[an error occurred while processing this directive]

---

Chapter One

It's not a good feeling to be lost over the Amazon jungle. Inside an airplane. During a storm. With the navigation equipment down and visibility virtually zip. Looking for a landing strip the size of a butter knife.

It's not a good feeling especially when, already, you hate to fly, and the only reason you've lived to be twenty-nine is that there happens to be an island in the middle of the Mediterranean called Crete and our Cairo-to-Athens flight a few years back, engines barely functioning, just happened to reach the island before crashing into the drink.

So I had a bad feeling that morning sitting in the military C-130 Hercules, circling over the Amazon, those front propellers whirring overtime against a paint job of jungle camouflage. I didn't realize at first that we were lost, that the Ecuadorian pilots were searching frantically for an airstrip called Tarapoa somewhere down there amid all those Ecuadorian trees. The scheduled arrival time had come and gone, the landing gear had gone down, noisily, and come back up, curiously, and the plane had begun banking, backtracking, flying in circles.

The few odd civilians who hitchhike into the jungle aboard these military flights are given seats amid stacks of cargo, between bare, curving fuselage walls. For the deafening engine noise, the crew hands out bolls of pink cotton to jam into your ears.

So there I was on this particular flight, surrounded by cargo at the very rear of the fuselage, alone except for a crew member next to me in a baggy jumpsuit. His name was Jose, and he slept most of the way despite wearing headphones that connected him directly to the pilots in the cockpit.

It is my curse that even minor wind turbulence scares me badly when I fly. But my main rule is this Never get totally terrified until the crew starts to look mildly concerned. Yet when dose sat bolt upright from his sleeping position just then, passing the headphones tightly to his ears, listening intently as the plane banked and turned another time, he didn't look mildly concerned. He looked totally terrified, which put me--by extension--in an emotional state beyond known psychiatric/orders.

A split second later Jose ripped off his headphones and thrust them into my hands. I pulled the cotton out of my ears. "Here," he said in rapid Spanish, "put these on and listen to the pilots. If they call for me, you come and get me as fast as you can."

Then he was gone, off to a starboard window, scanning downward with mile-wide eyes. Glancing out the window myself, all I could see were clouds and an occasional treetop. I put on the headphones as ordered, a draftee, and listened to a conversation I would gladly pay to have surgically removed from my memory.

Pilot One "It's no good! I don't see anything! Let's turn north again."

Pilot Two "We've tried northl We've tried it! Maybe we're not even close."

Pilot One "But where could it be? Trees! Trees! That's all I see. Dios mio!"

The voices were scratchy, full of that rough electronic sound that somehow makes even routine cockpit communication seem dire and foreboding. As I listened, I realized that not only were we lost, but I was hearing the only thing investigators would find after the crash. I was getting a grotesque and very unwelcome prescreening of that very terrible thing: THE BLACK BOX.

Jose was still glued to the window. It seemed academic to ask him the question. His face said everything "Can't turn around. Not enough fuel to make it back to Quito. Must land. Must find airstrip."

And God, I thought, I wasn't even supposed to tee on this flight. It was the classic plane-crash tragedy. There had been a change of plans, a last-minute decision to fly. A series of strange events during the past week had come together to put me on this plane at this moment--and now, in a rush, those events passed through my mind. Why, for heaven's sake, couldn't Russell and I have just had a nice, peaceful trip into the rain forest that first time, without all the intrigue? Why did we have to stumble onto a bizarre and complicated news story, one that was sending me back into the forest this second time? Russell was my companion, a crazed genius of a photographer who wore piranha teeth and a light meter on the same necklace and who carried an eight-foot-long fishing rod with him wherever he went. What in the world did Russell and I know about news. We hated news. We had abandoned newspapers for travel magazines years earlier, we hated news so much.

Which is how, the week before, we wound up in the Amazon in the first place, deep inside Ecuador's lower Cuyabeno Wildlife, Reserve. Planning to focus on wildlife, nothing more, we traveled by plane, then by motorized boat, then by dugout canoe; then we walloed part of the way; then we waded through swamps pulling boats behind us a la Humphrey Bogart. Then, when we finally reached the end of the earth, suffocating in the dense greenery and isolation of the Amazon, ready to do a light story on leaf-cutter ants and freshwater dolphin, we discovered the unexpected Something just shy of a shooting war was stirring in the Cuyabeno. Beleaguered forest Indians were using dynamite detonation wire as clotheslines. Rogue oil explorers--from whom the dynamite came--were muscling in illegally on the reserve lurking behind every tree. Oil production would obliterate the forest; and the Indians, it turned out, were backed into a corner with nowhere left to run. They were making a last stand. A showdown was in the works.

