Inspiring Chinese Entrepreneurship

This whole thing is almost getting away from me but in a really really good way. A few days ago, The Fixer brought a Chinese man who said he can collect any animal we want. He enthusiastically bragged about his great skill and refused to take a net (fisherman's landing net - round hoop on a long pole - essential jerboa catching gear). He did take one headlamp and said he would purchase another but insisted he could catch the animals with his hand (demonstrating this in the universal body language of "cacha!" So awesome, I said go to it, and I'll look forward to seeing you tomorrow.  So the next day he and his rather outspoken wife show up with 5 animals but they weren't sure of the sexes. Since I'm only paying for the females, I checked and confirmed that 4 were in face female and counted out the appropriate amount of money for 4 animals. The woman was not pleased. She pleaded and whined and complained that it was sooooo hard to catch these 4 animals. (What ever happened to "cacha!"?) They were up all night collecting and fell off the motorcycle. (Though I later found out they only collected an hour or two). And she said The Fixer told her I was paying a higher price. I basically said, I know it's hard and handed over a net to the sheepish guy. I'm sorry you were promised more money, but that wasn't a promise I made. After 20 minutes of earnest pleading, her whole mood perked up when she happily took the money I had to offer (after suggesting a more progressive payscale), and cheerfully took off on the back of her husband's motorcycle. I'm sure she was just trying to pry more money out of me.

Fastforward two days. Today they came with 11 animals, and 9 were female. Again, I count out the appropriate amount of money, and she gets all upset because again The Fixer told her I was paying more. I said (through translation) if he promised you more, then he's responsible for the difference. I am the one with the money, so all negotiations have to go through me. They want to hire more people to help. I'm all for that since they seem to be hunting at a good site with lower pregnancy rates and younger embryos. So I told her (again through translation) that I would pay a higher price for the next 3 days to encourage them to hire people and let them get better at catching. Then after 3 days I would return to the original price for the first 10 animals, a bit more for the next 10, a bit more for 10 after that. Encouraging them to keep working at it. It's a full moon right now which makes it really tough to sneak up on a quick bouncy animal with better eyesight than us. She seemed okay with that but wanted to be sure this was *my* agreement, so she turned to me, grabbed my arm, and with earnest enthusiasm said in chinese "50 each for the next 3 days, then 40 for 10, 50 for 11+..." I do know my chinese numbers, so I was able to repeat what she was saying and convince her that we are indeed now on the same page. So hooray, more people to collect.

So then the Kazakhs showed up with their bounty from the night before. I also explained to them that the animals they were bringing me are pregnant with babies that are too old (I release anything where I can feel lumps in the belly, but I'm still paying for useless animals). He said maybe it's just because the ones that are really pregnant are slow and easier to catch. Ha! But I also explained that they seemed healthier and better fed that the ones the other folks were bringing which indicates to me that they are in an area with more vegetation and the animals have recovered more quickly from hibernation. So he said they would try a few different sites over the next few days to see if they hit a place with younger embryos. At the end of these negotiations he had a rather long chat with my colleague who then turned to me and explained that he wants a guide book. This is the older Kazakh man who made the original deal with me. He saw the field guide to the animals of Xinjiang that one of the students here has, and he is interested in learning about the animals he sees. He's also apparently the only one of this group of people who can read and write in Chinese (their second language), and thinks it could be useful to teach some of the younger men. I'm all for advancing education, so now I'm really excited about the next time I head back to Urumqi. I'm going to hit up the bookstore with a couple of the students and find a really nice and well-illustrated guide to the animals and maybe also another book or two that he might find interesting. They're being so helpful. Granted they're getting paid really well for these collections already, but they're such good partners in this endeavor that I'm happy to do some extra little thing to help.