Pecked to death by ducks

by Cahill, Tim

  PECKED TO DEATH BY DUCKS 4 I58

  below zero, and a twenty-mile-an-hour wind was driving snow before it on a horizontal slant.

  About the twelfth minute, Mike managed to get a hand up out of the water and salute the 140 horrified passengers who were shouting for him to hold on. Help was coming. It had to be coming. Mike dropped his arm back into the water, and skuas circled over his head. Skuas are the wolves of the Antarctic, and they prey on the vast penguin colonies there, pecking the eyes out of the sockets of infant birds, of the sick and dying. Mike Dunn was dying, and the skuas were circling.

  The Zodiacs are lowered by crane from the top deck of the Frontier Spirit. The drivers ride the boats to the water and then unsnap a simple hook when the Zodiacs are afloat. The Frontier Spirit was brand new, and the hooks that fasten Zodiacs to the crane had been equipped with a new "safety" clasp. The intent was to keep the Zodiacs from accidentally dropping off the crane. In fact, these safety clasps had frozen shut, so when Dunn's Zodiac hit the swell, it held fast. The combination of a tight line and a five-foot swell had dumped Dunn and another man into the water.

  The same thing happened to the first rescue crew that went after them, and there were now four people in the water. Steve Dawson, among others, was finally able to get a third Zodiac into the water. He could not see the drowning men, because of the high seas, and allowed passengers on the fifth deck, twenty feet above, to direct him. Nothing could be heard above the howl of the wind, and we simply pointed at the man nearest Dawson's Zodiac. We pointed all at once, in the same direction, like a drill team composed of stunned and horrified marchers.

  Dunn was rescued from the water after eighteen minutes. So were the others, all of them barely conscious and unable to move. Some time later, while they were being treated by the ship's doctor, Steve Dawson and I had dinner in the elegant dining room. We were pushing roast pheasant around on our plates, contemplating, in silence, this contrast of luxury and deadly apprehension. Then came an announcement. All four men were fine.

  Steve Dawson, who had done himself proud during the rescue, burst into tears.

  In the fifth-floor bar later that evening, loud applause rang out when Mike Dunn and the three other men appeared, walking a bit stiffly and ready for a snifter or two of Remy Martin. Several of us took a break from the festivities and walked around the fifth deck. Curtains of green smoke swept across the sky above. Dozens of passengers stood out on the decks, in 30-below weather, to watch the aurora australis color the star-strewn sky.

  It had been, I realized, a dazzling and savage trip. The first Antarctic landfall, in Cape Evans, had featured mortality and spectacle in about even measure: a cross on the hill and a watermelon snowfall. Not now. I looked at the luminous sky and tried to see it through Mike Dunn's eyes.

  keep these larvae warm and apparently succulent, the accomplished ice fisherman places them between the cheek and gum, like a plug of tobacco.

  It is this sort of thing, I believe, that has skewed Jim Harrison's attitude toward the sport. The novelist is a renowned gourmand.

  Or maybe it's the people who drive their vehicles right out onto the ice and fish who amuse Harrison. Every year, in the late fall and early spring, someone sinks his Blazer. Others tow small icehouses out onto the lake, complete with wood-burning stoves, and they sit on wooden benches, inside, and stare into small holes where very nearly somnolent perch drift listlessly by succulent maggots. You need to "jig" the perch, which is to say, lift the bait up and down in front of them. Sometimes the perch take the maggot.

  Ice fishermen, dressed like winos in layer upon layer of jackets and slacks, drink schnapps, play pinochle, watch football on battery-operated TVs, and fail to notice when the red flags snap up on the tip-ups they've installed outside the shack. Tip-ups are fish-ambush devices, small wooden contraptions attached to a line through the ice. The bait, a minnow, swims about, and when a big fish hits it—a northern pike or a muskie—a red flag pops up. In theory, an ice fisherman sees this through the fluttering plastic window of the shack, dashes outside, and hauls in the fish of a lifetime, hand over hand.

  In practice, of course, the fishermen never notice the tip-up flags. They are playing pinochle, or dangling spittle-soaked larvae in front of a mesmerized four-inch perch. Some of them are out engaged in political campaigning: On certain lakes, hundreds of fishing shacks are set out side by side, in a kind of town grid, and a mayor is elected. Other men may be engaged in more distracting activities: It is said that an incredibly hardy band of hookers work the frozen ice cities.

