The bai (the Bayaka word for an opening in the forest) lay in rugged and undeveloped Ivindo National Park. To get to Ivindo, we took the train from the town of Libreville. Winding its way through the heart of Africa, the Trans-Gabon train is a little-known miracle of engineering. Its front cars also boast air-conditioning so powerful that it threatens to turn the upper-class passengers into Gabonsicles. In the days to come, we would have occasion to recall that over-cranked air-con longingly.
The town of Ivindo would not exist except to serve the logging industry. An undisciplined scattering of homes, small bars, and shops fan out from the train station side of the railroad tracks. Met by operatives from the Wildlife Conservation Society that operates the scientific station inside Ivindo and that occasionally welcomes tourists, we and a young couple from San Francisco on their honeymoon (!) tossed our backpacks into the rear of a big, dirt-caked 4x4 and embarked on the nearly five-hour drive to the trailhead.
You know when you’ve reached the end of the line because the road grows progressively worse and the vegetation ever denser around it until the track simply slams up against a steep jungle-covered slope and stops. In the rainy season, the dirt road is virtually impassable. Climbing gratefully out of the vehicle after the long, jouncing ride, we immediately found ourselves in the company of swarms of bees. After a minute or two of near-panic engendered by thoughts of Africanized bees, it became apparent that we were in no real danger. These weren’t Africanized bees: They were just African bees.
All right, so maybe I’m splitting antennae here, but it was clear the hundreds of happy honey hunters buzzing all around us were not interested in us—only in any open food, drink, or other exotic foodstuffs that we might have imported into their neighborhood. They landed on us, got tangled in our hair, and explored our clothes, all without anyone suffering so much as a single sting.
While my sister and I did our best to ignore the clouds of peripatetic pollen pickers, the rest of our party loaded supplies onto their backs preparatory to setting off. There are no roads to the Ivindo scientific station, no airstrip, not even room enough to land a helicopter. Food, medicine, scientific equipment, computers, furniture—everything goes in or comes out on the back of a porter. As the column formed up, I felt as if I was stepping back in time to the Africa of a hundred years ago, when every expedition’s equipment was transported overland on the backs of hired porters. In contrast to my imaginings, the digital watches and occasional rock T-shirt the men wore placed them firmly in the present day.
It is a seven-hour walk (for a healthy human being in acceptable physical condition) from the trailhead to the research station. Much of this is uphill, with the worst part being the first few miles. Steep, muddy, and hacked out of raw hillside jungle, it’s a tough enough march in good weather. In rain, it inculcates twisted ankles and broken bones. Thankfully, the only moisture we had to contend with was preserved in the mud, in small puddles of standing water, and in the perspiration that was already streaming down our bodies.
Our relief was unrestrained when we were told we had reached the top of the “hill” and that while more upslope remained, it would be nothing like what we had just conquered. Thus refreshed in spirit if not in body, we resumed the trek.
“Stop.”
Like the porters, our lead guide was a member of a local tribe. I moved up to stand alongside him and follow his gaze into the jungle ahead. The rain forest here was comparatively open. Large trees atop the plateau were more widely spaced than what we had encountered at the bottom of the canyon. This allowed more sunlight to reach the forest floor, resulting in a greater profusion of bushes and other lesser growths. My gaze fell somewhat, and my attention was drawn to what I first took to be a trick of the sunlight.
The forest floor appeared to be in motion.
“Driver ants.” The guide flashed a learned smile. “Do you know what to do?”
I knew army ants and tangarana ants and their cousins from South and Central America, but this was the first time I had been confronted with their Old World counterparts. Furthermore, this immense colony was not marching, but foraging. That meant that instead of moving in a single, rigid, predictable column, easy enough to avoid or simply jump over, they had spread out over a wide area. Its limits were defined, but extensive. The underbrush was too thick and the ground still too steep and uneven to allow us to go around the colony. Besides, in hunting mode, the ants would be on every trunk, branch, and leaf. Pushing through the brush meant one would inevitably get them on hands, torso—maybe even one’s face.
The glistening red bodies completely covered the trail ahead of us and extended far into the forest on both sides. I admitted to our guide that no, I did not know what to do, and if he had any suggestions for how best to avoid the nightmare swarm directly in front of us, I would gladly take them.
“Avoid?” His expression turned querulous. “Too difficult, take too long. This is what you do.”
Turning from me, he rushed forward and sprinted straight down the ant-carpeted section of trail. The distance from one side of the foraging colony to the other was at least ten yards. Halting on the far side, once again on an ant-free section of the track, he paused to slap and pick at himself.
My sister had come up alongside me. Carol had shown her mettle and determination ever since our transfer flight from Douala, Cameroon, to Port-Gentil, Gabon, on an otherwise empty Dornier through a raging tropical thunderstorm. She was game for anything. But she was from Orange County, California, and dashing through a million or so ferociously feeding driver ants was not an option that had appeared in any of the tourist brochures I had forwarded to her prior to our departure. She eyed the swarm dubiously.
“We’re supposed to run through that?”
I looked at her. “Unless you want to walk.”
