Leaving Madagascar in 1999, I didn’t know when I might return. Our friends wanted to know if it might be next year, or the year after that? I couldn’t say. I had scheduled our departure such that by the end of April, on my 30^th birthday, I would be back home. This was my birthday present to myself. By the end of that trip, though, I had finally fallen in love with Madagascar, and I didn’t feel the predicted urgency to leave.

Then Air Mad decided not to send the plane that flew between Maroantsetra and Tana, a flight for which we had had tickets for months. The plane simply didn’t arrive. Our international flight out of Tana was only 72 hours later. In the ensuing 24 hour dash to get out of Maroantsetra, we tried hiring a boat, a taxi-brousse, and even tried to charter a plane. A fast boat, we had heard, existed in town, captained by the mayor’s son, and perhaps he would take us. Heloise, the chauffer, took us to the weird outskirts of town where we had never been, dense with forest and broken down shacks. Here the son of the mayor lived on a small estate. He was a corpulent man surrounded by fawning women. He agreed to take us to Tamatave on his boat, for the astounding price of 5,000,000 FMG, almost $1,000. I didn’t have that kind of money with me. On the way back to town on the muddy rutted road, deep forest tangling in from both sides, we ran into one of the guides, who jumped into the Rover with us as we tore through town, trying to figure out what to do next. Perhaps we could hire a taxi-brousse.

There were no taxi-brousses equipped to make the long trip south, and besides, many of the roads were impassable at that time of year. We couldn’t count on reaching Tana in three days, even if we had found a vehicle capable of the trip.

Two vazaha who were staying at the new hotel had also been put out by Air Mad’s negligence, as they needed to get home for their wedding celebration. They had enough wealth to cover the fact that we didn’t, and when they chartered a plane, they told us that we could accompany them for far less than they were paying. It was due to arrive at six the next morning, and take off immediately thereafter, so we had to be there early or miss our opportunity. That night there were no rooms available at the Maroa, and our air mattress was packed away behind a locked door at Projet Masoala, so we spent a fitful, miserable night on the floor of the Projet, worried that we would somehow miss the flight, and be out of options.

By morning it was pouring, sheets of water peeling off the sky, turning the still dark streets into pools. Heloise, who was going to take us and our stuff to the airport, was late. Very late. I went out to the main road in town, where he would be coming from, and looked vainly down the empty street. There were no signs of movement. I was wet, it was dark, and several miles out of town a plane would be touching down shortly, then leaving again. Bret went off to find someone, anyone, awake or not, with a vehicle who could take us. He found a man with a taxi-brousse—a tarp covered pick-up truck. We had spoken to him the day before, and though he couldn’t get us to Tana, the airport was within range. Taxi-brousses don’t travel anywhere with just a driver, so shortly he and his two men arrived at the Projet. We loaded the brousse up, and took off down the wet, rutted roads. Over the roar of the engine and the pounding of the rain, I thought I heard a plane engine. Was it coming, or going? As we pulled up to the airport, I leapt out of the back of the brousse where we were sitting, and ran around to the back of the airport, where the airstrip was. En route I plunged into a hole, submerging my leg up to the knee in cold, murky water. I continued on. Rounding the corner on the building, I arrived to see…nothing. No plane. No evidence of a plane. No other vazaha. It was seven o’clock now. Surely they had left without us. I stared in disbelief, frozen, until Bret and Glenn caught up with me.

“Where’s the plane?” one of them asked. I couldn’t speak. It was too tragic. We were never leaving, and I was destined to celebrate my 30^th birthday on the floor of Projet Masoala, dirty and damp.

The driver of the taxi-brousse saw a man in a field nearby, and went over to talk with him. He came back to us and reported that the man had seen no plane this morning, that none had arrived. Then we heard the sound of another engine in the distance, not in the air, but on the ground. The rain was diminishing, but thick low clouds obscured line of sight beyond 200 feet. Suddenly the Rover was upon us, Heloise at the wheel, the two vazaha from the new hotel packed inside the cab. They were frantic, assuming that we had left without them, rather than the other way around.

“No,” we told them, “there has been no plane. It never came.” They were inconsolable. They would miss their own wedding. “Maybe it’s just late,” I suggested, “the weather has been bad, especially for a small plane.” So we sat, the five of us, listening for the sounds of a plane for the next two hours.

The taxi-brousse left, but Heloise sat a short distance away from us, looking despondent and pale. The driver that was supposed to ferry the other vazaha had never shown up, and when, desperate, they began roaming the roads outside the new hotel, Heloise had happened upon them as he was speeding by to get us, knowing he was hopelessly late. I approached him. He looked stricken.

“Is everything okay, Heloise?” I asked gently. He was trembling with what turned out to be a combination of fever and fear.

“I am so sorry I was late, Erika,” he said, his eyes downcast. “Please, please, I am very reliable, this is not something I do. I will be in big trouble for this.” He was sweating copiously on this chilly wet morning.

“Are you healthy?” I asked him. He looked up at me, imploring.

“I have malaria,” he said. “Today I am feverish, but that is no excuse…” I was aghast. Deeply afflicted with a serious illness, he was worried that we would be mad at him, and that for the sheer pleasure of being vindictive we might get him fired. If the vazaha makes a complaint, the vazaha is right. He would have no recourse.

“Heloise,” I said, touching his shoulder so that he would look me in the eyes, “this was not your fault. You are sick, and need to rest. We will not get you in trouble.” He looked relieved.

“Thank you,” he said, smiling, “thank you so much.”

“No,” I said, wanting to assure him that he had done far more for us than we had done for him. “Thank you, Heloise.”

We waited for hours, the five of us, knowing with more certainty with every passing minute that the plane would not come. We tried to assuage the mounting panic by going outside and peering into the sky, dark with cloud, or weighing ourselves on the large scale inside. Bret, Glenn and I had each lost 20 pounds, despite our constant attempts to procure peanut butter and macaroons to accompany our daily rice. We were almost skeletal now, our pants hanging loosely around us, held up only with fraying belts.

At 10:00 a.m. an official associated with the airport arrived. He stood around idly, disappeared for a while, then came back and announced to us that Air Mad was sending a plane. Where this news came from, and how the decision was reached, we never knew, but by six that evening we were back in Tana, with a whole day to spare. The chartered plane, so far as we knew, simply never came.

Madagascar was never a place that grew complacent, or felt satisfied that its visitors had really experienced all that it could offer. As I flew away from the big red island that final time, research notebooks full of data pressed close, I thought how difficult it would be to assess the broader Malagasy experience scientifically. Even in the small world of frogs and wells, intentionally constrained by my experimental designs in order to reduce chaos and uncertainty, I couldn’t keep the vagaries of Madagascar life under control. The weather wasn’t consistent, and the equipment often failed, or was whisked away by thieving hands. Still, I maintained enough control to obtain reliable data, to discern pattern in the frogs and their neighbors, to know that what I was seeing was real. What of my other experiences in Madagascar, though? What of the months of being followed, silently, by naked sailors? Or having a lemur remove a chunk of my arm? What of attending a retournement, and drinking toka gasy from banana leaves while the spirits hovered around the head of a sacrificed zebu? To interpret these experiences, I could not rely on formalized scientific protocol, or on repeated iterations of interactions, or theory. I had only observation, the strongest tool in anyone’s arsenal, scientific or no.

So ends Antipode.

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The beautiful little yellow and blue frogs that I had been tracking for so many months seemed largely oblivious to my presence. They did not yearn to be studied, or known. That desire lay wholly in me. When I went out on a hot dry morning, or a torrentially wet morning, and could not find male Z7 hopping around the edges of the bamboo stand, looking for an opportunity, or female B4, swollen with eggs, even though I had seen her the day before, I was disappointed. When I did not go out on a pale blue morning after a night of rain, because I was in town getting provisions, though I knew the weather was perfect for frogs, they were not disappointed. They did not need me.

And yet I put together their story, in pieces, with several reversals, in fits and starts. There are still holes in that story, to be sure, but there are threads of logical continuity between most of what I came to understand about these frogs, and these threads hold the narrative together in a cohesive mass. Before this work, science knew essentially nothing about these frogs. Now we have a set of ideas and hypotheses, some tested, some not. Hopefully, their behavior remains largely unchanged whether scientists have explained it or not. But, as physics has taught us, just the act of observation affects the outcome of any event. Nobody can know precisely what nature looks like when there’s no one around to watch.

Mantella laevigata are social animals. Being brightly colored and poisonous, they’re relatively free of predators, which allows them to be active during the day, when color-seeing, visually-oriented predators, such as most birds, are awake and hunting. Jessica and I did see one predation by a zonosaur. We also saw an attempted predation on a Mantella by a boa. Two males were simultaneously trying to court a female. She was hopping away from them, when the snake lunged at her from under the leaf litter and grabbed her in his mouth. The males scattered. The boa held her in its mouth, sometimes appearing to chew, but after twenty minutes it released her. The next day the snake, who had lived in that spot for several weeks, was gone, never to return. The frog, on the other hand, though bloodied and bitten after the event, went on to care for her offspring.

Yes, these frogs give maternal care. There is so much complexity in their social system. I am describing here but a thin slice of what I know, and even what I know is probably but a sliver of what is true. Males call from territories they defend, the best of which contain wells—broken pieces of bamboo, tree holes. Other territories are only spots on the forest floor, but males fight over these spots though they appear to be without value beyond their proximity to wells within other males’ territories. These tiny frogs can fight for hours, wrestling with each other, tumbling, chasing, yelling, the same call, over and over again, “deet-deet deet-deet deet-deet.”

“And don’t come back.”

When they are not engaged in these spectacular fights, males may call to establish their location, their ownership of a piece of territory, or to attract females. Females who are receptive—most are not, at any given moment in time—approach calling males. When a male sees a female approach, that interminable call changes, softens. Now emitting a single repeated note, spaced farther apart, “deet deet deet,” he approaches her, and rests his chin on top of her head or back—chinning, I called it. “Deet deet deet.”

“So glad you came. Please, let me show you a well you might be interested in.”

Then he leads her, oh so slowly, returning to her often to chin her again, calling all the while. He takes her to a well.

When finally they do arrive, after climbing the well together, she explores it thoroughly, alone. This, after all, is where her child will develop, if she agrees to mate with the courting male. She may reject the well. Perhaps it is too acid, or not acid enough (they actually prefer extremely acid wells, I found to my surprise). Perhaps it is too dry, or too tall, or already contains a tadpole, which she tries to avoid. Probably it will not contain other species of frogs, or the parasites that prey on Mantella eggs, for the male has already discriminated against such wells. Male and female alike are trying to find the best spot for their offspring to develop, although their interests—that of male and female, the prospective parents—are not entirely the same.

If the female rejects the well, the courtship begins again, with chinning and leading and calling. “Deet deet deet.”

“I have another, you’ll like it better, really.”

Often the courtship dissolves at this point, the female losing interest in a male who took her to a well she didn’t like. Even more often, surprisingly, the male will abandon a courtship, to fight with another male, a male who is sneaking into his territory.

But sometimes, a courtship is successful.

The female may accept the well, and allow the male to enter it with her, and amplex her—rest on top of her in the position assumed by almost all mating frogs. If they mate, only a single egg is laid. Most frogs lay hundreds, if not thousands, of eggs in a single mating, the long strings of eggs twisting in currents, easily spotted by hungry birds or fish. Not so Mantella laevigata. These eggs are laid in protected, isolated water bodies, tiny little wells, on the inside wall above the water. The parents know who their offspring are, simply because they know where they are. With this luxury comes the ability to care for offspring, and once you are caring for offspring, it no longer makes sense to produce thousands of them, for who has the energy to take care of so many? Fewer children tends to mean more care for each of them.

Parental care is relatively rare in frogs—less than 10% of frog species take any sort of care of their offspring. Most of that care is in the rather non-interactive form of egg attendance, in which one parent stays with the eggs until they hatch into tadpoles, presumably dissuading potential predators, sometimes keeping the eggs wet, or free of fungus. Mantella fathers do engage in a sort of egg attendance, continuing to defend the territories in which their offspring are developing. But mothers do even more.

If the single egg hatches, and drops into the water as a tadpole, its needs change. As an egg, it needed to stay wet, and not get eaten, but it didn’t have to find food. Eggs don’t eat. Some species of tadpoles don’t eat either, but most do, needing to eat in order to grow and metamorphose, to become frogs. Mantella laevigata tadpoles need to eat. And what they eat, it turns out, is eggs of their own species. They are cannibals.

As a result, when a female is looking for a place to mate, she is careful not to accept a well that already has a tadpole in it, for any egg she lays in that well will probably get cannibalized by the preexisting tadpole. The male who courts her is probably the father of that tadpole, so he benefits from a courtship in that well regardless of the fate of the resultant egg. If the egg develops and hatches, as the female desires, he gains another offspring. If his tadpole eats the egg, and thus gains strength and size, that tadpole has a better chance of survival. Either way, his offspring benefit. But a female who isn’t the mother of the tadpole is unlikely to see it that way. And so there is conflict between male and female frogs.

Although there is, theoretically, conflict between mother and child, too, regarding how much care the child should receive, and for how long, the mother does want the child to survive. In this system, where tadpoles survive by cannibalizing eggs, but courting females are on the lookout for wells containing tadpoles, tadpoles may sometimes go hungry. Mothers return to wells containing their tadpoles, especially those wells which have not attracted large numbers of courtships, and feed their young. Mothers deposit unfertilized eggs for their tadpoles to eat. And the voracious tadpoles inevitably eat these eggs, sometimes beginning even before the egg is entirely laid.

All of this activity focuses on and around the wells where eggs and tadpoles develop. Males fight over wells. Females investigate wells even before they are reproductively receptive, and do so again before mating. Males cruise wells too, learning which ones have been usurped by predators, or competitors. Several other species of frogs use the same wells Mantella does. Two of these species have extended paternal care, the fathers staying with their brood as the eggs develop, and later, as the tadpoles grow as well. The larger competitor species, a flat brown frog with a pointy snout and attractive white designs on its back—Plethodontohyla notostica—not only stays with his young, but actively dissuades anyone else from getting near them. When another frog, or a person, peers into a well containing one of these protective fathers and his young, the dad emits a sharp BARKof amazing intensity. It’s hard not to keep going back for more, following the same instinct that has people watching horror films and going on roller coasters. The frog, though, is not as amused, and if continually hassled, will climb the inside of the well and bark right at your face, unfazed by the fact that the primate causing all this grief is roughly 5,000 times his size.

Frogs aren’t the only animals that use these wells. Land crabs sometimes crawl into them and stay a while. Mosquitoes lay their eggs on the filmy surface. And the snarled “worms” I had seen eating frogs eggs were actually crane-fly larvae that lived inside the wells. These worm-like larvae, which attract all the gunk of the well, and tend to tangle themselves into writhing knots, will never be the poster child for any conservation scheme. Not only are they unpleasant to look at, they are voracious predators, quickly dispatching with frog eggs unfortunate enough to share their space. But they are an integral part of this system.

These wells, used by so many members of this rich animal community, are rare. There aren’t enough of them to go around. Mantella laevigata has specific requirements for these well—no other frog species, no crane-fly larvae, full of water, high acidity…the list goes on and on. There aren’t enough wells in the forest. When I added more, in an experiment to assess if such wells really were limiting for these frogs, the frogs moved in almost overnight. Adults have plenty of food. Calling perches, water, shelter—all of those resources are abundant in these lowland rainforests of northeastern Madagascar. But wells are in short supply.

When a female of any species is choosing between mates, she might try to assess who offers a better genetic contribution to her offspring, better resources, or better paternal care. But Mantella females are focused on a single thing—the quality of the well. The male can be a highly successful male who defends broad swaths of territory, or one who doesn’t defend any territory at all, one who creeps in and sneaks matings when the territorial males aren’t paying attention, it doesn’t matter. If the well is up to her standards, she will mate with him.

It is thrilling to discover the previously unknown aspects of a distinct evolutionary lineage, a species of poison frogs that are beautiful even to those who usually find such things slimy, or repulsive. True, some aspects of field work are less stimulating than others—the laying of transects, the routine collection of water chemistry data, the iterated experiments. But there is little dissatisfaction in the actual work. I go to Madagascar to watch frogs, and never when I wake up in my tent at five in the morning do I think, damn, another day watching those animals doing the same things ceaselessly. I love watching animals behave, interpreting what they do, basing that interpretation on theory that has worked itself into my head.

This is not to say, however, that there are no risks. People hear that you’re working in the tropics, and the first thing they want to know about is the snakes. How big are they, how poisonous, how aggressive, how many people die every year. How many did I see? Did I have to fight any off with sticks? Despite the fact that I did, in fact, once come face-to-face with a fer-de-lance in Costa Rica, snakes don’t tend to be a big risk for tropical biologists. Especially not in Madagascar, where there are no, count them, zero, poisonous snakes.

Disappointed by the lack of belligerent snakes, fangs dripping with deadly poison, people begin asking about the predators. Were they any really large cats—jaguars, or perhaps lions—prowling about for their next big meal? Were the crocodiles voracious? Did anything with large teeth and a nasty attitude come my way? Anything at all?

The predominant risks are not what you think. Sure, things with sharp teeth kill people. But the abiotic forces, the water and the lightning and the vast distances that separate you from help—these are what you really have to watch out for.

On my first field season in the tropics, I was in Costa Rica with Bret, five other grad students and the esteemed biologist John Vandermeer. John soon tired of hearing our excited discussions whenever we saw the tail of a snake disappear beneath the leaf litter.

“I’m not concerned about you getting killed by snakes,” he told us. “It’s the water that will get you.” He was prescient. Part of the reason the snakes were a low risk was precisely because we were afraid of them, and were careful not to walk around without high boots on, and to never reach our hands into holes in the ground without first investigating them thoroughly by other means. Part of the reason the water was dangerous was because we had no idea what he meant. Water? A threat?

A few days after John alerted us to his fears, during that first field season in Costa Rica, Bret and I were walking across the high, sturdy bridge that ran over the river near our field site. There was a lovely swimming hole, accessible from the other side of the river, and all of us had swum in it frequently. We were done with our work for the day, work that had been particularly muddy because of all the rains we had gotten in the night, and looking forward to a refreshing dip. As we began to turn down the path to the water, a local man stopped us.

“Wait,” he advised, “look at what is coming.” We didn’t speak much Spanish at the time, and weren’t sure what he was saying. We thought it probable that he was just trying to make conversation, and we were eager to swim, so we smiled and kept going.

“No!” he urged, pointing upstream, “look.” We stood at the railing of the bridge, gazing across the wide, smooth, slow river, at the trees on either side, dripping with vines and epiphytes. It was a beautiful scene, but we had seen it before. Really, what we wanted to do was swim.

Then, before our eyes, the river began rising. In minutes the water level came up ten feet, then more. The river became urgent, sharp. Swirling eddies formed in tight deadly whirlpools, then disappeared again. The shores were completely submerged, the detritus from the hills rushing down into the floodplain. Whole trees—immense boles two, three feet in diameter—rushed by. Stuck in a whirlpool, they would spiral madly then get sucked down, shot out like a bullet far downstream. Even on the bridge we were not completely safe. A bridge once 30 feet above the water was now less than half that, and the water continued to rise. Humbled, Bret gave our savior the only thing we had—literally, the shirt off his back—and we gazed at the awesome spectacle for a few more minutes before retreating to safety. We had come within minutes of being torn apart by a raging river in the throes of a flash flood, a river we thought we knew.

Later on the same trip, the six of us, minus John, our leader, were in the dry forests of Guanacaste, in northwestern Costa Rica. Bret and I knew of a beautiful beach a day’s hike down through the parched landscape. Here the Pacific coast is not ragged and dangerous, but relatively calm, with long expanses of white sand beach, and abundant iguanas and raccoon-like coatis living at the margins of sea and forest.

We went swimming in the refreshingly cool water, but as the waves came up all but I retreated to the shore. Quickly I found myself pulled by a riptide, ever farther, and unable to surmount the looming waves that formed just in back, then just ahead of me, as land grew ever more distant. I knew, intellectually, how to deal with a riptide—swim parallel to shore, or even let it take you out a little, until it weakens, then swim parallel to escape its grasp. But with the two threats of riptide and frenzied waves growing in intensity around me, I was scared. I was swallowing water, and growing less certain of my strength as a swimmer, less certain that I knew how to escape.

Finally, feeling myself losing both strength and reason, I dove under, into the seething dark waters, swam as long as I could towards what I hoped was shore, then let myself be pushed by the churning water. I don’t know how long I was under, out of view of my friends, distanced from my own sense of self, but it seemed forever, to them and to me. I emerged near shore, able now to stand in the frothy water that still churned around me. I was safe. I had survived the trial by water that John had alluded to. Never again would I assume I knew the risks of a place, simply because I knew what dangerous animals lived there.

Lightning is another unexpected hazard in the tropics. Bret must have particularly unusual electromagnetic fields about him, for too often he has found himself unnervingly close to the location of lightning strikes. Once, when he was working on a forested hilltop in Panama, a storm that had been on the horizon began moving towards him. He covered his equipment with a tarp, put down the large antenna he was using to radio-track bats—an antenna that would have been a perfect lightning rod—and huddled by a tree to let the storm pass. Soon the storm was upon him, lightning strikes growing nearer. In an instant, searing flash, an impossibly loud CRACK landed so close everything shook with the force, and the entire forest lit up. He bolted, running down the hill toward the field station while all around him, lightning continued to strike, intolerably close. It never quite got him.

All the inhabitants of the field station were standing in the lab gazing up at the hill he had been on, when he raced in, drenched and shaking. The forest was getting pummeled, over and over again, by spears of intense, bone melting energy. He had escaped, this time. But nature is a tenacious enemy, and there is no telling when or how quickly the next electrical storm would move in with such mighty force.

In Madagascar, where there are no large land predators or poisonous snakes to worry about, it is easier to concern yourself with the sea and the lightning, the treefalls that may result from lightning strikes, the diseases that can kill if left untended, the injuries that fester interminably in the hot, wet environment of the rainforest. The overarching risk, that which affects all decisions in northeastern Madagascar, is the sheer remoteness of the place.

You would be foolish to travel to such a place without emergency evacuation insurance, something that, in theory, guarantees an airlift out to medical facilities should the need arise. But this insurance doesn’t really do you any good. At Andranobe, with no radio at all, or on Nosy Mangabe, with a radio that rarely works, there is simply no way to call for help. Even if you make it the five miles to a radio at Andranobe, or jerry-rig a communication at Nosy Mangabe, maybe there will be no boat working that can come retrieve you in your illness. If you somehow manage to get on a boat and make it back to Maroantsetra, how would you notify anyone that now is the time to collect on the promise of an emergency helicopter? The phones in Maroantsetra rarely work, and then only to access Tana. During the floods of ’97 following the hurricane, the two helicopters that landed in town had to be donated by the French government. There are no helicopters to spare in this country. And though lives are certainly saved in Tana, and even in Maroantsetra, with the locally available medical facilities, many more people die than we Westerners are comfortable with. The nearest reliable emergency room is Nairobi—itself a risk, as the blood stores are tainted. Most people try to get to Paris. Arranging for all of those legs of an impossibly long voyage while suffering from a health situation that puts you at risk of dying—it isn’t particularly plausible. The time necessary to get you out of an emergency situation to safety is what will kill you.

