Excerpt
Junglekeeper
The Rivers in Our VeinsThere was once a little forest stream about an hour’s boat drive from the research station. It slithered beneath the canopy like a little blue snake—from a bird’s-eye view it was invisible. A hard-to-access, seldom-visited capillary of the great Amazon River. You already know what this place looks like in your mind: a hidden, vine-draped jungleland, shadowed by umbrella leaves, dappled with butterflies, and humming with wild beauty. That’s the spot JJ and I used to love to explore.
We’d head out in the morning with a boat and fishhooks, machetes and no shoes. Well, sometimes we brought shoes, but when we did, we left them in the boat, the way one leaves shoes outside before entering a temple.
The stream was small, never more than thirty feet across, often as little as ten, and not very deep. Most of the way up we could walk it like a path. Sure, there were pools at the bends, but we stayed away from those, knowing that’s where the largest crocs, the longest anacondas, and all the stingrays were hiding. For the most part we could see the streambed as we went. White sand. Soft on the feet. The water was cool and swift and full of little fish eager to swarm-feed on our dead skin if we gave them the chance. The tree branches met overhead like the ceiling of a great emerald-green cathedral.
We tried to formulate a theory as to why the trees here were so exceptionally tall, even for Amazonia. There were towering buttress-rooted Spanish cedars and pillar-straight quinillas with crocodile-skin bark, gargantuan kapok trees, manchinga, remo caspi, and gnarled matapalos. This was true old growth. In between the giants were myriad saplings striving upward and competing for light. Branches held bromeliads the size of small elephants. Vines interlaced the canopy, and up in the loftiest branches, cacti and orchids bloomed where butterflies and rare bees doted over their high-altitude habitat. This was true primary forest. A jungle that had never been cut. An ecosystem in its most abundant and diverse iteration, a constant state of biological climax.
One November day, we were picking our way along the stream and stopping to look at small wonders. We were barefoot and shirtless and each had a machete so sharp it could sing. There was no reason for snacks or water bottles on an all-day hike: JJ would find all the food we needed along the way, and the water of this stream was so clear and clean, we could drink any time we pleased.
JJ told me how his father, Santiago, was once searching deep in the jungle for vines to harvest for ayahuasca, when he found an anaconda in a stream not unlike the one we were walking in. The giant snake had almost finished swallowing an entire tapir (an animal roughly the size of a small cow).
JJ told many stories as we went. Every so often we would pause for a teaching moment in the present. Like when JJ spotted jaguar tracks on the beach beside us.
“Lookadis!” JJ said, motioning with his machete.
“Big one,” I said.
JJ smiled condescendingly. “No. Look. Mira.”
I studied the sand and tried to imagine what JJ saw. He can put his mind inside another animal and tell you what it wants and where it is going.
There were two jaguar prints, front paws, just by the water’s edge, deeper at the toes.
“That’s where he leaned forward to drink,” I said.
That earned me a smile.
By then I knew I was being tested, so I knelt. Close by was a thick log of jaguar scat covered in butterflies and bees and green flies. I guessed it to be about a day old. The tracks around the scat were clearly older than the ones by the water’s edge. Gradually the scene was coming into focus. The dry tracks and fly-buzzing scat were from yesterday. I could also see where the big cat drank yesterday—those imprints had settled and had bits of leaf material in them. Then there were the newer tracks, still moist, from perhaps moments before we had come around the bend. So from what I could discern, the jaguar had been visiting this beach regularly in the last twenty-four hours.
“Es macho, no?” I asked.
JJ nodded. “Sí. . . . Qué más? What else?”
“He was here yesterday . . . and today . . . like, just now . . . two days in a row . . .” I trailed off, thinking. Jaguars are usually marchers. They never stay in one place long. It seemed strange for one to be pacing around this spot. I was trying to imagine why the cat had been returning to this part of the stream.
