Jaguars Ripped My Flesh Read online

  Acclaim for Tim Cahill

  “Tim Cahill is the working-class Paul Theroux.… He delights in finding stories too peculiar to be labeled merely off-beat.”

  — The New York Times

  “Cahill writes in an agreeably off-the-wall fashion; he has a way with anecdotes, and he can be quite funny.”

  — Washington Post

  “Cahill [has] the what-the-hell adventuresomeness of a T. E. Lawrence and the humor of a P. J. O’ Rourke.”

  — Condé Nast Traveler

  “Tim Cahill is one of those rare types whose fun quotient seems to increase in direct proportion to the diceyness of the situation.”

  — San Francisco Examiner

  “You might call him crazy. You might call him reckless. But you’ll definitely call him hilarious. Adventure-travel crash-dummy Tim Cahill is to travel writing what P. J. O’Rourke is to political commentary.”

  — Hartford Courant

  Books by Tim Cahill

  Buried Dreams

  Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

  A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg

  Road Fever

  Pecked to Death by Ducks

  Tim Cahill

  Jaguars Ripped My Flesh

  Tim Cahill is the author of five books. He lives in Montana and is currently Outside magazine’s editor-at-large and a contributing editor to Esquire and Rolling Stone.

  FIRST VINTAGE DEPARTURES EDITION, APRIL 1996

  Copyright © 1987 by Tim Cahill

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover by Bantam Books, Inc., New York, in 1987.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Cahill, Tim.

  Jaguars ripped my flesh / Tim Cahill.

  p. cm. — (Vintage departures)

  eISBN: 978-0-307-77839-0

  1. Adventure stories, American.

  2. Travelers’ writings, American. 3. Voyages and travels. I. Title.

  PS3553.A365J3 1996

  813′.54—dc20

  95-46721

  Author photograph © Marion Ettlinger

  v3.1

  To Richard J. and Elizabeth Cahill:

  the first lucky thing that ever happened to me.

  Acknowledgments

  All stories originally appeared in Outside magazine except: “The Lost World,” “Gorilla Tactics,” and “Eruption,” which appeared in GEO; “Shark Dive,” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times Magazine; “Fear of Falling,” which appeared in West; and “The Underwater Zombie,” which appeared in Sport Diver.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. Tracking Snipe

  The Book on Survival

  Pombe Wisdom

  Getting Lost

  Bad Advice

  2. News of the World, Such As It Is

  Going South

  Strange Translations

  The Lost World

  The Underwater Zombie

  Cahill Among the Ruins in Peru

  Down Under and Thereabouts

  The Reception at Bamaga

  To the Place of Walleroo Dreaming

  Coming Back from Gato Island

  3. Animal Lore

  Rime of the Ancient Porcupine

  Life and Love in Gorilla Country

  The Clown Owl’s Bitter Legacy

  The Shame of Escobilla

  4. The Home Front (See the USA …)

  In the Wind

  Ill Wind at Poison Creek

  The First Fear Fandango

  Balloon Drop

  Fear of Falling

  Into the Eyewall

  Over My Head

  No Laughs in Satan’s Silt Hole

  Caving in Kentucky

  Shark Dive

  Kayaking Among the Ice Children

  Manifest Destiny

  The New Desert, an Old Woman

  World-Class Attractions

  Fire and Brimstone on the Volcano Watch

  Eruption

  The Killing Season

  A Camp at the End of Time

  Introduction

  When I was growing up in the late 1950s and early ’60s, there was very little in the way of literate adventure writing. Periodicals that catered to our adolescent dreams of travel and adventure clearly held us in contempt. Feature articles in magazines that might be called Man’s Testicle carried illustrations of tough, unshaven guys dragging terrified women in artfully torn blouses through jungles, caves, or submarine corridors; through hordes of menacing bikers, lions, and hippopotami. The stories bore the same relation to the truth that professional wrestling bears to sport, which is to say, they were larger-than-life contrivances of an artfully absurd nature aimed, it seemed, at lonely bachelor lip-readers, drinkers of cheap beer, violence-prone psychotics, and semiliterate Walter Mitty types whose vision of true love involved the rescue of some distressed damsel about to be ravaged by bikers, lions, or hippopotami.