  In Montana a cross-country skier may drill a hole in a frozen lake and catch a good-sized lake trout on a piece of canned corn. That's what I'd always heard. On the morning of the day I was to have dinner with Jim Harrison, my friend John Olson and I strapped snowshoes on our boots and made for Hidden Lake,

  which was nestled in the peaks, at nine thousand feet, about three thousand feet above the trailhead. We traded off carrying the ice auger, a fairly light plastic drill three and a half feet long and edged in surgical steel.

  Snowshoes are not my favorite form of winter locomotion. They're okay on the flats and all right if the path goes directly up or downhill. On steep side hills it is hard to set an edge with snowshoes. A man tends to fall; he rolls up in a big snowball, with the blades of the auger bouncing erratically, now over there, now inches from his eyes. This process suggests certain unpleasant headlines:

  MORON, SLASHED BY OWN AUGER, BLEEDS TO DEATH.

  Finally, at three in the afternoon, we hit the lake, which was a frozen expanse just below a series of jagged spires that formed the top of the range. The sun was hidden behind a peak, and the sky was gray. The temperature stood at 20 below zero, and the wind was blowing about forty miles an hour.

  John and I stood on the ice, hunched over in misery, staring at a hole it had taken us twenty minutes to drill. The gray water was the same color as the sky above.

  "Has the lake been stocked?" I asked through gritted teeth. Sometimes the Forest Service stocks the high lakes with rare golden trout. Sometimes they are stocked with rainbow or brown or brook trout.

  "Don't know," John said.

  "Just cuts then?"

  Cuts are cutthroat trout, our native species.

  "Don't know."

  Sometimes the high lakes do not contain fish.

  "You don't know if there are any fish here?"

  "Came here to find out."

  The wind was picking up the powdery snow, and it swirled around us in a waist-high ground blizzard.

  What we discovered, on this day, was that there seemed to be no fish of any kind in the lake. (This perception may have been caused by frozen maggots.)

  163 A THE NATURAL WORLD

  It was dark by the time we got back to the truck, and late by the time we got home. A quick shower and I was on the road. The hosts for the dinner with Harrison, longtime friends, said that the milelong road to their home had not been plowed. I was to bring my four-wheel-drive vehicle.

  Now, over the years, I have been to this house dozens of times, perhaps hundreds, but in the dark and snow, I missed the turn and drove two miles overland, through crusty drifts, when it occurred to me that the truck was behaving badly. I stopped, with the engine running, and steam erupted from under the hood. It was coming from a rupture in one of the radiator hoses. The wind was howling at sixty miles an hour.

  I climbed on top of the cab of the truck and took my bearings. The lights of the house I wanted were off in the distance, about five miles through the snow. I was out in the middle of a field owned by a local rancher who was notoriously inflexible about trespassing. The wind was blowing the steam in such a way that an inch of ice had already formed on the windshield. There was ice in my beard and ice coating the entire front of my body.

  One of the many things I thought at that moment was that I was going to miss dinner with Jim Harrison and would not be able to defend the intelligence of ice fishermen.

 
; Instead, I planned to stand there in the freezing steam for another few hours and mold myself into a noble ice sculpture, a heroic figure atop a disabled vehicle, a seasonal tourist attraction: the Moronic Sportsman.

  165 A THE NATURAL WORLD

  The tarpon's epic journey into one of the most dense and isolated jungles on the face of the earth takes them past the silent ruins of the ancient Mayas, past the massive stone palaces and ball courts of this most advanced pre-Colombian culture. The tarpon spawn in the heart of the low-lying jungles of El Peten, where, in the first thousand years after Christ, the Mayan culture soared to its greatest heights.

  Only in the past few years have sport fishermen discovered Lake Petexbatun and the tarpon it contains. Only in the last few years have professional archaeologists penetrated the depths of the nearby jungles and begun excavation of the Mayan ruins.

