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" Percival Gordon, King of the Howlers In praise of the jungle guide. And a warning: From Miami, you can be in Monkey River, Belize, in three hours. The return trip may take much longer. &amp;quot;LISTEN, MON! LISTEN!&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;You hear them?&amp;quot;  Percival Gordon cut the outboard motor, and we drifted between green barricades of wild cane. Beyond that tangled picket line, from somewhere miles up Monkey River, deep within the jungle, came distant dinosaurian roars.  &amp;quot;Sounds like Godzilla on fire,&amp;quot; I started to say, coughing out clouds of smoke and passing the mighty Mayan spliff back to Percival. The Maya grow all the best herb in Belize, the guide had told me, and their smoke was good for conjuring all the apparitions of the jungle, real and imaginary. &amp;quot;Listen,&amp;quot; Percy Gordon said, holding up a hand. The river burbled under the boat, and the harsh, guttural shrieks came again and again, regular as a bombardment. Black howler monkeys, maybe several troops, sounding their morning territorial bellowings from the treetops. Alouatta pigra, just twenty-five pounds max, is the earth&amp;#039;s loudest land creature; the alpha-male monkey&amp;#039;s high-decibel kiss-my-asses can be heard from as far as three miles away. The monkeys called again, and Percival chuckled, probably because he had just then figured out the monkeys&amp;#039; true tree address, somewhere in the seemingly limitless bush of the Toledo district of southern Belize. &amp;quot;Ya, mon, what I tell you, we find lots of monkeys, for true.&amp;quot; He tugged the starter cord and the Honda 50 grumbled to life, and we sped off in pursuit of the outrageous roars. Seated on the bow with his arm slung over the throttle, Percival Gordon assumed a heroic pose--Moses, the tiller for tablets, or Lorenzo de&amp;#039; Medici on his tomb--utterly relaxed, sufficient, as inevitable to his boat as rider to horse. I sat below on the middle bench of the twenty-five-foot open fishing boat, Laoco\u00F6n in fogged reading glasses, struggling in the coils of microphone cords and camera gear. I was taking my first baby steps to videotaping wildlife, but it was turning out to be more productive to shoot Percival Gordon--jungle genius, beastmaster, ace jungle-river guide--especially when the mood struck and he channeled his flamboyant alter ego, Barracuda Billy. &amp;quot;Up that creek, there, called Black Creek, I killed a jaguar,&amp;quot; Percy said, throttling down the Honda until it was just a background harmonic for his narrative mood. I sensed a Barracuda Billy moment coming and shot him in close-up. &amp;quot;I was huntinin&amp;#039;,&amp;quot; he said, his Garifuna dialect giving the word a double gerund. (Fishinin&amp;#039;, huntinin&amp;#039;--they double up on the best things.) &amp;quot;Not in this boat but a dory.&amp;quot; He meant the little dugout canoes that the Belizeans sometimes still use. &amp;quot;There was a great big tree fall across that creek, so I lean way back to get under it.&amp;quot; He mimed the backbend, tilting back his bearded face. &amp;quot;I look up and there&amp;#039;s this jaguar, right above me on the trunk of the tree, ready to jump. And he jump! He go for me, bwah! But I always have my gun ready. I&amp;#039;m falling backward from the jaguar and shooting at the same time. I paddle like hell away from that place, mon. When I come back, real quiet, sneaking around, I see he dead, all right, shot right here.&amp;quot; He touched a finger to the center of his forehead and winked--hey, why shoot a leaping jaguar in any other place?  Carving a hard starboard turn, Percy coasted the boat silently into the overhanging brush. Vampire bats (impossible to video in their camouflaged clusters) thrived in the perpetual dusk of the thick brush at the river&amp;#039;s edge. A brief bushwhack took us to where the jungle opened up and there was room to walk and gaze up at the high hollow places in the hundred-foot canopy. It was the rainy season, so the jungle was flooded in spots. We slogged through mocha water up to our knees, Percy slashing with his machette (two syllables here in southern Belize: machet), me staggering behind, videotaping, trying to keep him centered in the LCD display, which was a little like backing a car through shrubbery using only the side-view mirror. With each zig and zag, the howler whoops intensified. The alpha males must&amp;#039;ve known we were coming by then. Wherever you looked, there was the monotony of a million wading trees, like botanical wallpaper on a planetary scale. The mosquitoes were ferocious if you slowed down. It was slog or die. Percy, you ever have to save anybody who was lost here before? &amp;quot;More than a few,&amp;quot; he said, slicing a vine with the machette. &amp;quot;More than a few.