by Paul Rosolie
More than once Manuel stopped his boat to hunt. He once hit a spider monkey with his shotgun, and then later the same day a peccary. Neither animal died quickly. I finished off the spider monkey with my machete, unable to watch his expressive face search for hope that would not come. Then I watched in helpless horror as the boar breathed through the bullet holes in its side, suffocating in a stream. How easily a life passes from a body, leaving nothing but cold, inanimate tissue. It was the last thing I needed to see.
I was eager to get away from humans and on with the solo, so when after so many days of travel on successively smaller rivers, and the canoe at last reached a point where we could go no farther, it was a relief. The jungle had been unbroken for two days of upriver travel, without a single sign of human habitation. This was the source of the river; the current was shallow and slow. Manuel smiled awkwardly in the heavy silence after the motor had been cut and said, “That’s all.”
I nodded and swung my pack out onto the large beach, trying not to think too much. “Are you sure about this?” he asked, squinting at me in the blazing afternoon light.
“Yes. I am sure,” I told him.
“You are going farther upriver?” I told him I was.
“I have a map,” I said, trying to reassure him, and myself. He asked if he could see it. To reach the Western Gate I would have to hike farther up the river we were on and then cross several miles of jungle to the Rio Moxos, where I would find the Gate. My plan was to travel for several days beyond the Gate and then cross yet again to a final river, the Jura, where I would open my raft and float down to civilization. The Brazil nut farmer and his wife scrutinized the map and illustrated route for several long moments before looking up, aghast.
“You cannot cross to the Rio Jura,” he told me in Spanish with his index finger on the page. “There are nativos there—calatos—tribes. You’ll die.” He mimed shooting an arrow to illustrate his point. He was talking about uncontacted tribes.
“How do you know?” I asked, hoping his answer would be weak enough that I could still justify finishing the route I had been planning and preparing for over two years. I felt my temper flash for some reason, as though getting angry at this man trying to help me would do me any good.
“My brother is a fisherman,” he said patiently, “and he fishes at the mouth of the Jura, where it meets the next river. Each year at the end of the dry season the nativos come to the beaches to collect taricaya [turtle] eggs on the upper parts. They will kill anyone who goes there.”
His wife walked over then, glancing at the map in her husband’s hands. “Es verdad—It’s true,” she whispered, her eyes showing their full whites in alarm. “They are very, very dangerous.” He wasn’t kidding. Encounters with uncontacted tribes very often end in tragedy.
The tribes that remain in isolation today have done so for centuries, even millennia. Their customs, beliefs, and laws are a world apart from ours, which makes them very difficult to interact with. One of the most chilling examples of this took place in Ecuador in 1956, when a group of American missionaries made contact with a tribe called the Auca. The Auca were well known for wanting to be left alone, and despite the tribe’s history of violence, the missionaries spent time dropping gifts on a beach near an Auca settlement and waving from their plane. Over some weeks the missionaries interacted with the Auca people through hand gestures from the plane and the gifts they dropped from a box lowered on a rope. When they felt that the time was right, and the tribe seemed accepting, Jim Elliot, Ed McCully, Pete Fleming, Roger Youderian, and Nate Saint landed on what they named Palm Beach.
On the day of initial contact the missionaries interacted with the naked Auca, showing new items like balloons, shirts, insect repellent, and photographs from back home; they even gave one of the tribesmen a ride in their plane. But in their religious enthusiasm the missionaries were blind to the collision of worlds. As Wade Davis wrote, “The Auca had never seen anything two dimensional in their lives. They held the photographs and looked behind them to try and find the form of the image. Seeing nothing, they concluded that the portraits were calling cards from the devil.” The corpses of all five missionaries were found days later, their plane reduced to shreds. Each had been speared to death for reasons known only to the Auca.
