A wolverine is eating my leg

by Tim Cahill

  "This must have gone on for quite some time. Few of the dead men had family or friends who would worry about them or even know where they were. Anyway, the Brazilian government finally caught on to the operation. My friend was charged in connection with seventy-eight murders.

  "She and the two vets were tossed into jaii in Manaus along with seven other men. One man, who wore a two-pound gold medallion around his neck, got bail the next day. It turned out that he was running the mining-and-

  A WOLVERINE IS EATING MY LEG

  wore a hat something like an American policeman's, except it was three times as high and had gold braids on it. It looked like a hat that a loony dictator would wear in a slapstick film. The commandant learned more about our reasons for being in Chachapoyas in one hour than Zamora did in the half-dozen chats he had with us.

  As it turned out, we found a number of forts and stone cities of the Chachas. They were set deep in the forests in a mountainous region known as Ceja de Selva ("eyebrow of the jungle"). We had used a sixteenth-century Spanish text as a guide, and the cities were as described in The Royal Commentaries of the Incas. We camped for days in some of those vegetation-choked ruins and tried to imagine the lives of a people long gone. I suspect these should have been humbling days, but an intense euphoria overwhelmed all other emotions.

  It was as if the jungle had drawn its breath and sucked these people back into its darkness. There were ceramic artifacts one thousand years old and more, and the potsherds sometimes lay in company with human remains. We left this evidence for the archaeologists and marveled at the power of the forest. It had sent roots snaking through the interstices of the great stone forts and had swallowed the culture whole. Standing in the ruins, I imagined uncontrolled natural forces at work: it was like walking through the rubble of a hurricane-ravaged shoreline. The ruins had taken on the syrupy odor of all that triumphant vegetation. I was standing on the scene of some slow, choking horror, and I was alive, I would survive, and these thoughts left me feeling blessed and giddy.

  JUNGLES OF THE MIND

  I sat next to an investment counselor on a recent flight from Miami to a jungle island off the coast of the Yucatan peninsula. I told him about the picture—the white woman in panty hose, the three impassive Indians—and what it meant to me. We worked our way around that meaning, just as I am doing here, by swapping jungle tales. The man told me this story:

  "I have a friend who is a very successful contractor, and his wife is what you might call an adventurer. She's a pilot and has been all over the world. Well, she heard about some gold mines up one of the rivers of Brazil and wanted me to see if I could find investors. It looked a little too iffy for me, so she went ahead and raised the money on her own. She got all the permits and certifications that you need and hired two Vietnam vets to help her work the site.

  "One day, a government plane set down on their landing strip and they were arrested. The charge was murder— multiple counts. It seems there was another operation in progress in the area. The guy who headed the thing was hiring criminals, escaped convicts and various other unsavory types who might feel comfortable in the jungle, away from any legal agencies. These fellows would work a site, and each of them, I suppose, had a percentage of the take. The fellow who was running the operation would fly to the site with a couple of thugs and shoot the miners, take the gold, and save the percentage.

  "This must have gone on for quite some time. Few of the dead men had family or friends who would worry about them or even know where they were. Anyway, the Brazilian government finally caught on to the operation. My friend was charged in connection with seventy-eight murders.

  "She and the two vets were tossed into jail in Manaus along with seven other men. One man, who wore a two-pound gold medallion around his neck, got bail the next day. It turned out that he was running the mining-and-

  murder operation. My friend was left in the cell with six thugs. She slept against the wall. One of the vets slept beside her while the other kept watch. The other six never made a move.

  "Well, you can imagine the field day the Brazilian press had with the case. They found out that my friend had a small canister of Mace in an oversized belt buckle. One headline went something like: American aviatrix, alleged

  MASS MURDERESS, IN POSSESSION OF DEADLY NERVE GAS.

  "After three weeks, it became apparent that she could not have committed those murders, and she was released."

  "Did they ever catch the guy with the medallion?" I asked.

  "I don't know. But my friend still has all the permits, and she's going back."

  "She's going back?"

  "Gold's up over six hundred dollars an ounce again."