  I jumped at the chance to visit a lodge on Petexbatun Lake and sample both the tarpon and the ruins. A good part of my eagerness had to do with the fact that while others have caught tarpon on spinning rods or casting rigs, no one, as far as I knew, had ever caught a Petexbatun tarpon on fly-fishing gear. With a little luck, and some scientific angling, I would be the first. Fly-fishing is a snobbish affair; a true fly-fisherman, a purist, would rather not catch fish at all if he can't catch them on a fly.

  I packed my rods and reels, my collection of saddle hackle flies from Dan Bailey's, my jungle boots, my books about the Maya— The Maya by Michael D. Coe is probably the best introductory text—and caught the flight to Guatemala City. Aviateca, the Guatemalan national airline, runs a series of remarkably informal flights to the city of Flores in the center of the state of El Peten. There was a curious amalgam of passengers on the flight: prosperous-looking Guatemalan businessmen on their way to make lumber or oil deals in Flores, elderly tourists and hippie backpackers on their way to the great Mayan temple complex at Tikal, and a number of Indians in sandals, some of whom carried turkeys in wooden crates.

  At the Flores airport I was met by representatives of Panamundo, the Guatemalan travel service that owns the lodge at Lake Petexbatun. We stowed the gear in the back of a four-wheel-drive Scout and headed south for Sayaxche. The map said it was forty miles, over an all-weather road, but the drive took two and a half hours. The road was a cruel joke, a rutted wash-

  board, insidiously studded with small, kidney-jolting rocks. A fine, drizzling mist splattered the windshield, and the rain intensified the odor of the jungle, which rose like an endless green wall on both sides of the road. It was not an unpleasant odor; it was, in fact, rather sweet, like syrup and day-old cut flowers combined with a certain distant muskiness.

  At Sayaxche, on the Rio Pasion, we transferred the gear into a large, canoelike vessel dug out from a single immense mahogany log. The boatman was named Conrado, and he was joined by Liko, a representative of Panamundo. Conrado yanked the twenty-horsepower outboard into life, and we set off up the Pasion and into the Rio Petexbatun. The water was dark, black, almost like oil, but with no hint of thickness. The river flowed so slowly that it seemed almost still, and the black water glittered with a metallic sheen. Sometimes, the reflection of thick, low clouds loomed up out of those dark, gleaming waters and, near shore, the river shone with the myriad shades of green in the jungle wall. The odor here was more intense—Liko pointed out orchids growing in absurd profusion—and this heavy greenhouse fragrance was combined with a new smell, something a touch brackish and bracing, like a saltwater marsh. The river was a pleasure after the torture of the road. Tiny deer drank from the river, turtles slipped into the river before us, and snowy egrets rose ahead of the boat. The air was thick, warm, and floral, and we were accompanied by a constant symphony of unfamiliar birdsong.

  The sun began to set, unseen behind a dark layer of clouds. Conrado steered the dugout through a small wall of reeds, and suddenly we were on Lake Petexbatun, a small body of water, still and black as onyx against the overhanging greenery of the jungle wall. There were a few thatched-roof huts set in clearings along the shore, and the flickering light of kerosene lanterns shone through the glassless open windows. The sun sank below the clouds, and its light set them aflame so that their color glistened, in the stillness of the lake, and Petexbatun seemed, for a moment, like a great, blood-warm reservoir of light and color in the darkness of the jungle.

  Presently, Conrado pulled into a break in the jungle wall. Two

  dogs erupted into a furious crescendo of barking and yelping as we tied the boat to a tree. A thin, elderly black man stood behind the dogs. His name was Albert, and he escorted us along the stone path to the Petexbatun Lodge.

  It was a thatched-roof affair, very much like the huts we had passed—same style, same materials, same workmanship—except that it had two stories and seemed much sturdier. Albert took us up to the second story. My room had a bed, a foam mattress, and a kerosene lantern.

  Albert noticed two bottles of rum among my gear—we had been advised that the old caretaker took an occasional dram— and escorted us downstairs for dinner and a drink. He fried some catfish he had caught on fixed lines. The fillets were perfect: Albert is an open-fire gourmet.

