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Standing on the school football ground I saw the gentle rays of sunlight started brushing every pick against a sky of varnished blue with liquid gold, a soft mildness in the air floated like a feeling of happiness, and in the valley on the west side, cluster of huts, trees were still cozened to sleep by the trapped quickly fading darkness of a bygone night. The smell of wet grass brought the freshness of the morning through my breath. The nature was so pristine as if time had turned around and we were back at the beginning of civilization. On that particular morning I didn’t know why I felt the irrepressible urge to take the U shaped trail which threaded through grass land, bamboo bushes and thick tropical forest had split wedge tracks of deer and slithering tracks of serpents on its soft due-damp earth, to connect our school with the soldier’s camp at the border. Although the school and the camp at the border were at two high points of the U, the school was situated at a much lower altitude than the camp.

That was not the first time I was intrigued and drawn by those men at the border, who were probably by now not a man any more, only a soldier who had the same soul of that lighting struck half burnt palm tree at the edge of the school campus withered, decayed but still grounded firmly in fiercest sun and rain may be for a bird one day to build her nest over it, but I had withdrawn myself from such a venture so far only because of repeated warnings from my wife “You can go to any other place but please do not go to soldier’s camp. I will never allow you to go there. The headmaster also told me if they do something to you nobody can do anything here in this border area”

But this urge of adventure, to experience the new, to meet the strangers and to know the unknowns like a life long disease lived in my blood ever since first time I ran out of my home on one spring afternoon to catch a butterfly. From then on without any reason from time to time I felt a churn in my stomach and stamps of thousand horses in my heart beat. My father had told “It is the disease of age, over time, experience and responsibility will cure this itch” At that time I thought my old man had experienced the same and with age his wisdom cured his fever but even at this age when the call of the wild brings a restlessness, a shudder in my body I realized it is the child within me who never died like one of life’s greatest epiphany.

The dusty trail textured with shadow and sunshine gently wound across the valley up to the heights of mountain where now I could see them gathered near the barbed fence looking down at me. From here they looked like small cheap plastic soldiers I bought for my son, faces hidden under the shadow of their hat. The trail formed itself through the beating of earth by soldiers coming to the school or villages on the other side of the school, and the buffalo boys taking their hoards to the pastures in the valley.

Although the sun was mild and the reluctant wind had the morning chill, I was sweating from the exhaustion of the steep descend, during which sometime I had to crawl holding the tree roots or bamboo bushes and had to watch my steps carefully as not to twist my ankle. Along with dust, grass and dry leaves I realized couple of unfriendly red ants found their way inside my T-shirt from their sting. This was not the first time I was bitten by red ants but I thought there was something here in the soil which made their poison more powerful which caused considerable amount of more pain than the ones I saw else where but also I was lucky as not to be bitten by their more poisonous friends like scorpion or black cobra. To get rid off those tiny creatures I took off my T-shirt and jerked it vigorously and at that very moment I noticed two curious little eyes watching me from the shade of a bush and then a sound of laughter probably at the sight of my bare hairy chest for which my wife sometimes lovingly calls me “Hairy or Harry”. I thought I saw the little girl before in school, probably she was a student stayed in hill tribe village on the other side of the school whose smile was as innocent as her heart probably came here to catch snails or land crabs. I waved at her “Hello”

“How are you?” I asked.

“Good night” she giggled, as if a gurgling brook, “My name is Toi”

For a moment I was speechless and thoroughly bewildered, scratching my head I was trying to correlate my question and her prompt inappropriate answer and then realized that she had just recited them like a parrot from her memory without any understanding of the context, and may be a strange playful act of nature had reshuffled whatever she had been taught in school in a chaotic order. But there was no shame; her small brown face was sparkling in joy and excitement which slowly started permeating my spirit. We both broke into a wild laughter which hung in the morning air for a while then drifted away towards mountain across the valley. How marvelously beautiful was this communication, words were exchanged but their relevance didn’t matter, they didn’t come in our way with the burden of understanding, and at the end both of our soul levitated in pure joy which mattered most.