Working in Madagascar, the research itself is rich and rewarding, the risks stranger and more hidden than you might expect, but the benefits of such a life aren’t what you might think either. Certainly my raison d’être in Madagascar was to study frogs, to understand a life form not previously known. But this did not fully explain why I was there. It was an excuse to tweak my world, turn it on its head. It is so easy to grow complacent in the comforts of the developed world, to simultaneously grow dependent on and weary of the constant barrage of news, communication, and product. It is hard, when the comforts are close at hand, to willingly remove yourself from their reach, even for a day, much less a lifetime. And it is sometimes surprising to remember that most of the world’s peoples live without these accoutrements for their entire lives. But strip yourself of the ability to order in or dial up or buy now or turn it on, and life is laid bare. The essentials become clear, as do the luxuries that bring particular joy to your life. I need to buy rice, find clean water to drink, wash my clothes, keep dry enough not to mold from the inside. I want to be able to read books, sit in a comfy chair, have time to think. Immersed in Western culture, it’s easy to mistake want for need, and ease of acquisition for desire. Do I want to check my Email five times a day, or is it a strange compulsion that arises only when I can, and am searching for meaning in a life stripped of the urgency of cooking over a charcoal fire, or taking advantage of a hot afternoon to dry out a tent?

Then there is the realization, over and over again, that people are the same everywhere. No matter the culture, there are good people and bad, and finding the good in another culture opens doors of understanding and good will. To find yourself being “other” in a society, when in your own you have always blended in, forces an investigation of the xenophobia in all of us. I can believe that all people, regardless of origin or skin color, are equally valid and valuable, but I can’t have a clue what it feels like to live as an African-American in the United States until, perhaps, I have lived as vazaha in Madagascar. Some people accepted me, some people never would, and the vast middle regarded me with some skepticism regardless of what I did. As unprecedented and difficult as that was for me, I had an out. My life as other was finite, for I was going home someday. I will never know what it feels like to have no choice in the matter.

My memories of Madagascar are a series of snapshots, frozen in time. Much of the hardship of daily life is erased from these, replaced with images of fisher people with mangos, little boys curious about language, brightly colored frogs courting and singing. I remember the sweet smell of cloves wafting through camp, and standing under a waterfall stunning in its strength and glory, and listening to the forest wake up, the ruffed lemurs cackling as the sun warmed their furry bellies high in the trees. The frogs didn’t care if I came or not, if I sat among them on my little three legged stool and studied their every move. But I did. For in starry-eyed retrospect, wiping clean the frustrations and disappointments, these were frogs in paradise.

Next week: Epilogue

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If our trash was valuable to the local people, the stuff we brought with us was even more so. I woke up on what was to be the final day of my female choice experiment to an unwelcome surprise. Robbed, again. The dry bag holding all of my frog song playback equipment—several hundred dollars’ worth of scientific gear, including a tape player not designed to play music, though it would function in that regard—was gone. Some other items and cash had been taken as well, but the sound equipment was critical. Given my experimental design, that last day’s data were critical—without it, I could use none of the data I had. I had to get the gear back, or figure out a new way to record the digitized frog calls I had stored on the computer onto tapes.

The theft sent me into a tailspin, not only for the threat to my research. All of the details pointed to an inside job—the careful point of entry, the taking of an opaque dry bag that only people who were familiar with the lab would know contained sound-recording equipment. It wasn’t anyone on the island, either—Lucien, the only conservation agent there at the time, was as trustworthy as they come. The fisher family down at the remote camp couldn’t be thieves. I felt it in my gut.

Bret and I went into town as soon as we could—the radio was broken again, so we couldn’t communicate with the mainland, and had to wait until a boat showed up the following day. We wanted to get the word out, try to retrieve the equipment (the cash we assumed was a lost cause), and figure out how to get the digitized frog calls onto tapes.

Those first few hours in town were riddled with doubt and suspicions. Edwige quickly went into action, took notes on what had happened, and put together a message in Malagasy to be read on the air from the radio station at noon. Later, because we still had to eat, we went searching for le derniere fromage—our final interface with European cuisine. We found success, but before the woman behind the counter would sell us that last bit of cheese that Maroantsetra had, she asked if the radio announcement was about us. Had we been robbed? She wanted to know all the details, and asked probing questions that got to the heart of the matter.

"Who else was on the island?"

"Just the guardian, and a couple of fisher people."

"Are you sure it wasn't the guardian?"

"Yes, quite sure."

"But why? He easily could have done it."

"Yes, but he wouldn't. I can't explain. I'm just sure."

"How about the fishermen?"

"No, it wasn't them either—we have a relationship, you see. We know each other from two years ago. The man," I paused. This was going to sound lame. I sighed, and continued, "The man, he used to bring me mangoes in the forest." She nodded, understanding.

"Were there any boats there?"

"No. No boats. And it was raining." She was asking all the right questions, but was just going to end up as confused by the whole incident as I already was. We bought our cheese and left.

We went back to the Maroa, and were sitting down to order tomato salads when Felix walked by. I told him about the robbery, and he sat thinking for a few moments.

“Sounds like an inside job," he said. Then he sighed. It was the first time I'd seen him look sad. "Maybe Rafidy did it," he suggested. I gaped at him.

"Rafidy? You don't think he is honest?"

"Oh, I think he is honest, but think about what happened, and what he knows. He knows the lab—he was living in it. He knows what you have—he was living with you, and your things. He is a fisherman, and has a pirogue, so had the means to get there." I was stunned. All of what I had come to love about the people of Madagascar and the interactions I had with them was suddenly in doubt. Were my instincts wholly wrong? Could Rafidy, the radio repairman for Maroantsetra and assistant to Vonjy, have done it? The same man who would fish the entire morning, then present us with fried fish as a supplement to whatever meal we were cooking for ourselves. The same man who wanted to see a picture I received from my dearest friend of her family, and asked me about the details of her life.

My mind wouldn't let this one pass. I desperately wanted to be far away, to not have to wonder at every new interaction I had. Then reason kicked in. If it was a Malagasy we knew, it would be impossible not to be disappointed. But anger wouldn’t be relevant. We are the vazaha, with inconceivable amounts of money and resources at our disposal. We seem to throw money around like it means nothing to us—a whole dollar for four immense avocados, and another for more candles, when we already had some. Some of our friends there might, it is possible, steal from us. But only because they perceived that such theft couldn't possibly make much difference in our lives, but would make a huge difference in theirs.

“It definitely sounds like it was done by someone who knows the place,” Felix said, thoughtful. Then he added, without much hurry, and with a laugh, “but it wasn’t me.” The blood drained out of my face.

“No, Felix, of course it wasn’t you,” I agreed. But in my new, post-theft world, perhaps his words should have set off alarm bells. I wouldn’t let myself question Felix, though. It was all swirling in my head. I couldn’t sort it out without more evidence, but there was no more evidence.

Lacking the ability to decipher the crime, we tried to fix some of the problems it had caused. We made arrangements to record my frog calls at the radio station. The radio station, we’d been told, was across from the bank, in a store (magasin) next to the building where they repair boat motors. Bret knew the boat motor place, and there was only one magasin near it. There were five young Malagasy men sitting on the sagging stoop.

"Is this the radio station?" Bret asked in good French. The men looked confused. Bret tried again, with more gusto. They talked amongst themselves, then asked us, in perfect French, what it was, exactly, that we were looking for.

I repeated the question. The men resumed discussing amongst themselves. Two of them pointed down the street, back from where we came. Two others literally scratched their heads trying to figure out where this elusive radio station might be located. They grew animated, then stopped and asked Bret again what he had said.

"We are looking for the radio station. Do you know where it is?" he repeated.

"The what?"

"The radio station."

"You mean, the radio station?" they asked.

"Ah, yes," Bret agreed, "the radio station." The young men suddenly erupted in laughter, and gestured to the steps under them.

"Ah, the radio station, of course. It is right here." They were sitting on the stoop of the radio station. And now that they understood, they found the whole thing very funny. They laughed at themselves for being thick-headed, and stood up to let us go up the stairs.

Inside was the usual assortment of goods: Nosy soap, mosquito coils, crackers. The smiling woman behind the counter welcomed us, and told us that Monsieur Philippe, the man who ran the radio station, would be back shortly. When he returned, I identified us as the vazaha about whom the radio announcement had been made, which he seemed to know already. I then explained the predicament this left us in—that we had everything we needed to make new tapes, except for a tape recorder. He was eager to help. He led us back through the store, through a room containing bags of rice and a barrel of cooking oil with a slow leak, back to the room that was the radio station. Four stereo components, one of which was a fairly high fidelity tape-to-tape deck, comprised the equipment. One wall was full of tapes, another half full of CDs. A replay of the Peace Corps volunteer Angela's Friday night radio show in English was just finishing. The man unhooked the tape deck from the other components and brought it around to a table with two old microphones on it. Shortly, the DJ, a pretty young Malagasy woman, came in and began playing Malagasy pop. In the background, we recorded frog calls. Everything went smoothly, and within an hour we were off, with many profuse thanks to Monsieur Philippe. Now Maroantsetra had two copies of tapes with male frogs deet-deeting endlessly. The thief, who had probably been hoping for American music, may have wondered at what strange music the vazaha listen to. But he must have continued listening, for we never did see the equipment again.

Pascal showed up at our bungalows at the Maroa, looking for conversation. Bret and Glenn were on their way out to find crackers and kerosene, and Pascal accompanied me on my quest for small plastic cups to replace some in an on-going experiment. As dusk fell, we walked back to the Maroa. Bret, who wasn’t yet back, had the key to our bungalow, so Pascal and I sat on the porch and talked. He asked me if there weren't frogs in the United States. I told him yes, but not so many, and not so interesting, and already quite well-studied.

"Besides," I added, "Part of the reason to do biological research, for me, is to experience different cultures and ways of living. Being in Madagascar is part of why I chose to work on Madagascan frogs." He was surprised at this assertion, just as Emile, Rosalie, and many others had been.

A beautiful young woman strutted by. She had on tight black short shorts and white platform shoes. As Pascal and I watched her pass, he said something to her in Malagasy, in a tone that sounded pejorative. She answered in French, and was gone.

"Why did she address you in French?" I asked Pascal. He sighed.

"She likes the vazahas and their ways very much. She is always going with the vazaha." This seemed like my opening, so I pursued.

"After Malagasy women ‘go’ with vazaha men, do you, or do any Malagasy men, ‘go’ with the women as well?" He shuddered at the very thought.

"No, no. Never."

"Why?" I asked him.

"Oh, hers is a dangerous life. Also, once they have been with the vazaha, all they want is money. Malagasy men can't offer them money the way the vazaha can."

"Why do they do it then?"

"Because sometimes, very rarely, a vazaha marries a Malagasy woman, and then she is taken care of."

"But that doesn't happen very often, right?"

"No, hardly ever. And even if it does, the vazaha usually still has a family back in France, or wherever, and he is not here much of the time."

"So what happens to these women who ‘go’ with the vazaha? What happens when they age, and are not desired by the vazaha anymore?" I was asking questions that made him sad.

"They have a very difficult life,” he said. “The vazaha give them money when they are here, but much of the time there are no vazaha. The women must eat every day. So the money disappears. And when the vazaha are no longer interested, because the woman is getting older, and her family does not help very much, because she has turned her back on them, she has difficulty finding enough to eat. Usually, these women die young." And then he said, in a tone that suggested that I might be surprised by the revelation, "There are many different types of vazaha. Some are like you, curious about the Malagasy, and interested in talking with us. But many are rude, mean, and disrespectful. They come here with their money and expect to be able to do whatever they want. Often it’s the French who act this way."

"You think the French are worse than the other vazaha?" I asked.

"We have a history with the French, you know. They colonized us, and still think they own Madagascar. We threw them out almost 40 years ago, but still they act like we are theirs. When they come here, they do not respect our culture or humanity."

We drifted through various topics. I asked him about his work, and whether he wasn't spending more time waiting now, since there were more people on Nosy Mangabe who needed to get back and forth. He said that yes, he waits for us, sometimes, but that he enjoys the work, and there is nothing he would rather be doing.

"Aren't you also waiting for other things? Like to get married?" I asked. Our earliest conversation had revealed that he had a sipa, and that they were engaged to be married, he hoped next year. Now he was more clear with me.

"No, I hope to get married someday, but I don't wait for it, because it will be a long time before it can happen. Until then, she and I live together, and may start a family. I want only two children, because more is very expensive. But we cannot afford to get married now."

"What is the expense?"

"To get married, we must have all of our family with us. Much of my family is here in Maroantsetra, but hers is up north. Until we can afford to transport everyone here, we can't get married." Pascal wasn’t straining at the hurdles, at the time passing—he was a content, curious man with the love of a woman and the sea, and little else mattered.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked. I thought about it. At that moment, there was nothing. I, too, was content to sit on our little porch, under a deepening night sky, and talk with Pascal. As long as I was in town, though, I did want to get some more vanilla.

“Vanilla, I guess,” I said, and he laughed.

“I know a vanilla seller,” he said, “a friend. I’ll take you to him tomorrow.” And so the following day we were led into another Maroantsetran’s life, that of a vanilla merchant, who presented “only his finest beans” to us, huge piles on a big wooden table in his home. The whole place smelled rich and pungent. Pascal, standing in a corner watching our transaction, wrinkled his nose. Like most Malagasy, he didn’t like the smell of vanilla.

Looking at Maroantsetra as an outsider, the economic reason for its existence seems primarily to be as the spice growing epicenter of Madagascar. Most of the spices now grown in such profusion in Madagascar are not native, but this doesn’t seem to have adversely affected their ability to be cultivated. Cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and vanilla are the primary exports, and the Masoala peninsula produces much of the world’s supply. When the spice boats come in to this small port town, everything smells of spice. After a while in the region, it’s hard to tell by smell if a boat is carrying mainly cloves, or cinnamon, as the aromas begin to mingle in the head as well as the air.

Sometimes spices are for sale in the stores, before the bulk of them get taken south to the larger port of Tamatave. In Maroantsetra, sweet and potent cinnamon is still in its freshest, natural form, thick pieces of tree bark, and costs 5,000 FMG per half-kilo. About a dollar for more than a pound. The store-keeper invites me to taste her wares. It’s like candy, and I realize I’ve never known cinnamon before. The cloves are the same, but even cheaper. So cheap, in fact, that I buy them by the kilo and distribute them throughout my clothes and shoes as the persistent wet of the rainforest begins to mold everything I have. The cloves don’t keep the rot away, but they help cover the smell. After returning home, I found cloves for months, falling out of pockets, backpacks, field notebooks, every nook and cranny.

Vanilla isn’t for sale in the stores in town. To get vanilla in Maroantsetra, I must only make my wishes known—to Solo, at Andranobe, or to Pascal, who knows someone in town. Everyone knows someone. If you wonder what on Earth I’m buying vanilla for, you’ve never been close to this fantastic bean. Vanilla is pure luxury. There’s a Gary Larson cartoon I laughed at, but never fully resonated with, until I started going to Madagascar. The caption reads: Same planet, different worlds. It’s a split frame, a man in bed at top, a woman in bed at bottom. The man is thinking, “I wonder if she knows I exist…Should I call her? Maybe she doesn’t even know I exist? Well, maybe she does…I’ll call her. No, wait!..I’m not sure if she knows I exist…Dang!” The woman is thinking, “You know, I think I really like vanilla.” Well, I’m sure I really like vanilla.

Vanilla is extremely expensive in the developed world, so most things labeled “vanilla” have such trace amounts that you can hardly detect any flavor. Foods proclaiming to be vanilla-flavored aren’t usually vanilla at all, but synthetic attempts at vanilla that manifest as neutral, to which you can add flavor. Americans use the word “vanilla” derisively, to suggest blandness, ordinariness, an utter lack of intrigue. When I was a little girl, I mocked my father for choosing vanilla ice cream—the real stuff, flecked with tiny black seeds—and he would just smile and nod. How did he know I would come to see the wisdom in choosing vanilla?

The edible vanilla bean is the reproductive product of a rare orchid, the only species of orchid among more than 30,000 that yields anything edible. Native to the New World, it is produced in abundance in Mexico, and has been introduced to Madagascar, as well as Indonesia. The pollinator required to fertilize the orchid flower, a stingless bee, is found only in the Western hemisphere, in the native range of the vanilla orchid. Even where it exists, the bee is quite rare, so vanilla farmers must hand-pollinate each flower individually to produce a single bean. The bean, or seedpod, matures on the plant for several months before being harvested, dried in the sun, then cured for several more months. The beans have no odor when harvested, developing their signature scent during the long curing process.

In the developed world, where vanilla isn’t grown except by orchid enthusiasts, consumers usually buy vanilla in extract form—alcohol that has been infused with vanilla beans, then strained. Beans are also available at specialty stores, and increasingly at supermarkets as well. They cost almost $2 each. If you want to make real vanilla ice cream, or better vanilla extract than you’ll ever find in a store, or just smell the wondrous smell, the beans are the only way to go. I can say that. I pay less than ten cents per bean in northeastern Madagascar, and I get enough vanilla to keep me in raptures, the deep, faintly sticky beans exuding their power for years.

Theft took us to the one-room radio station in town, and Pascal led me to a vanilla merchant with deeply polished wood floors. Town it seemed, was full of items not immediately apparent to the outsider. When dogs started showing up dead in great numbers, though, it was hard not to notice.

Operation Chien had hit Maroantsetra. When we arrived in town for our last provision run before leaving Nosy Mangabe for good, we found dogs lying dead in the streets. First one, then two, now a pile of three over behind that shack, another one under a palm tree. On every path we turned down, there were more dogs, motionless. It seemed, at first, that they were merely lying, perhaps sleeping, as many dogs do, stretched out and relaxed, but these dogs were different. Their eyes were open, and flies hung about their heads.

It was raining. As we approached the center of town, the carcasses grew more dense. The zoma was vibrant, rice and fish and vegetable vendors all set up in the rain, with people roaming about with children on their hips and umbrellas over their heads, nimbly avoiding the corpses of dogs that littered the marketplace. Chickens pecked at them. The dogs did not move.

In one of the outlying villages, there had been three cases of canine rabies identified. Maroantsetra responded by mounting an attack on stray dogs, which is probably a reasonable response. Dogs with a rare vaccination certificate for rabies were spared. Beginning the day before we had come to town, and for the following month, there was a human curfew from 11pm – 3am. During that time, the veterinarian and his crew would deliver poisoned meat to the streets of Maroantsetra. Dogs (or, presumably, any mammal) who ate this meat would die within minutes. We did not know what poison was so effective and quick at killing animals. We did know that the second, important part of the plan was not being put into quick action. There was no clean-up crew.

After the dogs were killed, they were left where they died. That first morning, at 9:00 am, there were corpses littering all the streets of Maroantsetra. Rain fell onto the poisoned bodies and ran off, into the streets, where the children ran barefoot, where the food in the marketplace sat, where the chickens, ducks and geese drank, where it ultimately seeped into the water table. By 11:00 am, the dogs in the central marketplace had been cleaned up. By 3:00 p.m., we saw no more corpses anywhere in town. But that night, they began again. The next day, corpses again littered the market and streets of Maroantsetra.

On one level, this was clearly a great mistake on the part of the government of Maroantsetra, to have allowed half of a gruesome plan to take place, without securing the other half. But why was it so disturbing to witness this scene? The remaining dogs wandering about might be killed over the next few nights, and it was hard to look the survivors in the eyes. They see dead others in the streets. Do they have fear? Do we care for those who are still living, or are we primarily reacting to the vision of those that have been killed?

If it is primarily the latter, we must remember that, in our country, such activity goes on in much greater quantity, but behind closed doors, quietly. Thousands upon thousands of dogs and cats are killed—we may say euthanized or put to sleep, but euphemisms do not change the facts—because we have no room for them in our streets. We do not want stray animals roaming our streets for the same reason that people worked through a month's nights to eliminate them from Maroantsetra. Dense populations of strays are a hazard to us. We refer to our control efforts as "humane" societies, emphasizing our compassionate nature. They unrepentantly call it Operation Chien, highlighting its true character: an attack on dogs, by people, initiated out of real and carefully calculated self-interest. Confronting dead dogs is nothing compared to facing rabid humans. We tell ourselves it is better for the animals, but of course it is not. It is better, perhaps, that they never were born, if only to be killed. But stray animals at risk of spreading a disease that may easily be passed to humans are a real threat, and no human society will tolerate it. In the U.S., we are perhaps more sanitary, and certainly more discreet. How much of our despair at seeing these corpses is hypocrisy, much like worrying over the death of cattle while salivating for a hamburger?

Except during Operation Chien, one of the strangest and most obvious facets of life in Maroantsetra is the movies. On several of the dusty streets near the middle of town, wood framed chalkboards announce the movie that will play inside the nearby shack that night on the poorly working VCR and television. The videotapes are probably poor-quality bootlegs from Asia, but because there is no television reception, this is the only visual media most Maroantsetrans have ever been exposed to. In 1999, Titanic was the clear winner in terms of popularity, starring on several of the 10 or 15 television sets. The rest were dedicated to typical Hollywood adventure schlock, or earlier movies of possibly higher quality. Usually a star or two was listed on the boards—Jackie Chan, Steven Segal, Arnold Schwarzenneger. Sometimes the movie’s name (translated into French) and star were so remote from my experience that my only clue to the gist of that night’s promised entertainment was the genre, assigned by the author of the sign. Accion Kung Fu. Aventure dance suggestif (for Dirty Dancing). And the much maligned Aventure Gran Monster (Godzilla).

It occurred to me that, in the States, we might better avoid films that were never targeted at us by careful application of the Maroantsetran “chalkboard-genre” system. There would be Alien Invasion Adventures, and Brilliant Lunacies (Rain Man, Pi, Good Will Hunting). Incomplete Voyage would attract several applicants, the subgenre Almost Incomplete Voyage attracting fewer (say, Apollo 13). For the geek biologists among us, Hollywood could sort films by evolutionary relationships. Birds, crocodiles, and dinosaurs are all closely related to each other, in a group called Archosauria. The diverse genre Archosauria might represent Hitchcock’s The Birds, Crocodile Dundee, and Jurassic Park.

