Mother of God

by Paul Rosolie

  For an hour I ran without stopping. But I began to realize that I was doing something very foolish—draining my body of every ounce of energy I had, and this had become a survival situation. Gasping for air and shuddering, I exploded onto a beach and ripped open my backpack, removing the most precious piece of gear I carried: my pack-raft.

  Throwing the raft open, I took out the inflation bag and began filling it with air, then squeezing the air into the raft—all the while snapping my head left and right, looking for signs of humans. This is how it fucking happens, I hissed to myself as my hands shakily fit the inflation bag into the raft. This is how people vanish—they run into the last thing they ever dreamed of and it kills them, and the animals eat their body before dawn the next day. I had always wondered if people knew when they were screwed. Was there a moment of comprehension as the jaws dragged them beneath the water, or as the arrow parted ribs, or as the massive tree toppled to the ground?

  Using the inflation bag, I captured large quantities of air, and then hugged it close. The air from a single bag was more than a dozen lungfuls, and after just five bags the raft seemed workable. I snapped the sections of paddle together, grabbed my pack, and climbed in. The Moxos bore me downstream with a speed I could never have matched on foot, and I paddled to add to it, suppressing the projections of my mind in which an arrow tore through the body of the raft—pssshhh! But no arrows fell.

  On the river, however, I quickly had a new set of factors to worry about. The current was swift, nearly ten miles per hour and much faster than I would have imagined, and the river was full of debris. Carcasses of giant trees reached out of the water, thorny limbs lurked in wait, and floating logs threatened to pop my raft. Zipping past huge logs, around palisadas, the nimble little craft did its part and I did mine by steering and keeping wide eyes for the safest passage. Pico’s many teachings came into play big-time here. The ability to read the river, to know where there was something beneath the surface or something too narrow to fit through, was crucial. That day, for the first time, the gravity of my situation came into full view from wherever it had been hiding: if that raft popped, it truly would be months before I found my way out of the jungle.

  The river swung me around a bend and an island in the middle forced me to choose left or right. I chose right, where the channel was larger and the current faster—to the left looked shallow and full of dangerous, sharp debris. As I maneuvered the raft to the right, the current picked up even more and I braced as the raft plunged over a drop of two and then four feet. Thankfully, the declines were gradual and the raft took them in stride. I was able to cover in one hour what would have taken six walking. Even if there were tribal men chasing me with bows, I knew there was no way they could keep up with the speed of the river without canoes.*

  Moving swiftly through the land, under a dark sky, the river demanded so much of my concentration that there was no room left to worry about the tribe. Even a moment’s pause from the constant scanning and calculating could result in a collision that could tear the raft and plunge me into the river, stranding me in the jungle. I passed under the towering mountains of debris, everything from tree trunks to twigs piled thirty feet high over decades of flooding and receding.

  Traveling past one especially large mountain of fallen trees and branches, I startled a ten-foot black caiman that had been basking on the beach. The croc burst into a sprint toward the water and in a fraction of a second came rocketing across the mud toward my raft. Our trajectories were perpendicular and set to collide. I screamed, and braced for impact as the startled reptile reached the bank and dived into the water. Speeding below me, its back crashed into the bottom of the raft, and the raft nearly overturned. But remarkably no damage was done. The tremendous scaled body vanished beneath the raft and into the river. It had only been trying to retreat to safety; I had just happened to be in its way.

  When the current finally reached a straightaway, I breathed a huge sigh of relief and flopped back to lie on the raft. I dipped my hand into the water and splashed some water on my face, then drank. With a sweep of the paddle, the raft easily spun 180 degrees; setting the paddle down I let the raft float downstream backward, watching upriver in paranoia. Thankfully, there was nothing to be seen except for quiet jungle, and, turning downstream, I continued on. That day I covered more than thirty miles of winding, downriver current. I basked in the fact that there was no way any human could keep up on foot with the sustained pace of the river, and once again I was safe.

