by John Koloen
Progress was slow but steady. The machines produced copious exhaust and they switched them off when they stopped to reconnoiter. As if bracing himself, the young guide pressed his hands against a tree. In seconds, his hands were covered by hundreds of ants.
“What’s he doing?” Mitchell asked.
The boy rubbed his hands together, crushing the ants and wiping his hands across his arms and exposed skin. He smiled when he noticed the others watching him.
“Mosquitoes don’t like the way the ants smell when you crush them,” Suarez explained, though he, too, had sprayed himself with the bug spray.
“They’re leaf cutters,” Boyd said, having stepped off the ATV to get a closer look. “Give me a minute and I think I can tell you the species.”
“We don’t have time,” Duncan said. “We’re not here to classify Formicidae.”
Although they were only three or four miles northeast of the village, the odometer showed they’d traveled more than twice that distance when the boy directed them to stop. Pointing towards the massive stump of a Brazil nut tree, he stepped into the thick underbrush, stopping when Suarez shouted, “Pare.”
They could see the stump but little else from where they stood.
“What’s he pointing at?” Bob Mitchell asked.
“The stump,” Suarez said. “He says that’s where the bones are.”
“Let’s follow him, then,” Duncan said.
“Wait, wait,” Mitchell said assertively. “Let’s get this on video.”
While Mitchell connected a shotgun microphone to a recorder and attached it to a handheld, telescoping boom, Joe Robinson grabbed his camera and fiddled with its controls. Duncan looked at Boyd and rolled his eyes.
“Is this how it works?” he said, skeptically. “We gotta wait for them?”
“It takes time,” Boyd said. “It’s frustrating for us, and I think it’s frustrating for them, you know, having to set things up just right before they can shoot.”
Duncan sighed and leaned against his ATV, glancing idly at his watch as if timing them. It didn’t take long for them to notice the noise level of monkeys watching from the trees. Several minutes passed and Duncan’s impatience got the best of him.
“I’m tired of this,” he complained to Boyd.
“Well, here’s the deal, if you don’t wait and you find something, you’re gonna hafta to do it all over. Let’s just wait for them to get ready. See what happens. If it’s a big hassle, we can talk about it.”
Duncan sighed again.
“Ohh, Kay,” Mitchell said, boom in hand, followed closely by Robinson, shouldering his camera.
“Can we go now?” Duncan asked acerbically.
Following the boy through thick brush, they approached the stump. Behind it was an irregularly shaped mound of mostly mammal carcasses. It looked to have been thrown together rather than neatly stacked. Duncan and Boyd studied several carcasses closely.
“Definitely blaberus,” Duncan said. “How long has it been here?”
“He says they did this three weeks ago,” Suarez said.
The boy explained in Portuguese that, after he and his friends had found the remains scattered on the forest floor, they collected the carcasses thinking that they had value, but the adults in the village scoffed at the notion. The hides were damaged and stunk with decay and the adults ordered the children to keep them out of the village.
“There are more,” Suarez said. “They found them in all directions.”
“Pull some out from the bottom,” Duncan said.
“What you thinking?” Boyd asked.
“Antonio,” Duncan said, “Ask him if they found all of them at the same time, you know, all at once?”
“He says they found some of them and when they came back they found more.”
“That explains it,” Duncan said.
“Explains what?” Mitchell asked, steadying his boom above Duncan’s head while Robinson focused his camera on the scientist’s face.
“Some of the carcasses are old,” he said, holding up the remains of a ground squirrel that he took from the top of the pile. Slicing through the hide with his knife, he held the small skeleton, which still had small strands of rotting flesh attached to it.
“That’s really ripe,” Duncan said, tossing it back on the pile. “Now look at the carcass that Cody’s holding.”
Like Duncan, Boyd sliced the hide away. The skeleton was stripped of flesh.
“Territorialism?” Boyd said tentatively.
“Exactly.”
“What does that mean?” Mitchell asked.
“It means they might come back.”
“Is that good?”
“I hope so, but the fact that they came through here twice in such a short time really makes me wish I had some of these guys in a lab.”
“It’d be a lot safer, huh?” Boyd said knowingly.
“Not only that, but now we gotta figure out if and when they’re coming back.”
Duncan surveyed the forest silently while the others watched.
“What are you thinking?” Boyd asked.
“I don’t know. We don’t want to be anywhere near blaberus in huge numbers. Right?” Duncan said rhetorically. “Ideally, we want to locate a group of scouts, you know, we’ve got gloves, we can grab them and put as many as we can into the containers and be gone before the rest of them get to us.”
“But how do you find the scouts? And how far behind is the colony? We don’t know any of that,” Boyd said.
“Hmm,” Duncan said, turning to Suarez who stood with the boy behind the others. “When you were in that tree that night, did any of the bugs try to climb up to get you?”
Suarez shook his head.
“They jumped, Mister Howard. I don’t know why they didn’t climb to get me. I didn’t even think about it, I was so scared.”
“You thinking of going up a tree?” Boyd asked.
