Dark Banquet - Bill Schutt [1]
“We should get these poles up,” Jumbo said, nudging me into the present with the business end of a ten-foot stretch of bamboo.
We were setting up shop (thirty-foot lengths of monofilament netting, actually) in one of central Trinidad’s least populated regions, Guaico Tamana. Earlier we’d passed through several sleepy towns before Jumbo slammed the jeep into a lower gear and turned off the main road.
Basawan Trace was more of a trail than a road, narrow, twisting, and strewn with potholes. We had bumped along, top down, with Jumbo’s soca music cutting through the humid August air. The jeep slowed down only once—to avoid squashing a trio of oilbirds sitting in the road. I’d read that these bizarre creatures employed a form of echolocation to navigate the dark caves where they lived and that the early settlers of Trinidad had named them for their rich reserves of oily fat—which burned quite well in lamps. Now they were mainly a tourist attraction, another checkmark on the Life Lists of the thousands of birders who visited Trinidad each year.
I saw little sign of human habitation in the scrubby forest, but eventually Jumbo pulled up beside a pair of simple clapboard houses. Several garden plots had been carved out of the underbrush, and the yards were strewn with an assortment of old tires, tools, and rusted farm implements. I was soon introduced to the owners, Leno Lara and Mala Boris, as well as their wives, kids, and a friendly assortment of family members totaling about ten people. There was a television playing in the Lara house, but Jumbo informed me later that they had neither running water nor electricity and that the TV was running off a generator.
Everyone seemed to know why we were there and the kids gathered round to watch us set up our poles and mist nets around a fruit-laden grapefruit tree. Jumbo knew from experience that chickens and guinea fowl scrambled up into this particular tree each night, roosting in the branches to escape feral cats and other ground predators. But now the birds were getting progressively weaker with each passing night—bled through the same wounds by the same creatures that had inflicted them—until eventually they dropped from the trees, pale and lifeless. Although vampire bats consume only about half their weight in blood each night (roughly a tablespoon), the anticoagulants in their saliva keep the blood of their prey from clotting, long after the bat has flown off. This charnel house ambience tends to put off most people, especially those unfortunate enough to awaken in a pool of their own blood.
Jumbo and I finished up and were invited back to the Boris residence for some refreshment: warm glasses of the local rum. Twilight is fleeting in the tropics and now, twenty minutes after setting up our mist nets in bright sunshine, it was dark enough that we could no longer see our tree from where we sat under a sheet metal awning.
I asked Mr. Boris if vampires had ever bitten their pigs or their milk cow, but he shook his head. “Just lucky, I guess,” he said, and I nodded in agreement.
Unlike chickens, most vampire bat prey does not perish from blood loss. A half-ton cow can stand to lose a lot of tablespoons of blood before finally tipping over. But an open wound in the tropics is a dinner bell, a beacon on a foggy night. To the hordes of aesthetically challenged flies, beetles, and worms (not to mention a virtual encyclopedia of microscopic organisms), a divot-shaped vampire bite is dining room, bedroom, and toilet—all rolled into one. This generally does not bode well for the animal bearing the wound (or its owner). Infection, disease, and death are the likely outcomes.
Far more serious than disease-promoting wounds, however, is the potential transmission of rabies by infected vampire bats. Rabies is a viral disease that systematically destroys