Pink Boots and a Machete (7 page)

Apart from our food dramas and encounters with miners and scorpions, camp life could be pretty mundane. You get up, you drink sock coffee, you chase lemurs, you eat rice, and you go to sleep, so that you're rested and ready to do it all over again in the morning. But this morning was different. I had washed my clothes down by the river the day before and laid them out to dry overnight just outside my tent. In the morning I grabbed the pants and slipped in one leg at a time.
I wasn't alone. I yelled so loud I swear it's the reason we didn't see any lemurs that day. Before I knew it, my pants were flying through the air and I was standing in my underwear in front of the entire camp. Cockroaches had nested in my pant legs, hundreds of them, and I could feel each one scurrying up and down my calves and thighs and hissing up a storm. It was the last time I put my pants on in the field without checking their contents first.

Now it was time to try and save the lemurs by taking samples of their blood and tissue. That was the long-term goal; the immediate goal was to not kill any during capture. I worried about misfired darts. But George and Loret were the best, and Dr. Handsome and I had had experience capturing primates in South America. We loaded the injectable darts with Telazol, a sedative that would knock out the lemurs just long enough for us to collect samples before returning them to the trees. Next we identified a target, which had to be sitting in just the right position. It was the sifaka butt we were after, not a vital organ. Gun loaded, Loret would take aim, while George and I held a hammock to catch the animal plunging from the tree. For the most part, the sifakas cooperated, but one continued to hang on to the tree fully sedated. Just as we were deciding who would climb up and risk a wasp attack, the sifaka's grip loosened and it came plummeting down. It landed on my head, uninjured.

By now we had named the lemurs. One group became the Flintstones (Fred, Wilma, Barney, and Betty), while the other group was named after beers (Corona, St. Pauli Girl, Coors,
and Bud), a sign of our alcohol deprivation. Fred was the oldest and by far my favorite. He had a very sweet disposition, and the abuse he took from the females made me feel sorry for him. Sadly, it was his remains I found on the trail several weeks later. Not much more than a tail and a clump of hair were left, evidence that a fossa had gotten him. His death took a toll on all of us, even Zara, who had initially thrown logs at the sifakas if they came too close due to his tribal belief that these all-black creatures, like our black cats, could bring bad luck. Only their existence on sacred ground enabled them to survive that superstition. Zara, like all of us, had grown to love these creatures as individuals. Until his passing years later, Zara would dedicate his life to the protection of sifakas, assisting research teams and educating his grandchildren on the importance of protection. His son Bendanalana is now one of the area's most sought-after guides.

As time went on during our study, and mutual trust grew, I often found myself in the middle of a sifaka group moving cautiously from one forest patch to the next. As if crossing a treacherous highway, the creatures would pause at the edge of an open patch where aerial and ground predators might lurk, look right, then left, then right again before moving ahead. Side by side we made the journey. I began to delight in my new role as the lady who walks with lemurs.

Years before I appeared on television pointing out little-known facts about snakes or describing the mating behaviors of gorillas, I was putting in the legwork. Anyone who knows me knows I am not a morning person. But no matter. In the field a typical day for me began around 5:30 a.m., when the first fingers of light started to reach into the forest canopy. Home was anywhere I could pitch a tent, more often than not in some distant jungle, and chances were that I hadn't been able to communicate with my mother in months and she was wor
ried to death.

Yet the question I am most frequently asked is “How did you get to where you are?” This question refers not to my career as a scientist and explorer, but rather to my frequent appearances as a wildlife correspondent on television. Frankly, it was a lucky break that first got me on TV. And although there has certainly been a lot of luck and good timing throughout my career, I firmly believe that the harder I work, the luckier I get. The path was slippery and arduous, like the muddy, rugged terrains I've spent years traversing.

After my first trip to the eighth continent, as Madagascar is sometimes called, I was soon a regular fixture there and could hold my own in Malagache, the local language spoken mostly in the villages. As a result of my track record with Perrier's sifaka, I was entrusted by people at various conservation agencies, not least of all Russ Mittermeier, the president of Conservation International, with the laborious task of locating and gathering data on another species of sifaka, the ghost-white silky sifaka, an even more endangered species than the Perrier's. In the January 2000
Time
magazine article on endangered primates, the silkies were listed as the world's sixth most endangered primate, and like their cousins in the north, no photographs of these animals existed. With only a few hundred left in the wild and none in captivity, they, too, had never been studied.

I spent most of my time in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, waiting at MICET, the Malagasy sister office of the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments at
Stony Brook University, while my permits were being sorted. MICET provides logistical support for scientists and environ-mentalists working in Madagascar. More than once the staff there had bailed me out of trouble, and it was a great place to check email and meet just about any researcher worth knowing. A swirling hub of activity, the MICET office was where many expeditions and collaborations originated.

