Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  Thankfully for them and us, the areas the tribes inhabit are far up in the headwaters of the Las Piedras. Down on the lower Piedras, where the station was located, the issue was keeping the loggers from killing all the animals. Logging teams are divided by jobs, with each man having a different position. Some men are cutters, some are cooks, some are transport experts; but rumbiadores are the men who strike out alone deep into the jungle to search for large mahogany, for they know the forest best, even among other natives. The rumbiadores also do the hunting.

  These expert hunters targeted species like peccary, agouti, spider monkey, howler monkey, tapir, and other mammals for food. But they would often take other species if available. With large groups of timber bandits traveling up and down its banks, the Las Piedras was put under heavy strain. In the lower reaches of the river you can no longer see large herds of peccary, or spider monkeys, both of which are favorites for dinner in a logging camp. The loggers effectively cleaned out many of the species they hunted, rendering them locally extinct. Along the banks of the Las Piedras and throughout much of the Madre de Dios the greed-driven massacre devastated wildlife. It was this devastation that Emma and JJ had been monitoring and working against at LPBS.

  Of the many hunting stories I would hear over the years working in the west Amazon, my favorites were always of those times when the wildlife fought back. One ex-logger told me of a day when he was out hunting on the Las Piedras, in pursuit of what he thought was a tapir. Tapirs are the largest mammals in Amazonia and bulls can grow well over five hundred pounds. Juveniles are born brown with light horizontal stripes, but as they mature they become uniformly gray. Their bodies are hairless and their faces end in a strange prehensile trunk, like a stumpy elephant. Tapir tracks are among the easiest to recognize of any creature in the forest, large and three-pronged, like a sassafras leaf. That is why I have always wondered how the ex-logger could fail to realize he wasn’t following a tapir.

  He said it was the excitement. The two dogs he was hunting with had caught a scent and sprinted out ahead. For nearly ten minutes a chase endured in which both of the dogs were continuously barking, but as the logger hurried to catch up, one of the dogs let out a pained yelp, then went silent. The chase had led man and animals into the winding trench of a forest stream. When the logger raced to see what had happened to his dog, he rounded a bend and came face-to-face with a full-grown male giant anteater.

  As long as seven feet from nose to tail, a giant anteater can stand and look a small man in the face. They have the largest claws in the mammal world and muscular forearms to power them. What the logger came upon was a gruesome scene: one of his dogs had already been gored, its entrails ripped out all over the ground. The giant anteater, he said, snatched up the second dog just as he reached the spot. It lifted the dog off the ground by the nape of its neck and pinched its spine, killing it, and then flung it aside. Next the anteater, still standing on its hind legs, advanced on the logger, slashing at him with five-inch-long black claws like scythes. According to the logger, he barely escaped with his life.

  Out of context, the logger’s story might sound like exaggeration, but in order to survive in the wild giant anteaters need to be able to fend off jaguars. Any large creature that can fend off the ‘pit bull’ of the big cats, a muscular 150-pound killing machine, needs to be equipped with incredible speed and the capacity for brutal violence. In 2007 a nineteen-year-old Argentine zookeeper named Melisa Casco was killed when a mother anteater slashed her stomach open in one stroke. In another story from the Madre de Dios, a hunter shot a male anteater, which retaliated by penetrating his abdomen and pulling out alternating fistfuls of intestines. When they found the man’s body his rib cage was empty.

  Salvador Dali, who was once photographed walking a leashed giant anteater in New York City, wrote that the species “possesses enormous ferocity, has exceptional muscle power, [and] is a terrifying animal.” In the regional parlance of the Madre de Dios giant anteaters are called oso-bandera-gigante, which literally translates to “bear, flag, giant.” The name is evidence of the confusion that ensues in trying to describe an animal with the strength of a bear, a pluming flag tail, and tremendous size. The giants are alternatively called tamandua gigante, borrowing the name of the smaller arboreal anteater and just adding the adjective gigante.

