Surviving the Extremes: A Doctor's Journey to the Limits of Human Endurance (4 page)

I was invading the Amazon, a place crowded with more plants
and animals than anywhere else in the world, and therefore the arena for the most unrelenting and fearsome battles for survival. I had come here to study one of the winners of that competition, a prehistoric relic so perfectly adapted to this environment that it has lived here, essentially unchanged, for half a million years. By contrast, I had been here a week, having arrived by plane and canoe from my home in New York City, an environment far more unnatural than the jungle, but my native habitat nonetheless. My lifetime of adaptation to many of its most prominent features, such as streets, electricity, advertising, and air pollution, was irrelevant here. However, some of my acquired skills, particularly those in medicine and surgery, retained much of their value anywhere, even and especially here—in the Upper Amazon Basin of Ecuador, on a lake so remote it’s a three-day canoe trip from the nearest town and reachable only during the rainy season, when water levels are high enough to make its shallow entrance channel navigable.

The pristine lake provides an ideal study area for a team of field biologists intent upon unraveling the secrets and survival strategies of plants and animals that can’t live anywhere else on earth. It is also an ideal setup for those very plants and animals to prey upon the biologists who have come to study them. There’s no mercy here for anyone whose bodies and skills have not been honed by natural selection and toughened by a lifetime in the jungle. Distracted by their work, the scientists knew they would be easy targets. I got a ticket onto this expedition because they needed a doctor who could at least try to repair the damage—anything from an itch to a cardiac arrest—that might be inflicted by the toxins, spines, stingers, claws, and teeth that surrounded them. I had been eager to join the team; I wanted the challenge of treating exotic diseases in an exotic setting. Even more, I wanted the chance to become enmeshed in a tangle of life so densely interwoven that in the month we would be there I would only barely begin to glimpse its complexity.

Fully intertwined in this jungle is another well-adapted species, two examples of which were with me in the canoe on that starry night, visible now as silhouettes against the backdrop of moonlit water. Crouching low at the very front was Berullio, the builder and proud
owner of our dugout canoe, the largest in the area. Behind him, sitting in the bow, his father-in-law, Antonio, was steering. Two nonnative specimens were paddling in the stern: the expedition leader, a college professor from Connecticut, and myself, the expedition doctor. Antonio and Berullio are Cofan Indians, descendants of one of many small groups of humans who have adapted to the Amazon after thousands of years of harsh natural selection, tempered by countless generations of accumulated wisdom and practical experience.

Again the silence on the lake was broken by a grunting noise. This time, however, Antonio had produced it. He was immediately answered by a deeper, louder grunt coming from near the shore. Berullio signaled us to paddle in that direction. Antonio and our target continued their conversation while we made our stealthy approach across the dark lake. We swung into a cove. Suddenly we saw pairs of red eyes everywhere: some glowed at us from among the submerged trees and tangled grasses that ringed the shore; others were moving along atop black shadows that skimmed the silver water surrounding us. We heard many more answering calls now. Berullio and Antonio remained focused on one pair of eyes, wider apart than any of the others we had seen. They were like red lights mounted on the end of a thick black log. The distance between the eyes is proportional to the size of the animal, so even I realized this creature had to be massive.

The boat glided straight on toward the shore, the college professor and I in the stern, paddling gently, and Antonio making fine corrections with his paddle in the bow. He put his light out; we did the same. Berullio’s light, fastened to a band around his head, remained on; any other light would be distracting for what he was about to do.

The shoreline trees loomed larger and lower until they were hanging over us, their twisted branches and dangling vines lit up by Berullio’s headlight. The beam was bouncing off the water in a moving cone of light that illuminated the shallows of water hyacinths and elephant grass as well as the interlocking branches of the canopy overhead. Berullio tightened his crouch, to wedge himself a bit more inside the tip of the bow, then carefully leaned over the left side. In his left hand he held a lasso that was fed through a hollow bamboo tube that he held in his right hand. We were moving the canoe very slowly
now—hardly at all. The eyes lay dead ahead. Antonio tapped the water with his paddle. The canoe turned and the eyes swung left, now almost even with the bow. I could make out a black head, like an island surrounded by the silver water. Berullio lowered the bottom of the lasso into the water with a slight motion of his hand, making no sound at all. He placed it just in front of something else protruding from the water: two large holes that I suddenly realized were nostrils, connected underwater to the rest of the head that was still about 2 feet farther back.