  Some poor guy was sobbing in the next room, and I was just coming off another case of dysentery, swigging paregoric and thinking about that damned picture again. The picture and the jungle. The hotel was located just outside Flores, a town in the northern Guatemalan state of El Peten. It was a civilized sort of place, with clean beds, running water, and flush toilets. But it was in the jungle, after all, and the elements had conspired to sabotage the hotel's pretensions. Several months before, the hotel had been situated on the shore of Lake Peten Itza. Now it was in Lake Peten Itza.

  The lake had been mysteriously rising for more than a year, and the steady, unseasonable rains of the past few weeks had been disastrous. The swimming pool, in what had been the courtyard, was underwater, and a foot or more of Lake Peten Itza lapped up against the building. Flocks of tropical water birds floated by the windows, glanced inside, and blurted out horrid little croaks.

  The ceiling of my room was wire mesh. Ten feet above

  that was sloping, thatched roof. Air circulated nicely, but you could hear people in other rooms as if they were standing next to you, and a man in the adjacent room seemed to be lifting weights. There was the sound of heavy exertion— mmm-phuph, mmm-phuph —followed by several quick breaths— whee-who, whee-who.

  A young American woman was speaking to the man. "So they're ruined. A pair of jogging shoes. Big deal, thirty bucks. Jeeze. Please, Larry, don't do this to yourself. We can get the camera reconditioned. Jeeze. We have eight more days, and it just can't keep raining like this. Really."

  Clearly, Larry was not lifting weights. He was suffering a common sort of allergic reaction to jungle travel. "Larry," the woman said, "now you just stop it. I think the Mayan ruins are beautiful, even in the rain. So it got a little muddy, and there were a few mosquitos, and we had some bad luck. So what? Larry, you're thirty-two years old. Will you please stop crying?"

  I had just spent a couple of weeks at the more remote ruins, stumbling around in the same rain and mud. All archaeological evidence suggests that the Mayans, in what we now think of as their classic period, were the most advanced people of pre-Columbian America. They developed accurate calendars and hieroglyphic writing; they built massive stone cities and ceremonial pyramids. About 900 a.d., the race fell into an inexplicable decline. There are any number of theories about what happened: famine, flood, disease, revolt, invasion. My own idea is patently incorrect and stubbornly wrongheaded, but I cling to it because it terrifies me. I like to think that the jungle simply swallowed up the culture.

  El Peten has not always been heavily forested. Analysis of windblown pollen that was recovered from a long core drilled into the bottom of a centrally located lake shows that, in about 2000 B.C., El Peten was a land of broad savannas. The dominance of jungle over grassland began early in the classic period. Archaeologists believe that in the post-classic period, a poorer sort of folk moved into the temples and lived there until the jungle engulfed the buildings. Per-

  haps, as the jungle advanced, they prayed to the carved stone images of their ancestors.

  "It was clearing up when we came in," the woman in the next room said.

  "We waded in," Larry moaned.

  "And there's probably a beautiful sunset going on right now." I heard the sound of drapes being opened, and I looked out my o
wn window. Rain was falling in sheets. It was the same leaden color as the lake. A huge waterfowl drifted by, and, directly under my neighbors' window, it said "Gawaahhqk. " There was silence in the room, then Larry began lifting his weights again, much faster this time.

  Joseph Conrad, in his brilliant evocations of the jungles of Africa and the Far East, used and perhaps overused the word impenetrable. In truth, those jungles, and the lowland jungles of Central and South America, only seem impenetrable from a road or river or trail or clearing. In those places where sunlight is allowed to reach the ground, a tangled wall erupts out of the earth, a dense green wall that protects the jungle from civilization and can easily be seen as a warning.

