Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  I lifted her off my chest as a half dozen more whacks of the tongue hit. With hind feet on my stomach and front claws safely around my thumbs, I held her in a semi-standing position, careful that my face was just out of tongue’s reach. She bobbed her head and flung her tongue in all directions, seemingly thrilled with herself after a well-staged wake-up attack. I placed her on the deck and she stretched before trotting into the kitchen, where she could hear the others preparing breakfast and smell her bottle being mixed.

  Over the next two weeks JJ and I continued to lead the expedition, and everyone at the station learned and fell in love with the little anteater. We all took turns feeding her, napping with her, and playing with her. But when the expedition ended, it was time to make some decisions.

  Originally the plan had been for JJ to take everyone downriver and I would stay at the station to care for Lulu. In another two weeks JJ and Emma would be back with more volunteers. That meant I’d be living in the jungle alone with the anteater in the interim. But feeding Lulu each day had depleted our entire milk supply, and I’d coincidentally caught a nasty fever. In the end I opted to travel downriver with everyone else to Puerto Maldonado to get medication for me and milk for Lulu, and while I was there, to see my friends off. But I was left with a serious problem: how to get back to the station.

  On a boat with JJ, Emma, and a group of volunteers, Las Piedras was an exhilarating river to navigate. To travel it alone, at just nineteen years old, when it was all so new and still foreign, was another story.

  We left Lulu with a native guy we’d hired named Pedro, and made for Puerto. But in town JJ was busy running around doing legal stuff, trying to fend off the armed men he and I had run into months ago. He had taken the matter to court and was at a crucial stage, which meant I was on my own. JJ and Emma’s struggle to maintain Las Piedras had put them in the red in terms of cash, and their decade-long relationship had become similarly tense, fraying under the strain.

  My mission, however, was focused on one thing: caring for my little tamandua. The day after we had come downriver, after all of my friends had flown out, my fever was mostly gone and JJ dropped me off on the banks of the Madre de Dios River, across from the Las Piedras’s mouth, and wished me good luck. It was my first time traveling alone through the jungle.

  I spent hours feeling obtuse as passing gold miners and loggers stared at me. I tried to find boats with families, and would use the full extent of my Spanish to ask them if they were going “arriba Piedras,” up the river. It took several hours of trying but eventually I found one group who waved me aboard. I hadn’t fully beaten the fever and was feeling sick and a little scared as the boat left the world behind and was swallowed by the ominous jungle mouth of Las Piedras. Something in me didn’t feel right. I admit that I repeatedly thought of my anteater, and told myself insistently that everything would be fine. I was too young at the time to know that my gut is almost never wrong when it comes to sensing doom.

  At first the people on board eyed me cautiously, not knowing what to make of the stranger in their midst. The women kept their children close and the men were guardedly stern. They must have been wondering why this gringo would be going into the jungle where there were no hotels, stores, roads, or anything really. Was he loco? It seemed like the entire crew did nothing but stare at me for the first hour of travel, until I bent over the side of the boat and filled my water bottle to drink. Instantly they began whispering to one another. Repeating what JJ had always said after drinking river water, I turned to them, smiled, and said, “Que rico Piedras,” essentially: delicious Las Piedras water!

  Once they saw me drink, they all smiled and the tension broke. In years to come, intentionally drinking from the river, and making a show of loving it, was a first step many, many times in gaining the trust of local people. Because everyone in the Madre de Dios knows that as a rule the gringos don’t drink the river water, when one does, the local consensus seems to be that he or she must be all right. The truth is that back home in New York I often long for a gulp of Amazon water. On the boat that day I kept thinking, Thank you, JJ!

