by Joseph Wallace
When people would ask us why we would
choose to live in the rainforest, we would only laugh.
But the bugs! they would say. How can you stand the bugs?
Bugs? Did we tell you about the whip scorpion that was in Dave's
bed? Eighteen inches from the end of its tail to the tip of its
eyestalks, with claws half a foot long if they were an inch. Dave
came out wearing it as a hat!
But the diseases! Malaria. River blindness. Dengue fever. Aren't
you afraid?
Afraid? Pete passed out drunk one night, lay out on the sandbank
the whole night, got eaten alive by sand flies. Did he get
leishmaniasis? No way! Now the CDC has him enrolled in a study,
to see if they can bottle his immune blood and use it for a
vaccine. But we think it was the tequila.
Jaguars?
What about them? Sure, we run into them, usually on the trails in
the middle of the night on the way to the john. This is what
you've gotta do: just stand there and stare 'em down. They'll
turn away. They know who's boss.
That was us, two hundred miles from the nearest road, surrounded
by thousands of square miles of untouched rainforest. Riding an
endless endorphin rush, intoxicated by the forest, but unafraid
of it. In control. In synch.
Top of the food chain.
···
Elena and I were camping on the riverbank. We were the only ones
on the sandy beach created by the river as it wound past in a
lazy oxbow curve. Sometimes when we'd get up in the morning we'd
find the footprints of an ocelot or a tapir that had come up to
sniff our tent during the night.
Everyone else was staying at the research station, located about
half a mile inland, down a path that led through rainforest as
dark and silent as a cathedral. Elena and I were supposed to be
here to write about their work. We'd shown up six months earlier
for a two-week visit and had never left. I lost the extra weight
I'd put on up north, Elena's auburn hair bleached almost white in
the hot tropical sun, and we never put pen to paper.
Instead we helped out at the station, cooked meals when our turn
came up, took long canoe trips to distant lakes inhabited by
giant otters and twenty-foot-long caimans, and made love under
the canvas to the sound of night birds and insects.
We were sitting in front of our tent early one morning, drinking
cups of instant coffee and watching a flock of raggedy toucans
fly in single file to a big tree across the river, when we heard
the sound. A moaning cry, rising and falling in pitch, coming
from just around a bend in the river.
"What the hell was that?" I said.
"A jaguar in heat?" Elena was grinning, but there was no humor in
her eyes.
The sound came again, closer, and we couldn't deny that it was a
human sound of agony and despair.
As we ran to the edge of the river, the source of the sound came
into view: a battered fiberglass canoe, spinning in the current
as it approached the sandbar. I waded out to meet it, and saw
that it contained two white men slumped in the bottom. They
barely seemed to notice or care where they were going.
I glanced back at Elena, and knew that her shocked expression was
a mirror of my own. Robinson Crusoe's surprise at finding a
footprint in the sand could not have been greater than our
amazement at this moment. Where the hell had these two men come
from? We were in the midst of a roadless wilderness the size of
New England. People weren't supposed to just drift past.
Plus, these men had come from upriver. The only people who lived
upriver were a tribe of uncontacted Yaminahua Indians. People who
had never seen a Caucasian, and who had never been seen by one.
When I grabbed the canoe and hauled it up onto the beach, one of
the men looked up. He was wild-eyed, and seemed at first not to
understand what he was seeing, but he appeared unhurt. As I
watched, though, the other rolled onto his back, and I saw that
he had two arrows embedded deeply in his flesh, only the
feathered shafts showing. One arrow had pierced his upper arm,
and the other the soft flesh of his side just above the hip.
We helped the uninjured man climb from the canoe. He flopped to
the ground and lay there, face down. But we were afraid to move
the other one. The edges of his wounds were an ugly greenish
color. When he opened his eyes, we could see that the whites were
streaked with blood. As I watched, he made a small, breathy sound
and seemed to slide deeper into unconsciousness.
"I'll get help," Elena said, and ran across the beach and out of
sight, heading down the trail toward the research station. A
moment later, the uninjured man sat up, and I got my first real
look at him.
He was young, no more than twenty-five, with tangled dirty hair
and mottled sunburned skin speckled with mosquito bites. He
looked up at me and began to talk, a stream of monologue in a
hoarse voice, as if he'd almost forgotten how to make words.
His name was Glen, he told me, and his friend was Raymond. They'd
heard about this river, he said. They'd heard it passed through
places no had ever traveled, and then they knew they had to come
here. And they weren't going to fight their way upriver, like we
did to reach the research station. They were going to shoot
downriver, conquer it the way it should be done.
