Mother of God: An Extraordinary Journey into the Uncharted Tributaries of the Western Amazon

INTRODUCTION

In January 2006, just eighteen years old, restless, and hungry for adventure, I fled New York and traveled to the west Amazon. With a satellite phone that my worried parents had insisted on renting, and a camera I had borrowed from a friend, I was indistinguishable from any of the scientists and tourists aboard that first flight. In all likelihood, like them, I would spend my three weeks in the jungle, and then return forever to my life back home. There was no way to know I was beginning a journey that would span a decade and take me to some of the most inaccessible reaches of the Amazon River at the most crucial moment in its history.

It has been a journey filled with unfathomable beauty and brutality that sounds more like fiction than fact: lost tribes, floating forests, murdering bandit-loggers killed by arrows, insectivorous slashing giants, and a secret Eden. There would be fistfights, stickups, and beheadings; new species discovered, fossils unearthed, and people riding on giant snakes. I would see places that no one had seen before, and cultivate a unique relationship with the secret things of the Amazonian wild.

I wrote this book careful to avoid it becoming a scientific text, or historical summary of the Amazon—other authors have written such volumes far better than I ever could. Instead, I chose to focus on the extremes of adventure, and the beauty of wildlife and natural systems. The events in the pages ahead are written as I experienced them. Aside from changing a few names, dates, and geographic details to protect people and places, everything that follows is true.

BOOK ONE

THE AGE OF INNOCENCE

1

The Jaguar

The few remaining unknown places of the world exact a price for their secrets.

—COLONEL PERCY FAWCETT

Before he died, Santiago Durand told me a secret. It was late at night in a palm-thatched hut on the bank of the Tambopata River, deep in the southwestern corner of the Amazon Basin. Beside a mud oven, two wild boar heads sizzled in a cradle of embers, their protruding tusks curling in static agony as they cooked. The smell of burning cecropia wood and singed flesh filled the air. Woven baskets containing monkey skulls hung from the rafters, where stars peeked through gaps in the thatching. A pair of chickens huddled in the corner, conversing softly. We sat facing each other on sturdy benches, across a table hewn from a single cross section of some massive tree, now nearly consumed by termites. The songs of a million insects and frogs filled the night. Santiago’s cigarette trembled in his aged fingers as he leaned close over the candlelight to describe a place hidden in the jungle.

He said it was a place where humans had never been. Between rivers and isolated by a quirk of geography, it had remained forgotten through the centuries. The only tribes who knew of the land had regarded it as sacred and never entered, and so it had remained untouched for millennia. Decades earlier, after weeks of travel up some nameless tributary, Santiago had come to its border. There, he said, you could watch jaguars sunning themselves on open beaches in the morning; harpy eagles haunted the canopy and flocks of macaws filled the sky like flying rainbows. The river was so thick with fish that you could scoop up dinner with your bare hands. What he described was a lost world. He told me that it was the wildest place left on earth.

Don Santiago, as I knew him, even at the age of eighty-seven, would often spend months out in the jungle alone. He knew the medicinal properties of every herb, orchid, and sap in the jungle that surrounded the small indigenous community where he lived, in the lowlands of southeast Peru. He possessed an insight to the secrets of the forest greater than anyone I have met. He had lived in the jungle before boat motors or chain saws were available, before Spanish extinguished the native dialect of his people. Over the course of a long life in Amazonia he’d seen tribes that most people didn’t know existed and species yet to be described to science. As he spoke of the jungle’s secrets, lore of an age nearly ended, candlelight reflected from within shrouded sockets, the map of tributaries in his weathered face as cryptic as the landscape in which it was wrought.

I knew from experience that Don Santiago was never wrong, and in the years to come what he said had a profound effect on my life. As a naturalist, I knew that finding and sampling a truly isolated area of rainforest could redefine the baselines scientists use to study wildlife, and help me to protect habitat. As an explorer, it was the ultimate mission, and planning an expedition to find the lost world Don Santiago described became an obsession for years to come. But what kept me awake at night was something deeper than academic discovery or adventure. It was the realization that we could be the last generation to live in a world where such places exist.

I knew that it was a journey I had to make, and I knew I had to make it alone. If the place Santiago had described really did exist, as pristine and hidden as he had said, there was no chance I was going to foul the silence with the pollution and din of an entire expedition team: motors, voices, fuel. For a long time I struggled to work up the nerve. Even after having worked years in Amazonia when living in the bush had become second nature, the thought of going it alone made me shiver. There were too many stories, too many hundreds of would-be explorers, lost tourists, and even locals, who were swallowed by the jungle each year never to be seen again. In the most savage and dizzyingly vast wilderness on earth, the rule is simple: never go out alone. Yet there are those among us who have difficulty accepting what we have not found out for ourselves, who pass a WET PAINT sign and cannot help touching the wall. We simply have to know.

