Predators I Have Known - Alan Dean Foster [23]
We spent the night at a plantation on the other side of the Alto Madre de Dios enjoying the comfort of real beds. Waking us were the raucous shouts of macaws, parrots, and, in particular, the greater and lesser oropendula, whose melodious bell-like calls sounded like a chorus of flautists tuning up to play Debussy or Ravel. Leaving immediately after a breakfast whose white veranda setting was straight out of Somerset Maugham, we started downriver. In the heavily loaded, attenuated, motorized dugout, the journey took longer than anticipated. It did not occur to me until much later that the weight of two extra bodies in the supply canoe might have played havoc with Boris’s calculations and accustomed schedule. If such was the case, he very diplomatically never said a word about it.
Powering up the Manú River after a brief stop at the wannabe town of Boca Manú, we soon began to encounter enormous logjams comprised of huge trees that had been swept down the river by the annual rainy season floods. The irresistible power of water was evident all around us. As we maneuvered to go around one such pile, movement on its crest caught my eye.
Standing at the apex of a two-story-high jumble of gigantic mahogany logs stood a huge Matsigenka. Naked save for a pair of donated and incongruously colorful shorts, he was holding a portable chainsaw in one hand and waving cheerfully to us with the other as we motored past. One of Boris’s employees, he was engaged in cutting wood for the lodge-to-be. I will forever remember him standing there, a shirtless black-haired warrior content to do solitary battle with immense tree trunks that had been thrown together like the pieces from a giant’s game of pickup sticks.
The sun falls fast in the tropics. Though forced to slow our speed because of the darkness, we continued upriver. Standing in the bow, Boris trained a spotlight the size of a half-gallon jug on the water ahead. From time to time, he would call out instructions to the boatman manning the tiller. A pair of eyes like gold coins flashed on the starboard riverbank, and our host quickly swung his light around. Caught momentarily in its glare, something small, swift, and spotted snarled softly at us before whirling to vanish into the jungle.
“Jaguarundi,” Boris informed us. “Not easy to see.”
There was nothing to indicate the turnoff for the lodge site: no sign, no mark on the seasonally shifting riverbank. But both Boris and the boatman knew exactly where to pull in. While the men who had been waiting for the dugout began to unload the small mountain of supplies, our young host plunged into the dark jungle. Guided by flashlight and despite our fatigue buoyed up by excitement, we walked, slid, tripped, and stumbled through forest that closed in around us like a wet, clinging green blanket.
After an hour’s walk, we emerged into a small clearing. In front of our exhausted eyes, an oxbow lake glistened magically in the moonlight: Cocha Salvador. The sharply defined silhouettes of tents stood out against the surrounding chaotic verdure. Directed to our individual peaked quarters, Mark and I collapsed on our respective sleeping bags. On, not in. The suffocating humidity rendered covering of any kind not only superfluous but intolerable.
Arising the following morning to the music of effervescent songbirds and the prehistoric caw of turkey-size hoatzins, we soon discovered that the bulk of Boris’s time was taken up with supervising the construction of the lodge. Just as he had told us, it was still very much in the initial stages of construction. Proudly, he showed us where the visitors’ rooms were going to go, the hygienic facilities, the meeting and dining center, the library. At present, every one of these was represented only by mahogany pillars that had been painstakingly driven into the reluctant ground.
“The whole complex is being built of salvaged mahogany.” He grinned. “It may be the only all-mahogany lodge in the world. Ecologically sound, because all of the wood is salvage