Hair trapping is a research method invented by early scientists who studied felids with limited resources. They would spread catnip on tree trunks or hang reflective aluminium plates from branches to attract them. After all, leopard cats and clouded leopards are still cats, and scientists banked on their natural playfulness in order to catch some hair or tissue with velcro strips. This method went out of fashion decades ago—Shutter read about it in a folder containing research material for his late wife’s short story “Clouded Heights”. But, he also learned in his wife’s notes, despite seeming outdated, it allows you to collect hair samples for genetic analysis. Since her death, ten years of solitary gardening has changed Shutter’s mentality. Perhaps tracking animals is just like caring for plants: the least efficient tools are the most likely to create miracles.
Shutter has also bought ten night-vision cameras with wireless transmitters. They can capture clear night-time images using infrared fill light, automatically upload them to the Cloud, and generate a multimedia map sorted by time and location of capture. He installed them on forest paths on Mount Fog Crown, Mount Ancestors, Mount Kindoor and around Lake Ghostling, each location highlighted by a bright dot on his digital map. In vast stretches of dark montane forests, these dots glimmer like stars.
Shutter knows perfectly well that years ago, specialists searching for clouded leopards mobilised over a thousand cameras and snapped millions of photos over 160,000 working days without catching a single glimpse of a clouded leopard. Generally speaking, in countries still populated by clouded leopards, it should be possible to capture one image within one to eight hundred working days. Shutter set up his cameras with a hopeless gaze, not to actually find clouded leopards, but to experience the emotions felt by the character Pawz in his wife’s unfinished story. If Shutter retreats into the mountains like Pawz, they will be companions on the same wild cat chase.
What’s wrong with a futile pursuit? Isn’t life itself futile?
A new batch of maps pops up in Shutter’s Cloud every so often, and he knows straight away that Shu-yo has consulted old hunters for him and marked out new animal tracks. As Shutter merges these maps with his own data, layers upon layers of black paths interweave to form the fabric of a dark mountain.
*
Day after day, photos and videos from the Cloud capture Formosan serows, macaques, crab-eating mongooses, ferret-badgers, yellow-throated martens and muntjacs. They are survivors of the final wave of breakneck modernisation in Taiwan, ghosts confined to piecemeal habitats cut up by roads and deforestation.
Somehow, though these advanced night-vision cameras do not fire flashes, animals still seem to intuit something as they pass by and raise their heads to gaze at the lens. They study these unfamiliar objects with sharp instincts and night vision refined through mega-annums of evolution, their pupils glowing with intensity.
Shutter always senses his wife’s gaze in these photographs. He used to find her awake in the small hours, sitting at her desk. She would turn around to look at him the moment she heard a stir in the bed. Her eyes were sometimes full of sorrow, or anger, or desperation. Now he finally understands: it was because her emotions were synced to those of her characters.
This vast and enigmatic mountain harbours all sorts of people: Indigenous people, non-locals, hikers, researchers, foragers. But perhaps Shutter is the only lawyer-turned-gardener who has retreated into the mountains with his wife’s unfinished story. Does the same mountain appear different to a researcher and a novelist? How so? Does the extinction of clouded leopards mean different things to scientists and writers?
Or is it like what his wife wrote? Death is the only equaliser.
*
Shutter keeps trekking in the mountains, but the more he exchanges scents with the forest, the more unmoored he feels. There are times when he completely forgets why he came to the mountain. Here, every day is identical yet subtly different. Flora and fauna grow imperceptibly. Clouded leopards are still missing from the images streaming in from each animal track, but sometimes he is flummoxed as he examines the sambar deer or yellow-throated martens in the photographs, sensing another pair of eyes hidden in the frame and gazing back at him.
One autumn day, as Shutter detaches a malfunctioning camera from a hemlock tree, a rope drops from above. He looks up and sees a tall figure slide down from the canopy. Alarmed, Shutter stumbles backwards, but after composing himself, he realises that the man is Shu-yo’s colleague Fer, the tall quiet chef at the Mountain Inn.
So it was you who installed the cameras. What are you trying to capture? Fer reaches out and pulls Shutter up. He wanted to spook him, but he didn’t expect Shutter to panic so much.
Shu-yo once mentioned to Shutter that he was parting ways with Fer, because Fer was going to become a professional tree climber. Shutter didn’t even know such a profession existed.
