He showed us the God House, where the men participated in balché ceremonies. Balché is an ancient intoxicating drink made from fermentated honey and the roots and bark of the sacred Balché tree. The gods are invoked with chants and offerings and the inebriated men soon begin to receive messages from the spirit world through hallucinatory visions. We stood outside looking up at the tall trees, one a giant mahogany used for hollowing out dugout canoes for the waterways. Looking at the colorful birds flitting by, I waved my arms in the air and said in my primitive Spanish, “Usted, mucho perros.” Chan K’in politely nodded while Victor broke up. “You said ‘You have a lot of flying dogs’!” We had a good laugh.
Victor Perera, the Lacandon shaman Chan K’in, and me, Chiapas, Mexico, 1985 Credit 1
There was something magical about being in Chan K’in’s presence; he radiated wisdom, and we felt good. Victor told us that strange things happened here, that any technological device would break down after awhile. Alan and I were skeptical and I turned on my tape recorder at the conclusion of a dinner of rice, black beans, and the freshly made tortillas. Alan asked about the Jaguar, the “Were-Jaguar” and the “Master Jaguar,” while Victor translated, sometimes in Lacandon and other times in Spanish. Chan K’in began to talk.
He said they believed in a Master Jaguar that leads all the other Jaguars and in a minor god who transforms himself into a Jaguar to roam the forest. It was not clear if they were one and the same. “How do you know it’s the Master Jaguar?” asked Alan. “Because he speaks to you,” said Chan K’in. This resonated with Alan. In Belize he had sometimes heard his name being called in the night as if spirits were summoning him. He had also had an experience with an Obeah man who practiced a kind of black magic and who told him after a séance that a Jaguar would appear in his trap within three days. And there, on the third day, was a Jaguar.
The Mayan belief in the spirit world was clearly in decline as more Maya were converted to Christianity; still, a residual belief and even fear of a guardian of the forest persisted for many. As long as people believed in a controlling spirit or demigod, more protection was offered the animals of the forest. There was fear of retribution if one hunted too many animals or did not pay attention to the signs the spirit world gave, such as being bitten by a snake. Yet the arrogance of the Judeo-Christian ethic, placing man at the top of the pyramid of life rather than on a branch of the sacred Mayan tree, was dislodging the ancient beliefs of these people.
Alan asked Chan K’in if the voice in the night that called his name was the Master Jaguar. Chan K’in looked at Alan, his eyes shining in the firelight, and Victor whispered, “That’s your secret, Alan.” My tape recorder broke after a half hour. And then the light meter in my camera stopped working, as did my little travel clock. I have no explanation for this except to acknowledge how much I do not know of this world.
We bedded down in a tiny shack, Victor and Ed in hammocks and me pretzeled on a four-foot-long shelf with tiny spiders scurrying for safety. Alan spent time alone in the God House and then curled up in our VW van. He had endured enough nights battling insects, bacteria, and the chatter of sleepless jungle families.
In the morning we bid goodbye to Chan K’in. He gave me a very special gift of a god-pot, in which copal was burned for the Balché ceremonies. He was a most remarkable man to have graced our lives. Twenty miles down the road we got the tires of our van pumped up at a huge sawmill that was the repository for all the logging of the Lacandon National Forest. There, piled as high as a three-story building, were the giant mahoganies and the ceibas, the sacred tree. As far as the eye could see, the land had been cleared for cattle ranches and agriculture. Most of the Lacandon men had signed a government contract allowing extensive logging of the forest in exchange for money. Chan K’in was a holdout, explaining that the forest was not his to give away. “I didn’t plant the trees,” he said. “They’re God’s,” meaning they belonged to the great Lord Hachakyum, the major Lacandon deity. “Go ask him.” The greatest rainforest in Mexico, supporting a third of all the biodiversity in the country, was straining to stay alive. The fragmented landscape kept chopping away at the wildlife.
