Michael and the Caiman

You remember Michael, right? The wiry kid with the scruffle of brown hair clinging desperately to the top of his head? The insane little mowgli who so far on this website has nearly been the death of me by rapid deceleration after a fall from a tree and a deranged motorcycle cliff-drop? The yo-yo whom the Pater Noster of the U.S. military has deigned to designate manager of missiles?

Right, then. Believe you me this, freind, it gets worse. This is the story of how I almost died, and how a bright light came at the last moment and delivered me, and how Michael has not to this day (ten years later) ever admitted that it was his fault.

It would be more fitting, I think, if the tale started on a dark and stormy night. Unfortunately, it started as we (that is: myself, Michael, and Michael's family) were flying in a Helio Courier float plane to a house on Lago Tipishca. While the Helio is a nifty little machine (flies as slow as forty miles per hour, lands and takes off of a... very small thing), it does not do well in storms after the sun's down.

It was, however, a day of stacks of thick greyish clouds lumbering around the sky like groggy bears in spring, just waiting for something to piss them off. Tawny sunbeams slashed through as we flew, igniting rainbows and illuminating the endless emerald basin below. Looking down we watched as sunspots caught the occasional flowering tree and lit these giants up in flashes of yellow or eruptions of crimson. It was a breathtaking day and turbulence was tossing us all over. The weather gods are bipolar in the jungle. It was the sort of day that could go either way.

Michael's dad, a pilot and former green beret ("I could kill you with my bare hands" he said, grinning) banked once around the dark waters of Tipishca, looking for logs or native fishermen napping on the job. Satisfied that our landing was clear, he dropped the flaps and brought us roaring in, plopping down gently on the lake as the sun began to make overtures to the tips of the giant virgin jungle trees.

We pulled into the "dock", a home-built affair of logs lashed together with vines, and tied on next to Tom Hough's speedboat. Tom came down and helped us move food and sleeping gear up the slippery bank to his house. He would guide us for the next few nights as we slipped into the dark to hunt the dreaded caiman. Tom had been raised in this very jungle as the child of missionaries and had returned to carry on his parent's work of planting churches in rural communities along the tangled web of rivers and streams that veins its way throughout the entire Amazon Basin.

Tom was a powerfully built man with a bent, squashed nose - a souvenir of several years spent as an amateur boxer. He had a square jaw, a gravelly voice and a twinkle in his bright blue eyes that often sparked off a hearty laugh. That night after supper he regaled us with stories of hunts gone by; of mammoth reptiles and terrified tourists who chose just the wrong moment to fall overboard; of youthful nights spent hunting caimans with his bare hands in a dugout canoe with only an old flashlight for company. His eyes shone in the flickering light of the oil lamps as he recalled how he and his high school buddies would split up and whomever could bring back the biggest one alive (the caiman, that is) won.

Tom explained to us that the caiman is a relative of the alligator and just as dangerous to any prey (that's you) foolish enough to get close. It grabs you in a crushing grip and torpedoes you down to the bottom of the lake, disorienting and gnawing as it goes. If that doesn't kill you it repeats the procedure, bashing you against a submerged log for good measure. Then it eats its fill and stuffs you under the log for later.

At fifteen years old we had seen Crocodile Dundee at least eighteen million times and all this talk was whipping us into a fervor of reptiliodillic bloodlust. Tipishca seethes with the wriggling reptilian death-machines, so with many a hearty cry we tromped down to the speedboat, motored up and headed out - pointing our million candlepower spotlight at the shore and looking for the widespread glowing orbs that would signal the presence of a large caiman. The wider they were, the greater our chances of getting limbs torn from their respective sockets - which, to our jungle-warped minds - meant more fun for everyone.