A bit of everything, whatever I manage to capture. Why were you in the tree?
Sampling. But this one doesn’t need to be sampled, I just climbed it for fun. Look, it’s pretty special how it bends in the middle and hangs over the abyss. You want to photograph clouded leopards?
Shutter stares at him.
Didn’t you ask about them at the Mountain Inn? Very few people talk about them these days. They’re mythological creatures nobody has seen. Fer points at the tree. They climb too.
I know, they can even climb down with their heads facing up. I saw it in videos.
You study clouded leopards?
No.
You are getting better at trekking in the mountains. I saw you a few times from the treetops. Nowadays only hikers and cult followers climb these mountains.
Cults?
Well, lately there’s been a sect that brings random people up here for strange ceremonies. Some of them fell into the valley and two died. Didn’t you see it in the news?
I didn’t. Are you a hunter?
Every Rukai person is a hunter.
Could this path be a clouded leopard path?
Hunters track their prey, but the prey will avoid trails where hunters have set foot. They learn, so you have to think like a clouded leopard. Anyway, they’re gone, so their trails are gone too. No animal can slip past Rukai hunters unnoticed, which goes to say that clouded leopards are now the stuff of stories—death turns beings into stories. We, the Rukai People, often call this a mountain of ancestral spirits. That means those people became stories, and in turn became part of the mountain.
I’ve read stories about the Rukai migration to Kucapungane.
Oh?
My wife was half Rukai, on her mother’s side. But she never went back to her community.
Where is she now?
She passed away. Shutter regrets mentioning her to Fer. He should not bring her up lightly, to anyone.
I am sorry. Well . . . the story you heard actually has another beginning. Your wife probably knew it too. Kucapungane means “descendants of the clouded leopard”.
Shutter gazes at Fer, dark and steely-eyed, a man who has shut himself inside iron gates.
According to legend, at the beginning of time on a sacred mountain far away, a girl with a skin disease all over her body met a handsome clouded leopard. The leopard doted on her, tirelessly licking her bark-coarse skin covered in warts and boils, all day and all night long. After a while, the places touched by the clouded leopard’s tongue began to scab, shed, and grow new skin that was bright as the moon.
So the clouded leopard healed her?
I don’t know if she healed fully. But eventually the girl went on to live with the leopard in these mountains, and they had children together.
A human and a clouded leopard?
Fer nods.
*
Shutter and Fer climb onto the Tsuga chinensis that reaches for the abyss. If trees can be roads, then this crooked giant is like the mythical pathless way. Fer and Shutter are surprised to find their feet obscured as a sea of clouds washes over them. Clouds do not roar like the real ocean. They just flow in shadowy or lucid billows, morphing into fog when they pour into mountain trails. These masses of vapour never come to rest, sometimes churning like an immense iridescent waterfall, stirring the warm hues of sunlight into endless vortices. One’s perception of height and distance tends to change after extensive stays in the mountains, just like Shutter’s and Fer’s at this moment, who feel as if they are by the seashore. The void in front of them becomes animate, inviting them to leap in.
I want to jump, Shutter says.
Like someone’s calling you from below? It’s an illusion caused by vertigo.
Hmm.
This is the best altitude to observe the sea of clouds.
Is that so?
I wasn’t good at school. My only textbook was my Ama, my father.
Shutter watches the clouds and recalls how his wife was a storyteller too.
Ama said that you tell stories for your own sake, not for others, because when you tell a story, you have to imagine yourself as another person, a tree, a boar. In doing so, you become a true person.
A true person?
Fer stands up and clips his saddle onto the arborist rope. He bends his legs to grip the rope and spreads his arms like bows. He ascends with incredible speed, one hand pulling the rope and the other pushing the knot. His silhouette, the enormous tree, and the rolling fog on the ground form a composition full of contrast, strength versus stillness. Shutter is mesmerised. Soon Fer disappears from sight, hidden by the tree.
Come up and you’ll know how clouded leopards think. Fer’s voice filters down, as if from the Cloud.
