Bat Tales 1: Tales of the Wild Horse

The morning the horse showed up I was sitting at our bamboo-and-raffia work table trying to wake myself up with Nescafe. The others were laughing somewhere on the other side of the cook’s hut, but I was too sluggish to get up and see what the joke was for some time. “We have a visitor,” Jodi told me as I shuffled over to the dinner table. Munching away at the knee-high scrub down the hill from our camp was a thin, flea-bitten dark grey horse. Under the hide you could see the bones of shoulder and pelvis shifting like some creaky mechanism as it moved about. At least it explained the presence of the strand of barbed wire laid across the path on the other side of the dry riverbed at the bottom of the pasture. The wire, strung at human head-height, wasn’t very obvious in the dim forest so we tied pink flagging ribbon to it.

The Tagalog word for horse is kabayo, rather like the Spanish but with a more Asian-friendly spelling, which can be a little confusing for the visitor because water buffalo is carabao (this one a cognate to Malay, not Spanish, as far as I know). It’s like the joke about how Westerners can’t tell the difference between ‘rambutan’ and ‘orangutan’.

The next day, having exhausted bat-processing as a way to spend time and feeling too lazy to work on drawing, I decided to go for a walk along the trail where the harp trap line had been a few nights before. Picking my way between hillocks of grass and piles of horse-apples, I was stopped by the appearance of the kabayo, browsing along the very path I wanted to take. I stopped and watched. To a city kid like me, who’d grown up with stories about people called Farmer Brown (even though our farmers are more likely to have names like Mat or Lim), even a poor skinny thing like that was interesting for a while. From no perspective did it remind me of the horse-gods from Peter Shaffer’s Equus – rather more like a large herbivorous anjing kurap. Nevertheless, it looked territorial enough that I didn’t take that walk.

“Be careful,” Laura and I were warned the next morning. “The horse was hanging around the men’s tents last night and they had to get up and chase it away.” Apparently, the fellow who owned it, named Dodi, had been requested to take it down and tie it up, but ignored the second part of that request. So whenever he took it down it would make its way back to what it considered its pasture in a few hours, leaving lumpy booby-traps along the way. It had been shy the first couple of weeks the bat team had been camping at the Pasto, but by the time Laura and I got there, it had decided that the strange people were safe and it could go back to mowing the grass. When asked to tie it up, our local field assistants Dondon and Darwin declined vehemently because it had a reputation for biting.

At first I didn’t think the horse was much of a nuisance and looked on it as one more of the animal characters in our camp, like the small white puppy that Darwin brought up on Thursday. However, it proved itself to be a major force of destruction by tangling with and ruining two expensive mist nets which had been left bundled up in the forest for the day. “I hate that horse,” groaned Jodi. “I wish there were no horses in my life right now.” We complained to the owner again, and a second strand of barbed wire at waist-height made its appearance soon after that.

Around seven o’clock on the last night at the pasto, someone went “Yaaaaaaargh!” in the forest and we saw the bobbing light of a headlamp as the wearer fled toward us. Darwin had all but literally run into a wild pig guarding her two piglets – not an animal one wants to be on the wrong side of. In light of the number of squatters on the mountain, the presence of pigs was actually a nice surprise, as long as we stayed out of their way. He went back later to warn the people at the V-net about it.

While Laura and I were working at the table between our tents and the cook’s hut a while later, someone called out a warning and then something big and dark came crashing up the hill toward us. Having just discussed wild boar, our first thought was to get away. Laura ran away toward the cook’s hut and I swung my legs off the ground, ready to jump onto the table. A wild-eyed spectre plunged past, snorting. However, the creature was equine, not porcine, and the stupid kabayo was heading for our tents! Looming out of the moonless night, it really did look like something from Equus. Panik the puppy barked perfunctorily, but she wasn’t up to horse-herding, so Mang Danny scared it off.

We last saw the horse on the last morning at the Pasto. I think it was as glad to see the end of us as we were glad to see the end of it...well, we did see quite a lot of tahi kuda on the way down.