  I was reminded, quite viscerally, of genre a few years ago while scuba diving on the barrier reef near Whitsunday Island just off the coast of Far North Queensland in Australia. Hooker’s Reef was a typical coral atoll, an ovoid shape from the air, the ring of reef almost completely exposed during low tide. Inside the wall was a shallow lagoon populated by crabs, shellfish, squid, remoras, and the odd marine turtle. Larger, more predatory organisms lived outside the reef, where the wall sloped down into a disconcerting darkness. I like diving big walls—the sensation, gliding over the purple darkness of abysmal depths, is that of dream flight—so I was diving outside the lagoon, in the realm of the predators.

  The living reef had been trying to grow out from the wall, and it was building fastest near the surface, where there is the most light. This process had created some impressive overhangs: great expanses of golden brown antlerlike elkhorn coral stretched out perpendicular to the vertical wall twenty feet and more. In places these cantilevered coral platforms had collapsed, forming vast rubble heaps on the sloping wall below. There, spikes of elkhorn lay white, bleached in death, so that these amalgamated colonial organisms looked like the tangled bones of thousands of small children.

  My diving partner was a New Zealand man who liked to be called The Kiwi. Together we had figured out the current, and were letting it carry us under the coral platforms and against the kaleidoscope of color that was the reef wall. At forty feet, there were tube sponges growing on yellow ledges like impossible purple cacti; we saw pink plating corals in the shapes of miniature pagodas; there were banks of fire coral and stands of soft corals: lacy blue-green sea fans and velvety golden sea whips that bent with the current so that in places the wall looked like some sloping meadow alive with alien wildflowers. Swimming against this mosaic of color was a teeming chaos of small, brightly colored aquarium fish that divers call scenics—blue-green wrasse; red parrot fish; bright yellow long-nosed butterfly fish; and several solitary Moorish idols, an aloof black-and-white fish of immense dignity designed, apparently, by a creator entirely fascinated with the art deco style.

  When we hit the largest of the rubble slopes, there was no life at all.

  It was about seven in the morning and the sun was still low in the sky. It slanted through the water in rippling, purely religious shafts, through which planktonic matter glittered and shifted like dust motes in the light from an attic window. The rubble slo
pe was ash gray in color, and the entire effect, in contrast to the palette of the living wall, was one of devastation: the white broken branches of skeletal elkhorn coral, the sandy rubble, the smoky light. It looked like the aftermath of some hideous saturation bombing raid, the fires still smoldering. The eerie sense of dread was intensified by the total lack of fish on a reef that was otherwise a celebration of marine life.

  This was ominous: there had been fish enough on the other rubble slopes. The Kiwi and I anxiously scanned the water ahead. We saw them below at about eighty feet: three sleek tiger sharks, on the feed.

  They were forty feet away and the current was going to drive us directly over them. Tiger sharks are nasty fellows—certified man-eaters—the Australian divers refer to them as “munchies”; harmless lagoon-dwelling sharks such as black tips and white tips are called “reefies.” We drifted over this trio of munchies, and one rose, languidly, to greet us. He looked to be about seven or eight feet long.

  We were not, at this point, being attacked by tiger sharks. We were being menaced by tiger sharks, and it is not precise to say that my entire life flashed before my eyes. What I found myself thinking about were four peculiar magazines I had purchased earlier. They were printed in Australia by Page Publications, but they seemed to be reprints from older American magazines with roughly similar names: Action for Men, Men’s Challenge, Amazing Men’s Stories, and Fantastic Men’s Stories. The titles alone produced an odd sense of subliterary déjà vu.