  Traveling downriver was freedom. For the first time in hours, I thought that I might survive the day. For the first time, I could be angry.

  I cursed bitterly, furious that so many months of planning had just gone down the drain—so much for sitting in a hide and filming wildlife, so much for finishing the 157-mile route. That was all gone now. I also knew that no matter what, after an encounter like that there was no way that I was sleeping peacefully again on this river; that ruled out continuing the expedition farther downstream. Yet in those hours of pounding anguish and fear I discovered something that would change my whole future relationship with the jungle.

  In the years I had spent in the Amazon, I had never before paddled alone on a river in silence. Most of my travel had been done with JJ and his brothers, traveling as the locals do in roaring boats that destroy the silence and scare every creature for miles around. Even aside from the incredible noise, the machine-propelled, thirty-foot canoe made it impossible to feel the river as I did on that day.

  My legs could feel the cool, churning current below the raft’s bottom, and through my paddle I seemed to be able to feel each rush and eddy. In the raft, small and silent, a new world was suddenly accessible. It was so much more pleasant than the endless battle of trudging upriver on foot; it was indeed the most serene experience I have ever had. The swift current and my careful paddling brought me to within feet of capped heron and then a sun bittern, a family of capybara; one time a huge stingray glided beside me for a while in shallow water. Black skimmers, a species of bird with an elongated lower beak made for catching fish on the fly, darted around me, picking off prey from the river. Once, while passing the mouth of a stream, looking right, I caught a young tapir eyeing me curiously. Twice I spotted medium-sized anacondas basking on the banks. Several times I startled legions of butterflies that had been lapping salt traces on the beach; they rose—thousands of them, dozens of different species—into brilliant vortexes of every conceivable color. It was surreal. Rafting that day changed forever the way I interacted with the jungle and the Amazon.

  I rafted the entire day. Sundown came around 6 P.M. and I pushed on for another hour with my headlamp. Altogether I rafted for nearly ten hours that day, covering well over fifty miles before finally making camp.

  Never before had sleep seemed so daunting. How could I zip my tent and turn off? The answer was, I couldn’t. For hours upon hours I lay in the dark, listening for every sound. It was impossible to tell if I was awake or sleeping after a time, but I would check my watch to see that an hour had passed, or fifteen minutes. I know that I was sleeping at least once because I woke up with a start, I could hear whispers. Heart jackhammering, I realized that there were voices in every direction surrounding the tent. Holy shit!

  As an arrow penetrated the wall of the tent I awoke from the dream with sweat pouring out of me, panting. I unzipped the door and stood on the beach, scanning right and left. All was still; no one was there. I wanted to keep rafting but knew it was too dangerous in the night—the raft could easily hit something and pop. I knew that in all likelihood the tribe was miles away and I should have been fine, but anytime I drifted to sleep I just saw the painted faces of warrior Indians attacking, or stalking up toward my tent. When awake, I was heartbroken. So much planning and anticipation, so much had gone into this expedition, and now it was over before it had begun. The weeks of filming I had planned to do, the adventures I would have had—all of it ruined. But there was no way I could stay on this r
iver knowing that I might be putting myself and the tribe in mortal danger.

  The following morning I rose before dawn, inflated my raft, and pushed out once again. The sun emerged on the horizon and ascended into the blue, cloudless sky. Many hours passed as the river whisked my craft through the jungle. The speed varied, sometimes as fast as fifteen miles per hour and other times, at wide sections, slowing to one or two. Most often, it was somewhere around ten, and over the course of the two days, I estimated that I had journeyed between sixty and eighty miles.

  By 2 P.M. on the second day the river began to change. I had made serious progress downriver, retracing all the ground I had covered on foot and more. Now I entered an area that I had not noticed on the way up. The topography was stunning. Another sweeping turn of the river bore the raft in its current, and I watched as the jungle rose high above. The bank to the right was almost vertical, rising more than seventy feet in a sheer wall of clay and scrub before giving way to jungle. At the top of the steep cliff the roots from ancient trees stood naked in the wind, exposed by the fallen earth. I paddled disinterestedly as my eyes remained fixed on the view above. The turn ended and the river became a straightaway. It was then I spotted a boat, then another. Inside the boats were four men.