In the Madre de Dios, encounters with nomadic tribes have been similarly unpredictable. Even encounters that appear peaceful at first have become fatal, more than once resulting in deaths by so many arrows that the victims have been described as “porcupined” by them. It might seem harsh, but it is not for us to judge. The tribes have their own laws and beliefs, which we cannot understand. After all, the reason for their reclusion in the first place lies in the atrocities of the past, from the Spanish conquistadors, to the rubber barons, to loggers and gold miners. The very reason they survive today is their ferocious and uncompromising self-defense.
I had heard many firsthand accounts of tribes, many of them peaceful, from Don Santiago and others around the Madre de Dios. Other tribes were not. In 2011 a video filmed by tourists in Manu National Park shows a group of Mashco-Piro Indians walking on the beach. As the tourist’s boat follows the naked men on the beach, camera rolling, the members of the tribe grow increasingly agitated and begin pointing their bows and even loosing arrows toward the tourists. Though ordinarily reclusive, the nomadic tribes of the Madre de Dios do not hesitate to defend what is theirs. In 2013 a group of almost eighty Piro Indians would invade the village of Puerto Nuevo, on the Las Piedras River. Their hostile takeover was executed early in the morning, while the residents were still groggy from a night of festivities. The painted tribesmen gathered the women and children, pillaging houses and shredding beds. The terrified villagers could only watch as the Indians slaughtered livestock, taking machetes and other tools. It was a clear and threatening message: This is our forest, not yours. As the husband and wife looked over my map, I felt my courage and enthusiasm for my solo deflating rapidly.
They already thought I was poco loco for heading out on my own into the jungle, but it was evident from both of their gazes that now they were trying to determine whether I was suicidal. Taking the map from her husband’s hand, the woman came to stand beside me. “Escuchame—Listen to me, if you stay on this river,” she said, as she traced her finger along the Rio Moxos, “you should be fine. But if you cross over here”—now she dragged her finger along my highlighted route toward the Jura—“you will die.”
There had been years of planning, and now, just as my solo was starting in earnest, the whole narrative changed. Glancing for a minute at the satellite image map, I searched for an alternate path. I mentally recited the mantra that I knew to be true after years of experience—that the plan falling apart is a natural part of any worthwhile adventure. If I continued up past the Western Gate, all the way, I could cross over the jungle ridge . . . Then if I went south for a bit . . . Within minutes, I had found a decent alternative to my original plan that would still allow me to make a loop while avoiding the Jura, but I still felt violated by the change. I wanted to get the possibility of tribes on my route out of my mind as quickly as possible. They were the last thing I wanted to have to worry about.
I promised the couple that I would not cross to the Jura and shook hands with them both. They gave me a lump of peccary meat wrapped in a plastic bag, which I stowed in my backpack. One last time Manuel asked if I would change my mind. “Come back with us,” he offered, like he was trying to talk someone off the ledge of an apartment building. But I told him that I had to go.
They pushed the boat with a pole, half floating and half dragging against the sand. I watched as they moved downriver, becoming steadily smaller until I could barely see the orange of Manuel’s backward baseball cap against the distant green of the forest. For a moment I felt a surge of panic and my hand twitched with the instinct to call out and stop them while I still had the chance. Yet as my pulse protested they were swallowed by the jungle.
From where I stood
, it was well over a hundred miles of unbroken jungle to the nearest human settlement, weeks of travel on foot—days by river. This was it, like it or not. I was now a castaway in a sea of green.
16
The Western Gate
Here is sanctity which shames our religions, and reality which discredits our heroes. Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her.
—RALPH WALDO EMERSON
I dropped my pack on the beach and made some gear adjustments, placing the map back inside. I tried not to think about the fact that I had been dropped into the deepest wilderness on the planet and was following a dead man’s tale with no map to a place no one else knew existed. Then again, that’s exactly why I was here. Nerves be damned, I heaved my pack onto my shoulders, locked my jaw, and started walking northwest. When I reached a section of forest that looked dry and open, I spent three hours completing the first traverse, covering seven miles of jungle and emerging onto the Moxos for the first time.