Only months after Don Santiago told me his secret, there I was: a hundred miles from the most remote human outpost, in utterly untouched, untrailed jungle. I was completely lost and terrified. I looked up hoping to see blue, but the entire sky had been eclipsed for days. From beneath 150 feet of canopy, the view above was a churning mess of understory vegetation, vines, bromeliads, and towering pillars of ancient trees swaying menacingly in the hot wind. In the Amazon less than 5 percent of sunlight reaches the forest floor on a clear day, which this was not. Black storm clouds lay pregnant across the canopy so low that vapor and branches intermingled.

I walked fast, machete in one hand and compass in the other, praying to glimpse a gap in the foliage that would signal the salvation of the open river. Earth, forest, and sky were all fiercely animated and moving in concert. Twigs and leaves, Brazil nuts, and even small animals rained from above. Trees as thick as school buses buckled and groaned, shaking the earth as the wind tore at their branches. I felt trapped. I longed to see open space. I’d been lost for days.

The storm was gathering force and my heart was pounding. One hundred feet to my right a branch the size of a mature oak snapped and hit the earth with the force of a car crash. More than once a cannon blast sounded as an entire tree split and fell. In the Amazon large trees are meant to topple, opening gaps for light, which allows new vegetation to flourish, while the carcasses of the fallen giants are digested by legions of insects, fungi, and proteins. It’s how the jungle works; it’s a giant meat grinder. When you are in it, you’re part of that system, part of the food chain.

If the storm intensified, there was little chance I’d survive the resulting carpet bombing of shed tree limbs. Some of the great explorers have claimed that snakes or piranhas or jaguars present the gravest threat in the Amazon, but these declarations betray inexperience. The trees themselves, in their dizzying innumerability, isolate and disorient you, and in a storm prove the most deadly. Some of the true giants are so interlaced with vines and strangler tentacles that when they fall, their weight tears down almost an acre of jungle. There is no way to escape.

Please let me find the river, I whispered through clenched teeth as I hiked on. My route, had things gone as planned, ought to have led me out of the jungle and onto the open tributary yesterday morning. But as the weak light began to fade, it grew clearer that I would be spending another night lost in the Amazon.

Even as I employed every ounce of my consciousness and skill to finding some sign of the river, of open space and salvation, I could see the headline: Twenty-One-Year-Old New Yorker Vanishes in the Amazon. Nothing would be worse than being picked apart by the armchair analyzers who surely would categorize me as just another yahoo kid who went out into the wild to find nothing but mosquitoes and a lonely death. Or the way they criticized the guy who lived with wild grizzlies until being eaten. There is a difference between knowing what you are getting into and doing it well, and just flying out there and obligating others to clean up the mess. There are simply too many of them: people who court disaster in the name of adventure, getting themselves into trouble and then calling for help, or dying. No, I’d be quite happy to deny Jon Krakauer or Werner Herzog another project. True, I was young and the risk was moronically high; but this was something I had to do.

There were blisters on my hands from twelve hours of hiking and slashing, and my backpack straps had worn through the shirt and skin on my shoulders, but I pushed on for a bit longer. I threw a handful of nuts into my mouth but was too dehydrated to chew and spat them out, even though I needed to eat. After twenty-three days in the jungle, three of them lost and alone, I had lost more than a pound per day. In the last few hours I was certain I’d lost a few more.

I needed water, but because of the rains, every water source was a turgid mess of sediment and detritus. Even small streams that should normally be clear were roiled and murky. For hours I had kept an eye out for the species of bamboo that fills its segments with water. You can spot it easily, leaning over from its own weight. When I found a patch of bamboo that looked right, I cut the stalk of one and water burst out. Hefting the pole I felt that all its segments were heavy with water, like a dozen tallboy beer cans stacked atop one another. I cut segments one at a time, guzzling down the contents. Just two bamboo poles supplied me with a belly full of water and enough to fill my bottle. Then I pushed on. It was getting dark.

