by Paul Rosolie
The morning was gray and overcast, with no sign of the sun in the sky. It was 6 A.M. Please let this friaje lift! I was thinking when a rustling sound to the left of the tent caught my attention. Turning, I watched as a tremendous bull tapir emerged from the river cane. Standing thirty feet from where I stood, he was a good example of how large his species can get, easily in the range of five hundred pounds. The large tapir probed the air with his stubby trunk, flaring his nostrils in all directions and surveying the beach; he took little notice of the human presence close by. Nonchalantly ambling across the sand, the large mammal left three-toed tracks as it approached the current of the river. He continued into the river and paused there to drink. He took several long gulps before raising his head and looking in either direction, and then submerged himself, save for his ears, eyes, and nose. When he reached the opposite bank he turned to sniff in our direction. Then he galloped up the steep bank and into the forest.
Pico emerged from his tent, where he had been watching my tapir encounter, and joined me. “Mucho sachavaca aquí, no?” he asked without smiling. Sachavaca is the local name for the species. He continued in Spanish. “This is one of the few rivers where there are so many to see. Jaguars, tapir, peccary, all animals—they disappear from the forest once too many people come. These places where no one goes,” he said, now holding my gaze, “are very special.”
During the long, monotonous hours on the boat my mind was consumed by the struggle to digest the incredible wealth of information and knowledge that come from life on the river. With each passing mile, the country we traveled through was redefining my perspective on wilderness, and as a result altering the entire image of wildlife conservation that had for so long existed in my mind. For the first time I was seeing a land almost entirely devoid of humanity. Back in Infierno, the community where JJ’s family lived, the forests had long been hunted clean of peccary, tapir, Spix’s guan, and other game. Those forests were practically empty compared to what was here. The few remaining individuals of the persecuted species were forced to lead a life of hiding. Even on the Las Piedras the wildlife was still technically recovering from a period of slaughter, but not out here on the La Torre.
One afternoon we endured several hours of violent thunderstorm that drenched everything on our canoe. Our tents by this time were bags of sand, our clothing was damp and foul, and much of the food was in similar shape. The rice had begun to rot and had to be thrown out. Our sugar was also looking poor. Shivering under the driving rain, we endured the elements for what seemed like an eternity. JJ and I huddled under one tarp, while Chito retired to the bow of the boat under another, presumably asleep for hours. So far he hadn’t said more than a few sentences the entire trip; quiet guy.
We had covered a considerable distance and ascended several cataracts, steps of rushing current where the river changed elevation. The farther we went, the shallower the river grew. The La Torre is a naturally shallow channel and we were reaching the upper limits of its flow, the headwaters. Here more branches and trees lay strewn on the riverbed, waiting to catch our small launch. Often we got hung up. At that point we had endured more than three days of cold rain and endless discomfort, and when we got hung up again and again, I could feel all of us growing frustrated. One time when the boat ran aground on a submerged log, we were stopped stranded. Pico cut the motor and it was clear to the rest of us that there was only one option: into the river.
JJ stepped into the current on the left side of the boat and began rocking, but it would not budge. His eyes were dark and downcast as he submerged up to his knees and gave the boat a futile shove; it didn’t move. Cursing under my breath, I too stepped into the water and joined forces with JJ to move it. The problem was that we were standing on the same log that had hung up the boat; from where we stood it was impossible to get the leverage we needed. And moving from our suspended perch on this large, submerged log meant getting fully in the deep water, which neither of us wanted to do. Both of us began to argue, and the day began to turn sour. Clearly the discomfort and cold were beginning to chip away at our patience.
