by Paul Rosolie
The tracks were set in the clay more than fifteen feet from the log. My tracing of the trajectory from takeoff to landing revealed that the cat had taken a massive leap from the downed tree in which it had been perched. The distance covered was considerable; the beast in our vicinity had to be dangerously athletic. My heart was racing.
Kneeling by the impact area, I looked from the log to the prints and then ahead. There was another cave, one that hadn’t been checked. The moment my eyes fell on it, I knew the jaguar was inside. It made perfect sense, given the evidence, and the earth does not record such things with error. The jaguar had bounded from its perch, landed, and then leapt directly into the shelter of the cave with barely a trace, as if it had never existed.
There was nothing I could do; one foot went in front of the other. There was no chance of turning my body around, although areas of my mind were rioting in fear. It was just another instance of wet paint and my need to touch the wall; I knew I’d regret it the rest of my life if I didn’t find out. Reality moved in dream time as I approached the curtain of roots and foliage at the mouth of the cave and knelt. I cautiously stretched my arm forward to hold the curtain aside. Light flooded into the darkness, illuminating two large golden jaguar eyes, which stared back into mine.
All noise stopped. Every sensation and all awareness of a world existing beyond the grip of those hypnotizing eyes vanished. Not three feet from my face, and only inches from my outstretched hand, was a fully grown jaguar. Her eyes were wide, wild, livid with betrayal—with such savage intensity that it felt like her gaze physically penetrated my head. At the center of each eye was a pitch-black sphere surrounded by a starburst of green and orange. She was panting, mouth ajar so that just the bases of her two large lower canines were visible against the black of her lip.
My hand was only a foot from her face. The indescribable kinetic power coiled in every inch of her body dwarfed the defenseless creature before her—me. From the impressive weight of her broad paws, where her retractable claws were hidden, came the muscled pillars of her forelegs, followed by a barrel chest and heavy neck, above them pointed shoulder blades; even the war-paint rosettes that decorated her coat were testament to her supremacy in the animal kingdom.
I knew I was in extreme danger. This was an animal that could run faster, jump higher, think better, and be far more lethal than any human could ever dream of in this setting. Our two bodies were separated by only air; whether I lived or died was entirely at the discretion of the cat.
Yet even overlooking the mechanical advantages of the jaguar, there was such a fire in her, a wrathful vibrancy of life emanating from her, that my own fascination overpowered the instinct to flee. She seemed to exist on an entirely different plane of consciousness, immersed in a constant state of peak experience unobtainable to the ever-distracted human mind. Looking into those eyes was as overwhelming as it was intoxicating. This was a creature that, except for the brief days in safety as a kitten, swatting at her mother’s tail and taking in a new world, had spent every waking moment fighting for life. Like one endless solo expedition, her life was a solitary battle for survival. Each morsel of food won required skill, stealth, and often the risk of injury or death. Stalking the beaches and brush of the long river beneath black thunderheads of the Amazon sky, she had managed to survive through all adversity in one of the most competitive and unforgiving ecosystems on earth.
After several seconds I noticed that I was still alive. . . . She wasn’t attacking; instead she was just staring back at me, panting. It was almost impossible to believe at that point. Had I been able to move I would have run, but she held me with her stare.
She looked desperate, hunted. Even in those blazing seconds, the beauty of that face struck me. Her features had the lean aesthetic of a female, almost leopard-like. Between fear and wonder it was nearly impossible to break her gaze, but the will to know forced my own eyes to dart for an instant to her flank. The pattern of her fur was not the small markings of some jaguars, but broad rosettes, almost like a Borneo clouded leopard. Following her pattern, I saw a stream of blood running toward the ground, where it collected in a small pool. She was wounded. When I saw the blood, I felt my pulse intensify, and a new sensation overcame me, one of complete despair. There was no way to discern the extent of her wounds, but from the amount of blood, it was clear that her injuries were serious. My heart sank. There was no more hoping. Lucco had hit his mark. In all likelihood the jaguar before me, the fantastically beautiful ruler of the jungle, would die a long, slow death from blood loss or infection—for nothing.