  The atmosphere on board the large canoe changed entirely. Inquisitive children inspected my bag and person, and one woman with kind, hooded eyes offered me salted bush meat for lunch. The family was made up of two husbands, two wives, an old woman, and half a dozen kids; the guy driving seemed to be an uncle. Though they didn’t speak a word of English and I knew only a few words of Spanish, we communicated well. The kind-eyed woman and her husband seemed entertained by me. They were as curious about me as I was about them, and they asked me many questions, including why I was going up the river. It must have seemed strange to them. I could only smile. They shared their food with me, mostly rice and yucca, and took great pleasure in pointing out wildlife. At night we camped on a beach beneath the stars.

  We traveled all day the second day, and the second night it was already dark when we pulled ashore. The uncle had been driving and nodded in approval when I hopped off the front of the boat to tie us to shore, again demonstrating what JJ had taught me. I walked a few paces along the beach to pee as the family clamored in the boat; I assumed they’d be there when I got back.

  When I walked back to the boat it was gone, and so were the people. So was my backpack. For a long moment I stood in the dark, dumfounded. It was one of those moments when you doubt what your eyes see. Had I missed something, or did I just get robbed? The river rushed by and the jungle towered above, indifferent to my turmoil. I was nineteen years old and alone in the Amazon. I should have known something like this would happen. “Hello?” I called out, but no one replied. For about ten minutes I stood in complete shock, in complete darkness.

  “Señor!” a voice called out. I turned and could make out the shape of a child; it was a girl no more than ten years old. She was barefoot and naked save for something around her waist, and held out her hand to me. Still dumbfounded, I took it and followed. She led me through the jungle on a path, though I don’t know how she saw. It was pitch black out. She held my hand the entire time as I stumbled along, fireflies and bioluminescent fungus glowing in the darkness like alien Christmas lights. We walked for almost ten minutes, far from the river, before I was able to make out firelight ahead.

  We emerged into a clearing where a dozen thatched huts stood close to one another. In the center was a fire, around which several people sat cross-legged on the ground. As we walked through the huts, sparsely illuminated by the firelight, the village enveloped us. Beings moved in the shadows all around and from hollow doorways I felt the curious stare of unseen eyes. The little girl led me to the back of one hut, where I recognized the family I had traveled with. One of the men walked up to me, gave a hushed chuckle, and patted me on the back as if to say there you are!

  It was barely nine o’clock but to people who live by the rising and setting of the sun this was the middle of the night, and he pointed to where I could sling my hammock. They had also carried my backpack from the boat. Once I had climbed inside, the kind-eyed woman from the boat who had offered me lunch approached. She advanced with an expression of sage understanding and placed her palm on my forehead for a long moment. Smiling warmly, she said something in Spanish before turning to go to bed. The motherly gesture was comforting; it was as if she could see how out of place and thinly stretched I was.

  For a few hours I stayed awake, too awed by my surroundings to sleep. I watched the group around the fire, illuminated in orange light. This was a village that looked as villages in Amazonia must have for thousands of years: split-bamboo walls, palm thatching, and balsa cord ropes and hammocks; water buckets made from gourds were placed by roof corners to collect clear rainwater. Monkeys lay curled in the shelter beneath the thatched roofs, and more than one blue-and-yellow macaw slept quietly on some perch or another. Built on stilts to escape the floods of the rainy season, small huts for individual families were scattered about, with the occasional communal longhouse. Everything was entirely f
rom the jungle.

  The chorus of frogs and insects in the jungle night was omnipresent and overpowering, playing in pulsating waves as an old man sang softly. Huddled in my hammock, I took in the dark world, acutely aware of my surroundings. Traveling alone through the Amazon on a mission to save a baby giant anteater . . . If this was not the adventure I had always dreamed of, nothing was.

  The following day, before dawn, we left the village and battled the rapid current of the river until evening, when we arrived at La Piedras Station. I hopped off the boat and thanked everyone aboard. They had taken me on a days-long trip, shared their food, and cared for me. As the boat pulled away, leaving me onshore, they waved and smiled warmly, and I did the same, dearly wishing I knew the words to thank them. Once they had gone, I ran along deserted trails toward the station through the jungle night and found Lulu in her box. After days apart we embraced and spent the remainder of the night in a hammock dozing.