  Giant anteaters are the largest of the “Amazon claw” family, which includes sloths, armadillos, and anteaters. They walk on their knuckles to spare their valuable claws, which are used to fend off jaguars and to excavate ant and termite mounds. Their claws are a heavy-duty defense to compensate for their slender, fragile head. They have poor eyesight, a keen sense of smell, and no teeth. Along with their size, local legends surround them because the hind footprint of a young anteater is almost identical to that of a human child, with arch, toes, and heel, leaving delicate impressions in the ground. Because of their mystique and the fear that comes with it, fearful farmers who worry about losing their dogs, or their own lives, often kill them. It was exactly this scenario that unfolded on the Piedras in 2007.

  Just months from the time that Julio García Agapito was gunned down near Alerta, and in the same year Melisa Casco was gored by the anteater, I watched as a team of loggers drifted down Las Piedras. Our boat was also traveling downriver but much faster than the loggers’, and as we passed I could see that their hull was filled with the carcasses of many animals. I was glaring at them, lost in thought as we passed by.

  “Ay! Watch out!” JJ shouted, motioning to turn sharp right. He had also been watching the loggers and hadn’t realized that we had arrived. I leaned over the edge of the boat, pulling the motor’s steering bar toward my chest as we raced toward the shore. With a flat palm pumping the air JJ motioned for me to slow as we neared the bank. Then his palm sliced horizontal: cut the engine. I did and JJ hopped barefoot onto land as the boat gushed into the soft clay. “Bien hecho,” he said, smiling; well done. I was coming along decently as a motorista.

  Following my initial expedition on Las Piedras I had returned to the United States transformed. The anger and frustration I had built up in high school had dissipated in the jungle. I had returned home with photos, feathers, and stories I was eager to share with anyone who would listen. My relationship with my parents was back on track, and commuting to college allowed me to continue working and saving so I could concentrate on the thing that mattered more than anything else: getting back to the jungle. Though I had spent only a short time with Emma and JJ at Las Piedras on that first trip, the way I returned home you would have thought I was a Ph.D. who had studied in the Amazon for a century. I read the great explorer-naturalists like Wallace, Bates, Sprice, Shultes, and Munn; I studied species guidebooks. And I had difficulty carrying on a conversation about anything that didn’t relate to the Amazon.

  In my time at home I finished a semester at school with passing grades and managed to keep my word to Emma and JJ. Determined to join the fight to save Las Piedras, I had used my time at home to recruit enough volunteers for an entire expedition. It didn’t matter that they were all my friends: it was a group, and that is what JJ and Emma desperately needed. I was proud to be helping. Emma and JJ were the kind of people I had always dreamed of meeting as a kid, heroes bravely protecting limitless wildlife in the jungle—people who stood for something.

  JJ and I picked up right where we had left off months before, as student and teacher, and as friends. Together we brought the group on the two-day journey to the station, and settled into macaw observation and mammal transects. But this time the expedition was very different: Emma was in the United Kingdom with Joseph, which left just JJ and me to run the trip. I was now a guide. JJ was overjoyed that I had followed through on my promise and that I had retained everything he had taught me the first time around. He treated me like a second in command, a position I was proud to fill.

  JJ held the bow rope as the volunteers, including Noel and other friends from back home, disembarked onto the beach. Just
days into a two-week expedition we had brought the group downriver from the station to investigate a local farmer who, it was rumored, had shot a mother giant anteater. The farm was small, several acres that had been slashed and burned the previous year. In the cleared area were three small huts, a pigpen, and a field where corn and yucca grew. The jungle stood patiently at the limits of the field, waiting to reclaim what had been taken from it.

  In keeping with Peruvian etiquette, we were not able to get right down to business and ask the guy about the anteater, but instead had to act as if we just happened to stop by. JJ told the farmer and his wife that we had come to explore, and after they fed us a meal of fried peccary and rice, the farmer took us to investigate a nearby lake. He showed us the carcass of a mother black caiman that he had killed after it defended its eggs when he and his dogs had gotten too close. The croc had been more than thirteen feet long. The farmer also showed us the skeleton of a twenty-foot anaconda he had shot; it was also a female. “This asshole likes killing females, eh?” Noel asked me as we hiked. After spending our childhood adventuring in the woods back home, naturally Noel was among the first to come with me to Peru.