Our escalating quarrel was interrupted with an obnoxiously loud assault of Spanish profanity, from Pico. Smiling as he called us little girls, he grabbed a mahogany oar and smacked it against the water, which splashed frigid waves all over us. My eyes widened in fury. He splashed a second time, and exploded in laughter. Slapping his knee in rapture, he rocked side to side with his eyes tearing. I lunged for him in anger, but misstepped and plunged downward into the river and out of sight below the water. When I surfaced Pico was riotous. Wailing and hacking, he fell backward in uncontrollable laughter. JJ dived across our pile of supplies to grab Pico’s foot, or else he would have fallen out of the boat. Chito emerged from his tarp with a tired grin that grew into loud, hearty laughter. As I climbed out of the water, JJ lay stretched across the supplies, holding his brother. We were all howling now with laughter.
From that time on, the discomfort became a game. We had covered plenty of distance and logged almost a dozen anacondas. That afternoon we measured a nine-and-a-half-footer, and just missed catching a slightly larger specimen coiled on a palisada. We began stopping more frequently now to explore interesting areas of forest, or to swing on vines into the river. We made a great deal of noise laughing when JJ back-flopped from fifteen feet on a miscalculated launch. Later Chito was stung on the groin by a bullet ant while peeing in the forest, which, needless to say, also induced a fit of laughter from the rest of us. It was a wild and perfect day.
After nearly a week of travel, when the clouds at last parted we rejoiced. The sun set fire to the landscape, suddenly gripping the jungle in brilliant light and igniting the fantastic green mountains of canopy around us. The change was miraculous and occurred in only minutes. We crashed the peque-peque into the first beach we found, and our party emptied onto its shores to bask in the glow. To be at last in the embrace of the sun was salvation, and we four stood with arms outstretched, soaking it in for a long moment.
Chito and Pico began baiting hooks and launching their heavy lines into the water, while JJ and I explored the opposite beach. We found a unique area where the river had engulfed a patch of jungle the size of several football fields—from above, the river would look like a light-colored, lopsided doughnut around the dark center island of forest. Surrounding the patch of thick forest was a horseshoe-shaped beach nearly a mile long.
We walked together silently across the broad sand, observing the peculiar landscape. What made it almost eerie was the unfathomable amount of animal tracks covering the sand. It looked like there had been a parade there. The earth had recorded activity from an astounding number of species. Among the massive three-toed tapir tracks were broad padded jaguar prints. But these were only the most obvious among a myriad of others: ocelot, tayra, capybara, heron, puma, peccary, deer, tortoise, and more birds than I could guess at. It seemed as though the whole forest had emptied in recent days to stalk over the great beach. JJ’s eyes were wide with fascination. Just as species do not occur homogeneously throughout the jungle, the forest itself is not one monolithic mass. As I was learning that day, there are places out in the depths that are special.
Near the water on the beach, black caiman tracks lay heavy on the beach, evidently the indication of a tremendous individual. In the last half century, black caiman, the largest predator in the Amazon, was hunted dangerously close to extinction for their highly prized leather. To acquire black caiman leather local hunters all over the basin spent decades in what became a wholesale slaughter of the species, the result being that today black caiman exist within just a fraction of their original range, most often inhabiting lakes and rivers far removed from human habitation. So as we observed the huge croc’s tracks, it was with a special appreciation and longing that we imagined what the giant must have looked like stalking over the beach. But the find that caused even greater anguish to our imagination was an S-shaped anaconda track almost twenty-four inches wide. Th
e large trunk was free of footprints or tail drag, the signature crocodilian indicators. In my mind, over and over were the words it can’t be.
But there was nothing it could be. I remained skeptical, hesitant to imagine a snake so large. I estimated that a snake with a twenty-inch stomach must have a total circumference of almost sixty inches, roughly the girth of an oil drum. No way.
I spent more than an hour on the beach photographing and making notes in my field journal, recording the incredible diversity. JJ and I continued to debate the “anaconda” track. Even though JJ was positive, at the time I was quite sure that it was not an anaconda that had made it, although no other explanation came to mind. In the weeks to come, I would learn how wrong I was. We were novice detectives following the trail of a massive predator, on a path toward a discovery that would change our lives. But on that night it was another giant reptile that would leave its mark on our expedition. The beaches here were littered with caiman tracks that were far larger than any I had seen, by two or three times. JJ explained that they were black caiman prints.