While trying to decipher a particularly complex chalkboard-genre one day, two policemen in dainty pillbox hats bicycled past me, waving cheerily. It was mango season, and there were men hanging from trees all over town. Maybe the policemen were out making sure nobody had fallen, or erupted into fights over mango rights. On that long lazy afternoon, Bret and I took a frisbee out into one of the wide roads punctuated by large puddles and chickens, but little else. Quickly we attracted a crowd of 30 or 40 children, intensely curious to see the vazaha flinging a plate at each other in the heat of the day. They retreated en masse when one of us threw them the frisbee, moving like a wave, but after a few attempts at engaging them, some of the braver boys gave it a shot. On the island, we had been teaching Lucien to play frisbee in the restricted space of camp, and were amazed at his intuitive grasp of the physics involved. These children, too, caught on very quickly. They learned to catch the spinning disk almost immediately, although throwing took a bit longer. Their less intrepid friends were more than willing to howl with laughter at these early attempts, but every time a new child tried his hand, there was one fewer person to laugh at the rest.

Two little girls stood apart from the rest, one dressed in ancient black lace, a party dress from a different time and place, probably donated in Europe with the best intentions, now worn as the sole garment in a child’s wardrobe. Unlike most of the children, and all the rest of the girls, these two did not hide and giggle when the frisbee came near them. The participating boys tried to wrest incoming frisbees from the two girls, but they stood their ground, and learned to throw, too. Perhaps we sparked a love of frisbee in Maroantsetra that day. If so, I feel we did our country proud.

Next week: Chapter 24 – Frogs in Paradise

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On my first trip to Madagascar, when we were in the dry south, Bret and I wanted to see nature untamed. We had heard about a “private reserve” that promised snakes and forest and sifakas, so we signed up to go. Our guide was merely a glorified driver, with no ecological knowledge, and he took the two of us along an interminable stretch of road. We were watching the clock, thinking the road might be the extent of what we saw on this all-day “nature tour.”

Spotting a troop of ring-tail lemurs playing in the spindly, spiny native plants—reminiscent of Dr. Seuss, like so much in Madagascar—we grew excited, and asked the driver to stop.

“You don’t want to get out here. This is forest!” he exclaimed.

“Yes,” we agreed, confused at the implication. “And there are lemurs here. We want to see them.” The driver shook his head.

“Not these lemurs. These are no good.”

“Why?” we persisted. “There’s a whole troop—look, a baby on its mother’s stomach, and juveniles chasing each other. These are wonderful lemurs!”

“But they are wild,” he said. We were silent. “I’m taking you to better lemurs, lemurs that know people, and approach when you give them bananas.”

So this, like other reserves we had been to and were now avoiding, was to be a small plot of disturbed forest where friendly lemurs approached banana-toting tourists. As we were to find over and over again, few people trying their hand at ecotourism in Madagascar understand that some of us want to be immersed in nature, not carefully shielded from its betrayals and surprises.

Conservation is a tricky issue, especially in the developing world. White outsiders want to preserve the environment they view as precious, often without regard for the equally native and natural people who live in it. Ecologists and other trained scientists gain personally by convincing themselves and granting agencies that their work will benefit conservation efforts. Native peoples cannot fathom why the welfare of animals they might eat, or of trees, is more important than their own survival and traditions.

Why do we want to save the forests? Some would say because they are valuable, as potential harborers of undiscovered compounds, which might do humanity a public health service if found. But if we need justify all scientific inquiry on the basis of what specific, practical, benefit it will serve, we are lost. Our culture cannot claim foresight, nor intelligence, nor even a grasp of history, if we pursue only that which can be currently justified as useful.

If not for practical reasons, then, why do we want to save the forests? In part, because humans do not have the right to destroy them, though we have already destroyed so many in the developed world. We did not make them—indeed, they preexisted us, helped shape us into our current form.

But the emotional argument is perhaps the strongest: do we really want a planet without natural places? Are we content to lose all space that is free of human nattering and influence? As human culture homogenizes to a lowest-common-denominator across the globe, do we want to also eradicate what advertising and big business cannot get to? Nosy Mangabe has never been touched by Adidas or Nabisco or McDonalds. Even Madagascar is too small a market for them to be there yet. Coca Cola is there, in drinks with names we don't have at home, but their influence is relatively small. In 1999, the theme song from Titanic blared from every speaker in Maroantsetra. Luckily, Maroantsetra has very few speakers. There are a few huts in town where you can go watch a video on a certain night every week, the name of the film written on a chalkboard in front of the house. There is no television in Maroantsetra yet. Still, our Western influence is coming, albeit under a different guise.

The new hotel, the grand hotel, the Relais, opened in Maroantsetra in 1997. At the time, Maroantsetra had one wheelbarrow to its name, and when Jessica and I tried to commission it to aid us in porting our baggage and provisions to the boat, it had no wheel. Maroantsetra had, as its sole attractant for the vazahas, the proximity of Nosy Mangabe and the more isolated Masoala peninsula. And yet the hotel came to Maroantsetra.

It is debatable whether conservation should encourage tourism at all. It may be helpful to conservation efforts to spread the word about the beauty and diversity of ecosystems in the world, through interested laypeople with a fascination for nature. But should it be a stated goal to attract Westerners to preserved areas in the developing world? I believe so, for the following reasons: naturalist guides are required to show vazahatourists the forest. In general, naturalist guides are locals, and these people will, if they are good at what they do, have an interest in the forest, even a passion for it. Furthermore, if their welfare depends on being hired by vazaha to be shown the forest, they will come to respect and help to protect the forest. They will speak of the forest with fondness and care, to their families and friends. It will become clear to the community that protecting the forest brings money into town, and not just for the naturalist guides. The food vendors in the marketplace benefit, and the hotels, and the restaurants. The weavers who make baskets and hats benefit from our presence, for we buy their products. And the charcoal sellers, who sit at the bottom of the economic ladder among the vendors in the Maroantsetra zoma, they too benefit from us, for we must buy charcoal to cook our rice. Even the vazaha must eat. With tourists come an infusion of money into the local economy. In all of these ways, ecotourists, who come to see the forest, bring an economic bloom to the town of Maroantsetra. The townspeople can see, even if they do not understand why, that the attraction is the forest, and that without the forest, the vazaha would stop flowing, and so would the money.

But the introduction of a hotel such as the Relais de Masoala changes all of this. The Relais charges rates that are an order of magnitude higher than the other hotels in town—$70 per night, while the Maroa charges $7.50. If you stay at the Relais, their vehicle picks you up at the airport and ferries you through town without stopping— Maroantsetra passes by the window. You are delivered to their little haven, which has very little to do with Madagascar. All of the workers are dressed in odd, but specifically non-Malagasy costumes. No other villagers are allowed on the grounds.

Patrons of the Relais are discouraged from going into town. Why make that long, hot, dusty walk, where you might be obliged to interact with townspeople who share no piece of life experience with you, and may not even share a language. It will probably be frustrating, and perhaps even a little frightening, to have interactions so foreign to your expectations. The Relais successfully protects its patrons from ever realizing that Maroantsetra is filled with smiling, life-loving people. The Relais provides European meals, a full bar, hot showers, laundry service. And, for an additional fee, it offers day trips to Nosy Mangabe.

The Relais did not want to advertise Nosy Mangabe to its patrons. Access to Nosy Mangabe requires acquiring permits from government agencies, and hiring naturalist guides from their Association at Projet Masoala. The Relais is otherwise free from such restrictions. Monique, the owner, wanted to take tourists to the flat little deforested island that she had procured, where the Metcalfs and I had spent Easter two years earlier, rather than the lush rainforested island of Nosy Mangabe. But her tourists were having none of it. So she made a bid to take over Nosy Mangabe. The Wildlife Conservation Society has the interests of the forest, and the local people, in mind. Were the new hotel to take over Nosy Mangabe, however, those interests would be turned on their head. It would, I am certain, be the end of the reserve. Monique, and her Relais, are not mega-corporations. Because the new hotel is relatively small, it seems less dangerous. I believe it may be more so.

Before the Relais, the few tourists who came to northeastern Madagascar were ecotourists. People engaged with nature, wanting to see the results of millions of years of evolution in weird and fantastic forms, and willing to be somewhat uncomfortable to do so. The people Monique is attracting are wealthy tourists, adventurous enough to go off the beaten path to Madagascar, but unwilling to endure hardship to experience Madagascar as it really is. These people are probably aware that one of Madagascar's claims to fame is the extraordinary diversity and endemism of its biota. But these are not people awed by nature. They are tourists, not ecotourists, and by ensuring their comforts, and protecting them from interacting with the real people who live just outside the gates of the Relais, it is ensured that their preconceptions about the developing world will remain.

The Relais would turn Nosy Mangabe into a beach resort for wealthy vazaha. I have seen this before, in Central America. A façade is erected to look like home. Tourists hand over large amounts of cash for the pleasure of visiting the façade, and little of the money ever trickles into the local economy. Money would probably be poured into a more functional and beautiful plumbing system; into a kitchen that could prepare meals without charcoal smoke or rice; into easy walking trails. The Relais would probably begin feeding lemurs, to ensure close encounters for the tourists, so that nobody went home feeling they had not gotten their money’s worth.

Money would not be expended for the exquisite naturalist guides who have trained themselves so well in the ways of the forest, in languages, and in how to interact with vazaha. Already there were arguments over pay—the hotel did not want to pay the minimal rate the guides had agreed upon among themselves. Little of the money spent by tourists at the Relais went to the local economy. What value, then, does this new hotel have to local people?

If the new hotel administered Nosy Mangabe, the people of Maroantsetra would come to dislike the island, too. Once economic incentives vanished, there would be no reason to protect the forest. Even the guides, even Felix, with the most naturalist in him of all, he who loves to go into the forest even when his tourists do not, would have to find other work, or he and his young son Alpha would starve. Knowledge of the forest and its intricacies would die out in Maroantsetra. Ecotourists would no longer be attracted here, because the prices asked by the Relais are too high for most. Having one or two researchers hanging about to explain some curious natural history revelations to the fellow vazaha might be handy, and surely there are enough out of work Ph.D.’s to take that job, demoralizing and, indeed, destructive, as it is. For that job would take food out of the mouths, and knowledge out of the heads, of the local people.

Northeastern Madagascar, including the newly minted Masoala National Park, has more species endemic to itself than most countries. It contains the largest remaining piece of lowland rainforest in Madagascar, and is incomparable, and irreplaceable. It is at risk, because decisions are being made that put greater emphasis on impressing the wealthy than on protecting the environment. It is a deal made with the devil. The devil: money hunger from the west. Bring rich vazaha here while exploiting their desires for comfort, and there will be no returning. Pirates, a Dutch hospital, a Malagasy cemetery, Malagasy fisher people—all of these are part of this island's history, and all have left a mark, but none is indelible. The mark of Western money would never be erased.

Once the mark of Western comfort-driven consumption comes to a place, everyone believes that their lives, too, would be better if only. If only I had a tarp like hers. If only I had hiking boots like his. If only I had as much money as they do. With their longings, and an increasing availability of consumer goods, we will turn them into us, with our lost communities, our clans spread thin. They will forget to value what they have, and care only for what they do not. And in all of that cultural change, while the generous and real people of Maroantsetra turning to Western wannabes like the rest of the world, the forest will disappear. It will go quietly. A few people will notice. Nobody will heed the cries of despair. And then, it will be gone.

The new hotel was not the only risk to Nosy Mangabe. Lebon and Fortune had grown complacent in their jobs, bored with their lives on the island, so that even their large incomes (by local standards) weren’t incentive to actually protect the island they were being paid to protect. Before Rosalie left, she saw a sailor hunting lemurs with a spear. She had dissuaded the man, but when we alerted the conservation agents to the problem, we received only glassy stares in return.

The guides began reporting that Uroplatus—the magnificent, camouflaged leaf-tailed geckos—were declining on the island. They had reason to believe that the cause of this decline was that someone in town was paying 5,000 FMG for any that came their way. Less than one dollar each for one of the more spectacular lizards on the planet. Probably they were being whisked away to the first world, where a tropical herp enthusiast would pay in excess of $100 for that same animal, which had been ripped from its wild life. When we reported this probability to the conservation agents and their higher ups, again nothing was done. Several weeks later, a crate of Uroplatus was discovered being smuggled out of Maroantsetra on a plane.

For reasons I could never understand, when the guides generated plausible explanations for mysteries such as the dwindling Uroplatus population, they were not paid any heed. The guides, to a person, were tremendous—eager to learn, already possessing a good deal of knowledge, intuitive about humans and nature, amiable and fun to be with. By comparison, the conservation agents had become a hazard to the island, accepting kickback from sailors with spears.

The guides, like Rosalie, stayed optimistic and intellectually curious in the face of an uncertain future. Augustin asked me to make a list of the frogs I had seen, so he and the other guides could learn them. When he was out on the island with Hungarian tourists one day, and they wanted to play alone in the water with their snorkels (snorkels kept multiplying), Augustin went into the forest with a notepad. Felix, Emile, Armand, Jean and Paul all asked me separately to teach them, please, what I know about the forest, about frogs, and about the process of scientific discovery. The work that I do is particularly well suited to what ecotourists like to hear. Tiny, beautiful, social frogs who fight and court with such frequency that a tourist with an hour to spend, if taken to the right place, and weather permitting, would be likely to see a social interaction. Armed with the full narrative, the guides could try to find for their tourists some of the other players that round out this story—perhaps a Plethodontohyla notostica father frog taking care of his young in a well once used by Mantella laevigata, or the parasite that eats frog eggs.

The fact that the guides had both a passion for the forest and the wit to understand it seemed extraordinary, but it makes sense that such motivated, savvy people should be naturalist guides. Doesn’t it also make sense, though, that the people hired to protect the forest should have passion and wit enough to comprehend and care for the forest? Why this disconnect, where a connection is most critical?

Lebon and Fortune were slipping further into inaction, and with the bit of entropy they added to the system, camp actually fell into disrepair faster when they were around. Twice more they broke the pipe connection to the shower, and left it there, spilling hundreds of gallons of water into camp, until Bret or I fixed it. One morning a group of sailors invaded my small research area, leaving a pile of fresh human shit before I arrived, and attacking me verbally once I was there. I asked them to stay outside the boundaries of my bamboo stand, which I had demarcated in bright flagging tape, and they just laughed. When I reported the incident to Lebon and Fortune, they told me, as they had before, that the beach is not protected.

“It is protected, and besides, my stand is not on the beach, it’s in the forest,” I objected. It was futile. There would be no conservation from the conservation agents that day.

Towards the end of that final field season, the conservation agents were replaced, in stages. First Lucien arrived. He was a hard-working, slight man with a perpetual smile on his face, who cleaned camp daily and walked the coastal trail, clearing the path and making his presence known to any unpermitted Malagasy who might come ashore. Two weeks later Lucien left for a few days to be with his family in town, and was replaced by two brothers, Joe and Vincent. The first thing Joe and Vincent did on arrival was to build gym equipment out of bamboo. A chin-up bar and parallel bars were sturdily erected in camp, so that Vincent might continue his passion for exercise while on Nosy Mangabe. The two brothers were indefatigable. After constructing their bamboo gym, they insisted on cleaning the spiders out of the lab. Besides not being their job, it was a losing battle. They cleared a treefall that had been blocking a path for at least three months, perhaps longer. They actively watched for boats and, when three of them had to moor in our little bay during a storm, they made sure that the sailors only came on land to get drinking water.

When Lucien returned, he brought his family. His sweet, terrified wife couldn’t make eye contact with the vazaha. His four exuberant children couldn’t help but. The oldest, a lithe, long-limbed boy of 9 or 10, was honing his skills at retrieving mangos from trees. The two girls, the middle children, liked to stand on the dock and watch the waves, or dig in the sand for crabs to fish with. The littlest, but a toddler, was everyone’s responsibility, and his siblings took just as keen an interest in his well-being as did his parents. I asked Lucien if he would allow me to take pictures of his family, both for me and for them, and he was pleased at the request. His wife was too timid to come out of hiding, but the children, who vaguely understood what a camera did, but had not seen one previously, were natural hams. Maybe, I thought, if Lebon and Fortune had been encouraged to bring their families out to the island, they would have been more content, and therefore more productive, during their time there. Although I only saw the first four weeks of the new agents at work, their work ethics and personalities boded well for the future of Nosy Mangabe.

There is one trash can on Nosy Mangabe, half an old oil drum. It is not particularly large—about twice the size of an under-sink kitchen garbage can. A programme exists for its regular pickup and emptying in town and return, but it is not adhered to. Probably, when there are no vazaha on the island, the trash can fills so slowly that it seems ludicrous to those who would be doing the work to cart a quarter- or third- full trash can into town twice a month.

When Bret, Glenn and I arrived, the situation quickly became dire. We almost doubled the population of the island. But it was not our numbers that made the difference. Had three Malagasy researchers arrived—as, indeed, the two pig researchers did shortly before us—trash accumulation would have accelerated, but not by much. The Malagasy eat rice, smoke fish and cigarettes, and reuse every made or found object. As Westerners, we are consumers. This despite our personal environmentalism which translates, in the U.S., to buying in bulk, thus reducing consumption of packaging; recycling papers and glass; reusing boxes and shopping with baskets or cloth bags. But these efforts are, by comparison with a simpler way of life, trivial.

We arrived on Nosy Mangabe with many baskets of rice, which would have comprised most of our purchases for the next four months had we been Malagasy. But the increased options in Maroantsetra meant that there was pasta to be had, imported “Marie 22” crackers, tomato paste, soy sauce, mustard. There was even soy oil, prepackaged in plastic bottles. Previously, the only cooking oil available was coconut oil in dirty oil drums, with flies resting on the surface. An old ladle was used to dip into the drum and deposit some of the opaque oil, sediment and all, into a container you brought. We preferred the stuff that came with its own clean plastic skin, easily tossed when the contents were used.

We bought clothes-cleaning soap, which came in individual plastic packets, to augment the biodegradable CampSuds we had brought from home. We also found person-cleaning soap, a new kind that didn’t stick to your skin for days after each use, as was true of the only soap you used to be able to buy in Madagascar—Nosysoap. It means “island soap.” Nosy soap is still used by the locals for cleaning their dishes and clothes and selves. It is sold as bars without wrapping, open to the air, and is cheap. The new soap, which our Western sensibilities prefer, because it comes off when we rinse, has a nicely comforting name—Lux—and comes well-packaged, in several layers of paper, with plastic on the outside, and a picture of a beautiful, smiling, and immaculate white woman. We believe that we prefer it only because it does not leave the sticky residue that Nosy soap always does, but perhaps the name and packaging also attract some deep-seated consumer in us. Perhaps it is precisely when I am sure that I am not the target audience for an advertisement that they have gotten into my head.

We buy more of these products every time we go into town. The Malagasy don’t tend to—both because they cannot afford it, and because it is not what they are used to. Rice comes without packaging in Madagascar. The diversity we expect in our diets requires that a great deal of food be moved around the planet, and with that food, its packaging. Our desires brought packaging to Nosy Mangabe. Packaging is just trash, an earlier life stage. We filled the trash can quickly.

To alleviate some of the trash problem, and to satisfy our composting urges, we suggested that a pit be dug, for organic trash. At first glance, it seemed extremely odd that this had not been done before—wasn't composting a natural outgrowth of farming on poor soils such as these, a way to recycle what nutrients you could? Our suggestion was taken, and we watched with interest as the pit began to fill with uneaten rice, fruit peels, fish bones and heads. The trash can, now devoted to non-organic material, remained empty. The Malagasy generated essentially no inorganic trash.

We drank perhaps a bottle of wine a week, and the empty bottles were of value to the Malagasy. They do not typically drink wine. The Lazan'i Betsileo vintage, made in the Fianar region of Madagascar, is not a fine wine, but drinkable, and a bargain at $3/bottle. Who here can afford a $3 bottle of wine, when they can get toka gasy—the local, extremely strong rotgut—for pennies? They understand neither our penchant for wine, nor our willful indifference to the glass bottles that hold the wine. To contain the coconut oil they buy in bulk, a wine bottle does nicely.

The trash can never remained empty for long, as we dumped our inorganic trash into the trash can, and filled it. We generated plastic bottles with soy oil residue in them. And tomato paste cans. And the plastic wrappings from pasta, candles, malaria pills.

When you buy prepared food from street vendors in town—samosas, or macaroons—it is handed to you on a piece of old paper. The paper tends to be from a long-since irrelevant bureaucratic document in French, delineating the hierarchy of now-extinct personages in a particular government ministry. Everything is reused until it is gone. We take those greasy pieces of paper and throw them away.

When we bought bouillon cubes in one store, they gave us a plastic bag to hold them. The bag was printed in Chinese, advertising tea strainers from a remote province in China. How many hands must it have passed through before reaching ours? Its journey ended with us. Once emptied of jumbo cubes, we threw it away. In a land of practically nothing, we still managed to generate trash—a tiny amount by American standards, but huge by those of the rest of the world.

The trash can on Nosy Mangabe overflowed with vazaha trash. I left our friends anything they found useful, but still the trash can overflowed. Ten years from now, one may still be able to find a plastic bag from K-Mart or REI in Maroantsetra. As I happily roam farmer’s markets in the States with my Maroantsetra-bought baskets, feeling virtuous, the rest of the world is sorting through my trash, making it valuable.

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Next week: Chapter 23 – Cinema Maroantsetra

Antipode is a true account of my experiences while doing research in Madagascar from 1993 – 1999; it was published by St. Martin’s Press in 2001. Here is where we started—with the Introduction. And here are all of the chapters posted thus far.

I was tattooing frogs in camp when, fifty yards away, a treefall almost killed Bret. First there was just noise, a thunderous, splintering collapse of a massive old tree, breaking the expectations of daytime rainforest sounds. Chattering lemurs, frogs calling back and forth, and the drone of the nearby waterfall were instantly replaced with a searing, urgent crack.

Sitting on our tent platform, Bret heard it too. Having worked long nights in neotropical forests chasing down bats, he knew well the distinct snap of a treefall. He looked behind him to see improbable movement, a trunk three feet wide bearing down on him. He sprang. Ran full speed off the platform towards the coast, diving onto the shaky wooden dock just as the crashing stopped, as suddenly as it had begun.

The lemurs resumed their conversation, the frogs their vocal competition, and the lazy heat of the rainforest pressed in from all sides. All seemed normal. Except that my husband was lying face down on the dock, bleeding somewhat but not flattened, and a large tree hung, poised, over our tent platform, caught in the arms of another tree. On a horizontal branch, the tree nearest our platform held the fallen giant. The downed tree’s huge root mass was almost perpendicular to the earth where it had once stood, and an immense mass of wood was suspended over our delicate backpacking tent. Those few hollow aluminum poles strung with nylon mesh couldn’t protect us now. At any moment, the tree might complete its path of destruction to the ground, flattening all in its path.

