A thousand insects hummed in the canopy overhead as we set off down a path only Miltón could see. The air was thick with moisture, and vines seemed to stretch towards the rich earth even as I watched. Miltón put the machete to good use, hacking away creepers that had grown up in the last few days, pointing out inch-long stinging Conga ants to avoid grabbing, and quietly dispatching a small poisonous snake that coiled on the trail, nearly invisible.

CAPTION, by Sarah Hamilton

Miltón paused periodically, shaking sweet, chalky berries from a tree; splitting vines to weave a basket as he walked; and chipping flakes of bark off medicinal trees. One vine tasted like mint and worked like novocaine, and we were told that local people used the sap of another as a curative for everything from cuts to bronchitis to stomach cancer. Miltón showed scars and told stories of ulcers and wounds healed by Sangre de Drago (‘Blood of the Dragon,’ so named for the ruby-red sap that oozes from cuts in the bark)—I later learned the tree was subject to several medical patents by pharmaceutical companies.

Each day we took a different path in the jungle, and each was filled with all the adventure I could want. Hearing a rustling in the underbrush along one well-traveled trail, Miltón whistled a few low notes. A few moments later our party was joined by a baby tapir, weighing perhaps two hundred pounds, which approached to have his back scratched and to eat leaves from our hands.

A snail the size of a softball crawled slowly up a tree nearby, specimens from some of Ecuador’s 1,500 bird species called overhead, and red orchids glowed amidst the darkness of the trees. With a mischievous grin, Miltón sure-footedly hopped over fallen trunks across a swamp so deep that when I inevitably fell in, only a frantic grab at a hanging vine kept me from sinking to my shoulders. The mud, miraculously, washed out of my clothes in the torrential rainstorm later that afternoon.

Cloudburst, by Sarah Hamilton

We learned to fish for piranha in the tributaries of the Rio Napo using only a string and a hook baited with raw meat, dangled in the same pool that visitors sometimes swam in. Miltón brought out a blowgun, used by locals to hunt monkeys and birds, and I tried my hand at wielding the heavy, six-foot weapon, missing my target by several feet every time. We meandered down wide footpaths to visit a traditional community down by the riverbank, where two little boys in shorts and t-shirts watched us warily from their open-sided homes while their puppy, a piece of red yarn tied around its neck, waggled over to investigate.

Evenings were spent with more traditional meals, rich with thick-kernelled maize and sweet root vegetables, and cold beer from the lodge’s bar. We befriended the two big geckos that lived in our roof, and found them overhead each night before retiring under a mosquito-net canopy.

On clear nights, we took nocturnal canoe rides and tiptoed along a riverside path, in search of tiny green tree frogs and the twin rubies, glowing in the darkness that betrayed the location of a caiman. The Amazon is home to several species of these South American alligators, including monster movie-worthy black caimans that can grow to twenty feet in length. Those terrors are rarely seen, as they tend to avoid humans, and the specimens we came across—the much smaller spectacled caimans—slipped away shyly as soon as our lights caught them.

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