All of which was startling enough even before the Oil Helicopter from Hell swooped down on our canoe that one afternoon, buzzing the water angrily, telling Russell and me, in effect, to split. But just when things couldn't get weirder, we heard the rumor about the small village down the river where the great white chief lived. The chief was an American, reportedly born and raised among forest Indians, a blowgun hunter since age four, a man gone totally native. With paint on his face and wild-boar eye teeth strung around his neck, this bushed-out Caucasian was leading the Indian campaign to keep the oil intruders out. The name Kurtz settled over my mind like equatorial heat when I heard this. I saw a malarial dream of a man. Conrad's antihero fast-forwarded to the late twentieth century.

But Russell and I refused to track the rumor down. The. whole jungle situation, in fact, had too many markings of a greet news story, so we did the only appropriate thing: We ignored it completely. I went back to Quito when the nature tour ended, leaving Russell behind only to get a few more tree shots. And that's when, inside my head, the whisper started. A voice from my newspaper past. Find Kurtz, it kept saying. Go back and find Kurtz. I banged my palm against my temple a few times until word reached Quito that the white chief, back in the jungle, was taking hostages now as part of his bizarre crusade. The whisper grew louder. "What are you awaiting for, pal? Go on. This ain't no page-twenty house fire. Get the story. Find him. Find Kurtz!"

And the next thing I knew, I was back on the Hercules, pink cotton in hand, Jose by my side. Despite myself, I was obeying the voice. I was on my way back. Back to the forest, back to the Indians, back to find Russell, back to find the oil explorers. Back to find Kurtz.

But first, God, the Hercules had to land. We had to find the airstrip. dose was still staring, mouth open, out the window. The cockpit conversation was still crackling in my ears. "Mierda!" one pilot said. "Let's turn around! Turn around! Try west! Too far this direction!" I learned later that, by the end, there were six crew members and two civilians crammed cheek-to-jowl in the cockpit, all searching the ground for the butter-knife runway. I had the sudden urge to add my own voice to the black box"--Good-bye, Mom. Good-bye, Dad. I love you, Sis."--when at last the cockpit words hit my ears "There it is! There it is! There it is!"

Never in my life have I been in a plane that maneuvered so sharply. It banked and dropped like an arrow to the earth, racing madly for the 1,500-foot-long asphalt strip before clouds swallowed it up again. Jose made his way back to his seat, putting on his earphones. I stuffed cotton into my ears, and the plane landed--herky jerky--on the tarmac, coming to rest, finally, dead still, in the middle of the jungle.

There's a growing consensus among environmentalists that the only way to save what's left of the Amazonian rain forest--now on an express train to oblivion--is to make it pay. You have to treat the forest as a sustainable, commercial resource. Rubber tapping instead of ranching. Herb harvesting instead of homesteading. And tourism. Open the door to bird watchers and adventure freaks. Let in the people who bring binoculars, not chain saws, people who pay top dollar just to look. There's even a word for it now Ecotourism. Or, if you prefer, ecotripping. It's a new sort of chug experience, recreational in form, more expensive than acid but easier on the cerebral cortex.

Which is how this whole convoluted jungle story first got its legs. To begin at the beginning is to begin with that idea, ecotripping. When, after months of wanting to visit South America, Russell and I learned that Transturi Touring, an Ecuadorian company, had begun offering ecotrips into a remote portion of the Amazon, we signed up, wheedling a freelance assignment from an editor in New York. The assignment was nothing too complicated. Just flora and fauna in pictures and prose. We would have fun while at t}re same time being part of the rain-forest solution, nature's customers. Trouble was the last thing we were looking for. We just wanted to trip a little, ecologically.

We packed our bags and said our good-byes. And off we went.

The tour began, simply enough, on the banks of the Rio Aguarico, a moderate-sized river flowing down from the Andes and snaking its way into the jungle toward Ecuador's borders with Colombia and Peru. Backpacks in tow, having flown 2,800 miles in thirty-six hours, Russell and I arrived at the Aguarico with a small group of other travelers. We hopped into aging wooden boats with outboard motors and settled in for the seven-hour journey to our initial base camp.

That first day on the river, as we moved farther and farther into the forest, was a singularly exquisite experience, replete with the sense of our being gradually and lastingly dipped into the unknown. This was before Russell and I knew fully of the oil-and-Indian pyrotechnics about to greet us up ahead, so we were able to enjoy with a touch of innocence and equanimity the wonderland unfolding before our eyes.

