Jaguars Ripped My Flesh Read online

  Deering and Angus kept their wits about them. They didn’t try to descend in the darkness, which, on that frigid night, is one of the things they did right. The temptation to “go for it” must have been great. The idea of shivering through fifteen hours or more of below-freezing temperatures generates a sense of anxiety that, in its effects, is sometimes indistinguishable from pure panic.

  I’ve felt it often enough myself: this unhealthy urge to push on past the safety point rather than bivouac in uncomfortable circumstances.

  Once, in Peru, three of us spent twelve hours climbing up through the rain forest on the jungled eastern flanks of the Andes. We were looking for a long ledge of rock rising above the tangled vegetation where, we had been told, there were human remains and funeral urns. The ledge was called the “City of the Dead,” and we couldn’t find it anywhere. When the sun began to set, we were exhausted and angry, still somewhere around the eight-thousand-foot level, while our tents and sleeping bags were down on the river bottom at about five thousand feet. All we had with us were day packs, rain gear, about two handfuls of trail mix apiece to eat, and a climbing rope we had brought with us in case we had to lower ourselves down into the City of the Dead.

  The stream we’d been following down to the river had become a waterfall, and the sheer cliff face below us dropped for what looked to be about forty feet. It was hard to judge the extent of the drop because of all the vegetation and the darkness that was pooling up at the base of the cliff. One of our number suggested we uncoil the rope and go for it. The thought of the warm bags below and the frozen night ahead made this seem like an eminently sensible idea. It was a forty-foot drop. We had eighty feet of rope: Why not double the rope around the tree, rig up a carabiner brake bar, rappel down, retrieve the rope, crash through the dark jungle for another couple of hours, and sleep warm? What a good idea.

  The end of the rope disappeared in the darkness below, and something I’d read in some woodsy survival book somewhere began snapping away at the periphery of my resolve. The book said that a smart hiker never jumps, ever. You might be standing on a fallen tree trunk, and the ground is right there, two feet below, but how do you know there isn’t some ankle-twisting vine skulking just out of sight? Some leg-breaking badger hole covered over with grass? A rattlesnake? According to the survival manual, you should sit on the tree and lower yourself gently all that two feet to the ground. This advice had always seemed overly cautious to me, like the diet books that tell you to “consult your doctor before beginning this or any other weight-reduction program.” Still, rappelling into inky blackness without knowing precisely how long a drop it was suddenly seemed stupid, if not suicidal. “A smart hiker,” I told my companions, “never jumps into the whirling darkness of abysmal depths.” Or words to that effect. So we spent a night huddled around a gasping, half-choked fire, wishing it was five degrees colder so that the rain would turn to snow. In the morning, the sun rose on the face of the cliff. Jungle rock glowed, as if from within, in the pastel pinks and rose-petal reds of a Monet painting. The drop was more than 150 feet. We all stood there, looking down, thinking how close we had come to finding the City of the Dead the hard way.

  Angus and Deering, trapped on the fogged-in ledge above Bell Canyon, knew better than to even think about making a descent in the darkness. What they needed was a fire: a fire for physical and psychological comfort; a fire to ward off hypothermia; a fire to summon rescuers. There were plenty of twigs on the ledge, but they were thin and wet, soaked through, hard to light. The young climbers had a limited supply of matches and a wilderness survival book with them. Survival books are full of good advice—a smart hiker never jumps, for example—and people fogged in on high, rocky ledges find them especially interesting reading. When their first attempts to light the twigs failed, Angus and Deering made their second smart move of the night. They settled back and consulted the book. Carefully following instructions, the boys spent two hours trying to light their fire. It was now 8:00 P.M. Twenty rescuers from the Salt Lake City sheriff’s office were searching for the stranded climbers: helicopters clattering helplessly through the fog and darkness. Below, the boys were still following instructions, still trying to light a fire by the book. Their lives, if it came to that, depended on the fire, on the book.

  I find this story fascinating, because I am a man who sits around at home reading wilderness survival books the way some people peruse seed catalogues or accounts of classic chess games.

