Pink Boots and a Machete

by Mireya Mayor

  One night I suddenly felt a sharp pain on my right foot, and off the dim light of my headlamp I saw a small, black scorpion scuttling away. I let out a yelp. The ranger calmly placed a mug over the perpetrator and continued eating. Dr. Handsome helpfully pointed out that scorpions with small claws have the strongest punch, as they rely on the potency of their venom to kill their prey. I looked: It had small claws. The pain was unreal. My foot felt like it was being attacked with a jackhammer, and it was rapidly swelling. As sweat streamed off my forehead, I worried that I was going to lose consciousness. I remembered hearing somewhere that if you’re stung by a scorpion, you should crush it in a mortar and pestle and rub it into the wound. I wasn’t sure if this was for medical purposes or revenge. All I could do was treat the bite with antiseptic cream from my first-aid kit, shove painkillers down my swollen throat, and pray for the best.

  Despite my miraculously brief incapacitation, followed by an equally traumatic encounter with swarming wasps, the project was going well. We collected data documenting every morsel the sifakas ingested, their proximity to other group members, and the distance they traveled. We would sometimes spend hours looking up into the trees, a task that I found rather painful, given a neck injury I’d suffered as a cheerleader. I had opted not to have it surgically repaired and still had a bulging disk in my upper spine.

  Other times these acrobatic monkeys put us to the test; they may have found it humorous to watch us struggle up the rocky terrain as we chased after them. The area was covered in tsingy, razor-sharp peaks of limestone, demanding slow and deliberate climbing or else suffer the bloody consequences. The sifakas, which made their way across the treetops, often paused to stare at us below as if to say, “What’s taking you so long?”

  Back at camp one day I discovered we were out of food. Not almost out of food…completely out of food. That we were suddenly out of food came as a shock (how could we have even run low without anyone noticing?) but it’s been my experience that the Malagasy will not come to you with a problem until you have discovered it. It turns out that our park ranger had been cooking up extra portions while the rest of us were out chasing lemurs. With more than a month to go, we were in trouble. The following morning we set off bright and early to trek ten hours back to Zara’s village for more food. On the way we stopped in several other villages but came up with nothing more than six tomatoes, a few potatoes, and less than a kilo of rice. There was a drought and crops were sparse, leaving everyone worried about where the next meal was coming from.

  Desperate, we asked the ranger if he would be willing to head back to Diego Suarez. Not surprisingly, he was thrilled. The rest of us would continue to starve until he returned. I gave him money, some tomatoes for the journey, and a note to be delivered to Dr. Patricia Wright, who was hours south of us. In addition to being my advisor and now lifelong friend, Pat is a housewife turned world-renowned lemur expert, creator of Madagascar’s Ranomafana National Park, discoverer of two primate species, a diplomat, and a proud Jimi Hendrix fan. In fact, she had been on her way to a Hendrix concert when she ducked into a pet shop to escape rain and saw an owl monkey, a nocturnal South American primate that would become her passion. Having endured criticism for wearing miniskirts as a social worker and, after being a housewife, struggled to be accepted in the Amazon to study owl monkeys, she could not have been a more appropriate mentor for me. Pat in many ways is very much a cheerleader herself.

  In my letter I explained to Pat the hardships we were encountering, as well as our successes in finding and following the lemurs. I also explained that besides food we needed men. Not just any men, but George and Loret, the two top Malagasy lemur capturers who worked with her. Our experience with Perrier’s sifakas convinced us they were more than a mere subspecies of other sifakas. Their distinctive appearance, peculiar behavior, and geographic isolation led us to question the conventional wisdom that they were only a color variant of the species. With starvation setting in after weeks of an inadequate food supply and several days with no food at all, I wondered if we would ever find out.

  Later that week our ranger returned with food, George, Loret, and a letter from Pat. In the note she wrote, “Congratulations on your success! Enjoy the sausages and cheese. They are a gift from Michael Apted!” I was stunned. The Michael Apted, director of Gorillas in the Mist, the movie that had inspired me to follow in the footsteps of Dian Fossey, had sent me sausages and cheese?! What a fateful turn of events, I thought. This would be the second time the film director had rescued me. The first time was back at home with the film that changed my life. This time, with sausages.

  Apart from our food dramas and encounters with miners and scorpions, camp life could be pretty mundane. You get up, you drink sock coffee, you chase lemurs, you eat rice, and you go to sleep, so that you’re rested and ready to do it all over again in the morning. But this morning was different. I had washed my clothes down by the river the day before and laid them out to dry overnight just outside my tent. In the morning I grabbed the pants and slipped in one leg at a time. I wasn’t alone. I yelled so loud I swear it’s the reason we didn’t see any lemurs that day. Before I knew it, my pants were flying through the air and I was standing in my underwear in front of the entire camp. Cockroaches had nested in my pant legs, hundreds of them, and I could feel each one scurrying up and down my calves and thighs and hissing up a storm. It was the last time I put my pants on in the field without checking their contents first.