She responded to my sarcasm with an expression that was wholly devoid of amusement.
Bending over, I tucked the hem of each leg of my pants into my boots. The day before leaving home I had treated boots, socks, and clothing with permethrin, a flower-derived natural insecticide that works fairly well at repelling ticks, chiggers, and other hungry small critters that like to crawl up one’s legs. Among those insects it was supposed to dissuade, I did not recall seeing on the can any specific mention of African driver ants, but at the time I was not in a position to query the manufacturer as to its product’s efficacy in deterring that particular insect.
In any event, I was about to find out.
Making sure my pack was securely on my back, I took a deep breath and ran, trying to make as little contact with the ground as possible. Long strides, I told myself. On tiptoes. And whatever you do . . .
Don’t fall down.
I made it across without suffering a single sting or bite. My satisfaction vanished a moment later when the ants that had climbed aboard while studiously ignoring the permethrin managed to somehow get inside my pant legs and set to work. It wasn’t too bad. Nothing like the tangarana-ant sting I had suffered in Peru. Of course, I told myself, magnified a few thousand times over, the burning discomfort I was enduring would probably be somewhat less tolerable. My sister, I am happy to report, did wonderfully well.
We encountered three or four more such swarms before reaching the station. They were still there on the trail days later to greet us on the long walk back down. Each time I ran, I tried to maneuver differently. Each time, no matter what I did, I still suffered a few stings and bites.
No matter how hard you try, you cannot avoid the ground when it is alive.
* * *
Southeastern Peru, July 1998
MORE THAN A DECADE PASSED before I was able to return to Manú. In the interim, I had visited dozens of countries including Gabon, but my memories of southeastern Peru were strong and I had always determined to go back. Eleven years sees many changes on our crowded planet, even in a place as remote as the Madre de Dios region. The nearest real town, Puerto Maldonado, had grown from a collection of tin-roofe
d shacks linked together by a network of dirt tracks into a thriving regional hub. Boca Manú, which I remembered as little more than a couple of huts poised tenuously at the confluence of the Alto Madre de Dios and the Manú Rivers, had become an actual small town. There was a new establishment just outside the park boundary and Boris’s dream lodge had long since been opened for business. Though still thankfully infrequent, tourist canoes now plied the Manú River itself on predetermined schedules.
I was elated to reacquaint myself with the region surrounding the still unspoiled Cocha Salvador. This time, I had the pleasure of sleeping in a screened-in room with a bed instead of on a sleeping bag in a rotting tent. Meals prepared in a kitchen and served at wooden tables made recollections of eating while standing up in la casa de los mosquitos seem like a memory from an ancient fable. The nocturnal horror of the pit toilet was all in the past, and showers were available. All sheer luxury compared to my former visit.
One thing fortunately remained unchanged and untouched, however, and that was the surrounding primeval rain forest.
When I declared that I wished to take solitary walks in the forest, I was met with unease by the concerned lodge staff. With a knowing smile, I explained that I had walked the shores of this lake when there had been no buildings here, and that I knew what I was doing. After eleven more years spent traveling the world, I did know better. If nothing else, I had learned enough not to let myself get overconfident even in seemingly safe surrounds.
For example, the first rule to remember while walking through rain forest and jungle is simple: No matter how attractive something is, no matter how much you may think you know about it be it plant or animal or unidentifiable, assume that everything you encounter can bite, sting, or otherwise hurt you.
With that caution in mind, I took my walks alone, reveling in the sounds and sights of the forest, free from the enervating chatter of visiting housewives and day-tripping tourists. I saw much that I had seen before and plenty that was new. Back at the lodge, I cheerfully discussed my encounters with the staff guides whenever they could spare a little time to sit and chat.
I was especially fond of the conversations I had with an energetic young female guide who I will call Anna. She had committed to the lodge for a year, following which paid sojourn she hoped to return to Lima to further her studies in tropical biology. We were sitting and talking one day when she happened to ask, “Is there anything you’d like to see that you haven’t seen? I mean, besides a jaguar or a harpy eagle or something really difficult?”
I thought a moment. “Yes. I’d like to see an isula ant nest.”
She blanched. I always thought that was purely a literary description of someone’s reaction, but you could see her actually go a little pale. I had expected a response, but not one quite so strong. I hastened to reassure her.
“I’ll be careful, I promise. I know the isula ant. I won’t take any chances.”
She hesitated a moment longer before nodding reluctantly. “OK. As long as you promise. I know you’ve been here before, but as a guest I’m still responsible for you.”
“I won’t do anything stupid.”
She rose from the rattan chair. “I actually know where there’s one not too far from here.”
Those who have never spent time in real rain forest assume that to see exotic and sometimes rare animals one has to spend days or at least hours traveling by canoe and hiking on foot. While this is true of certain specific locales like Langoué Bai in Gabon, in many other instances it’s a misnomer propounded by decades of television nature documentaries in which the suffering of the photographers to get the picture is emphasized in order to add drama to the process. Cutting back and forth from the subject plant or animal to a cameraman or woman sitting motionless in a blind can get pretty boring, and is as devoid of action as it is of the human interest so beloved of sponsors and their ratings monitors. Far more drama is to be had from watching people stumble through raging jungle streams, or rappel down rugged mountainsides, or shimmy up liana-draped trees. All of this does happen, of course, and sometimes it’s unavoidable in the course of conducting real science, but it’s not always the only way to see interesting things.