Sitting in the warmth of a fire, passing around a small bottle of whiskey, the guys told me that years earlier on a similar expedition with their father, Elías’s dog had been eaten by a black caiman. The dog had been left on the far side of the river and tried to swim across to meet its master. They said that the caiman batted the dog out of the water with its tail and then smacked its jaws shut on the mutt in midair, taking it under, never to be seen again.
That night I awoke to yelling, and bolted out of my tent to find Chito and JJ standing on the sand with flashlights in hand, whooping excitedly. Pico was on the ground laughing hysterically. The boat was rocking in the water. The massive black caiman had just stolen our fish. Packed neatly inside a pot, along with some of the salted peccary, had been the remainder of a tiger catfish. Around the large pot had been a four-foot Brazil nut bag containing much of our utensils, cooking equipment, and the scale for weighing anacondas. Pico had left the fish in the pot, in the bag, on the boat so as to discourage inspection by jaguars during the night, yet a raid had been pulled off all the same. The caiman had eaten the entire package. It took Pico days to stop bursting into laughter each time the image of the caiman’s upset stomach occurred to him.
Eventually we reached a point where it was impossible to go any farther upstream. The boat was hitting sand every few minutes. Pico explained that we had to turn back or else risk becoming stranded. If the river dropped in volume, we’d have no way to return. I was reluctant to turn back; heading up that river had been the most exciting experience of my life: the anacondas, the oxbow lakes, the raw adventure of it all. “What’s it like farther up?” I asked Pico. He shrugged and looked to JJ, and they both agreed that neither had any idea. “Local people only go where boats can take them,” JJ explained. “I don’t know anyone who has been up there,” he said with a wave toward the mysterious beyond.
Progress downriver was much faster than going up—almost twice as fast, but uneventful. On what was to be the final day of the expedition, the mood on board had become once again somber. The end of our expedition was quickly approaching and we had yet to find a massive anaconda. We had caught and measured several specimens, but all of them were small. Each snake had been measured and replaced onto their debris piles, some without being weighed because the caiman had eaten our scale. Nonetheless, my notes were beginning to take on an eloquent correlation; the La Torre seemed to be proving that where humans are not, anacondas are. The only issue that continued to frustrate me was that none so far had been more than twelve feet, which is tiny for anacondas. These were males, skinny and lacking the bulk one finds in a healthy female. I spent all my energy scanning the beaches as we passed, trying to decipher every inch of the palisadas as we went, but found no anacondas. JJ too used all the power his eyes had to find even just one more giant snake, but found nothing.
At one point I was beginning to doze when the canoe suddenly shifted as Pico sat bolt upright. Before anyone said a word we all looked to the mad motorista; we knew he had locked on something serious. His eyes were wild with frozen awe as he pointed to a large palisada in the distance. Our heads spun around to the pile of forest debris downriver from us, where a tremendous pile of anaconda coils lay basking. It was by far the largest snake I had ever seen.
Action enveloped our tiny vessel. Because she was in the center of the large palisada, we decided to split up. I would come from upstream while JJ and Chito came from the other side. Pico maneuvered the boat to about seventy feet upstream from the snake. In the turbulent current I had only a split second to jump onto land. “Cuidado tus huevos—Watch your balls!” Pico grunted through a cigarette grin.
The palisada the anaconda had chosen was the biggest we had seen, stretching for nearly the length of a football field and rising high above the river. Looking downstream, I peripherally noted Pico and the others moving into position, but my eyes remained glued to the snake. She was spellbinding even from a distance. JJ and Chito were climbing out of the canoe, and I took a step toward the snake, which was still seventy feet away at least. Ever so slightly the muscles of her powerful coils tightened and her head emerged. She was awake.
Without any warning she lunged across her body in the direction of a large, hollow tree. I broke into a wild sprint down the trunk of the fallen kapok, screaming for the others to let them know that the moment had arrived ahead of schedule. Her body was disappearing so rapidly I was sure she was going to escape as I rocketed over the timber mountain toward her.