  These magazines were all of a type and it was difficult to tell one from another. Each carried a story about a single brave man who stands up to blood-crazed horror bikers: “I Battled Georgia’s Terror Bikers (Two years in prison had turned them into a pack of mindless animals!)” and “Vengeance Feud with the ‘Rat-Pack’ Cycle Gang (They came at him like a tornado whirling into a Midwest town at dawn!).” Three of the magazines had a cave story: “We found Mussolini’s $60 Million Treasure Cave (A freak cave-in trapped them and left them at the mercy of a horde of vampire bats!).”

  Another staple story seemed to be the jungle trek. I was particularly fascinated by “Our Death Race with Snake-Worshipping Headhunters of New Guinea” and “Prisoner of the Legendary ‘Leper Army’ Jungle Bandits.” Guys escaping from headhunters or leprous guerrillas generally dodge flesh-ripping jaguars in South America and rhinos in Africa. These men are invariably accompanied by one or more “nymphos.” The jungles seem to be full of women suffering from this provocative disorder. As a former editor of such magazines once put it, “Even the rhinos were nymphos.”

  For all of this, the stories that came most immediately to mind as we drifted over the tiger sharks were the ones about animal attacks. In these magazines, the most inoffensive animals imaginable suddenly become horror-movie material. “I Fought Off Montana’s Blood-Crazed Coyotes” is a case in point—“The razor-toothed beasts had come for one thing: human flesh!” In another article, a group was savaged by (I’m not making this up) “the nightmare giant condors of the Chilean Andes!”

  In Action For Men many of the animal-attack stories happen now, as you read them, right here in the present tense. “A Monster Ape Is Ripping the Town Apart!” Or, more to the point, “My God, We’re Being Attacked by Tiger Sharks!” In this rousing effort, a commercial diver named Jack Sturges and his crew are working to repair a ruptured line under a floating oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico when they’re attacked by two twenty-foot-long tiger sharks. Sturges stabs one of the tigers in the belly with his knife. The other shark turns on its bleeding companion and tears it apart in a blood-crazed razor-toothed feeding frenzy. The divers escape through dark torrents of flowing shark blood. Praised by his employers for his courage and quick thinking, Sturges modestly replies, “Danger, sunken shipwrecks, sharks—they’re all part of a day’s work!”

  Right, sure, Jack.

  The tiger sharks confronting me weren’t even in the Action For Men league. They looked to be a mere eight feet long. Adjusting for adrenaline magnification, I was probably trembling before a trio of mere six-footers. Little fellows. Sissy sharks: a couple of minutes’ worth of light, bare-hand work for your basic Man’s Testicle kind of guy.

  The truth is that actual human beings, as opposed to real men, experience genuine terror in such situations. And if these human beings know anything at all about real sharks, they do not draw their knives. The only use for a knife during a shark attack is pure treachery: stab your buddy, swim like hell, and hope the munchies take him.

  The nearest of the tiger sharks passed within four feet of my mask and eyed us curiously. The others coasted below, a foot or two above the smoking rubble. Blake’s line about “fearful symmetry” rang through my mind. The closest shark rolled and dived back down into the smoldering broken coral. In two minutes, no more, the current had driven us well past the now disinterested sharks.

  I felt a jolt of fully explicable exhilaration—a sense of the world reborn—followed by a kind of professional glee. Here was something I could write about: something I had, in fact, predicted years earlier.

  Back a decade ago, in 1976, Jann Wenner, the editor of Rolling Stone, assigned a group of his editors the task of designing a new outdoor magazine to be called Outside. Michael Rogers wrote up a prospectus. Harriet Fier and I helped fine tune the outline that was to become Outside.

  We weren’t going to try to take on the venerable hunting and fishing magazines or any of the lesser hook-and-bullet efforts. We didn’t feel we could compete with special-interest books that told the reader how to paddle a canoe or buy a backpack twelve times a year. Outside would cover an entire spectrum of outdoor activities, and the emphasis, in the feature well, would be on good reporting and literate writing. It was, at the time, a unique concept.