“Well, yeah, like that tree over there looks like a tripod or something. It looks easy to climb,” Duncan said absently. “Ahh, forget it, that’s not gonna work. As far as we know, they can climb trees. Just because they didn’t doesn’t mean they can’t. We’re gonna have to catch them after they’ve been through an area, capture the stragglers.”
“What about bait?” Boyd said.
“The forest is filled with bait. Why would they take our bait?”
“Maybe so, but if we think they’re gonna come through again, we can set up some kind of trap, couldn’t we.”
“What kind of trap?”
“What do you think Thomas is using?”
“Good question. Maybe we should ask him,” Duncan said.
Duncan and Boyd discussed as many ways as they could think of to trap insects, including bottle traps, interception traps, funnel traps, sticky traps, floor traps, wing traps and bucket traps, among others, some of which they could make with the available materials. But each of them had a flaw that eliminated it from consideration. Ten minutes after they started their conversation and after they’d retraced their steps back to the ATVs, they agreed that the trap had to be sturdy enough to resist the insects’ cutting surfaces, their teeth and their leaping ability. And it had to be constructed of materials available in the village.
“I got it,” Boyd said. “You know how ’possum traps work, right?”
“We can’t use an opossum trap, for God’s sake,” Duncan said disparagingly.
“No, of course not,” Boyd retorted. “Just hear me out. It would be like a ’possum trap where the bug gets in but can’t get out because a door or gate shuts behind it.”
“Hmmm. How would that work?”
“Well,” Boyd said excitedly, aware that all eyes and ears were on him, “we could get something like a plastic bottle, cut the top off and somehow attach a piece of plastic on a hinge near the spout and then glue the top back on, dump some bait into the bottle and set it out. The bugs should be able to fit through the opening, right? But if they try to get out they run
into the little hinged gate. What d’ya think?”
No one said anything for several seconds.
“That’s not bad,” Duncan said guardedly, breaking the silence, while Robinson watched through his camera LCD and Mitchell continued to record sound. “It’s a great idea, if we can find the materials. Assuming we find what we need, we build a bunch of those and set them out and wait. It’s worth a shot, assuming, of course.”
Duncan patted Boyd’s shoulder and smiled at the camera.
“You know, it might take a while to get results, but if the bugs come back, I think it’ll work,” Boyd said, grinning widely.
“Yeah, if they come back,” Duncan said.
“Let’s hope they do,” Mitchell said.
77
AS THEY DROVE, Nolan Thomas outlined his plan for the day. Able to hear only part of what Thomas said, Gruber focused on avoiding holes that pockmarked the trail and the occasional rock protruding through the surface.
Equipped with wireless radios, Gruber and one of the assistants would be dropped off near where they’d finished the day before. The others would be dropped off where they had finished. At this point, Thomas had no expectation of finding blaberus. The idea was to map out their territory, determine its extent as much as possible and then determine how recently the colony had been at the site.
Without carcasses to go on, he struggled to estimate the colony’s size and how they sought out their prey, whether through the use of scouts or some other mechanism, and then the strategies they employed to kill. Did they crawl across the forest floor in a wave, filling up every nook and cranny? Did they surround their victims or engage in a frontal assault? Did they coordinate their activities though some unknown mechanism, such as pheromones? Were they social insects like ants? Did they have a leader? Did they have castes? How did they locate their prey? In the back of his mind he questioned whether they were accurately named. He understood from what he’d read and seen in the media that they were classified by an old professor who’d published few, if any, papers. He knew that naming the species would generate headlines, especially if it corrected other people’s mistakes. Although some of the answers would come from the laboratory, the broader questions about the colony itself and its behavior could occur only in the field where it could be observed in its totality. The question was how to do that without endangering their lives.
Prior to setting his assistants loose, Thomas instructed them to look closely for dead blaberus and collect them.
“I want to see the freshest remains you find,” he said in a business-like tone. “We’ll agree to call them Reptilus blaberus for now out of convenience.” Gruber and the others exchanged surprised looks.
“You think they’re misnamed?” Gruber asked gingerly.
“I think we have to approach this with an open mind. We have to avoid making assumptions and relying on what other people have reported.”
“Right,” Gruber said. “Do you think we’ll need the flamethrower? It’s kinda heavy.”
“You didn’t carry it yesterday. I don’t see why you should today,” Thomas said. “You’ve got your radios. Check in every fifteen minutes, and don’t get out of radio range. I don’t want to send a search party after you.”
78
AFTER DROPPING OFF equipment at their campsite, and while Suarez looked for plastic bottles in the village, Duncan and his crew returned the ATVs by early afternoon. Bob Mitchell hadn’t given a thought to the possibly underhanded way in which they’d obtained the ATVs until they’d dismounted at the administration building and waited for Santiago to inspect the vehicles and return their deposit. He watched several men running across the campground toward him. One of them was shouting, but he couldn’t tell what he was saying.
“Here it comes,” Joe Robinson whispered to Boyd.
By the time Boyd looked up, the first of the runners had reached them.
“What the fuck! You stole our ATVs, you bastard,” one of the men who ran toward them said lividly. “I oughta…” he threatened, raising his fist above his head as he nearly ran into the startled Mitchell.
