Howler Monkeys and Serpents

A Strange Day in the Cayo District

By Leland Rucker

 

Yesterday we flew back from Ambergris Caye and caught a crowded public school bus in Belize City, arriving at Mountain Equestrian Trails in the afternoon. 

 

There are no chickens on board or passengers hanging from the outside roof or any of the other clichés you read about Central American buses. We must have stopped thirty or forty times to let people on and off.

 

During the more than two and a half hours it takes to navigate the sixty-odd miles to the Georgeville stop, a group of shacks with a general store not far from San Ignacio in the Cayo District of Belize, we wind up talking with Peter,a fellow who is in his seventies and moved here in the 1950s as part of a Mormon community that has become part of the local culture.

 

Mike Bevis, one of the owner’s nephews, picked us up and drove the eight miles over unpaved limestone roads past the grapefruit plantations and into the rain forest which we’ll call home for a couple of days.

 

We were lured by MET’s advertisement of a horse ride into the Mountain Pine Ridge district, a pine woodland within the rainforest, with waterfalls, birds, butterflies, orchids, medicinal plants, Maya ruins and caves on the schedule.  But we’re here, too, to enjoy being as far away from civilization (read that home in Boulder) as possible. The only communication with the outside world is MET’s radio. There are no land lights to interfere with the late-spring sky.

 

And we came for the chance to sleep in the jungle. We’re spending the night in permanent MET tents a quarter mile from the cantina where we’ll take our meals.  The tents are clean and comfortable, with a Coleman stove and cots on wood floors. 

 

While walking down to the cantina for dinner last night, we heard the familiar strains of —  would you believe? — Firefall. A thousand miles from home, and "You Are the Woman” is on the stereo. I walk up to the bartender and introduce myself and mention that we’re from Boulder.

 

“I am, too,” said Nick, a college student taking a year off traveling the world.  He proceeds to mix us up a round of panty rippers — the local concoction, a blend of pineapple juice and Belizean cocoanut rum — to celebrate. Dinner was some beans and rice plate topped off with a couple more rippers.

 

Sleeping in the jungle was an adventure, but perhaps not what we expected. Mostly I remember the piercing, creepy screams of the howler monkeys. Never mind that they are harmless, rather small creatures, they nonetheless sounded to me like big cats on the prowl for me.

 

Add the bustling of something thrashing in the brush around our tent — a lizard, mammal, a howler, what?? — and what sleep we got was fitful. When the sun finally appeared sometime before six, the forest erupted in a cacophony of birds and creatures saluting the light after the long night. Nobody was happier than I.

 

We had gotten used to the concept of “Belize Time,” which differs from our equally singular “American Time.” The most noticeable difference between the two is that American time puts a premium on being on time; in Belize, you can be tardy without penalty.

 

So it’s eight thirty before we drift down to the cantina, about a quarter of a mile through the jungle, for breakfast. In the daylight, the noise and scenery are quite spectacular, the sun already warm at our backs. Westward, the forest along the Pine Ridge wouldn’t look out of place in Colorado as it glimmers in the morning light.

 

Our guides for today’s ride are grooming the horses in the corral. Our friend Barb, who accompanied Billie and I to Belize, meets us. She’s already been up for a couple of hours helping the guides get the horses ready. “About time you guys got up,” she chides as she heads for the wooden outhouse.

 

I walk on to the cantina while Billie trails off behind Barb. About the time I get to the door, I hear Barb scream. I don’t pay much attention, until she reaches the door of the cantina. “I got bit by a snake. I feel dizzy,” she says just before dropping straight to the floor onto her back. Just like that.

 

Billie located the snake, less than a foot long and ready to strike again, where Barb had thrown it off her finger into a corner of the outhouse. Mike, one of our guides, ran over, took one look and stomped the little sucker dead with his rubber boots.

 

I think it was Mike who uttered the word first.

 

Fer de lance.

 

I had read about snakes since I was a kid, and there are only a few that strike terror in your heart. Snakes you don’t mess with. Bushmaster. Black Tiger Snake.

 

And fer de lance. A pit viper and cousin to the water moccasin, the fer de lance venom system is more highly evolved than most. Also known as a yellow-mouth tommygoff in these parts and a “two-stepper” in others (because two steps is all you get before the venom takes you down), the fer de lance is the deadliest land snake in Central America.

 

It’s both hemotoxic and neurotoxic, which means the venom is able to stop the production of red blood cells and obliterate nerves. And Barb, who got only a few more than two steps, is lying on the floor with that deadly shit attacking her nerves and annihilating her blood cells.