Somehow, despite the excitement, Glenn and I remembered to put newly tattooed frog T4 back into a Ziploc bag before racing to the scene. Augustin, the naturalist guide, was on the island that day with two eastern European tourists, as were Vonjy and Rafidy. Lebon and Fortune rounded out our population. It was a very full house. After Bret picked himself up and assessed his damage—not bad—we turned our attention to the tree. Here we had a problem.

“What we must do,” announced Augustin, “is go into town, acquire a team of men and a lot of good rope, and…” he trailed off. Bret, Glenn, and I were looking at him in disbelief. After the last few months in Madagascar, we knew without a second thought that what he proposed was impossible. His instinct was surprisingly Western—get the experts, and the proper equipment, to solve the problem. But the suggestion was meaningless in Madagascar. Augustin, a native Malagasy who had been there all of his life, a smart man with a quick wit, surely knew his country better than this.

“Strong rope, Augustin?” I asked.

He smiled shyly and looked down at his feet. “They must use good rope to pull boats,” he suggested.

“Have you ever seen good rope here?” Bret asked.

“No, but…” Augustin trailed off.

“Where could we get strong rope?” Bret wondered aloud, gently mocking. “Nairobi might be our best bet,” he added, bringing home the point to the ever optimistic Augustin. Nairobi, of course, is in Kenya, on Africa, a different country, a different world. Strong rope couldn’t be found on Madagascar. Certainly not in town, a boat ride away, almost certainly not in Tana, a boat ride and plane ride away, with no planes due for several days. We had at our disposal only what northeastern Madagascar could offer, which mostly amounted to brain power and a lot of rice. The tent platform had to be saved, solely with our ingenuity and strength. We had nowhere else to sleep, as the wet season was in full swing, making the ground spongy with water in places. More to the point, backpacking tents aren’t made to withstand months of punishing tropical rains and persistent humidity unshielded. Already my tent was rotting, the grommets ripping, another tent pole snapping spontaneously every week. And this was on the platform, on a small raised bed of wood, with a thatched roof high overhead, and a massive blue tarp we had strung along one wall, to reduce the impact of the weather.

Thankfully, on this trip, Bret was with me. He appears to overpack for every situation, a trait I have often resented when we are simply trying to get from A to B, and it seems unnecessary to drag the stuff of our lives along with us. In fact, he is careful, calculated, and largely efficient in what he packs, and even the few apparently frivolous items turn out to have use in unlikely situations. Such as the 50 foot length of climbing rope he had dragged with us to Madagascar.

Three months earlier, when our living room floor had disappeared under piles of gear, research equipment, scant clothes, toilet paper—all the necessities for life in this endeavor—I demanded of him what on Earth the climbing rope was for. He wasn’t sure. I was feeling peevish, wondering how I could possibly get all of the equipment I needed to conduct my research, including a 50 pound battery, into the 3-bag, 210-pound limit I was up against. Bret didn’t have the same needs—he was coming to help me keep my sanity, give me some field assistance, and write his own dissertation, none of which took up room in the backpacks. So his own 140 pounds of gear and clothes ended up including items such as a snorkel, and a length of climbing rope. At the time I thought him hopeless.

When we had gotten to my site and set up camp, Bret promptly found a use for the rope. He slung it over his shoulder, climbed a large mango tree overhanging the water, and made us a rope swing. It was one of very few distractions in a life otherwise full of field work and the arduous tasks of feeding ourselves and trying to keep clean and healthy. Most nights, as the sun set over the bay and the mainland of Madagascar, we took turns hurling ourselves on that rope swing, twisting in the slight breeze, escaping momentarily the slow, normal confines of gravity and human muscle that we were otherwise restricted to on this island.

Now that a tree threatened to destroy our home—that little tent platform on which we slept, hung our clothes to keep them from molding, and sat at night talking—the rope became a necessity. It was, we had been telling each other, the best rope in all of Madagascar. Augustin had been right—this was what we needed, and it just so happened that we owned the object in question. Now all we needed were experts.

First things first: get all our stuff off the tent platform. At any moment, the tree could break through the branch it was resting on and crush the platform. We went back to the base of the fallen tree and touched it, gingerly at first. Would another fifteen pounds of pressure send it crashing to the ground, or would it take a thousand? We couldn’t budge it, so quickly set to vacating the platform, bundling our clothes, tent and sleeping gear into bags and whisking them away from danger.

“You are all ready. No more danger,” Lebon announced. Now that our stuff lay in a pile in the middle of camp, he figured the job was done.

“No, no, we need to try to save the platform,” Bret reminded him. Lebon looked a bit put upon.

“But the team of men…” he began. He knew there would never be a team of men. Teams of men never just materialize in Madagascar, and when you try to assemble such a group, it might take weeks, months, or simply fail to happen at all. Lebon knew this. But he obviously didn’t want to have a part in deciding what our next move was.

Bret climbed the mango tree on which the rope swing hung, and untied it. He then ascended a tree near the platform, near the tree on which the fallen giant was resting. He tied the rope to the trunk, and tossed the rest down to Augustin, who had volunteered for the truly dangerous task ahead. With great hesitation, and the knowledge that any moment the tree could come crashing down, killing him instantly, Augustin climbed the roof of the tent platform, slipping often on the wet thatched roof. Slowly, with many missteps along the way, and unhelpful instructions from those of us on the ground, Augustin tied the rope to the fallen tree. Bret then climbed another tree, far in back of the tent platform, and tied the free end of the rope to it.

Both of them dismounted, and strolled over to us.

“Here is the plan,” Augustin announced. “We will cut the tree in increments, and every time we cut a piece out of the bottom, it will fall a little, supported by the rope so it does not fall all the way.” He pointed back to the tree Bret had tied the rope to by way of explanation. “Finally, it will swing around and fall away from the tent platform.” We rated the probable success of this plan at about 40%. But we didn’t have a better one. If we destroyed the tent platform while trying to save it, we weren’t any worse off—we couldn’t sleep on it until the danger was gone, so something had to be done.

“Okay then,” we agreed to the plan. Having worked for some years in Central America, where machetes are the cutting implement of choice, I assumed we would use my machete to cut the tree. I had brought it from home, though originally I had gotten it in Costa Rica, where it was indispensable in getting through thick, viney forest. Here in Madagascar the vines weren’t nearly so bad, and the machete spent most of its days alone, hanging from a nail. Bret retrieved it now, and received dubious stares from Lebon and Augustin.

“What’s that for?” Augustin asked. Bret was mildly exasperated. Hadn’t Augustin just explained this very plan?

“To cut the tree,” Bret said. Lebon shook his head pensively, a sure sign that he thought we were making a huge mistake.

“Why not use an axe?” Augustin asked. Another apparently brilliant but misguided suggestion, as we figured there weren’t any axes for hundreds of miles either. The machete would work, even if an axe would work better, but the point seemed moot.

“Where will we get an axe?” Bret decided to play along.

“Right here,” and Lebon pulled an axe from out of thin air, or so it seemed. Bret and I looked at each other, baffled. It was pointless to wonder where this axe had been for the last several months. We had never seen it before. This was apparently the instrument Lebon used to chop wood for the fires he and Fortune cooked over, and it was the better tool for the present job. The head of the axe was none too secure, but it was relatively sharp, and it quickly became clear that Lebon had extensive practice chopping wood. The rest of us stayed out of the path the axe-head would take when it flew off the handle, as we assumed it must, and watched in some awe as Lebon took on the tree. This man, usually quiet and inactive, was remarkably strong, able, and precise, repeatedly whacking away at the same spot on the hard wood of the tree. Augustin spelled him periodically, and Bret tried his hand at it, but the rest of us sat back and watched. Lebon was the star. Tropical hardwoods have the reputation of being impermeable for a reason. They resist heartily the advances of burrowing pests, fungus, and even the sharp blade of an axe.

Soon it began to rain. The axe began slipping from Lebon’s grasp as he attacked the tree, and we decided to call the project off for the day. We moved our pile of belongings into the lab. The lab, remember, is a building of about 12 feet by 36, with a cement floor and porous walls, four windows with no or failing shutters on them, and a door that doesn’t close all the way. The roof leaks, water seeps up through the floor, it is perpetually dark and moldy, and all variety of animals break in when we store items of interest in it, such as bananas, or chocolate. On the stoop of the lab, at one end, we had built a small lean-to out of bamboo and palm leaves, and under this we cooked our rice twice a day.

Still, it was a shelter, the only building we had access to on Nosy Mangabe, a place that was more water-resistant than anyplace else on the island, save perhaps the cemetery cave. Vonjy and Rafidy had set up their small tents in the lab. The Malagasy, as a rule, don’t like the forest, and particularly don’t like to sleep in it. Even these men, who spent their days in the forest chasing down wild pigs, didn’t want to sleep outside on a tent platform. They preferred sleeping in the lab, which was fine by us, for it meant we had our own tent platform. Until today. The “lab” was kitchen to all of us, the pantry where we hung our provisions, home to Vonjy and Rafidy, and storage place for my research equipment. We sat there some days when the rain poured down and there was no point going out into the field, as there would be no frogs. At night, by candlelight, I might sit at the table and write letters. As night began to fall on this wet gray day, our tent platform still had a massive tree hanging over it, so the lab became our home as well. We set up our tent in the lab which, in combination with Vonjy and Rafidy’ two tents and the accumulated gear, pretty much filled it up. There was barely room to get in and out of the tents.

I was miserable. Sleeping in a tent inside a rotting building, where rats come out at night and the air is stifling, ten degrees hotter even than the tropical air just outside, is not my idea of a good time. Just one night of this drove me to frustrated distraction, and I plotted how to escape the confines of the lab and regain the fresh air and privacy of our platform. If it was destroyed, as was likely, we needed an alternate plan, for sleeping in our tent in the lab for the rest of the field season was not a viable option.

Every morning just before dawn I was up to go watch frogs. The morning after the tree fall I woke, confused, wondering why my clock told me it was 4:55 am, but there wasn’t a hint of light yet. Slowly the day before came back—the deafening crash, the endangered tent platform, sleeping in the lab. I got up and out, surveyed the damage again, and decided that I would add little or nothing by standing around observing the progress made on the tree this morning. I decided to go into the field as usual, hoping that I would return, midday, to find a reprieve, and not disaster.

Around 10:30 that morning, I heard a crash, then whoops of yelling from the direction of camp. I was half a mile away, too far to discern meaning from the yells—were they triumphant, or despondent? I sat watching my focal frog do nothing in particular for a few more minutes, before becoming so impatient to know what had happened at camp that I packed up and went back. As you come into camp from the south, on the coastal trail, the first thing you see is our tent platform. This day, as I rounded the corner into camp, I came upon exactly the same scene I’d been returning to for months. Our tent platform. Still standing. Looking up, I saw no uprooted tree leaning precariously over the platform. I dropped my backpack and ran around the back of the platform, where I found Lebon, Augustin, and Bret standing, looking dazed.

“Great job, men!” I enthused. I couldn’t have been happier. That tent platform, which only 24 hours before had seemed stifling and small, representing all of the limits of life on this remote island, now evoked feelings of home, of privacy and comfort, of cool breezes off the bay and limitless opportunity. The area in back of the tent platform, which had once been scrubby secondary forest, was now flattened, the low vegetation having succumbed when the tree bore down on it. Apparently, the plan had worked. When the tree finally came down, after four sections had been cut from it, it had swung within inches of the platform before landing just feet away.

This was cause for celebration. Our home had been saved, disaster averted, and no team of men had been called in. With our own in-house team of men and bring-your-own-rope plan, the tree fall was a thing of the past. How to celebrate?

Had we been home, we might have gone out for a good dinner, indulged in some fine wine, had some friends over, seen a movie. Had we been home, though, we wouldn’t have had to fix the problem ourselves—indeed, it would have been a mistake to try. Living in the developed world, with its insurance policies and experts around every corner, means living with liability. Caution is imperative, and fixing your own problems is frowned upon. If a tree had fallen over our house in Ann Arbor, and been caught in the arms of another tree just overhead, the extent of our response would have been to use the phone to call the appropriate people into action.

The irony is this: in the States, there is less opportunity to really solve your own problems, but far greater means to celebrate your victories, even when the victories aren’t really yours. In Madagascar, particularly on this little island reserve, where our victories were real and in the moment, the opportunity to celebrate was extremely limited. We made ourselves some rice and beans, and broke out one of our cherished boxes of cookies for dessert. The forest spilled out onto the coarse sand beach, turning a rich, saturated green elicited by the setting sun, while needlefish swam in a small school in the shallow water, lazily. We sat on the dock, Bret, Glenn and I, while the sun set across the bay, over Madagascar, relishing luscious, rare European cookies. Knowing that I was going back to my tent platform to sleep that night, all felt right with the world.

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Next week: Chapter 22 – But They Are Wild

As static as many aspects of life on Nosy Mangabe were, it seemed I was often in a state of transit—going to or from the forest, the waterfall, or town. The boat ride from Nosy Mangabe to Maroantsetra is but three miles, but can take three quarters of an hour, depending on conditions. Under the rubric of “conditions” falls everything from the size of the swells to the mood of the captain. The rich warm greens of the forest recede as Nosy Mangabe darkens to a silhouette, and the only color at hand is blue, the water deep and rich, the sky pale and infinite, the distant mountains an indefinable hue that seems blue though you know it can’t be, really. Seabirds fly by, their gullets hanging low over the water. Flying fish occasionally make an appearance, jumping silently out of the way of the boat. Pirogues with fishermen in them pass silently, rarely looking hurried as they paddle out of the way of the motorized menace approaching them.

Finally, a turn to the right, into the broad river that is, at this point, indistinguishable from the sea, then bank left, and we are amidst reeds and water hyacinth. The wholesale general store appears, a one room barn where you can buy mints, in 50 package bundles, or car batteries, in this region with hardly any motorized land vehicles. The hulls of boats, once brightly painted, are now flaking, streaks of blue and red flashing from otherwise dulled corpses. Interspersed among them are live boats, with crews aboard who nap, or gaze out to sea.

Town was more full of possibilities this year, with not just more hardware, but more food to buy as well. Lebon and Fortune were not cooking for us, as they had been advised that it was against the rules. Cooking for ourselves added several hours to every day’s tasks, but we didn’t risk serving ourselves rancid crustaceans. In the market and stalls around its perimeter, I was able to find real cheese, soy sauce, vinegar, hot peppers, potatoes, garlic, cucumber, and even thyme. In one store, there were sometimes outrageously priced boxes of European cookies, which we bought and hoarded. And there was still ample rice, beans, onions, and cooking oil to go around. Not exactly a full pantry, for our American palates, but good enough.

The act of cooking proved to be extraordinarily arduous. We bought charcoal in town, and carried it to the island in massive woven nylon bags. Everything the bags touched turned black with sticky, tar-like soot. We bought small rectangular metal “stoves,” into which we poured and arranged charcoal, and then tried our damnedest to light. Being extravagant vazaha, when we found kerosene in town, we bought lots of it to help light fires for cooking. It still took twenty minutes to get a fire going well enough to cook on, even with copious amounts of kerosene added to the mix. Between handling the charcoal, pouring the kerosene, trying to light the thing without burning your hair, and fanning it furiously for ten or fifteen minutes, the cook required a bath after getting the fire started and before actually beginning to cook. We tended to work in pairs. While one person was working on the fire, the other would retrieve onions and garlic from the baskets I had strung up from the roof of the lab to keep the rats out. We still found evidence of rats in our food sometimes, but the basket pulley system was an improvement. With one of our lock blade knives that was too small for the task, we would peel the tiny onions and garlic and chop them. One of two cocottes—cast aluminum pots we had bought in town—went on the fire, then some oil inside, followed by onions and garlic. If someone had remembered to soak beans the day before, we could start cooking them in a lot of water now, so long as we didn’t want to eat within three hours. Rice took about an hour from start to finish. Vegetables to go with the rice, the same.

We ate rice and beans, or rice and vegetables, every day, and I came to appreciate more what Lebon and Fortune had done for me two years earlier, even though I was eating better now. It still wasn’t worth it. Cleaning up took another hour, scrubbing the metal pots “clean” in a shallow pool with a combination of local sand, and a scotch brite pad we had carried halfway around the world.

We did have our small victories with food. One day, after coming into town through water hyacinth and faded boat hulls, we found pineapples, tomatoes, eggplant and ginger. Oh, luscious ginger. The wonder of the marketplace in Maroantsetra is that, as a vazaha, with clear evidence of fantastic wealth, all one has to do is make a fuss over a particular food item, and there is a good chance it will show up again the next time you come to town. We never went without ginger again.

We found peanuts too, a fantastic, easy source of protein. We commissioned a wooden mortar and pestle, hoping to fashion peanut butter. And so we did, one peanut at a time. Each of us, Bret, Glenn and me, tried our hands at it, but none of us had much success. Bret estimated the number of poundings required to fully smash a single peanut at ten. A whole afternoon could be killed making enough peanut butter for a single meal.

One of the family members at the Maroa offered to make peanut butter for us. Our interaction beforehand suggested that they had a blender of some sort, but when the nut butter was delivered to us, it was clear the man had spent an entire day smashing nuts by hand, just as we had. And he would get no benefit from doing so, beyond what we paid him—there was no pride in craftsmanship to be had in smashing peanuts. But he refused to tell us how much we should pay him for his hard work, saying he wanted no money. Finally we gave him an amount that made him smile and thank us, but it is impossible to get past the layer of politeness in these moments, and we never knew for sure if a gaffe had been made. Although our protein- and fat- starved selves continued to crave peanut butter, we never again asked the people at the Maroa to spend their time making it.

We also found a little old lady sitting on the stoop of an old building with a plate of, could it be? Macaroons! In my first-world life, I am not a fan of coconut, but nothing sounded better than freshly made macaroons that sweltering afternoon in Maroantsetra. We bought ten, and devoured them. The old woman spoke no French, but her little granddaughter who was helping did, and I managed to convey the idea that no matter how many macaroons the woman could produce by the following morning, we would buy all of them. Early the next morning we found ourselves in possession of 147 macaroons.

We needed beans even more than we wanted macaroons, so I took another basket, not the one brimming with macaroons, to the friendliest looking bean vendor, and proceeded with the complex machinations that these transactions always involve.

“How much for the lentils?”

“750 a kapok.”

“Okay, I’d like ten kapoks.” Blank look. Hesitation, a reach for the kapok, a nervous laugh.

“Ten?” She looked at me, doubtful.

“Yes,” I tried to say in my most confident voice, not revealing that “ten” was rather arbitrarily picked, in deference to our decimal world. She delivered the lentils to my basket. I also received 10 kapoks of red beans, at 900 per kapok, which was going to be difficult for the bean-seller to calculate, largely because she had little practice with such enormous transactions (16,500 FMG by my math, about $3). Most local people have so little cash that they pay with exact or nearly exact change for a couple kapoks of beans—handing over two or three bills totaling ten or fifteen cents. The largest currency in Madagascar was still the 25,000 FMG note—less than $5 at this point—and very few vendors or even shopkeepers could easily give change for that large a bill. The vendor probably wouldn’t sell this many beans again for the next week.

I took out my wallet and handed her a 25,000 note, all that I had. One of the difficulties in switching between first and third world economies is that when I change $300, I receive several stapled packets of 25,000 FMG bills, which few people want. But the banks were unwilling to part with an equivalent amount of 10,000 FMG bills, so I was stuck with stacks of these bills that were enormous by local standards. I had seen local people wait in line at the bank for upwards of an hour to take out a total of 10,000 FMG, less than $2, and walk away with a handful of bills of various denominations.

Not only would it take the vendor a while to calculate the total, she would have to physically find the change for me. Calling on an intricate network of kin and neighbors, she disappeared behind several stalls, where shadowy figures passed, handing off money. Finally she reemerged, with enough bills to give me my change. Often the change given seems random, bearing little resemblance to what is actually due. I make a point of just accepting what they give me, unless, as rarely happens, I am given too much, in which case I return it. It is pennies to me, but sustenance to them.

When we returned to Nosy Mangabe, provisions replenished, I made an attempt at forest risotto. This was in the same tradition as jungle pie, which Bret and Glenn had invented. Jungle pie was a mixture of pineapple, bananas, sugar, and crumbled crackers—plus fresh cinnamon and cloves, when the spice boats came in—packed into a cocotte and cooked over a charcoal fire. Like the relationship between pie and jungle pie, forest risotto was to be the closest approximation of risotto I could make under the circumstances. We didn’t have arborio rice, of course, nor stock, nor Parmesan cheese, nor asparagus, spinach, red peppers, olives, chicken, prosciutto or any of the other fine ingredients which can be used to create luscious risottos.

First I had to get two charcoal fires going. Thirty minutes and a mini-bath later, I sautéed onions and garlic in vegetable oil obtained in town from a large bucket. After a poor vazaha attempt at winnowing the rice, I sat down and culled by hand the medium-grained rice that was the only kind Maroantsetra vendors were selling, and poured it into the oil and onion mix. I added the water, which was boiling on the second fire, slowly, in small increments. And I planned, at the end, to add some precious Swiss cheese, and a miniature can of tomato paste. But Rafidy found me first.

Rafidy is the Maroantsetra radio repairman. There are but a few radios in town, so he seeks other work as well. At this time, Vonjy (pronounced Voonj), a Malagasy graduate student from Tana, was living in a tent, in the lab, on Nosy Mangabe. He was studying wild pigs. In my seven months on Nosy Mangabe, I saw pigs only once. Vonjy had an assistant to help him study pigs, and this was Rafidy. Even the two of them together rarely saw the animals. They did find and collect droppings relatively often, carefully packing them away to look at in a different place, in another time. We were curious about each other’s work, but clearly didn’t understand it, and our attempts to explain it to the other seemed to fly past one another without comprehension.

Vonjy was extremely shy, and never talked much, even to Rafidy. Rafidy, on the other hand, suffered from gregariousness on this lonely little island. So, though his French and mine were comparably mediocre, and had largely non-overlapping vocabulary sets, we often found ourselves in conversation, especially when I was doing anything in camp that he couldn’t begin to comprehend. An attempt at forest risotto was just such an activity.

“Erika!” he cried, running over to my fires, “You can’t make rice that way! Let me show you.” Rafidy is actually a very good cook, and produced a few meals which were, to my starved palate, quite delicious. He usually wasn’t quite as interested in what we made, but he couldn’t let me make such a tragic mistake with rice.

“This is a special, Italian way,” I told him. It felt sacrilegious to liken what I was doing to Italian cuisine, but I didn’t have any better words.