It's so immense, the rain forest, its tableau of life so immediately and obviously and impossibly intricate all around you, that it takes a while to realize you're really there, really in the fabled Amazon, that those mammoth kapok trees with their cottony crowns grow nowhere but in the densest tropics and that you could see a greater variety of birds every hour than you've probably seen in your entire life combined. But as the truth sinks in, it does so deeply, like a balm seeping through skin to bone. After a while, even the occasional Quichua Indian huts along the shore don't bother you. They're getting fewer and fewer the farther you travel, and eventually they disappear altogether, leaving only river and forest and sky. "I'm in the Amazon," you want to say over and over to no one in particular as howler monkeys stage vine acrobatics to your right and an eighty-pound peccary--bristle-haired and searching mauritia palm fruit--emerges on a muddy bank to your left.

Roberto, our bearded twenty-two-year-old guide with scars on his hands from a slew of scary jungle accidents, was pointing out these gems one by one from the stern as I took notes. Steve, meanwhile, was taking pictures. Steve was a nature photographer from Colorado, and each time I looked he seemed to be urgently reloading his film. This made me nervous because the photographer immediately next to me, Russell, my partner, was behaving the way he always did on assignments. He was doing nothing. Just hanging out. Dallying serenely. "What about the monkeys, Russell?" I said, finally deciding to act. "Wouldn't they make a nice shot?"

In his own way, Russell was as exotic as anything on the river. He was a hulking, befreckled redhead from Brooklyn who wore shaded eyeglasses and a backward-facing baseball cap and a baggy pair of shorts that hung like knickers to his knees, resting above bulky, overworn hiking boots. My question about photographs seemed to irritate him. He squinted his eyes at the shore, then at the sun, then at the shore again.

"The light's not right," he said flatly, turning back toward me.

It was Russell's pat response to such situations, revealing his approach to photography, which was like that of a master surfer. Let others ride the duds. Only when the light was just right, when the perfect wave was cresting right before him, did he make a move. Until then his mind stayed mostly on his favorite subject Fishing. Russell had many gods, and they all had fins. He asked [Roberto if the armored catfish of this region would hit a spinner. He asked Roberto if a fly rod was of any use against piranha.

I gave up and went back to watching birds. After two hours, my list of sightings was getting quite long, ranging from a pair of boat-billed herons to a red-capped cardinal to a lesser kisskidi flycatcher. Pablo, the Mexican ornithologist next to me, had an even longer list. He bubbled with excitement behind his binoculars, mentioning out loud how Ecuador had a stunning 1,500 different species of birds--second in the world only to Colombia--and perhaps half of these species could be viewed right here along the Aguarico.

"We've made it!" Pablo enthused over and over again as we spotted another gorgeous Amazon kingfisher. "The candy store of birds! We're in the world's candy store of birds, We've made it!"

Pablo, whose eyes were very much bugging out just then, was in the throes of an exceptionally heavy ecotrip, I decided, and someone should probably keep an eye on his breathing.

Just then, up ahead, another animal came into view. This one was in the water, weighed several hundred tons, and was coming straight at us. It was a boat, actually, a floating hotel, a Fitzcaraldo mirage of jungle comfort put together piece by piece on the Napo River and then piloted all the way up the Aguarico to this spot by Transturi Touring. "Flotel" was the boat's name, in fact, and as it grew closer Roberto explained how its twenty cabins on three decks were designed for the semirugged jet-set crowd, for people who like to fly in and absorb nature's savagery from a sun deck, drink in hand.

At Roberto's suggestion, we tied up alongside the boat and climbed aboard, stretching our legs on the deck and peeing in flush toilets. Sensing this was our last brush with modernity, Russell offered to stand me a drink at the top-deck bar. Afterward, we decided to order a bottle of whiskey for the road. Without blinking, the bartender said, "One bottle, seventy-eight dollars." Supplies were very expensive this far into the jungle, he added. Russell let loose a long gasp. Forget the macaws screeching overhead. Forget the evil-eyed caimans (crocodilians) skulking along the shore. It was whiskey at $78 a bottle that let him know just how far from Brooklyn--or any place else--he really was. He told the bartender nD thanks, and we returned to the river.

It took four more hours to reach Zancudo, the isolated and tumble-down Ecuadorian military outpost from which we would set off on foot. A two-hour hike through the forest lay ahead, then a canoe trip across Iripari Lake to our camp. Pablo, the ornithologist, seemed wary. "Just so you'll know," he said as we stepped ashore. "One translation of the word zancudo in Spanish is `long-legged creepy crawlies.'"

