered on top of the mound, a dozen or so small oval slices of meat smothered in a richly aromatic gravy.

Medallions de chien Koreanoise.
It could be nothing else. There must have been a moment’s hesitation, but no more than that. I picked up my chopsticks, and with the two unrelated Kims beaming from the sidelines, tucked in happily, finished the plate in five minutes flat, licked chops and sticks with equal vigour and then said to myself:
I’ve just got to write about this.

And so I promptly did, 800 crisp words, and I faxed it off (this was during that strange limbo period before the birth of email but after the death of telex, when foreign correspondents like me had the damndest time sending copy around the world) to a small magazine I knew in London. After which (except for the moment a week or so later when the cheque came in, and a month or so later when a copy of the magazine itself followed) I forgot all about it.

Except that the editor, a gentle and fragrant lady – not herself a dog-owner, but an Englishwoman of some sensitivity – rang me up one day not long after publication. The letters, she said.
You wouldn’t believe it. Hundreds and hundreds of them! Sacks full of letters. Never seen anything like it. Every day! Twice a day, special deliveries. Torrents of them. And every single one abusive! The worst language imaginable. Threats! Taunts! Warnings! You have to come here and read them – it is just wild!

And so I travelled down to London on the train from Oxford, and found my poor benighted editor-friend sitting woefully amidst a Vesuvian pile of envelopes and cards and Royal Mail sacks, unopened. We laughed at the sight, as much in terror as in joy, and then spent the rest of our day ploughing through the mail and working hard to try to understand more fully the near mystical connection that apparently exists between the species
Homo not especially sapiens Britannicus
and
Canis familiaris.
I suspect you can imagine the tone of most of the correspondence: suffice to say, it could not in any way be described as
fan mail,
unless the fan was for fanning the flames of my funeral pyre.

Just one letter have I retained from this rather inglorious period of my journalistic career. It came from an elderly sounding gentleman in the seaside town of Bognor Regis, who signed himself both with his name and his army rank, which happened to be Major. Here it is, in full:

His name I made up. The rest is true. I have happily never met the gentleman. But I have never eaten a dog since.

I did once eat a cat, though. Cat stew. It was given to me by a nun in West Africa. I wrote about that also. But no-one – not even the galloping Major – ever wrote in to complain.