Chapter 3 — Forest Keeper

That night Khue couldn't sleep. She lay on the wooden bed in the small room reserved for station officers, heard the sound of rain starting to patter on the corrugated iron roof, and in her mind, memories of eight years ago came rushing back, so clear that it was as if it had only happened yesterday.

That year, Khue was nineteen years old, studying in the second year of a forestry intermediate school in the province, taking advantage of the opportunity to return home for the summer. At that time, Ban Sai village did not have concrete roads, so every time she returned home she had to take a bus and then walk another two kilometers on dirt roads. She clearly remembered that evening, the family meal was as normal as any other - her mother, Ly Thi Hoa, stir-fried a plate of wild vegetables, her father had just returned from patrol, with mud on his pants legs, sitting at the tray with an unusually thoughtful expression.

He ate very little. Khue's mother asked what was wrong. He just shook his head and said, "Let me see to make sure." Then he looked at Khue's mother for a long time - a look that, every time he remembered it, Khue always wondered if his father had a premonition of what was about to happen - and said the words that the whole family would later have to live with for eight years: "I discovered something big, let me see to make sure, then I will report."

Khue was still young at that time, still thinking about studying and friends in the province, and did not ask his father any more questions about that "big story". She only remembered that the next night he left again, carrying a backpack and flashlight, saying he was going to the Pu Cai peak area to check further, going alone because "this is not certain yet, I don't want to make a fuss, let me verify and report properly".

Three days later, when he did not return, the new station organized people to search for him. They found him under a deep rock crevice near the top of Pu Cai, nearly a kilometer from his familiar patrol route - a distance that Khue later found to be more unreasonable. Her father knew every inch of that route by heart, and there was no reason for him to stray so far in the night, unless he was chasing, or being lured to, somewhere off his usual route.

The conclusion of the investigation at that time, by a working group from the province, was very briefly recorded: the victim slipped in heavy rain, slippery terrain, and died from severe head and chest injuries when falling from a height of about twenty meters. No criminal elements were detected. The case was closed in less than a month.

Khue remembers that her mother, then only forty-four years old, did not cry in front of her and her sisters every day during the funeral. She just did everything quietly, receiving guests, taking care of the incense and smoke, and only late at night, when she thought her two children were fast asleep, did she sit alone at the altar, her cries choked in her throat echoing through the thin wooden wall to Khue's room. Her younger brother, Nong Van Kien, was only fifteen years old at the time. He quietly dropped out of school for a semester and later had to skip classes to keep up with his friends.

As for Khue, she remembers not being able to cry right away. The pain came slowly, like an underground wave, only truly breaking the night she returned to school after the funeral, sat alone in the dormitory, looked out the dark window, and realized she would never hear her father tell forest stories again. That very night, she decided - even though it was still vague, not yet clearly formed - that she would return to Thousand Clouds, to do what her father had done, not for revenge, she told herself, but to continue what he had left unfinished.

But lying here tonight, eight years later, with the baby langur sleeping outside and the steel cable still in the evidence bag on the desk, Khue cannot deceive herself any longer. She returned to Thousand Clouds not only because of her love for the forest, not only because she wanted to continue her father's work. Deep inside, from the first day she put on the ranger uniform, she has always carried an unanswered question: What was the "big story" her father said that night? And why, just three days after saying that, did he not live to tell anyone?

Early the next morning, when the rain stopped, Khue took advantage of her lunch break to cycle down to Sai village to visit her mother. The family's small stilt house is located at the end of the village, in front is a small grocery store that her mother opened to earn extra income after her husband passed away, selling packages of instant noodles, bottles of cooking oil, rolls of rope, and pairs of rubber boots to people in the village.

"You came back today without notice, is something wrong?" Ly Thi Hoa asked, her hands were still rearranging the stacks of goods on the shelves, but her eyes, after many years, were still sharp enough to recognize when her daughter had confided.