“See you in school” then suddenly realizing that this time may be she would come up with another of her wild amusing answer, I just waved at her “Bye”

She smiled, then like a squirrel skittered away behind a bush in her little feet and I continued my journey.

While high up on the mountain top our school bathed in sunshine, the valley was still shrouded in thin mist and being here it was as if you are looking at a picture through a smoked glass. But as the retiring fog slowly revealed the landscape I saw a hut in front almost half way between me and the camp standing in solitude under the shade of a teak tree, from there, after an arch the path climbed up steeply to enter the jungle and to reappear again just before reaching the camp. From the very structure and position of it I assumed it was a security check post before the camp. The thatched roof was holding itself on top of four uneven bamboo polls in a crazy balancing act which gave the structure the same tragic appearance of a stooped old man and as I came near it saw hay stacks and wood piles covered by green canvas were scattered around amidst a sullen ferny smell of dampness. Inside the hut, there was a low stool probably used by the soldier on duty, who nowhere to be seen at this moment, but his presence was felt in the odor of smoke from smoldering ashes of last night’s fire.

For long minutes I stood there marveling at the sight of the majestic expanse of green ocean of grassland stretched up to the edge of the jungle from where the bluish green mountains rose undaunted contemplating the mystical silence of the valley. It was a perfect balmy morning. I brought the stool at the edge of trail and sat on it thinking about how life brought me from the shadowy trails of redwood forest to this nameless desolate path in Chiang-Rai. What lays ahead in time and space in our life, even our love doesn’t know, but there is depth in care, and religiousness in love. Ah, a promise of a new life in a new world, I felt an excitement, pulse of blood in my veins like warm wash of an oceanic wave.

Then I watched the little dusty ants scurrying in a steady unbroken flow like a plumb line. I playfully put my feet on their track, for a moment they scattered in chaos and confusion then gradually got their act together and started climbing up my feet to form their line again. A ticklish sensation on bare skin, I felt their movement. Soundless flutter of butterfly wings like a translucent colorful dream, fading jingles of cowbell from meadow and swirls of dry leaves in mildly playful midmorning air all were part of a quintessential peace.

Then I felt a change in the ambience around me, a sudden rush among ants as if they sensed something strange, an unknown smell of an animal rose like an ominous possibility; then a hush, a dark silence like a vacuum. Then a slow steady hissing like a slicing of a sickle in air from the scattered hay stacks and wood piles sent a pulse of death-like chillness almost paralyzing within me. I looked back, a creaking sound from the stool and within a flash I saw her hood wavering in a sinister suspension in front of me and a forked-tong flickering with hypnotic prowess. Her elliptical unblinking black-bead-eyes had a savage playfulness. I felt a trickle of cold sweat running down my spine making me numb. I kept my sight fixed towards her in a dizzy apprehension. I had seen her before in Snake Park with snake charmers or coiled lazily in slumber in glass case but this was the first time we were facing each other in the wilderness of nature with her unconstrained freedom. A fully grown adult King Cobra can be up to eighteen feet long but this one was smaller, not over ten feet with a color of wet sand.

May be now my wife had already gone for Morning Prayer, my son started playing with other students and once quite school campus had been filled with their voice. May be she would wait for my return till lunch break and then she would probably come this way to find my body here laying on grass as cold as this Cobra’s skin. My eyes were paining, and through the soft haze of accumulating tears I could only see a brown dusty image of hers quivering like a mirage. A hesitant dull emotion more like agony than fear has less to do with death itself with the fact that I would soon die, shrouded my senses like a sawdust cloud. Now the brown blurry rope like image got smudged as if somebody spilled water on a painting, then darkness, and I thought probably it was death. Ah, the darkness brought a cool comfort in my eyes, and I realized it was just that I had closed my eyes. I thought to myself let it bite, I wont open my eyes till death comes but moments passed and that eerie silence was broken by the thudding of foot steps coming from the direction of soldier’s camp. Then it stopped.

“Swadee khrap. Tham arai?”

Opening my eyes I saw a man grinning, and death more fresh and alive than life hung somewhere between my knowledge and wisdom.