Read Online Predators I Have Known by Alan Dean Foster - Free Book Online

find a certain Boris Gómez Luna, as he was the only one who could conceivably arrange such a visit on short notice. Though his name made him sound like a character from a John Le Carré novel, Boris turned out to be a slight, charming fellow whose unexpected youth was matched only by his dedication to and enthusiasm for the wild Manú. Though in the years that have passed Boris has since moved on to bigger things, his enthusiasm for Manú has never flagged.
    Señor Gómez Luna, we learned, was in the process of building the first facility inside the park that would be permitted to accommodate non-researchers. In other words, visitors like Mark and myself. Could we possibly, we inquired when we finally managed to track him down, make some arrangement with him to spend a week or so in Manú?
    “I can organize it for you,” he told us in his excellent English, “but nothing is finished there. We’re still in the beginning stages of construction, and you’ll have to sleep in a tent like the rest of the construction crew, eat the same food, utilize the same facilities. And you can’t bring much with you. I need the space in the truck for supplies.” We immediately and eagerly accepted, and a price was agreed upon.
    Two days later, we were picked up by Boris in his hulking, specially reinforced Nissan Patrol 4x4 and struggled to squeeze ourselves and our backpacks in among the mountain of materials and equipment he had collected for the journey. The road out of Cusco soon turned from pavement to dirt and began to wind its way through high treeless mountain canyons horizontally striped with perfectly level ancient Inca stone terraces. Vistas turned grand and wide. Like mice in a nest, simple houses clustered together at the bottom of increasingly deep river valleys. Irregularly shaped irrigated fields and neat square plots linked the vast expanses of bare rock together like bright green patches on a heavily weathered gray overcoat.
    Many hours later, we reached the high pass near the turnoff to Tres Cruces and came to a stop. Though the view over the clouds and mountains to the east was as spectacular as it was sobering, I found myself wondering about the delay. Boris proceeded to explain.
    “From here all the way down to the Upper Madre de Dios, the road is one way. From noon to midnight, traffic is allowed to go down. From midnight to noon, traffic can come up.” He checked his watch. “We must wait a few more minutes.”
    Hacked, hoed, and blasted out of winding, cloud-forest-swathed, perpetually damp and foggy mountainsides, the road from the Tres Cruces turnoff down to the backcountry Amazonian town of Pilcopata offered one of the two most hair-raising drives I have ever experienced (the other was also in Peru, from Chachapoyas to the citadel of Kuelap). Everyone is afraid of something. Sharks, bees, spiders, the dark, enclosed spaces: Me, I don’t like heights. So I was thankful for the thick clouds and mist that blotted out the view below us.
    Hours later and only partway to our destination, we encountered a characteristically overloaded truck illegally making its way upward. The Patrol halted, sliding slightly on the muddy track. It had been in four-wheel-drive mode ever since we had commenced our descent.
    “You might want to get out of the car and watch,” a thoughtful Boris advised us. Mark and I hastily complied, beating a judicious retreat up the rain-swept road. Standing there in slick, shallow mud with a light drizzle falling, we watched open-mouthed as our genial and unflappable host and the tight-lipped truck driver embarked upon an agonizingly slow, incredibly patient, and exceedingly dangerous vehicular pas de deux. While the clumsy, top-heavy truck scraped and hugged the fern-encrusted rock wall, Boris gingerly edged the Patrol around it. At one point, the 4x4’s rear right wheel was literally hanging over a sheer drop with nothing beneath it save hundreds of feet of fog. Eyes wide, we held our