How to Walk a Puma (18 page)

Don't Let Me Die This Way

The never-to-be defined illness was just part of a catalogue of misadventures I experienced during my time with the Huaorani, but I was still enjoying every day—apart from a moment on the evening after visiting Conan's village when I almost died.

Earlier that day we stopped at Otobo's place in Boanamo. I helped unload the boat, hauling seats, tanks of water and gas cylinders up a muddy slope. Suddenly everything wavered and I briefly fainted, something I had never done before. Just as Roy had tried to hide his weakness from me, I didn't want the Huaorani to see I was still unwell, so popped back up. The Huaorani laughed, not out of malice, but because it was clearly not anything worth worrying about. And because no matter your culture, a man falling face first into mud is funny. So I burst out in guffaws too, until it made me feel woozy again and I staggered on, followed by chuckles.

An hour later I went to bathe in the river, barefoot and wearing nothing but a swimming costume (this was more clothes than I was normally wearing, but I felt it was an important precaution against candiru). Most of the embankments by the river were muddy and any foot traffic quickly turned the ground into the consistency of chocolate mousse. The trail I walked through led to Otobo's ‘beach', a sandy patch that only turned muddy once you were ankle deep, meaning that with some tricky foot shaking you could emerge clean.

On the trail a column of ants, maybe twenty wide, swarmed laterally across my path in a hypnotic stripe of constant movement. I hopped over them, identifying them as army ants. These ants are so feared that even a jaguar will walk around them. Army ants don't look much different to a common garden ant, apart from being slightly larger. Their main difference is the sheer numbers they gather in to launch their marauding attacks, and the columns they travel in. When they fan out in a swarm to forage they devour everything that does not move out of their way, and there are stories of chickens trapped in coops that the ants stripped to the bone in minutes.

The trail of ants doubled back, and crossed the path at another point. I hopped over it again, but soon after the column turned and began to march down the centre of the trail. I waddled along straddling it until it split into two columns, then split again, and I found myself surrounded by multiple lines of ants. Glancing back I saw that the way I had come was now covered, and with no time to think I launched into a run, my tender feet seeking the places with the fewest ants. But the first bites came immediately, causing excruciating pain in both feet, and I broke into a sprint, no longer caring what I trod on.

I would probably have been better off turning back and trying my luck that way. After sprinting for a few steps the world lurched and I felt another faint coming on. I had no time to process the thought, but I instinctively knew that falling here and blacking out would leave me so covered in bites they could be fatal. ‘Don't let me die this way,' I thought briefly, recalling stories of elderly people killed because they couldn't move fast enough. A few more bites and the pain they brought, plus a shot of adrenalin, kept me upright until I was finally past the rapidly expanding swarm, and I threw myself
down, my feet aflame as I swatted at the ants digging their mandibles into my flesh.

Standing again, I staggered to the water and flopped in, only to find that the bites had paralysed my feet to a degree but hadn't deadened the pain receptors, so agony flared anew. Looking back at the river bank, I could see every grasshopper, mantis and other insect capable of flight taking off in waves as they escaped the voracious army. Soon the beach was covered in black bodies. It was only around a fifty-metre swim to another exit point, but my feet were numb and useless for propulsion, the river was filled with snags, and I knew I was prone to fainting. Swimming back was lunatic. Yet I took one more look at the beach and began careful strokes into the current.

Buggered if I was walking back.

After what must have been my first booze-free New Year's Eve in two decades (I was in bed pretty much as soon as it was dark), I spent another feverish night but woke feeling the best I had in some time. So I took a beautiful wooden canoe that was sitting at the village edge filled with water and mud, bailed it out and spent several idyllic hours paddling up the small river that flanks one side of Boanamo before it joins the murky Cononaco.

As I paddled I saw my first ever Jesus lizard, a creature straight out of a cartoon—when startled on the river banks that are its home it rears up on its back legs and whirrs them so fast that it literally walks on water until it reaches safety on the other side of the river. I spent the rest of the day with Omagewe and his wife, who decided to make me some armbands out of palm cotton and strands of Omagewe's hair that he had crudely hacked off with a knife. To make
the armbands she quickly built a loom from kindling-sized branches and the tough aerial roots that the Huaorani use for twine, then threaded the cotton and hair round and through these to make a tight weave. These armbands could be worn for dancing, or just because someone felt like having them on. Omagewe sometimes sported a headband when he set out hunting; apparently it signified a message along the lines of ‘I come in peace,' should he encounter Tagaeri or Taromenane. This was as elaborate as any clothing went for the Huaorani, and led me to musing about their adoption of Western attire and how they wore it.