“You oughta what?” Robinson said with equal menace, stepping boldly alongside Mitchell. The curmudgeonly videographer had a reputation in the industry as someone not to mess with. It’s why he was assigned to Mitchell’s crew to begin with.
“It was my idea,” Robinson said defiantly. “You got a beef with someone, it’s me, not him.”
Although at fifty-four Robinson was much older than the three men who confronted Mitchell, he was built like a fireplug, with thick arms, a barrel chest and an abdomen that covered his belt. Unshaven, his long-sleeve shirt saturated with sweat, he looked like someone who was ready to take the first punch and then retaliate with force.
While Duncan and Boyd watched from nearby, the three aggressors considered their options. Boyd noticed two ATVs parked in a small junk yard behind the building.
“Why didn’t you take those?” one of the men said angrily, pointing toward the ATVs. “Besides, we had reservations.”
“Talk to the old man,” Robinson said. “He rented them to us.”
Nobody wanted to upset villagers, much less the guy in charge of the ATVs.
“Well, it takes two to tango,” the de facto leader of the group announced defiantly.
As they walked away, Mitchell asked what they meant.
“It means, they’re gonna do to us what we did to them,” Robinson said. “I kinda thought this might happen, but, what the hell, at least we got a day out of it. I got all the B-roll I’m gonna need and you got some decent sound. Didn’t you, Mitch?”
Bob Mitchell was thrilled that the crusty Robinson called him by his nickname for the first time. He felt accepted.
79
SUAREZ, WHO LOOKED like the villagers and spoke their language, had no problem finding an armful of two-liter plastic bottles. The villagers collected them and found multiple uses for them and had plenty to spare. Boyd wasted no time in working on a prototype that would turn the plastic bottles into traps. It would have been easy if they were trying to catch beetles, but blaberus was powerful and vicious. He had little doubt that, with the appropriate bait, they would be lured inside. The question was how long it would take them to escape.
Duncan’s disdain for the media bubbled into consciousness while watching the confrontation over the ATVs. He thought them arrogant for expecting to take priority over scientists whose purpose was far more important than mere coverage. At the same time, he couldn’t help but notice that additional media tents had sprung up in the encampment since they’d left in the morning.
Robinson watched as Boyd sliced the top of a bottle. His instinct was to grab his camera, but he hesitated.
“You might want to do that inside the tent,” he said quietly, standing behind Boyd and nodding toward the other campers, “You’re supposed to be part of our crew, remember?”
Boyd looked up, at first not certain what Robinson meant.
“Right,” he said, hastily tossing the bottles and scuttling inside the tent he shared with Suarez and Duncan. “Good idea.”
“Hey, Howard,” Boyd said, pointing to the Broken Tree Productions logo on his shirt pocket, “we’re supposed to look like we’re working for them.”
Duncan understood immediately, ducking into the stuffy tent. While Boyd worked on his prototype, Duncan rolled up the flaps covering the screens, letting in additional light and air.
The major problem that Boyd had to solve was how to install a flap at the opening that would allow the insects to enter but not exit.
“You know what would be great to have right now?” Boyd said. “A skewer of some kind.”
“A skewer?” Duncan asked.
“Yeah, I could push it through one side and out the other and hang the flap on it. Where we gonna find a skewer?”
“OK, how about sticks?” Duncan said.
“I thought about that. They have to be thin and strong.”
“
You think they’ll just chew through it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nobody knows,” Duncan said. “How about I ask Bob? They might have something.”
“And then we gotta figure out how to reconnect the top with the rest of the bottle. Wish we had some glue,” Boyd said.
Duncan unzipped the screen and poked his head out of the tent door. Crawling out awkwardly, he rose and felt stiffness in his back and knees. The film crew’s tent was larger than Duncan’s, with straight sides. He entered it by ducking his head. Inside, Mitchell and Robinson, sitting on canvas camp chairs, stared at a laptop resting on a small table, examining the day’s footage.
“Hey, doc,” Mitchell said. “C’mon in. Sorry we don’t have another chair.”
“No problem,” Duncan said, looking over their shoulders at the laptop. “We’re building traps and I was wondering if you all have anything like a skewer with you.”
“A skewer?” Robinson asked, looking up at Duncan.
“Yeah, you know, something like that. Thin and strong and maybe six inches long. Something like that.”
The two exchanged looks, as if expecting the other to have something that fit the bill.
“I can’t think of anything,” Mitchell said. Robinson shrugged.
“How ’bout glue?”
Again, they looked at each other as if expecting a solution.
“We got duct tape,” Mitchell said.
“Yeah,” Duncan said eagerly. “That might work.”
Returning to his tent, Duncan handed a roll of tape to Boyd.
“That’ll work,” he said. “I think I figured it out. There’s lots of vines in the forest. We just need to find the right size stuff. It’s not as stiff as a stick but it’s not brittle either. And it would be harder to chew through. What do you think?”
“Antonio can find it for us,” Duncan said, smiling. “By the way, where is he?”
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