*
For some reason, Shutter used to dream very little when he lived in the garden house, but his nights in the mountain are filled with colourful dreams, brimming with bygone scenes and objects. A red balloon escaping from his father’s fingers, lily bulbs suddenly pushing out of the soil in unison, the path he took daily from home to middle school, et cetera et cetera. Appearing in dreams means they belong to the past, since Shutter believes that human beings can only dream about things they’ve experienced. Memories live in the brain, which is part of our corporeal existence. Dreams manufactured by the brain can’t possibly point to the future, but are montages of past experiences.
His wife had written something similar. Dreams are the product of the body and its experiences. They are illusions, like imagining taking flight when we are planted on the ground.
If you don’t climb trees, you won’t understand clouded leopards. Shutter wraps this sentence in tin foil and places it in a box hidden below many flights of stairs, inside his wife’s virtual House on the Cloud constructed with cyber data.
Shutter has been rereading his wife’s writing over and over again recently, whenever he is not busy with the necessities of surviving in the mountains. Words are tools that lend themselves so easily to falsity, deception and insincerity. Can you really understand another person through words? If she were still alive, would she hate that human who aimlessly murdered innocents just to make his words heard? If she had survived the attack, would she fear other human beings, or even herself, since she too was human? Or instead, would she finally have agreed to bear his child, the baby he had always pined for but which had never come into the world?
*
That night, Shutter sleeps in the tree tent Fer has given him, suspended between two trees like a chrysalis. As he sleeps, strange sounds drift into his dreams. He gets up and goes outside with his headlamp, but all he can see are swaying trees; there is not a single sound in the foggy night. Scanning the undergrowth like an owl, he freezes with fear as he suddenly realises how high above the ground he is.
The next day, Shutter downloads images from the Cloud as usual, and discovers a shadow that appears in various photos captured across the vast mountain range. A shadow that resembles both human and beast. Shutter zooms in to the projected images: a naked, scrawny, mud-covered humanoid, running on all fours with his belly close to the ground. Given the ultra-realistic holographic projection, the images seem to blend with the trees physically in front of Shutter, as if this ‘man’ is still around.
The Shadow doesn’t look like Fer, who is tall. Shutter is shocked after he checks the timestamps. If the same ‘man’ appeared in all these images, that means he travelled back and forth between nine cameras across tens of hectares within just a few hours. How fast is he? Shutter is sometimes struck by sudden flashes of intuition in dense forests, feeling as if he is being watched. Now he understands why.
Maybe the ‘man’ intended to let Shutter see him last night. He sounded like a full orchestra resided in his body, while the forest was a sea of silence.
Shutter starts to pay close attention from then on. He discovers some footprints, and even lies belly-down on trees to sniff for scents. The Shadow leaves behind overlapping messages of odours, footprints, and snapped branches—these are the words with which he informs Shutter of his presence nearby, where he can see Shutter while remaining hidden, so that Shutter will grow accustomed to his presence. Shutter recalls Barry Lopez’s words, summarised in his wife’s notes: Carnivorous animals communicate with their prey. These ‘conversations of death’ establish whether the prey is ready to die, which in turn determines the outcome of the hunt.
Three days later, Shutter hears a stir at midnight and sees a scrawny silhouette on a branch outside his tent, lit by the moon. He switches off the camping light and the Shadow becomes even clearer. Not a clouded leopard or a bear, but a man’s shadow.
I am Shutter. Who are you?
The Shadow is silent.
Though Shutter hasn’t socialised for the past ten years, he still knows that you have to state your purpose to earn someone’s trust. So he speaks slowly, introducing himself word by word, as if delivering a speech to an empty forest. I just happen to be here because of my wife’s unfinished story. He even divulges what he has been withholding from Shu-yo and Fer, about how his wife died. The reason is simple. He deems it impossible to deceive this Shadow, and unnecessary.
The Shadow remains silent for a few minutes before finally speaking. His voice is deep and hoarse, a smoky baritone. You installed the cameras and hair traps?
Yes, but I don’t mean any harm. I just want to see if I can find one last clouded leopard.
Human beings always say they don’t mean harm.
You’ve been observing me all along, no?
The Shadow is silent.
If so, you’d know it’s true. Are you searching for clouded leopards too?
For about ten years already.
Why? For such a long time too.
Why?
Why search for clouded leopards?
*
The Shadow replies, It all begins with the clouded leopard skin . . .
Just like the first line of his wife’s story.