A Huaorani fashion parade would be a curious affair. It is only the elderly who regularly dress (or undress, I should say) traditionally, but even Quempere wears a necklace made of red and blue plastic beads interspersed with beads that have random letters of the alphabet he cannot read printed on them. Omagewe walks around in shorts most days, but at home or out hunting he goes naked save the string. One day though he strolled over to me wearing saggy grey underpants so large he had to tuck them into his string, and an oversized fluorescent green T-shirt with ‘Abercrombie and Fitch' in grand lettering down the side, a fine counterpoint to the Dolce & Gabana T-shirt Bartolo had sported the day before. They are of course cheap Chinese knock-offs and often have misspellings, or whole words missing, so I was really hoping at some stage to come across someone with an FCUK shirt.

The men also sport some fine hairdos. Otobo's father-in-law, as I've mentioned, could have stepped straight off the cover of a Bon Jovi album (if Jon Bon Jovi were five foot tall, that is). Quempere maintains a traditional style, long, with a dead-straight fringe stopping just above his eyebrows, kept in shape by regular trims with sharpened
mollusc shells. Like his father-in-law, Otobo has a fine mullet, and I saw a child in Bameno with a perfect Elvis coif.

As his wife worked, Omagewe kept me entertained with a pantomime of the morning's hunt, during which he'd speared a peccary (a pig-like animal that travels in large herds, clacking their sharp tusks as a warning to any potential predator): all the while he chatted in Huao and laughed, chortling hardest at the part where he fell from a tree and the peccary slashed his ankle with its tusk. Part of the Huaorani's happiness seems to stem from their ability to find comedy in everything. If I saw someone fall out of a tree my Western instinct would be to ask how they were or offer assistance. The Huaorani laugh at them until the person laughs back. Maybe they would respond differently if the situation was life-threatening, but I never witnessed such a situation.

When I returned to Boanamo, Otobo explained to me that the following day I was going to be sent off deeper into the jungle again and would spend the night near one of the salt licks; this might be my best chance of seeing a jaguar at last. Time has almost no meaning in the Amazon, so while my makeshift diary allowed me to keep track of the date I had no idea what hour or day it was, but I did know that the date of my departure from the jungle and the continent was stalking, getting closer, and about to clamp down.

On my London trip to see Lisa I had met up with several of my old safari friends who had been attending a travel trade show, and I had been offered a very intriguing job by one of them. It involved travel—lots of it—and the chance to do good. The company I'd be working for is quite fraudulent, in that it's not really a business at all but a conservation organisation disguised as one. It runs safari camps but uses its profits to protect habitat for animals, sponsor research,
and involves communities in conservation projects so they embrace them. I'd decided to take the job, and once I left the Huaorani I would be heading out of South America after almost eighteen months there. I wanted the most from the last few days. Above all, I wanted to see a jaguar.

The next morning I didn't go to the salt lick as planned—to the Huaorani, plans are as flexible as time and numbers; while I had found this mildly frustrating at first, I soon found it quite liberating. Instead Omagewe took me for a jungle walk. There is a rhythm to jungle walking. It is less frantic than a city walker's pace, less harried, but it somehow feels faster, more elegant, a glide compared with a thump. A jungle walker's feet must be in tune with their eyes, the same eyes that watch the canopy, the trees, for prey or danger while picking out the quietest and most efficient way of placing each limb. This requires the most intense concentration but is somehow relaxing, like a mobile meditation. Both exhilarating and soothing, it may be our species' oldest and finest art.

I'm crap at it.

Twigs snapped under my feet, branches rustled as my arms brushed against them, and the permanent toothy display of joy I couldn't hide would have been as subtle as Gotham City's bat signal. ‘Look! Over there! Hop in the monkey-mobile! It's an idiot!' I could imagine my quarry saying.

Making things worse, I was wearing boots, no doubt a fetching complement to my string, but necessary as my baby-soft feet had me hopping, cursing and stumbling in blind pain whenever I tried walking without them—surely a spearable offence should I chase food away.

For Omagewe the jungle was a book he had read so often that every page was familiar. In Africa I might have advanced to Dr Seuss levels of proficiency; here I didn't even know the alphabet. But as always, Omagewe read his book as a comedy, and regaled me with long incomprehensible tales in Huao peppered with some Spanish words he had just learnt, chuckling as he acted out previous hunts, mainly of peccaries (though for all I knew he might have slipped in a tale or two about picking off oil workers as well).

People I knew who had visited the Huaorani had told me about witnessing the moment when they get ‘in the zone', becoming pure hunters. This happened while I was out with Omagewe. He carried just a spear, no blow gun with poison darts, so he could only hunt ground game, but while he was pointing out some woolly monkeys to me they reacted as if he were fully equipped to put a dart in them and took off through the canopy in fright. If he had been hunting and had managed to hit one with a poison-tipped palm arrow he would have had to chase it, as the monkeys don't die immediately. So when these monkeys swung away he shot off along the ground below them, perhaps out of habit, perhaps just for the fun of it; all of a sudden his four-foot-ten frame was an immense advantage. On a level track I am confident of my speed, but here he was swift, silent and agile. I lumbered behind him in my flippety-flappety rubber boots, feeling like a half paralysed elephant seal.

