Trail of Feathers (24 page)

A meal of roasted meat and
yuka
, manioc, was set before us. The chief shouted at his wife to bring more food. She was a lazy woman, he said, and had been nothing but a burden since the day of their marriage. In time he hoped she would drop dead. Then he would find another wife, a woman with big breasts. The chief picked out a hoof. He passed it to me. I gnawed at it spiritedly. Had he been married long?

The chief thought for a moment or two.

‘Demasiados a
ñ
os
, so many years’ he said. ‘I cannot remember how many. But our wedding was before we built New York.’ 

‘You built the village?’

‘Yes, with the missionaries’ help. They have given money for so many villages along the Tigre - Brussels, Egypt, Los Angeles, Great Britain and others, too.’

Glance at any detailed map of the region and many familiar names jump out at you.

Richard chewed a chunk of the roasted meat. He asked our host what he knew of the Shuar tribe. The chief spat through a hole in the floor.

‘Shuar will cut off your heads,’ he said. ‘They’ll eat you, just like you’re eating that meat.’

‘Are they cannibals?’ I asked.

‘Canibales
, cannibals? They’re much worse than cannibals. The Shuar are Devil Worshippers.’

‘Even the Shuar man who lived here’ he said, ‘he pretended to be a good man, but we all knew the truth.’

Richard, Francisco and I waited to hear that truth. The village chief called his wife to bring more meat. He cursed her for being so slow, for having small breasts, and for bearing him no sons.

‘Se
ñ
or Rogerio was seen talking to the Devil,’ he said with wide eyes. ‘He would walk in the jungle at night. He had no fear because Satan was protecting him. It’s fortunate that he disappeared.’

‘Where did he go?’

‘He vanished one night,’ said the chief subversively. ‘I think the Devil took him to Hell.’

After the meal our host swore at his wife again. She was ugly and no better than a thief, he said. Were he not a Christian, he would have slit her throat years ago. Lucky for her, the missionaries had converted them. He put on his Wellington boots and led us across the football pitch, with its lop-sided goal post, and into the jungle.

Wellingtons have a special place in an Amazonian man’s wardrobe. Although far below a Man United football strip, they are regarded highly. No one could understand why I chose to wear handmade leather hiking boots when I could obviously afford Wellingtons.

The curtain of green descended with tantalising effect. Twenty feet beyond the football field we were lost in another world. A realm of fallen tree trunks and shadows, bottle-green moss, lichens and leaves the size of louvre doors, spanned out before us. High above the canopy shielded out the rain, pierced by only the harshest streams of light.

Francisco and the chief tracked expeditiously through the undergrowth. Richard, too, moved swiftly. Clearly an expert in jungle matters, his confidence mirrored my unease. He was a walking pharmacopoeia as well. There wasn’t a single plant or creature he couldn’t identify by both Linnaean and dialect name. At first I’d mistaken his camouflage dress and military background for signs that he enjoyed the ways of war. But, although he had been trained as an élite soldier, I soon realised that he was a naturalist at heart. He would only ever kill an animal for food, and he delighted in the preservation of life. Above all, he basked in the mysterious ways of nature.

‘It’s stuff you just can’t make up,’ he often exclaimed.

‘What is?’

‘Nature!’

He pointed to a tarantula cowering on a branch.

‘It looks like just another tarantula, doesn’t it?’ he said, ‘but it’s in a coma, paralysed by the venom of a tarantula wasp. The wasp lands on the top of the spider and bores a hole into it, in which it lays its eggs. When the eggs hatch they’ll feed on the live tarantula.’

I had to agree that even my over-vivid imagination was stumped by such nature.

Taking my place again behind Richard, I struggled forward, tripping clumsily like a convict bound in chains.

After five minutes of stumbling I had lost my bearings altogether, and was gripped by a great thirst. Sweat drenched me. Richard called back, telling me to lift up my feet, and to not fight the forest, but to become part of it. Every twig, every branch, vine, and pool of stagnant water, every ant, spider, and rotting trunk of wood, he said, were part of the system. Each element was linked to and dependent on the next.

How could I ever become part of such a thing? A European is an intruder in the jungle. He can’t help it. He’s ignorant of the sounds, the smells, the sense of unity - just as the precise detail of a modern city would be lost on a tribesman from the forest.