“Italian?” he was, by turns, disbelieving, then amused, then curious. “I’ve never seen rice made this way.” He reflected. “I thought I knew all the ways to cook rice.” As good a cook as Rafidy was, he, like all Malagasy, only cooks rice one way, the same way, three times a day. He puts it in a large pot with a lot of water, and burns the bottom of it, producing a thick, black crust stuck to the bottom and sides. The top, fluffy white rice is eaten with whatever “broth” he has prepared. Ranon’ ampàngo is then made by adding fresh water to the burnt rice shell, and simmered over the dying fire. It is drunk with and after every meal. We vazaha were never able to retain any Malagasy eating with us for more than two meals, as we either failed to burn the rice, or forgot to make the ranon’ ampàngo after doing so. A meal without ranon’ ampàngo is pretty much a meal without eating. Risotto, it occurred to me now, had no chance of producing ranon’ ampàngo from its dregs.

“Why do you cook it this way?” Rafidy was deep into curiosity now. As a Malagasy, he wasn’t sure he was going to like the end-product of what I was doing, but as a cook, he wanted to know.

“To bring more flavor to the rice, to make the ‘broth’ part of the rice,” I suggested. He took a step back.

“Part of the rice?”

“Yes.”

“But…” He couldn’t continue. There weren’t any words. Rice is so integral to the Malagasy’s being, it is like a god. You don’t sully your gods by mixing them with broth, even if you do occasionally pour broth over them. Instead he changed the subject back to territory he was sure of.

“Let me show you how to winnow the rice.” His eyes twinkled deviously. I laughed.

“You’ve shown me so many times already. I just can’t do it.” It was true. The wide, flat basket used so expertly by women and men alike to separate out the debris from the rice was unwieldy and unpracticed in my vazahahands. With years of experience, I would learn, but for now, I always ended up inadvertently throwing much of the rice onto the ground. At that point I would give up, and pick through the rest of the rice by hand for the remaining rocks and grit.

“Don’t you do this at home?” Rafidy asked, as he effortlessly flung a new batch of rice on the winnowing basket.

“No, we don’t have to. The rice we get is already winnowed.” He stopped winnowing for a moment.

“By whom?”

“Er,” I paused. I wasn’t sure. “By machine, I think.”

“You must have a lot of machines at home.” Before I could parse this bit of wisdom, I had to turn my attention to one of the fires, which was getting low. Ungracefully, I managed to get the cocotte off the fire, and wedge in new pieces of charcoal, before balancing it back on the fresh, pointy charcoal. The result was barely functional, the pot perched precariously at a wild angle. Vonjy approached as I was doing this, and he and Rafidy watched me in my ineptness. Usually shy and exceedingly proper, Vonjy couldn’t restrain himself this time.

“Don’t you cook with charcoal at home?”

“No, we don’t. Isn’t it apparent?” I asked. He nodded.

“But how do you eat?” It was the obvious next question.

“We cook with gas, lit on fire. It’s piped into our homes.” They both gaped at me.

“You cook inside?” they asked.

“Yes.” I thought about this. Vonjy was a middle class family man from Tana, on the haut plateau, where it gets quite cool in the winter. Surely he cooked inside? “Don’t you?” I wondered.

“No. We have a shelter, attached to the house, with two walls. But not inside. That would be dangerous.” Indeed it would.

“We have pipes, that keep the gas contained. It’s not so dangerous.” I reassured them.

“Is it very expensive?” Hmm. Good question. Dollar for dollar, the natural gas we use to cook with is extremely expensive compared to the charcoal they use. But relative to income, our gas is much cheaper than their charcoal.

“No, not so expensive.” I didn’t mention all the years of developing an infrastructure necessary to provide such a luxury at a low price.

The concept of gas stoves was remarkable to this middle class, educated man, who happened to be born into a country with few amenities. How surprising he would find our lives, so simplified of the daily, life-sustaining chores, but so much more complex in order to afford the simplification.

Time is of the essence in America, but we spend it working at trivial things in order to buy those objects which save us time. In Madagascar, time is worthless, so common as to not be worth watching, counting, or saving. People here claim to know how old they are, but I believe that they are estimating. Pascal, the captain, assured us that the large shipwreck off Nosy Mangabe had been there for three years. I know that, less than two years earlier, it was not there. In a world where day length is constant, it may be harder to keep track of time passing. More to the point—why should you? Once an adult, you monitor the important events—your life's relationships, your children being born, deaths in the family. And perhaps you know, for a while, how old your children are, but once they are grown, they, too, will forget exactly how many years, or moons, or rice harvests, or rainy seasons they have lived through. They will remember that there was a hurricane, several years ago, when the waters rushed down from the hills bearing both corpses and the decimated rice harvest. They will remember that this time of year it usually rains, and that in a few months, things should be drier again. They know that two days a week the market is more full than usual, and these are the days to dress up, walk around the muck and the chickens in one's best clothes, looking, and being looked at.

Time does not factor here. At Projet Masoala, they speak of the programme with some regularity, although it is rarely followed. The programme exists, I presume, to allay the fears of the white people in charge. Without a programme, nothing would get done. This is a truism in the developed world: without deadlines and fear of reprisal for missing them, what incentive is there? But in Madagascar, most people's work directly affects how much food they have in their stomachs. If you are a fisherman, you cannot be lazy and fail to go out in your pirogue for a week. This does not require attention to a programme, merely what natural selection gave us—hunger to prompt us to eat. Being scenario-building humans, we can estimate that, having been hungry before, we will be hungry again, unless we act preemptively to secure food before the hunger hits.

The guide Augustin explained the Malagasy passion for rice this way: the Malagasy are born and raised on rice, three or, minimally, two times a day. They become accustomed to having full bellies—not just feeling sated, but feeling physically full. To a vazaha it is a feeling of dead weight in the stomach, after eating a bowl of rice as large as a Malagasy eats. The Malagasy learns to equate physical fullness with satiation, and when rice is absent, no matter how many nutrients and calories enter his body, he feels he will die of hunger, for his belly does not feel full.

None of us vazaha were afraid we would die of hunger on Nosy Mangabe—though we all lost a lot of weight inadvertently—but we had moments of fearing death from other causes. The Malagasy are accustomed to having primarily rice meals. The vazaha are accustomed to having constant body temperatures. When Glenn began complaining of fever and weakness in the middle of our season, I assumed at first that this was another inexplicable tropical fever, the likes of which everyone there seems to get and recover from without the apparent aid of medicine. But as Glenn grew worse, it seemed necessary to take him to town, which Bret did, so that I could remain on the island and continue my work.

Shortly the diagnosis came back: Glenn had malaria. The doctors in town, with the exception of the good doctor who was now gone, apparently diagnosed everyone presenting with fever with malaria at first. But Glenn responded to a quinine drip, which was set up inside a bungalow at the Maroa, while Bret nursed him back to health. My emotions at this news were chaotic. I felt horrible that I had brought someone to Madagascar who had never before traveled this way, and it had been him, not one of us, who had fallen ill. I felt responsible for his illness, which I really wasn’t, but also for his overall well-being, which I was. I seriously considered sending him home, so that nothing more could happen to him. As much as I wanted a field assistant, I needed him to be safe more. How would I answer to his mother, or myself, if he died in the field?

But Glenn wanted to stay and, as if to prove his increasing strength when he heard that I might put him on a plane home, he recovered quickly. Meanwhile, Bret was in town with little to do, so he began surreptitiously introducing the word “snorkel” to Maroantsetra. He had brought a snorkel to Madagascar, which Paul, the guide, had seen and admired, so he had an easy jumping off point. Running into Bret on a dusty path, Paul would smile widely and ask Bret about the news.

“Inona no vaovao, Bret?” What’s the news?

“Tsy misy vaovao, Paul.” Bret responded, as was required. No news. But then he would veer somewhat from convention, and switch to English. “Will you go snorkeling today, Paul?”

“Oh yes, today is a good today to snorkel.” Paul would agree heartily, enunciating carefully his newfound word. Bret disseminated the concept of snorkel primarily through Paul, but also dropped it casually into conversations with people who had the barest rudiments of English, their third language. As Bret began infecting the town with this concept, snorkels began to appear. Two days after Bret and Glenn came back to the island, I watched a sailor come to land to get water. Usually, when a sailor was sent from a boat to get drinking water, he jumped overboard with a large hollow plastic canister, and swam until he could wade ashore, pushing the canister ahead of him. This time the man wore a snorkel. It was as if they were only waiting to be named.

Later the same day, on his way back from washing clothes at the waterfall, Bret found a remarkable lizard—very large, with a flash of yellow. It was on a rock, sunbathing, and when it spotted Bret, it dove into the shallow pool and disappeared. Bret wasn’t sure that such an animal even existed, and briefly convinced himself that he had imagined it. But it did exist, and he caught it, and brought it back to camp for all to see. It was the most gorgeous, largest skink I've ever seen. It was well over two feet long, had a long thrashing tail, and a bright yellow underbelly. It was strong, and could wrap itself around you like a boa. When it swam, its reduced arms and legs folded back, and it moved like a water snake. Amphiglossus astrolabi.

I held it on the stoop of the lab as Glenn retrieved the field guide to figure out conclusively what it was. Rafidy came up to us.

"Très grave," he said, pointing to the lizard. Very dangerous. We looked up at him, down at the lizard, and back at him. None of us believed this—poisonous lizards are rare, and between Glenn and me, at least, the nominal herpetologists, we would have heard of one that existed here. Of course, we didn't know this animal existed at all, so it was just possible.

“It’s the teeth that will get you,” Rafidy continued in French. “They are poisoned.” We nodded non-committally, while Glenn found the descriptor in the field guide. He read: "…Malagasy people are very afraid of this species and told us that they are poisonous." We looked around expectantly, hoping to find the invisible hand that was writing our script just before we read it.

Next week: Chapter 21 – A Team of Men, and Some Cookies

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Pascal took us out to Nosy Mangabe in the little motor boat, and Lebon and Fortune, on shore, smiled widely as they recognized me coming in. Two years earlier, Rosalie had told us that she thought they were terrified of Jessica and me. I wondered at their apparent pleasure now, and thought these may have been fear grins, of the sort known in other primates.

If they were, it was warranted. The island had gone to seed, a sour, wildly sprouting seed which left its foul odor on all it came in contact with, and a lingering smell of helplessness. The physical structures of camp were basically unchanged—three tent platforms still prominent, the conservation agents’ small cabin, the dank, cement-floored lab, the tiny structure housing the toilets—but all was in chaos. In 1997, one of the toilets never worked, but the other one usually did, albeit with a lot of leakage from the tank. There was always an inch or two of water on the floor of the dark room where spiders went to die. The PVC pipe which ran from the waterfall to the wooden shower, and from the shower to the toilets, had been wobbly, but secure. When we arrived this year, though, someone had walked into the pipe and knocked it off its connection—no adhesive had been used in its construction. Now a waterfall’s force of water was flooding camp, constantly, and reattaching it seemed impossible with the huge amount of water now flowing out the pipe. From the channels the water had formed, it seemed the PVC had been broken for at least several days. The noise was deafening. There were no shower or toilets as a result. The pit toilet was even less appealing this year, for the boards on which you squatted were rotting, lending a very precarious air to the endeavor.

Furthermore, the little pool in which I had been attacked by the lemur, the pool closest to camp, where we got our drinking water and, just downstream, brushed our teeth and washed our faces, had been polluted. It was being used to clean fish, the unwanted parts left to decay in the once fresh water. Worse, the conservation agents were using the pool to bathe, now that there was no shower, and the waterfall, though it was my preferred bathing spot, required clambering over several boulders to access it. The Malagasy, traditionally, don’t use toilet paper—they find the habit dirty and rather disgusting, which perhaps it is. Instead, they prefer to clean themselves after a bowel movement by rinsing themselves in water. This once pristine water source quickly became known to us as butt-water pond.

We couldn’t do anything about the bacteria now living in butt-water pond, and this left us without an easily accessible source of clean water. Bret set about to fix some of the problems in camp immediately, with his unique combination of mechanical and logical skills, and an intuition that often results in him packing just the right combination of required items. Now the two tubes of epoxy putty he had brought saved the day.

Glenn, on the other hand, had never before packed for such a trip. I had given him what background I could think of regarding the living conditions: he needed a tent, something comfortable to sleep on, and cheap, quick-drying clothes that could be discarded at the end of the season if necessary. He had to bring all the toothpaste and shampoo and whatever else he might need. I told him what shots to get, and which prescriptions to request from his doctor. Everything needed to fit in one 70 pound bag, plus his carry-on. Except for the toilet paper that I calculated and packed for all of us, he needed to be self-sufficient.

When the trident emerged, like Neptune’s, from Glenn’s bag, it made him easy to mock. Did he expect to be sparring with the deities? In what bizarre situation did he imagine coming to rely on a trident? Had he ever needed a trident before? But he had also packed a folding shovel, which was extremely useful before its untimely demise shortly after we arrived, and fishing rods, the likes of which Lebon and Fortune had never seen. He was naïve at this game, and Bret and I were relatively experienced at predicting the disasters that might befall us, but we had all done relatively well in this test of our accuracy in deciding what we would need to live in a rainforest for several months.

Bret was doing what he could to elevate our lives above the minimum required for mere survival. After several spectacular attempts to simply reattach the broken pipe, he realized he would have to block the water source first. He climbed the waterfall and found the pipe’s origin, in a pool above the cascade. His first choice of plug: a mango. When he laid the sweet fruit at the entrance to the pipe, though, massive suction stripped the flesh off the mango, pulling the remaining fruit far into the middle of the pipe, where it stopped, firmly embedded. All water flow was stopped, apparently permanently. In one sense, the plug had worked perfectly, but there was now a mango lodged inside a 12 foot length of pipe that was not replaceable without a trip to Tana. The pipe had to be cleared of mango-plug before any further attempts were made to reattach the pipe to the shower. Over the course of several hours, Bret effectively plunged the pipe by repeatedly decreasing then releasing the flow of water into the pipe at its origin, slowly moving the mango downstream until, finally, it shot out the other end, hitting the shower with a welcome thud.

After experimenting with fruit and non-fruit plugs alike, Bret found one that worked, and set to fixing the problem back in camp. He had found a spigot in town and, with the variety of adhesives and blades he had brought with him, fixed the broken pipe and installed the spigot, giving us even easier, if less romantic, access to pure water than we had at the pool before it became butt-water pond. He spent several days fixing the toilets, finally producing two brilliantly functioning flush toilets where before there had been none. The rooms they were in were still dark, dank little stalls where insects and their predators collected, including both the neon green Phelsuma geckos and the occasional boa. Wearing a headlamp into one at night, clutching a roll of toilet paper while trying to stay dry in what seemed to be constant rain, did not approximate a developed world toilet experience, but it was several orders of magnitude better than the alternative.

Bret, however, is a perfectionist. It was clear to him that what was missing was a toilet seat. Few Malagasy have access to flush toilets at all, and those who do have generally never seen a toilet seat. It wasn’t surprising that there was no seat. I had spent the previous season strengthening my stomach muscles squatting over the toilet or a hole in the ground, and expected to do the same this year. Bret would have none of it.

When next we went into town, to procure supplies so that Bret could fix the rest of camp, and to get Rosalie, who was going to help me and be trained at the beginning, rather than the end, of my field season this year, Bret had an agenda. As I languished at the Maroa, my gut reacting to Nosy Mangabe bacteria, Bret took Glenn on a mission. Find a toilet seat. In Maroantsetra it was now possible to buy three kinds of adhesives, and two or three gauges of wires—hardware stores were diversifying, and becoming better stocked. But there wasn’t a pre-fabricated toilet seat in all of town. Bret spoke essentially no French, so I taught him set phrases to use when he was seeking particular objects. In my daze, I inadvertently wasted his entire morning while he walked around town asking for an “assiette de toilette.” A toilet plate. Finally I got it right, but he still had no luck finding a seat.

Remembering that across the river there was a building claiming to be a Technical College, they went there. In short order, Bret found a man who knew another man, the actual craftsman, who would carve a toilet seat for us. We had taken the measurements of the relevant toilet dimensions, and with these, a sharply honed aesthetic, and very little French, Bret described to the middleman what he wanted.

“Oh yes, I understand,” the man nodded. “Europeans use these. I have seen them.” If true, this suggested a rare sophistication for a Maroantsetran. Because we were headed back to the island the next morning, they arranged to have the toilet seat sent on the next boat. The price for commissioning a toilet seat? Twelve dollars. We expected that if and when a toilet seat did arrive on Nosy Mangabe, it would be a plywood plank with a hole, crudely cut, in the middle of it.

Several days later, when I came back to camp after a morning watching frogs, the toilet seat awaited.

“This,” Bret told me, “may well be the most beautiful toilet seat the planet has ever seen.” And so it was. Carved out of a deep red hardwood, two thick planks had been melded together in a perfect seam. All of the edges were rounded and sanded, the grain of the wood seeming to bend as the form itself did. The proportions were perfect. It was a work of art.

The fine workmanship of our new toilet seat did not impress Lebon and Fortune. They were too busy watching us to care much for art. Meanwhile, Rosalie had arrived, and I was busy teaching both her and Glenn how to start a field season. Truthfully, I was distracted by them at this point, as what I really wanted to do was jump into the work myself—I had been away from my frogs for almost two years, and was yearning to learn more about them, rather than teach others how to do so. So as I dragged them out to the forest, day after day, looking for appropriate spots to set up experiments, and for populations to mark, I wanted to be watching frogs, but Rosalie and Glenn had nothing to do but watch me. I made excuses to wander off and find frogs doing interesting things, but often I would look up from my observations and find Rosalie or Glenn, silently, almost shyly, observing me.

Part of my aversion to this stage of the process was that, to set up the second year of the experiment that tested what limits the size of Mantella populations, I needed to lay several transect lines through the forest. I was establishing grids, areas outlined by pieces of neon flagging tape that delimited areas of known size, so that we could monitor frog populations in pieces of forest of identical size. Drawing straight lines of 35 meters (115 feet), or even the shorter lengths of 10 meters (33 feet), in the tangled, viney, steep and slippery understory is an exasperating, muddy task. It never results in grids as accurate as you were hoping for, due to the surprising appearance of large trees or boulders exactly where a line should go. Glenn volunteered frequently for the job of walking the plastic transect tape along the compass bearing I had calculated, and quickly understood why I disliked this particular task so much. Each of us, at some point, ended up face down in decomposing leaf litter, after an ankle-level vine had tripped us while we focused on compass and transect tape instead of our own feet.

Another task that both Glenn and Rosalie helped with was finding populations of frogs to watch, and marking them. When Rosalie had been with me during my previous season, she had walked into several populations that Jessica and I had already tried to mark. We had clipped their toes, tied waistbands around them, stitched beads into their backs, but nothing stuck. Before coming to Madagascar this year, I had found reference, in a book on field methods for studying amphibians, to tattooing frogs. After dialing the phone number given in the appendix, I was soon listening to a message of a gruff male voice advising that they only took orders late at night, a few days a week. Were those motorcycle engines I heard revving in the background? I called back at the appropriate time, and it became clear that I was communicating with a tattoo parlor in New York, a hang-out for bikers.

“What do you need?” the man asked, after yelling at a buddy to cut his engine. I hesitated, thinking perhaps I should give up on this line of inquiry altogether.

“Well, I need to mark some very small, tropical frogs,” I paused, waiting for a laugh, or confusion, or annoyance, to become apparent at the other end of the line. Nothing. So I continued. “I’ll be in the rainforest in Madagascar without access to electricity, so I need a battery-powered tattoo machine that will allow me to permanently mark the wet skin of amphibians.” Long pause. I thought maybe he had dropped the phone.

“We can do that,” he said finally. “Sometimes we need to tattoo on the road, so we have portable models.” I was incredulous.

“Really?” I asked. “Frog skin is wet, so it won’t work the same way as a tattoo on human skin does.” Now I had managed to annoy him.

“I know that,” he said, “I’m not an idiot. Just last week, we were down at Sea World tattooing penguin toes.” He paused again, thoughtful. “But penguins aren’t amphibians, are they? Still, they’re in the water all the time, and their skin is wet. I think the same machine will work for you.” I was off to the races.

Glenn took to tattooing the frogs, which I was grateful for, and soon we had several populations of A1s, D4s and P6s. Each of us, Glenn, Rosalie, and myself, picked a population, and began watching individuals each morning, again taking the afternoons to run experiments. Quickly I began seeing males employ sneaky strategies, avoiding territory owners while trying to attract and court females. K2 was a male who defended a territory that included no egg-laying sites—no wells—but often met with reproductive success anyway. He seemed always to be assessing whether or not his nearest competitor, who controlled access to the wells he needed to mate in, was present. If not, he would quickly make his move and try to utilize a well himself. I tried to stop myself from over-estimating what they were capable of, but sometimes it did seem that they were building scenarios, plotting alternative outcomes. But these are frogs, with small brains. What really differentiates us and them?

I was not the only person wondering about this question. Many of the guides were on the island more frequently than they had been in 1997. There were a few more tourists, at least one most weeks, and they always had a guide with them. Furthermore, Projet Masoala, apparently on orders from headquarters in Antalaha, was pursuing trail-building and camp rehabilitation projects now that Bret had fixed the most egregious problems in camp. In theory, the guides were being paid for their work on Nosy Mangabe, which required their unique combination of forest knowledge and physical skills, but in practice they were being taken advantage of. Since 1997, an exquisite new trail had been constructed up to the old cemetery. The trail was perfectly graded and lined with rocks, with trenches dug at regular intervals to allow run-off down the hillside without washing out the trail. The guides had designed and built the trail over the course of several weeks, but had been paid for only half of their work. Now they were routinely being called out to the island to do camp maintenance. One of the guides told me that he had worked one day for pay in each of January and February, a total of 24,000 FMG, or less than $5, each month. Many days he was out on the island doing manual labor, labor which the guides agreed, when pressed, was truly the job of the conservation agents. None of them knew what the conservation agents made, but they believed it was around 500,000 FMG/month, or roughly 20 times what the guide had made. I asked one guide how much they got paid for each day of manual labor.

"Oh no," he smiled, the weak smile of a man defeated, "we do not get paid for this work."

I was already friends with Felix, Armand, and Emile, and quickly we came to know Paul, Augustin, and others as well. Often when I came back to camp for lunch they were there, which itself was a departure from the isolated feeling the island had in years past. They were all intensely curious to know what I had learned about the forest. They asked me what I had found that day and I, happy to have people as excited by my frogs as I was, would tell them of a new tussle over territory I was watching, or a mother frog who had fed her tadpole. These stories, so easily interpreted in terms of our own, human experiences, were fascinating to the guides. And they, like me, wondered how complex these frogs really were.

Bret, meanwhile, was working on a chapter of his dissertation in which he attempted to explain the long-recognized but poorly understood correlation of species diversity with latitude. There are more species the closer you get to the equator. At the poles, there are few organisms; in the tropics, there are many. Any rather obvious explanations you may come up with for this—there is simply more sunlight in the tropics, or more resources—fall apart under closer scrutiny. The guides, especially Paul and Felix, frequently asked Bret what he was working on, and were surprised to learn from him just how unique their home was.