This is the point where I pull an ensteinian time shuffle and hop forward about fourteen hours. I do this because I have been using real names here - most notably my own - and I'm not too keen on being tracked down and harpooned in the side by an environut. See, hunting caimans isn't pretty. It involves steel-barbed harpoons and machetes and frothing, bloody lakewater. To my own credit I have labored since I left Peru to avoid killing anything that was not trying to kill me first. (With the exception of spiders. Of course. Because they are the spawn of Satan.) I don't even eat any meat at all that hasn't been hygienically relieved of breath and blood in an antisceptic factory somewhere and chopped into little unrecognizeable chunks so I do not have to think about it. Aren't I a super?

Anyways. The next day Michael and I were scrambling around about fifty feet up a gargantuan mamay tree gorging with the monkeys and Michael swung over and said, "we should go for a swim." I thought about that a bit. I thought about the night before and the teeth and the blood and the writhing. Still, it was a muggy jungle day and the sun was beating a cannibalizing jungle rhythm on our sweating skins. From our high vantage point the lake looked seductively cool and inviting. Besides, caimans mostly just sleep during the day. Right?

"Sure" I said.

We grabbed air mattresses and headed down the bank with Katy in tow. Rank dark mud squished between our bare toes, but Katy was Michael's sister and a jungle girl, and therefore game for anything. We decided that the game should be "paddle really fast and lose Katy". We went for the island.

In the middle of Tipishca there was long, narrow clump of trees and bushes. Old Tom had told us that in low water season it was connected to shore by a spit of dirt and monkeys would go out there to eat fruit and get landlocked by the Flood. The Amazon Basin is really, really flat and when the rains come the water table goes up about twenty feet and a lot of crazy stuff happens. Rivers change courses, lakes swell and change fish species, and poor silly little squirrel monkeys try to swim for it and become a tasty midnight snack.

It was the perfect place to hide from Katy. Our arms were getting tired as we paddled our air mattresses in behind the first few bushes and began wending our way through the brush. "Guys?" Katy hollered "Josh!?! Michael?" and then gave up and turned around. The trees closed in overhead. We paddled further and further into the shadows. Vines and branches gnarled around us as we kept a sharp eye for venomous bugs, frogs and water snakes. Gradually light began to once again stream through the foliage. Kingfishers flashed in the sunlight and water-skimming dragonflies flirted with fish and water plants. We kept paddling and soon broke through to the other side.

We were now completely out of sight of the house and the sun was once again sidling indecently close to the tops of the trees. "Maybe we should get going", I said, turning my air mattress towards the island. It was no longer quite so hot and the caimans were probably not quite so sluggish.

"Good idea" said Michael. "But the house is down that way. If we paddle around the tip of the island we'll be right across from it."

This was, of course, very wrong. "You're full of horse poo" I said, in the strongest missionary-kid language I could muster. "We came straight across from the house and sort of zig-zagged through the trees. This is a really long island and there's no way we went that far sideways."

"Nah ah" Michael replied.

"Look, man. The sun's about to go down. The caimans will be coming out and I want to go home. Lets just paddle straight through the island and then if it's the other way we can just angle across the lake. Besides, I don't want to die." Sounds like a good argument, right?

"No." Michael replied.

Michael had an infuriating way with words, but if you wanted to be in on the insanity you had to go along with it. So we paddled and stroked and paddled some more, pulling those air mattresses across the water until every single fibre of every single muscle in every single one of my arms burned like it had been bitten by fire ants. An air mattress is very, very flimsy protection against a ravenous, vengeful caiman. We were almost to the corner of the island when the sun fell into the arms of the far trees and snuffed itself out for the night. We rounded the tip and there, waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the direction we'd just come from, glowed the comforting lamps of home. I wasn't comforted. I was going to die. Painfully.

----

You know what? You're sick. That is just a sick thought. I left out the killing stuff out of consideration for your finer sensibilities, and here you are going on about "literary irony" and "the hunter becoming prey" and "just desserts" and all that. Fine then. Forget you and the horse you rode in on. I'm not even going to tell you how it ends. You'll never hear about how we were dramatically saved at the last moment by a fortuitous glance from a fortuitous spotlight and literally plucked from the jaws of death. You'll just have to go through the rest of your life wondering if Michael and I got eaten by caimans. Hah! Eat that!