I remember spending a week in Ecuador’s fabulous Yasuní National Park trying to catch a glimpse of the park’s signature species, the golden-mantled tamarin. Like all small primates, this spectacular small monkey is not easy to see. Both on my own and in the company of the lodge’s guides I spent days searching for them, each time without success.
It was my last morning at the Napo Wildlife Center. The other handful of guests were all birders and were out in the forest busily indulging in the orgy of aves spotting that was their chosen passion. Yasuní is considered one of the best places in the world for birding. Birders are more obsessive about their pastime than a foot fetishist locked overnight in a Manolo Blahnik store. A jaguar could attack an anaconda directly behind them, and they would ignore it in their anxiety to identify the subspecies of parrot feeding on palm nuts that they happened to be observing.
Sitting alone on the open terrace of the lodge’s restaurant, I heard a burst of idiosyncratic chittering. Thinking it was only some common monkeys, I nevertheless roused myself and walked out behind the lodge, following the noise.
Two tall trees behind the lodge were full of golden-mantled tamarins.
So much for slogging through canyons sloppy with mud and swarming with leeches in search of rare animals.
But back to Manú.
Anna and I had not gone a hundred yards from the camp when she turned slightly off the trail. Twenty feet or so back into the bush she stopped, began searching, and finally picked up a suitable fallen branch a yard long and half an inch thick. Studying the forest floor intently, Isaw nothing unusual.
Slowly approaching a slightly built-up area of dirt located between the flaring buttress roots of a mature cecropia, she inserted one end of the stick into a small, dark hole at the top of the gently sloping dirt pile. She then proceeded to jab the stick sharply down into the opening three, four, five times.
A black shape emerged from the hole. Then another, and another.
She threw the stick aside and retreated. Fast. Their energy sapped by the unrelenting heat and humidity, people tend to move slowly in the rain forest. To this day, I don’t believe I’ve seen anyone move as fast in such sweltering surroundings as Anna did at that moment. Halting about ten feet away from the tree, she alternated her attention between the creatures that were now boiling out of the hole and me. I had insisted that I would not do anything stupid, but she was taking no chances.
Emerging angrily from their home were some fifteen to twenty Paraponera clavata. When compared to the hordes of army ants easily encountered anywhere in the Amazon, or the driver ants of tropical Africa, that may not sound like much of an eruption. Except the representatives of this genus are the biggest ants in the world.
Known in Peru as isula ants, some specimens of Paraponera are reputed to grow as long as two inches. Their hefty, ruthlessly efficient bodies look like they have been welded together out of shards of reddish black steel. Their jaws alone are longer than many species of ant. Solitary hunters, they haul everything from other ants to grasshoppers and even frogs and salamanders back to their nest, which unlike that of many ants is not dominated by a queen. The isula ant is the Spartan of the ant world, irresistible in single combat, a Hymenopteran Praetorian guard. The mastodon ant.
In other parts of South America, the isula ant is known as the bullet ant, because if you are stung by one it supposedly feels as if you’ve been shot. Elsewhere it is often called the twenty-four-hour ant, because the excruciating pain of its sting can last for a full day and nothing can mitigate the suffering.
Moving closer, I took care while aiming my camera. Every couple of minutes, a concerned Anna would say something like, “That’s close enough,” or “Be careful,” or most tellingly, “Watch your feet.” She didn’t have to warn me. Thanks to a singl
e encounter with the tangarana ant, I had learned my lesson eleven years earlier. The tangarana ant that had stung me so forcefully had been about the size of an isula ant compound eye.
Spreading out, the agitated ants began to search for the source of whatever had disturbed their nest. In their determination and purpose, they were fascinating to watch. On their bodies, details of ant anatomy that usually have to be studied under a magnifying glass or microscope were easily visible to the naked eye. Powerful jaws long enough to be measured with a ruler opened and snapped shut expectantly.
I know what you’re thinking. This is the part where I feel a stabbing pain in my leg or arm. This is the section where I lie in bed writhing in agony for the next twenty-four hours, decrying my rashness at getting so close to such a small but deadly carnivore, lamenting my inability to see the attack coming.
Sorry.
Glancing down and away from the camera, I noticed a single isula ant actively exploring the ground near my left boot. Another was nearby. I could have raised my foot and crushed each of them into the ground. Revenge for the tangarana ant attack of more than a decade ago. Revenge in Nature, however, has neither place nor meaning. It is purely a human conceit, and one to which I was not about to succumb.
I switched off the camera and stepped back. Still watching me closely, Anna was visibly relieved and more than happy to leave the vicinity of the nest to the patrolling ants. There are times and places in which I will take chances or push the envelope a little, but as I assured Anna, I do not do anything overtly dumb.
My incredibly understanding wife, of course, would sigh knowingly and beg to differ.
VI
SHARKS I HAVEN’T JUMPED