Barefoot and naked save for briefs, I closed in. When I reached her, only a third of her body was left visible; the rest had disappeared into the timber below. First I tried lifting her heavy tail, but I quickly realized there was no chance of pulling her back. My only option was to climb down with her.
The anaconda had slithered down the shoot of the large hollow log that sloped through twelve feet of debris and into the water. Scrambling and sliding down the top of the log, I slid into the bowels of the wooden mountain. Landing with a crash in muck and thorns, I found myself on the floor of a cavern of packed wood. The way the timber had piled up in this spot had left a large gap, almost like a hidden room, and I was now inside of the mountain, face-to-face with a fifteen-foot snake.
Looking up through the tunnel of the great hollow log, the anaconda dominated the scene, her coils pulsing and alive with ripped muscles. She was steaming fast toward a gap in the timber where the water showed below. With heart pounding I screamed one last time in vain for JJ and Chito, and went for her head. I had barely taken one step before she spun around in a sweeping arc of a strike, mouth exploding open 180 degrees to reveal a sixteen-inch gape. Mottled purple and black and lined with six rows of needle-sharp teeth, the tremendous jaw swept across the cavern toward my face.
I collapsed backward to evade the strike, falling flat to the ground. The snake’s head sped past the open air where my face had been and continued on, carried by the momentum of the lunge. Thankfully, anacondas of such large size, while agile in the water, are plodding on land, slowed by their own bulk. The momentum of her strike launched her front half violently across the cave, and when she landed I knew that there would not be another chance. I regained my feet and pounced, securing a grip behind her head. Big mistake.
Instantly her body began to twist and curl, binding my arms together between powerful coils the girth of my thigh. Crushing with indescribable power, her trunk wrapped once, then twice around my arms, threatening to snap the joints of my elbows. Her weight forced me to my knees and I screamed in pain. The moment had gone from hectic to out of control with amazing speed, and I was alone. As another of her coils rolled up over my shoulder and around my neck, it became clear that even if I released her head, there was a very real chance that this snake would crush me to death.
The level of force from a constrictor of her size can in seconds flatten the rib cage of a caiman or tapir, animals much tougher than humans. Pa
nic surged in my veins as her impossible strength mashed my shoulders toward one another, flexing my clavicle like a twig.
It was then that JJ came into view, hurtling at full speed down the same log I had used. The momentum carried him to the opposite side of the cavern. He swung around with knees bent, arms spread, and mouth agape in shock. “Whoa!” he shot out, paralyzed for a moment by what he saw.
He tackled the trunk of her coils and protected my neck as I tried to maintain my grip on her head and the snake beat us against the jagged walls and floor, writhing in alternating directions. As more and more of the anaconda’s body emerged from the hollow log, JJ and I continued to wrestle the front end. With the final third of her body came Chito, who had been dragged through the hollow log, grasping her tail. He was covered in yellow and white snake shit, buckets of it.
Screaming and straining, we began heaving the coils off my arms. It took us fifteen minutes to get control of the snake, and even longer to get the snake up out of the cavern in the great pile of wood and to the edge of the island. Pico maneuvered the canoe into position below the palisada and the four of us (anaconda included) dropped into the tiny canoe. Pico’s eyes were bulging out of his head as the canoe nearly capsized in our struggle to control the giant.
On the opposite beach we got out and collapsed. The snake was unrestrained but both humans and reptile were too spent to move. The three brothers kept their distance from the anaconda as I knelt in awe. She lay curled in a tight spiral, peacefully protecting her head, as I soaked in the sight of a creature I had always dreamed of seeing. Legendary in both size and spirit, she was the find of a lifetime. She was magnificent, large green and black scales on her back fading into vivid yellow and black toward the stomach. Emerging from her mouth at intervals was a thick, pitch-black tongue the width of a man’s finger, which probed the air with regal indifference.