After another twenty minutes of desperate slashing and hiking, another surge of panic and rage came as the realization broke that I wasn’t getting out tonight. I slung my hammock, removed my shoes, and used a shirt to towel off my soaked body. It was impossible to tell if the storm would turn on full blast or if it would continue to simmer and growl the whole night. The image of my hammock being smashed into the earth by a falling branch played on loop in my mind. There was nothing I could do about it. I needed sleep.

Inside my hammock I zipped the mosquito net and spent several minutes killing the bloodsuckers that had made it inside. I went over a mental checklist. My machete was beside me on the ground, my headlamp was on my head, my backpack and shoes were hung off the ground to reduce the likelihood of them being shredded by ants. I opened my journal out of habit but abruptly closed it, too ashamed to admit to the page how miserably scared I felt. In entries from previous days, only forty-eight hours before, I was living my dream, on a mission, soaking in every sensation of being immersed in the gut of the jungle. But confronted with the cosmic force of the coming storm and the reality of being truly lost, my courage stores were waning.

Anyone who has seen, or even read about, what the Amazon is capable of during the rainy months would know that attempting even the most mundane travel is virtually pointless. Cities and towns flood, dirt roads become muddy rivers, and actual rivers can swell more than fifty feet in places, exploding far onto land. Larger tributaries can burst their banks and flood miles of forest, ripping thousands of trees from the earth in the all-encompassing current. The result is a river of giant timber that would turn a boat to splinters. Before starting the expedition, the one now veering dangerously off course, I had known these dangers but saw no other option. Time was running out.

For months the sound of heavy machinery and chain saws had grown louder; smoke could be seen on the horizon. After thirty years of dormancy the trans-Amazon highway was under renewed construction; the final link was being constructed over the Madre de Dios River. For the first time in history the heart of the Amazon would be connected by a land trade route to the Asian market. Offshoots of the highway were rapidly metastasizing throughout the lowlands as colonists cut their way into the frontier. Towns were filled with indigenous protesters, police in riot gear, and people were dying. Don Santiago would soon be gone and it seemed that an age had ended. The western Amazon was under siege.

With a light pack made up of ten days’ worth of food, matches, machete, bowl, camera, and hammock, I had hitchhiked as far into the jungle as poachers would take me, and then plunged into the trackless green. Maybe I’d been born a century too late? What if my destiny was not to protect the west Amazon but to bear witness to its annihilation? Tucked into my journal was a hand-drawn map with a circle drawn at the place I had come to call the Western Gate, the boundary of the nameless Eden. I was twenty-one years old, young enough and dumb enough to voluntarily trek into the Amazon, old enough to know that what I sought was worth the risk.

I lay in my hammock looking up as darkness consumed the jungle. Lightning in the low clouds flashed emerald green through the leaves, turning the canopy to a ceiling of stained glass. As downdrafts gusted hot and then cold air through the subcanopy, the light show made the savage landscape all the more surreal. I closed my eyes and told myself that everything would be fine. After four years of living and working in the jungle under the tutelage of the Ese-Eja Indians, I knew what I needed to survive. But even so I could hear my mother’s voice from years earlier warning that even the best swimmers can drown.

I don’t know how or when, but eventually long, torturous hours of blackness morphed into unconsciousness. For a time there was peacefully nothing. But then, prompted by some dread instinct, I awoke to a nightmare. My eyes were open, but nothing was visible in the inky void. For a moment I wasn’t sure where I was or why I wasn’t sleeping. I wanted to call out, Where the hell am I? Then, as my mind slowly booted up, I remembered. Oh yeah, in the Amazon, alone . . . except I wasn’t alone.

The Madre de Dios, or Mother of God, is a living anachronism. Like a world made from Joseph Conrad’s nightmares, it is the edge of nowhere, a vast region choked in snarling ancient jungle. Nestled in southern Peru under the shadow of the Andes to the west, with Bolivia to the south and the Brazilian state of Acre to the east, it is remote, pristine, and like nowhere else on earth.

Some say the southeasternmost region of Peru got its name because an apparition of the Virgin Mary appeared to a Spanish conquistador in the late 1500s. Others maintain that the isolated no-man’s-land was simply given a God’s country designation for being wild and unexplored. Still others say that the name was given out of reverence, that even the conquering Spanish were overwhelmed by the raw wilderness and unfathomable bounty of the jungle there. One thing is certain: in today’s context the profound name remains worthy, for the region is the womb of the Amazon.