“More species here?” they would ask, curious. “But isn’t it just that there are different species here?” The much discussed endemism of Madagascar was well known to the guides—what you find on the great red island you can find nowhere else in the world. But they had never before heard that the tropics had more species than, say, a comparable area of land in Europe, or North America. Even Nosy Mangabe, with its conspicuous absences, was much more diverse than any two square miles of temperate forest.

One of the most difficult aspects of both Bret’s and my scientific discussions with the guides was convincing them that the world they know, the rainforests of northeastern Madagascar, does not look like the rest of the world. This is one of the most formidable aspects of communicating with people in the temperate zone, too. Everyone assumes that their world is the world, or at least fully representative of the diversity that is out there. In fact, part of Bret’s thesis focused on the idea that one of the common explanations for species diversity patterns, competitive exclusion, seems to hold true in the temperate zone, where it was founded, but not in the tropics, where species are most diverse. Competitor species do not necessarily drive each other to extinction in the tropics, although they usually do in the temperate zone. Even scientists, who seek explanation for the patterns we see, are biased by our predominant experiences, which tend to be in first world, temperate zone countries.

Rosalie understood the world’s Western bias all too well, but managed to elude any bitterness many people would have felt in her situation. Instead, as a burgeoning scientist in a country too poor to provide much, if any, support for such a career, she took advantage of joy where she could find it. Even when a large (but non-poisonous) snake, a Madagascarophis, bit her, she was philosophical about it, figuring that she had annoyed it enough to deserve the attack. We had a discussion on the long walk back from the forest one day, just Rosalie and me, about science and work and routes to defining quality of life.

“Why do you work here in Madagascar?” she wondered aloud. “What about it do you enjoy?” Despite very different perspectives, like my mother, Rosalie didn’t understand the appeal. We spoke, as always, in French.

“It is arduous to work here to be sure, but also thrilling to glean new information about the frogs and this forest.” I paused. This wasn’t a complete answer.

“Aren’t there animals at the Museum in Michigan?” she wondered. The only other vazaha she had worked with were collectors, who took animals back to their Museums in the U.S., France or Italy, rather than working on them in their natural environment. She had told me earlier that she simultaneously disapproved of the wholesale ransacking of her country’s flora and fauna for the knowledge of first world scientists, but also recognized that there was value in that knowledge. It also meant that she knew there were a lot of Malagasy animals dispersed through the world.

“Yes,” I acknowledged, “but they’re all dead. It’s hard to study the behavior of dead animals.” She laughed. “But more to the point, perhaps, is that I defined a research question that would bring me to Madagascar. That was part of the choice, not an unexpected by-product.”

“Really?” she asked, surprised. “I like this idea, that you actually enjoy working in Madagascar. Most people do not.” She shook her head slowly, remembering.

“Don’t get me wrong,” I continued, “it’s difficult and excruciatingly frustrating at times. But, in many ways, Madagascar is more real than the U.S. Many people in America are accustomed to having things, and the money to buy them, but don’t have close-knit communities of friends and family. The reverse is true in Madagascar.” She was nodding, ruefully.

“But sometimes things would be nice,” she offered.

“Oh yes, they are.” I conceded. “I guess it’s very easy for me to think that I would rather have community than things, but how do I know? I like my things, my comforts, but I have never had real community, so have no idea what we have given up for a few possessions and comforts.” I didn’t say it to Rosalie, but having Glenn with me on this trip was reminding me of my own weaknesses. This was his first time in the developing world, and he was struggling to make it feel like the world he knew and understood, to interpret it in first world terms.

That evening the four of us—Bret, Glenn, Rosalie and myself—were having dinner on the middle tent platform, where Rosalie’s tiny tent was pitched, and there was a table to sit at. It was low tide and full moon, and the clear white light bounced off the still bay and onto everything in camp, lighting us up as if on a movie set. With her strong personality only slightly hidden beneath shyness and a soft voice, Rosalie taught us Malagasy words for some of what was so present in our lives then—moon and tide and sun and cloud. I asked her about her name, and she told me she wished her parents had given her a Malagasy name, not the French Rosalie, which evoked colonial times.

What she really wanted to talk about that night was music. Bret had brought some music with him, and a Walkman, and she was intensely curious what kind of music we listened to. We brought out one of my small playback speakers, usually reserved for experiments, and put on traditional Latin American salsa and merengue, which Bret had fallen in love with during his time in Panama. Rosalie had never heard such music before, and it made her want to dance. So, on a coarse sandy shore, Bret taught her to salsa, to merengue. She was tireless, and soon I took his place, though I dance less well than he does, and had never led before.

The light from the moon, as well as a few candles we had melted into the table, projected our silhouettes onto the tarp that lined the back of the tent platform. Lebon and Fortune were up at their cabin, drinking, watching our spiraling forms, hearing shards of music and laughter. Soon, unable to resist, they came down to where we were. Lebon danced a little with us, but mostly he and Fortune retreated into shyness and cultural amusement, watching from the shadows. Only Rosalie was utterly unself-conscious, the rest of us sliding in and out of embarrassment and fluidity.

The next morning when I got to my stand to do focal watches, it began to rain furiously. I sat about being glum, seeing no frogs, then retreated to the fisherman's camp to wait until the onslaught diminished. There were ten or fifteen fisherfolk there, smoking fish, cooking rice, and trying to stay marginally dry, just as I was. I greeted them, put my stuff down on one corner of the giant tent platform—not wanting to displace them or their stuff, but feeling that I had a right to use the space as well—and, after updating some data sheets, began to read. I often carried a novel for such circumstances. After a few minutes, a small boy came over with a brush, and cleaned the area in front of me. After a few strangled words of protest, that this wasn’t necessary, I merely said "Misoatra." Thank you.

After a while, a youth of about 15 or 16 came up to me, shyly, and looked over my shoulder. I smiled at him, then continued reading. Trying for real communication with my very limited Malagasy vocabulary is an absurdity. "No problem." "What's the news?" "No news." "Rice frog administrative building." "Going for a little walk." "Thank you very much." "Pain. No pain." "You're welcome." Doesn't make for much of a narrative. So I sat reading while he looked over my shoulder for a few moments. Then he said, distinctly, and in English, "your book is in English." I looked at him, laughing—but I had thought you someone without a second language, and here you have a third!

“How do you know English?” I asked him, slowly, enunciating.

“I am learning English at the lyçee in Maroantsetra.” He paused, noticing my surprise. “I fish with my family on the weekends, for our food,” he explained, then asked, “are you waiting for someone?”

"No, only for the rain to stop. I study frogs."

"Oh yes," he said, thoughtful, "I have seen you, working, in the, I don't the word in English, in the bambu?" He ended on a question, not knowing if I would understand the French word.

"Yes, the bamboo," I agreed. "It is the same word in English." I had slipped into French, but wasn’t sure why. My French was better than his English, but he wanted to practice, it was clear, and his English was certainly not bad for a poor child from Maroantsetra who has to help his family fish to get enough to eat. I told him that it was very impressive that he spoke three languages.

"My English is very bad." I think they teach this as a stock phrase. Every Malagasy says it when you tell them they speak English well.

"What country are you from?" he asked, having some difficulty with the grammatical construction, but getting it right before finishing the sentence aloud.

"The United States." He looked confused. Ah yes, the ridiculous name that our country has. If we weren't such a superpower, we'd have to explain ourselves every time we left our borders.

"Les Etats-Unis," I added, in French.

"Ah, America," he nodded, and smiled, and the image I evoked by mentioning America didn't reek of barely clad blondes selling toothpaste and cars. In Madagascar, unlike in many countries, the U.S. hasn't messed anything up with neocolonial or military activities. But the French have, so we, along with the rest of the non-French vazaha, are the good guys, relatively speaking.

"What is the book you are reading?" He asked, then added, "I have no books to practice my English with." Oh, I thought, I would gladly leave you a book to practice with, but how could you possibly get through what I have brought—Steinbeck and Austen and Twain and my current book, Tereza Batista, by Jorge Amado, translated from the Portuguese. How to explain this? I thought of the Sartre novel I had also brought, translated into English. How odd it would be for him, whose second language is French, to read Sartre in English, his third.

"This book is from, and about, South America. It is translated from Portuguese." I couldn't remember how to say "translated" in French, and didn’t think he would know the word in English. Sure enough, he didn't catch that part.

"So, in all of America, North and South, you are speaking English?" He seemed excited at the prospect of all that land available to him if only he spoke English.

"No, in South America they speak Spanish, and Portuguese. Only in the United States do we speak English." Canada, Mexico, and Central America were too complicated to explain, with my limited language skills and lack of a map. I wished that I had brought world maps to show people. What arrogance we have, calling ourselves Americans. The Mexicans and all peoples south know it, and call us Norteamericanos, which is what we are, though it doesn't describe us as precisely as when we say that we are from the United States of America. But our nationality is "American," though Mexicans, Hondurans, Brazilians and Chileans are equally "American."

By this time the rain had eased. I began to hear frog calls from the bamboo stand next to the fisherman's camp. In back of me, rice was being dished onto plates, with fish to follow.

"Please," my young friend said, motioning to the gathering group of people, "come eat with us."

"No," I smiled, thankful that Rosalie had instructed me in this point of Malagasy hospitality. When a group of people is eating, they must invite those who are not. This holds even if there is not enough, and those invited are expected to decline. "Thank you," I said, "but I think it is time that I return to the forest."

Next week: Chapter 20 – Now We’re Cooking With Charcoal

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Part III

A year and a half later, Madagascar beckoned again. I had not gone back the following rainy season, choosing instead to live in Panama with Bret for a few months, where he was conducting his own dissertation research on tent-making bats. At the time, before the U.S. turned the Canal back to Panama, the country was an odd mix of first and third world. Most of the trappings of the U.S. were for sale. We lived on a small island in the middle of the Panama Canal, a research institute run by the Smithsonian, which bore almost no resemblance to the small island I lived on when in Madagascar. Here researchers from all over the world gathered to study ecology and evolution, and the facilities reflected the prominence of this island in tropical biology research. Air-conditioned labs, modern sleeping quarters and bathrooms, a cafeteria open all night, public computers with an Email server, and frequent, reliable boat service to the mainland left one with the impression of a well-oiled machine. Nothing in Madagascar had ever evoked such an image for me. In Jamaica, once, a friend of Bret’s, upon being discovered greasing his bike chain with coconut oil, advised Bret that “the wrong lubricant is better than no lubricant.” Such practical wisdom serves people with limited access to resources well, valuable in Jamaica or Panama. But in Madagascar, there is rarely a choice. What do you do when there’s no lubricant at all?

Bret returned from Panama after 18 months, just in time for us to get married, celebrate our nuptials in Turkey, then spend a few months in the U.S. before heading back to Madagascar. I was enjoying the comforts of being home, with our cats and our stuff, but I knew I always appreciated them even more after I had tweaked my universe by living in a different world for a while. I began the months of paperwork, procuring equipment, making travel arrangements, and packing before finally going to the field. As I assessed what I had learned the previous season, and what I hoped to discover on this one, I realized I would have a much better chance if I had with me another Jessica. Bret would be there, and help with data collection for one of my experiments, but mostly his role was to be as intellectual and emotional support, for he would be writing his dissertation while we were there. I needed a field assistant.

Enter Glenn. Glenn was an undergraduate hanger-on at the Herpetology division in the Museum of Zoology, where I was based at the University of Michigan. Glenn had been one of those children who was always bringing home snakes, lizards and frogs that he had captured. As a college student, he had collected several more herps, and was living with them. (By contrast, I had only a couple of frogs at home.) At the time, he was vying for the title of world’s most obscure herpetologist. Since then he’s obtained the lowly rank of graduate student. He jumped at the opportunity to go to Madagascar. He had the time, I found the money, and we were set.

As soon as we landed in Tana, I was Erika again. The officials who occupied various booths at the airport were still there, dressed in military uniforms, receiving money, looking at passports, handing out forms, and conducting customs checks. Something had clicked in me, though, and now I had an easier time accepting the inconsistencies, and swallowing the indignities dished out by these uniformed men who wielded only enough power to annoy unsuspecting vazaha.

We went to our hotel, a clean, inexpensive affair near the zoo in the center of Tana. Arriving well past midnight, there was only one room free, so the three of us packed ourselves and all of our baggage into that room and fell into exhausted sleep. We all woke several times during the night, though, as the tourists in the adjacent room engaged in loud carousing with prostitutes. In the morning, when I went to use the communal bathroom, I found it occupied by them as well. Bleary-eyed from jet lag and the tasks that loomed before I could extricate us from Tana, I went out to the balcony. I was reacquainting myself with the bustle of morning commerce on the street below, and the relative calm of the rice paddies just a few yards further away, when one of the tourists spilled out of his room.

“Oh, we have company!” the young Frenchman, cigarette in hand, exclaimed in French. “I do hope we weren’t too loud last night.” His hand swept over the evidence of the night’s debauchery—an empty bottle of alcohol lying on its side, a pair of pants flung over a chair. I just looked at him. I had no interest in pretending to be this man’s ally. He assumed that we were on the same side, because of the color of our skin; I assumed we weren’t, because of the broken look of the woman in the doorway.

That morning we began the arduous task of getting research permits, visa extensions, internal plane tickets, and air freight arrangements, all of which needed to be done before we could leave Tana. Benjamin Andriamihaja, who had helped me with logistics on earlier trips, was a godsend. The organization he ran was now independent. It had changed its acronym from ICTE to MICET, to include a reference to Madagascar in its name, and was largely devoted to helping researchers such as myself wade through the morass of rules and requirements necessary to work in Madagascar. I had taken Benjamin a small gift, a Leatherman-type tool, but had qualms about it, for “gifting” was a standard euphemism for bribes, which were rampant in many government agencies. Benjamin had previously worked in the government, and had apparently been disliked by many of his peers: his rigorous refusal of bribes made them look bad. Mine was a true gift, but the last thing I wanted was to insult his integrity.

We spent several days engaged in the cat-and-mouse game of contrition demanded by the system. But I was getting better at this, and as my frustration diminished, the interactions went more smoothly as well. The Department des Eaux et Forets (DEF), the first of two agencies requiring input on the permitting process, made us wait for several hours the first day we showed up, then told us to come back the following day. The next day we received the same treatment. Occasionally, we were called up to someone’s office to sit in front of their large desk and answer questions that seemed unrelated to the task at hand. “Are you Americans?” “Do you like Madagascar?” At the end of the second day we were dismissed again, and told to return in the morning. Glenn, unfamiliar with the schedules and red tape of the developing world, voiced to us his concern that we wouldn’t get our permits at all. He hadn’t bargained on the long delay between leaving for a field season and actually getting to the forest, and was annoyed with the people in charge. Each trip to these offices was an adventure unto itself, a long winding taxi ride through remote Tana neighborhoods that often took half the morning.

The next morning we returned, but the group mood was deteriorating. I knew we needed to keep up the appearance of eager hopefulness, so encouraged Bret, who understood the importance of the façade, to keep Glenn occupied and out of view. I had suffered through my own intolerance with the system for years, and didn’t want the bureaucrats reacting to Glenn’s, which was still in its early stages.

A few hours after we showed up, I was invited into yet another office. A smartly dressed young woman told me that our permits had been granted. I voiced my approval of this outcome, and thanked her for all her help, though I had never seen her before. Then she explained that the permits were in a locked room, and the man with the key was not here. In fact, he was on vacation. Perhaps I should come back tomorrow. All acquiescence and smiles, I thanked the woman again for her efforts on our behalf, and promised to return the following day.

I did, but the man with the key did not. By mid-afternoon on that fourth day, another copy of the key was discovered, the room was opened, and the papers were delivered to us. Now we had to take them to ANGAP, the second of the two agencies, to be processed, in order to receive the actual permits. After four days spinning our wheels at DEF, ANGAP gave us our permits within five minutes of our arrival. The weird calculus was apparent again—the permitting agencies take precisely as much time as you have budgeted, whether that’s three weeks, or three days.

Arranging to get our bags to Maroantsetra was similarly complex. Air Mad had changed its rules somewhat, and the 400 pounds of gear that we could not carry with us on the plane had to go by freight, a service operated by Air Mad.

“We can’t guarantee when your freight will get to Maroantsetra,” we were told at the Air Mad office in Tana, “but if you want to go to Sambava, we can promise it within a week.” This is rather like being told, "We don't know when we can get your wedding dress to Poughkeepsie, but we can get it to Boise by Friday." As my research program was based in the rainforests outside of Maroantsetra, this option did not appeal.

The woman at Air Mad thought it “likely” that our freight would get to Maroantsetra before it was time for us to return, three and a half months later. Not comforted by this, we went instead to the airport, several miles out of town, to talk to the Air Freight people directly. The problem, they explained, was that the planes to Maroantsetra are so small that it is impossible to know when there will be enough room to get the freight on board. The man in charge, though, seemed convinced that it would not take more than nine days from when we left our freight with them. In fact, he guaranteed it. And he repeatedly refused my offers of monetary incentive to smooth and speed the process. Somehow, we’d entered a wholly different Madagascar.

I also had to check in at the Wildlife Conservation Society, which meant getting to their offices. Getting there by taxi always involved describing to the taxi driver what part of town it is in. The driver, predictably, scratched his head, not quite understanding my pronunciation, and never having heard of WCS. Finally, inevitably, I succumbed, and admitted what I knew all along, but didn’t want to say.

“It’s near the paint store, Gamo.” At which, the driver’s eyes lit with recognition, and we were off. Paint stores are rare, and precious. Conservation organizations, on the other hand, have no apparent function, at least to taxi drivers in Tana.

Finally we flew to Maroantsetra, and found the airport much changed. It still consisted of a single, weedy airstrip, one windsock, and a shell of a building, with no equipment inside but a large scale. But there was glass in the windows, and the roof that had caved in was again at ceiling level. Most significantly, the single door, the door that Bret had knocked off its hinges three years earlier, had been replaced.

Upon arriving at the airport, we were bombarded with men asking us where we were staying, and didn’t we want to stay at their hotel? Matthew Hatchwell at WCS had told me that a new hotel had opened in town, the Maroa, and that it was clean, cheap, friendly, and a short walk from Projet Masoala. The Coco Beach had raised its rates, and though $20 for a bungalow is cheap by first world standards, the rather decrepit huts on the outskirts of town didn’t warrant the price. Furthermore, Projet Masoala had turned the room Jessica and I slept in in 1997 into storage. I certainly couldn’t afford the Relais de Masoala, the luxury hotel outside of town that had opened its doors for Jessica and me. There were two other, extremely cheap hotels in town. One, the Vatsy, charged by the hour. The other, the aptly named Hotel du Centre, is directly across the street from the market, and in desperate shape. With so much money tied up in equipment, I didn’t want to risk staying in a place without some expectation of security. Besides, in years past, when Bret and I had traveled as backpackers through Central America and Madagascar, we had stayed in such places, and had, I felt, done our time. We had graduated to the next level. Glenn, who had never before traveled in the developing world, would get to skip the bottom few rungs entirely.

I engaged the men vying for our business. The most persistent of the lot was a fat man, sweating profusely. I thought it a bad sign.

“Where do you want to go?” he asked, sly.

“I don’t know. Projet Masoala at the moment.” I didn’t want to be tricked into some hotel I wanted nothing to do with.

“Relais de Masoala?” he repeated in error back to me, taking us for wealthy tourists.

“No, no. Projet Masoala. We are researchers.” He looked blankly at me. There wasn’t any money for him in Projet Masoala.

“What hotel? I have bungalows for 25,000 FMG.” About $5 dollars. I was exasperated with this guy, and wanted the decision to be over with.

“Give me ten minutes.” I told him. He laughed in my face. Then he scuttled over to the only other vazaha in the place, a smarmy French guy, mid-30s, who had a slinky young Malagasy woman draped over him. The foul hotel man repeated what I had said to the Frenchman, and they both had a good laugh. The Frenchman grabbed his sweet young thing by the ass, causing her to topple off her platform heels. I called the sweaty hotelier back over.

“What’s the name of your hotel?” His mumbled answer came back sounding like Maroa.

“What?” I persisted.

“Look it up in the guide book. Very recommended. You will see.” I knew he was lying, but didn’t have the strength to resist.

“Okay.”

“So, you will come stay at the bungalow for 35,000 a night?”

“You said 25,000.”

“There is one for 25,000, one for 35,000.”

“What’s the difference between them?”

“No difference.” Of course.

“There is electricity? Outlets?”

“Of course.”

“And a private bath?”

“Yes,” he lied.

“Hot water?”

“Everyone asks about hot water, everyone thinks it is good.” It wasn’t an answer, but I didn’t care. I now remembered where I was, and realized that hot water was, to say the least, unnecessary. I was tired of the discussion, and just wanted to be going.

“Okay, we’ll take both.” So, we collected our bags, stuffed ourselves, barely, into his car, and trundled into town. We passed the sign for the Maroa, and just as I was going to protest, pulled into the Hotel du Centre.

“You said we were going to the Maroa.”

“No, no, this is the Hotel du Centre.” Yes, I thought, I know what it is, but it’s not the advertised product. But we were here, and had taken his car, so we had to look at the place. The sleazy French guy and his sweet young thing were already camped out in one bungalow, door open, mostly naked. The sweating proprietor showed us to the one next door, drowning in filth and stagnant, fetid air. In the tiny room was a torn and stained foam mattress, over which a crusty sheet had been partially thrown. The wood floor was rotting. There was no fan, a critical element in the tropical stillness. Through an open doorway was the private bath: a closet sized enclosure with a spigot hanging loosely from the ceiling, a rusted drain in the cement floor. There was no sink or toilet. He led us outside, and motioned to the building next door, out of which was oozing something akin to water, but wasn’t, quite.

“Voilà, la toilette.” I was not pleased. This was hardly an auspicious reentry into Maroantsetra. We told him we would stay one night, left our stuff, then headed into town. We went immediately to the Hotel Maroa. It was miraculously clean, with eight or ten individual bungalows. The bungalows had thatched roofs, bamboo walls and wood floors, electric fans, porches, and private bathrooms with sinks, toilets, showers. Simple by first world standards—as usual, there was no hot water—it was paradise after the Hotel du Centre. There was the usual complement of geckos and bugs sharing the space that was, after all, basically open to the air, but nobody expected hermetically sealed quarters. Soon we would be living in tents.

The family who owned the Maroa was accommodating, friendly, and eager to help or leave us alone, depending on our mood. There was a restaurant serving mostly faux-Chinese dishes in the main building, where the owners lived. The bungalows surrounded the main building in a small dirt courtyard, in which the chickens ran free. A wooden fence separated the Maroa from the rest of town, and I felt that our things would be safe here, and that we would be content. We went back to the Hotel du Centre, and engaged in a short argument with the owner over exactly how much we owed him. He wanted full price for the two bungalows, as if we had spent the night, plus an “inconvenience fee,” so named for the inconvenience we had caused him by leaving early. Finally we came to an agreement, retrieved our things, and moved to the Maroa the same day.

