Jaguars Ripped My Flesh Read online

  The first time, it happened in a department store during the Christmas shopping rush. I was perhaps four years old, and my mother had dressed me up for my interview with the Santa who presided there. A picture taken at the time shows a skinny child bundled up in a large jacket with mittens on strings dangling from the sleeves. I was sitting there on Santa’s lap wearing a red beret and a look of complete terror. “Ho, ho, ho,” this albino Sasquatch said, and all I could think about was the giant in the story “Jack and the Beanstalk.”

  Sometime later during that trip, probably while my mother was paying for some purchase, I wandered off. There were more people than I had ever seen before, and the place was full of shiny stuff that a kid could play with or examine or ignore as the mood struck. I was a cliché. A child lost in a department store during the Christmas crush. But it was like a dream of flight, this small exploratory foray, a heady, soaring sensation combined with the vague impression that everything—the toys, the people, the half-price sofas, the Philco radios, and the blinking lights—somehow belonged to me. When an adult holds a child’s hand, the world belongs to the adult. But for those few minutes, all of it—the wholy shiny new world—was mine.

  As my mother tells the story, she spent half an hour “frantic with worry” looking for me. She was riding up an escalator, about to search another floor, when she looked over toward the adjacent escalator and saw a red beret sticking up above the moving rail. She called to me, shouted out my name—“Tim, Tim”—and I glanced over as if to say, in utter surprise, “moi?” I am told that I looked at my mother with the sort of vague, disinterested curiosity one usually reserves for people who make a spectacle of themselves in public. I was captured at the bottom of the escalator and scolded in such a way that I felt absolutely loved. It is a sweet memory, this tearful reunion, but I also recall a sense of some small disappointment: It would have been nice to have been lost just a little while longer.

  Not every directional misadventure, however, has been my fault. Sometimes, as Bogart said about the waters in Casablanca, I have been misinformed. South America is a good place for this sort of thing. When asked, a typical South American male is likely to rattle off detailed directions to your desired destination. The fact that he has no idea where it is that you want to go will not deter him in the least.

  I have discussed the matter with veteran South American travelers and with members of the South American Explorers Club, and we have come up with three possible explanations for this behavior. It may have something to do with the tradition of macho: A man may feel somehow less of a man if he cannot give directions to a stranger. (Likewise, American males find it difficult to admit they are lost. “Why don’t we just pull into the gas station and ask,” she says. “Naw,” he replies, teeth clenched, “it’s gotta be just around the corner.” This can go on for hours.)

  A second explanation may have something to do with the courtly Latin tradition of courtesy. How rude to reply “I don’t know” to a guest in one’s country.

  A third explanation: In the mountainous hinterlands, say in the eastern foothills of the Andes, Indians, who generally speak Spanish as a second language, often give directions like “above” or “below.” When the traveler arrives above or below to find that he has been misinformed, he seldom has the energy to climb back to the source of the misinformation for a bit of clarification. Better to simply push ahead and ask again at the next village.

  Something like this happened to Gonzalo Pizarro back in 1541. A decade before that, Gonzalo’s half brother, Francisco, had led the Spanish conquest of the Incas. In the ten years that followed, I am certain the news of the conquest then gradually floated up over the Andes and into the cloud forests at 10,000 feet, where the Chachapoyas and other peoples lived. Gonzalo and his expedition of 200 Spaniards were looking for cities of gold and groves of cinnamon trees. The people must have known that these strangers carried sticks that killed from afar, that they were great ones for rape and robbery, for pillage and murder, not to mention wholesale enslavement of the locals.

  “Oh yeah,” the native people told Pizarro, “a city of gold—you bet. It’s about a ten-day march over that range of mountains on the horizon there.” The expedition staggered around for more than a year, certain that the gold and spices were just over the next rise. Some Spaniards deserted the expedition. Many died of disease or fatigue and malnutrition. Eventually the survivors ate their dogs and horses. Only a few of the Spanish managed to stumble back into Quito in August of 1542.

