Chapter 2 — Forest Keeper

Ngan May Ranger Station is located on a rare flat piece of land in the middle of a steep mountain, a row of yellow-washed four-level houses that have faded due to rain and sun, with old but still sturdy corrugated iron roofs. In front is a cracked cement yard, where there is a flagpole and a wooden sign engraved with the words "Ranger Station No. 4 — Thousand Cloud Nature Reserve" with faded red paint. Behind the station, hidden behind rows of bamboo, is the area Khue jokingly calls the "forest hospital" - a series of temporary cages she built herself with B40 nets and bamboo, where animals that are injured, trapped, or illegally trafficked are temporarily cared for before being healthy enough to be released into the wild.

When Khue entered the station yard, holding the baby langur in her arms, Quang Thi May was sitting on the steps cleaning the tranquilizer gun, raised her head, her eyes bright.

"Hey, there's a new customer?" Cloud stood up, ran back on all three legs, and poked his head to look at the bandana Khue was holding in his hand. "Oh my god, the baby langur! It's so tiny, it's so damn..."

"Died in a cable trap," Khue replied briefly, her voice still heavy. "On the Nam Dam line, northeast area."

The smile on May's face completely disappeared. As a park ranger for three years at this station, May clearly understands the meaning of an adult white-rumped langur dying in a trap - it is an endemic species, extremely endangered, the number of individuals left in the wild can only be counted on the fingers of one hand in a few rare reserves across the country, and Ngan May is one of the few places that still maintains a relatively stable population. Every individual lost is an immeasurable loss.

"Let me prepare a place for it," May said, her voice serious again, then quickly walked ahead and led the way to the barn behind.

Khue's small rescue area has no official name in the records of the Provincial Forest Protection Department — on paper, it is only listed as "a temporary holding area for wild animals in the process of handling violations", a dry caption that says nothing about what Khue has spent over the past five years to build it. Starting with just a small wooden cage she built to raise an injured civet, then gradually expanded into six different cages, each suitable for a type of animal, including a small water tank for turtles and amphibians. She taught herself how to care for her through books, through short training courses organized by conservation organizations, and through countless heartbreaking failures when an animal did not survive despite her best efforts.

"Is it injured anywhere?" May asked, spreading a layer of dry banana leaves on the bottom of a small covered cage.

"Haven't checked thoroughly yet, but looks like it's just hunger and shock, no obvious skin injuries." Khue gently put the baby langur down. It was still clinging tightly to her sleeve, refusing to let go. "You need to breastfeed it as soon as possible. At this age, it's probably completely dependent on mother's milk."

"Do we have monkey formula? Looks like I ran out of it last time since rescuing the loris." Cloud frowned and calculated.

"There's still some goat milk powder in the cupboard. I'll use it for now. I'll call the Department to ask for more specialized milk. It will probably take a few days to arrive." Khue sighed and gently stroked the head of the trembling baby langur close to her palm, searching for warmth and the feeling of security it had just lost forever.

The two women sat down next to the cage, mixed some warm goat milk, and used a syringe without a needle to apply small drops into the baby langur's mouth. At first it resisted, turning its head to avoid it, but when the first drop of milk touched its tongue, survival instincts overcame fear, it began sucking, its dark eyes staring at Khue as if trying to remember the face of the person who saved it.

"Have you named it yet?" Cloud asked, his voice became happy again when he saw the animal starting to eat.

Khue looked at the characteristic orange-yellow fur of a newborn langur, with some mud still lingering from the tree root hole where it was hiding. "Brown. Call it Brown. Its fur will turn black, but now it's this golden brown."

"Brown," May repeated, nodding. "Okay, the name fits."

After Nau had eaten enough and fell asleep in a warm corner of the cage, wrapped in a small blanket, Khue had time to take a quick shower and change into the ranger uniform that was still stained with mud from the morning trip. She walked into the shared office, where Ma Van Loc was sitting behind an old wooden desk, his glasses hanging down on his nose, reviewing a stack of papers.