  Early on, I argued for a travel-adventure piece in each issue. There was some small dissension. Adventure stories were the stuff of Action For Men, hardly the sort of literate writing Rogers and Fier wanted to see in Outside. I pointed out that there was a tradition of outdoor adventure and travel writing in American literature—James Fennimore Cooper, Herman Melville, Mark Twain—and that the tradition was not well served by the stories in Men’s Challenge. “If you’re diving and see a shark, a real man-eater, that’s enough for a story right there,” I argued. “Just seeing a certain kind of shark is an adventure.” I suggested that we find men and women who could report the facts and who could write an evocative English sentence about, say, shark diving, without a lot of gratuitous chest pounding.

  We would be dealing, I said, with dreams, and dreams are immensely fragile. Most of us abandoned the idea of a life full of adventure and travel sometime between puberty and our first job. Our dreams died under the dark weight of responsibility. Occasionally the old urge surfaces, and we label it with names that suggest psychological aberrations: the big chill, a midlife crisis. Outside, as I saw the new magazine, should be in the business of giving people back their dreams. The tough assignments would go to writers, not adventurers. “We don’t want supermen and-women,” I argued. “We want physically ordinary folks. The reader should think, ‘Hey, if this clown can do it, so can I.’ If the writer’s sort of incompetent and easily frightened, all the better.”

  The last thought gave Harriet Fier an idea. “You do it,” she said.

  Terry McDonell was hired as Outside’s managing editor and Will Hearst became the publisher. Each endorsed the idea that adventure-travel writing didn’t have to be moronic drivel, and I enjoyed their unqualified financial and moral support. Which isn’t to say McDonell, Hearst, and the entire Outside staff didn’t enjoy making some fun of the latest expedition. Was I going to the cloud forests of Peru to look for ancient cities buried in the foliage? Better call Action For Men for one of their old titles. Something like: Jaguars Ripped My Flesh.

  The fact that Frank Zappa had recently released an album titled Weasels Ripped My Flesh probably figured, unconsciously, in what was to become the generic title for all my stories. At the time, ho
wever, we were thinking in terms of pulp men’s magazines. “Get some blood in there and use a lot of exclamation points,” McDonell counseled, and what he meant was, “I don’t want to see any blood or any exclamation points.”

  Jaguars ripped my flesh for two more years!

  In October 1978, Larry Burke of Burke Communications purchased Outside and the offices were moved from San Francisco to Chicago. John Rasmus was named editor of the new magazine. A sure, steady editor, John’s vision of what Outside could be paralleled that of the original editors, right on down to the odd adventure-travel story.

  During that decade, the adventure-travel business has boomed, and outdoor adventure stories have become, well, almost fashionable. I have written them, over the past few years, for many national magazines. And Outside, a magazine that usually carries one adventure-travel piece per issue, is frequently nominated for and has once won the National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

  * * *

  Occasionally, in the course of my travels, I have been slapped in the face with some particularly egregious example of ecological rape—“The Shame of Escobilla” is a case in point—and have felt compelled to report upon it. Similarly, the account of what happened in the aftermath of the eruption of Mount Saint Helens is a dark one. In general, however, the stories that follow were conceived in fun and are meant to be read for pleasure.

  One final truth: savage blood-crazed razor-toothed jaguars have been ripping at my flesh without surcease for over ten years now, and I have yet to see one in the wild.

  Tim Cahill

  Montana, 1986

  The Book on Survival

  Two fourteen-year-old rock climbers, Jim Deering and Ryan Angus, were stranded. They had been climbing in Bell Canyon, not far from Salt Lake City, when one of those dense, dirty fogs that bedevil the western front of the central Rockies rolled in and left the two stuck on a high ledge. It was late—6:00 P.M.—and the fog, thick as cotton candy, muffled and muddied the fading sun. Just for a moment, before the light died altogether, the sky glittered with the color of steel wool. Then the world purpled down into absolute blackness, with the dank inevitability of an Edgar Allan Poe poem.