To properly appreciate the scope of topographic magnificence of the Madre de Dios you’d need to imagine cramming the varied temperature range contained within the latitudes between Peru and Alaska into a dozen miles: from frozen peaks to steaming jungle. In the western Amazon, glaciers in the high Andes send mineral-rich runoff in torrents toward the land below. These streams and rivers rush through mossy cloud forests and down into the flat lowlands, where they converge to create the Madre de Dios River and begin the slow march 1,400 miles across the continent, bursting into the Amazon’s main channel roughly twenty miles downstream of Manaus, Brazil.

The tropical Andes and the lowland Amazon are considered two separate, mega-biodiverse biomes; entirely different ecosystems. It is the intermingling of these two systems in a tropical climate, with abundant moisture and in drastically varying elevation, that makes the perfect storm for speciation. On a clear day from the Los Amigos River, a tributary of the Madre de Dios, it is possible to look west over the boiling lowland jungle and see the snowcapped Andes looming divinely far in the distance. Contained in that single view is the greatest array of living organisms to have ever existed.

Amid the foliage of the Andes/Amazon interface, which constitutes more than 15 percent of the global variety of plants, is a land of faunal giants. In the canopy harpy eagles hunt for sloth and red howler monkeys, the latter the size of small children that the eagles skewer and lift into the air en route to be dismembered in the nest. Toucans greet the mornings, and stunning blue-and-yellow and scarlet macaws are like flames in the sky. Each rainy season frogs descend from the canopy to breed in stagnant forest pools, and in the dry season butterflies flock in clouds of thousands on the riverbanks in color variations that would stun a rainbow.

Most ecosystems have a single, indisputable apex predator, but the western Amazon is more like a cage fight in murderers’ row. With so much muscle around, they’ve had to split up the terrain. The harpy eagle takes the canopy, while jaguars cover the ground. Anacondas and black caiman crocodiles, which can reach eighteen feet in length, battle in the rivers and lakes, which are also haunted by giant otters, a formidable hunter whose Spanish name translates to river wolves. Probing the deepest parts of the river are 150-pound black catfish. And yet this list of killers is far from complete: several other species of cat, croc, mammal, and large snake back up the hulking lead characters. The list of smaller hunters is virtually infinite.

The rough tallies for the entire Andes/Amazon region: 1,666 birds, 414 mammals, 479 reptiles, 834 amphibians, and a large portion of the Amazon’s 9,000 fish species. In the Madre de Dios alone there are more than 1,400 butterfly species. The numbers on everything from bats to beetles are constantly changing as scientists learn more. In early 2012 researchers from Conservation International announced that they had documented 365 previously unrecorded species in a single study area, just a pinprick of the landscape.

Within the impenetrable assemblage of giant hardwoods and bamboo are palms with ten-inch thorns that can run a man through, and others that walk from place to place beneath the canopy on their roots, like Tolkien’s Ents. Flowing in the cambium of some trees are poisons that can kill you in minutes and other compounds that can drop your mind into hallucinogenic pandemonium, but there are also medicines that can control fertility and cure the most horrendous diseases. The west Amazon was where the first cure for malaria was discovered and where rubber was first tapped on a large scale. Amid the diversity grows one tree that produces sap almost completely made of hydrocarbons, producing 1,500 gallons of sap each year that can be poured directly into a diesel motor as fuel.

While the food chain can be mapped in web format for most ecosystems, the west Amazon defies human explanation. If it were possible to trace the elaborate interspecies relationships unfolding within the jungles there the result would most likely resemble a Jackson Pollock painting the size of Rhode Island. Even today we know little about the system. It is for this reason the region has been described as the largest terrestrial battlefield on earth. Every last organism is eaten. Life here is a countdown, a temporary stasis as the jungle waits, inevitably adding all things into the rapid cycle.

The Mother of God is a region of extremes, polarizing all elements within it, including humanity. In a world where rivers are highways, there remain infrequent indigenous settlements. It is not uncommon to come across a cluster of palm-thatched villages among the green. In the early morning you can see women washing clothes in the river, while children play and splash. Men hunt and fish and grow crops like bananas and yucca, or collect Brazil nuts. Much of the sparsely inhabited backcountry is like this, peaceful, and made up of simple, warm, friendly people.

At the other end of the spectrum are the extractors. Prowling the backcountry is a host of loggers, drug traffickers, poachers, and gold miners. The latter use motor pumps to tear up the riverbed sand in search of their prize, dumping mercury into the water and polluting the otherwise pristine world. Narcos also make strategic use of the geography. It is rumored that the cocaine trail comes up from Bolivia and that the runners use a small airstrip hidden in the jungle. They apparently maneuver the plane into a gap in the canopy and land on a runway obscured by the branches above, remaining invisible to aerial surveillance. But it is the loggers who are the most blatantly nefarious. There are numerous accounts of loggers clashing with local people and even isolated tribes, native arrows little match for loggers’ modern guns.