Somehow they hired a military helicopter to drop them, supplies,
and their canoe a hundred miles upriver from where we sat. They
set off, traveling past forest so beautiful and unspoiled that
they felt like they were canoeing through the Garden of Eden.
And then they entered Yaminahua territory. First they glimpsed a
dugout canoe being paddled away from them with unbelievable speed
by a short, dark, nearly naked man. Then a pair of expressionless
faces peering out at them from the bank. Then a wisp of smoke
from a hidden fire.
The first attack came at dawn, a spray of arrows from the heavy
underbrush bordering the shore. One of those arrows found its
mark, burying itself in Raymond's arm. As Raymond gasped and
moaned in the bottom of the canoe, Glen ran the canoe as fast as
he could, risking burning out its small outboard motor.
If they were lucky, he thought, they could outrun the Yaminahua.
They weren't lucky. Like all lowland rivers, this one was made of
long, lazy S-curves, oxbows that might travel a mile east, then a
mile west, before resuming the river's north-south course. All
the Yaminahua had to do after firing their arrows was walk a
couple of hundred yards overland and wait for the canoe to show
up again along its circuitous course.
That dusk and the next morning the attacks came again, flurries
of feathered shafts launched from a patch of underbrush and a
tree-lined bluff overlooking the river. Mostly the arrows would
clang off the boat—but once, though the two men huddled under the
canoe seats, trying to protect themselves with cans of water and
petrol, an arrow struck Raymond in the side.
"After that, we traveled only at night," Glen said. "At first
light, I'd drag the canoe up the beach and hide it in the densest
brush I could find. Then we'd sit there, all day, in the heat,
getting eaten by the bugs, waiting for the sun to go down so we
could get back on the water, try to reach you."
He shuddered. "Every moment I was sure that they would find us.
That we'd hear footsteps and then they'd be standing there,
aiming their arrows at us....
"We were dead," Glen said. "One more try, and they would have
gotten me too. But they left us alone after that. I don't know
why."
He paused, then said, "Yes I do. They were afraid of us. That was
their land, and we'd invaded it. Once we'd passed their borders,
they left us alone." Suddenly, with a ferocity that shocked me,
he made a fist with his right hand and hit himself, hard, on the
temple. "Stupid!" he said, spitting out the word. He hit himself
again. "We were so stupid! What were we thinking?"
···
Elena and I took a canoe trip the next day. Somehow we knew that
it would be our last one, that our time here in the forest was
coming to an end.
Glen and Raymond were long gone. The researchers had called for
help by radio, and one of them had taken the two men by canoe to
the airstrip, four hours away. At best, Raymond would be in a
hospital by the end of the day, but most of us doubted that he'd
survive the trip downriver.
Caimans watched us through ancient pebbly eyes as Elena and I
headed for our favorite lake. But we didn't get there. We'd
barely gone a quarter of the way when the Yaminahua found us.
There were four of them in two dugout canoes. All men, small and
muscular, with fierce dark eyes and black hair that hung to their
shoulders. They were dressed only in loincloths made of woven
plants, and they carried long wooden bows and slings of arrows
with feathered shafts.
The canoes pulled up, one on each side of ours. I'd been idling
the engine since they appeared, but now I cut the engine. In the
sudden silence I could hear the breathing of the men, the trickle
of water off their resting paddles, and in the distance the
raucous calls of a pair of macaws.
The four men stared at me with expressionless eyes until I looked
away. Then, methodically, they checked out our canoes, our
clothes, our bodies. Reaching to examine my baseball cap, running
their hands along our aluminum paddles, leaning in close to stare
at Elena's sunglasses until she made a gasping sound and closed
her eyes.
I reached over and touched her hand: Be calm. I'm not sure how,
but I could tell they didn't intend to harm us. Having found out
that such strange, pale creatures existed at the borders of their
world, they'd simply come to get a closer look at us.
Still, as we sat there, waiting for the inspection to end, I felt
the last vestiges of arrogance drain out of me. Had I really felt
that I owned this forest, that I knew the slightest bit about it?
"Stupid!" Glen had said. "What were we thinking?"
I knew what he meant.
After about ten minutes, the Yaminahua departed. I could detect
no signal, but as one they all lifted their paddles, dug them
into the placid river, and swung away.
Elena and I watched them cut effortlessly through the water, the
muscles in their shoulders flexing with each stroke, droplets of
water spraying like tiny jewels from the blades of their paddles.
It seemed to take only a few seconds before they reached the
oxbow's bend and disappeared from our view.