  The Indian people east of Quito were left in peace for centuries due to this policy of misdirection. And I think the impulse survives in the folk who live there today. “Who knows what the strangers want? Let’s send them out to the nasty land where no one goes, send them so far away they’ll never come back.”

  In Africa, in a remote central equatorial country, the people I met seemed eager to be of help, but I had mistakenly bought and studied a Swahili phrase book under the impression that the language was used in business and social intercourse. And it was, everyplace in the country except under the Virunga volcanoes, where I happened to be. There, people spoke Kinyarwanda, and only a few spoke a smattering of Swahili, which, in any case, I spoke ungrammatically, one painful word at a time, from the dictionary, rather like Tarzan speaks English. “Where … trail … Ruhengeri?” (“Mahali … wapi … utambaazi … Ruhengeri?”)

  Sometimes, however, it’s all my fault. Given my sloppy technique with compass and topo map, I generally stroll into camp or back to the trailhead several days overdue. I believe that I can read a map pretty well if I take my time and really concentrate, but I am like those accident-prone people who, according to psychiatrists, want to punish themselves by bouncing off speeding semis or falling down stairs. I want to get lost. I like to get lost. I am creative in my ineptitude.

  The survival and woodcraft books I own all caution the traveler to sit and think when disoriented. “DON’T PANIC,” they scream—the sort of admonition that makes a person consider running off into the bush, hands in the air, screaming and gibbering. How come no one ever tells you to relax and enjoy it? My rules for the lost and inept—my kind of people—are simple. When backpacking, never run your food supply too low. Be entirely self-sufficient. Never, but never, leave your pack to see if the trail ahead seems to be the right one. You want to be able to sleep comfortably and eat to maintain your strength; you can’t do either if you’ve managed to lose your pack as well as yourself. If all else fails, you can go on half-rations and wander around for a few days until you find your back trail and—humiliation!—go back the way you came.

  Finally, consider your predicament a privilege. In a world so shrunken that certain people refer to “the global village,” the term “explorer” has little meaning. But exploration is nothing more than a foray into the unknown, and a four-year-old child, wandering about alone in the department store, fits the definition as well as the snow-blind man wandering across the Khyber Pass. The explorer is the person who is lost.

  When you’ve managed to stumble directly into the heart of the unknown—either through the misdirection of others or, better yet, through your own creative ineptitude—there is no one there to hold your hand or tell you what to do. In those bad lost moments, in the times when we are advised not to panic, we own the unknown, and the world belongs to us. The child within has full reign. Few of us are ever so free.

  “How in the hell did you manage to get lost half an hour from camp?” my backpacking companions ask.

  “Dumb luck,” I tell them.

  Bad Advice

  Recently, I came across a survival manual issued to American troops in the South Pacific during World War II. The book contained a section on sharks that shimmered with falsehoods and sparkled with bad advice. At the time, soldiers and sailors had been hearing horror stories of shark attacks in the aftermath of several South Pacific maritime disasters. For instance, when the troop carrier Cape San Juan was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine
, the merchant ship Meredith managed to rescue only a third of the fifteen hundred men who went down. The majority of those who died, according to eyewitness reports, were torn to shreds by sharks in a feeding frenzy. One rescuer, quoted in Michael Jenkinson’s book, Beasts Beyond the Fire, said, “I heard soldiers scream as the sharks swept them off the rafts. Sometimes the sharks attacked survivors who were being hauled to the Meredith with life ropes.”

  In what Jenkinson thinks was an effort to “dispel shark fears among American troops,” the survival manual stated flatly that sharks are “frightened by splashing” and easy to kill: Just stab the “slow-moving, cowardly” attacking shark in the belly. And, hey, why waste the chance to have a little fun in the bargain.… Swim out of line of his charge, grab a pectoral fin as he goes by, and ride with him as long as you can hold your breath.”

  This is real bad advice, and I was mulling it over early in October while camping and kayaking on the southeastern coast of Alaska. Specifically, I was thinking about the comforts of bad advice, and wondering what well-informed people do when confronted by an Alaskan brown bear.

