Out On A Limb

 

Intrepid? Fearless? Foolish? 

Don't know. Don't know which adjective works best. Maybe all of them. Twenty meters off the ground.

Out on a slim flexing limb, he reaches for branches filled with fruit to drop to his friends waiting below.

I watch him stop to eat some himself.

I had seen him out of the corner of my eye as I drove down the new highway out of Vietnam to Ban Lung, Ratanakiri. I continued down the road, looking for a safe place to to do a U-turn to come back and park on the verge.

It is Sunday, school's out and everyone is excited about the three-nation trade fair in town.

I stop, settle my motorcycle and get my camera out. As I am taking my helmet off, I can see him edging out onto a secondary branch, bouncing it up and down, testing its strength. When I first saw him I did not see his friends--my first pictures don't even show them--they were obscured by bushes they were sitting behind.

Intrepid?  Fearless?  Unthinking?

Maybe he is more than 20 meters above his friends.

I work to get a picture of him and of the two boys below, though they are at some distance from me and from each other. 

That part of me, the photographer, was thinking: "if he falls, he will fall for seconds. Probably cartwheel. His orange shirt clear against the green background."

The rest of me is thinking: "Be careful damn it!"
 
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The three boys were at the bottom of a steep hill, out across a wide pasture when I first saw the boy in the tree.

 Even as far as they are from me, the kids on the ground notice me, and then their friend above looks over at me. The limb he then stands up on sways under him. I wave my hand motioning him down, down out of the tree, though there is no reason to believe that he would climb down, even if he understands.

"Praw-yat!" I shout. "Careful!" I don't know if he can hear me. 

But he is soon skinnying down the tree: a skilled and intrepid climber. Absolutely fearless.

I start breathing more easily.

When he reached the ground, he and his friends gather the branches he has dropped. They climb the steep hill to the edge of the highway where I stand, branches and fruit clutched in hand.

Seven years old he says in answer to my question. "Nice kid," I think as I take his picture, trying to keep the third child out of the view-finder. He looks younger.

"Weren't you afraid?" I ask him. "Ot te!" His teeth are tinged blue. "No!" he says--as if he can't believe how clueless I am.

The berries on the branches were small and dark purple. I tried one. They look like huckleberries but have no distinctive flavor. Bland is the word that comes to mind. There is very little "meat" and almost no juice. The seed is large; it almost fills the skin of the small spherical fruit, and what meat there is, has to be scraped off with your teeth as you rotate it in your mouth.

Astonishing.