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;They must&amp;#039;ve been very grateful!&amp;quot; I yelled. We had to shout now to be heard over the howlers, and about then I started psychically wincing, flinching on the level of my autonomic nervous system: &amp;quot;How ya like being shouted at? Huh? Don&amp;#039;t like it, do ya?! Huh? Huh!&amp;quot; Oh, Jesus, no, I never have liked being shouted at. It seemed we hiked under a weight of vibrational admonition unknown since the last moments of Eden. &amp;quot;Whup, whup, whup, whaaa!&amp;quot; Percy suddenly shouted. At that, the monkeys went ape-shit--literally--shat and pissed at us en masse. Percy allowed himself a muffled little chuckle from his safe position a few paces back. But finally, by following the descents of their contemptuous droppings, I caught a glimpse of many dark, furry bodies rustling the leaves. Now, to really push his buttons, Percy started slapping the trunk of the alpha male&amp;#039;s tree with the broad side of the machette, belting out his challenge at the same time. Whack, whack, whack! &amp;quot;Whup, whup, whup, whaaaa!&amp;quot; That pushed the alpha male right over the edge.  &amp;quot;Here he come! Here he come!&amp;quot; And here he came, rumbling down the limb, posturing like crazy, strumming at his chest as if playing some sort of pain-releasing air-guitar. On the charge, alpha monk shaped his mouth into a big black O, and, with his throat expanding like the bell of a trumpet, he aimed his wrath at us and gave us hell. It was the primal scream at the primal scene, how great Nobodaddy Himself might sound as he came roaring out of the celestial sheets of the firmament, his coitus with the cosmos interruptus: &amp;quot;Can&amp;#039;t you give us some fucking peace, you little shits?&amp;quot; Wild ferocity is something you don&amp;#039;t see much of anymore, and nowhere else that I know of will you see such a sustained barrage as the one provoked by Percival Gordon. It resonated with me in a place of great infantile vulnerability and thwarted oedipal competitiveness. Now that we&amp;#039;d stopped, the mosquitoes caught up. They lined up along my fingers as I tried to hold the camera still. One at a time, they bit the end of my nose, and two by two they climbed into my ears like jet pilots revving the turbines of my nervous system. Percy orchestrated a couple more shout-ing contests, during which I thought the howler might simply blow up. Instead, he abruptly concluded his tirade and wandered back up the limb, and they all--wives, children, the one-day successor to the throne sulking among the ladies--departed for another tree, their languid brachiation making a great show of having meant to move all along. &amp;quot;You get the shots?&amp;quot; Percy asked. &amp;quot;I look one time you got the shot right on his balls. Heh, heh, heh.&amp;quot; Well, that was thematic, anyway. But my best shots, I was sure, were close-ups of Percy issuing his challenge, standing up to that monkey braggadocio, laughing--Barracuda Billy at his best. We were two hours up the river from Percival Gordon&amp;#039;s village, also called Monkey River, and we made it back in time for lunch at Miss Alice&amp;#039;s Restaurant, where his mother, Alice herself, served us spicy creole-style fish and rice and fresh avocado slices. I had to keep reminding myself: Miami International was just three hours away. Hell, Placencia, a growing beach-resort town, was only forty minutes away, though by a tricky water route over shallow reefs and through a maze of mangrove passages. Closer still, on the north side of Monkey River, about a mile apart from each other, were two beachfront micro-resorts, the terminal tentacles of the encroaching universal middle class, offering complete comfort and fully stocked bars. Both take Visa. But Monkey River village, on the far side, was still floating free, for good and ill, of all that.  