This animal was looking directly into my eyes with no indication of aggression, only lacerating desperation, pleading and imploring the stranger before her to simply let her be. I’m sure that more than a few people reading these words would accuse me of anthropomorphizing the cat, or romanticizing her communication, but what I saw was unmistakable. We all can see when a dog is bored, or happy, or confused; we all have seen the big cats at the zoo with that empty, spiritless glaze in their eyes from a lifetime of caged misery. This was no different. The jaguar was communicating. Terrified and badly wounded, she was doing all she could to simply avoid further persecution. In the space between us there was no escaping the untold atrocities inflicted by our species on hers.
When the sound of Lucco crashing through the brush reached my ears, I glanced left. The jaguar’s jowls curled in a silent snarl, exposing tremendous yellow fangs for a moment, before once again falling. My heart was slamming in my chest; if he came to know she was here, he would surely kill her. Now panic coursed through every inch of my nerves. If Lucco discovered the wounded cat, he would finish her off in the cave, where she was helpless. The fantastic fire in those eyes would be extinguished.
His clumsy trajectory was leading him right toward the cave, where the jaguar hid and where I knelt, and if he continued he would almost certainly see the jaguar tracks, large and clearly defined in the clay. Once more I met her eyes, so unbelievably close to my own, but there was no time. I lowered the curtain of roots and brush that I had been holding aside. “Please live,” I whispered, holding her gaze before the last glimpse of her disappeared behind the brush. Cautiously I stepped backward, ever aware of her ability to change her mind and choose fight over flight, and moved away from the cave.
Lucco was now making his way toward me, swearing in Spanish. As he slipped and fought his way over the steep landscape, my eyes went to the large pawprints still in the mud. Shit! It was miraculous that Lucco hadn’t seen them on first inspection, and there was no chance he’d miss them a second time. In two steps, I reached the impressions in the clay and stepped firmly on them. I tried to look casual, even bored, despite the fact that my entire body was shaking. I felt tears well in my eyes.
“Nada,” he said, panting and wheezing. “Puta madre!”
“I think you are getting old,” I joked in Spanish. “There are no jaguar tracks here. Are you sure it wasn’t a bird you shot at?” The comment had the desired effect: he laughed and took no suspicion from my face, which I tried to keep hidden—had he seen it, he would have known something was being kept from him. Watching his casual dimness, hearing his giggle, sent lava through my veins. In his face I saw the craven rapacity of my own species, the gluttonous waste; I saw the faces of elephants axed off while they screamed, bears strapped with bile extractors coming from their stomachs, a rhino bleeding from where its horn had once been. For a moment my hand tightened on the handle of my machete, and I thought of killing him myself, returning what he deserved. But my hand hung despondently at my side. I felt too hollow to do anything at all.
I was no longer in control of my emotions. As we made our way down the cliff toward the two boats below, I tried to get hold of myself, but I had been utterly disarmed by seeing the suffering cat. Tears welled in my eyes as I climbed back down the slope. Too defeated to care what happened next, I sold out and boarded their boat. Amid the carcasses and flies, I accepted a free ride and speed
y, safe return to civilization. My great solo expedition was over.
18
The River
Ah how shameless—the way these mortals blame the gods. From us alone, they say, come all their miseries, yes, but they themselves with their own reckless ways, compound their pains beyond their proper share.
—HOMER, THE ODYSSEY
If you journeyed back 2.7 billion years, just before photosynthesizing life began eating light and oxygenating the world, you would not be able to breathe. Plants literally created the livable reality that enabled air-breathing life-forms to exist.