The collision of human worlds is comparable to the westward expansion of European settlers across North America in its components, but the situation in Madre de Dios is wilder by several degrees of magnitude. Copy and paste the players from the American West into the insane context of the Amazon, change a few names, sprinkle in some anacondas and several million other species, and the similarities are eerie. Loggers versus Indians, gold miners versus helicopter commandoes; oil companies, pipelines, new roads, secret genocide, corruption, greed, missionaries, bandits, politicians, and massive paradigm shifts unfolding at a dizzying pace.

At a time in history when scientists are recording unprecedented extinction rates and many people feel that the loss of biological diversity and deteriorating natural systems is the defining issue of our time, the west Amazon is ground zero. Nowhere are the stakes higher.

It was within the depths of this world that I slept on that torturous night. All hope of finding Santiago’s wild land had faded. Now the great adventure had become a survival situation, a question of direction and luck. I remember waking into darkness like the belly of a black hole. Alone in my hammock, I listened desperately. Something was nearby, something big. I could hear breathing. I shut my eyes. Heartbeats shook my chest, and my blood rushed audibly. I had no thoughts, only blind terror. The volume of air drawn with each sniff told me this was something massive. My nostrils filled with a pungent odor as my hand instinctively went toward my headlamp, making a small noise against the hammock’s fabric.

A growl erupted from the darkness. A god’s voice. Warm breath fell on my neck in savage staccato like thunder, cosmic and overwhelming. Every fiber of my body understood the command of that growl: don’t move. I closed my eyes and lay still, too terrified to move. Cradled in blind purgatory, grasping at lucidity, I was helpless and prayed that whatever happened next would be over quickly.

In the context of their rainforest environment, jaguars are ghosts. Masters of the shadows, they employ a skill for stealth that is leagues beyond human ability. Scientists who study jaguars their entire lives can go years without a sighting and instead have to rely on tracks and scat, and on camera traps and radio collars to collect data. The cats are thick-bodied and powerful, the pit bulls of the big cats. They move silently over land and through water. They can drag a deer up a tree and, at 250 pounds, can overpower anything in their environment. To a jaguar, dispatching a human wrapped in his hammock would translate roughly to you or me peeling a banana.

I could feel her breath as she drew my scent into the labyrinthine reaches of her nasal cavity, her face only inches from my right ear. Is this how it ends? She sniffed and drew nearer, exhaling another furnace draft onto my neck. For a small eternity she was silent, standing invisibly beside me, incredibly close.

Lost and alone beneath the storm and the canopy, on the dark side of the planet, it was a pivotal moment of a story that began when I was very young and would shape my entire future. Despite the jaguar at my side, a remarkable calm ebbed through me. She hadn’t come for blood.

2

Restless

Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach some of us more than we can ever learn from books.

—JOHN LUBBOCK

When you travel east from Lima by air, floating over the snowcapped steeples of the Andes, the clouds are numerous and blinding. Jagged parapets draped in glaciers fall to immense valleys that seem to yawn into eternity. The land between the great peaks is stoic and barren, treeless and empty for thousands of miles at a time; an alien landscape interrupted only rarely by a long and lonesome dirt road.

The FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign came on as the pilot threaded between mountains that seemed too massive to be real. I was vaguely aware that the guy in the seat next to mine was pale green and burping bile from the turbulence. Behind me a woman was praying the rosary in Spanish. The plane’s wings were flapping as we were jerked up and down. But I was mesmerized and barely noticed. I had waited my whole life for this moment.

The empty valleys below were gradually shading green. The barren emptiness began to turn to lush foliage and then riotous cloud forest as we lost altitude and the mountains dropped off. Vision came in glimpses through the clouds as glacial rivers cascaded through a world of moss and mist. Then came more clouds, torturous moments of whiteout when I could feel my heart pounding with anticipation. Then it happened.

Shuddering through turbulence, the plane dropped below the ceiling, revealing an unbroken immensity of green jungle from horizon to horizon. For the first time in my life the breath was sucked from my chest. Rivers lay across the range in great sweeping arcs like bronze serpents reflecting light skyward. Mist sat like puddles scattered in the omnipresent foliage, rising and curling in places. It was like looking into the vault of the universe to