I felt a shiver run up my legs, and I thanked Pablo for sharing.

A doctor was waiting for us at Zancudo. Her name was Dorys, a pretty twenty-seven-year-old Ecuadorian wearing tall rubber boots and a no-nonsense frown. Dorys was a walking first-aid station, hired to protect us from long-legged creepy crawlies and the myriad other hazards of this place so far from telephones and hospitals. Those hazards included poisonous frogs and scorpions and, of course snakes--bushmasters, anacondas, water snakes. I asked Dorys what antivenins she carried.

"I don't use antivenins," she said. "This is better."

She reached into her kit to produce an ominous black "stun gun," the sort people back in Brooklyn use against muggers, Russell pointed out. Dorys pulled the trigger and a blue jag of electricity crackled between the terminal heads-20,000 volts. Applied to the skin, this slowed the spread of venom long enough to allow a chance to get to a Quito hospital. But the blast treatment was very, very painful, Dorys admitted, and I began to wish Russell and I had coughed up the $78 for whiskey.

The hike through the forest, with Roberto up front and Dorys at the rear, was long and tiresome and sweaty and wonderful. Now that we were off the river seeing things up close, a byzantine universe of Amazon insects came into focus. Leaf-cutter ants streamed across the trail, hurrying toward vast subterranean cities. A gigantic moth, delicate despite its size, alighted on Roberto's shoulder, its wings presenting a near-exact replica of an owl's face, a trick on would-be predators. And just as we were getting hungry, Roberto led us to a species of lemon tree covered with millions of tiny black ants. The tree and the an+.s were linked in a complex symbiotic relationship, but more intriguing was the ants, surprising culinary allure. With a wetted finger, Roberto withdrew a few dozen of the insects, popping them into his mouth. The rest of us followed suit, making a small snack of the ants--lemony, through and through--as the sun set and a gentle shower of snowlike cotton fell to our shoulders from a nearby kapok tree.

It was almost completely dark by the time we reached Iripari Lake, canoeing across its glassy water to the camp on the far shore. The camp was a collection of sturdy thatched-roof huts built for Transturi Touring by Quichua Indians. Each hut, Roberto explained, was constructed with a special forest tree harvested only during the days of the month when the moon was full--a Quichua superstition ensuring extra durability. Crowning this antediluvian architecture was something equally exotic Solar panels. Sleek rectangular panels--ferried in by canoe--lay in startling juxtaposition atop each palm-thatched roof, feeding batteries that powered small lightbulbs below. This was, after all, an ecotour. No machinery, no generators, no engines allowed.

I fell asleep that night to the tranquilizing rich hum and rustle of the living forest--nothing added, nothing subtracted.

Soft shafts of amber light streamed through my window, filtering through my mosquito net, reaching my eyes and waking me the next morning. I looked outside. The sun, a stunning fireball, had barely risen above the trees on the far shore. Just as stunning was the sight of Russell's tripod and camera set up outside, facing the lake. He had pulled out the 4-by-5 view camera, I noticed, a huge and cumbersome thing he'd painstakingly lugged into the jungle for greater creative range. Yet Russell himself was nowhere in evidence at that moment. He had taken a few sunrise shots, gotten irritated somehow by the quality of the light, and reached for his fly rod instead. Sighing, I fell back into bed, listening to the morning operetta of a hundred different birds and the gentle rhythms--swoosh swoosh plunk; swoosh swoosh, plunk--of Russell's expert fly casting somewhere in the distance.

After a leisurely morning observing pygmy marmoset monkeys dangling from vines around camp, we all sat down to lunch, and Roberto speaking perfect English gleaned from a year studying in the States, began holding environmental court. By definition, most ecotours have as their objective more than just taking travelers to see pretty things in hard-to-reach places. The point is to educate along the way, to hold forth on the sundry man-made hazards that directly imperil all that's on display.

The overriding environmental threat in Ecuador, of course, was oil. That much I already knew. Thee jungle oil boom around Lago Agrio, to the northwest, had spread over the years to devastate vast portions of Ecuador's forest. When, in 1975, Transturi Touring first organized nature trips along the Napo River to the south, that area was largely untouched except for a population of forest Indians living in a virtual state of nature. But then came oil Seismic testing, wells, a pipeline, roads, settlers. Today, sixteen years later, much of the area along the Napo was a rambling ruin of cleared squares and fenced-in rectangles, a checkerboard wasteland. For Transturi, the fir,al straw came in 1990 when an oil crew brazenly erected a 100-foot-tall drilling derrick directly across from whet used to be the outfit's most secluded base camp. In disgust and defeat, Transturi pulled up stakes and vacated.

