The Riverbones extract

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The Dying Animal

Tonight, on my way down the stairs from the cookhouse, a small bat slams into my hand. He drops straight to the ground and lands with a soft thud. I’ve always believed they would steer clear – a basic assumption of life in the rainforest is that bats will avoid you – but it turns out that’s not true. I’ve thumped this one with my hand and now he’s a dark stillness on the ground.

I turn on my headlamp and lean closer. He squirms away, pulling himself along the ground pitifully. He tries to fly but only makes it half a metre. This bat is going to die tonight. I have killed this animal and he’s not even dead yet.

I follow him for an hour, from the clearing in front of the cook¬house into the dense jungle underbrush. I don’t shine the light directly on him; I lose him a number of times. The humid air thickens as the forest wraps around us, the musty stench of decaying plants, the lowering canopy of twisted vines, the astonishing claustrophobia of innumerable whispering trees. To my left, the moonlight dapples a bank of delicate ferns. To my right, an impenetrable thicket of lianas dangles a metre or so off the ground. Underfoot, the soft floor of the jungle, the black soil made of everything dead or dying.

The bat slows, his movements become more pronounced. My guilty hand recalls a moment of silken fur. And then I remember walking with Emma in that other jungle, two weeks before I left Toronto. We found a struggling pigeon on the sidewalk. At first I thought her wing was broken, but then her movements slowed. The Polish man with the broom tried to sweep her away, and I realized we were watching not a fallen body but a crashing life. She stopped moving and Emma let out a gasp – a whole, entire thing gone.

I searched my bag for a piece of paper, wrapped up the dead bird, and carried her into a nearby alley. I felt her warmth against my palm, passing through the paper, as if she were asking for protection even though she was long past needing it. I left her in a quiet corner, buried beneath a handful of soil and leaves, and returned to the street, where Emma called me her jungle hero – already, way back then. Just days before I returned to this unknown country for some unknown reason. Just days before I left.

On my favourite map of the world, the National Geographic’s map of earth- borne light, Suriname barely exists. There is just one small point of light, the capital, Paramaribo, on the northeast shoulder of South America. In this photograph of the sleeping world taken from space, the rest of Suriname is dark – as if no one lives here and nothing happens in the dense jungle that lies to the north of Amazonia.

When I was twenty-three years old, I lived deep inside this darkness for a year. My home was a place called Raleighvallen, a remote outpost in the Central Suriname Nature Reserve, which is the largest protected tract of pristine rainforest on the planet. I was there to study monkeys.

I lived with six other researchers in a bare-bones building on the eastern bank of the Coppename River, a mile south of a small tourist facility called Foengoe Island. All of us were young, aspiring primatologists who couldn’t believe our luck. We’d been given an opportunity thousands of biology graduates would have killed for – an entire year in the middle of a virgin rainforest no one had heard of, surrounded by troops of brown capuchin monkeys no one had studied. We were connected to the rest of the world only by a wonky satellite phone and trips to the capital every two months.

We spent twelve hours a day, seven days a week, following troops of monkeys through an untouched wilderness. Our neighbours included all of South America’s most poisonous snakes, the vicious fer-de-lance, the stubborn bushmaster. Jaguars roamed the forests at night and left eviscerated deer carcasses in the middle of our trails. We routinely crossed paths with herds of wild boar – some more than two hundred strong – that could trample a human in seconds.

We were the Jane Goodalls, the Dian Fosseys, the Biruté Galdikases of the New World. We wrote down, in obsessive detail, everything we saw: where the monkeys went, what they ate, who was friends with whom. We gave them names like Agnes and Wacky and Suri Rama and Mignon. They became our entire world, our reason for waking in the morning and our reason for collapsing into our bunks at night. Though well-fed we grew skinny, our cheekbones and ribcages announcing themselves, our fat reserves burning, our leg muscles shrinking, our bodies slowly evaporating. Physical and mental exhaustion became indistinguishable and a way of life. We lived on the edge of breakdowns and the known world. Sometimes we felt the monkeys were studying us.

