We
drive south on the one highway that cuts through the Maya Mountains
to Belize's southern border, ending up at the Cockscomb Basin, a mountain
jungle sanctuary for the jaguar, where there are more jaguars than anywhere
in the world. The Cockscomb is both hot and humid; even at night, beads
of sweat drip down around your eyebrows. Hot, humid, and noisy; here
there are tree frogs croaking, and a thousand birds squawking. Conversation
pauses for the occasional overzealous crooning bird to finish a skit.
Vicente,
the night warden of the Cockscomb Basin Jaguar Preserve, joins us over
beer at our campsite under a moonless night.
"I
am from Red Bank," he says, "in Toledo District. I was a banana
farmer, but since the hurricane I needed to find new work. So I come
here."
"Red
Bank is a Mayan town?" I ask.
"Yes, I am Kekchi. We are the people from the south. We have a
different language than the Mopan and Yucatec, but we like to think
of all the Mayans as one people."
"And that's your native language?"
"Yes, Kekchi. I learn English and Spanish and Creole because those
are the languages of Belize, but I was born first speaking Kekchi. "I
am trying to pay for high school for my kids. But it is expensive. Almost
four hundred dollars to get to the next level."
Vicente,
like anyone in any country who is not trying to sell you anything, is
genuinely interested both in telling the story of his world - Toledo
- and asking about ours.
There
are four of us in the jungle. Pierre, a Frenchman, is traveling from
Houston to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America,
by car. Pierre was one of those guys who always gave up his job for
travel. He had driven Africa north to south. He recently drove to Costa
Rica to meet a friend. "Its funny," he said, "there was
some kind of civil war in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, but the
only place I couldn't get to was Panama, because the U.S. had just attacked
Noriega."
I
asked Vance and Pierre if they would like to go into the jungle to look
for jaguars. It was, after all, a moonless night. Jaguars rely on complete
darkness to hunt. They smell, they see well. They pounce. They go for
monkeys and turtles and turkeys. They like the smell of flesh.
I
am the kind of person who jumps at the sight of a spider, gets the creepy-crawlies
from bugs, and howls at snakes. So to walk into the jungle on a moonless
night gives me the willies. Three miles in, with the Frenchman yapping
about the things that French people yap about, I ask if either of them
have the willies. Both assure me otherwise. I find this odd; in our
walks in the jungle during the day, there is a constant sense of encroachment;
of snakes under the brush, of malarial mosquitoes, of getting lost.
At night, and yes I certainly have the willies, the jungle seems comfortable,
and relaxing. Here, too deep even for the sound of the birds, the shrub
layer is biological silence. Everything moves, grows, eats and kills
in quiet.