Rain begins to fall on the forest, pitter-pattering as droplets hit the tent suspended in the void. Shutter’s mouth feels dry. He takes a gulp from the flask, pours some water on his palm and blows at it slowly. The surface ripples. So this is the real, physical world. But what the Shadow said just now clearly overlaps with what happens in his wife's story, the unfinished one in her House, hidden below flights of stairs, in a room lit by a faux moon. He, Shutter, should be the only one who has read it.
The Shadow falls silent once again. He seems to be readjusting to the use of language. As years passed by, no clouded leopard ever showed up. I believe they are just hiding, because they don’t want to be found by humans. To show them that I am different from the others, I started living like a clouded leopard in this mountain forest.
Living like a clouded leopard?
I figured if you want to know how an animal survives in the wild, the most direct approach is to live like one. Lurk in caves. Bury your nose in the earth. Put all your thoughts into hunting when you’re awake.
Shutter is overcome by a splitting headache, perhaps due to the cold. It feels like a big cat is crushing down on him, paw on ear, making his insides buzz and his ears ring. It parts its jaws, which can open up to a hundred degrees, and pierces his skull with nerve-packed fangs, sinking teeth into brain. A clouded leopard would stalk a muntjac, wait for the best moment to clamp its jaws around its throat, suffocate it, rip its warm belly open, drag it up a tree, lick its blood, and rub its scent on the trunk. Can a human live like this?
Though the forest is the same one, what clouded leopards see is different from what we see.
*
Shutter’s wife once told him her life was so dreary that she had to seek inspiration from other people’s stories. He only began to feel the sting after her death, for it made him think that their marriage was meaningless and lifeless. She used to tell him ideas she came across in books or on the news that can be worked into stories. She used to share all her daydreams, fantasies, illusions and lies. Used to. It’s like Shutter is learning this word for the first time, and feels its despair for the first time.
Her story about clouded leopards seems too realistic to be fiction. Shutter even searched online to see whether there were any posts about a clouded leopard skin dropped outside a remote ecology museum. Her story mentions a lost-item post, so perhaps there is still some trace of it online. Indeed, he found such a post, now deleted, coming from a town in eastern Taiwan. Judging by the dates, she began writing the story soon after the notice was posted, and then travelled south by train, probably to gather information or to revisit her home region. At the time, he was working on a lawsuit against a multinational company, filed by residents of another eastern town on behalf of a river.
Shutter is convinced that he saw his wife for the last time on television. Fire ripped through the train carriage, which looked like a prop in some disaster film. The footage played in a diner where people were snacking on sesame noodles, pork chop rice and rougeng soup. Shrieking, news correspondents noted how this was the first train bombing in Taiwan. It derailed after the explosion and eighteen people died. Famous commentators were invited to speculate on possible causes, and because there was no passenger list for that train, her name did not appear on television at first.
Shutter recalls . . . No, he refuses to remember. Not the software. Not the thought that his beloved has now turned to ashes. There is no way she was the intended victim of that massacre. Like all the others, she was but a substitute.
Some media outlets speculated that the murderer was among the dead, because this was the only way to explain the embarrassing impasse police investigations ran into. Popular live streamers joined the three-ring circus, some claiming that an international terrorist group planted the explosives, while others said it was a conspiracy staged by China to wreak havoc in Taiwan, or that it was an election-related act of revenge, or a freak attack by some nutter or psycho . . .
As soon as panic strikes, human beings stop caring about others’ feelings. Like hungry vultures, they scavenge for every last detail about the deceased, as if only death can ignite their passion. Police interrogations brought Shutter so much pain. In this digital age, every individual’s daily life is documented online in excruciating detail. Her whereabouts before death were tracked on her phone, in public transport records and on surveillance cameras. She became a shadow formed by a stack of data. Why did she go to the supermarket at that exact moment? Why did she buy an air ticket to Borneo and then return it? What was her real reason to travel south? Why didn’t you accompany her? Did she smoke Winston cigarettes? If not, why are they on her e-receipt?
Shutter hadn’t the faintest clue. His wife had lost her life in a freak accident, and even after death, her body and brain continued to be stripped bare and pecked open. At first only the police had access to the data, but soon almost every streamer flaunted scoops and doled them out on their phones.