  Now it was time to try and save the lemurs by taking samples of their blood and tissue. That was the long-term goal; the immediate goal was to not kill any during capture. I worried about misfired darts. But George and Loret were the best, and Dr. Handsome and I had had experience capturing primates in South America. We loaded the injectable darts with Telazol, a sedative that would knock out the lemurs just long enough for us to collect samples before returning them to the trees. Next we identified a target, which had to be sitting in just the right position. It was the sifaka butt we were after, not a vital organ. Gun loaded, Loret would take aim, while George and I held a hammock to catch the animal plunging from the tree. For the most part, the sifakas cooperated, but one continued to hang on to the tree fully sedated. Just as we were deciding who would climb up and risk a wasp attack, the sifaka’s grip loosened and it came plummeting down. It landed on my head, uninjured.

  By now we had named the lemurs. One group became the Flintstones (Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty), while the other group was named after beers (Corona, St. Pauli Girl, Coors, and Bud), a sign of our alcohol deprivation. Fred was the oldest and by far my favorite. He had a very sweet disposition, and the abuse he took from the females made me feel sorry for him. Sadly, it was his remains I found on the trail several weeks later. Not much more than a tail and a clump of hair were left, evidence that a fossa had gotten him. His death took a toll on all of us, even Zara, who had initially thrown logs at the sifakas if they came too close due to his tribal belief that these all-black creatures, like our black cats, could bring bad luck. Only their existence on sacred ground enabled them to survive that superstition. Zara, like all of us, had grown to love these creatures as individuals. Until his passing years later, Zara would dedicate his life to the protection of sifakas, assisting research teams and educating his grandchildren on the importance of protection. His son Bendanalana is now one of the area’s most sought-after guides.

  As time went on during our study, and mutual trust grew, I often found myself in the middle of a sifaka group moving cautiously from one forest patch to the next. As if crossing a treacherous highway, the creatures would pause at the edge of an open patch where aerial and ground predators might lurk, look right, then left, then right again before moving ahead. Side by side we made the journey. I began to delight in my new role as the lady who walks with lemurs.

  Five

  Caught on Film

  NOVEMBER 20, 2000: I stood underneath the tree, my eyes fixed on the target. My hands held the rifle nervous
ly. With a film camera crew watching and recording my every sweat bead I felt the pressure mounting. I couldn’t miss. I closed my eyes and concentrated on not shaking. Then eyes wide open, I took the shot. The lemur jumped, reacting to the feel of a sharp dart hitting his butt. The race began. With little effort the animal glided through the trees while we incompetent humans tried to keep up. If we didn’t make it on time, he would plunge from the canopy to his death. Crap, that would be filmed, too.

  Years before I appeared on television pointing out little-known facts about snakes or describing the mating behaviors of gorillas, I was putting in the legwork. Anyone who knows me knows I am not a morning person. But no matter. In the field a typical day for me began around 5:30 a.m., when the first fingers of light started to reach into the forest canopy. Home was anywhere I could pitch a tent, more often than not in some distant jungle, and chances were that I hadn’t been able to communicate with my mother in months and she was worried to death.

  Yet the question I am most frequently asked is “How did you get to where you are?” This question refers not to my career as a scientist and explorer, but rather to my frequent appearances as a wildlife correspondent on television. Frankly, it was a lucky break that first got me on TV. And although there has certainly been a lot of luck and good timing throughout my career, I firmly believe that the harder I work, the luckier I get. The path was slippery and arduous, like the muddy, rugged terrains I’ve spent years traversing.

  After my first trip to the eighth continent, as Madagascar is sometimes called, I was soon a regular fixture there and could hold my own in Malagache, the local language spoken mostly in the villages. As a result of my track record with Perrier’s sifaka, I was entrusted by people at various conservation agencies, not least of all Russ Mittermeier, the president of Conservation International, with the laborious task of locating and gathering data on another species of sifaka, the ghost-white silky sifaka, an even more endangered species than the Perrier’s. In the January 2000 Time magazine article on endangered primates, the silkies were listed as the world’s sixth most endangered primate, and like their cousins in the north, no photographs of these animals existed. With only a few hundred left in the wild and none in captivity, they, too, had never been studied.

  I spent most of my time in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, waiting at MICET, the Malagasy sister office of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments at Stony Brook University, while my permits were being sorted. MICET provides logistical support for scientists and environ-mentalists working in Madagascar. More than once the staff there had bailed me out of trouble, and it was a great place to check email and meet just about any researcher worth knowing. A swirling hub of activity, the MICET office was where many expeditions and collaborations originated.

  On this particular day, I was waiting to meet with my advisor, Dr. Patricia Wright, who would be joining me on this next expedition. As I sorted through some field gear, a stocky, hairy young man dripping with brand-new North Face gear came stumbling into the office. He introduced himself as Mike Kraus. Mike had apparently shown up in Madagascar to study lemurs the way someone pops over to the zoo to look at zebras. He wasn’t aware of the long and difficult permit process or the challenges of getting to field sites. “I was mugged last night, and they took all of my money,” he moaned. He had wandered into one of the areas in Antananarivo where only a tourist would go wearing a fancy camera and a fanny pack full of money. Those items were no longer in his possession.