Berullio held the rope steady, letting the momentum of the boat slowly carry the lasso under the mouth and jaws. Then, in one quick move, he lifted the lasso over the creature’s head, gripped the bamboo pole, and jerked the loose ends of the rope with his right hand to tighten the noose. The rope caught on a water hyacinth and slapped against the head instead of slipping over it. The animal, until then entirely motionless and seemingly oblivious, suddenly reared its head back, lifted its upper body out of the water, and gave the canoe a ferocious kick, lurching it sideways. I gripped the sides of the rocking boat and felt lake water spilling over my knuckles. Berullio’s hand got caught in the rope. The beast thrashed its jaws as both it and Berullio tried to disentangle themselves. Berullio’s headlight ran helter-skelter over the animal, giving us quick flashes of rows of sharp white teeth lining a long pink throat. My heart was pounding. I didn’t know what to do and there was no time to react anyway. In another second came a loud splash. The animal disappeared under the water, tugging Berullio’s arm down with it. Some bubbles rose to the surface, and then Berullio calmly withdrew his arm from the water, holding an empty lasso. I felt immeasurable relief: no mauled arm, not even a cut.

The crocodile had escaped. Antonio said that judging by the space between its eyes (about 4 inches) the animal was approximately 16 feet long. I could easily believe that. I had seen for myself that the distance just from the nose to the eyes was about 2 feet. Different species of crocodile have different eye color; on our three-day approach along the river, I had seen only green and orange eyes. This lake was filled with red eyes—the color of the black caiman. Its eyes are actually colorless. The red is produced by our lights reflecting off the blood
vessels inside. The black caiman is a fearsome but strikingly beautiful animal with a soft leather skin, black with yellow-white stripes.

“I should have shot it,” Antonio said ruefully. “A good hide and a lot of meat.”

He couldn’t quite understand why a group of gringos was asking him to catch these animals and bring them to camp, where we would perform the frivolous rituals of weighing and measuring them, counting their teeth, and painting numbers on their heads with nail polish. Worst of all, when we finished we would ask Antonio to drop them back in the water where he found them—what a waste. But the pay was good, and cash was hard to come by in the jungle, especially now that poaching was illegal.

“Black caiman skins used to bring good money,” Antonio told us. “Not the other crocodiles—they have little bones in their skin. At the market no one wanted them. But the black ones make beautiful leather.”

I suddenly realized why, on our three-day river approach, we had seen only the orange and green eyes of the other crocodile species and came across red eyes only after we had entered the nearly inaccessible lake.

“Not so many black caimans anymore,” I said to Antonio.

“No, hard to find now,” he agreed.

I wondered whether Antonio’s poaching days really were over or whether he’d be back here as soon as our expedition left. I also wondered about the fate of the other crocodiles. A new tanning process had been developed that could dissolve small bones embedded in hides. The local Indians would find out about it soon enough.

We continued our hunt around the lake, targeting a second pair of eyes (less far apart than the first pair) and edging silently toward it. This time Berullio got the noose tightly around the creature’s head. Antonio jumped up and coiled a rope around the snout. Then they put their forearms in the water under the animal and forklifted it into the canoe. I felt its power as it came on board. Though I was seated safely at the back of the boat, a force of nature had entered my personal space.

The crocodile wasn’t too cooperative, so it was roped further. The
forelegs were tied to the hind legs and then to the tail, to stop it from flailing. An Amazon rodeo. Once the animal was subdued, it was dropped in the middle of the boat, behind them and in front of us. The terrifying and majestic ruler of the lake had been transformed into a pitiable spectacle in the bottom of a canoe. I stared at it. Antonio made a sharp whispered noise to catch my attention and then swung his head to one side, indicating the direction in which he wanted me to paddle.