  The next morning Lulu woke me up with her signature attack, and I cringed as my morning brain-cleaning came in rapid slurps. Then she and I set out exploring. Being at the station without Emma, JJ, or anyone else was incredible. I was feeling as good as ever after surviving my journey upriver and being reunited with my anteater, and was glowing with the reality that I had two weeks ahead of me to simply soak in the jungle and enjoy my strange new friend.

  On that particular day we had walked for hours on and off trails, at one point encountering a large group of spider monkeys moving through the treetops. I removed my shoes for increased stealth as Lulu and I stalked below the troop of long-limbed primates. They were calmly foraging in the crown of a large strangler fig when the rumble of peccary registered to my ears. Crouching, I held the anteater close. As Noel and I had learned a few weeks earlier from the poor gored dog, peccaries can be dangerous.

  What we were about to witness was an interaction between several key species of the Amazonian landscape: spider monkeys, peccaries, strangler figs, and huicungo palms. The strangler fig that the spider monkeys were perched in is one of the strangest trees on earth. A gigantic and deadly species, figs occur in many tropical regions, and in many locations they are crucial for the surrounding ecosystem. The reason they are so integral is their value as food, shelter, and structure within the forest. They produce fruit at odd times of the year, like the dry season, when most other plants are barren. Out of more than fifteen hundred species of plants, only about a dozen, or roughly 1 percent, produce fruit during the driest months, and none in greater abundance than figs. These select plants support everything from minuscule birds to twenty-pound spider monkeys, fruit bats, and myriad other arboreal species. These and other animals can get as much as half of their diet from figs, depending on the time of year. But it is the fig’s reproduction that is its most fascinating trait.

  They are pollinated epiphytically, which means that they use the branches of other trees like flowerpots to grow from. The jungle is adorned with thousands of varieties of epiphytic plants, orchids being one, that grow in this way. When a monkey or bird defecates after eating the fig’s fruit, they often deposit seeds in the crown of a tree. Epiphytic plants latch on and use the collected rainwater and decomposing leaves to survive. But the strangler fig is not content simply to live on another tree; instead it wants to overwhelm it.

  From its perch the seed begins to send down roots. They grow from the top down and thereby shortcut the struggle for light that almost every other tree species endures in the jungle. These roots travel down the host tree’s trunk until they reach the forest floor. The organism then kicks into high gear and begins attacking its host tree from above and below. The long, slender roots grow in girth and multiply in number, surrounding the trunk of their host, while above, the fig begins to slither out onto the branches of the existing tree to unfurl leaves of its own that outcompete those of the original tree. The roots of the fig by this time are so massive and numerous that when the host tree rots and disintegrates, they maintain structure. Mature figs stand as hollow columns stretching up to the canopy. Tangled and vast, they provide habitat for innumerable species of mosses, lichens, insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and on and on. On this day it was spider monkeys.

  The monkeys in the strangler fig were clearly intrigued by the approaching army of boar. Emma had explained that peccaries are extinct throughout many of the regions where they once existed, including Las Piedras, because they are so prized by hunters and hungry mahogany loggers. So having herds of one-hundred-plus individuals inhabiting Las Piedras was an achievement. Lulu seemed to have the good sense to stay quiet as the pigs approached. The rumbling of the earth as they passed was something akin to the vibrations of a freight train. The bass of their grunts was resonating in my chest, their tooth clacking and the squeals of the young echoing through the forest.