On this particular day, I was waiting to meet with my advisor, Dr. Patricia Wright, who would be joining me on this next expedition. As I sorted through some field gear, a stocky, hairy young man dripping with brand-new North Face gear came stumbling into the office. He introduced himself as Mike Kraus. Mike had apparently shown up in Madagascar to study lemurs the way someone pops over to the zoo to look at zebras. He wasn't aware of the long and difficult permit process or the challenges of getting to field sites. “I was mugged last night, and they took all of my money,” he moaned. He had wandered into one of the areas in Antananarivo where only a tourist would go wearing a fancy camera and a fanny pack full of money. Those items were no longer in his possession.

Pat emerged from a meeting with permits in hand and announced that a car had been arranged to pick us up the next morning for the 18-hour, bumpy, kidney-crushing drive north. I introduced Mike and his predicament. In her usual generous and relaxed way, Pat invited him to join us, a move I hoped we would not regret. Also joining our expedition would be Felix, Safia, and Desire, Malagasy graduate students and guides; Loret, who had captured innumerable
lemurs with Pat and me; Peter Tyson, a writer doing a story on our groundbreaking expedition; and Jacinth O'Donnell, a British wildlife filmmaker.

With Land Rover fully loaded, we were squished like sardines in a can, but it was still more comfortable than my last taxi-bus experience, in which a runny-nosed toddler and a chicken were thrown onto my lap for eight hours. A Madagascar experience not to be missed. After months of preparation, we were finally on the road, and not just any road but the very artery of life here. Through the car window I watched the island's hard-working people as they went about their everyday lives: women streaming to or home from the markets; uniformed children returning from school; herders with loaded carts pulled by zebu cattle; drivers in minibuses hustling passengers aboard. It was not unusual to see beggars no older than six or seven years with infants on their backs in the middle of the busy road. Most impressive were the men and women carrying enormous bundles of charcoal, sticks, or wheat in reed baskets perfectly balanced on their heads as they dodged traffic. Small bungalows and market stands lined both sides of the road. Past the traffic and into the hills lay fields of wheat, vegetables, and rice in various stages of cultivation. The fields are farmed by hand with primitive plows pulled by cattle. Also on the side of the road stood traditional brick-making furnaces and stacks of raw red bricks left drying in the sun. Most of the houses along this central road were made from the bricks and were a far cry from the shacks on stilts I was accustomed to seeing. From a distance, the little rust-red houses sitting in
the hilly landscape evoked small villages in Tuscany.

Our destination was Marojejy, a 60,150-hectare reserve in the northeast and one of the few places in the world where you can hike from a dense, vine-cloaked jungle to a treeless plain in the cloud forest just shy of 2,400 feet in altitude. Home to the silky sifaka. Our aim was to hike a single-track trail to a narrow opening on the mountain where the rare primates were known to visit. It would be a five-hour, strenuously steep climb up a slippery trail made even more miserable by the rain. But leeches between my toes were a small price to pay for being one of only a handful of researchers to see these sifakas, thought to be the most beautiful in the world. I would soon dub them the angels of Marojejy.

Less excited was Mike Kraus, gasping for air in the back of the line all the way. Even the porters carrying the generator for Peter's computer had flown past him. Several times during the trek I stopped to wait for Mike, whose bulky body struggled against the mountain's slope. I suggested he remove some of his many layers before he succumbed to heat exhaustion. But he confidently refused, saying that his pricey, state-of-the-art, “breathable” clothing was designed for just this sort of trek. Well, he was a big boy entitled to make his own mistakes. As I stood aside and let the porters pass so I could check on him, I heard the frequent mention of “crazy
vahza.
” Not long after, from around the corner appeared Mike, wearing nothing but his boxers and hiking boots.

“So the clothes didn't breathe?” I said, ribbing him. Drenched in sweat, he could only gather enough breath to
say, “Can I have some of your water?” Normally, on an expedition you guard your water like your life depends on it, since often it does, but I'm a bit of a camel and don't require much to drink, so I handed him my almost full, pink water bottle. Seconds later he returned it. Empty. (The next year Mike returned on another expedition but almost never left his tent and went home early. Point being, not everyone is cut out for the explorer's life.)

Once we had made it to the plain, I collapsed, journal in hand, beside a waterfall plunging over a lip of stone. One false move on this slippery edge and I was toast, but the view was incredible. Treetops literally brushed the clouds. An ocean of forest rolled off into the distance. But no tree in Madagascar is safe. Sitting on the cliff's edge, I could just make out bare slopes where the Malagasy had cleared hillsides to plant rice. Poverty and the ever increasing population have put tremendous pressure on the island's dwindling forests. Slowly, they've been slashed and burned for rice fields. It's what Malagasy ancestors did for centuries, but now less than 10 percent of the original forest remains. I have yet to find a place on the island where I could escape this harsh reality.

Setting up camp on a small ridge, Pat and I shared a tent. As I am usually the only woman on my expeditions, the thought of girlie chitchat into the night was welcome. But by the time nature's lights had gone out, we were too exhausted to talk; we listened to the nocturnal woolly lemurs just beginning their day, crawled into our sleeping bags, and passed out. Gab about boys and shoes would have to wait.