He intuitively knew that he was the next target, because someone commented that he didn’t look heartbroken at all. That’s not how a husband would react. Netizens doxed the law firm where he worked, and his experiences became fodder for gossip. In their words, he was a lawyer without integrity and principles. Can such a man be trusted? Reading those articles, even Shutter began to doubt himself.
Six months later, the police finally declared the case solved. The culprit was indeed among the dead, a twenty-something with an immaculate record. Part of the raw material for the bomb came from abroad, while the rest was bought online in batches. But the police never managed to pin down his motive.
It was all too late. Shutter could no longer bear to stay in familiar spaces, not even for a minute. Perhaps that was when the Rift in the Cloud emerged. Anything can fall through the Rift: wedding photos, intimate pictures, the urge to lynch your boss, messages sent to the dead, dashed or forgotten hopes, personal weaknesses, shame, anger, fear and sorrow secretly disclosed online. Cybertech companies exploited the situation to launch new ‘untraceable software’, supposedly safer, more user-friendly, and almost free of rifts. Wipe all traces with a single click, they say. People erase their digital trail as they turn off their computers, just like cats anxious to bury their scent.
WIPE DATA? The programme regularly sends pop-up reminders.
Shutter remembers the days when he first entered his wife’s Cyber House with the Access Key. It was like playing a documentary backwards, from the first time they met, to her previous relationships, her graduation, her university days, her first love. It was more vivid and detailed than what she had told him. Down and down, beyond countless flights of stairs, at the end of wooden steps that resembled bones of the dead, there was a box wrapped in fresh green leaves. Inside, the spine of a mammal had just formed, fishbone-like.
Shutter recounts all this to himself. A partial confession hurts him, but even that is better than not sharing. Hear my pain, and I’ll bear yours. This exchange is the key to human socialisation and bonding.
He says to the Shadow. I am so sorry, but my mind is in total chaos right now. My wife once wrote a story, practically identical to your experience. She called the protagonist Pawz.
The Shadow rises up. Pawz? Half to Shutter, half to the forest, he says, Today there will be a sea of clouds.
*
Ground level moisture, once transpired, rides air currents up the slopes of mountains, and condenses to form clouds at a height where the temperature drops. These clouds are not heavy enough to rain, but they cannot rise either, so they pool into valleys and form seas of clouds, yunhai. They say the yunhai around Mount Beidawu is unique, saturated with vapours from the Luzon Strait south of Taiwan, and from oceans flanking the island. But according to Fer, hikers who only see this sea of clouds once would deem it no different from yunhai elsewhere. After all, that’s how people are: they see something once and they think they’re done.
Shutter finally makes up his mind to open the tree tent, but the Shadow has vanished. The sky begins to blush and light up. Pink is always the first colour to announce an iridescent yunhai.
Before sunrise, Shutter skulks beneath the panoramic platform where hikers love to gather, and watches silently as the clouds roll and tumble. None of them is wise to his presence on the sheer rock face below, furtively sharing their view.
This yunhai is so dense that it seems tangible, as if you could walk on it effortlessly. Clouds gather into scenes from the past and disperse into nothing again, never stagnant, never still, beyond any comparison. This live footage is jointly performed by each and every biotope, a macrocosm encompassing realms of the divine, the human and the condemned. No matter how extraordinary future panoramic holographic inventions might be, nothing can possibly reproduce this moment.
Shutter recalls Fer’s words. We Rukai believe that ancestral spirits, fallen trees and tears of dying animals are all held within the water vapours in this yunhai.
A mountain hawk-eagle soars above the forests and cuts into the clouds. Shutter glimpses his wife’s face there, and then she fades away, like a second departure.
*
Shutter packs his gear in the afternoon and decides to descend the mountain at daybreak. It is time to go home. But when night falls, he cannot sleep. He is struck by a sudden urge to write.
And so, he sits up to type. Pawz grows close to the mysterious schoolteacher who left the clouded leopard skin outside his ecology museum, and she agrees to show him her father’s room, which houses a secret about how the old hunter killed the last clouded leopard by mistake and died in regret. His nebulous map is the only clue to the big cats’ whereabouts. Pawz and the teacher fall in and out of love. Alone, he eventually follows the map into the mountains to search for clouded leopards with foolish devotion.
