The Flight of the Iguana by David Quammen Read Free Book Online Page A

lowland forest that the Zabalo, so slowly, drains. The mouth of the Zabalo is where your real adventure begins. You turn there and ease off on the Evinrude, heading upstream through a windingjungle tunnel like Marlow in search of Kurtz. Except that you yourself are merely in search of a fish dinner.
    The idea is that the diner will be you and the role of entree will fall to the fish, though the reverse is also a possibility. This little blackwater stream, the Zabalo, is full of eager piranha.
    Your guide, if he is a good one, will inform you that the Zabalo is no place for a noontime swim. Better to wait until you are back on the Aguarico, where the worst to expect is that you might step on a stingray in the shallows. For that matter, today on the Zabalo you’ll want to refrain from so much as dangling a hand overboard.
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    Our own guide for the trip was a young man named Randy Borman, and he was a very good one. The son of missionary parents from the U.S., he had been raised in a small Cofan Indian village just downriver from Lago Agrio, where he blossomed into the Huckleberry Finn of the upper Amazon. He was fluent in the Cofan language, adept in their traditional skills of jungle subsistence, and pragmatically grateful for that Evinrude at the back of his forty-foot dugout. He had just enough American hellion in him to drive the canoe like it was a souped-up ’59 Dodge. As the Zabalo narrowed down tighter, and our passage upstream seemed blocked by fallen trees that lay floating across the channel, Randy would merely back the canoe off to a distance, then crank up his outboard to full throttle and charge ahead, planing out, vaulting the boat and a dozen white-knuckled passengers over each log like it was a water-ski jump at Coral Gables. He made it look easy, he even made it look sensible—but if Randy hadn’t lifted his propeller clear at just the right moment, we would have been paddling home with palm branches.
    Finally came a log barrier too high for even the most reckless canoe jockey, so we made a lunch camp there on the bank. Hand lines were brought out, as well as a couple of fishhooks roughly the same size and gauge as the bend on a coat hanger. Randybalanced his way barefoot out on the barrier log to a spot in midstream, two feet above the blackwater surface of the Zabalo. He was joined there by his compadre Lorenzo, a shy Cofan man who wore a red feather through his nasal septum on formal occasions and a baseball cap reading “Oklahoma Sooners” when he was in mufti. Lorenzo was chief petty officer on this voyage, and a master of Amazon hand-line fishing. Then those two were joined on the balance-beam log by me, an incurable fool for angling of any sort.
    The bait of choice was large chunks of hard salami. It released savory oils into the water and if you gave it a bit of action—some twitches and jerks, like the spasms of a small wounded fish—all the better. The first piranha to strike bit the hook in half.
    So far this was not much like casting a dry fly to snooty trout on a Montana spring creek. My own touch was slow and inept. In truth, I was preoccupied with keeping my balance on that log—to set the hook on a fish and then somersault backward into the Zabalo would have seemed a hollow triumph. Lorenzo and Randy knew their craft, though, and before long they had hauled in three lunker piranha, each one as large as a flattened football, each one snapping its jaws maniacally at every finger or toe that came near. After three fish like that in ten minutes, I tiptoed carefully back to dry land.
    That evening, along with our stewed caiman, we ate roast piranha. They were bony but delicious. I saved the lower jaw from one of those fish, and it sits here on the desk before me now. The teeth are pyramidal, each with a sharp point and a razor-like cutting edge. Perfect for clipping away mouthfuls of flesh from the side of a fish or a