Of the dozen pairs of eyes we targeted that night, Antonio and Berullio lassoed six. None was longer than 7 feet, but as the night wore on we accumulated quite a pile. Our boat was very big—about 25 feet long and 4 feet wide at the beam—but it was still a dugout canoe, hollowed out from a single tree. It had no keel and was very tippy. There were numerous cracks in the side walls. I had been told that the boat was five years old.

“How long do these canoes last, Berullio?”

“About five years.”

Each time we took on another unwilling passenger, the professor and I grabbed the sides of the canoe to steady it as it rolled from side to side and sank lower in the lake. With the water level only a few inches below the edge, the cracks became leaks. I was able to staunch one large one by wrapping a plastic bag over a pencil and jamming it in as a plug. But water continued to drip, supplemented dramatically each time a vigorously protesting caiman brought some of the lake in with it. The puddle on the bottom was good for our captives but bad for my feet; my waterlogged boots had remained immersed for hours. Finally I had enough. Far more insouciantly than I would have thought possible one week earlier, I took off my boots and rested my bare feet on one of the crocodiles.

Just before dawn, the temperature on the lake dropped. I had been cold and wet even before it started to drizzle, so despite our ponchos the professor and I were pretty uncomfortable. The Indians in front had no rain gear, but their enthusiasm seemed undampened. They kept sweeping their lights across the water. The caimans, however, were getting harder and harder to spot. Antonio explained that raindrops annoy the creatures, so they were closing their eyes. As the rain got
heavier, the red lights all went out. We turned our canoe back toward camp.

Sunrise comes suddenly at the equator. As we paddled back, the rain stopped and the sky evolved in rapid sequence from silver to puce, mauve, pink, orange, and then blue. A huge ball of fire made its dramatic entrance over the trees. I was starting to feel drier already, but was still looking forward to a change of clothes, breakfast, and a good morning’s sleep. Tonight our team had come close to experiencing its first crocodile bite, but having seen Berullio deftly extricate his arm, I felt a little more relaxed. I was beginning to think I might get through this expedition without treating any major lacerations.

With the dawn and the proximity to shore, the jagged silhouette that had rimmed the lake all night revealed itself to be a tangled wreath—a 150-foot interlocking wall in every imaginable shade of green. From a distance, individual trees were indistinguishable except for the kapoks that punched through the top of the canopy and rose an additional 100 feet before spreading out into huge crowns. They looked like gigantic heads of broccoli—dark green against the bright blue sky.

As we got closer in I could see the detail of the shore, but nowhere could I see dry land. The lake ended in a succession of plants, their stalks protruding from the shallow waterlike weeds with floppy leaves on top, called elephant ears. Mixed among these were delicate-looking purple flowers growing on flat, floating leaves—the water hyacinths that nearly cost Berullio his arm. Looming behind them were the first rows of trees, actually growing out of the water, and above them a slope of muck that led to higher ground. The growth there was too thick and too dark to see anything within.

Improbably, a little boy popped out from the maze of foliage. He was waving his right arm and holding up his left hand, which was dangling forward and to the side, a position we surgeons call the “wounded paw.” Hands can’t fall into that odd angle unless they’ve sustained major damage. The boy needed help. It was as if my beeper had gone off, transforming me from dreamy jungle gazer to doctor on alert.

The boy came to the top of the mud slope and shouted something
to Berullio. He couldn’t easily get down through the ooze, and our canoe couldn’t penetrate any closer to shore. There was a short, excited conversation I couldn’t make out, and then the boy disappeared back into the vegetation. The only word I had caught was
doctoro.

Antonio made a chopping motion with his right hand against his left wrist. “Machete,” he said.

“When?” I asked.

“This morning,” he replied. “He’ll meet us at the village.”

Being in charge of our logistics, Antonio knew that my medical box—as well as most of our other equipment—had not yet been transported to the lake but was still at the village. The rest of the team would be there this morning, loading supplies. It would be the best place to treat the injured boy.