Thai Horse

In April the winds sweep down the mountainsides of northern Thailand, chasing away the last of the monsoon clouds and wafting across the fields of red, white and purple flowers. The flowers sway like rows of ballet dancers as the sun burns down on them and they burst into bloom and the mountainsides arid fields become a tapestry of color.

But like some species of butterflies that live only for a single day, the flowers die quickly, each leaving behind a pale green seed pod that looks like an onion on a stick. In the months before April the plants toil day and night to produce alkaloids, which are stored in these seed pods. When the pod is cut, the milky alkaloid oozes out and quickly dries and darkens.

When the petals fall, the hill people in their flat straw hats appear on the steep slopes where the flowers grow and move through the rows, slicing the sides of the pods and gathering the thick sap with iron spoons before it hardens.

General Dao, the phu yai ban of the Hsong hill tribe had watched the previous spring as his villagers tapped the pods. As village headman it was his custom to sit like a god on his black horse on the crest of the hill with the strap of his M-14 draped around his shoulders like a sling, his arms resting on the butt and barrel of his weapon, observing the harvest while his two shotgun guards sat nearby. The guards took turns scanning the sky and valley with powerful binoculars, watching for signs of federal troops or helicopters, while below, on the sides of the hill known as Powder Mountain, the field workers tapped the pods.

As phu yai ban, Dao was elected by his fellow villagers. Like his father, he settled disputes of every kind, listened to the problems of his villagers, and negotiated for the Hsong with the outside world. The Hsong were part of a tribal sect called the Phui Thong Luang, the Spirits of the Yellow Leaves, a small, elusive group whose isolation had enabled them to maintain customs and traditions that were centuries old.

Dao was a compact man, hardened, as were all the Hsong people, by the harsh life of the mountains. He was thirty-seven and looked fifty-five, although he was still handsome, with a face that was a bronze square, a wide mouth and a broad, flat nose. He preferred dark green military clothing to traditional garb, as did his men. His black hair was wrapped with a red bandanna. Occasionally he would take the binoculars and watch the women workers, who wore brightly colored blouses with striped yokes, colorful pants fitted tightly around the hips and draped at mid-calf — called pasin and resembling old- fashioned pedal pushers — and large, flamboyant turbans of gaily colored material woven with silver beads.

The sap they were gathering was opium gum.

The natural alkaloid was morphine.

And the pretty little purple, white and red flowers were Papaver somniferum, which proliferate like weeds in Southeast Asia. No innocent garden flowers, the somniferum poppy is a metaphor for the best and worst in man, a symbol of good and evil. It is both heaven and hell contained in a white pod that is not much bigger than a man’s thumb. Like the mythical song of the Sirens, the promise is alluring but the reality is deadly, for while opium begets painkilling morphine, it also begets heroin.

Dao did not know any of the statistics or demographics of drug use. He did not know where his packages were going, who would buy them, or who would eventually use the product of his crop. He had never heard of a spike or a jolt or a rush or a high or uppers, downers, hash, pot, boo, toot, coke, smack, crack, H, horse, lid, hit, popping, chipping, mainlining, tripping, acid or poppers. He did not know that his crop might kill some pitiful junkie half of a world away or that teenage gangsters might die in the street fighting over an ounce of the white powder that would eventually be refined from the sap of the little flowers. He had never seen a hypodermic needle. It was the cash crop of the village and had been for years, and to Dao and the rest of the Hsong tribe there was nothing wrong with selling it.

But the government had said it was wrong and had begun a program to coerce farmers into growing coffee, mushrooms and maize instead of poppies. There had been trouble in the hills. The Leums and the Lius and many other hill tribes had been attacked by the army and had their crop confiscated and burned, but the government had never approached Dao. His tribe was large and controlled a difficult, rugged section of the mountains. He was a fiery and independent leader as well as a dangerous adversary. Dao controlled only 250 hectares of poppy fields — about a hundred acres — hardly enough to start a war over. Besides that, the young general, as phuyai ban, was supposed to report to the government’s district director, but two years earlier he had expelled the nai amphoe from Hsong and the government had never replaced the man.

But the young general still followed the same precautions. When the sky had turned red and the river sparkled like gold, Dao rode down to a small hooch located at the center of the fields and went inside. The place smelled sweet like new-mown grass. The opium gum had been brought there and wrapped in one-and-a- half-kilogram packages called joi. There it would retain its potency indefinitely unless refined.

The packages of gum, which looked like dark brown cake icing, were stacked in saddlebags. A ten-kilo package of gum and another containing one kilo of the same substance lay on the wrapping table. Dao took out a knife and twisted the point into one of the packages, drawing back a small, sticky dab, which he rolled between his fingers until it was a small ball called a goli. He put it under his tongue, closed his eyes and sucked on it, rolling it around in his mouth. Then he smiled. Excellent.

That night the packages were loaded on mules, and before dawn, Dao and four of his most trusted men led the mules off through the forest toward the House of the Golden Lady. They rode for two hours through dense brush, staunch spears of bamboo as tall as pine trees, enormous teak trees choked with crawling vines. They rode along paths only the best-trained eyes could spot, paths that were crawling with deadly krites and patrolled by black panthers and tigers.

They stopped when they heard the familiar deep rumble through the towering overgrowth ahead, tethered their horses and walked the last mile as though mesmerized by the rumble, which finally crescendoed into a roar. When at last they broke out of the jungle, they were at the mouth of a deep, rocky gorge, veiled by sprays of mist that billowed out around them from the thundering waterfall called the Golden Lady at the far end of the vale. Struggling over slippery rocks at the edge of the river until the earth was trembling underfoot, they finally found the entrance to the cave known as the House of the Golden Lady.

Hsong leaders had been hiding their opium gum here for centuries. Now the place was better than ever, for it was not only suicidal to reach on foot but inaccessible to government choppers. They stacked the joi of opium gum deep in the cave, covered them with straw paper, and there they remained until the time to deal.

Now it was fall and the previous day the Chiu Chao boss had sent his messenger to the Hsong village to request a meeting. Dao had sent the Straw Sandal back to his boss with the kilo of gum as a gesture of goodwill, so they could check the quality.

Most of the hill tribes still sold opium gum in its raw stage, but the Hsong tribe had its own refinery, a crude but effective little factory in a room no larger than a bedroom. The Chiu Chaos preferred to refine their own heroin, but the Hsong had always produced the powder themselves. It was a matter of pride to Dao as well as of economics. It