On the first evening of the rainy season, the power out, so the family sat around a candle. While the rain on the tin roof, Grandpa Kham began to tell stories. ‘When I was young,’ he said, ‘this forest much bigger. Tigers in these hills, but nobody has seen one for thirty years.’

‘One morning in 1982, I alone along the river when I heard a strange sound. I and listened. Something large through the bamboo toward me, and my heart so hard that I could hear it. Then a mother bear and her cub out of the bushes. The bear at me for a long moment, and then she her cub away into the trees. I almost my whole life in the forest by then, but I so close to a bear before.’

‘ you scared?’ Dao asked. ‘Of course,’ said Grandpa. ‘But fear a good teacher. In those days, rangers for weeks without seeing another person. We rice and fish paste in our bags and slept in hammocks between the trees.’

Dao these stories many times as a child, but that night she listened differently, because soon she her own groups through the same forest. By the time the power back, it was almost midnight.