Time flies. Every day is a day without clouded leopards, but years of mountain living accustomed him to detect even the slightest flutter of wings, the patchiest paw print of strange beasts, and the faintest whistle as air is expelled from a nostril. His foolish heart transforms him into a clouded leopard in dreams and in the forest. He grows familiar with the scent of earth. He remembers every water source. He rubs his smell on trees that he passes every day. He kills a sambar deer, rips its flesh with his teeth, licks its entrails, hauls the carcass up a tree. As deer blood drips from the tip of the branch, he rubs his cheek against the bark until he bleeds too, his blood blending with the deer’s. He repeats this day after day, and the scars turn into cloud-like patterns. He grips the tree with his fingernails as he climbs, his nails shedding and regrowing, eventually becoming dark claws. He imitates the anguished growls of the last clouded leopard, deprived of its kin, and retreats into the canopy to watch the sun rise and set. He avoids any trace of human life. Tear lines run along the slopes of his nose, like brooks in the valley, their banks overgrown with ferns and knotgrass, their fronds dotted with pearly damselfly eggs.
The fog closes in as Shutter writes. The tent sways in the wind, swinging from one tree to the other, like a tiny ark drifting in the tenebrous forest. He is still writing when an incredible rumble emanates from deep underground and resonates through the tree and the rope to reach his hands. He peeks downhill through the gap in the tent, but he cannot see anything through the dense fog. Due to radical climate change, a city in the distance is partly flooded all year round. Is another deluge about to come down?
Shutter keeps writing, anxiously and hesitantly, until both he and Pawz curl up and succumb to sleep. A big cat emerges from the drowsy haze and slinks into the tent, circling along the edge. Shutter cannot get up, as if he is bound by invisible ropes. The big cat pads about and then curls up above his head. He doesn’t dare to move, knowing that any movement could trigger its killer instinct. Its breath is so near, almost palpable, charging the tent with violent intensity. Shutter can visualise its jade-green eyes and stunning bagua swirls on the chest, even with his eyes closed. The cat licks his head, earlobes, cheeks and neck, and peels away his long-unwashed shirt, its whip-like tail caressing his abdomen. It gently nibbles his chest with sharp teeth, lapping his nipples to draw blood. Its paw presses down on his calf, which has grown more muscular after spending so much time in the mountains. Its fur is smooth but sharp, pricking his skin with each hair.
His body, like a volcano, burns with impatience. Somehow he plucks up courage and presses his forehead against the clouded leopard’s. It meets him and lovingly wrestles with him. He flips over, bites its neck, and clamps it down with his own claws. His penis hardens like a ripe seedpod and enters its body without hesitation. The big cat emits a low growl, which shakes the forest and every leaf within. Water droplets pour down from the foliage, creating a deluge above the clouds, above other rains, saturated with memories.
*
In the early morning, the buzzing pager wakes up Shutter, who is struggling to tell reality from dreams. Fumbling, he turns on the holographic projector to play a video from Fer. In the video, Fer is lying in some lush green meadow, which is actually a giant cypress with a diameter of forty metres, as he explains to the camera. He is resting on the polygonal space where boughs branch out from the trunk, like an enormous bed covered with a green blanket of epiphytes, with a deep narrow rift in the middle. You see the crack in the tree? I can’t gauge how deep it is! I’m going to drop down into it today and see what the inside looks like. He reaches the camera inside the rift, and the image turns black.
Now Shutter is fully awake. Strangely though, the more awake he is, the more this feels like a dream. He unzips the tent, as if emerging from his chrysalis. He changes the story title from “Clouded Heights” to “Cloudland”, and projects it onto the forest and sea of clouds.
Rain falls between words. Perhaps rain can bring everything in the Cloud back to earth.
His fingers flutter frantically on the holographic keyboard, like a drowning man waving his arms. In the world inhabited by words, Pawz finally discovers a gigantic Chamaecyparis formosensis above the sea of clouds on Mount Beidawu, where no human being has ever set foot. The Formosan cypress is tall and strong on the outside, but hollow inside. Forty metres above the ground, the trunk splits open and a deep rift emerges. Since no one has ever climbed the tree and stepped inside, the immense world beyond the rift remains unbeknownst to humankind. It is the heart of the heart, an entire forest inside a sacred tree. Rain pours in from the rift and forms a cascade. Inside, Pawz and the last clouded leopard beget children and posterity. Their tribe will only appear before fools, whereas all other ordinary mortals are shunned.