We had several days to kill in Maroantsetra, as we waited for the bulk of our baggage to arrive via Air Freight. During this time we habituated the new employees at Projet Masoala to our presence, and made some new friends. The office staff now comprised two women, Edwige and Laurence, who had not been there in 1997. Our relationship, like mine with their predecessor, Clarice, began on a hostile note, and had to be massaged into harmony. As in previous years, the local staff had not been alerted to my existence before my arrival. I had completed all of the paperwork required of me by WCS, and we were to be the only foreign researchers in the area for months, but nobody had thought to tell these women we were coming. Understandably, they were a bit suspicious, and set out to make my life difficult. Finding Clarice gone, however, and having brought a few pretty items of clothing for her, I distributed them to Edwige and Laurence, which smoothed some of the distrust away.

The captain, too, had been replaced. The little boat with two outboard motors was the same, but Yves, who had always had a frantic look in his eyes, and seemed none too stable, was gone. Pascal was the new captain. Shy, intelligent, and curious, Pascal was a beautiful man with rich insights into life, and those he saw around him.

“I love the sea,” proclaimed Pascal early in our acquaintance, adding that there was nothing he would rather be doing than driving the little boat across dancing waters.

Projet Masoala had also acquired a vehicle, an old but not decrepit Land Rover. Heloise was the only person authorized to drive this beast. As such, he was the chauffeur. Maroantsetra is a small town, and there are neither many places to go, nor many people authorized to go anywhere, but it was Heloise’s job to be at the ready, should someone need to go someplace.

My friends Felix, Armand, and Emile were all still around and working, and there were several more guides we quickly became familiar with on this trip. To a person, all were skilled, personable, quick-witted and full of humor and good will. Whenever we were in town, I sought out the guides, and they sought me out, identifying kindred spirits, I think, in our shared love of the forest and its inhabitants.

Our time was primarily spent lounging in the small yard at Projet Masoala, or at our bungalows at the Maroa, watching people come and go. But we also wandered through town, acquainting ourselves with the expanded lot of consumer goods now available. PVC pipe was being sold in a limited number of sizes, though most of the connectors were not. Metal files and soldering irons were available. And, as always, the diversity of hand-woven products was immense. Malagasy artisans are highly regarded, the products from various regions including intricately carved wooden furniture, handmade papers, batiks and other fabric arts, and semi-precious stonework. In Maroantsetra, the artisans work in straw.

Bret decided he needed a hat, to protect his fair skin. From the women who sell straw baskets in the market, it is possible, for about 70 cents, to commission a hat. The hat lady, sharing no language with us except those few words of Malagasy we knew, measured lengths of raffia around his head. The next day we came back, and picked up a hat that perched nicely on top of Bret’s head, as is the Malagasy custom. Unfortunately for Bret, it is not his custom. So he commissioned another one, specifying with hand gestures that he would like it a bit larger in every dimension. The following morning, he picked up his sombrero. It came down to his eyes, and would act as an umbrella in a downpour. He and the hat lady were developing quite a rapport, now, so when he went back, somewhat abashed, desiring a third hat, some middle ground between his two existing hats, she was ready to comply. That third hat would last him several months.

Wandering around town during those slow days, I found a greater diversity of flip-flops than had been available two years earlier. Desperately cheap, these were rejects of the first world. Some bore a picture of a fat, jolly animal on the instep, with the words “Friend Mole.” Others, with an improbably thick sole, carried a tag that said, in fancy script, “MODREN.” When typos or other errors in the prediction of consumer desire happen to products designed for the first world, they get shipped to people without choices, people in places like Maroantsetra.

We were still in town on Sunday, a special day in Maroantsetra. Missionaries had once been here, so even many of the locals who retain their animist beliefs go to church. Everybody strolls through town in their Sunday best after going to church. Some stores close entirely, but most just close during the hottest part of the day, the sieste, as during the week. Glenn was suffering his first bout of tropical indigestion, so Bret and I went looking for food alone. We found a building with a sign reading “Lebon Cap,” but it didn’t seem to be open. A young boy carrying a bucket of eggs on an immense, rusty bike pulled up to the gate. He saw us standing at the closed door, looking confused, and gave a shout. A heavy-set, smiling woman let us in with apparent pleasure. And, unlike many restaurants that have open doors in Madagascar, this one had food. And juice. In the developing world, products sold as juice are primarily sugar and water, with a hint of fruit. Jus natural is the magic phrase in Madagascar, and the mistress of the Lebon Cap had two kinds: coroçol—sweet sop—and grenadelle, the exquisite passion fruit. Ah, sweet heaven.

The food was no less inspired. Malagasy tomato salads, when you can find them, are made with simply sliced rose-red tomatoes dressed in vinegar and black pepper, sometimes with slices of tiny raw onions. In Maroantsetra, my preferred entrée is “substrate of the day” with sauce au coco, poured over mounds of rice. The coconut sauce is rich, savory, complex, and bright orange. Usually the substrate available is scrawny chicken, heavy on tendons. Today they had fresh tuna steaks, the fishermen having come back early out of deference to a Christian god. I celebrated the tuna who gave his life for my gustatory pleasure.

After lunch, we wandered through town, stopping to sit on the shaded stoop of a store that was shut up tight. We engaged in the exhausting activity of being vazahas in public, saying “Salama” to everyone who passed. A few children stopped in front of us, touched us, smiled big perfect smiles. We were like dolls on display.

“Sali vazaha!” other children cried, streaking past in a furious run, using the shortened form of salamaemployed by children across Madagascar.

“Salama Malagasy!” Bret responded, causing mirth and confusion among the children. “You are vazaha,” the logic seemed to go, “but we are individuals, with names.” Referring to them as Malagasy, although it seemed parallel to calling us vazaha, had never occurred to them.

The Peace Corps had arrived in Maroantsetra the year before, in the form of two American women. We had dinner with them, for as soon as vazaha arrive in town the scant other vazaha hear about it, and we had quickly found each other. Angela was teaching the naturalist guides, and some others, English. Linda’s job was less clear, but she had an interest in conservation and ecotourism on Nosy Mangabe.

When we returned to the Maroa that night, a small party was in process. Four large tables with tablecloths and matching glasses were set up in the dirt courtyard, with people milling about. Occasionally they erupted in applause. Then a round of singing, with clinking of glasses and outbursts of clapping. A whistle. Much appreciative shouting in response. Laughing. More clinking of glasses. I listened through the window of our bungalow, wooden shutters open but covered with a sheer fabric drape. Scattered female laughter punctuated the singing and talking that drifted in. A pleasant, constant, rising and sinking hum of content human voices. Never before had I been privy to such a party in Madagascar. I wonder, at such times, why I am still embarrassed about my own curiosity with regard to the Malagasy, when they make no attempt to conceal their curiosity about me. The difference, I guess, is that I am in their home, and they are not in mine. Their curiosity—even hostility if they have it—is acceptable, but I must be deferential. I owe them everything, and they owe me nothing.

We checked every day for evidence that our freight had arrived. I was anxious, convinced that we would never see our gear again, feverishly coming up with alternate plans—how long do we wait until we assume that our bags are lost, how do I try to conduct my research without tents to sleep in or equipment to measure parameters, how will I explain this to my doctoral committee back in the States? We wandered through Maroantsetra for those first three days fiercely focused on our bags, and their possible location within the system. We were not waiting; we were scheming.

And then, on the fourth day, I woke up in my thatched roof bungalow at peace. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow, probably sometime—what do the specifics matter? In a small dusty town with little to offer the outsider, I was suddenly content to laze about on the porch of my bungalow, entertained by my companions or my novel of the moment, but most often just to gaze into the middle distance. I had left the world of precious time, and entered that of passing time. I strolled through the market assessing the rice vendors’ baskets of rice, admiring small piles of potatoes, onions, pineapples. I recognized that sometime, I would be called upon to return to the market and buy enough food to last the three of us two or three weeks, to plan and organize, but felt that, this responsibility not being immediate, it wasn’t very real. I wandered back to my bungalow, where the proprietors of the Maroa had recognized my change of attitude and supplied me with a raffia mat on which to sit. When I sat on that woven mat, watching chickens chase each other around the yard, listening to the yells of children splashing through puddles as the rainy season began, I didn’t worry about equipment and research and time. I found myself there and, there being no plans to leave, would remain until something else came along. I had finally begun to learn how to wait as the natives do.

No wonder the raised voice and irritated demeanor of a vazaha desiring an immediate research permit or plane ticket fails to produce anything but mutual frustration. In my current trance, I would not have been compelled by someone else's insistence that his needs were paramount either. It will happen when it happens. I began to take the early afternoon sieste, when everything closes down, and even the dogs move into the shade. I was getting twelve hours of sleep every day, and why not—what else was I going to do?

Then our bags arrived. All of them, unscathed. Edwige told us that the boat could take us out to the island the next morning, but if we missed that window of opportunity, it would be several days before another came. Jolted out of complacence, suddenly time mattered again. Damn the sieste anyway—how do we plan around those two and a half hours when nobody will conduct business with us? We need to get the bags from the freight office today before they close; we need to have the permits I so meticulously acquired in Tana glanced at and approved by Projet Masoala; we need to buy provisions, which involves multiple trips, hauling heavy baskets of rice, beans, and charcoal through the sandy town. Each one of these activities could take an entire day. Why, my newly rediscovered discontent screams, why must things be so inefficient and slow? Why? Because nobody else here has deadlines of such an immediate nature. People live, people plant and harvest rice, people sit in the market under umbrellas and sell their wares, people sleep and eat and flirt and take care of children. Again, I am the vazaha with strange ideas about time.

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Next week: Chapter 19 – Observer, Observed

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The next morning Jessica and I rose at 5:30. Air Mad sent a vehicle to take us to the airport, and we spent an hour or so driving around town, occasionally picking up an additional passenger, mostly stopping so that the driver could chat with passing acquaintances and argue over the price of peanuts. Finally we were deposited at the Maroantsetra airport, the single room that still had no doors. There were flights to and from Maroantsetra twice a week, and when the tiny Twin Otter planes landed, and shortly took off again, people from the surrounding villages came out to watch. Air travel is rare throughout Madagascar—so rare, in fact, that in the south, where graves of important men are usually decorated with zebu horns, a patriarch who had once during his life taken a flight has a large replica of a plane atop his grave. Even before the plane arrived, there was an air of expectation and activity in the airport on flight days, so that though there were at most 20 passengers flying on any given day, there was bustle and excitement at the decrepit airport.

When we arrived, a mass of people swarmed around the large scale. There was no one behind the counter. We dumped our bags in a pile as close to the scale as possible, then arranged our tickets in a decorative fan shape on the counter next to the others, similarly prepared. Sitting down in the plastic chairs that were surprisingly reminiscent of airports in the Midwestern United States, we began to wait.

On this day, the other travelers included a couple of would-be courtesans, a bit past their prime, dressed in black lace and external red bras, coiffed and made up and bedecked in gold necklaces and thick gold bracelets, but a little older and heavier than most of the women you see consorting with tourists and expats. There were two young Frenchmen we hadn’t seen before, probably short-term tourists. They were the only other vazaha. Several people carried large baskets, sewn up at the top so as not to spill their precious contents. Although it is a very select group of people who travel by air in Madagascar, it’s still not unusual to get on a plane in which sewn-up baskets are used as luggage.

One man had a massive white block that crumbled at the edges, probably salt. Another carried gnarled pieces of driftwood. A third ported an immense cardboard box filled with coral. Most of the women over 40—many of whom were not flying, just observing—wore two straw hats at the same time, stacked so neatly one on top of each other that you had to look very closely to perceive that there were, in fact, two hats there. Some wore five or six—an efficient, if peculiar, way to transport them.

A well-dressed, gray haired man who, by his bearing, portrayed his supremacy in the Maroantsetra airport’s social and political hierarchy, began making the rounds. He bore bad news. This was not unexpected, given that our plane, which was supposed to leave in less than an hour, was not yet in evidence.

“I am quite sorry, but the plane will not arrive until 11:20 this morning,” he apologized. The level of precision made a further mockery of Air Mad—he might as well have said it would arrive at 11:23, for in the four hours between now and then, anything could happen. “Would you like to return to town?” he asked. The Frenchmen and slinky young women, as well as the proprietors of the various marine art, were all going back to town. We chose to avoid dragging our heavy equipment through those dusty streets one more time, and stayed at the airport, far removed down a ruined dirt road even from the relative bustle of Maroantsetra.

To occupy herself, Jessica took a walk. She reported later that she had been wandering down a footpath near a small village, and had been surprised to hear an old woman, standing behind a rickety fence, speaking in French to her.

“The raging bull coming up behind you is in some danger of goring you,” the woman advised. Jumping nimbly aside, Jessica thanked the old crone, then paused to watch the agitated antics of this beast, as it pulled the man who was trying to calm it. Softly, a new voice arose at her side.

“Bonjour vazaha,” it said. Jessica looked askance, and pretended not to hear this too-typical introduction. The man was persistent, though, and finally she muttered “Bonjour” in reply. He took this as encouragement, and embarked on the story of the bull’s fate.

“This bull will be sacrificed today, for a celebration of the turning of the bones of the ancestors.” This got Jessica’s attention. One of the most renowned and fascinating cultural traditions of many of the Malagasy tribes is the ritual retournement. In the animist tradition of ancestor worship, the bodies of the ancestors are dug up every few years, dressed in new shrouds and, if they are fully decomposed, moved from the “body boxes” they were buried in to smaller, stone “bone boxes”. Even after the remains are in bone boxes, the tradition continues, and the ancestors receive new shrouds on a regular basis. While the ancestors are above ground, the current village elders speak to them, recounting the events of the previous years.

“Isn’t this the wrong season for the turning of the bones?” Jessica asked.

“No, no, this is the right time, for it is in accordance with the rice harvest.” He embarked on a detailed, hard-to-follow explanation of the importance of the rice and the ancestors being in harmony. Then he added, “you may come to the ceremony if you would like, and participate with me and my family. If you bring a camera, that would be wonderful, for we have never had photographs before.” Enthusiastically, Jessica told him that she had a friend with a camera, and that we would return shortly.

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Having hurriedly gathered my camera equipment at Jessica’s retelling of her interaction, I returned with her to the site where the frenzied bull had almost taken her out. We found nobody. I wondered briefly if we hadn’t been conned, realizing that right now our bags were sitting unguarded in the middle of the mostly empty airport, and could easily be taken. Despite my earlier experience with the clove boat guardian, I generally had little suspicion of the Malagasy, finding them far less likely to steal than their need might predict. I didn’t want that impression to change.

We turned and walked down a side road, and shortly came upon a crowd. Several women wearing bright, matching lambdas, the traditional fabric skirt wrap, were disappearing behind some thatched-roof houses off to the right. We stood around being vazaha for a few moments, looking vaguely confused, and the trick worked. Out came Knick (pronounced Kuh-nick), the man Jessica had met earlier. He was, it seemed, the master of ceremonies for this retournement, which was now beginning its second day. The village was preparing the zebu for sacrifice, and preparing to listen to the prepared speeches of the elders.

Knick led us in through the crowd and sat us down in front of several layers of men and children. The women had all dispersed. Repeatedly we suggested that perhaps this wasn’t the place for photographs, that we would be honored to sit and watch only, but he insisted, and it became clear that he wanted documentation of the event. I would send or bring copies of these pictures back, and this tiny village would have a permanent record of their sacred ritual.

We were in an open area with no trees, the village buildings of thatch and bamboo encircling us widely. In front of us lay the zebu, feet tethered, lying on its side, groaning intermittently. It frequently raised its head enough to look truly menacing, causing the crowd to recoil. In front of the zebu stood a low tray of banana leaves, on which were three glasses of pale liquid, the ceremonial rum. Also, a saucer with clear liquid in it, which was not elucidated to us, though Knick explained most aspects of the goings-on.

An extremely dark young man in a brimless straw hat scurried to and fro, adjusting the angle of this banana leaf, filling that glass just slightly more, looking askance at the zebu when he had to walk near it. He didn’t interact with the other participants, and I asked Knick about him.

“To do the actual killing, a Comoran man is needed. Otherwise, the ancestors are displeased.” He nodded in the man’s direction. “That is the Comoran.” So blood-letting was performed by outsiders. How they had found a Comoran, a native of the Comoros Islands to the north of Madagascar, I had no idea.

It came time for the elders to address the ancestors, to tell them how the villagers had spent the time since last they were above ground. The crowd, perhaps a hundred people, circled around the zebu, and a distinguished gray haired man stood up. His hat in his hands, he spoke clearly and, it seemed, eloquently, though I understood none of the words. Sometimes he drew laughs from the crowd, more rarely brief applause, and as he finished it was clear he had elicited great joy. Then a second man rose, tall and gaunt. The sun was rising in the sky, and shone fiercely down on him. A villager raised a palm leaf over his head to shield him. This man had the air of a stand-up comic. He delivered lines dead pan that drew great laughs. The barest hint of a smile played at the corner of his mouth, as if he had rehearsed for weeks, and was finally getting to orate.

When the elders were finished, a woman poured rum over the zebu, then slapped its stomach. Villagers gathered around and held the zebu’s tail in their collective hands.

“What is the significance of this activity?” I asked Knick, curious.

“It is important for the villagers to hold the zebu’s tail in their hands,” he answered, leaving any further explanation to my imagination. After a few more iterations of pouring rum and holding parts of the zebu, the animal was dragged ten feet away by several men. A little girl with a pale, torn dress walked by, but was indifferent to the proceedings. Bracing himself out of reach of the zebu’s sharp horns, the Comoran slit the animal’s throat while additional men tried to hold it still. The blood was collected in a small vat.

As the sacrifice was happening off to one side, women began dancing, all color and swirl. They danced in a long bending line, following one another. Soon they were singing as well, and clapping their hands as percussion. The sacrifice of the zebu marked the end of the solemn portion of this long ceremony, and the beginning of the celebration. The rum, previously reserved for small ritual-laden sips only, began to flow freely. Banana leaves were ornately folded into cups with long curved sides, as the few available glasses had apparently been reserved for the ancestors. Everyone living drank from banana leaves. Jessica and I were handed leaves containing some of the potent liquid, and it was made clear that we must drink, or risk displeasing the ancestors. One old man, who had apparently been nipping at the rum before the appointed time, danced among the women.

After the Comoran killed the zebu, he beheaded and eviscerated it. A platform of banana leaves was laid out where the speeches had taken place, and proper glasses of rum placed at the corners, for the dead to imbibe. A middle-aged man and woman, who Knick said had been specially chosen for the task, were seated on low wooden stools in front of the display. They were handed umbrellas to shield themselves from the hot sun. Slowly, piece by piece, the head and organs of the zebu were brought and placed on the leaves in front of them.

“These two people must keep watch over the zebu’s organs,” Knick informed us, “and if they protect these parts from evil spirits until midnight tonight, then we are free to feast on the meat.” I glanced in the direction of the organ guardians. The man was eyeing the ritual rum covetously, while the woman shooed away a curious chicken with a palm frond. “Please, if you can, stay with us for our feast.” Knick was a gracious host, but we had been there for two hours, and had a plane to catch. I felt sure that both evil spirits and chickens would be kept at bay, and the feast would commence as planned. Until then, dancing and drinking was the order of the day.

“Before we leave, Knick, might I take a picture with just you and your family?” I asked. He had been so generous, encouraging photos of particular people, but I had not seen him with his own family. He grinned widely.

“Yes, please, I would like that. Wait here—I will go get them.” We stood in the shade of a hut, watching the women dance, their lambdas blinding as they twirled. Several children stood near us, eyeing us curiously.

Folded banana leaves were being passed among the men, who now lounged on the ground, occasionally tipping a leaf too far, spilling its precious contents.

Knick reappeared, and arranged his family in front of the organ display. He had gathered more than 30 people. I had forgotten that family refers to a more inclusive yet more closely-knit unit in Madagascar than it does in America. These were not distant cousins he saw once a year, but the people he lived with and among, on whom he relied for friendship, labor, and advice, and who relied on him.

Returning to the airport after the retournement, we unwittingly played the pied piper, a long line of festive children in tow. I felt a need to record some observations about the retournement, and opened my computer, to the delight of the amassed youngsters. They crowded around so closely—mine was the only computer for hundreds of miles, and surely the first they had seen—that I wished I had tricks or games to show them. But to reduce the risk of incompatibilities and crashes in the field, I had stripped the thing of most of its obvious pleasures. But even a spreadsheet was scintillating to these children, and when I simply typed text, one little boy actually sounded out some of the words he saw. His literacy was stunning, given the poverty he came from, the lack of schools or books, and the fact that I was writing in a language that was, at best, his third, after Malagasy and French.

Finally it was time to be processed for our flight, so we reunited ourselves with the bags we had dropped by the scale, before being called up to the counter. The sequence in which we were called seemed to follow an algorithm that included the order in which the tickets had been laid down, but also incorporated how pleasingly they had been fanned out into their decorative display. Shortly it became clear that the scale was not just for our bags, but also for us, the plane being so small that everything going on board had to be weighed. We were more massive than any of the Malagasy being weighed, and gasps of incredulity could be heard as Jessica, and then I, clambered up on the platform, and the needle flew upward. Apparently we were light enough, though, for soon we were on our way.

We were not going directly to Tana, but to Antalaha, a town on the east coast of the Masoala peninsula. Antalaha is unlike other Malagasy towns in that, though most of its residents are impoverished, a few have become extremely wealthy from exporting vanilla. While even middle class Malagasy such as Rosalie could never conceive of being able to afford a plane ticket out of Madagascar, some of the residents of Antalaha have private jets, with which they fly to Paris for weekend shopping sprees.

The Wildlife Conservation Society had its regional headquarters in Antalaha, and I was to meet Matthew Hatchwell, the head of WCS in Madagascar, with whom I had been in much communication. I was also due to give a short presentation on my research to the WCS staff. We were welcomed into the Hatchwells’ home, which had once been a building used for processing vanilla, and there spent a truly enjoyable, if odd, few days. Just days before I had been living in the rainforest, sustained on rice and fish broth, washing myself and my clothes in a waterfall and sleeping in a molding tent. Now, suddenly, after a brief foray into a traditional Malagasy ceremony, I was having tea with Matthew and his wife, playing with their inquisitive, towheaded son, sleeping in a real bed and eating chocolate chip cookies. I didn’t know how to grapple with so many changes this quickly. Wistfulness for the calm of Nosy Mangabe hit me for brief spells, while I also retained wistfulness for the first world, although our time with the Hatchwells was a good approximation of the comforts I craved.