In his book The Sacred Balance, David Suzuki takes a step further to point out that even if a time-traveling human came prepared with a breathing apparatus, life on pre-plant earth would be far from safe. Water would be toxic to drink because there would be no “plant roots, soil fungi or other microorganisms to filter out heavy metals and other potentially dangerous leachates from rock.” There would also be nothing to eat. Even if a time traveler had anticipated the barren pre-life environment and brought seeds to plant fresh vegetables, he or she would find no soil to plant in “because soil is created when living organisms die and their carcasses mix with the matrix of clay, sand, and gravel.” Looking backward at the earth in this way allows a sharper appreciation of the modern world, where plants and animals make up the living biosphere, in which life creates and sustains life. A walk through the woods starts to take on a completely different meaning.
By now, of course, plants have run the show long enough to put the more mobile animal species to work for them. Colorful flowers attract bees, birds, bats, and myriad other transporters of pollen; food in the form of ripe fruit is advertised in gaudy colors that are irresistible to the animals that will consume it and later deposit the seeds from it in their droppings. Many plants have evolved to depend entirely on animal dispersal.
Among the Amazon’s largest and most impressive tree species is the Brazil nut tree, a towering 150-foot giant of the forest. Yet this massive pillar of the jungle depends on some of the smallest creatures to exist, such as species of orchid bees that enter their yellow flowers and transport pollen between male and female trees. Fertilized by the bees, the trees produce large, woody seed-filled pods, like super-thick coconuts, that grow in the canopy and harden before plummeting to the jungle floor like cannonballs, with the speed and weight to kill.
The pods are too hard for virtually any animal in the forest to penetrate and would remain trapped and rotting on the jungle floor if not for one creature: the agouti. Agoutis are a sharp-toothed rodent, roughly the size of a rabbit, that specialize in opening the hard pods, exposing the Brazil nut tree’s nuts. Agoutis bury the nuts in the ground for later, and inevitably forget many of their caches.
Orchids, bees, trees, and agoutis—and the list goes on to include a species of arrow frog that guards its tadpoles exclusively in the empty Brazil nut pods that become filled with rainwater, and still others like the mosses, lichens, vines, bromeliads, ants, and other organisms that call the trees home. The result is a giant tree, a crucial element of life in the Amazonian landscape. Not to mention an important cash crop for the people who call the jungle home. Interestingly, Brazil nuts are one of the few products that come from the Amazon that can actually benefit the forest. Because of their complex life cycle, the trees are found only in primary forest, and so for Brazil nut farmers it is wiser to leave the forest standing and extract the Brazil nuts each year than to level the forest and attempt to farm in the poor soil. In this way the Brazil nut tree’s clever lifestyle in the forest and resulting bargain with human industry has protected immeasurably vast areas of the Amazon.
In the wake of my solo trip I gradually made my way back to civilization. I spent more than a week camping and exploring deep in the back areas of Santiago’s land, through forest riddled with pathways that led from one Brazil nut tree to another. I fished in streams, observed animals, and tried to take stock.
For some time the feeling of failure persisted. The plan had been to spend a week hiking upstream past the Western Gate, and then another week to ten days filming, and then return. In all I had budgeted just over three weeks for an expedition that in the end lasted less than two. Of the time I had spent alone I had filmed virtually nothing, saving battery and time for when I could set up, stake out, and concentrate on filming and not hiking. But the stakeout period never came. I would not, it seemed, be making a documentary after all.
Though I had cursed the bad luck of encountering the tribe, gradually my wonder replaced fear and disappointment. What they must have thought to see a white man standing at the edge of the forest? They had almost certainly never seen one before. Of course, many questions were left unanswered: what they thought, what they felt, and what would have happened if there had been less distance between us. In hindsight, I wish that I had waved to them, that there had been some form of communication other than the tense staring back and forth. But it was the jaguar’s eyes that continued to haunt me, and the question of whether she had lived consumed my thoughts day and night.