The tragedy of this wholesale butchery is made worse, Roberto pointed cut, by the fact that there is no rainforest in the world quite like Ecuador's. Indeed, for all the hymns sung to Brazil's magnificent forest, it is less well known that for sheer richness, for variety, and diversity of life in a concentrated area, the small portion of the Amazon basin in eastern Ecuador, southern Colombia, and northern Peru is the continent's true crown jewel, a Mecca of biodiversity. Some scientists believe that much of the Amazon basin dried out in periods of heavy glaciation during the Pleistocene Ice Ages over the last million years. But isolated areas, including stretches along the Aguarico and Napo rivers remained moist, providing refuge for existing rain-forest plants and animals as well as allowing a staggering rise in new species of both. Today, as a result, this dense forest within a forest, this candy store of birds, is also a candy store of tropical plants and animals and insects heaped atop one another--layer upon layer--in a way found nowhere in Brazil. If it made sense, consequently, to save any one part of the Amazon, this was it, this was the place The fecund and diverse jungle wilds of eastern Ecuador.

Which was why, in 1990's conservation experts at Transturi pulled out a map and drew a wide circle around the lower Aguarico River, around a forest called the lower Cuyabeno. This was one of the last great stretches of wilderness still untouched by oil and settlement in Ecuador. And this time there would be protection. With lobbying pressure from Indian rights groups, international environmental organizations, and Transturi itself, the government of Ecuador in May 1991 established the nearly one-million-acre lower Cuyabeno Wildlife Reserve, a place off limits--on paper at least--to everyone except tourists, scientists, and indigenous Indians. Officially, the park was an appendage to the already existing "upper" Cuyabeno reserve, itself containing more than 750 thousand acres. But the predecessor park, stretching almost to Lago Agrio along the upper Aguarico, had been significantly degraded by oil exploration in recent years like much of the Napo River area. Thus the lower Cuyabeno annex was in effect a new and separate entity, a fresh start, a park immediately heralded around the world as perhaps Ecuador's last and best chance to save part of its exceptional forest.

It was midafternoon by the time Roberto wrapped up his history of the reserve. Russell, who had been listening from a nearby hammock, swinging softly with his boots propped up, had just bolted off to chase Helena, the camp's burly semitame pet tapir. An odd-looking mammal native to the Amazon, the tapir, combines the vague features of a horse arid a pig onto a 200-pound adult frame. Helena was a gentle plant- and insect-eater who also happened to have a sappy soft spot for human beings. Like an oversized puppy starving for attention, she kept loping into camp from the forest and stealing Russell's baseball cap, giving it a light chew each time. She had his cap again now and Russell was gone. Dorys, meanwhile, was feeding bread to the camp's other eccentric pet, an awkward, squawking trumpeter bird named Sophia. Sophia was kept around for her snake-killing skills, something Dorys--who hated to use her stun gun--called "preventive medicine."

I would have enjoyed these midday antics with something more akin to rapture had Roberto not kept talking. Pouring a glass of water, he returned to the subject of the reserve, and I asked him if he thought the park would succeed in keeping oil exploration away forever. He wasn't sure, he said. There were known oil deposits all along the park's perimeter, and no one pretended to think there was no oil inside the reserve. Less than a month after the reserve's inception, in fact, a seismic testing crew had been spotted near the park border at the Cuyabeno River. Two months after that, Indians in one village found dynamite detonation wire actually inside the park. The Indians confiscated the wire and were using it to make clotheslines. Petroecuador, the national oil company which from the start had privately opposed the park's establishment, was now saying publicly that it would stay clear of the lower Cuyabeno reserve. But way out here in the park itself, way out here so far from Quito, things were shaping up differently.

The situation, in fact, was worse than Roberto had admitted that first day. Much worse. If Russell and I had come seeking only flora and fauna in pictures and prose, we had chosen an exceptionally bad time to do so. A showdown--approaching for months and involving Transturi Touring and the local Indians versus crews of unscrupulous oil explorers--was about to reach the shoving and kicking stage. It would begin the very next day.