It&amp;#039;s the kind of place where not long ago a local looked up from his TV and saw a jaguar peering in through his window. Where, obeisant to their own obscure schedule, ants periodically enter the village, billions of them, a great licking tongue out of the bush, and there&amp;#039;s nothing you can do but stay out of their way while they take whatever they want, which fortunately is just tiny particles of rubbish. They just come right in and clean house. A generation ago, Monkey River thrived as a banana town. Freighters from Great Britain anchored offshore near the river mouth, and men paddled dugouts laden with fruit out to the ships, men who were giants of strength and labor, who commanded intimate knowledge of sea and jungle and were wise with the perennial wisdom that stretches all the way back to the first men, and that is everywhere being lost. Then a fungus struck the banana plants, and the work moved inland and north, and Monkey River&amp;#039;s population began to dwindle, from several thousand down to its current 189 souls.  &amp;quot;Too much bush!&amp;quot; was how Alice summed up Monkey River&amp;#039;s civic crisis. &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;ve forgotten us in Belize City, and now the jungle take over.&amp;quot; She said the young people didn&amp;#039;t care to know the jungle anymore. They&amp;#039;d rather make some money lobstering, or guiding, and stay away from the bush. Percy did some lobstering, partners with two of his brothers, and guided, of course, but he was still a hunter, and that more than anything else, I think, made him the best guide. He still had a real relationship with the bush. Out on the river, he was a fount of bittersweet Rastafarian homilies on the bush that praised as much as they described. &amp;quot;That iguana,&amp;quot; he would say, amused, congratulatory, his voice gone all syrupy with the sheer leisureliness of bush life at its best, &amp;quot;is gonna just eat those good morning-glory flowers or look for some figs or plums that he likes. Right now he&amp;#039;s just enjoying the sunshine, warming himself up, eatin&amp;#039; a little, lookin&amp;#039; aroun&amp;#039;.&amp;quot; He appreciated all the animals&amp;#039; abilities to make themselves comfortable, to work their gigs as copacetically as they could, and then chill out somewhere, in nooks and crooks and fine lookouts, and savor the sweet flavor of passing life. And wasn&amp;#039;t that a lot like life in Monkey River? Hardly anybody had the kind of job where you had to be somewhere at a certain time or answer to a boss. The lobstermen would blow off work whenever they weren&amp;#039;t in a lobsterinin&amp;#039; mood. There were no police in Monkey River, though there was a dilapidated jailhouse that nobody had ever been locked up in except the former policeman himself, who&amp;#039;d briefly gone giddy with power and rum and made an ass of himself at a village dance. The community locked him up, then he quit, and there was no replacement on the way. There are no cars in Monkey River. The streets are all of grass. They&amp;#039;d been newly mown when I arrived. Shredded candy wrappers were blowing around everywhere, attesting to all the kids with a sweet tooth, and to the two little general stores where their cravings could be appeased. &amp;quot;You can go anywhere you want here, do anything you like,&amp;quot; Percy had told me when he first brought me ashore. And so it had seemed to me a place of great peace and leisure. I woke up every morning with the roosters at around 4:00 A.M. and looked out the window of my room in Enna&amp;#039;s Hotel--ALL NIGHT ELECTRIC FAN, the hand-painted sign advertised--and across the grassy alleyway my neighbor would already be up, sitting on his stoop. And though I would go back to sleep, when I awoke again hours later, he would still be at his meditations, a real Zen master. By first real light, Alice would be in the restaurant kitchen setting great cast-iron pots on low heat, where they&amp;#039;d simmer all day. I&amp;#039;d hear the shh! shh! shh! of Alice&amp;#039;s slippers scraping along the hard-packed dirt outside the restaurant and know the kettle was on. By eight in the morning, there&amp;#039;d be a considerable stir of extended family and visiting neighbors in the cool covered space under Alice&amp;#039;s house on stilts, where they would talk into the afternoon, maybe chop a bit of coconut, do some laundry by hand. In the heat of the day, many of the women gathered under the shade of a palm and played hours of bingo. From anywhere in the village, you could hear Shirley, the great bingo caller, crying out, &amp;quot;O niney-one! B tree!