by Paul Rosolie
I looked back at the river with wide eyes of comprehension. The caiman had smelled the carrion and done what caiman do when there is a dead animal near the water: flock to feed. Taking the hunk of meat from the pouch, I began preparing for an experiment. This was the largest croc I had ever seen. I had to get her on film. I set up the tripod and camera ten feet from my tent and tied the meat to a piece of paracord, constructing a sliding trap. When the big croc came out I would reel in the meat, coaxing her farther and farther up the beach toward me. If it worked it would make for a great shot—face-to-face with a huge black caiman. The crocs kept their distance, cautiously waiting while I moved about. When everything was set, I climbed back into the tent.
The crocs watched cautiously and silently for forty-five minutes before the great female emerged onto the beach in front of me once again. First she came within two feet of the sand, then she placed her chin on the beach, then she took a first step; all at five-minute intervals. I was surprised to learn how cautious the largest predator in the Amazon can be. If she had wanted to, that croc could have sauntered up the beach, taken the meat, and had me as well, very easily.
After what seemed like forever, she finally approached the chunk of peccary meat, placing the front third of her body onto the sand and turning her head sideways to grab it. I pulled on the string and moved it just out of her reach. She righted her head and glared at me, obviously frustrated. I glanced over to the video camera and hoped it was capturing all of this through the darkness.
The croc took another slither up the beach only several feet from where I lay. Suddenly it felt too close for comfort. I was thinking of chasing her away again when she exploded into movement. She leapt to the front of my tent, and with her head turned to the right, decisively chomped the meat with a crack of monster jaws. Her massive mouth grabbed the meat as well as a scoop of sand—she also snagged the green mosquito net that had been rolled up outside my tent. She backed up as she threw her head back repeatedly, launching it all into her gullet. This had gotten out of control—I needed that net! I leapt up yelling, attempting to shoo her away with another round of shouting and arm-waving, when she took a threatening step toward me and roared. I fell back off my feet. She was swallowing my mosquito net whether I liked it or not. Everything went down her throat with unbelievable speed, and I was left holding a string that stretched across the sand and into the mouth of a giant black caiman. For a moment I held on to the rope, staring into her red eye in the beam of my headlamp. I reached as far forward as possible and cut the line. Satisfied, she turned to the water as dozens of other red eyes watched, the fat trunk of her spiked tail sweeping past before sinking into the river.
I was left shuddering. Part of me was thrilled over the encounter, but the ever-present question of survival took precedence: how the hell was I going to cook without a mosquito net? How was I going to peacefully observe wildlife without being constantly eaten alive? That mosquito net was a devastating loss to my gear. In the Amazon, bug bites accumulate to cause real problems like fever, infection, and severe mental stress. A lone human in the heart of the Amazon is nothing more than another mammal struggling to survive. I was a second-class citizen compared to what was out there. The only asset I had was the machete; that is the crux, the single most important piece of gear that exists, the twenty-something inches of steel that makes it all possible. Without a machete, life in the jungle is painful, difficult, and often short. Next on my list of crucial gear were my hunting knife, headlamp, pack-raft, tent, and then: mosquito net.
I knew that without that net, simple tasks like cooking, eating, taking notes, and filming would be made infinitely more difficult and discouraging. It worried me but I knew I had to concentrate on sleeping, to take advantage of the cool night hours. I had to sleep while I could, because at the crack of dawn, the heat and the insects would begin their siege. There were still a host of eyes watching me as I zipped my tent and lay down, knowing very well that it would be hours before I slept, if at all.
Indeed, the sun came up far too soon, and once again I broke camp and set out hiking before the bugs had a chance to find me. I took in the misty morning’s beauty, pausing to enjoy the landscape, but by 8 A.M. it was so hot I knew that walking all day would be impossible. The sun was blinding and oppressive. I wished I had thought of adding sunglasses to the gear list.
I was still making excellent progress, and it was only day five of the expedition. It had been three days since I had left Manuel back at the Western Gate. Following the river, I didn’t need to worry about getting lost at all. During the storm solo, it had been days of pounding stress and danger because of that constant risk of being irreversibly lost. It had been a stressful but important initiation for me. But this expedition, without that stress, was entirely different. It was fantastic. But I remained cautious when cutting through bends.
Cutting bends is something I do when the river cuts back so much on itself that it almost forms a circle. The rivers in the Madre de Dios slither to and fro across the landscape so languidly that bends in the river sometimes almost touch. In places where this occurs, it is a much shorter distance to cut through the jungle than to follow the contour of the loop. Sometimes the distance is so short you can see through the trees to the open space on the other side. Other times it may be several hundred yards. The stretch of river I was on that day had several bends that could be cut, and so I spent much of the time walking under canopy, which was a refreshing change. Stopping frequently, I filmed black skimmers, Spix’s guan, and an Amazon red squirrel. I decided not to film the troop of squirrel monkeys that were playing above a small stream since I already had good footage of the species and needed to conserve battery. It was only day five, I reminded myself.
