Raucous Summer - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 2

The images of the past few weeks crowded my mind. I remembered
Zé, the serial killer who owned the airstrip at Macarão, taking his
gunmen into the bar to liven things up, and the man who had been
carried out with a hole the size of an apple in his chest. I thought of
João, a mestizo from the north-east of Brazil, who had spent ten years
crossing the Amazon on foot, walking as far as the mines in Peru and
Bolivia, before cutting through the forests for another 2,000 miles to
come here. 'I have killed only three men in my life,' he told me, 'and
all the deaths were necessary. But I would kill that many again if
I stayed here for a month.'
I recalled the man who had shown me the strange swelling on his
calf. When I looked closely I saw that the flesh was writhing with long
yellow maggots. I remembered the Professor, with his neat black
beard, gold-rimmed spectacles and intense, ascetic manner, the cynical
genius who managed the biggest claim for its scarcely literate owner.
Before he came here he had, he said, been Director of the University
of Rondônia.
But above all I thought of the man the other miners called Papillon.
Blond, muscular, with an Asterix moustache, he towered over the
small dark people who had been driven here by poverty and land-theft.
He was one of the few, barring the bosses, the traders, the pimps and
the owners of the airstrips, who had come to this hell through choice.
Before he joined the goldrush the Frenchman had worked as an agri-
cultural technician in the south of Brazil. Now, having found nothing,
he was trapped in the forests of Roraima hundreds of miles from the
nearest town, as destitute as the others. Here was a man who had
leapt over the edge, who had abandoned comfort and certainty for a
life of violent insecurity. His chances of coming out alive, solvent and
healthy were slight. But I was not convinced that he had made the
wrong choice.
I cleaned my teeth, picked up my notebook, then stepped out over
the mud and gravel. The temperature was rising and in the surround-
ing forest the racket of yelps and whistles and trills was dying away.
It was now three weeks since Barbara, the Canadian woman with
whom I was working, had found a way through the police cordon at
Boa Vista airport, and had shoved us, unrecorded, onto a flight to the
mines. It felt like months. We had watched the miners tearing out the