Although much of my travel could have the word “adventure” appended to it, there have been only a dozen or so occasions when I felt I was at some risk of being eaten. Here’s the introduction to a story I wrote about one of those times, in Guyana. I’ll tell you ahead of time that I never did get a fire started, something I greatly regretted as I lay alone in darkness so thick I couldn’t see the machete I was holding as I listened to the distinctive coughing sound a jaguar makes. I did survive, or course, something that both surprised and amused the Indians who had abandoned me:
Shortly after sun-up on the Burro-Burro, a cocoa-colored river that meanders through the heart of a nearly pristine rainforest in the South American country of Guyana, one of the other occupants of the battered outboard boat we have just edged up onto a steep, muddy bank gives me some last-minute advice.
“As long as you have a fire, it’s okay,” he says, “You’ll have no bother from the mosquitoes, the spiders, the snakes, and—he pauses, with what I hope is not uncertainty—the jaguars.”
The speaker, Lionel James, whose name and fluency with English are legacies of now-independent Guyana’s British colonial past, is a member of a tiny group of indigenous people known as the Makushi. For the past week, I have been in the rainforest with a half dozen Makushi hunters as they have tried to teach me to survive without the conveniences, and even, some might argue, the necessities, of modern life.
Now, to see if I have been paying attention, they are leaving me on my own for a night or two along a section of river far from our already remote camp. I am without food or shelter, and have with me only a machete, a few fish hooks, a flint for starting a fire, a bow made of forest hardwood, and a small bottle of iodine to kill (most of) the undesirables in the river water I’ll be drinking.
As I ascend the bank, my machete drawn and my steps tentative, an overhead limb almost immediately snags the Indiana Jones-style hat I thought looked so cool when I first tried it on at a post-Christmas sale at a mall in the States. I suppose I should consider it a first victory that the hat isn’t a snake.
“See you soon, maybe,” says Lionel as they push the boat back out into the river.
“Maybe,” reluctantly agrees the boat’s driver, Sparrow, who, I can’t help but observe, has the cover off the outboard motor, as if there is some problem that might signal its approaching demise.
The story appeared in the March 2010 issue of Conde Nast Traveler. You can read the whole thing here.