We were an Iripari Lake when it happened, paddling in canoes--me, Dr. Dorys, Roberto, Russell. It was late afternoon and we were bird watching, taking in another superlative dose of biodiversity. Below us in the lake's black water swam manatee and caimans and piranha of several varieties. But birds were still the marquee attraction. They fluttered through philodendron plants all around the lake--hoatzins, tanagers, yellow-rumped caciques. All the while, Roberto kept telling us to keep one eye on the muddy shoreline for the jaguar prints visible there from time to time. I had my eye on the canoe instead, where a giant iridescent dragonfly had just alighted, the biggest, most colorful dragonfly I'd ever seen in my life. Roberto was baffled by the specimen. He'd never seen one in three years of working as a guide, probably just one more of the thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of life forms in this forest yet to be scientifically catalogued, much less studied.

It was then that we heard the sound, first a hum in the distance, then a growing rumble, then a shattering shriek as the helicopter burst over the tree line. !t came out of nowhere, circling the small lake once before spotting us. Within seconds, the helicopter was hovering directly overhead, seventy-five feet up, the blades causing ripples on the water. "I cant believe these guys!" Roberto shouted above the noise, looking up. "Keep your seats everyone! Don't move!" With its bulbous windshield eyes and long mechanical tail, the helicopter had its own dragonfly look. It stared down at us, creating the effect somehow that we, vulnerable below, were its prey, tiny ants on water.

"It's an oil helicopter!" Roberto cried against the sound of blades. "I've seen it before near Tarapoa. They know they're not supposed to be here!" Roberto waved the helicopter away with his hand, but it stayed. I looked at Russell. He had brought none of his cameras, just his fly rod. I wanted suddenly to throw him to the caimans below.

For about sixty seconds the helicopter stayed fixed overhead, long enough for my goose bumps to grow taller with the realization that this oil-versus-reserve business was no mere child's game. Not in the Amazon, a place long known for its frontier law and violent endings. Nervously, I wondered if the pilots up there were packing guns. But then, just as suddenly, the helicopter banked and flew away, disappearing. The lake was quiet again. There had been no direct communication whatsoever. Not even a wave from the pilots.

"It's intimidation," Roberto said, angrily turning the canoe back to camp now. "They know what they're doing. They're telling us to leave, to clear out, because they're coming in. It's bad."

That night, in the camp's main pavilion, w e gathered under a bare solar-powered bulb and the atmosphere was subdued. Then, with an incongruous lack of fanfare, a Transturi staff member did something no one anticipated. He pulled out a detailed map of the lower Cuyabeno reserve. The map had been secretly obtained a few weeks ago by Transturi officials with contacts at Petroecudor. Afraid it would alarm us, no one on the staff had shown the map to any of us tourists the day before. But now it lay unfurled on the table, and when I finally realized that I was looking at, I recoiled. There running through the heart of the park, stretching out all along the banks of the Aguarico, were thousands of markings for dynamite placements. Virtually every region of the park had been turned into a grid of lines, with Xs spaced every three hundred meters for detonations that would give a Seismic reading of oil deposits below. One line of explosions, according to the map, would run within thirty meters of this very camp. It explained everything, this piece of paper. It explained the helicopter visit and the detonation wire and the seismic testing crew near the Cuyabeno River. The oil people were coming. It was happening now. To hell with the reserve.

"What are you going to do?" I anxiously asked Roberto, still feeling tremors of shock as my eyes lingered over the map.

Another staff member had already radioed Transturi's Quito office about the helicopter incident, he said. Letters would go out immediately to the Minister of Energy and Mines and to Petroecuador and to environmental groups. Some sort of legal action was also possible, perhaps a last-minute injunction preventing exploration.

But Carlos, one of Roberto's assistants, was shaking his head as Roberto spoke. Carlos had been mostly silent since the helicopter incident He lacked the look of fighting determination still remaining in Roberto's eyes. "No," Carlos said, lowering his gaze to the dusty plant floor. "It's over. Nothing's going to stop these oil people now. What happened on the Napo River is going to happen here. I knew it will."

Of all the emotions crowding Carlos, face at that moment, the most dominant was anger. He was filled with anger, and it had a focus. He turned to me, the American, and boiled over.

"I'll tell you what I think," he said. "I think it's funny how everyone in your country looks down here at rain forest destruction and they think, 'How could all those ignorant people tear up such a beautiful place and kill all those animals and make all those medically valuable plants extinct, and then have nothing but a big desert left afterward?, That's the way they think, isn't it?"

I didn't answer. Carlos didn't give me time to.