  Pat emerged from a meeting with permits in hand and announced that a car had been arranged to pick us up the next morning for the 18-hour, bumpy, kidney-crushing drive north. I introduced Mike and his predicament. In her usual generous and relaxed way, Pat invited him to join us, a move I hoped we would not regret. Also joining our expedition would be Felix, Safia, and Desire, Malagasy graduate students and guides; Loret, who had captured innumerable lemurs with Pat and me; Peter Tyson, a writer doing a story on our groundbreaking expedition; and Jacinth O’Donnell, a British wildlife filmmaker.

  With Land Rover fully loaded, we were squished like sardines in a can, but it was still more comfortable than my last taxi-bus experience, in which a runny-nosed toddler and a chicken were thrown onto my lap for eight hours. A Madagascar experience not to be missed. After months of preparation, we were finally on the road, and not just any road but the very artery of life here. Through the car window I watched the island’s hard-working people as they went about their everyday lives: women streaming to or home from the markets; uniformed children returning from school; herders with loaded carts pulled by zebu cattle; drivers in minibuses hustling passengers aboard. It was not unusual to see beggars no older than six or seven years with infants on their backs in the middle of the busy road. Most impressive were the men and women carrying enormous bundles of charcoal, sticks, or wheat in reed baskets perfectly balanced on their heads as they dodged traffic. Small bungalows and market stands lined both sides of the road. Past the traffic and into the hills lay fields of wheat, vegetables, and rice in various stages of cultivation. The fields are farmed by hand with primitive plows pulled by cattle. Also on the side of the road stood traditional brick-making furnaces and stacks of raw red bricks left drying in the sun. Most of the houses along this central road were made from the bricks and were a far cry from the shacks on stilts I was accustomed to seeing. From a distance, the little rust-red houses sitting in the hilly landscape evoked small villages in Tuscany.

  Our destination was Marojejy, a 60,150-hectare reserve in the northeast and one of the few places in the world where you can hike from a dense, vine-cloaked jungle to a treeless plain in the cloud forest just shy of 2,400 feet in altitude. Home to the silky sifaka. Our aim was to hike a single-track trail to a narrow opening on the mountain where the rare primates were known to visit. It would be a five-hour, strenuously steep climb up a slippery trail made even more miserable by the rain. But leeches between my toes were a small price to pay for being one of only a handful of researchers to see these sifakas, thought to be the most beautiful in the world. I would soon dub them the angels of Marojejy.

  Less excited was Mike Kraus, gasping for air in the back of the line all the way. Even the porters carrying the generator for Peter’s computer had flown past him. Several times during the trek I stopped to wait for Mike, whose bulky body struggled against the mountain’s slope. I suggested he remove some of his many layers before he succumbed to heat exhaustion. But he confidently refused, saying that his pricey, state-of-the-art, “breathable” clothing was designed for just this sort of trek. Well, he was a big boy entitled to make his own mistakes. As I stood aside and let the porters pass so I could check on him, I heard the frequent mention of “crazy vahza.” Not long after, from around the corner appeared Mike, wearing nothing but his boxers and hiking boots.

  “So the clothes didn’t breathe?” I said, ribbing him. Drenched in sweat, he could only gather enough breath to say, “Can I have some of your water?” Normally, on an expedition you guard your water like your life depends on it, since often it does, but I’m a bit of a camel and don’t require much to drink, so I handed him my almost full, pink water bottle. Seconds later he returned it. Empty. (The next year Mike returned on another expedition but almost never left his tent and went home early. Point being, not everyone is cut out for the explorer’s life.)

  Once we had made it to the plain, I collapsed, journal in hand, beside a waterfall plunging over a lip of stone. One false move on this slippery edge and I was toast, but the view was incredible. Treetops literally brushed the clouds. An ocean of forest rolled off into the distance. But no tree in Madagascar is safe. Sitting on the cliff’s edge, I could just make out bare slopes where the Malagasy had cleared hillsides to plant rice. Poverty and the ever increasing population have put tremendous pressure on the island’s dwindling forests. Slowly, they’ve been slashed and burned for rice fields. It’s what Malagasy ancestors did for centuries, but now less t
han 10 percent of the original forest remains. I have yet to find a place on the island where I could escape this harsh reality.

  Setting up camp on a small ridge, Pat and I shared a tent. As I am usually the only woman on my expeditions, the thought of girlie chitchat into the night was welcome. But by the time nature’s lights had gone out, we were too exhausted to talk; we listened to the nocturnal woolly lemurs just beginning their day, crawled into our sleeping bags, and passed out. Gab about boys and shoes would have to wait.

  The following morning I woke to the sound of cascading water, unzipping of neighboring tents, and clanging of metal pots. Our camp cooks, Nestor and Jean, had a fire going and water boiling for coffee and tea. Breakfast was a rice pudding–like fare mixed with raisins and condensed milk. By 6:30 a.m., when small rays of light began to creep through the forest canopy, a family of five silky sifakas appeared just across the stream. We gazed wide-eyed at the two-legged creatures for a quarter of an hour before they vanished into the forest. Flushed with excitement, I looked over at Pat and said, “This is one of the best days of my life.” I noticed she had a tear in her eye and knew she felt the same.