  That night we slept at the farm. JJ spent hours chatting with the farmer, exchanging stories, and tolerating the farmer’s pain-in-the-ass kid, who wouldn’t leave him alone. First JJ asked the kid to stop bothering him, but when the boy wouldn’t let up, JJ got angry. What can you do against a seven-year-old? When the kid ran by and yanked his hair, JJ had had enough. “You wanna play?” he asked with a twinkle in his eye. The idiot kid thought it was a game and said yes. JJ lifted the boy above his head and told him to hold on to a beam in the roof, which the child did. Then JJ walked away. Stranded and terrified, the obnoxious child burst into tears, holding on for dear life until someone heard him and came running. After that the kid left JJ alone.

  The next morning we awoke to a filthy yard bustling with chickens, dogs, cats, pigs, and ducks, that was covered in feces from all. While JJ and I prepared breakfast for the group, it was impossible not to notice one of the farm’s dogs. It was lying still, bleeding.

  We found out that the previous day, while hunting with its owner, the dog had chased a herd of peccary. The boars had surrounded the disoriented dog and plunged their fangs into her body. As we inspected her, there were dozens of gaping three-inch-deep holes all over her body, brimming with squirming maggots. I felt the color drain from my face, and I could see Noel’s hands trembling. We had never seen such hopeless suffering. The pain the small dog was in was heartbreaking; it could barely lift its head. The farmer laughed and said he expected her to die within the week. I asked the farmer why he didn’t just kill the dog and put it out of its misery. He said he didn’t want to waste a bullet.

  Noel and I talked and agreed that there was no way of saving the dog, and that to leave her alone to die slowly over the course of days was inhumane. We asked the farmer if we could put her down. The mother murderer didn’t care either way. So with heavy hearts Noel and I carried her into a field, under the shadow of the jungle beyond. I watched as he petted her, fed her, and made her last moments as comforting as he could. Then he stood and nodded to me. I held her head, whispering and stroking reassuringly as Noel brought an ax high over his head. The stroke cleanly passed through flesh and bone and into the earth. Death was instantaneous. We buried her and returned to the farm, where at last JJ got around to asking about the anteater.

  The farmer’s wife was excited to show us her newfound pet, and called out into the corn field: “Luluuuuuu.” We all looked at each other incredulously. There was no way an anteater was going to come when its name was called; but stalks of corn rustled and within moments a giant anteater emerged. “Mira mi tamandua pequeña!” she said. Look at my little tamandua.

  She was tiny, roughly the size of a beagle, with a tail as long as her body. Her bristly coat was gray and she had a thick Mohawk of white along the ridge of her back. Decorated with black bracelets and triangular flank markings, she was a beautiful animal. Trotting from the corn up toward our group, she ran straight for me. Simply out of some habit from beckoning my own dogs, I bent down to her and held out my hands. She stood on her hind legs and spread her arms. Again I reacted as if on autopilot and lifted her from the armpits like a child. She turned her long alien face toward mine and slurped a ten-inch tongue across my cheek. Everyone laughed, and someone took a picture. Noel and I looked at each other like What the hell is this thing? Even JJ had never seen a giant anteater so close-up.

  As our group fawned over the bizarre animal, the farmer’s wife explained that for the last month or so she had been feeding the anteater powdered milk mixed with water. The woman had used an old plastic container and stretched the spark-plug protector from a chain saw across the opening to form a nipple. She demonstrated how she fed the baby giant, and we all watched spellbound as Lulu curled a black claw over the woman’s hand, holding on as she ravenously gulped the milk.

  In the end it took almost two hours of slow, tactical conversation on JJ’s part to convince the woman to let us take the anteater. We were sure that if it stayed, her husband would sooner or later dispatch it; that is, if the dogs didn’t get it first. In the end she agreed, but only after a flashlight and half the contents of our boat’s gas tank had been parlayed. The fate of the tiny orphan was now in our hands.