"But you see what the problem is here in Ecuador?" he went on. "It's oil. We're trying to protect this forest by using it for tours, to let it earn money without being destroyed. But oil is mote valuable. Our country needs oil to pay its debt to your banks. Your country needs oil because everyone has two cars. So my question is, who's really destroying the Cuyabeno forest, Ecuadorians or Americans?"

It was a fair and obvious question, and during the long discussion that eventually followed I did nothing to challenge Carlos conclusion of where the real problem lay. When all the bizarre plots and subplots had played themselves out in the jungle, the final story was rather straightforward: Entire ecosystems were being obliterated in northwestern South America to keep highways and shopping-mall parking lots full in Chicago. Or, put another way, broadening the view, it was an exceptionally sick form of double jeopardy Oil that warms the planet with [CO.sup.2] was obtained by leveling a forest, which, once it dies, accelerates the same process.

But Roberto, for now, was less interested in grand analyses than in sticking to the specific subplot at hand The growing threat of seismic testing in the lower Cuyabeno reserve. As it turned out, our knowledge of the situation was thus far incomplete. Roberto had until now failed to mention one of the last key weapons in the fight to keep oil out. "And what's funny," he said, glancing significantly around the room, "is that that weapon happens to be a gringo. He's a man from North America."

It was then that Russell and I learned for the first time about Randy Borman. For the past two days we had seen and heard a lot of unusual things, and our imaginations stretched in many directions. But the moment Roberto began describing Randy Borman, I wondered even more just what sort of true-life novel we had stumbled into.

According to Roberto, Randy was a thirty-six-year-old Caucasian living in a village down the river, presiding as chief over a bared of Cofan Indians. Born in the jungle to American missionary parents, members of the Summer Institute of Linguistics evangelical group headquartered in Texas, Randy had grown up in large respect like a Cofan, speaking the language, hunting with blowguns. The Cofan were true forest people, not Andean immigrants like the Quichua. They decorated themselves with face paint and flower bracelets and wore macaw feathers pushed through their pierced noses. In 1981, when his parents ended their forest missionary work, Randy decided to stay behind. In 1984, when oil production by Texaco Oil had decimated the Cofan's homeland near Dureno to the west, Randy led a hand of Cofan Indians to the isolated lower Aguarico. Now the Indians had nowhere else to go. They had migrated once to escape oil and their backs were up against the Peruvian border. As perhaps the only Indian chief in South American history with deep knowledge of both Western and Indian ways, Randy had so far proven himself adept at defending Cofan rights and he was instrumental in helping establish the lower Cuyabeno reserve. Now, with oil threatening everything again, he wasn't about to yield quietly, Roberto said.

"But what is he?" I asked Roberto, trying to get a better fix on this man. "Is Randy an Indian or an American or both or what?"

"He's an Indian," Roberto said. "He's white like you and speaks English. But he lives in a village and hunts animals and up here"--Roberto pointed to his head--"he's really Cofan, I think."

I have to admit that so taken was I by the Conradesque implications of all this, sleep came to me slowly that night, postponed by flights of imagination. It crossed my mind to visit this man myself, to see firsthand what sounded like an honest-to-god Kurtz figure alive and well on the shank end of the twentieth century, digging in at his own final station. But it also sounded, at second blush, a little too much like a news story for my taste and for that of Russell. We just weren't the investigative types. Period. No apologies. And besides, Roberto, the very next morning, was adamant in saying the tour should go on as planned, with no detours. Despite the awful seismic map and the helicopter scare and everything else, there was much, much more wildlife to see and he intended to show it to us.

Thus instructed, I strung my binoculars around my neck, pulled out my bird- and plant-life guidebooks, and, without too many regrets, let the idea of finding Kurtz pass from my mind.

A long morning of travel took us to our second base camp the next day, situated near the Peruvian border. We began in canoes, leaving Iripari Lake via a swampy blackwater creek. Roberto was pointing out a series of strange trails left on the shore by bushmaster snakes when our canoes began to snag and falter in the swampy creek.

"Get out and push," Roberto ordered in frustration. "Don't worry. The piranha only bite if you're already bleeding. Jump in."

With a splash, Russell and I obeyed. Water and mud rose up to our hips. Rechristening our canoe the "Amazon Queen," I pushed and pulled and grunted until my legs quivered with exhaustion and my arms were covered with the prickly bites of dozens of tiny black spiders.

Later, paddling again, we reached the Aguarico, then took a left on the Lagarto Cocha, a blackwater river separating Ecuador from Peru. And it was there, on the Lagarto Cocha, gliding below overhanging mimosa branches, that the moment arrived. It was that single, crystallizing, most-perfect moment, the one travelers carry away from a trip saying, "This is it. This is why I came."