When I had planned the expedition I hadn’t expected to be dropped so far upriver. I was more than fifty miles ahead of schedule. From what I could calculate, I would reach the Western Gate in just hours. Although I had never thought about it, I realized I had been counting on a few days of solo travel before reaching the Gate to prepare myself mentally. I felt like a skydiver who has just taken the plunge with no idea if his chute will spring.
It took only two hours of walking before I rounded a bend and saw the tremendous gnarled column lying perpendicular across the river. It was just like Don Santiago had said it would be, unmistakable. I paused there, at the legendary boundary between the world of man and the nameless range beyond, suddenly timid. The Gate is actually a behemoth fallen tree laid across the river, with immense branches reaching up like a thirty-foot-tall defensive tarantula, a warning to those who would pass. It is a natural blockade across the entire channel, which marks the end of navigable river for boats. It’s the last place with a name; the natural border between two worlds. For the local people in the area who knew of it, the Gate had spiritual significance: the beginning of the otro mundo, or other world. I stared at it in the dwindling light, humbled by its gravity. Crossing was not something to be done lightly. Even the fearless Elías had warned that beyond the Gate, all bets were off.
I made camp just below the tarantula of limbs, on the beach beside the river. Honestly, I was too spooked to cross in the dusk—even though “crossing” merely meant walking past it on the beach. My fear kept me below it that night, even though good firewood was scattered just feet beyond it, farther up the beach. It took a long time to fall asleep that night.
In the light of day it was far easier to feel the thrill as I took my first steps past the Gate. The sun crested the canopy around seven thirty and by nine the temperature rocketed up to a scalding ninety degrees Fahrenheit. I walked all day. The following day was much the same—seemingly endless trudging across beaches, interrupted only by hacking my way through stretches of jungle, on and on upriver.
I was astounded at how much my body was sweating during these days of travel. Shortly after starting each morning, my clothing was soaked with sweat so thoroughly that it looked like I had been swimming. I had to make a special effort to stay hydrated. In the Amazon, only a quarter of the rain is swept away in the flow of rivers, while roughly half the rainfall is sucked back into the sky through evapotranspiration. The vegetation drinks from the earth through billions of roots before being released once again through the trunk and the leaves; in the air the moisture accumulates to form clouds that once again dump the lifeblood of the system down to start the process over, so that the forest produces more than three-quarters of the precipitation it depends on. Forest and sky are one cycle. For this reason, when tropical forest is cut, the entire system is thrown off kilter—the drying caused by decreased vegetation interrupts the cycle and depletes vital moisture. Trudging up the beach, I, too, was engaged in this ancient cycle of liquid and gas, hydrogen and oxygen. Each time I would emerge from a concave bend of jungle to the open inferno of the beach, I would throw down my pack and dive into the river. I drank like crazy, with my chin and mouth submerged, just gulping in water. It was a wondrous gift after having grown up in a world where water is sold in plastic, or flows from metal pipes.
I drank in excess. I had been taught years earlier that the test of proper hydration in the wilderness was for urine to be “clear and copious,” which it was. During an expedition, the body becomes almost like a machine, a system of functioning parts that needs to be deliberately maintained in working order: properly hydrated, lubricated, heated, cooled, fueled, and rested.
Around six o’clock the sun finally dropped below the trees and the temperature fell. I spent a few minutes filming some oro-cerulean macaws perched in a nearby tree, with the camera on the tripod. The brilliant birds chattered and nuzzled in the golden light as I watched them in the viewfinder, feeling profoundly thankful and full of purpose. This was exactly what I had come for.