At one stage, while he was still in sight, I saw ahead of him a fallen tree about a foot off the ground; another tree had been brought down and lay parallel above it, leaving a gap of maybe two feet, with lianas framing it on either side. Without breaking stride or losing sight of the monkeys, Omagewe ran straight ahead, jumping at the gap, tucking his legs under and his head down, a mighty ball of
muscle with a spear protruding, before starbursting on the other side of the gap and hitting the ground without missing a step. Following him, I ran up to the obstacle, briefly paused, and then made the uncharacteristically sensible decision to run around it. By then, however, Omagewe was out of sight.

Some minutes later he came back, grinning sheepishly, spear still in hand, telling me with gestures and Huao what had just happened, even though I had witnessed most of it. Then he told me again, this time with some monkey noises thrown in. He smiled at me, seeming to want a response.

‘
Waponi
,' I said and, as expected, he laughed as if it was the best thing he'd ever heard.

Alone in the Amazon

I was completely alone. In the Amazon. Well, alone as far as human company went. At least eight species of parrot, including three types of macaw, were squawking, cackling, chirping and croaking around me, and I’d been visited by howler monkeys, spider monkeys, and a very large herd of white-lipped peccaries. Due to the peccaries’ reputation for aggression I thought it best to entertain them from a perch a little way up a tree, and spent more than an hour there, during which I realised that I had spent more time in trees as an adult than I ever had as a boy, and reflected that this was probably a fine thing.

I had arrived at the salt lick a couple of days later than planned and would stay there for two nights and three days. I had asked to go alone so I could get a real feel for the jungle; I also wanted to give Otobo’s family a break from me. With me, I had a small tent, plenty of water, my binoculars, some chocolate that Otobo had miraculously produced, two torches, a spear on loan from Omagewe, and an imagination that just wouldn’t stop taunting me with everything that could go wrong. It was exciting, but also very frightening, so to soothe myself I started a list of things that could kill me while I was staying alone at the salt lick, reproduced here: 

1. Eyelash viper/fer-de-lance/bushmaster: These three snakes had all been seen in the area. The eyelash viper is known to be
   moody—perhaps because it has no hair, let alone lashes (in spite of its name). Those are horns above its eyes—
   because it is the devil
   . I’d never seen one, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t one in my tent. The fer-de-lance, meanwhile, has a cross on the back of its head, like a pirate flag without the skull; I presume evolution is working on correcting that omission. And even Roy was afraid of bushmasters: once he saw one outside his cage and refused to come out for the rest of the day. They are pure evil with scales.
   
2. Jaguar: Now that would be deliciously ironic, wouldn’t it?
   
3. Puma: Yes, getting bitten by a puma a week before leaving South America would bookend my trip quite neatly, but I’ve never liked bookends.
   
4. Tagaeri: The number of animals and large birds has increased dramatically in this area since Otobo’s clan decided not to hunt here (a decision made in the hope of attracting more tourists). Their abundance might attract the Huaorani’s cousins the Tagaeri, though hopefully not in the next two days. Nobody could tell me the likelihood of seeing Tagaeri, as when discussing the tribe’s numbers even expert anthropologists become Huaorani and grab a figure from the air. ‘One hundred! No, three hundred! One thousand!’ Who knew? But I had my spear just in case. Oh goody.
   
5. Taromenane: This most mysterious of uncontacted tribes might not even exist, according to some anthropologists (who may be funded by the oil companies seeking to justify their exploration of the area). But their purported nonexistence was no good to me if they didn’t know about it.
   
6. Peccaries: Being killed by a peccary would be the most dignity-stripping of the above options, but was still quite possible. If they caught me off guard and felt the need to avenge the deaths of
   their brethren at Omagewe’s spear tip, I could be slashed and gored to death. Luckily they smell like a wrestler’s armpit so I should be able to detect them coming.
   

And with those pleasant thoughts, I lay down a while. That night I resolved to keep a watchful if bleary eye open for a jaguar, and whatever else might come to my home sweet temporary home.

As darkness fell, I initially found my isolation unnerving. I imagined footsteps (which were probably just leaves falling from trees) and heard breathing (it was my own), so at one point I got up to face it all, grabbed the torch and went for a brief night walk before my nerve failed and I returned to the tent. I didn’t see anything noteworthy, and this reassured me enough to drop into a refreshing sleep, from which I awoke every few hours. Each time I woke I shone my torch outside to check for jaguars, or Taromenane, but none appeared. There was always the next night though.