  My heart quickened at the sight of humans from my world, and an indescribable primal elation flowed through my veins at seeing other people. My raft approached the two boats and I dug the paddle into the current on the left to turn sharply onto the sand. The four men stared at me, eyes bulging out as I came by in the raft. We talked for several minutes and I learned they had come as far up the Moxos as they could, looking for good hunting—and the last thing they expected was to find a white guy. It was also revealed to me that one of the party, a fat cross-eyed member of the smaller vessel, had just shot a jaguar.

  “What?” I asked, hoping that I had heard wrong.

  “Sí!” said the cross-eyed man, grinning broadly. He was short and fat, with a dim expression. A filthy baseball cap covered his ratty, balding hair and matched his soiled and unbuttoned shirt. The second man, whose face I couldn’t see, was skinny and silent, uninterested in the conversation. I scanned both boats and saw no spotted cats among the many carcasses there. The man explained in Spanish, “We shot it just a hundred meters upriver, high up on that fallen log.” I knew exactly where he had meant. Just minutes earlier I had made a mental note of an impressive log at the top of one of the cliffs. It had occurred to me that it was the perfect perch for a jaguar to survey the river below.

  “You hit it?” I asked.

  “Yes, but then it ran into a cave.”

  “So you are just going to leave it?”

  “Sí! A wounded jaguar is very dangerous.” At this point it was difficult to control my rage. I tried to explain that you can’t just shoot something and leave it, least of all a jaguar, but the men only grinned more and shook their heads. I looked upriver, to where the last bend was, just beyond where it was possible to see; there could be a wounded jaguar there . . . a jaguar.

  “Tu tengo miedo?” I asked. You are afraid?

  “No!” said one. “Are you prepared to go looking for it up there?” I told him I was. I was feeling violent with emotion. “Ta bien,” he said, and motioned for his partner to start their motor.

  As we covered the hundred meters upriver to the place of the incident, the men filled me in on the details. Somewhere along the way, I gleaned that the chattier of the two poachers called himself Lucco. Lucco explained to me that the jaguar had been sitting on the large fallen beam that lay across the cliff above before they had shot it. Looking up at the large beam, I could picture the large cat stretched out there above the rest of the jungle, regally surveying its kingdom. The setting was perfect, exactly the place a person would expect a jaguar to spend its morning, any photographer’s dream. From his description of the jaguar’s initial position he seamlessly continued to the part where he raised his gun and shot the animal. From the log, he said, the jaguar had fallen and then quickly regained its wits and disappeared into a cave; as he talked, my head spun. What’s more, I had no idea what he meant when he said “cave.” Caves are rare in the homogeneous clay landscape of the western Amazon.

  The boats were tied. Lucco opened his 16-gauge and removed the expended cartridge, throwing the red plastic and metal case into the river. Then he asked me to bring my headlamp. The bank was steep and so slippery that we were forced to use all fours and still found ourselves at risk of being thrust downward into the river. While we were climbing, I repeatedly asked Lucco if he was certain his shot had hit its mark. I asked repeatedly because I just couldn’t fathom someone actually raising a gun to a jaguar, it went against everything I knew about local people’s supposed respect for the cats.

  The other thought I had was one of self-preservation: if we really were about to come close to a wounded jaguar, the situation needed some considering. With each moment we climbed higher, my heart began to pound ever harder. The cliff was so steep that we had to kick at the mud to force our toes to hold, and sweat poured from every pore in my body as repeated slips threatened a long and painful fall. Each time the mud gave, I froze, clutching the cliff with every bit of strength I had left, machete in my teeth. As we scrambled skyward, our legs and arms were repeatedly snatched by razor grass that tore our clothing and left deep lacerations on our skin. After several minutes the boats had become small beneath us and the incline mellowed so that we were able to stand. We were beneath the log.