"I saved a baby langur yesterday," Khue said, sitting down on a plastic chair next to the counter. "Mother langur died in a cable trap. An expensive, professional trap, not homemade."

Mrs. Hoa stopped and turned to look at her daughter. Even though they didn't say it out loud, both mother and daughter understood the meaning behind that story.

"I think it's the same thing as you," she said, not a question, but a tired assertion, as if she had been waiting for this day for a long time.

"I don't know for sure. But the trap layout, the type of cable... I feel familiar, Mom. Just like in the old photos Dad used to take as evidence." Khue hesitated, then asked the question that she had been holding back from asking her mother for many years. "Mom, did Dad tell you specifically what the 'big deal' was back then? Even if it's just a small detail, it's okay."

Mrs. Hoa sighed, sat down opposite her daughter, her hands clasped together on her lap, a habit she still keeps when faced with painful memories. "I've already told you everything I know, when you first started your career. Your father just said that exact sentence, nothing more specific. He's a careful person, he doesn't want to say anything when he's not sure, for fear of doing wrong to others."

"But do you suspect anyone? Anyone?" Khue asked, her voice more urgent than she intended.

Mrs. Hoa was silent for a long time, long enough for Khue to realize that there was something she was considering whether to say or not. Finally, she spoke, her voice very quiet, as if afraid that someone would hear even though there were only mother and child in the house. "One time, about a week before he passed away, your father came home very late, soaking wet, his face pale. Mom asked what was wrong, he just said he was passing by the area near the forest product control station on the district road, and saw a truck carrying wood going at night, a time when no one is normally allowed to transport it. He said he would pay more attention."

Khue felt her heart beat faster. This was a detail she had never heard her mother tell before. "Mom never told me this."

"I don't want you to grow up with a mind full of doubt and hatred," Mrs. Hoa said, her eyes red but her voice still trying to stay calm. "I just want you to live peacefully. But now that I see you choosing the same path as me, I think maybe I was wrong in hiding so many things from you."

The mother and daughter sat quietly for a long time, the occasional sound of a motorbike passing by the dirt road in front of the house being the only sound that broke the silence. Finally, Mrs. Hoa stood up, went into the room, searched for something in the old wooden chest still kept in the corner of the house - the chest Khue remembered as a child was forbidden by her mother to open it, saying it belonged to her father and kept it separate.

She turned around, holding an old leather-bound notebook in her hand, handing it to Khue. "This is your father's notebook, I found it in a pile of things people returned after that incident. I don't understand everything he wrote in here, it's all symbols, coordinates, and abbreviations. I've been meaning to give it to you for a long time, but I kept hesitating, afraid of bringing up old things. Now maybe it's the time."

Khue held the notebook in her hand, feeling like she was touching a part of her father after eight years of separation. She quickly flipped through a few pages and saw her father's familiar handwriting, square and careful, meticulously taking notes on patrol routes, animals discovered, and the weather each day. But near the end of the notebook, she realized that some pages had been torn away, leaving jagged edges of paper remaining in the spine of the notebook - traces of at least five or six pages that had been hastily and carelessly removed.

"Mom, the last few pages were torn out," Khue said, her voice shaking with a mixture of anger and hope.

Mrs. Hoa looked at the notebook, her face slightly stunned. "Mom... I don't know. I never read it carefully, I just put it away because I couldn't bear to throw away his things."

Mother and daughter looked at each other and understood one thing: if those last pages were torn out before the notebook was returned to the family, then someone, eight years ago, knew exactly what needed to be erased so that the story of Mr. Nong Van Thai's "accident" could close smoothly, without a single ripple.

Khue hugged the notebook tightly to her chest, stood up, and kissed her mother's forehead as an unspoken promise. She cycled back to the station under the sunny sky after the night's rain, her heart both heavy and as if she had received a new source of strength. The baby langur is waiting for her at home, and now, her father's notebook is also in her backpack, a reminder that some stories, no matter how long buried, will eventually find their way back into the light.