On the afternoon of the next day I’d been sitting, concealed, for some time (hours? I had no way of knowing) as parrot species, ranging from enormous macaws to tiny leaf-green parrotlets, all gathered, inching their way closer to the lick, building the nerve to flutter in and get the nutrients they needed from the clay. They were wary of predators, who knew this was a daily ritual; any branch could hide a viper, every shadow some lethal cat.

The parrots were very close to the lick when they erupted into a cacophony of squawks and a shower of fear-induced defecation, the sky filling with colour as hundreds of birds wheeled away. Seconds later a hawk arrowed through with something clutched in
its talons—something green, red, and redder still where the twitching body had been pierced.

I never like to see any animals die but I have learnt not to flinch from the reality of nature. In cities we react with abhorrence to any sort of violence, as if blood and death were unnatural, but the animal kingdom shows us otherwise. Maybe that was why I had started laughing during the mugging, a revolutionary moment after too many sanitised experiences. ‘Here it is!’ I thought. ‘This is the real stuff! This is life!’ While I’m no fan of conflict, a complete absence of it can also dull humans to the pain of others, as suffering seems only to be on television, and as real as anything else you see there. I’d felt this myself in Sydney, where I had found myself complaining about the most petty of inconveniences as if they were genuine setbacks. On my return to Sydney in 2002, people often asked me what it was like coming back to ‘the real world’ after so long in the bush. But this was the real world, and a lack of exposure to the blood and guts of living felt like hiding from reality.

Despite all the talk of spearing, the Huaorani aren’t violent people. They only kill when the situation demands it. Noting that Huaorani men are built like wrestlers, I had asked Otobo one day about their approach to fighting. He shook his head adamantly. ‘No. Huaorani don’t like to fight at all! If there is a real problem with someone we just spear them …’

As my second day at the salt lick drew to a close, I checked that my testicles were still present (they were), urged them to contribute some bravery, and dashed along a path as far as I could before darkness hit, so that I was forced to walk a long way back. Again I saw nothing
worth reporting, and yet it remains one of the most frightening things I have ever done. I realised how often I put on a brave face when with others, sometimes
for
them, so my company wouldn’t feel scared. Yet, alone on that walk, I had regressed to the boy scared to take the garbage out at night because who knew what monsters lurked along the garden path?

My last night alone in the jungle was also most likely my last good chance to see a jaguar. It was still possible that one would cross my path in the two days I would spend back with the Huaorani before Otobo took me back to Coca, but most jaguars would be too canny for such an encounter. (The last jaguar seen near the villages was six months before my visit; Omagewe speared it because it was eating his chickens.) All this ran through my mind as Otobo came to fetch me in his canoe, and take me back to Boanamo.

Perspective is such a fickle thing. I was back at Otobo’s village, which felt city-sized and bustling after three days alone. On my first day back at Otobo’s village his wife prepared an enormous meal which included paca (a rodent slightly larger than a rabbit). Out here food is valued, treasured even, but there is no refrigeration so when something is abundantly available the people gorge. To begin with I had been eating Western food that had been brought in from Coca, but when this ran out I began eating mostly traditional food with the Huaorani. This included paca and a type of caterpillar; eventually the peccary that had gored Omagewe turned up on my plate.

While I ate the welcome-home feast I watched Otobo’s older daughter playing with what I thought at first was some sort of ragdoll, before I realised it was the baby of the paca we were eating for dinner.
Although the small rodent was quite dead, the little girl cooed over it, even wrapping it in a blanket at one point. Later, after one of the dogs had stolen it, she treated a bottle of cooking oil the same way, showing certain instincts are global.

Once dinner was over, the clan piled into a canoe for the short paddle to Omagewe’s hut, leaving me alone again. This was their life as they would live it whether I was there or not: some chores, some family time, lots of laughter.

Everyone I have spoken to about the Huaorani believes they will be dragged into our modern world one way or another, and soon; there are any number of groups that want to adopt and help them through the process. But if you asked any parent what they want for their child the first thing they would say is ‘happiness’. I have no idea what anyone can teach the Huaorani about that.

While I am perhaps naive in my view of the Huaorani to me their life has the blissful simplicity of those first few months in a relationship when your connection feels pure and perfect and even spinach between your lover’s teeth is somehow cute. Surrounded by the abundance of the forest, right now they desire no more because they don’t know what else there is to want. Billions of us have moved past that honeymoon stage: we now want too much, and probably can’t go back. For us, perhaps—just like in a relationship when the first flush has faded—what’s left is to identify what you do love in the world and endure the rest. Maybe what we—what I—needed to do was find what inspires me and fills me with joy, and use the rest of my time on this planet to do something that matters to me.

But as I watched the Huaorani, I knew that I would give all of my clothes, the few other things I owned, even all that I knew of the world, everything but Lisa, to be as shamelessly happy as Omagewe.