Free Predators I Have Known by Alan Dean Foster

indigenous and mestizo workers. Enjoying themselves immensely, they grinned at the two apprehensive gringos in their midst. I could understand but little of what they were saying, but their gestures were eloquent. Resolute but still uneasy, we smiled determinedly back.
    The designated moment arrived. As if on command, the last biting insect vanished from the enveloping superheated air. And as though they had been vaporized, clothes slipped off swarthy, muscular bodies as twenty or so men of varying ethnic backgrounds and skin hues promptly plunged into the lake like so many naked schoolboys out of a bucolic Norman Rockwell painting. We all splashed about frantically, my friend and I in a delirium of delight as the almost chill water banished the accrued and all but crusted perspiration from our bodies.
    Bathtime was up far too soon. Having been warned, we charged back to shore as fast as we had fled from it and hurriedly dressed ourselves—in the same sweat-soaked clothing from which we had just escaped. I felt like a moth forced to again take up residency in its icky, cast-off cocoon.
    Twenty minutes later, we were again drenched in perspiration and glumly readying ourselves for another restless night’s sleep.
    One of the worst experiences I have ever gone through in my travels occurred the following night when the lower portion of my insides woke me from a fitful and restless slumber. Nocturnal urination was not a problem. It was performed outside one’s tent, a few steps into the forest.
    I did not have to urinate.
    Fumbling through the darkness inside the tent, I found and checked my watch. My heart sank. It was a little after two-thirty in the morning. The living, breathing organism that was the Amazon was all around me. The sounds of the jungle at night are far more amenable when experienced in the comfort of one’s own home as they emerge from a movie soundtrack or a pleasant mood–inducing recording. In the isolation and feverish reality of the sweltering rain forest itself, those same curious sounds can be, by turns, provoking or sinister. As an accompaniment to a suddenly overwhelming need to go to the bathroom at two-thirty in the morning in the middle of untouched jungle, their overall effect tends to incline toward the latter.
    I remonstrated with my bowels. I told myself over and over that I didn’t really have to go. I insisted to my intestines that they could wait until morning. With increasing urgency, my innards maintained otherwise. The brain disposes; the body imposes.
    Crawling out of my tent, I flicked on my small flashlight. Its beam was distressingly short and narrow. Around me, the camp was completely silent. Locating the relevant trail that had been pointed out to us when we had first arrived, I began walking.
    Few places on Earth are as dark as the rain forest at night. Like damp sheets, moist green-black walls close in around you on all sides. The forest’s leaf-fingers reach out to touch you, to caress you, to explore you as you stride hurriedly forward, trying to have as little contact as possible with the crush of overripe life. It is not a place for claustrophobes.
    At night in the jungle, a different flourish of life emerges to eat—and to hunt. Spiders as big as dinner plates, snakes whose venom can kill in minutes, giant scorpions and centipedes are joined by all manner of biting bugs gravid with parasites and infectious diseases, some of which are so rare or new they do not yet even have names, much less antidotes. Things that crawl and slither and jump are everywhere, and outside the thin civilizing beam of your flashlight, you cannot see a single one of them. Rustlings, movements, small flurries of sound from all sides tease and confuse your hearing and your sense of place.
    Was that a movement? Quickly, you swing your light around, and you see nothing save perhaps the slight bobbing of a branch or the up-and-down quiver where a leaf has been disturbed. A subtle cough reaches