"Reporting to you," Khue said, standing straight in front of the desk out of habit even though there were only a few people at the station, no need for cumbersome formalities. "I fully recorded the scene, took photos, and seized the cable as evidence."

Loc nodded, reached out his hand to receive the plastic bag containing Khue's cable and placed it on the table. He rotated it under the light, the sunburnt face of the man in his fifties was lined with thoughtful wrinkles. "This type is expensive. It's not homemade."

"Yes. And the trap layout is also very methodical — the trapper clearly understands the langur's movement in the canopy, not the haphazard setting of an amateur hunter." Khue hesitated for a moment, then continued, trying to keep her voice as calm as possible. "I also saw human footprints, at least two pairs of army boots, large in size. With... this type of trap, this layout, I feel familiar. Like in old photos."

She deliberately left the sentence hanging, observing Loc's reaction. And she saw it - just for a very short moment, his hand paused slightly as he was flipping through the stack of papers, his eyes behind his glasses looked at her more intently for a second than usual, then he bent down again, his voice trying to sound calm.

"What old photo?"

"Documentary photo when my dad still worked here. I remember my dad once showed me this type of steel cable trap. He said it was a rare item and rarely seen." Khue said, trying to keep her voice natural as if she was just reviewing a normal memory. "This morning I plan to go to the file store and look for it again to see if it's correct."

A silence that lasted longer than necessary. Loc took off his glasses and wiped them with the hem of his shirt, an action Khue knew he only did when he needed time to think. "The old records were moved to the district archives a long time ago. They are no longer here. Besides, ten years ago there were a lot of paper records and they were messy. It's unlikely they can still be kept."

"Really." Khue replied, not arguing further, but in her heart that answer only made her doubts even bigger. She remembered clearly that last year, when she needed to look up an old violation to compare penalties, she herself went to the file warehouse behind the station, a small, damp room filled with file cabinets, and saw the folders with the year and month from more than twenty years ago still there, covered in dust but never moved anywhere.

"Okay, just write down the cable trap issue in the duty book and report to the Department according to the correct procedure," Loc said, putting his glasses back on and bending down to a stack of papers as if to end the conversation. "As for the baby langur, just take care of it, let me know if you need any help."

Khue nodded, turned around and walked out, but as soon as her hand touched the doorknob, she heard Loc call back, his voice was much softer, almost with a bit of guilt mixed in.

"This Khue."

She turned back.

"When patrolling alone like this, be careful. The forest is different now." He said, his eyes not looking directly at her but looking down at the stack of papers on the table. "I don't want to... well, just be careful."

That unfinished sentence followed Khue all afternoon, as she sat next to Nau's cage, watching the baby langur sleep soundly, its belly full of milk. The forest is different now - a vague statement, perhaps simply a warning from a superior who cares for his subordinates. But the way he spoke, the way he avoided her eyes, the way his hands stopped when he heard the mention of old photos - all combined to create an uneasy feeling that Khue could not name exactly, only knowing that it was exactly the same feeling she had eight years ago, in the days after her father passed away, when the adults around her kept saying incomplete sentences, avoiding eyes, as if there was something everyone knew but no one dared to say it out loud.

In the evening, after feeding Brown another round of milk and checking the entire barn, Khue sat alone on the station steps, looking out at the dark yard, with only the moonlight dimly shining through the mist that was gradually falling from the mountain. The chirping sounds of insects and the occasional howling gibbon echoed in the distance, sounds so familiar that she almost no longer heard them after so many years of living here.

She took out her phone and reviewed the photos taken at the scene in the morning — the cable, the footprints of soldiers' boots, the tree stump where the trap was set. Then she opened another folder in her phone, where she kept a few old photos scanned from the family album, including a photo of her father standing next to a pile of confiscated cables, a proud smile on his face, behind her mother's handwritten note noting the date: "Brother Thai seized the big trap, that year."

Khue enlarged the photo, comparing every small detail of the cable in the old photo with the one she just collected this morning. It was impossible to confirm for sure just through photos, but there was one thing she felt very clearly in her heart, stronger than any physical evidence: this story did not just begin today. It started a long time ago, and perhaps, never really stopped.