  Philosophically, I like Paul Petzoldt’s The Wilderness Handbook. Petzoldt, former director of the National Outdoor Leadership School, isn’t big on the challenge of the wilderness, confronting and overcoming fears outdoors so as to become more confident in business or interpersonal relationships. The wilderness Petzoldt loves is its own reward, to be enjoyed—here’s the part I like—in comfort. There are plenty of challenges out there, he seems to be saying, but they ought to be thought out and self-imposed, not thrust upon one by circumstances, or worse, by guides with drill-instructor mentalities. Accordingly, the first chapter of The Wilderness Handbook is titled “Survival: Avoiding Survival Situations.” It is full of sane and sensible advice.

  Emotionally, though, I like books that foster personal wilderness-survival fantasies. Generally, my light plane goes down somewhere in the Amazon or Alaska. Occasionally I crash in Nepal, Africa, or Patagonia. I’m seldom seriously injured in the crash, but with my knowledge of wilderness survival lore, it’s my job to save the lives of at least six people. I’ve got a Swiss Army knife, some strong monofilament, a pocket full of fishhooks, and my waterproof set of five Survival Cards, produced by Lee Nading of Bloomington, Indiana. If the plane goes down in the Arctic, the Survival Cards warn that there is “QUICKSAND at stream junctures,” and that “FOOT TRAVEL is risky, exhausting, useless; travel by RAFT no matter how long it takes to build.… Most towns are on rivers.” If the fantasy turns nasty, I sometimes have to perform a field amputation while referring to the Survival Cards, a full paragraph of which starts by warning me not to make the decision to lop off someone’s arm or leg “lightly … sever the muscles at the new skin line … the muscle will promptly retract, leaving the bone exposed … Then cut the bone …”

  Two of the best books I’ve found for extended outdoor survival daydreams are Bushcraft by Richard Graves and Outdoor Survival Skills by Larry Dean Olsen. Both books suppose the reader is going to be stranded for days or weeks or even months in the wilderness. I can barely hang a picture, but after going over either of these texts, I am capable of building a crude shelter, making a rope out of vines, trapping rabbits for dinner, and assembling a proper salad out of rude weeds.

  How to Survive on Land and Sea by Frank and John Craighead was first written in 1943 for the U.S. Navy, and it is still one of the best books on survival in unusual environments. It contains information on hunting and gathering (if the monkey eat, you probably can too), mountain travel, ocean navigation, cooking, food preservation, vermin, and predators. The section on dealing with native peoples avoids common errors of cultural superiority (“your own fate … may depend on your treating native peoples well”), though I disagree with the Craigheads’ contention that “if you can outdo the natives in feats of strength or skill, you will be held in esteem.…” Once, on the island of Man-hat-tan, I sat in a waterfront bar and defeated all comers in wrist-wrestling until several of the natives gathered around my table and suggested, in their quaint island dialect, that “either you get outta here or we kick youse ass.”

  Perhaps Jim Deering and Ryan Angus were beginning to get similarly annoyed with their own wilderness survival manual after following its instructions and still failing to light a fire after two hours. At 8:00 P.M., just as the sheriff’s search party got off the ground, the boys made their third smart decision of the night. “It was so hard to start the fire,” Angus said later, “so we started ripping out the pages and it started right up.” Searchers spotted the flaming survival book, and the two climbers were evacuat
ed by helicopter.

  Pombe Wisdom

  No one who lives in France is ever referred to as a “native,” no matter how far back he can trace his ancestry. Natives, so we imagine, are folks who live along the banks of tea-colored rivers that flow through impenetrable jungles that are located in amorphous countries with unpronounceable names. Natives wear loincloths, have bones in their noses, dine on root crops, and roast lizards for lunch.

  The word is one with more meaning than its stated definition allows. Because natives are technologically primitive, we also suppose them to be intellectually and emotionally barren. People who don’t know the difference between a Buick and New York City are not capable of simple human accomplishments such as the put-on.

  Or are they?