As I walked I decided that the next day I was going to stay put. The poachers had taken me farther than I thought I would be able to hitch, and hiking, too, had been more successful than I had anticipated. The jaguar tracks around my tent each morning and the abundant broad prints on beaches made me confident that if I was going to be able to film a jaguar anywhere, this was the place. I planned to set up a hide made of palm and brush and sit in it all day, starting at 4 A.M. The thought of sitting still all day without the mosquito net was worrisome, and I wondered if it would even be possible. I wondered what the hell I had been thinking with that croc—I had lost a vital piece of gear. Should have had a backup for that, add it to the notes for next time.
Regardless, sitting quietly was the part I was most excited for. Perched in the river cane, with an entire beach or perhaps the mouth of a stream in view, I planned to stake out for days. In the jungle, where every single organism is eventually eaten by something, every creature is on high alert, which is why wildlife sightings in the rainforest are so difficult to come by, compared to other habitats. As humans, we usually scare away everything around us with our loud footfalls and obvious smell and appearance. But when you stop acting like a human and start acting like a part of the landscape, if you really just sit, you start to see the incredible world where animals just go about their lives.
This was what all the true wildlife film guys did. One of my favorites was Nick Gordon, a Brit who spent years in the Amazon filming, sometimes spending weeks in a single location, doggedly waiting for his subject. He filmed wild jaguars, diving with pink river dolphins and giant otters for the BBC and the National Geographic Society. In more than a decade filming in Amazonia, he documented the tarantula-eating Piaroa Indians and was once held captive by chanting Yanomami warriors. He hand-raised everything from spider monkeys to jaguar cubs, and even discovered a new species of primate. The guy was legit. Gordon had come from the other side of the world to find that he belonged in the Amazon, and he had determined to do whatever he could to protect it. He is one of those guys I wish I had had the chance to meet while he was alive, one of those guys I hoped to be one day.
His camera was his weapon. He went where no one else went, deep into Amazonia’s shadows, and he filme
d species in a way few ever have. Even today his work on jaguars is considered groundbreaking and has yet to be matched. The films he brought to the world generated international awareness and funding for conservation on a scale that is dizzying to conceive. He was a warrior who fought the bullets and chain saws with film. He defended the place he loved by sharing it with millions of people. And though I am not a professional cameraman, I knew that the footage I was shooting on this solo was something special. This place was special, unique on the earth, and if it was going to survive, someone needed to pick up where Gordon and the others like him had left off.
With my heavy backpack, slashing through the foliage between riverbeds, I daydreamed about the jaguar I was going to catch on film. I was still sore over the missing mosquito net, though. Nick Gordon lived the ultimate life but he had also paid the ultimate price for it. A rare form of malaria that he contracted from spider monkeys, along with the numerous other blows to his immune system that the jungle had dealt over the years, caused his heart to fail when he was fifty-one. He probably would have survived to be an old man if he had used a mosquito net more often.
I maintained a brisk pace without stopping for several miles. The jungle-beach transition came often. The river here was twisted tight across the land, searching the flat earth for a decline in elevation so that it could flow free. If you observe the lowland Amazon from the air, it is possible to see how the rivers weave like living snakes along the path of least resistance. From the smallest tributaries to the largest, they warp and wind through the jungle, carving out the clay. Over the course of hundreds and thousands of years their routes can change dramatically. As the rivers shift they leave behind scars in the soft land, sweeping curved lakes called oxbows.
Oxbow lakes are always near a river bend, a record of where the river once was, but they do not flow. Instead the sediment falls in the absence of current and an entire ecosystem emerges around them. Many species specialize in these stagnant sanctuaries; some species of birds, fish, and vegetation are found almost exclusively in oxbows. Black caiman specialize in oxbow lakes, as do anacondas. But it was the call of a hoatzin that let me know I was passing the tip of a lake that day. The coughing call and clumsy wing beats are unmistakable. I decided to investigate.
It was a tiny lake, perhaps only fifty feet across, but long. The foliage was buzzing with a quiet energy. Squirrel monkeys chattered in the low limbs above the water, where caiman watched with stoic patience. Turtles basked on logs in the sun, and kingfishers zoomed back and forth; a train of butterflies flew with serpentine grace, slithering one after the other, winding through the foliage of the idyllic scene. It seemed like the perfect place to throw down my pack and spend some time relaxing, a good time to wait silently and see what came by.
I found a tree that grew at an angle from the bank and leaned over the water out into the middle of the lake. I climbed it and sprawled in its generous, moss-covered branches. Comfortable and cool in the shade, the tree held me like a hammock. I watched the squirrel monkeys for some time, but didn’t film—I wanted to savor the brilliant afternoon. Sunlight illuminated the foliage, creating a green and yellow dappled roof above, birds chasing dragonflies, caiman, and turtles basking in the few spots ablaze with direct light.
I remembered Nick Gordon’s story from Wild Amazon about filming a jaguar while he had been perched above a stream and the jaguar swam by. I felt similarly poised to witness such an event. How could any tapir or jaguar resist cooling off in the shallow pond? This was the fantastically beautiful setting I had imagined during my pre-expedition planning. Pushing my hat down over my face and folding my arms behind my head, I closed my eyes, dozing a little.