We walked the ruins of Palenque, marveling at the artistic line of stone Jaguars, safe for another thousand years for tourists like ourselves. Evening found us at Na Bolom, the home of Trudi Blom, the widow of archaeologist Frans Blom, who devoted her life to helping the Lacandon preserve the forest and their way of life. Trudi reputedly said,
I have learned through bitter experience that you cannot hope to protect the Lacandones without safeguarding their forest…In the dreams of the Lacandones, which regulate their waking lives, each animal, each plant and each ritual object is an instrument of prophecy or protective magic. As the forest is burned and cut down through our stupidity and greed, the animals disappear one by one; the jaguar, the boar, the puma, the spider monkey—they all disappear, and soon the souls of the Lacandones will also disappear…it makes no difference how many of them will be left—the fact is, their souls will wither and die as their magnificent forest is destroyed, and all of us will share part of the blame…What you are seeing is the last whisper of a magnificent culture…But in Naha, if you gain the confidence of Chan K’in Viejo and other elders, you can still get an idea of what the Lacandon culture was about. Chan K’in in particular is an extraordinary man. So far, he has not permitted the government to cut mahogany around Naha. When he dies, there will be no stopping them.
Chan K’in died on December 23, 1996, at 104 years old. The Lacandon forest continues to be logged. No one knows how many Jaguars still exist there.
2
Belize
Nothing in Alan Rabinowitz’s early years would lead you to believe that he would become one of the great conservation heroes of our time, except for the solace he always found in the company of animals. He was born on New Year’s Eve 1953 in Brooklyn, during the worst snowstorm of the century, it was said. He grew up a quiet child in Far Rockaway, placed in a special-education class because of a severe stutter. Alan found comfort sitting in a dark closet with his pet turtle or chameleons because there he could talk to them without stuttering. His father, a vigorous high school coach known as Red, noticed his son’s affinity for animals and took him to the Bronx Zoo on free afternoons. Alan gravitated to the Lion House, where the big Jaguar paced back and forth in her lightless cage, on a path worn into the stone by her short miserable journey from one wall to the other. The little boy stood mesmerized on the other side of the bars; here was a trapped, voiceless creature like himself. He promised her that if he ever found his voice he would be a voice for her and keep all animals from harm.
Years later an auspicious meeting with George Schaller of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS, then called the New York Zoological Society, the umbrella organization of the city’s zoos) changed his life forever. Schaller was working on Giant Pandas at the time and Alan was finishing up his PhD at the University of Tennessee when a visit by the great field biologist resulted in Alan’s taking him on a hike to compare the Black Bear habitat of the Smoky Mountains with that of Pandas in China. Schaller was the head of the International Program of WCS and needed someone to study Jaguars in Belize. He recruited Alan, and soon Alan was on his way to Central America and a life-changing experience.
Dr. Rabinowitz was well into his two-year study when I flew to Belize to research the movie proposal I’d written about a female zoologist. He suffered headaches from the recent plane crash. The single-engine aircraft had plummeted from the sky while he was tracking his radio-collared cats from the air. The propeller ground into the tangled forest floor, but Alan and the pilot managed to extricate themselves and walk away from what seemed like certain death. His head injuries needed time to heal, so it was a good time for me to visit.
The young field biologist was recovering from the crash, but he had been weary for some time of the immense efforts it took to do his work. The magic he had felt when he first came into th
e forest, the cacophony of insect life, of birdsong, the mammals and reptiles that he encountered on forest treks, the glory of plenty, had faded in the wake of constant trials. The difficulty of capturing and then safeguarding the Jaguars, the relationships with the Maya and the women in his life, the constant assault on his health from parasites and injuries—all these were weighing on him.
My arrival was serendipitous. I was immediately entranced with the rainforest. Most of my prior forays to the tropics were typical Caribbean vacations, lazing on beaches, a mai tai in one hand and suntan oil in the other, some hikes here and there and visits to the requisite tourist sites.
When Ed and I went to Belize in 1981 to visit my Foreign Service friend, Cynthia Thomas, I realized just how vast a world there was off the beaten path. Our world of theater and film, of imagination and the magic of illusion, never ceased to excite us. We would jump into a new project and know we were the luckiest people on earth to be involved in the exploration of human behavior, emotion, and the mind. There were layers upon layers to be exposed and the process never ended. But venturing into the wild, into landscapes dominated by animals, onto paths trod by few other human beings, presented even more exciting worlds of exploration.