They were together, a male and female, sleek and gray, swimming side-by-side, coming toward us from upriver. Anyone who's ever seen the wondrous rise and dive of dolphins on the open sea knows their special grace and beauty. But to see the Amazon version, to see that friendly presence up close, almost within arm's reach on a freshwater jungle river, is to witness something truly magical.

The dolphins slowed upon spotting us, rising and spewing air to star-board, eyeing us with the same curiosity with which we eyed them. It was then that we saw the calf, just months old. It was pink in color, plump of body, tagging close behind its elders with a delicate, cresting dorsal fin half their size. Only when the family finally disappeared behind us, cresting and blowing one last time around a bend as if to say good-bye, disappearing in the murky water with the help of natural sonar, did we go on, glancing back now and then, smiling.

We smiled more as we finished the day, reaching our second base camp without seeing a single sign of further oil-crew activity. The second camp was on a lagoon called Imaya, abutting the Peruvian border. Again there were solar panels atop crude thatched roofs. And again the timber for the huts had been harvested during a full moon.

Too tired for bird-watching, Roberto and Russell and I deposited our gear and went down to the lagoon's murky water to fish for piranha. For bait, Roberto brought a bag of raw beef chunks cut into cubes, pilfered from Manuel, the tour cook. Roberto and I used his gear Bundles of old fishing line wrapped around sticks like kite string. We loaded our hooks and slung them into the water. "You know," I said to Russell, who w. as using his fly rod next to me, "I don't think I've ever fished with beef chunks before."

Roberto got the first bite almost immediately, pulling in his line hand over hand. The two-pound piranha that landed on shore had beady eyes and reddish scales and teeth just as you imagine Upper and lower rows like the pointy edges of a sharp, lethal saw. It took five crushing blows from a canoe paddle to kill it and finally end the awful reflex snapping of those jaws.

I caught the second piranha. Like Roberto's, mine arrived bleeding from fresh, gaping bite wounds on its back and sides. The wounds, Roberto explained, were inflicted by other piranha in the water who pitilessly cannibalize their struggling, vulnerable peers as they're being reeled to shore.

Meanwhile, Russell had yet to make a catch, and in a move both bonkers and highly typical of him, he decided to wade into the wafer for better reach with his fly rod. Roberto assured him it was okay as long as there were no cuts or sores on his legs. But I was nearly hyperventilating glancing at Russell's succulent calves and thighs submerged just feet from where I was pulling in a second and third chomping monster. When at last Russell made his own catch, he was so elated and proud he took the piranha and, before it was cleaned for cooking, had the jaws removed to wear on a string around his neck. There the jaws stayed the rest of the trip large and awe-inspiring, a toothsome jungle trophy dangling just below his now-jungle-worn baseball cap.

The sun had set and the camp was thick with the aroma of trying fish when later I returned to the lagoon to sit by myself for a while. It was a wholly different place at night, the forest, a nocturnal wonder of grunting caimans and cooing owls and phosphorescent glowworms floating through eerie blackness. With only a small patch of starry sky above me, I felt enveloped and secure for a moment, contentedly thinking back to the day's sightings of docile river dolphins and electric-blue morpho butterflies.

But the feeling didn't last. A heavy note of melancholy stalked Russell and me as we prepared for bed that night. Try as we might, neither of us could shake off the implications of Roberto's awful map. In our minds we kept hearing dynamic explosions, thousands and thousands of them, following the seismic Xs spread all over that morose piece of paper. Was it already too late for any other outcome? we wondered. Could Roberto and Randy Borman and the river Indians really find a way to save, at the last minute, this irreplaceable land? Or was it in reality all just one big elaborate joke; the idea of forests as sustainable resources--of ecotourism and all the rest--having arrived far too late in the path of steamrolling Western cupidity to make a difference. Ghastly enough was the checklist in Ecuador. The Napo River: Gone. Dureno Gone. The lower Cuyabeno Hanging by a thread. And who says it can't all disappear, Every bit of it? We tend always to think after each ecological defeat that we'll save some other place farther down the river, over the next mountain, deeper in the interior. Funny how that had been the very idea with the lower Cuyabeno reserve.

That night, for the first time on the trip, I had trouble sleeping. When finally I drifted off, it was to the sound of a lonely guitar being strummed somewhere in the distance. It was a Quichua Indian, one of Roberto's assistants, singing a Spanish love ballad. The song was soft and sad and full of long, slow moans that broke my heart into a thousand pieces.