The Moth by Unknown Read Free Book Online Page B

stuttering broken child inside.
    Throughout my academic years I had focused on science. I loved science because science to me was the study of truths apart from the world of human beings. And when I got to college, I decided to channel that science into medicine, thinking maybe if I became a doctor people would like me, people would accept me. But I never liked working with people. And when I got back from the clinic, I realized I couldn’t be doing this. I hated being in labs, and worse than that, I was tortured feeling the frustration and the pain of the lab animals in the little cages, spinning in those little wheels.
    So I applied to graduate school at the University of Tennessee in wildlife biology and zoology. I got accepted. And that first year I was down in Tennessee in the Great Smoky Mountains studying black bears. When I was in the forest with the animals, I was at home. This was what I was meant to be doing. Being in the forest alone with the animals was my real-world closet. This was what made me feel good. And I came to realize what I’dalways known in my heart but had never been able to put into words, and that’s that the truth of the world, the reality, is not defined by the spoken word. In fact it’s not even speakable. And I knew that this was how I had to live my life, somehow.
    Fortunately, right before I got my Ph.D., I met the preeminent wildlife biologist in my field, Dr. George Schaller. He and I spent the day together following bears in the Smoky Mountains, and at the end of the day George said to me, “Alan, how would you like to go to Belize and be the first one to try to study jaguars in the jungle?” The very first thought in my mind, and I remember it so clearly, was
Where the hell is Belize?
But the very first words out of my mouth, not thirty seconds after he had asked me that, were “Of course I’ll go. Of course.”
    Within two months I had bought an old Ford pickup truck, packed everything I owned in the back—which didn’t even take up half of it—and driven from New York to Central America. Those last few miles of driving into that jungle, where I would set up base camp for the next two years, were just unbelievable to me. Driving by the Mayan Indians gawking at me, I was entering the jungle to catch jaguars, which nobody knew how to do, and put radio collars on them and get data that nobody had ever gotten before. This was what my life was all about. This was where it had to take me.
    For the next year I did just what I had set out to do. I learned from hunters. I learned how to capture jaguars. I captured them. I followed them. Many things almost stopped me from achieving my goal. There was a plane crash where I almost died; one of my men got bitten by a fer-de-lance, a poisonous snake, and unfortunately he died. Those things changed me. I had to really look upon things differently. But this was my life, this was where I knew I could stay forever and be happy and be comfortable.
    But I couldn’t. Because I also realized that as fast as I was catching jaguars and gathering information about them, they were being killed in front of me. My jaguars were being killed. The jaguars outside of my study area were being killed; they were all being wiped out. Yes, I could sit in that jungle, but then I wouldn’t be true to myself. And more important, I wouldn’t be true to the promise I had made to the animals in the closet, that I would be their voice. And I had the voice now, if I wanted to use it. So I realized I had to come back into the world of people and try to fight with that world to save the animals, and these jaguars in particular.
    But, ironically, I realized that if I was going to save these jaguars, not only did I have to enter the world of people again, but I had to go to the highest levels of government. I had to talk to the prime minister of Belize. Well it took some doing, but within six months I was standing in the capital city, outside the office of the prime