At Alan’s study site, deep in the jungle of Cockscomb Basin, I was in my element. An insect species the size of a hummingbird must have just hatched because pale orange bodies filled the air by the hundreds and emitted a whirling hum, like toy helicopters. No one could tell me what they were, and I have never seen them anywhere since. A Laughing Falcon perched above the porch, cackling at my intrusion, antbirds followed the legions of army ants on the move, and dozens of different kinds of flycatchers whistled in the forest. The sheer abundance of life was mind-boggling.
Tropical forests cover about 7 percent of the earth and hold more than half of the animal and plant species. No one knows how many species exist on earth, but the figure could be as high as thirty million. They are still to be discovered. These forests used to cover as much as 20 percent of the earth’s surface, but as human beings continue to convert the land to agricultural and pastoral uses more species are lost every day.
Cockscomb Basin, 1984
The tropical rainforests are a delicate balance of soil and climate, where the temperature range is usually between 64 and 100 degrees Fahrenheit and the precipitation is not less than 66 inches annually. Whatever nutrients are in the soil are mostly absorbed by the biomass of trees and plants, leaving the soil itself rather barren when the forest is demolished. Speciation flourishes in rainforests for a complexity of reasons not fully understood. But the farther one gets away from the equator, the fewer species exist. In Belize almost six hundred species of birds can be seen. By the time one reaches Antarctica there are about forty-five species, mostly pelagics, which spend most of their lives at sea.
In those first five days with Alan in Cockscomb when we were getting to know each other, we walked the trails looking for Jaguar scat or pugmarks. Once he told me not to stop but to calmly keep walking on as he sensed a Jaguar a few feet off the path. He knew the forest and pointed out the secrets of medicinal vines and one that streamed water from its core when sliced, just in case one needed a thirst quencher on the trail. He was a restless patient and would not stay in his shack. At night I accompanied him when he went to track the cats on a starlit rise, earphones on, the antenna held high in the air to catch the beeping radio signal. When there was none he worried for his Jaguars as if they were his children.
Alan Rabinowitz listening for Jaguars he has radio-collared
We read poetry to each other on rainy evenings, and one afternoon he offered me his journals to read. These were not simply data listed at days’ end by a scientist. These were the musings of a young man documenting his rite of passage from naïf to sophisticate, from pure scientist to committed conservationist. There was a writer in these highly personal pages. He managed to balance fact, storytelling, and emotion, something I hoped for in my work as an actress. I told him he had a book in the making and that his was a hero’s tale, the struggle for the Jaguar’s survival. He demurred, and, changing the subject, read me his favorite poem, Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”:
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence,
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
What was the other road? I wondered. It would still have encompassed exploration of some sort, he said. Not the arts but medicine, perhaps, as he was a premed student in college.
In New York many months later, I introduced Alan to a literary agent, and his first book, Jaguar, published in 1986, became a classic of nature writing and a young man’s inner journey.
His study site in a former logging camp was near several Mayan families. The women beat clothes on washing rocks in the river and I would join them with their children in the water. The little girls attached themselves to me like puppies, giggling when I tried out my Mopan or Spanish. One girl in particular stood out. Seven-year-old Agapita carried a child’s book around with her but only half of each page, the other half gone forever. Still, it was her treasure and she was learning to read the words. She was curious about everything. There is always one child who breaks the mold. I’ve observed the same about animals: one will be more daring, or clever. Perhaps this is how speciation begins, through subjective behavioral change.
The last of the unconverted
The water was beautifully cool on these mornings when the heat seemed to exude from every leaf and vine around us. Most of the women wore the traditional huipil blouses, but one, the youngest mother in her late teens and the newest arrival in the community, was naked above the waist. This was a village in final transition. Missionaries had taught the women that it was not good to be naked, so they clothed themselves. Jesus was a welcome god because sins were forgiven and he gave them hope for an afterlife. What was lost was a connection to all the gods and demigods of animism, a direct line to the creatures of the forest. Would Jesus protect them too? Yes, God the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, would take care of them all. The responsibility in this mortal life was relinquished.