  He was also something of a raconteur. Originally from Belize (formerly British Honduras), Albert spoke an eloquent nineteenth-century English with a Caribbean lilt. "We has some heavy fishes in this lake, mon. Ah, they come in on first flood, in September." Albert spoke with the wisdom of age, and, as the night progressed, with the animation of rum. He introduced us to the dogs, Lassie and Jet, and to the parrots, Marie and Lorenzo. Albert declared that Lorenzo spoke perfect Spanish. "He says, 'Lorenzo, lorito bonito.' " The words mean "Lorenzo, pretty little parrot," and when, after an eternity of coaxing, Lorenzo finally squawked, "Loreeko loreeko loreeko," Albert smiled like a proud parent. Lorenzo would take your finger along with a cracker, and he had a voice like a buzz saw tearing through a pine knot. Albert, of course, spent most of his time at the lodge alone with this cantankerous bird.

  Albert has been caretaker, cook, and resident fishing guru at the lodge for ten years. The place was built by archaeologists who used it as a base during their study of nearby and recently discovered ruins. Albert said he had enjoyed the company of the archaeologists. "Ah, they brought wines of the finest variety from the land of France," he informed me grandly. I felt a bit shabby with my two bottles of local rum. "Whisky from Scotland," Albert went on. "Oh, we had some fine times. . . ."

  The night was cool—incredibly, there were almost no mos-

  quitoes or other noxious stinging insects—and it was pleasant to listen to the whisper of rain on the thatched roof and on the jungle canopy. It sounded like sustained applause, like an ovation heard faintly from a distance. Albert held forth on the proper method for catching tarpon, on the Mayan ruins, on the foolishness of civilized man. There was something almost unbearably romantic about sitting there with my glass of rum, quite comfortable in the midst of one of the thickest and most remote jungles on the face of the earth.

  The days were alternately sodden and bright. Heavy tropical clouds formed and reformed over the water. They were dark, operatic, even Wagnerian, these clouds, quite beautiful in their own way. For several hours each afternoon the clouds gave way to blue skies and welcome sunshine that glittered off beaded rainwater on the vegetation. Occasionally, drifting near shore in Con-rado's dugout, we'd spot large tarpon, rolling indolently. The fish are air-breathers, and they surface much like dolphins, their silver scales stark against the darkness of the water.

  Conrado would paddle us into the area, and I'd cast blind into the darkness, while Liko threw out a handline Albert had lent him. The fishing snob in me regarded the handline as unscientific, primitive; Liko couldn't understand why a man would fish with gear that was obviously too light for the fish he hoped to catch. I spent some time explaining the superior and scientific aspects of fly-fishing, but it didn't make any difference: Whether our methods were snobbish or savage, neither of us caught fish. So
one day when the rains came again, misting gently over the lake, we decided to visit the old Mayan site called Aguateca.

  It was a half-hour ride to the other side of the lake and another fifteen minutes of threading our way through narrow, bayoulike channels until we reached the trail. We walked for half an hour, straight uphill, until we found ourselves on a rocky ridge that overlooked a great green marsh choked with waterfowl.

  Aguateca, first discovered in 1957, has six temples that seem to belong to the jungle: odd, almost rectangular mounds, twenty to thirty feet high, covered over with the tangle of the jungle, with wrist-sized vines and twisted jungle trees. During the last thou-

  sand years of solitude, wind-driven leaves and other debris had settled on the temples, settled so thickly that they formed a sort of soil as they decomposed. This soil took the seeds of the jungle so that it was difficult to tell the temples from the forest itself.

  At this particular site several stelae had apparently stood free in front of the temples. Stelae are stone monoliths, shaped rather like the tablets Moses brought down from the mountain. They stand six feet high or more. Carved into the rock are the images of priests and warriors. These stylized figures are generally accompanied by a kind of hieroglyphic writing that has yet to be fully deciphered. It is the stelae that the archaeologists find most useful in interpreting the vanished culture of the Mayans, and the archaeologists who stayed at the Petexbatun Lodge had uncovered and pieced together a number of evocative stelae at Ag-uateca.

  I stared for a time at the stela labeled No. 2. It depicted a man in battle dress: He held a pike similar to those carried by Europeans in medieval times, and his shield was decorated with a terrifying and inhuman face. Oddly, this warrior, who seemed to be standing on the back of a crouching slave, was staring through a small stone circle. Could it have been some sort of lens? A telescope? The idea of a telescope in the middle of the jungle sometime around a.d. 700 set the mind spinning, sent gooseflesh rising up the spine even in the heat of the jungle.