  Lucco brought his gun into position and gave me a grave nod. Standing several feet from him, I clutched my machete. It was clear now what he had meant when he said cave. Beneath the cascade of roots and limbs from the jungle above were large hollows in the upper area of the cliff. It was difficult to tell how deep they were from all the interference, but the sight of those black chambers beneath hundreds-of-years-old trees tugged at my gut. There was no turning back now. Back down by the riverbank, when the men had first told their story, I had processed it as just that—a story, a collection of descriptive statements and little more. Now, as I stood at the top of the cliff, faced with the reality of our position, the sight of those caves, my skepticism was the first thing to fall away.

  At that moment, I knew there were only three possible outcomes to the next five minutes of my life. One, of course, was that we would see no sign of a jaguar and return quietly to our boat. Another was that we were about to be faced with the savage wrath of a wounded jaguar defending itself against its attackers. The third and most terrifying option was that I would have to watch as the already wounded jaguar was executed.

  We advanced slowly, Lucco with his gun outstretched in front of him, ready to shoot at the first sign of anything. It was then that I began to feel truly sick. Even as I veered between fear of an attack and dread of what I might see, my eyes clung to Lucco as his trembling legs brought him forward. I hated that man. You bastard, I thought, you miserable murdering bastard fuck. I found myself imagining a jaguar tearing out of the cave at full tilt, ears peeled back and face contorted with savage wrath. I pictured the cat’s broad paw clubbing Lucco in his fat poacher face or, better yet, removing his throat in one slash. I hoped that it would happen. In fact I was rooting for it.

  My blood-soaked daydream came to an end as we reached the mouth of the first cave. Lucco hissed for me to turn on my headlamp, which I did. He parted the hanging roots with the muzzle of his gun, peering into the dark. I prayed not to see the cat. I prayed that Lucco had missed, and that the jaguar was a half mile away by then. It was all too easy to picture the wounded cat huddled in the shadow of the cave, helpless, and Lucco mercilessly executing it at point-blank range. Please, no, I repeated to myself again and again as I shone the light into the reaches of the small cavern. There was nothing.

  The first cave was indeed empty, and so we moved to the left to check another. When that cave also turned out to be vacant, Lucco seemed to relax a little. He looked my way and shrugged his should
ers dumbly, now scanning the ground for tracks and still holding his gun at the ready. There were no signs of the jaguar’s impact after falling from the log—it was as if it had simply evaporated. I too scanned the clay for tracks. Jaguar tracks are large and telling, but we saw none.

  After several tense minutes of watching and listening it seemed as though the cat was long gone. Lucco lowered his gun, moved off farther to the left, and mumbled that he would move to check other caves off to the right, while I remained where I stood. I tried to reconstruct the event, and deduce possible trajectories a wounded animal could have taken when falling or leaping from the log. It seemed that with so much soft earth, there had to be some evidence. I re-created the event in my head as Lucco had told it, and imagined the cat being shot and falling from the log. If it had fallen injured there would be a large, smooth impact crater. The log was more than ten feet from the ground, more than high enough to produce a noticeable impact. That crater should be more or less just below the log—where both Lucco and I had already searched. Looking at the boats below, and then considering Lucco’s pathetic antique excuse for a gun, I began to wonder if he had—or could have—actually hit the cat from that range. It was quite a distance, and the pellets of the 16-gauge might not have held their power by the time they reached their mark—if they reached at all. The thought dawned on me that it was possible that the cat had not fallen from the limb but instead jumped in escape.

  I broadened the radius of my search, meticulously inspecting every inch of earth. It was then that I saw them: four large, broad jaguar tracks punched deep into the mud, with several large spots of blood beside them. The blood beside the four paw prints in the clay settled the debate: Lucco had shot a jaguar.