Alan did not set out to be a conservationist. He was there to research the top carnivore of Central and South America, a cat that had roamed the New World for perhaps a million years. The Olmec of three thousand years ago, the Maya and the Aztecs later, all revered the Jaguar, as represented in their art and writing. There are stunning Olmec statues of men holding limp Were-Jaguar children, the cross between a Jaguar and a human, which some speculate was indicative of child sacrifice. Thousands of Mayan ceremonial vessels depict Jaguars, and there are references to them on stone stelae and in the Popol Vuh codex. The Aztec had an elite military unit called the Jaguar Warriors, who dressed in Jaguar skins to incorporate the strength of these gods of the night.
There were perhaps ten million people living in Central America before the Spanish conquest. Who knows how many Jaguars there were and how they managed to survive the people who hunted them even as they revered them? But they did survive and continued to disperse successfully throughout South America. Even before the Spanish came, the prolific Mayan cities collapsed, by 900 AD, probably from drought, warfare, and disease, the great temples left to decay in the sun or be swallowed by the jungle. The Spanish conquistadors who arrived in the sixteenth century brought smallpox, measles, and the flu, effectively wiping out most of the existing population. The Jaguar became king of the forest again. But not for long—five hundred years is not long in the scheme of things. Modern guns entered the picture, and by 1980 Jaguars were gone or severely diminished from Arizona south throughout Mexico.
Alan trapped seven Jaguars in his years in Belize in the 1980s. He tranquilized and radio-collared them, measured them, and medicated their infections and parasites before they awoke and disappeared into the dark forest again. He learned a
lot: the density of the animals in the area, what they ate, and how far they traveled. He pioneered research on the species. But none of it was easy. Roads washed out regularly after torrential rains that sometimes lasted for weeks; his truck kept breaking down; and the well became contaminated when no one noticed a dog’s rotten carcass in it.
The profusion of animals in the tropics includes, of course, the tiniest ones: bacteria, amoebas, and parasites like hookworm. Mosquitoes are ever present and a bite can result in malaria or yellow fever, while a deposit of botfly larvae burrows under the skin and begins to eat you inside, causing stabbing pain before the fully grown two-inch worm finally exits months later. You learn not to grab onto trees or vines for fear of thorns or biting ants or an insect that mimics the bark or a snake the green vine.
Underfoot the forest has many wonders and as many dangers. The deadly Fer-de-Lance snake—or “Tommy Goff,” as it is known locally—lies in its hole near the base of a tree and will defensively strike as you pass by its territory. You learn to walk gingerly around protruding roots for fear of a snake hole. Alan lost a man to a Fer-de-Lance bite when they were out trapping his first Jaguar. Guermo was wearing sneakers, and the snake bit him in the ankle. Victims of a Fer-de-Lance bite experience excruciating pain, internal bleeding, and swelling; if there is no treatment, death can occur within hours from hemorrhagic shock. Guermo received antivenin and antibiotics in the hospital where Alan urged him to stay, under the care of Western medicine. His family took him home, however, where he died a few days later.
Alan became close to the Mayan families of Cockscomb, ministering to their medical needs and welcoming them into his shack at all hours. He was known far and wide as “El Hombre Tigre”—Tiger Man. (The Jaguar was known as El Tigre.) There were many stalemates involving the people and their relationship to the wildlife of Belize. It was illegal to kill the big cats and yet they did it anyway, because the animal was too near cattle, or because they could get $100 for its skin, or simply because “it was pretty” and they wanted to nail the dead Jaguar to the wall rather than see its black rosettes glowing on a riverbank in the late afternoon sun. Alan’s frustrations coalesced into depression, then anger, and, finally, a single-minded motivation to change the equation. He would find a way to protect the Jaguars in the Cockscomb Basin by making it a preserve. The voiceless young man began to find his voice.
Wild Things, Wild Places Page 2