When I finished my research contract I left Suriname right away. But the country stayed with me. I was hooked on the place. Over the next few years, I read every book about Suriname I could find, bookmarked every website that mentioned it and subscribed to online European newspapers I couldn’t even read. I learned that Suriname was once a Dutch colony. I learned that it sits atop the Guiana Shield, a 1.7 billion-year-old sheet of Precambrian rock that encompasses more than two million square kilometres of tropical wilderness and is one of the oldest geological formations on the surface of the earth. I learned that for much of the Shield’s existence, most modern tropical regions simply did not yet exist (such as Western Amazonia) or were covered over by shallow seas (such as Central America). I was struck by this and compiled a list of all the ancient, untouched places that have been hailed as the Last Eden – Patagonia in Argentina, the Okavango Delta of Botswana, the Ndoki region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the wild island of Borneo – and added the jungles of Suriname to that list.

I collected obscure cultural references to the country the way a young hipster collects vintage T-shirts. In The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal Lecter’s shipment of Death’s-head Hawkmoths comes from Suriname. In Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, a mischievous parrot from Paramaribo occasions the death, by fall from a ladder, of Dr. Urbino. In J.R.R. Tolkien’s invented language of Quenya, the word surinen means “in the wind,” but the Surinen were actually the Amerindians who furnished Suriname with its name. Rudd Gullit, my favourite footballer of all time, was born in Suriname, as were Edgar Davids, Clarence Seedorf, Patrick Kluivert, Frank Rijkaard, Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, and most other dark-skinned members of the Dutch national football team which I had supported, for no legitimate reason, since the age of eight. And, finally, during the last frenzied chapter of Don DeLillo’s White Noise, protagonist Jack Gladney wonders if perhaps the man he’s about to murder, the deranged Dylar dealer Willie Mink, might, in fact, be Surinamese. “Where was Surinam?” thinks Gladney, moments before he opens fire.

I shared this trivia with strangers on street corners, in elevators, at grocery stores, at dinner parties. I’d never been to Thailand or Peru or Prague, as it seemed everyone else my age had, and perhaps I was overcompensating for this. I told anyone who would listen about my monkeys, about what it was like to live in the largest un disturbed rainforest on earth. But I also told them stories about the rest of the country, things I’d only read about: mysterious Amerindian shamans, superstitious tribes of rebel African slaves, zealous Moravian missionaries, outlaw Brazilian garimpeiros, exhausted jungle gold mines, a fetid lake with the dead canopy of a drowned rainforest at its surface, the aftermath of a six-year civil war, and an unsolved murder mystery fired with political intrigue that continues to haunt the nation.

Don DeLillo was right. No one had heard of the place. Most thought it was a post-colonial fragment somewhere in Africa, a few figured Southeast Asia, and the rest thought I was making it up. Occasionally, these doubters came close to convincing me. After all, I’d accepted the job as a monkey researcher thinking I was headed somewhere near Vietnam. It was only when my airline tickets showed up that I looked up Suriname on a map and found, to my amazement, that there were monkeys in need of study at the bottom of the Caribbean.

Friends and family often asked why I was so haunted by a place where so little happens, where there are fewer people than in any other South American nation, where 90 per cent of the country is jungle, where deep in the bush there are only 0.2 people for every square kilometre, a density similar to Nunavut in the Canadian North. I said I didn’t know. Suriname sounds like such a magical place that if I hadn’t already been there I’d swear it was imaginary. It reminds me of Macondo, Márquez’s fictional land.

Soon I ran out of new information about the place. With nothing more to read, I imagined what it would be like to return. My life began to revolve around this idea. I stopped making long-term plans. I re-read those books. I fell out of love with science and began writing. I wrote my first novel (a bad one). I tried, and failed, to get it published (and rightly so). I waited for a sign. I waited for time to guide me.

Edited extract from The Riverbones by Andrew Westoll, Copyright © Andrew Westoll 2009, University of Queensland Press, RPP $34.95

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