Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  With no communication to the outside world, I could only hope that anteaters produced milk that was roughly the same percentage fat as the crappy little bag of evaporated milk that we had bought from Puerto Maldonado. The chemistry of milk between mammals can vary greatly. Species like hooded seals produce a 65 percent fat content, while some whales produce 45 percent. To put that in perspective, humans have a 4.5 percent fat content and cow’s milk has between 3.5 and 5 percent (depending on the breed). The purpose of milk in large mammals is to give young the high-fat and high-energy boost to go from infancy to efficiency as rapidly as possible. If the milk I was giving Lulu didn’t meet her needs, I worried, she might not grow properly, or worse, might not survive at all. Anyone who has cared for orphaned wildlife knows that the odds are always against success.

  I knew that I would have to work carefully on Lulu’s diet if she was going to survive, let alone grow into the six-foot giant she could one day be. I wanted to get her on ants as soon as possible. To make it easier for her to get the protein she needed, I made mixtures of milk, mashed bananas, and crushed ants. These she always accepted with joy. It looked like a revolting ice-cream shake with squirming black sprinkles.

  I wanted her to be able to eat ants on her own, though, and recognize them as a food source, and so I would take her on walks through the forest, not as a human, but as an anteater. On my hands and knees alongside Lulu, I plodded through the jungle. She was noticeably happy to see me at her level, and stayed close. From my ground-level vantage point I was afforded a chance to experience the way the little tamandua took in the world. We traveled locally, one of us looking utterly ridiculous, for some time. At the base of one tree was a large brown termite nest that appeared to be the perfect place for a first lesson. Crawling alongside it, I made a show of sniffing loudly at the mass and inspecting it as an anteater would. Lulu joined in with enthusiasm, poking her long snout in under mine.

  Inside the smooth exterior of the nest were tens of thousands of termites, calmly patrolling the labyrinthine passageways of the mound. They had no idea what was about to hit them.

  I took two fingers and bored into the wall of the mound, instantly exposing several hundred scurrying bodies. Lulu didn’t have to be shown what to do next. Latching her long black claws deep into the mound, she tore it in two. It was as devastating as Godzilla destroying Tokyo. As the termites scrambled in pandemonium, I pictured the event from their perspective, looking up as the nose of a monster swept overhead like a vacuum of death; slow-motion giant sounds as an alien tongue smashed and slapped over the tunnels and byways of the once-peaceful termite city, snatching larvae and soldier alike and whisking them upward.

  With surprising speed her tongue was shooting in and out in slurps as she swept the exposed masses, and also snatched hundreds from deep within tunnels. The termites didn’t have a chance. This, however, only lasted briefly. Within less than a minute she seemed to lose interest and scurried off. Throughout the rest of that day and the studies of days to come, it was a matter of concern that she never seemed to gorge on ants. But she slowly seemed to be gaining an appreciation for the protein.

  I figured that my best shot was reinforcement, and so spent entire days with that little anteater, visiting termite and ant mounds. Sometimes I would spend hours on my hands and knees, with Lulu on my back, just moving through the jungle. I got the feeling that we confused the other creatures of the forest. One day a toucan swooped low onto a branch and cocked its head in our direction, skeptically studying us. Another time a crew of squirrel monkeys came above us to chatter, and I swear it sounded like they were laughing.

  Together we spent a week of uneventful yet vividly remarkable days. Lulu and I continued our long walks, and I continued to learn about the forest. During this period we saw Pedro from time to time. Often in the morning he was off in the bush, but in the afternoons we would meet. More than once we loaded Lulu into the small dugout canoe and spent the afternoon fishing on the opposite side of the river. Other days the anteater and I would go solo, staying deep in the jungle to our heart’s content.

  It was life as all life should be. Living close to the land, we had beauty and adventure all around us. Liberated from the soul-crushing repetition of scheduled existence, every day was new. Far from the distractions of technology and responsibility, each moment was ours. We were never idle. Collecting fruit and vegetables from the garden, mending the thatched roofs of the station, or fixing fallen beam bridges on trails, fishing, cooking, even bathing—all became rewarding experiences. Life was simple, and accomplished with the most basic of tools: bare hands and machetes. These were brilliant days.