  In the forest proper, under the endless, broad-leaved canopy, direct rays of the sun seldom reach the earth. What light there is seems tired, heavy, turgid—a flaccid twilight. The floor between the tree trunks is largely bare. But the jungle supports an abundance of life. The majority of invertebrate organisms in the Amazon basin have yet to be named, and generations' worth of botanical research has yet to be done. Above, arboreal frogs with adhesive pads on their feet creep over the dripping leaves. Hordes of bats pollinate the colorful flowers sprouting on tree trunks rather than attempt the tangle of greenery. Aquatic flat-worms live in the perpetual moistness of the forest floor. There are tapirs and jaguars, spider and howler monkeys, amphibians, ants and anteaters. There are spiders that drop

  from the canopy above and eat birds, and there are more birds in the jungle than anywhere else on earth.

  In the jungle rivers, one-hundred-pound rodents graze on reeds, and anacondas, those twenty- to thirty-foot-long green-and-white snakes, lie in wait for pigs and small deer that they will kill by constriction and eat whole. The jungle generates persistent reports of forty-foot anacondas, and one miner swears he's seen such a reptile, sunning itself on a riverbank, with the antlers of a deer protruding from its open mouth. "The snake was going to have to wait for the head to decompose before it could spit out those horns," the miner told me.

  Despite the telling and retelling of such tales, despite the abundance of animal life—the shrieks and barks and howls one hears—it is the forest itself that captures the mind and sometimes ensnares the soul. "Contact with pure, unmitigated savagery," Conrad wrote, "with primitive nature and primitive man, brings sudden and profound trouble into the heart." For Conrad, civilization was not a matter of flush toilets and paved roads. In his jungle tales, good men, left in the isolation of the forest, became slave traders, murderers, less than men. The jungle provides "a suggestion of things vague, uncontrollable, and repulsive, whose discomposing intrusion excites the imagination and tries the civilized nerves of the foolish and the wise alike." I have felt these sensations, and have translated them as fear. Especially when lost in that troubling darkness, I have felt the sheer weight of indifferent animosity, of some vast, humid hatred.

  In the jungle, a lost man feels driven by a desire to plunge ahead, while the hanging vines slap at his face and roots rise up to tangle his feet. Better to stop; sit, think. And that is when the green hostility begins to smother the soul. The mind's eye sees the forest as if it were a time-lapse film. Trees twist into grotesque shapes, the better to steal the sun. Parasites erupt out of healthy organisms. Creepers lash out to strangle lesser plants. Lianas—long, woody vines— drop from branches like thick ropes and root at the base of

  the host tree, choking off its life so that they themselves stand as a new tree with the dead one inside.

  The jungle is moist and warm, and living things may grow and reproduce all year long. Competition comes not from the elements but from the volume of life. A lost man, sitting, thinking, perceives that every living thing longs for the death of every other living thing. He understands "the ever-ready suspicion of evil" Conrad wrote about, "the placid and impenetrable mass of an unjustifiable violence."

  These thoughts took on a special clarity when, in the company of other reporters, I visited the necropolis of Jonestown, where the stench of decomposing bodies sent bile rising into my throat. I had already spent days talking with survivors, and I knew that Jim Jones had been deluded, probably addicted to drugs, and clinically paranoid even before he moved to the jungle. But the jungle tore at his mind and fed his paranoia: when the rains came early and the crops failed, it was because the CIA had seeded the clouds. In the jungle compound, from the wooden chair he called his throne, Jones passed on his paranoia to the people of Jonestown, for paranoia is a contagious disease. They saw soldiers in the bush beyond the clearing, and they could hear the growling of vehicles as these shadow forces massed for attack. It was a debilitating siege, and in the end, like the heroes of Masada, who killed themselves nearly two millenniums ago rather than surrender to the Romans, most of them committed suicide rather than submit to the shadow forces that lay in wait, out there in the jungle.

  I'm not suggesting that the tragedy happened because Jonestown lay in the jungle. Still, it is impossible to conceive of a similar occurrence in Indianapolis or San Francisco. The madness, the danse macabre of suicide and murder, could have happened no place else but in the dark vastness of the jungle.

  I have sat around fires with people others might describe as primitive, even savage. We have shared food. And I have been places where there is no evidence that man exists. I find an inexplicable delight in that, in the sure knowledge that, throughout all of time, no other human being has stood on the same spot. It is, finally, a fragile emotion, something not easily recollected in more temperate climes, where man has stripped the earth of darkness. Still, I find a flicker of that lustrous delight, of lunacy and darkness, in the idea of a white woman in panty hose posing before three unimpressed Indians.

