Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [22]
“I can organize it for you,” he told us in his excellent English, “but nothing is finished there. We’re still in the beginning stages of construction, and you’ll have to sleep in a tent like the rest of the construction crew, eat the same food, utilize the same facilities. And you can’t bring much with you. I need the space in the truck for supplies.” We immediately and eagerly accepted, and a price was agreed upon.
Two days later, we were picked up by Boris in his hulking, specially reinforced Nissan Patrol 4x4 and struggled to squeeze ourselves and our backpacks in among the mountain of materials and equipment he had collected for the journey. The road out of Cusco soon turned from pavement to dirt and began to wind its way through high treeless mountain canyons horizontally striped with perfectly level ancient Inca stone terraces. Vistas turned grand and wide. Like mice in a nest, simple houses clustered together at the bottom of increasingly deep river valleys. Irregularly shaped irrigated fields and neat square plots linked the vast expanses of bare rock together like bright green patches on a heavily weathered gray overcoat.
Many hours later, we reached the high pass near the turnoff to Tres Cruces and came to a stop. Though the view over the clouds and mountains to the east was as spectacular as it was sobering, I found myself wondering about the delay. Boris proceeded to explain.
“From here all the way down to the Upper Madre de Dios, the road is one way. From noon to midnight, traffic is allowed to go down. From midnight to noon, traffic can come up.” He checked his watch. “We must wait a few more minutes.”
Hacked, hoed, and blasted out of winding, cloud-forest-swathed, perpetually damp and foggy mountainsides, the road from the Tres Cruces turnoff down to the backcountry Amazonian town of Pilcopata offered one of the two most hair-raising drives I have ever experienced (the other was also in Peru, from Chachapoyas to the citadel of Kuelap). Everyone is afraid of something. Sharks, bees, spiders, the dark, enclosed spaces: Me, I don’t like heights. So I was thankful for the thick clouds and mist that blotted out the view below us.
Hours later and only partway to our destination, we encountered a characteristically overloaded truck illegally making its way upward. The Patrol halted, sliding slightly on the muddy track. It had been in four-wheel-drive mode ever since we had commenced our descent.
“You might want to get out of the car and watch,” a thoughtful Boris advised us. Mark and I hastily complied, beating a judicious retreat up the rain-swept road. Standing there in slick, shallow mud with a light drizzle falling, we watched open-mouthed as our genial and unflappable host and the tight-lipped truck driver embarked upon an agonizingly slow, incredibly patient, and exceedingly dangerous vehicular pas de deux. While the clumsy, top-heavy truck scraped and hugged the fern-encrusted rock wall, Boris gingerly edged the Patrol around it. At one point, the 4x4’s rear right wheel was literally hanging over a sheer drop with nothing beneath it save hundreds of feet of fog. Eyes wide, we held our breath until the wheel once more caught solid ground and dug in, and the pass-by was complete.
Wiping mist from my forehead and face as I clambered back into the Patrol, I was unashamedly unstinting in my praise of Boris’s driving. Having just casually cheated death and disaster, he shrugged off our compliments.
“I have to do it all the time. Nobody pays much attention to the guidelines.”
Mark leaned forward from where he was crammed, pretzellike, among the jumble of supplies. “Uh, anybody ever go over the edge?”
Boris’s voice didn’t change. He was concentrating on the mist-shrouded single-lane road ahead. “Oh, sure. All the time. When it’s a bus, it can be really bad.”
I looked out the window. It was starting to get dark, and I was glad of it. Now I wouldn’t have to contemplate the fog, or the nothingness that it masked. I envisioned dozens of decrepit, twisted, rusting buses lying in the deep ravine below