  5

  The Giant

  God is really only another artist. He invented the giraffe, the elephant and the cat. He has no real style. He just got on trying other things.

  —PABLO PICASSO

  She was a monster. On the boat trip upriver Lulu had quietly latched on to Noel’s thigh and barely moved for two hours while he broodingly turned the pages of Heart of Darkness. The rest of us had made the hasty judgment that this animal was calm and sweet. Now back on the main deck of the station, though, she had become a terrorist.

  Upon returning from two days of camping, everyone hit the hammocks, which development Lulu seemed to find infuriating. As soon as she wasn’t in someone’s arms she ran toward the hammocks, her claws clip-clopping on the wooden deck. Galumphing up to my buddy Ben’s hammock, she stood on her hind legs and sank her claws into his stomach. Ben screamed and rolled out of the hammock as her razor claws sliced fabric and skin. Still on her hind legs, the anteater wheeled around and then chose her next victim. She made for JJ and slashed at him as well. JJ jumped to his feet with wide eyes and asked, “Que pasa, tamandua?”

  If you bred a hyper baby black bear with Edward Scissorhands, the result would be something similar to what we were dealing with. Though she was small, her claws were already three-inch-long black sickles that could tear through denim and skin with ease. She went from hammock to hammock attacking and slashing. Everyone was jumping, running, and laughing amid the onslaught. She seemed to be after anyone she could skewer. Here was the weirdest animal any of us had seen, something strange enough to be a creature from Star Wars, advancing angrily toward whomever she could find and slashing them to ribbons.

  When she came toward me I curled into a ball on the floor in mock terror, knees down, hands over my head. Lulu approached and stood on her hind legs, and a worried Ben warned, “Dude, be careful, she can really cut you, man!” I didn’t have time to move before she was on me. I felt a claw latch onto my shoulder, and then another on to my spine. For some reason, despite the pain, I stayed still and Lulu pulled herself onto my back, where she grunted, wiggled, snuggled in, and seemed to fall asleep instantly.

  Lifting my face from my hands, I looked up to see everyone staring, stunned. Suddenly it made sense.

  Female giant anteaters give birth one at a time, and share an intimate relationship with their newborns. The infants spend the first nine months of life on the mother’s back. Lulu almost certainly remembered holding on to her mother’s fur, riding through the jungle in safety. Though they begin eating ants after eight to twelve weeks, they continue riding and learning from mom for months. Only weeks ago Lul
u and her mother would have spent nights in the jungle curled tightly, newborn nestled in the center, both blanketed by the mother’s thick tail. For the last few weeks, however, she’d been on her own.

  We would learn that she needed to be draped over someone’s knee or lying on somebody’s chest at all times. If we neglected this need, she’d claw and scream until she got what she wanted. As a result, in the days and weeks that followed, I was rapidly forced to play the role of full-time mother anteater.

  On that first day, though, I carefully coaxed the tiny anteater from my back to my chest and sank into a hammock, shrugging to JJ that it seemed like I had no choice. He grinned understandingly and said he’d take care of dinner and other things for the night. Lulu grunted and purred as I stroked her coarse mane, eyes closed tight, seemingly soaking in the thrum of my rib cage on hers. Together the anteater and I slept. It was the start of a rare and profound relationship between human and animal. We spent the night fast asleep together in the hammock and the next morning went like this:

  I woke behind closed eyes and wondered where I was for a moment; something was shaking me. Cracking an eye open, I saw the elongated snout and eager eyes of Lulu inches from my own face. She had slept the entire night on my chest but now was ready to play. She could see that I was awake and wiggled with happiness, shot several quick slurps across my face with her tongue, and fixed her large front claws into my ribs to gain better position.

  I howled and tried to remove her black claws from my sides as quickly as possible. As my hands were busy with her claws, she capitalized on my vulnerability and dug her little black snout against my exposed ear and sent rapid-fire laps from her ten-inch, ant-grabbing tongue into my cranium. What a way to wake up.