  These fellows weigh as much as fifteen hundred pounds and can stand nine feet tall. Your basic inland grizzly, by contrast, reaches a maximum height of seven feet and weighs about nine hundred pounds. For a time, the Alaskan brown was thought to be a separate species, but biologists are now satisfied that browns and grizzlies are different races within the same species, Ursus arctos. In other words, bad-news bears, because Ursus arctos of any race are aggressively unpredictable. Their fight-or-flight response leans heavily toward fight: The beasts evolved on the high plains and tundras, in competition with wolves, saber-tooths, and the like; with nowhere to hide, their best defense was a good offense. The American black bear, by contrast, evolved in the mountains and forests, in plenty of cover. With the exception of a sow with cubs, a black bear is likely to flee a threatening situation. Merely startle a grizzly, however, and instinct may launch him into an attack. And sometimes it seems to take even less than that.

  In Yellowstone National Park, not far from where I live, it was an unusually bad year for grizzly attacks. On July 30, a grizzly dragged a young woman from her tent and killed her. In August, a Yellowstone grizzly mauled a twelve-year-old boy, and another injured a park naturalist and her husband. On September 4, two California campers survived a mauling in Glacier Park.

  No one knows what caused the attacks, but some biologists studying Yellowstone grizzlies speculate about a lack of food: This was a lean year for high-country berries and white bark pine cones, they say, and the grizzlies may have been driven down into campsites in search of food. Others think that Yellowstone bears have become too accustomed to hikers and have lost their fear of man because firearms are not allowed in the park. Still others think that bears previously tranquilized with PCP—a drug that can cause violence in humans—have suddenly gone berserk on the drug. My own theory, which I began to develop as I thought about going up to Alaska, involves revenge. The Yellowstone bear population is declining disastrously. Soon it will be too small to support a self-sustaining population. I suspect that the few remaining beasts there can feel the black suction of extinction and are showing an existential rage beyond the capacity of their species. Perhaps they would be more benign where they were less threatened. Native Alaskans I talked to before my kayaking trip pointed out that there had been no maulings and no deaths all year in the area where I was going.

  Still, my kayaking partner, photographer Paul Dix, and I found it hard to be casual about the big browns. We had agreed before the trip that we wouldn’t carry any fatty or odorous foods. Bears don’t see particularly well, and their hearing isn’t very keen, but they can apparently smell bacon several miles away. We cooked on the wave-washed intertidal zone—in accord with Park Service regulations—and stored our food a quarter-mile from the tent, along with the clothes we wore for cooking. We had been told not to camp on an obvious game trail, which seemed like a pretty self-evident piece of information until a friendly ranger advised us that our campsite—the beach just above the high-tide line—was in fact the prime game trail. So we camped in the tangled bush beyond the sand. In the mornings, when we hiked inland to find our food, we never failed to see tracks, mostly moose and wolves. Then one day: the track of a bear so huge it seemed prehistoric.

  The alder breaks above the sand were jungle-thick and just high enough to obscure our vision. With an offshore wind blowing our scent out into the ocean, we could easily stumble onto some crabby, nearsighted, half-dead brownie. We tried to make plenty of noise, tried to give some bear ample warning that we were coming. We shouted as we walked. I adopted the dominant voice of unquestioned authority.

  “Clear out, you pathetic wimps!”

  Paul, who is a gentle soul, added, “He doesn’t really mean that, guys. We like bears.”

  After a few minutes of apologizing for me, Paul took to long explanations of why he wasn’t actually with me.

  All this seemed to be sensible enough, but what if we had the bad luck to stumble onto a bear anyway? Neither of us seemed to know what to do for certain. There were no trees within miles, and the head-high alder bushes would hardly support the weight of a man. Not much protection from a bear that stands nine feet tall on its hind legs. We needed a strategy.

