A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg Read Free

control of the mine from “the Goose Gang” after at least one massacre and uncounted assassinations. The government’s lucrative decision to cooperate with the gangsters has eliminated much of the violence associated with Muzo. Officials recently told Warren Hoge of the
New York Times
that the mine has been “pacified,” but Hoge quoted an outside observer who said he had counted twenty-four corpses in twenty-one days at Muzo. The observer said that some prospectors had taken to swallowing their emeralds when confronted by thieves, and some thieves had taken to disemboweling their victims.
    Two of the most popular bars in the area are called the Seven Knife Stabs and Where Life Is Worth Nothing.
    T he law of the jungle seems to be this: there is no law in the jungle. Which isn’t to suggest that there aren’t a lot of policemen and soldiers around. There are, and one reason for this is that boundaries are difficult to establish. There are border disputes everywhere: Peru and Ecuador, Belize and Guatemala, Guyana and Venezuela. The less populated an area becomes and the deeper into the jungle one goes, the more forms there are to fill out and checkpoints to go through. One may be obliged to show a passport, a visa, or permits; to state age, marital status, occupation, reason for being in the area; to explain one’s very existence.
    In certain areas of Peru, one may have to first report to the Peruvian Investigative Police (PIP) before checking into a hotel. Miguel Zamora, the man who heads up PIP in the northeastern town of Chachapoyas, did not seem to trust the three of us. The expedition had been launched in search of a pre-Incan culture known as the Chachas. We were also making our own maps, and these, Zamora decided, might be of assistance to, say, an Ecuadorian military expedition. Every other day that we were in town, Zamora called us in for another little talk.
    On the other hand, the chief of police, the commandant, seemed to like and trust us. He had sent his daughter to a school in Lima, where she studied English, and she had taught him an American song.
    “Heengalay bales, heengalay bales …”
    We figured it out more from the tune than the words, and so, on a hot July afternoon in Chachapoyas, which is located in the eastern foothills of the Andes, on a plateau that drops off into three thousand miles of jungle, we joined in with the commandant.
    “…  jingle all the way, oh what fun it is to ride in a one-horse open sleigh …”
    Every time we saw the commandant, he reminded us of the fun we had singing “Heengalay Bales” together. Hewore a hat something like an American policeman’s, except it was three times as high and had gold braids on it. It looked like a hat that a loony dictator would wear in a slapstick film. The commandant learned more about our reasons for being in Chachapoyas in one hour than Zamora did in the half-dozen chats he had with us.
    As it turned out, we found a number of forts and stone cities of the Chachas. They were set deep in the forests in a mountainous region known as Ceja de Selva (“eyebrow of the jungle”). We had used a sixteenth-century Spanish text as a guide, and the cities were as described in
The Royal Commentaries of the Incas
. We camped for days in some of those vegetation-choked ruins and tried to imagine the lives of a people long gone. I suspect these should have been humbling days, but an intense euphoria overwhelmed all other emotions.
    It was as if the jungle had drawn its breath and sucked these people back into its darkness. There were ceramic artifacts one thousand years old and more, and the potsherds sometimes lay in company with human remains. We left this evidence for the archaeologists and marveled at the power of the forest. It had sent roots snaking through the interstices of the great stone forts and had swallowed the culture whole. Standing in the ruins, I imagined uncontrolled natural forces at work: it was like walking through the