  In hindsight, my time at the station with Lulu and the years that surrounded it were an age of innocence. My horizon contained nothing beyond the continuation of my friendship with JJ and work at the station, and above all else the quenching of my seemingly endless desire to listen to the jungle’s teachings. There was nothing more important in my world. In my mind’s filing system it is a chapter tucked in a folder of sunlit green warmth. Years later, beneath slate skies and blackened canopy, during times of grave struggle, when the stakes had risen too high to bear, I would long to return to that time of carefree, elemental simplicity.

  The jungle was gradually coming into focus, and what had once been an unintelligible mess of green began forming into recognizable elements. My extraordinary luck in the jungle seemed to have only intensified with time, and animal sightings highlighted our days. I would spend hours watching troops of spider monkeys, or cautiously following in the footsteps of jaguars. These and many other species were no longer exotic wildlife, but a type of familiar neighbor. All of the creatures became this way. Long afternoon naps cradling Lulu contrasted with rugged expeditions into uncharted bush; our activities almost always culminated in a long session of splashing and frolicking on the shores of the river at dusk. In short, Las Piedras became my Walden. I was beginning to build on what JJ had taught me and find the innate sense of the forest that only comes through quiet observation.

  Sitting with Lulu cradled in my arms, I’d admire her beauty and listen to the twilight chorus of the jungle. The black bracelets on her front limbs and a large triangular mantle of black were framed in a white border on her flanks, and that big bushy tail. Alone in the jungle at the candlelit station, she’d lock her front claws over my wrist and her tiny mouth over the makeshift nipple to drink her evening bottle of milk. Several inches of tongue hung out off to the side as she closed her eyes in happiness, all the while grunting and slurping. I remember studying her as I lay in my hammock, soaking in every visual and tactile detail of that incredible alien wild animal I had come to love so much. I had no way to know that very soon we’d be pulled apart.

  6

  The Basin of Life

  How many hearts with warm, red blood in them are beating under cover of the woods, and how many teeth and eyes are shining? A multitude of animal people, intimately related to us, but of whose lives we know almost nothing, are as busy about their own affairs as we are about ours.

  —JOHN MUIR, YOSEMITE VALLEY, 1898

  The jungle at night is the greatest freak show on earth. When the sun goes down the landscape welcomes a churning nightshift of murdering, slithering, creeping, fornicating, stalking, swimming, glowing life. To walk the Amazon by night is to enter a world where you are gravely disadvantaged compared to millions of sensory savants. Some exchange chemicals signals, others complex vocalizations outside our auditory spectrum, and almost all have night vision. JJ and I had spent hours out at night with headlamps, searching for anacondas and other creatures, but alone it is something else altogether. One night I put Lulu to sleep at the station and headed out on my own into a world that few experience.

  In the rainy season the sound of frogs and insects was deafening, so loud at times that I could feel my eardrums vibrating uncomfortably. Millions of mist particles swirled in my headlamp’s beam as I stalked slowly, timidly, down the Brazil nut tr
ail, about two miles from the station. I tried to make each step silent, because with limited sight, sound becomes the most important sense. Somewhere in the distance a crested owl gave a menacing growl. Nearby, a bamboo rat barked repeatedly. There were other sounds, too: rustling and cackling volleys so deranged I couldn’t guess what it could be. Mammal? Bird? Insect? No clue. My pulse was spiked and I was on high alert. As if it weren’t enough to be living isolated from civilization in the Amazon, going out alone at night seemed to be pushing it. But I couldn’t help it. Nighttime in the jungle is both intoxicating and terrifying.

  It took some time before my pounding heart began to relax and I became lost in the wonders around me: a brown leaf mantis waiting for prey, the metallic plumage of a roosting blue-crowned motmot, night monkeys. At night in the forest it is a battle of stealth. Foragers must find food in the void without making a sound that would give prowlers a lock on their position. Everyone strives for invisibility. JJ had explained that on some nights even a bright moon can cause the whole jungle to shut down: for creatures made to see in the most complete dark it’s like being in broad daylight. On night walks we would always wait for dark, cloudy ones, when there was no light whatsoever. That’s when the jungle came alive. This night was ink black and everything was moving.