  Stare at the picture long enough, knowing that it is a story that will never be told, and you realize that the jungle is an ecology of secrets, that in the jungle, more than any other place on earth, there is the conservation of mystery. The white woman sits in her panty hose, and the welts on her back tell us the jungle is eating her alive. Long after she is gone—after she has screamed her last curse at the photographer and the whole idiotic project, whatever it may have been—one feels the Indians will still be there, sturdy and placid. And that is the final meaning of the picture: as civilization schemes to violate the jungle, the jungle conspires to brutalize civilization.

  In the question-and-answer period following her lecture, someone asked if she wouldn't be afraid to return to Rwanda in the wake of Dian Fossey's brutal murder at the Karisoke Research Center there. Kelly Stewart said no, she wouldn't be afraid. The tragic violence seemed to be directed against one person only.

  No one asked what would happen to the last mountain gorillas on the face of the earth now that Fossey was dead. Many people believe that in the aftermath of Dian Fossey's death, the gorillas' future is bleak. They are, fortunately, wrong.

  In the spring of 1980, after thirteen years at Karisoke, Dian Fossey left Volcano Park (Pare National des Vol-cans) in Rwanda to take a position at Cornell University. A year later, my partner, Berkeley photographer Nick Nichols, wrote to ask her permission to go to Karisoke. Nichols and I both considered Fossey a hero. In her years at Karisoke, she had amassed an incredible quantity of data about gorillas. She had courageously taken on the poachers who killed gorillas for profit—men who cut off the head and hands of the animals, boiled away the meat, and sold the skeletal remains to tourists. Fossey's antipoaching patrols in the seventies may have actually saved a species. Additionally, she had spent years learning the intricate rules of gorilla behavior and habituating the animals to her presence. Photos and films of Fossey sitting in the midst of a gorilla group, of Fossey being touched—lightly, quizzically—by four-hundred-pound silverbacks (mature males), struck a chord in the viewer's mind, something that echoed with the divinity of Michelangelo's work in the Sistine Chapel: God and man, reaching out to touch one another, to understand one another. It was Dian Fossey—through her writing, through these fil
ms and photos—who single-handedly changed the public's perception of gorillas. The King Kong image gave way to Fossey's formulation: the mountain gorillas were "gentle giants."

  It was a remarkable record of lonely courage and achieve-

  ment. The word "single-handedly" seemed appropriate. Nichols and I, quite frankly, were in awe of Dian Fossey, and the letter Nick wrote to her was humble, respectful. It fell a yard or two short of outright cringing.

  Fossey must have fired off the telegram within hours of reading that letter. "Proposed visit of yourself and Cahill for Karisoke filming and writing permission emphatically denied," it read, "letter following."

  The letter arrived two days later and it was very nearly scalding: "It is quite impossible for you and/or your colleague, Tim Cahill, to 'go to Karisoke and work with some of the researchers.' " Fossey made it clear that "the Karisoke Research Center is a scientifically oriented institution maintained and supported under my direction" and "is not open to the public for purposes of tourism and/or photography." A bit harshly put, I thought, but fair enough.

  The last paragraph, however, was an insult no matter how I read it. "Numerous people are on ego trips concerned with mountain gorilla conservation, a very popular pastime at present. On this end of the ocean, such interest is called 'Comic Book Conservation.' It might be advisable if you did not add your name to the list."

  What I had had in mind was a celebration of Fossey's work with the gorillas: something that might end with a plea for more funding for her project. But, it seemed, Fossey would do that herself. Single-handedly.

  I suppose Fossey thought Nick and I would blunder around disturbing the gorillas and end up writing an article based on her research anyway. Maybe it had happened like that before. Maybe she was right: perhaps my simple interest in the subject amounted to no more than comic book conservation. Even so, there was a demonstrable lack of tact involved. That last paragraph felt like a slap in the face. Every time I read it, I felt like something the dog left on the lawn.