 

Everybody in the camp is running around, most speaking Spanish in anxious tones.  Though I couldn’t understand what they were saying, I identified with the tone of their conversation. We try to keep Barb comfortable; she’s drifting in and out of consciousness, complaining that she couldn’t breathe and then dozing off.

 

The cook heads off in search of cockspur, a jungle remedy for snakebite. But someone else reminds her that it must be chewed to be effective, and Barb is probably beyond that.

 

Nick, the bartender from Boulder, comes running up with the medicine kit, which flies open when it hits the ground next to her, the contents spilling out on the ground around us in comical slow motion. We search frantically for snakebite remedies and come up with some serum but no syringe, and nobody could figure out what the serum was for, anyway.

 

I don’t know if I’ve ever felt as helpless. Nothing I could do, and our friend was dying there on the floor in front of us. It seemed like an eternity, but within 10 minutes Rolando wheeled up in the only four-wheel drive vehicle that worked — he had pumped up one slow-leaking tire before he could even get it up

to the cantina. 

 

Mike, who ran faster during this time than anyone I’ve ever seen, ordered us all to get Barb into the back of the vehicle. I scooped up the medicine kit and dropped it in just as Billie and Mike and Rolando sped off for San Ignacio, fifteen miles away.

 

The rest of us waited breathlessly back at the cantina. One of the horsemen, Peter, told stories of his grandfather, a shaman, now 99 years old, who Peter said was able to control the fer de lance and had the snakes draped on his arms during ceremonies. He said the old man used them as guards posted at the edges of his property.

 

We searched for books on snakes in the cantina library. I read that the fer de lance is a fierce, territorial snake, one of the few serpents unafraid of man and born ready to attack. One anecdotal story related how someone killed a pregnant fer de lance with a knife, and several dozen babies came out snapping and attacking and just as nasty as mom.

 

Everybody hung close to the MET radio, where we finally got a message from Mike just before noon. As it turns out, Rolando made that trip that had taken us forty-five minutes yesterday, past the grapefruit plantations, in no more than fifteen minutes. The heavily armed officials at the police roadblock seeking the kidnapper of a local Mennonite let them right through.

 

We learned later that the Adventist Hospital in Santa Elena had no anti-serum.  At the state hospital across the Mopan River in San Ignacio, they scored, and she was almost immediately pumped with ten vials of anti-serum. There was, one doctor said, no more than fifteen minutes left before it would have been too late. Yet a few minutes after the ejections, Barb came to and was conscious again, albeit with one incredibly painful wound on the middle finger on her left hand.

 

After the dash to the hospital, Rolando sped to the airport near Belize City, a two-hour drive, to pick up Jim Bevis, the owner returning to MET for the first time since last July while recuperating from back surgery. Rolando gave Jim the bad news right away, and they hurried back to the hospital, where they picked up Barb and brought her back to MET.

 

Bevis, a Belizean of American descent, turns out to be an Indiana-Jones kind of fellow, gregarious and big as life and twice as natural. Nobody wanted to stay up in the tents again —too many serpentine thoughts running through our minds — and Bevis graciously invited us to stay in the empty bungalows next to the cantina for the second night.

 

After dinner, Barb went off to bed, while the rest of us remained in the cantina and drank panty rippers until the bartender ran out of cocoanut rum, forcing us to start in on the vodka supply. Soon we could see the light on Barb’s miner’s hat making its way along the path. She said we sounded like we were having too much fun, which we were, and that her finger hurt too much to sleep, anyway.

 

Jim told us stories about his adventures in Belize, trekking in rainforests and along uncharted rivers, about raising his family here and how all four children walked through these same weeds and outbuildings. They were aware of the snakes, of course, and kept woodpiles and high weeds cleared. But even with twenty horses, employees and a large family, there had never been a fer de lance incident. He was visibly shaken about it.

 

Barb told us what happened. She had gone into the outhouse, and when she lifted the lid of the toilet seat, the snake, an adolescent a few inches long, bit her middle finger on her right hand. She whirled her finger, tossing the snake off into the corner of the outhouse where Billie found it.

 

Bevis looked over Barb’s bluish-blackening finger and made a decision. With all our flashlights concentrated on the spot, Bevis lanced the wound. It was messy, and a lot of nasty stuff came out of that digit. But by the end, Barb was feeling much less pain.

 

At the first scream of a howler over on the ridge Jim was off his stool and standing out in the patio, where we joined him. It was, he said, the sound that he said he most missed during his exile in Washington state.

 

Tonight the howlers sound downright thankful, neighborly even.

 

Leland Rucker can be reached at: lerucker@comcast.net