  How the Amazon gained the staggering multitude of species that live within it remains largely a mystery. We do know that the story began a few hundred million years ago, when the continents of our planet were jammed together in a landmass scientists have come to call Gondwana. Africa and South America were spooning and across them both flowed a tremendous proto–Congo River system that started in the east and flowed west across Africa and what is now South America to drain into the Pacific. When the continents began to drift apart in the late Jurassic the great river was broken in half, leaving Africa with only the upper reaches, which would later become known as the Congo River Basin.

  Over the next 130 million years, South America drifted away from Africa, forming the Atlantic Ocean. The low-lying riverbed that had once filled from the Congo became filled with the salt water, until the continent jammed into the Nazca Plate, a geological giant that halted the drifting landmass and spiked the Andes Mountains out of the earth, blocking the westward-flowing river. For a few million years the entire Amazon Basin was nothing more than a massive inland sea; the stagnant, continent-sized swamp gradually desalinized and turned to freshwater. The slow transition is why many saltwater creatures adapted to freshwater. Today more than twenty species of freshwater stingray probe the riverbeds of Amazonia, along with pink river dolphins, manatees, and others.

  When an ice age caused sea levels to drop, the Amazon swamp began draining into the Atlantic. The Amazon River was born. Such was the start of the river system as we know it today. In the hot equatorial climate and abundant moisture, jungle flourished. The conventional theory for what happened next has to do with the coming and going of ice ages. Scientists believe that as the world was clutched in periods of glaciation the cooler climate caused vast areas of jungle to die out and become grassland, while other areas survived as jungle oases. This created an isolation effect. Over tens of thousands of years the jungle would have survived in patches, along with the species contained therein.

  The phenomenon of unique species living in isolated communities is called allopatric speciation. In the Amazon, it is believed that this happened again, and again. Each time an ice age came, the Amazon would turn to an archipelago of jungle islands, intersected by grasslands. Each time the thaw returned and the temperature rose, the flourishing jungle would rejoin the isolated groups. And so the Amazon went through stages of intensifying and then mixing. Even today grassland savannah makes up a large portion of the Amazonian tapestry.

  But this theory of isolation causing speciation has its critics. Increasingly it is believed that interspecies competition was the largest driver of species proliferation, the challenge to adapt or become extinct. Whether the cause was climate or competition or, more likely, a combination of both, the result is the greatest explosion of life to have ever existed.

  In my night walk I saw ants of various color and size racing along the ground, over vines, and up trees: leaf-cutters, army ants, solitary bullet ants, as well less familiar ant species symbiotically inhabiting and guarding pterocarpus and triplaris, cecropia and other plants. Jumping spiders, social spiders, ornate webs, simple webs, and hundreds of sets of octo-eyes caught the light of my headlamp. I could count more than seventeen different tree frog calls, and bats of every variety raced by, beating their fleshy wings and chattering. Well over a hundred different species inhabit the Madre de Dios, each with its own specialized niche: some fish, others eat insects, some drink nectar from flowers, while others suck blood from live animals.

  Looping from the Brazil nut trail to Transect A, I entered a small stream with water up to my waist in search of my own prize: anaconda. The question of why there were apparently no anacondas in Las Piedras was puzzling. The only evidence of their presence had been at the lake where the farmer that shot Lulu’s mom showed us the skeleton of the twenty-footer he had killed. Walking in the stream, I was hoping for a glimpse. They had to be here.

  The hours that passed held many wonders, but, to my frustration, giant snakes were not among them. Instead I spent my time watching the subaquatic inhabitants of the stream. In one bend there were more than a dozen species of fish. Sucker fish clung to drowned tree limbs while another species with leglike feelers probed the aquatic environment. A slender eel-like fish with a pulsating lower fin running half the length of its body moved smoothly forward and backward. Larger catfish lurked in the deepest parts of the pool. There was an exquisitely plated hypoptopoma, and then a small spotted fish with a forest of vertical feelers sprouting from its face, some kind of Ancistrus. How could so many forms exist in such a tight space?

