Like Felix, we kept on walking.  Years afterwards I tried to write a novel about an expedition in the bush.  I gave Yvonne a draft of the first few chapters.  “It’s boring,” she said.  “All they ever do is walk.”

     We came to a bigger than usual creek.  The water in all the upland creeks and rivers of Guyana is tea-colored, not from silt–it’s totally clear, even transparent in the shallows–but from tannin, leached from the leaves.  Since there are no humans or domestic animals up there to foul it, the water’s pure, you can drink it without boiling or filtering.
     It had been a long hot walk and there were deep pools between the sandbars in the creek bed.  We stripped off and jumped in, the water icy, exhilarating.
     Somebody yelled out “Labaria!”
     The labaria is one of the more deadly water-snakes.  Splashing a rain of water-drops we stampeded for the bank.  I looked behind and saw the labaria, maybe three feet long, swimming towards us.
     A shotgun roared.  Spray flew up where the labaria had been.  It drifted past me, inert, a crooked L, its back broken by the shot.
     But we did not resume our bathe.

     The drogher in front of me stopped suddenly.  From a waist-high bush he picked the biggest and most revolting caterpillar I ever saw. It was green and yellow with bumps all over it and hair sprouting from the bumps.  He held it out to me, smiling.
     “You like?”
     Dumbstruck, I shook my head.  He popped it into his mouth and swallowed it whole.

      I was walking at the head of the line, immediately behind the lead drogher.  He too stopped and mutely signaled me to stop also, and keep quiet.  I did so, not having the faintest idea why.  He moved forward soundlessly for a few feet, then raised his shotgun and fired into the canopy a hundred-odd feet above us.    
     A maam, another almost flightless bird about the size of a turkey, came crashing down out of the canopy and lay lifeless at our feet.
     It was like magic.  It was like something in a Christmas pantomime I’d seen as a kid.  The comic fires a popgun into the wings and a turkey, ready plucked and stuffed, falls onto the stage; the audience howls.  The maam, of course, was neither plucked nor stuffed, but I’d had as little idea as that bug-eyed seven-year-old that there was anything up there to shoot.
     But an Akawaio can read every sign of nature.  Has to, in that game-poor region, just to survive. 
     That night, we ate maam and bakes.  Bakes you make by frying flour in an iron skillet.  In the bush, the most unappetizing of foods tastes like gourmet cuisine.

      We reached the foothills of Ayenganna.
     Not that anyone but Bleakley would have known; the mountain was wrapped in thick cloud.
     “Are there any streams up there?” the Swiss doctor asked.
     “I don’t think so.”
     “What are we going to drink?”
     “Water from the bromeliads, of course.”  For these plants hold deep pockets of water in the axils of their leaves.
     “But what about all the insects that are drowned in them?”
     Bleakley’s eyes twinkled.  “Aha,” he said.  “Protein!”

     Instead of murmuring quietly to each other, as they had done on previous nights, the Akawaios were restless, argumentative.  Bleakley went over to see what was the matter.
     When he came back, he said, “They refuse to go any further.  They say the mountain is the home of evil spirits.”
     I could hardly keep a straight face.  In every boy’s book of adventure I’d ever read, the native bearers refuse to go any further because the mountain is the home of evil spirits.  It was just too stereotypical.  Was he putting us on?
     “What are you going to do about it?” I asked.
      “Offer them double pay and a box of shotgun shells.”
     He went away and after a while came back smiling.    
     Now I know why, wherever you go in the bush, sooner or later the native bearers will say they refuse to go any further because the mountain is the home of evil spirits.

      The next night we made a precarious camp on the shoulder of the mountain, and the following morning set out to conquer the summit.
     Although Ayenganna’s a tepui, at its eastern end it breaks down gradually, so there’s only one point at which anything you could call mountaineering is required.  Here the Swiss doctor was called in–maybe that’s why he’d been picked–and he scaled the fifty-foot pitch with a rope, with the help of which we scrambled up.
     Higher, we entered an unreal world.  First, there was thick mist, or  probably cloud, everywhere, so you could see not more than a few yards in any direction.  Second, the ground consisted of a kind of knee-deep paste of vegetable matter, laced with tree-roots that one tried to use as stepping-stones, with frequent failures, needless to add.  Third, it was filled with plants the like of which I’d never seen before.  One in particular I remember: a bare stem twenty feet high with just two objects at the top, one like a canoe paddle, the other like a feather duster.  Male and female organs?  Who knew?  I learned later that the oldest and most primitive species of  palm-tree in the world originated on the higher reaches of Ayenganna.   

     As we got higher, the vegetation shrank to a dense shoulder-high scrub.  The lead drogher cut trail with a machete, or cutlass, as this all-purpose tool is universally known in the English-speaking Caribbean.  We followed, strung-out, in Indian file.
     I was a few feet ahead of Jerry Carter.  I inadvertently brushed against a cut branch and it flipped over behind me, lodging across the trail just above waist height.  I turned to remove it for Jerry...and stopped dead,
     A snake’s head had emerged from one side of the trail and was using the branch as a bridge.  The rest of the snake followed.  All six feet of it.  And its back showed a rich, brown-and-yellow, diamond-shaped pattern, like the tread of an expensive tire. 
     A bushmaster.  Deadliest snake in Guyana, one of the deadliest in the world.