  Carl Sagan, in Broca’s Brain, asked anthropologists if they could ever be certain that “the natives are not pulling your leg.” He wasn’t sure, for instance, that Bronislaw Malinowski had actually discovered a people on the Trobriand Islands who had not worked out the connection between sexual intercourse and childbirth. Babies, the people told Malinowski, were the result of complicated interrelationships between the stars and various gods. Malinowski responded with the birds and bees, and the natives listened politely until he got to the business about a nine-month gestation period.

  “Hardly possible, my dear Professor Malinowski,” they said, or words to that effect; and by way of proof, they pointed to a woman holding a newborn child. The woman’s husband, Malinowski learned, had been away for more than two years.

  “Prescientific people,” Sagan points out, “are people. Individually, they are as clever as we are.” Sagan thought that these natives might have been having a little fun with Malinowski. “If some peculiar-looking stranger came into my town and asked me where babies came from,” Sagan wrote, “I’d certainly be tempted to tell him about storks and cabbages.”

  The supposition that people who don’t know a Buick from New York are necessarily stupid can be a costly mistake. Back in the seventies, a famous French research vessel was chugging about Truk lagoon in the Caroline Islands, looking for the Shinohara, a Japanese submarine sunk in World War II. The crew confined itself to science and did not socialize with the local people. It never found the Shinohara.

  A few years later, an American research team arrived at Truk and set up a search for the sub. The Americans were more gregarious than the French, and, during the course of one long night of drinking and talking, a local Micronesian fellow said he remembered the Shinohara and knew where it had gone down. The Americans gave it a go, and the Micronesian succeeded where magnetometers had failed. The find resulted in a popular ABC-TV special. More important, the men who had gone down with the Shinohara were finally given a proper Shinto burial by their relatives.

  I like to think that the American success in finding the Shinohara had something to do with faith in the intelligence of the natives, a faith that was fueled by the consumption of alcoholic beverages. A man has reason to justify his own vices, of course, but it has been my experience that nothing more quickly transforms natives into people than a couple of beers, a few jars of jugo de caño, a bottle of pombe, or several cups of chuba.

  Jugo de caño is the fermented juice of sugar cane, a kind of sickly sweet wine that tastes a bit like orange soda. It goes down easy after a long walk, and it sneaks up on you like a mugger in the night. I drank quite a lot of it in certain chicken-scratch villages in the eastern foothills of the Andes, drank jar after jar up there in the cold, green cloud forests overlooking the sprawling immensity of the Amazon jungle. It is a fact, little studied by science, that after five jars of jugo, previously unilingual Americans are capable of speaking perfect Spanish and that Peruvian Indians will forsake Quechua and speak English with the facility of the entire Yale debating team.

  Jugo is not kind to one in the morning, and this too affirms the humanity of all involved: Men who suffer much together are forever brothers.

  In the Philippines, the language of instruction is English and the medium of communication may be rum—Anejo and Manila are good—or malloroca, a coconut wine flavored with anise. Green Parrot brand comes in a clear bottle, and the cork under the cap is usually black and crumbly from contact with the wine. You can drink this stuff at the Hobbit bar in Manila. All the waiters are dwarfs or midgets, and the entertainment consists of good Philippine folk singers crooning tragic songs about finally earning a gold record, only to have their pancreas (yes, pancreas) fail on them. The Hobbit draws a mixed crowd, tinged Graham Greeneish, and no one there, from the dwarfs on up to the smugglers, could rightly be considered a native.

  For that, you’d have to go to some remote area of the country: Go thirty miles north of Bogo, to the foreboding northern tip of the island known as Cebu. There the most popular fermented refreshment is known as chuba, pronounced “tuba.” It is made from the rapidly fermenting sap of the coconut palm and colored with mangrove bark. In the morning, chuba gatherers bring in the sap, which is sweet and orange and has a white froth on top. The longer it is aged, the more sour and alcoholic it becomes. Properly aristocratic chuba is as bitter as lemon juice, but it will drop you to your knees and set you to howling at the jungle moon.