Beyond the immediacy of her pain and needless death, the jaguar encounter was significant as part of the larger principle of the human relationship with predators. Only recently, scientists have begun to realize the true impact of apex predators on ecosystems; the parable of wolves in Yellowstone National Park has become the classic example. The last wolves in the Yellowstone area were killed in 1926, and the park remained without them until scientists reintroduced the species in 1995. The resulting changes that the predators caused in the ecosystem shocked everyone. For decades, the elk herds had overpopulated and overgrazed the riversides, munching the aspen, willow, and other tree saplings before they could mature. With the reintroduction of wolves, the elk numbers fell by half, and their behavior changed—they move more often now, because even when the wolves aren’t around, the elk are on guard. With the elk moving often and in fewer numbers, new trees are able to grow, for the first time in almost a century. The rich new foliage allowed beaver numbers to increase, which in turn had positive impacts on the fish population. Coyote numbers also fell sharply under the rule of wolves, allowing more rodents, rabbits, and small mammal life to flourish—this, combined with the increased fish stocks, benefited raptors like the bald eagle. With wolves culling coyotes, there are more red foxes; with willow trees growing, there is a greater diversity and abundance of songbirds.
The reintroduction of wolves snapped a malfunctioning system rapidly back into order. Because the effects were so clear, it has become the textbook example of how apex predators improve the environment. From a human perspective, the benefits of top predators and the fully functional ecosystems they promote include healthier fish and game for us, healthier forests and timber, cleaner water, flood control (due to the flood-absorbing power of forests); there are myriad others. The scope and nuances of these top-predator influences, from wolves in Yellowstone to tigers in Asia, to sharks in oceans all over the world, are still little understood. What we do know is that these “umbrella” species are responsible for the health and balance of the systems they rule. By extension, it is not difficult to imagine the far-reaching repercussions that would take place in the Amazon with the loss of any of the top players: anacondas, black caiman, giant river otters, and jaguars.
Gowri arrived ten days after the solo expedition ended, after finishing a semester in New Jersey. Once I had crushed her in my arms for almost an hour, we spent a day in Puerto Maldonado together visiting cafés, catching up, and eating ice cream. I told her all that had happened. In the following days, she, JJ, Pico, and I, along with the other brothers, began preparing for another volunteer group. Months earlier I had coordinated with people from the United Kingdom, France, the United States, and even with a couple from Finland.
The first two weeks of the trip were spent at Saona, in Infierno. But for this group we had planned to spend some days in true Amazon adventure fashion: a boat expedition. JJ and I agre
ed there was nowhere more perfect than Las Piedras. After experiencing the front-country feel of the Saona station for weeks, the volunteers were awed by Las Piedras’s unbroken primary forest. JJ and I knew the guy whom the foundation had hired to watch Las Piedras Station, and he’d agreed to allow us an afternoon to walk the trails, without the foundation’s knowledge.
Guiding in the rainforest is never easy. Your task is to show people wildlife that for the most part does not want to be seen and has spent millions of years adopting habits and camouflage that make it virtually undetectable. It doesn’t help that most people assume that they can stomp through the forest with the noisy heel-toe city shuffle, while talking, and still see animals. But this group was different. They were careful, quiet, and tuned in. Two had come specifically to see anacondas, and others had significant outdoor experience. As a result, on the first night in Infierno I was able to bring them within ten feet of a mother tapir and her baby, near a colpa. On transects we’d seen monkeys, tamandua, and a huge arboreal porcupine. After spending a quiet night in a hammock, one of the guys in the group had returned to tell me he’d seen a jaguar with no spots, which I explained was a puma—a very rare sighting. With her skilled eyes, Gowri added greatly to what the group was able to see by picking out dozens of the smaller wonders of the forest that even JJ and I often missed.
This group enjoyed the forest wonderland and bare-bones station at Infierno in a way few ever have; they really got it, and as a result were able to have unique encounters with wildlife. But when we arrived at the Las Piedras Biodiversity Station, I saw awe on their faces. Their eyes were pulled upward by the pillars of huge hardwood trees that dominated the ancient forest, and before we even reached the station they remarked on how different and wise the forest seemed. When we reached the clearing and the actual station, with its palm-thatched roof, inviting hammocks, and paradisiacal array of flowers against the greenery of the clearing, there was a collective hushed silence while each person took in the beauty in his or her own way. More than once, people quietly exclaimed that they had never seen anyplace so beautiful.