&amp;quot; By the river, on the other side of town, a block away, the men assembled around a bench they called the Base and bragged and smoked and gossiped the day away. With a little effort (though also with considerable skill and knowledge), the people of Monkey River could, from the sea and the jungle, satisfy all their needs--except perhaps a certain sort of ambition, and frozen margaritas.  It was in search of the latter that Percival and I crossed the river that Saturday afternoon and dropped by the Monkey House Resort, where we met proprietor Martha Scott, a former oil-rig environmental technician from Texas. Monkey House had a computer, which was kept covered in plastic, and a Web site, and since this was just after the Love Bug virus, we talked about that and other online menaces. Percy had told me great stories about the monsters of the bush--Mama La Teytey, a female vampire that flew in a ball of fire; the Duende, a backwards-footed dwarf who wore a great hat that hid his face; and even Barracuda Billy, the archetypal Belizean wild man, the local Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, who was a monster of indigenous competence, a wooer of lost women, too true, too much dude. So I told Percy about some of the north&amp;#039;s goblins--computer crooks, identity thieves. One had recently got hold of my wife&amp;#039;s credit-card number and was buying airline tickets out the wazoo. Not that we were going to  have to pay, but still. Scary, eh? Was Percival Gordon impressed? I guess I was hoping so. Then Martha, Percy, and I headed up the coast to Bob&amp;#039;s Paradise for a couple more rounds. Bob&amp;#039;s setup was a lot like the Scotts&amp;#039; Monkey House--a few tastefully appointed rooms, a palm-thatched beachfront bar. His partner, Blanca, brought out chips and salsa, and we drank beer and watched the pet chicken lay an egg between Coke cartons behind the bar. Entertaining at a certain level of intoxication. After a few Belikins, Bob told us how he&amp;#039;d come to be Bob of Bob&amp;#039;s Paradise, how he&amp;#039;d survived a series of meretricious ex-wives and grueling sixteen-hour shifts as a pastry chef working for alimony money and emerged miraculously from the concrete hell of south Florida, big-bellied and bald as a baby, new-born in Belize. &amp;quot;Where I don&amp;#039;t have to do a goddamn thing I don&amp;#039;t want to do ever again!&amp;quot; By this time Blanca had put on a rock &amp;#039;n&amp;#039; roll tape, and she and Martha were dirty dancing with each other behind the bar. I challenged Percy to a game of horseshoes, and, with Bob loudly cheering against me, I kicked Barracuda Billy&amp;#039;s butt in match after match. (He&amp;#039;d never played before; I have a pit behind my house.) And I was on, baby! I&amp;#039;d been in Percy&amp;#039;s territory all week, following his lead; now he was in mine--clang! clang!--piss-artist that I am. I was merciless with the shoes. But I don&amp;#039;t think it was losing at horseshoes that Percival Gordon minded. No, more likely it was the whole week of having the camera in his face and just the steady abrasion of two men in a small boat that got him worrying about what we were doing with the camera and what it might mean for him and Monkey River, if anything at all. Then it was my last day; we were just prowling the river, and Percy talked about one of the best times he&amp;#039;d ever had on Monkey River. He&amp;#039;d been hired as a guide for researchers from the University of Calgary who were studying the howler monkeys, and they&amp;#039;d recorded his howler calls along with the real thing. &amp;quot;The machine was fooled,&amp;quot; he told me. &amp;quot;It couldn&amp;#039;t tell a difference.&amp;quot; One day he shot an antelope for them and roasted it, a feast for everyone, and one night, taking some of the grad students out in his boat for a cruise, he caught a four-foot crocodile for a joke. He told me how he ordered everybody out of the boat, so that they gathered round him, up to their thighs in the water. And then, when everybody was real quiet and close, he goosed the croc. &amp;quot;It goes, &amp;#039;Bwaahh!&amp;#039; Just crazy, mon, trying to get away, and I look around and they all piled in the boat, everybody just jump in the boat and everybody laughing, freaked out! I make a fire that night on the sandbar, and we have these good bottles of rum, and one of the girls, she say, &amp;#039;You Barracuda Billy, all right. You wrestle crocodiles and drink jaguar blood!