The following morning I woke to the sound of cascading water, unzipping of neighboring tents, and clanging of metal pots. Our camp cooks, Nestor and Jean, had a fire going and water boiling for coffee and tea. Breakfast was a rice pudding–like fare mixed with raisins and condensed milk. By 6:30 a.m., when small rays of light began to creep through the forest canopy, a family of five silky sifakas appeared just across the stream. We gazed wide-eyed at the two-legged creatures for a quarter of an hour before they vanished into the forest. Flushed with excitement, I looked over at Pat and said, “This is one of the best days of my life.” I noticed she had a tear in her eye and knew she felt the same.

Peter arrived in camp that day, too late to see the sifakas' brief debut and with less than good news. On the long hike up, a blister on his foot had become infected. As I knew all too well, infections in the tropics can turn deadly in a matter of hours. His foot, red and swollen, would make it impossible for him to maneuver the terrain. Feverish, he had lost his appetite, and you could barely see where his foot ended and his toes began. The infection was already beginning to show signs of going systemic. I recognized the signs from my Guyana basketball hands, gave him medication, and volunteered to clean his wound.

We decided to try antibiotics for a night before deciding whether to get Peter out of the forest. Even with two good feet, the five-hour hike was treacherous; using a crutch, it was impossible. Less than two days in the field, and we already had a crisis. Fortunately, by morning Peter's foot had improved
and, eager to stay, he decided to remain in camp writing dispatches. We quickly scarfed down a breakfast and divided into two teams.

The team consisting of Pat and Mike with Felix, Safia, and Desire would scour the forest in search of the silky sifaka. With Loret and me, the second team would walk the transect lines. One of our goals was to conduct a census of the number and kinds of lemurs in Marojejy. To do this, we set up transects along the existing trails and posted small, bright-orange flags every 82 feet from base camp. This would allow us to identify and reference exactly where we were when we found the animals. Once we'd established transects, we walked quietly, stopping every 50 feet to look up and around in the trees.

At first it seemed as if the forest was still asleep; the only sounds were raindrops falling and what our guides called the “barking crab,” which may have been a frog. Suddenly, we heard lemurs directly over our heads. By their loud grunting noises we knew they were not silkies, but rather a group of white-faced brown lemurs. We noted what we saw and continued the search. Shortly after, we came upon a group of gentle gray bamboo lemurs, which quickly scuttled into the treetops, prompting an excited whisper from our guide, “Maybe we've found our lemurs,” as this species is often seen traveling with silkies. We all looked and hoped, but we had not.

We hiked up our mile-and-a-quarter transect and then turned back because we had reached the mountaintop and the trees had become shrubs. Discouraged, I had to remind myself that the trek had not been a total waste. We had seen lemurs,
even if not the ones we were looking for; observed a paradise flycatcher with its gorgeous, long tail feathers; spotted a black, squiggly fungus resembling its name, dead man's finger; and found several miniature waterfalls spilling out of the hilltops. A great day, indeed, by anyone else's standards. Besides, as our guide, Desire, had pointed out in the beginning, it can take more than a week to catch a glimpse of these animals. So we had already been lucky. But as we descended to camp, the morale seemed to plunge like a waterfall. We had climbed (and slipped) all day and had not seen or heard our sifakas.

At a point only about 1,000 feet from camp, I happened to look up at what resembled a soft cloud. There were our angels, the silky sifakas. They came down the trees and sat close, within five feet of us. They seemed to be just as curious about us strange, bipedal creatures as we were about them. Needless to say, we were elated. I had every piece of camera equipment out, and in the dark understory my flash went off constantly. But it didn't seem to bother them. On the contrary, they appeared to be more than happy to pose for the camera.

A half hour later we realized they were not running away as before. They continued to sit, munching on young leaves and grooming one another, seemingly ignoring us. At one point, they even hung suspended by their hind feet and twined together in play. More than three hours later, they seemed to have had enough of performing for their newfound friends and continued on to the sleeping tree. We followed and it was there we left them, all snuggled up together.

Back at camp we gathered beneath the cook's tent for a
meeting. Just then the skies opened up, and everyone squeezed in tight under the overhanging cloth. Monsoonlike conditions notwithstanding, tomorrow would be a big day. This site was one of only two for the silky sifakas, and in the morning Marojejy was to be designated a national park. With an audience of politicians and bigwigs at the base of the mountain, we would attempt to capture some animals for study. “God forbid anything goes wrong,” said Pat in a tense and excited tone. Silently staring into the coals of the fire while awaiting our dinner of rice and corned beef, I think we were all praying to the ancestors. Exhausted from the day's trek, Pat and I made a dash for our tent with rain pelting down, while the Malagasy sang traditional songs by the fire. Once we were in our sleeping bags like two schoolgirls at a slumber party, I opened one of the bottles of wine I had swindled from Air France. It was the first time I'd seen Pat nervous. We talked about all the things that could go wrong the next day, like accidentally wounding or even killing a lemur. With park ministry officials there as witness, such a mistake could spell death to our careers. A couple of bottles of wine later, we were asleep.