It couldn’t have been more than ten minutes before I heard a substantial splash and my eyes snapped open beneath my hat. From the sound, it was clear that something big was coming. Turning slowly onto my stomach, I looked down over the lake, and in a halo of ripples were two giant river otters. They didn’t see me; in fact they had no idea anyone was watching them. Cruising directly under me, the six-foot predators frolicked. The male would nudge the female and then flop onto his back and she’d chase, and so the two playfully swam for some time. It was the first time I had ever seen the endangered species, and they were significantly larger than I had pictured them. In fact, seeing them just feet from me, I got a surge of adrenaline—these were no-joke predators.
Their Spanish designation of river wolves is an accurate description. Throughout their range, giant otters live in packs and dominate their habitat. The longest member of the weasel family, their bodies are slender and powerful, equipped with large webbed feet, a powerful oar-shaped tail, and impressive canines. Their ears are close-cropped on a broad head and their snout bears a set of long white whiskers. The two below me had beautiful marbled patterns decorating their throats, and the dazzling rich coat of prime specimens.
I couldn’t believe my luck. Most sightings of wildlife, especially in the jungle, are from the perspective of the frustrated naturalist as his subject flees into the bush—these guys had their guard down. My camera, of course, was in my pack on the ground—but I didn’t mind. Otters are mesmerizing to watch. They seem to live life at 100 percent on, twenty-four hours a day, every moment of their lives.
The pair frolicked below me for some time, but then began to swim toward where my gear lay, at the base of the tree. Approaching within a few feet of my pack, the large male gave a sudden, violent snort that echoed through the forest, and the female mimicked him. Both dived into the water, disappearing. They surfaced nearly twenty feet back, lifting their heads high, craning to view the suspicious package that smelled so strange. From only ten feet away, and directly above, I watched as they circled and sniffed, snorting in alarm—they knew something they couldn’t see was amiss. After half a minute I felt guilty and gave them a clue—a click of my tongue. Both heads snapped upward, eyes wide, barking aggressively and rising out of the water toward me. At the sound of their panic, another call of distress was voiced from an unknown creature—a long moan.
At the sound of that moan, the two parents raced to where they had first entered the lake and vanished into the foliage. I took advantage of their absence to rush down the tree to my pack and remove my camera. I had barely gotten it out of the bag when the parents returned, this time with a tiny juvenile between them. The camera was rolling as both parents raced toward me, barking and rising out of the water to display their white throats in an attempt to intimidate; the baby mimicked them.
Though both of the parents continued to scowl and bark at me from time to time, they eventually seemed to realize that I was not an immediate threat. They began swimming and playing once again, though always keeping a cautious eye on my position. They dived, and played and nuzzled each other as if purposefully showing off for the camera as I filmed. I watched them rip under the water and return to the surface, munching on fish. They clasped their catch in the same humanlike way a standing grizzly holds a salmon, with both hands. I was filming one of the most charismatic and endangered species in the Amazon, and they didn’t mind my presence. In all likelihood they had never before encountered a human.
For some time they interacted together as a family, diving and curling in the water, nuzzling and grooming each other. The care and tenderness between them were striking; they were a family, going about their otter day in the jungle—checking for predators, catching fish, and performing other chores accomplished together as a unit. For a time they allowed me to observe their world, and threw little attention in my direction. When they moved toward the far end of the lake, I allowed them their privacy and carefully packed my camera away. For me, the rest of the afternoon was a continuation of beaches and jungle, beaches and jungle.
That night I camped as I had the previous nights. I gathered wood, lit a fire. Already, after just five nights of expedition, three days of solo travel, I felt as though I’d been out on my own for ages. I made notes about the otters and sketched some.
I was doing my best to hold on to my nerves and stay sharp on the expedition, but I did feel lonely. It is both exhilarating and cosmically terrifying to be so alone. The world I had grown up in seemed from a different lifetime: streets, cars, houses, toasters, cell phones, even other people. It is the most profound loneliness imaginable, as though the rest of the world had ceased to exist. I had a good laugh thinking of Times Square.
As I lay flat on the beach that night, the entire cosmos seemed visible: the lavender haze of the Milky Way, the faint dusty peppering of jade halos around multitudinous points of light and scores of more distant bodies. The celestial landscape exposed by the clear night was teeming with detail, great depths of the universe discernible. There were so many stars of such varied sizes that there seemed little room for the black of space.
As I stared at the stars hung at random in billions upon billions of miles of outer space, it suddenly meant something altogether different to be in the jungle. The Amazon, with its vast matrix of interconnected, interdependent organisms as seen from one of those points of light, a star billions of miles from earth, is something unfathomably unique. The Amazon, viewed from space, has been described as the Tree of Rivers: the trunk rising from the Atlantic Ocean and reaching across the continent in ever-diverging branches of tributaries. It is the tree of life, the single greatest example of life to exist, perhaps, in the universe—the miraculous antithesis to the trillions of miles of barren, frigid space.