  I was staying in this remote corner of the world with five other American men, and the people of the dusty little village called us all Joe. In the weeks I was there, I spent two nights sitting out on the beach demolishing jugs of chuba with various locals, and for this I earned a new and distinct nickname: Chuba Joe. One of those locals was the schoolteacher. He impressed me, and the feeling must have been mutual, because I was asked to speak before his students: Chuba Joe, Doctor of Fermented Communication.

  Pombe is a product of the tiny African country of Rwanda. I’m not really sure how pombe is made, but what I do know is consistent with its revolting taste: It involves mashing up rotten bananas with bare feet and burying the resultant mess in a cask for an undetermined amount of time. After the pombe is exhumed, it is poured into liter bottles that once contained beer. You get a wooden straw with the bottle—give it back after you’re done—because an unappetizing black sludge forms at the bottom of the bottle and along the sides. The stuff tastes like death, and even the most dedicated pombe enthusiasts avoid it.

  One of my drinking buddies in Rwanda was a guide and guard in the Virunga National Park, a refuge for the last two hundred mountain gorillas in the world. Big May was a taciturn sort, given to brief rages and prolonged sulks. He often carried a short stick, like a riding crop, which he banged on tables when making a point. He bullied his peers, sometimes poking them in the chest with his stick and backing them across rooms. He was a bad drinker.

  There were small wooden homes all along the trails to the mountains where the gorillas lived, and if the people had pombe to sell, they’d put fresh flowers by the front door. Pombe vendors who saw Big May walking by in the morning stationed spies along the trail in the evening. When Big May was spotted, runners sprinted back to the houses to remove the flowers.

  Sometimes the runners were slow. Sometime Big May took a back trail. Sometimes he got to a home before the flowers could be hidden, and then the people were in for a night of table-banging and intimidation.

  It was easy to see Big May as a “mean native,” which is to say, a man with an inscrutably ugly soul. The truth was something else again. Several pombe-soaked nights with Big May convinced me that he had, like Mark Twain, taken a philosophical and biting dislike to the whole “damned human race.” We had swum around the language barrier in a sea of pombe. Big May seemed a familiar sort. The wells of gentleness and compassion in him were entirely reserved for animals, and animals of one peculiar sort—gorillas. These gorillas were threatened by the land-lust of the people Big May bullied in his pombe-generated rages.

  Big May seemed to like me. I wasn’t interested in growing potatoes in the Virungas, and there were things he could teach me. He liked people who listened intently and didn’t interrupt with their own
senseless opinions. And after several hours of pombe, the rage would dissipate, for moments, into softness.

  One day while patrolling the mountains, Big May found a baby gorilla, Mtoto by name, with her hand caught in a poacher’s wire trap. If she couldn’t extricate herself, she’d die. The silverback, Mrithi, a four-hundred-pound male, crouched by his daughter, angry and agitated. Mrithi howled at Big May. The gorilla’s teeth were coated with black tartar and were the size of small carrots.

  Big May dropped to his belly and made the double-belching sound that signifies lack of aggressive intent among gorillas. He crawled forward carefully, risking a charge by Mrithi. Such a charge could be deadly, but Big May got to Mtoto and managed to twist the wire off her hand while Mrithi hooted and pounded his chest. It was an act of incredible bravery.

  One of my traveling companions was amazed that Big May, of all people, had done this thing. “Big May cares,” he said, incredulous.

  Anybody who’d spent a night sucking pombe out of a bottle with Big May would have known that. He was a disagreeable man who couldn’t tell you the difference between a Buick and New York City, but he possessed sensitivity and rare courage. It took only the proper circumstances, or sufficient pombe, to see that in him.

  Getting Lost

  I seem to have spent a lot of time lost: I’ve been lost in the jungles of South America and Africa, lost in the Arctic, lost at sea, lost in the caves of Kentucky, and even lost atop a mountain I can see from my front door. I’m a master of inept bushwhacking, of erroneous orienteering. Give me two roads converging in the woods on a snowy evening, and I’ll take the one most bivouacked.