&amp;#039; &amp;quot;  Percy&amp;#039;s mood changed after he told me that. Maybe he was thinking--though I&amp;#039;ll never know--that if chance had willed otherwise, he&amp;#039;d have been one of those university kids. He was smart enough, but in Monkey River the sea served for high school, the jungle for college. And maybe he&amp;#039;d fallen a little in love with that coed who&amp;#039;d called him Barracuda Billy, that cool young thing from the U of C in the great frozen north. &amp;quot;If I had the money, I&amp;#039;d be out of here like a flash, bwah!&amp;quot; he told me. I was shocked. What a waste that would be--Barracuda Billy working to pay his mortgage in some suburb, like me.  Then he said, &amp;quot;Listen. When you gone, they gonna come to me. These people that you taken their picture, they gonna come to me with their shit.&amp;quot; I knew what he was talking about. The guys at the Base, the gossip group. I could imagine the sort of envy that might arise in a tiny community where everybody knew absolutely everything about one another. And there I was, mercifully oblivious, wielding that little camera on a stick all week as if it were a Car Vac and I was sucking up all the authenticity from every corner of the place--worse than the fucking ants. And there was Percy helping me to it, the &amp;quot;star&amp;quot; of something suspiciously like TV, probably making a lot of money while nobody else got anything. But there was nothing I could do about that. Except become extremely paranoid for a little while. Percy had talked a lot about hunting wild boar in the swampy jungle bottomlands, how they traveled in herds of a hundred or more and you could hear them from far away, the gnashing of their tusks like cicadas. &amp;quot;You got to have your shit, mon! You gon&amp;#039; hunt the boar, you got to have some balls, bwah!&amp;quot; And he&amp;#039;d talked about shooting the gibnut, a rodent the size of a suckling pig, easier game (also known as the royal rat, because Queen Elizabeth had eaten one on her visit to Belize). Now I got hung up on that word--gibnut, geebnut, give not. I was the give not! Barracuda Billy was gonna fucking shoot me. And then I had a moment of inspiration. Percy had just spotted a basking crocodile, just a little six-footer, and since I&amp;#039;d blown it the last time we&amp;#039;d found one--couldn&amp;#039;t get focused in time, didn&amp;#039;t anticipate its slithering retreat--I handed over the camera to him. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve got better eyes than I do. You shoot it.&amp;quot; Of course, I was getting the better end of the deal again. I got to drive the boat, which I&amp;#039;d been dying to do all along. Percy shot the croc, and he shot Percy Jr. on the prow, chip off the Barracuda Billy block. He was the auteur now, and I was the kibitzer at the stern, saying, &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s a good shot there, yeah, shoot that,&amp;quot; as he&amp;#039;d been doing to me all week. And he shot me at the tiller--a lot!--flipping the LCD display around so I could admire myself in miniature, as I&amp;#039;d done for him, to him, plenty of times. &amp;quot;Cool!&amp;quot; I said. There I was, sunburned, twitchy, nervous, uncertain about the boat, uncertain about the river, uncertain about everything except that whatever it was we were doing, we were finally in it together.  [ BELIZE DIGEST-] Dial this number--011-501-62-2014--and a phone will ring in the jungle. Ask for Percival Gordon, and if he is within earshot, your planning is pretty much done. Percival (or another licensed guide) will arrive by boat to meet your plane at the Placencia airstrip and ferry you to Monkey River village. For total immersion in Garifuna culture (that great mix of African and Carib Indian), abide awhile at either Enna&amp;#039;s Hotel or the Sunset Inn (both about $25), where the ambience is absolutely &amp;quot;for true.&amp;quot; Two micro-resorts on the north side of Monkey River offer a compromise between relatively bustling Placencia and Monkey River village: The Monkey House, 011-501-61-2032, $75--$100; and Bob&amp;#039;s Paradise, 011-501-61-2024, $75--$100. Avon&amp;#039;s Skin-So-Soft is the best antidote to mosquitoes, which aren&amp;#039;t too bad between September and March, the best time for wildlife viewing. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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