  Thankfully the hogs moved past us, to below where the spider monkeys were feeding. The peccaries were interested in feasting on the strangler fig fruit that the monkeys were dropping. They were also chomping on the fruit of huicungo palms. Huicungos are very different than strangler figs: they are a small- to mid-sized palm in the Astrocaryum family that dominates the interior of the canopy so profoundly that it is the second-most abundant tree in much of its range. The key to its success lies in its ability to grow well in low light, and the armor of savage spines that protects them. From two to seventeen inches they jut from the tree’s main trunk in the thousands, needle sharp. They are jet black and perfectly straight, and so thin that even the slightest encounter will send them plunging into your body. This defense makes them impossible to approach, let alone climb, and keeps them safe during their slow growth. Over the years I have seen dozens of people get skewered through their shoes, and on a few occasions seen a spine completely impale a finger or foot. It is not uncommon for me to work tips out of my feet even back home in the United States, months after leaving the field.

  As the monkeys moved through the canopy, dropping figs and huicungo fruit, the peccaries feasted. It is in this way that the large black primates and bombastic pigs help shape the landscape of the jungle; without the monkeys and peccaries, many trees would not have the opportunity to reproduce successfully; without the trees, the monkeys would have no food and no home. But it’s not solely about growth; it’s also about control: studies have shown that in areas where peccaries have been hunted out, the nasty huicungo palm spreads uncontrollably, dominating and altering the composition of the forest.

  John Muir famously wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe,” a statement that in the Amazonian context is more immediate reality than philosophical musing. As biologist John Terborgh put it: “Subtract figs from the ecosystem, and the whole thing can collapse.”

  After Lulu and I had watched the monkeys and pigs for some time, the monkeys seemed to become enraged at the hogs below and started showering down sticks and fig fruit. The peccaries roared with insult and crashed about, making as much noise as possible as they looked up at the monkeys. Some of the lanky-limbed primates came surprisingly low in the trees for better accuracy, and launched whatever ammunition they could find at the black pigs, while cursing loudly. In years since I have never seen the two species interact in this way.

  My observation of the scene ended when a large branch snapped under one monkey’s weight and spun onto the ground with a powerful thwack. I had placed Lulu on the ground by that point. She reacted in terror to the nearby impact and bolted for the safety of my arms. I was still looking up with wonder when she leapt off the ground and onto my leg, her black claws piercing the denim and flesh. I yelped in pain.

  The peccaries realized how close I was to them and ran. Stampeding in a din of crashes and grunts, they barreled off into the jungle, while above the monkeys retreated to higher branches. Our cover was blown.

  Part of my job every day while living with Lulu was not only to make sure she was fed, but also to encourage her to eat ants. I had
no idea if this was something she would do naturally, or if it was something her mother would teach her.

  In the Amazonian ecosystem, ants alone can make up as much as a third of the total biomass of the landscape, roughly 30 percent of all living organic matter. That total includes everything in the ecosystem from termites, bees, and flies to mammals, and even trees; everything alive. It is no wonder then that giant anteaters are so at home. In a strange way they are similar to humpback whales: both species have unique physical adaptations that allow them to exploit the surplus of tiny invertebrate caloric opportunities that are off-limits to other carnivores. While a jaguar has to fight and kill for almost every calorie earned, the anteater has the luxury of jogging through the jungle, sampling the endless buffet. A giant anteater’s diet requires a raw protein intake that resembles the dietary needs of an obligate predator (i.e., animals restricted to a carnivorous diet), like a jaguar, tiger, or crocodile. But they do not have to “hunt” and don’t even have teeth. Instead they have one very special tool, an evolutionary key to the city that grants them access to rapid arachnid consumption: their tongue.

  A giant anteater’s tongue can be as long as two feet, extending deep into the ground in rapid slurps, as I learned from Lulu’s brain-cleaning morning wake-ups. They have specialized firing muscles and active salivary glands that power the tongue and keep it sticky. The combination of their excavating claws, long nose, and even longer tongue makes it difficult for ants and termites to hide. They are voracious eaters—which is why it scared me that Lulu only seemed interested in milk.

  The plan was to rehabilitate her so that she could one day live in the forest, but even in my care her future was far from certain. For one thing, back in those days I knew nothing about what baby anteaters need to survive.