As we tramped through the undergrowth, Francisco gathered leaves, flowers and sections of vine for his potions. He squirrelled them away in a cotton bag, tugging up his Y-fronts as he walked. I asked why he was only taking a few leaves from each plant.

'Lore of the jungle,’ said Richard, ‘take only what you need. Anyway, that shit’s so strong it’ll blow your mind.’

‘What is it?’

‘Hallucinogens,’ he said dreamily, ‘lots of hallucinogens.’

Eventually we reached the hut where Rogerio had lived. It was set in a narrow clearing, edged with banana trees. The roof was tattered and had let in the rain, causing the floor to rot and grow moss. An enormous termite mound had developed nearby. The chief said that it was a sign.

‘A sign of what?’

‘That
el Diablo
, the Devil, has been here.’

In all his years in the jungle, Richard hadn’t heard of the superstition. To him termites were an invaluable commodity. He strode over to the mound, kicked off its top with his boot, and grabbed a fistful of the insects.

‘Rub ‘em on your skin,’ he said, ‘and you’ve got yourself a natural insect repellent. They live on tree resin which keeps the bugs off.’

He ground a handful of termites onto my bare arm. Their mashed wings and bodies soon rubbed away, leaving my skin smelling of the sticky resin.

Richard led me to the house. We climbed up onto the raised stage. A few of Rogerio’s belongings were still in the house. His machete, a blue and red checked shirt, a box containing ammunition, and a pair of Chinese-made Wellington boots. His gun appeared to be missing.

‘Those are good boots’ said the chief.

‘Why don’t you take them, or any of the other stuff?’

He laughed.

‘We do not need the possessions of Satan’ he said.

‘Are you certain he was a Devil Worshipper?’

‘Of course,’ said the chief of New York, ‘that’s why he disappeared.’

‘Maybe he died while out hunting, after all his shotgun isn’t here.’

The chief jumped down from the house.

‘His gun might be missing’ he said, ‘but no man would go hunting without his rubber boots.’

*

Back on the
Pradera
, Cockroach reported that the
Titanus giganticus
beetles had been fed. He had put them on a diet of rotten wood, scraped from the underside of the boat’s floorboards. The chicken had been tied to the ledge, with her bottom pointing over the edge. She was being fattened up to eat. I named her Rosario. She was, after all, now a member of the crew.

We gave the chief of New York some old clothes, some rice, soap and sugar and a couple of tins of tuna fish. He and the other villagers came to see us off. A last request was that we drop one of the young men off at the next village, so that he could play football there. He climbed onto the boat, dressed in a luminescent green and yellow outfit. He was barefoot and carried a wicker basket. In it were his precious football boots.

From New York, we had decided to continue on the River Tigre, before journeying west up the Corrientes River to the Pastaza. This route would act as a shortcut, taking us deep into the backwaters of the region. The Amazon’s tributaries had much more wildlife than the main river. But my route planning came out of worry over the fuel situation. As ever, we were getting through far more petrol than expected.

I spent the afternoon sharpening my Alaskan moose knife. One never knew when it might be needed. Richard swore loudly when he saw the nickel-coated blade.

‘It was very expensive,’ I said. ‘It’s sharp enough to skin llamas.’

He swayed back and forth on his chair.

‘Seen any llamas around here?’

I changed the subject.

‘What about Vietnam?’ I asked.

To anyone else it might have been a strange question. But to a man who’d lived through the Tet Offensive and the Battle of Hue, it was a subject of endless possibility. Richard never volunteered his tales of battle but, if asked, he would talk.

‘I volunteered for ‘Nam’ he said, ‘cos I wanted to be in the deep jungle. As far as I was concerned it was an all expenses paid, two year snake hunt, with unusual and additional hazards thrown in.’

‘Weren’t you frightened?’

‘You bet your ass,’ he said. ‘I was shit-scared. On the first day I was dropped into a combat situation. It was early ‘68, just before Tet. I knew the only way I was going out of there was in a body-bag. The first two weeks on the ground were the worst of my life.’

Richard paused to light a Marlboro.