JJ lifted the jaguar shit and broke it in half, removing some red fur. He asked me what it was. I said venado (red brocket deer) and he nodded in a way that told me he would have been pissed if I’d gotten it wrong. The presence of teeth in the scat was fascinating. Usually we picture a predator eating the flesh off the skeleton of an animal, not devouring the meat and bone all at once. Did the jaguar eat the deer’s face, teeth and all? There were several hard seeds in the scat as well. Neither of us took much notice, but I remember thinking it was odd. Hair, bone, teeth, and seeds all set into the fecal material.
Now that he had my guesses, JJ gave me the report. Without speaking, he used a finger to indicate where the cat had come out of the jungle, shit, and then drunk (yesterday). Then where it came out from the same spot today, and chose a slightly different site to drink. Finally, he grabbed me by the shoulder so we were cheek to cheek and he pointed up into the foliage where two king vultures were nervously crouched on a branch. But their attention wasn’t actually on us—which was strange. They were looking instead at something a little way off, just where the jaguar tracks had gone into the bush.
Finally I got it. My jaw dropped and a satisfied smile spread over JJ’s face. He whispered, “Let’s go quietly. The jaguar, he doesn’t like to be disturbed while he is eating.” We tiptoed away, checking over our shoulders, peering through the shadows for a glimpse of the golden eyes that were surely watching us as we went.
This was life with JJ. I would have seen the tracks, taken a photo, and kept walking. But JJ-level tracking meant interpreting an animal’s movements, its thoughts, preferences, and current position. Each grain of sand, each behavioral detail was filed away into his vast archive of natural-history data, which he had been building for more than thirty years, since he was a barefoot Ese Eja child beside his father and the other men of the village. The vastness of his knowledge gradually came into focus for me as I watched him identify which nuts on the forest floor would have a grub inside to use as fishing bait. Which vines at which time of year were right for making a broom. Or medicine. All the different trees and their woods of various densities and for various uses. The animals, their tracks and scat and habits. If someone had an ear infection, JJ ground up fungus and cured it. If you had a fever, a skin infection, a toothache, there was a sap that could cure you. He had a sixth sense for the forest. Where I saw a mess of green jungle, one large confusing thing, he saw a completely different reality. Each vine, flower, animal print, bone, fossil . . . it all had meaning that was indecipherable to me.
This was because he had grown up with the people of the jungle. The Indigenous men and women of the Madre de Dios region. People to whom working indoors was a purely anecdotal concept—like telling a wild lion about zoos. The men of the Madre de Dios were outdoorsmen: loggers, miners, fishermen, trackers. They were men who had no idea what a perfect credit score meant, but knew it couldn’t save your life in a storm. These were men who took pride in the calluses on their feet. Who didn’t own sunglasses, but squinted into the sun’s glare. They had never used sunscreen, but knew which mud was smooth on the skin. For them, good manners, clean clothing, a knife and a fork—these were the concerns of tamer animals.
The funny thing is, you can’t just ask JJ to tell you what he knows. I’ve tried it. It doesn’t work. He just giggles, or changes the topic. Where to even start? You truly have to spend the time, walk with him, and watch how the jungle pulls his attention, what he gravitates to and what catches his curiosity. That’s when you begin to get a glimpse. And it’s nothing to him. I was pretty floored by the jaguar lesson; JJ was on to his other favorite topic: English and Spanish. He had recently learned somewhere about collective nouns for animals.
“Ay. What is it called when they make other names for animals?”
“What?”
“Elephants don’t make a parade?”
“Ohhhh, yes, I know a few of these.”
“Like what? Which ones?”
A murder of crows.
A swarm of bees.
A caravan of camels.
A quiver of cobras.
JJ smiled and checked to see if I was tricking him. “What are others?”
I couldn’t think of many. I told him that giraffes are a tower. Penguins are a congress.
We paused on either side of a spot where the banks were hard and the stream narrow, and below the rushing water a tremendous stingray with blue spots was floating magically over the sand. We watched in silence.
“What do they call a group of rayas?”
I told him I didn’t know.
“How about humans?”
I shrugged.