That night beside a crackling fire, I checked my maps and saw that I had made some serious progress. While walking, I had kept count and recorded finishing upwards of twenty bends in the river, for a total of roughly eleven miles. A respectable distance. I jotted down notes on species and landmarks seen and marked progress on the map, occasionally swatting the lone mosquito. I boiled some water in a tiny pot and ate some ramen noodles, more because I knew I should than out of actual hunger. It felt spectacular. Things were going better than planned, and at this speed I would reach the headwaters of the river in two more days—the end of the Amazon and the start of the Andes.
On that night I pitched my tent in the middle of a sprawling beach. I had set it up only about ten feet from the water’s edge, where the sand was slightly moister and held the stakes of the tent better. Inside with me were machete, headlamp, and a few other items. Outside the tent were backpack, paddle, pack-raft, and other equipment. I spent an hour taking notes in my field journal, writing and sketching before falling asleep.
Sometime in the night, a sound just in front of my tent woke me. The hairs on my neck quickly stood at attention—something big was nearby. Slowly I unzipped the front of the tent and folded back the nylon door. In the beam of my headlamp were two glowing red eyes not six feet from my face.
Most animals are equipped with a tapetum, a membrane in the back of the eyeball that bounces light back through the rods and cones of the retina a second time, allowing for greater vision. This is the reason for the “eyeshine” that most wildlife give off at night, and the reason they can see in the same jungle night that renders humans blind. If you spend enough time in the jungle at night you learn to identify species by the unique reflection of their tapeta in a headlamp beam. Cats have bluish-green tapeta, while many other mammals have white, and many fish have orange or silver. On snakes the eyeshine is constant and uninterrupted because they lack eyelids and never blink. On crocodilians the reflection is an unmistakable deep red.
Where the water met the beach lay a tremendous black caiman, the largest I had ever seen. She must have been upwards of fourteen feet. Her head alone was well over two feet long, her tail the girth of my waist, and from my ground-level perspective her teeth looked massive. I stared at her and she at me, neither of us moving. Looking left and right, I saw the eyes of numerous other large caiman, eleven in total. Some were as small as two feet long, others almost as large as the one in front of my tent—almost. Some were near the bank, others on the opposite bank, and some hovered mid-river.
The river before me was a swarm of red orbs. I knew I wasn’t in danger: caiman are ambush predators, and if that big girl had wanted me, she would have done it already. I lay on my stomach, propped up by my elbows, staring at the crocs. Why there were so many crocs surrounding me, though, was beyond my comprehension. For a moment I wondered if I was dreaming—in my entire time in the Amazon, I had never seen so many caim
an in one place. To find yourself alone in the wilderness with a host of giant saurians staring expectantly at you with glowing red eyes is a strange sensation, to say the least. They were all staring at me.
After several minutes of standoff, when neither of us broke the other’s stare, the giant female turned her head toward the river and slid into the current. I ached to know what was going on. I closed the zipper nylon door again and lay down. What the hell. After several minutes of wondering if I should open the zipper again and check to see if the host of crocodiles had been a hallucination, I once again caught the sound of something large moving. This time I listened for some time. It was the sound of something massive dragging across the sand. With extreme caution not to make a single sound, I began opening the zipper. Peering through the narrow opening of a half-opened tent door, I turned on my headlamp. This time three large caiman were staring back at me. I unzipped the zipper all the way and waved my arms, yelling, “Get back!”
The large reptiles about-faced, and their broad tiled stomachs made that dragging sound as they retreated to the river. Standing up, I confronted them. “What the hell do you want?” I asked, now infuriatingly curious. I decided I had better move my tent farther back on the beach. I grabbed my backpack to move it and caught a foul odor coming from it.
The lightbulb went on: that stupid peccary meat! When I had parted ways with Don Manuel and his wife, they had insisted I take a piece. I told them I didn’t need it, but they would not hear a rejection of their hospitality, so I had taken a small cut. I had done it just to appease them—I knew that the meat would go bad before I could eat it. I had stuffed the plastic bag with the meat into my backpack, intending to use it as fish bait later on, but had forgotten about it. Now it smelled terrible.