  Some people, I know, advocate playing dead. There is, for instance, a Montana rancher who was attacked by a grizzly two decades ago. The bear ripped most of this man’s collarbone from his chest with one swipe. The rancher fell over and lay still, as if dead, all the while feeling the grizzly’s hot breath on the back of his neck. “I could smell her,” he said. “She stunk like anything.”

  On the other hand, I had just read a new and authoritative book, The Grizzly Bear, by Thomas McNamee, who thinks that “playing dead may be a good idea once an attack is initiated. But I tend to think that playing dead before the bear exhibits any aggressive tendencies may in fact be an invitation.” And then there was an old cartoon I remembered on the subject: Two bears were sitting around after dinner, picking their teeth and chatting. There was a backpack and hiking boot on the ground. One bear was saying, “Don’t you just love it when they play dead?”

  A privately published guidebook to the local trails carried the suggestion that we attempt to intimidate a bear by putting our arms around each other, in order to look like one big animal. Lumped together in this manner, we should speak to the bear in loud, dominant, and commanding voices. Somehow, this had the ring of riding sharks as long as you could hold your breath. Besides, Paul and I were philosophically divided as to what should be said. Suppose I had Paul sit on my shoulders so we looked like some great tall animal. I’d be screaming, “You pathetic wimp!” while Paul would be trying to explain that, although he was sitting on my shoulders and all, we weren’t really together.

  And if that didn’t work, it’d be pretty tough to run. I’d have to try psychology on the bear, all the while backing off slowly with Paul teetering on my shoulders. Maybe a little Freud would give the bear pause: “Uh, have you ever studied defense mechanisms? Like projection? Like, if I called you a pathetic wimp, see, it’s not really you, it’s me that’s the pathetic wimp.…”

  “I’m not with him!”

  McNamee knows of cases where the one-big-animal approach has worked, but he has reservations about it. “I’d say Doug Peacocks method would be a better one. I can’t think of anyone who’s been closer to more grizzlies than Doug.”

  Peacock, who lived ten seasons with grizzlies in Yellowstone and Glacier parks, has been charged by more than a dozen different bears. “I stand my ground,” he says. “I’m not saying this is foolproof or even recommending it. It’s just always worked for me. So far.”

  Peacock bases his response on studies of interactions between the bears themselves. He’s almost certain, for instance, that running will provoke an attack. Peacock tries to act like a self-confident bear who just doesn’t feel like fighting today. “I stand sid
eways because I think confronting them full front is aggressive. I try not to look them in the eye for the same reason. I speak to them in a quiet voice. For some reason, I hold my arms out. I suppose it makes me look like a bigger animal, but I do it because it feels right.”

  McNamee thinks Peacock’s method is sound, but adds, “There could be something Doug hasn’t figured into the equation. It could be as simple as the confidence he has in himself that someone else might lack. Then again, there could be something in that old Hemingway stuff about animals smelling fear.”

  When you’re standing in the alder breaks after stepping over a monstrous bear track on the beach; when it’s getting dark and there are suspicious … sounds … out in the bush; when there’s no place to run or climb or hide; the fact that no one knows for sure how a human should act when confronted by a brown bear is not reassuring. Suddenly, I longed for something that would deliver supreme confidence. What we really needed here was some truly bad advice.

  Going South

  Strange Translations

  In Spanish, the word for “now” is ahora. In the Peruvian state of Chachapoyas, on the eastern foothills of the Andes, overlooking the immensity of the Amazon basin, a fellow who wants the metal skid plate bolted back onto the frame of his Volkswagen might use the word ahorita, “a very short right now.” The mechanic is likely to get to it in a week or so. He has two or three trucks belonging to regular customers that he must deal with first, and he works at a stately and dignified pace. The mechanic is a man of honor, impervious to bribes, and the phrase ahorita, y no más—“a very short right now, and no more”—strikes him as a very good joke. The word hoy, “today,” is cause for hilarity unequaled in the whole lugubrious history of Peru. The mechanic slaps his forehead, pounds his knee, rolls about on the ground clutching his belly and spluttering, very like a man suddenly seized with intolerable abdominal cramps.