  As I was contemplating this, something moved mere inches from my face. It was a huge black tarantula stalking down a fallen tree branch toward the water. I usually find tarantulas charming, but I was alone and already on high alert, thus the sight of the spider so close to my face gave me a jolt. This was the legendary bird-eating spider of the Amazon. The dinner-plate-sized hairy beast with inch-long fangs walked calmly down the pole beside me; when it reached the water’s surface, it casually continued down the pole and disappeared into the pool. That was enough for me, and I made my exit from the stream.

  Later that night I held the gaze of either a puma or a jaguar. I couldn’t see the animal itself, only its lantern-green eyes searching to see what was behind the strange light. Emma said you had to earn a jaguar sighting. I also spent a spell in a tree when a herd of peccary cornered me. Despite moments of fear and even being lost for some time, the jungle night remained too alien and fascinating to deny. As first light rose in the east I realized that in one night I had been more alive and packed in more adventure than I had in my entire pre-Amazon life. It was fully light by the time I got back to the station, and I called out to Lulu to announce that I was back. But she was nowhere. I found a cigarette butt in a coffee cup, which meant Pedro had come by, and I figured he had taken her down to the farm with him. So I headed down there, too.

  I found Pedro beside the river, hammering the blades of a propeller into shape. I approached and he looked up excitedly. “I saw a jaguar this morning,” he reported in Spanish, “right over there,” gesturing with the mallet.

  “Really?” I asked, slightly perturbed that I had missed the sighting. Pedro responded that he had seen the predator at the station in the morning, out in the open. I looked around the sugarcane and banana trees expectantly. “Where’s Lulu?” I asked. Pedro looked up, eyebrows raised. The expression on his face spoke clearer than any words could have: you mean she’s not with you? I turned on my heels and sprinted the path through the forest and up the palm-plank staircase.

  Racing along the last hundred yards of the path and emerging into the clearing of the station, I called
for Lulu. I called repeatedly, frantically running around the station. It was too much of a coincidence. Lulu was nowhere to be found. But there were large, newly laid jaguar tracks behind the kitchen. I cursed myself for leaving the anteater alone and retraced the entire station calling for Lulu. Once again the search produced nothing. After a night of no sleep, shell-shocked by worry, I wiped the sweat from my forehead and tried to think.

  Pushing aside the burlap door, I entered my room and sat. Hands on my temples, I tried to think of why Lulu would not be at the station. Could she really have been eaten? I knew she could. After all, Emma and JJ had tried to start a chicken coop and the birds had lasted mere days, picked off by a legion of predators. If an adult jaguar had grabbed Lulu, there would be no evidence, no sounds; I’d simply never see her again. Panic was beginning to set in when there was a noise under my bed. The sudden commotion below startled the hell out of me and sent me springing to the other side of the room. Lulu’s face emerged cautiously from under the bed, and then she lunged for me on her hind legs. I scooped up the little anteater and showered her in affection.

  She had been hiding under the bed, something she had never done before. As I carried her out into the sunlight and toward the kitchen for a meal, it seemed certain that the jaguar’s presence and the anteater’s actions were related. I could tell she had been scared, and her excess energy in the wake of her fear was comical. She wanted to play.

  She balanced on three legs, stretching one arm toward me, like she was calling me out, pointing. Her head was held down at an angle and she grunted and scratched at the deck, advancing and then falling back. I tried to pick her up but she slashed at me. I tried to grab her, but she slashed again. Dropping to my knees, I started a gentle slap-boxing session with her that she enjoyed immensely. My job was to get to her head; hers was to keep me from doing so. I haven’t mentioned that through all of Lulu’s affection and seemingly tame behavior, the one no-no was touching her head. She loved being cuddled, cradled, and even wrestled with, but if you touched her head she’d punish you for it. The behavior was likely born from the evolutionary advantage of keeping safe the delicate cartilage of their snout.