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Paul kvinta

Jungle Pigs

"Be very quiet," Gustavo whispers. "Don't move." It's a strange request. We're deep inside Corcovado National Park, and I'm concentrating on a white hawk through the scope the biologist has set up for me. But when I glance up from the scope, I see what has my guide concerned. There, on the trail 20 feet before us, stands a pack of wild tusked pigs, white-lipped peccaries to be precise, two dozen of them, snouts high in the air and sniffing frantically. Fortunately, we're downwind of the beasts, but they suspect something, and they register anxiety by slamming their jaws together--chomp! chomp!--an unnerving sound, to say the least. "Stand completely still," urges Gustavo.

We'd been slogging through the mud since early this morning, and the jungle wasn't giving us much love. Already, a bunch of spider monkeys had pelted us with avocados, a gang of howler monkeys had realigned our boxers with a murderous shriek, and, most ignominious, a troop of capuchin monkeys had tried to piss on us from 60 feet up. As for the hairy black pigs that now want us dead, Gustavo and I had been tracking them for about two hours. Rather, we'd been tracking the jaguar that had been tracking the pigs. The story kept repeating itself in the fresh mud--a flurry of cloven hoofprints followed by the large outline of a feline paw.

As we followed the tracks beneath the sun-blocking canopy of towering trees, my biologist guide often stopped at the faintest twig snap. Then he'd set up the scope and have me peer through it: A shaggy three-toed sloth, dangling from a secropia tree. A squirrel-like agouti, rummaging about the undergrowth. A spectacled owl, surveying the forest floor from on high. Other denizens didn't require the scope: Iridescent blue morpho butterflies fluttering before our faces, and white-nosed coatis, cousins of the raccoon, crunching nuts in an almond tree just above our heads.

Now, after posing like statues for three minutes, the peccaries finally bolt off the trail and cut a wide swath around us. I curse. Gustavo doesn't. "It is the jungle," he proclaims, completely unfazed.
A Blessing of Mud
It's August, middle of the wet season, and there are two particularly satisfying results of the torrential downpours that roll through every night--the drama and the muck. The drama takes form in the pounding rain on my cabin's tin roof, along with lodge-rattling peals of thunder that ricochet between massive, old-growth trees. The muck shuts down the dirt road from Rincon to Agujitas from April to November. It's the only road connecting Drake Bay to the outside world, and it's used mostly by illegal loggers. The Osa refuses to be tamed easily.

"You couldn't have a better place as an example of ecotourism," Johnson argues over coffee on my final day. "There's nothing here. You're starting from scratch. They could make this place a model of how to develop wisely."

Johnson, other lodge owners, environmentalists and residents of Agujitas are certainly pushing for that. They're improving the water system in the village and planning a municipal dump. They're raising money to offset the cost of having electricity cabled underground to Agujitas rather than transmitted over wires, which is cheaper but requires clearing trees. There are other hopeful signs as well. The Corcovado Foundation, a nonprofit Johnson works with, is buying up land in the critical buffer zone outside the national park and hiring guards to monitor for poaching and illegal logging.

Johnson is wrong about one aspect of his assessment, however. It's something I don't realize until my final dive, on the south side of Bajo del Diablo. Iliana and I wind through deep, meandering trenches formed by volcanic walls, swimming through busy schools of yellow snapper and steel pompano. We're about to go stalking more whitetips when a pang of nostalgia suddenly strikes. I roll over, peer up at the surface and see the mobula rays. There are 40 of them at least, flying in formation, sunshine streaming down through the group. It's not a mirage. It'll take more than El Niño to scare these creatures away.