‘Then I came to a realisation’ he said. ‘As I was gonna die I’d better make the most of the time I had left. You bet I was sorry when buddies were killed but, hey, all I can say is that I’m glad they took the bullet rather than me. We all went to ‘Nam with the same fuckin’ odds of survival. Sure I was brainwashed’ he said. ‘Too much John Wayne shit.’

Our conversation was interrupted by Cockroach, who said dinner was ready. He had cooked a pot of spaghetti. Like virtually everything else prepared in his kitchen, it was boiled in oil. He served my helping in my lightweight aluminium mess tin. I’d spent hours teaching him to disinfect the tin and my green metal cup with rubbing alcohol. Richard had shown me the merits of 70 per cent clinical alcohol. He washed his hands and toothbrush in the liquid all the time. It protected him, he said, from common jungle diseases, as well as from chiggers.

The six-legged chigger fly was a constant threat. It burrows under the skin of an unsuspecting victim where it reproduces. The larvae hatch under the skin, causing excruciating pain. Dousing the body in alcohol prevents visits from the chigger fly. Nicole Maxwell had her own special way of keeping the pest at bay. She would dab bright red nail varnish on her skin, to prevent the larvae from hatching out. God knows what she was doing taking nail polish into the Amazon.

*

For a squeamish landlubber like me, life aboard the boat was one of hardship. But before I knew it an entire week had gone by. I had no idea how much further we had to proceed. Nor did anyone else. As the days passed, life on the
Pradera
entered a well-structured routine. Richard would sit up on the roof, rocking back and forth, smoking. When his supply of Marlboros ran out, he turned to Francisco’s stock of
mapacho
. Most nights the shaman and he would smoke themselves senseless. Then Francisco would lead him on a spiritual journey, with the aid of some jungle decoction. They hardly ever slept. Before dawn, Richard would be up, prancing back and forth on the roof, practising
ryuku kempo
, an Okinawan martial art based on pressure points. He rarely came down into the body of the boat. He liked to watch the jungle, which he called ‘the biggest widescreen TV in the world’.

Walter was usually at the wheel, although everyone took turns from time to time. Throughout the day and late into the night, Cockroach spent his time cooking. The others regarded his cuisine as nothing short of Amazonian Cordon Bleu. They mistook quantity for quality. I was constantly worried that the supplies would run out. Some of the meals used more than twenty cans. Richard was keen to give the crew fresh food. He didn’t want them becoming even bigger wimps than they already were. The thought of fresh food, which meant roasted jungle rodents, made my stomach turn. It was my greatest worry of all.

One day mingled into the next, each one a cycle of rain, heat, and darkness, filled with animated insect wings. The boat became infested with cockroaches. The cook said it was my fault, as the rats had always eaten the roaches. When the rats were turned into stew, the boat’s fragile food chain had been broken.

Safe in the medicine cabinet, the precious
Titanus giganticus
beetles were growing even bigger, weaned on their diet of rotting floorboard. Rosario the chicken was getting plumper as well, a fact frequently drawn to my attention by the crew. I refused to let them kill her.

Hour after hour I lay on my hammock, staring zombie-like at the rot above my head. I’d never come across such decay. But the floorboards were not the only thing to be rotting. The nightly storms had drenched us, and the boat’s limited size meant that airing out belongings was near-impossible. Fungus and mildew now covered everything. All my stuff was decomposing - my clothes and sleeping-bag, my self-inflating mattress, hammock, and the Force Ten high altitude tent, were all scarred with mould.

When I was not watching the rot, I was sprinkling my feet with powder. Most of the jungle expeditions I’d read about had failed as a result of trench foot. Another concern was genital infestations. The best explorers have been stopped dead in their tracks by genital lice. So I doused the area frequently in 70 per cent medical alcohol, and hoped for the best. With time, I got used to the burning sensation.

Each night I would cocoon myself in the mosquito net, and dream of a fast food restaurant far away from the Amazon. I’d almost given up ever coming to a firm conclusion about primitive flight. Such thoughts were the preserve of a well-fed person wearing clean clothes.

Now we were on the Rio Tigre, there was a wider variety of fauna to be seen. The jungle was flooded - higher than at any time in living memory. Hundreds of trees on the river-bank had fallen, the soil softened by the high water. Many of the mammals had moved inland to higher ground. But in the trees howler monkeys, three-toed sloths and brightly coloured birds were abundant.