We flew back to Tana, where Jessica was reunited with her parents and I stayed in their house for the last time. Oasis though their house was, it was yet in Tana, and the ubiquitous fumes, beggars, and curbside food stalls seething with naked children and rats were still in evidence when we moved through the city. Ros had been doing my homework for me, and informed me when we arrived that Air Mad had changed its schedule. My flight to Paris was leaving 32 hours earlier than my ticket suggested, and it was overbooked. As irritating as this glitch was, the Metcalfs, true to form, made everything comfortable during my last day in Madagascar. Jessica and Peter took me on a walk to a hillside outside the city, on which an old tomb lay partially obscured by weeds. This breezy, gorgeous afternoon, clouds high above the hills, rice paddies far below, would be my last image of the vastness of Madagascar, until I returned again.

As I waited in Ivato airport, the international gateway out of Madagascar, I realized that the day I had fantasized about for so long had finally arrived. No more naked sailors. No more sitting on my blue three-legged stool waiting for frogs to act. No more clumped white rice and questionable fish heads.

At last the plane was ready. As I boarded, I felt a different kind of gaze upon me. This was not the “there’s a vazaha in our midst” look I had been receiving all of these months. Now I was back in the land of white people, for even though this was an Air Mad flight out of Madagascar, only the wealthiest Malagasy ever fly out of their country, and most of the passengers were white businessmen, expats, and tourists. What I felt now was their gaze, made curious by circumstance. Many of these men who had been in Madagascar had taken advantage of the slinky Malagasy misses for rent, but few considered such women wife-material, although the women are specifically seeking marriage. These men were returning to their country, to women of their same class and education, for their acknowledged relationships. During their foray into a reversal of mate choice and sexual politics in Madagascar, these men had seen few if any white women. White people are rare in Madagascar; white women are but a tiny fraction of that already small minority. I had been free of mirrors for many months. Now I realized I had also been almost entirely free of the male gaze.

Our nighttime departure from Tana meant that, almost as soon as we took off, Madagascar had disappeared into memory. Only around Tana were there any lights at all. Even where they existed, they were sparse, separated by rice paddies, dimmed by frequent power outages. Fitfully I slept, as we landed in Nairobi, Munich, and finally Paris. I was heading to London, where my parents were living at the time. I knew I would be surrounded with the trappings of the first world that I craved, but I was not prepared for my reaction to being back in a land where I spoke the language; where commerce was constant, fast and efficient; where nature was relegated to parks; where there were so many things available to buy, and eat. Walking down a busy London street, my mother lost me to reverie. Forcing her way back through the crowds, she found me gazing into the window display of a Baby Gap.

“Our children are so pampered,” I began, than looked around at what they grew up expecting—lots of goods, but also heavy doses of anonymity, stress, and urban sprawl. “They have all these material things. But few of them have a family to compare with Knick’s.” We are nuclear, tight in upon ourselves. Looking out at the world from our small cocoons, our narrow vantage points offer little insight into the breadth of possibilities for human life.

Sensing my tension at being dropped into the big city after so much time in the rainforest, my parents took me to the countryside. We visited lovely English ruins, which sat in rolling fields covered in wildflowers. Walking up the spiral stone staircase in the ruin of a castle once lived in by royalty, I realized that I had been in ruins like this as a child, and that it had not occurred to me then to imagine what it implied about people’s lives. It was a ruin, an historical artifact, not something to be interpolated into a modern understanding of human life. But now, the comparison seemed obvious. The very richest and most pampered English of the 14th and 15th century lived surrounded by cold, dark, thick stone walls. Their beds were made of straw. The kitchen staff kept fires burning always, because they were so hard to start. Filth crept in everywhere, and many royals, even, made no attempt to stop it. Bathing was an occasional occurrence. The rich had more trees and woodland animals around them than the average middle class person from any country today. And already the poor had even less, living in urban pits with few laws or public health policies to protect them.

How utterly foreign I am among the Malagasy, just half a planet away. I could barely comprehend their expectations for their lives, there were so few parallels with mine. But move me in time, just 500 years back, and I was equally at a loss. Hearing about the lives of the 15^th century British royals, or of famines in North Korea, plague in Africa, abject poverty in America—this is not sufficient to evoke empathy. One must truly see people living in ways other than one’s own. Better yet, one must live differently, with other people’s rules and history, for a while.

So ends Part II

Next week: Part III, Chapter 18 – A New Launch

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To work in Madagascar, every vazaha researcher must help train a Malagasy student. This enforces a moral obligation to give something back to the country—in this case, an enhancement of the knowledge base. The Wildlife Conservation Society, as the administrators for the protected lands of northeastern Madagascar, had a student they wanted trained, and they were sending her to me. I didn’t know if they wanted her to learn particular skills, but I doubted it, as they themselves didn’t know what field skills I possessed. Jessica and I had both heard horror stories about researchers who had been stuck with uninterested “trainees” who learned nothing and, worse, required constant supervision, so kept the research from getting done. Rosalie Razafindrasoa was due to arrive for the final three weeks of my field season, when I was finishing my experiments and tying up various loose ends. I feared that her presence would compromise my ability to finish my research. Before her arrival, Jessica and I knew nothing of her, except that she was a graduate student at the University of Tana. We worked ourselves up by fabricating atrocious personas for her, such that we could only refer to her as the dread Rosalie.

At dinner a few nights before Rosalie was due to arrive, we asked the conservation agents when the boat would come next. We were both hoping for mail, and though getting letters to Maroantsetra from the States took several weeks, and many just disappeared into the system, if they did arrive in town, Projet Masoala sent them out to us with the boat. Uncharacteristically, Lebon was in a bad mood.

“I don’t know the schedule,” he said, glowering into his plate of rice. Then he added, “Probably sometime next week. Fortune and I are leaving to be trained.”

“Trained—has this happened before?” Jessica asked.

“Every year, two or three times a year.” He seemed proud of this.

“And will someone be coming to take your place here on Nosy Mangabe while you’re gone?” we prodded, curious as to our fate.

“Someone from Eaux et Forets, yes.” Ah, a bureaucrat from the department of water and forests come to oversee us.

“And what about Rosalie?” Jessica introduced, for the first time, the Rosalie question to the conservation agents. Lebon looked at her abruptly.

“You know Rosalie?”

“No, but we’ve been told that we must work with her,” Jessica offered. “Do you know her?”

“Yes, we know her. She worked here, doing observations on animals.”

“Observations? Behavior?” Our interest was piqued.

“Yes, behavior.” Jessica and I looked appreciatively at each other. To our knowledge, nobody had studied in-depth the behavior of any Malagasy animals but lemurs before.

“On what kind of animals?”

“Oh, lizards,” he paused, “and snakes,” another pause, “and frogs.” he concluded. It wasn’t sounding like a behavioral study after all, given the investigation of so many unrelated species. More likely, she had been conducting a survey of the fauna of Nosy Mangabe.

“And she also did conservation,” Lebon offered. He seemed to know a lot about her. So we threw him a softy, a question to which you can never say no, at least not if you’re Malagasy.

“Est-elle gentille?” Jessica asked. Is she nice?

“Oh no,” Lebon responded quickly, “not nice at all.” Jessica and I gaped at him, then laughed uproariously. We had never before heard him go against the rules of etiquette.

“Why not?” Jessica pursued.

“She captured animals without permits, and when I told her to stop, she wouldn’t, so I had to call in the authorities, and we had a trial, here on the island.”

“A trial?” This was sounding like a fantasy, or a nightmare, it was hard to tell which.

“Yes, and she was not very nice at all.” He was sure of this, at least.

“So you’re going to be gone when she’s here?”

“Yes, both of us,” he said, motioning at Fortune. The faceless Rosalie irritated the usually unflappable conservation agents so much that they were being protected from her very presence. My curiosity was growing.

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Lebon and Fortune were whisked away to their training early one morning, and we had received word that Rosalie and an interim conservation agent would arrive within hours. Instead, fog closed in around our little island, and by early afternoon, we were alone in the Universe. Jessica and I were all that remained in a gray, drizzly world, with only the surf softly reminding us of a moon, somewhere. The boat that was supposed to arrive bearing Rosalie failed to materialize. For two days our little island lay suspended in fog. There was no world outside of us and the forest, and all it contained—frogs, chameleons, kingfishers, ruffed lemurs calling from the summit, a troop of brown lemurs overhead. All was insular. A paradise fly-catcher flitted overhead. Lemurs leapt from one tree to the next, greedily grabbing water-apples as they ripened. In the night, wild pigs arrived in camp, grunting, digging deep holes everywhere. I hadn’t believed before that there were any pigs on the island at all.

Finally, the dread Rosalie arrived. With her came Yves, the boat captain, who was to act as conservation agent until Lebon and Fortune returned. Rosalie, we quickly learned, is a thoroughly middle class, educated, 24 year old woman from Fianarantsoa, on the haut plateau, whose father directs the “normal” school, the regional equivalent of an American junior high. She had been training to be a teacher before deciding that biological research was her true passion. Jessica and I remained wary of her, even as she flashed her big smile, busied herself setting up her tent, and quickly made herself available to be taught. It was still utterly unclear to me what I was supposed to train her to do.

“How many species have you collected?” she asked us the day she arrived. It is a common misunderstanding among the scientifically-inclined in Madagascar, that all biological field work must inherently rely on systematic collections. This consists of finding as many different species within a particular group as possible, then preserving them in alcohol (pickling), so that you or others may later look at them at your leisure. It was not Rosalie’s fault that this was all she knew, but it is difficult to overcome the belief that field work and herpetology are comprised exclusively of collecting and pickling. I realized that one service I could offer was to show her a different kind of field work, another line of scientific inquiry which did not involve accumulating vast numbers of species, but rather coming to understand one or a few species very well.

I began by explaining the basics of behavioral field work to Rosalie, including the concept of the focal watch, during which the observer watches just one animal, for a period of time that can seem to go on forever. Part of the problem in training someone in this kind of field work is that it is necessarily solitary and silent work—to learn anything of the animals, you must be still for long periods of time, and let the patterns of what they do reveal themselves. This is not an activity easily taught—either you have the patience and observational skills to discern pattern, or you do not. Unlike the surveys Rosalie was used to, where teams of people moved through the forest catching animals, then reconvened to “key them out” (identify the species), this work did not involve chasing, collection, or identification of species. I couldn’t include her in my experiments, as they were already well underway, and their integrity would be compromised had I inserted a new researcher into the mix now.

But as I explained the focal watch to her, she became visibly excited, so I suggested that she go out to a bamboo stand that we monitored, and conduct a focal watch of a marked frog to see what she could see. She came back to camp excited an hour later. She had seen a female rebuff an attentive male.

“People should study behavior of everything,” she said. I had made sure to warn her that this work can at times be quite boring. Watching frogs can feel like a never-ending task. But she took to it. Both Jessica and I were beginning to like and respect her, and thereafter I dropped the descriptor. Dread Rosalie no longer, unless she should earn it.

In addition to patience and observational skills, a good behavioral biologist also needs a solid theoretical background. I asked Rosalie what courses she had taken in evolution or ecology, either as an undergrad or as a graduate student. She seemed stumped by the question. In her experience, there were no such courses at the University. Rosalie had never been introduced, formally or informally, to the basics in her own field, and claimed no knowledge of evolution at all. I decided that this, at least, I could try to teach her.

Because my French wasn't up to the task of giving lectures, I asked Jessica if she wouldn't mind translating a short lesson every day. When I asked Rosalie if she would be interested in such a thing, she was exuberant.

For our first lesson, I began not with Darwin, for Rosalie had heard of him, but with the modern synthesis, which was an ambitious and successful attempt by biologists in the 1930s to combine evolutionary theory with new advances in genetics. I then introduced her to the four forces of evolution, all of which have the power to alter gene frequencies in a particular gene pool: mutation (direct genetic change), gene flow (movement of organisms into or out of populations, thus changing the frequencies of genotypes in those populations), genetic drift (differential reproduction of particular genotypes due to chance events), and selection (non-random differential reproduction). Previously, Rosalie knew only of mutation.

The next day’s lesson was on natural and sexual selection, where my own interests were focused, and Rosalie’s enthusiasm and wit turned it into a conversation.

“Selection shapes the forms and sounds and rituals of all organisms,” I began. “From the very beginning of humanity’s study of evolution, Darwin was talking about two different kinds of selection. Every living organism must survive, which is accomplished through a process he called natural selection. And reproduce—that’s sexual selection.”

“You have to survive, obviously, but reproduction…?” Rosalie asked for clarification.

“Without reproduction, the individual’s gene line stops, and won’t be represented in future generations,” I explained. “So selection can’t act on those genes any more, and they are lost forever.” Rosalie scribbled in her notebook.

“The two selections are often viewed as distinct because they cause animals to do different things,” I continued, “Under natural selection, we expect both sexes to attain their goals in similar ways, through acquiring food and shelter. Under sexual selection, though, there is marked sexual dimorphism—the two sexes may accomplish their objectives by different means.”

“Like how?” Rosalie asked, looking up from her note-taking.

“Think of the peacock,” Jessica suggested, invoking a classic example of sexual selection. “Its tail attracts peahens, but it also makes it more difficult for the peacock to escape from predators. That big, bright tail makes him more likely to reproduce, but less likely to survive.” Rosalie didn’t look convinced.

“If the tail isn’t good for him, why do females prefer it?” Rosalie asked. She had hit upon a central question in evolutionary biology: how do sexual and natural selection reconcile with one another? I smiled, in part to hide the fact that I had no idea how to answer her question in a way that would satisfy her.

“We really don’t know,” I admitted. “Females do prefer larger tails on peacocks, and those larger tails do have a survival cost. But why females have that preference has been hotly debated for years, and there’s not one good answer that everyone can agree on. We’re still trying to work it out.”

“Really?” Rosalie asked, stunned to hear that Western science still had some things to learn.

“Really,” I confirmed. “But we do know some things. For starters, in most animal species, females are limiting for males,” I began.

“What is ‘limiting’?” Rosalie asked, pen poised.

“It means there aren’t enough of something, like females. In this case, it means that males could reproduce more if there were more females.”

“Why is that?” she pursued.

“Because the more matings any given male can get, the higher his chance of successfully reproducing. Increasing the number of matings a female gets, however, doesn’t significantly increase her chance of reproducing. From the males’ point of view, there aren’t enough females to go around,” I concluded. Rosalie had stopped writing, and was just looking at me.

“Consider humans, before birth control,” Jessica said. “A man who has sex with 20 women in one year has a chance of fathering 20 children; a woman who has sex with 20 men in one year can only become pregnant once.” This made more intuitive sense, and Rosalie nodded, and picked up her pen again.

“So,” I continued, “the asymmetry between males and females, regarding how many offspring can result from multiple partners, leads to similar ones in behavior and strategy as well.” Rosalie was writing furiously. “Because females are limiting for males, females are likely to choose among potential mates. Males, however—except for human males—are not usually apt to be choosy. Instead, males tend to compete amongst themselves, to impress females, or to control resources, like food, that females need.”

“So,” Jessica summarized, “costly traits like the peacock’s tail can be maintained in two ways: by female choice, or by male-male competition.”

“Male-male competition tends to be showy, with big or loud displays,” I said. “Male moose butting heads and antlers. Roosters crowing at each other. Male elephant seals viciously attacking other males who come near their harem.”

“But what about female choice?” Rosalie asked, intense. This she wanted to hear more about.

“Female choice is just as, if not more important, than male-male competition. It’s not as photogenic, though. That makes it harder to identify. Typically, females choose mates by approaching the one they’ve identified as their favorite, and making it clear that they’re sexually receptive,” I said.

“How do females identify their ‘favorites’? What do they look for?” Rosalie pursued.

“Females may make their choices based on some resource that the male is offering—a food source he defends, or paternal care he will give to his offspring.” I explained. “But more frequently, females seem to choose mates on the basis of their genetic quality…”

“How does a female recognize genetic quality?” Rosalie asked. “Humans can’t assess that, can we?” I smiled. She was identifying so many important questions.

“Genetic quality usually can’t be gauged directly,” I conceded. “But an animal’s genotype—all of its genes—produces its phenotype—all of its observable properties, including size and color.”

“So,” Jessica explained, “assuming a good correlation between observable, phenotypic traits, and hidden genes, females can assess males’ genetic quality on the basis of their size, or call. In many frogs, for instance, the most complex calls, or those at a particular frequency, are the most attractive to females.”

“Female gladiator frogs choose males on the basis of both their calls and their nest, which the male builds and maintains,” I said. “And in some poison-dart frogs, females choose males that defend the best territory, because those territories contain bromeliads which are necessary for their tadpoles’ survival.”

“About those poison-dart frogs,” Jessica interrupted, “Why did you stop working on them? ”

“What are these frogs? Where did you work on them?” Rosalie asked me, curious.

“They’re little, toxic, brightly colored frogs, like Mantella, but found in Central and South America,” I answered. “I switched partly because the poison-dart frogs were already quite well studied, but also because the poison-dart frogs provide an example of just one lineage that has evolved many complex behaviors in response to being poisonous, colorful, and diurnal. I knew that if we found similar behavior in the Mantellas, here in Madagascar, that would provide a wholly new data point, and suggest convergent evolution between the two groups.”

“Interesting,” Rosalie reflected, nodding to herself. “But are frogs the only animals that have female choice?” She was chiding us for our preoccupation with the leggy critters. We laughed.

“No, of course not,” I said. “Most animals have some sort of mate choice, although a lot of it is difficult to understand. In some bower birds, females choose males on the basis of how many blue things they have acquired.”

“Blue?” Rosalie asked, to be sure she had heard me right.

“Blue,” I repeated. “You might wonder, why blue?”

“Yes,” she said, looking at me intently.

“Well, blue things are rare in nature, so presumably more difficult to find than, say, green leaves, at least in the forests where these birds live. It’s difficult to acquire and keep blue things, because they’re rare, so females can look for males with the most of them as a way to assess their quality.”

“But it seems so random,” objected Rosalie.

“It does, doesn’t it,” I agreed. “Again, how these processes get started is still a bit of a mystery. Why do females like blue, if it doesn’t help them survive, or have better offspring?”

“Isn’t one thought that males who have the skills to acquire a lot of blue things have sons who can do the same thing?” Jessica asked. “So the sons, like their fathers, will be sexy, and attract mates.” Rosalie smiled at this. Like father, like son; if senior is a catch, so too will be junior. After a pause, she tried to bring some of the theory she had learned back to real organisms.

“So what do you think Mantella laevigata is choosing?” Rosalie asked.

“That’s a large part of what I’m hoping to figure out,” I said. “A couple of months ago we didn’t know anything about these animals. I think,” I said cautiously, “that females are looking primarily for good wells, into which they can lay their eggs. But they might also be looking for some aspect of male quality I haven’t found yet. These males fight a lot, and call, which begs the question—why? Fighting and calling, like all activity, is energetically costly, so if they weren’t adaptive in some way, they would be lost…”

“Why is that?” Rosalie asked.

“If fighting was really non-adaptive, the animals that conserve energy by not fighting would thrive more than those that wasted energy with fights. Given that animals do call and fight, then, there must be a reason. Why call? Why fight? That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” I said. Rosalie seemed satisfied with that answer, but later approached me with a question that had apparently begun to plague her.

"Why do you have to bring selection, or evolution, into this at all? Why not just study behavior?" My multi-pronged answer included a discussion of the importance of a theoretical background to all empirical work, having a framework in which to interpret the pattern you observe.

"Okay, then if you're going to study selection, how do you know what traits to look at?" she asked. How indeed. She was landing on all of the landmines that were salient to me, as someone engaged in this research.

"That's a large part of defining your research question," I admitted, "and one that we don't talk about much. It helps if you can find an obvious morphological trait, one that the animal uses to interact with its environment in food acquisition, territorial defense, mate getting, or the like. Basically, you need to watch animals for a good long time before you form an idea of what to monitor for the effects of selection."

Rosalie continued to go into the forest, mostly to bamboo stand six, and watch frogs. Early on, her disbelief that this was really what we did led to an interesting mistake. I had suggested that she try to observe a single frog in stand six all afternoon, to get her used to what it is that students of animal behavior spend most of their time doing. Apparently unable to believe that this was what I was suggesting, she remembered that one of the other things we did in stand six was take data on all of the marked bamboo wells. Every three days we took data on water level, frog activity, and numbers of eggs, tadpoles, and parasites in each well. On this day, Rosalie walked from well to well in stand six and repeatedly took data on all of them.

Her persistence proved valuable. The following day, Rosalie told me that, for three days, she had been watching a well in stand six that had more eggs in it every day. It had been raining almost constantly. I knew that, five days earlier, just before she started her observations, there had been a large, almost fully metamorphosed tadpole in that well. It had left just before she arrived, and now she reported that eggs had been showing up in great numbers ever since. Two things were probably in play: the tadpole had been eating some number of eggs, so those that would have been eaten were now free to develop. More interesting, females may be unwilling to deposit in a well with a tadpole. Once it metamorphosed, though, what had been a very bad place to lay eggs now became a very good place, as it had a demonstrated ability to produce young frogs. Perhaps selection had enabled females to discern the difference, and the newly hospitable well became a place females descended upon to mate in. That Rosalie was a good observer is but one more piece of evidence that she was going to be an excellent scientist.

She was concerned, though, that she wasn’t working hard enough to please me. I found it difficult to explain that I had no such expectations, and that if she was learning, that was success. At lunch one day, after she lowered her head for her customary moment of silence, she asked if we would be working the following day. Jessica, well familiar with the schedule, explained what wells we would be taking data from, and which experiment we would be working on, before noticing that Rosalie looked a bit shocked.

“You work on Sundays?” she asked, in a small, plaintive voice. That stopped Jessica short, as she, like me, has no religion, and we worked every day the weather allowed.

“Yes, we do, but you don’t have to,” I interjected.

“Are you sure?” Rosalie asked, clearly concerned that I might think her lazy.

“Yes, of course,” I assured her.

Later I was sitting on the dock with my photo equipment, trying to capture some of the magic of the mid-afternoon light over the bay. I had a camera body, with a zoom lens on it, mounted on a tripod. Rosalie seemed interested, so I had her look through the viewfinder. I zoomed the lens in and out, then swiveled the camera on the tripod, so she could see a variety of views.

“Does it use film?” she asked me. I didn’t know how to answer. I’d been interacting with her as if she had seen cameras and knew of their basic functioning. This was well before digital cameras were common, even in the developed world. Now I wondered if this was the first camera she had ever seen, but didn’t want to make her uncomfortable by asking. By this time, Jessica had joined us on the dock. Rosalie, pointing at my hair, asked Jessica another odd question.

“Is this blonde?” she wanted to know of my usually distinctly brown hair, which was now a bit lightened from the months of tropical sun. Jessica looked unsure for a moment, then responded.

“No, definitely not.” Rosalie looked slightly disappointed.

“I’ve only seen blonde people in photographs,” she said. “I thought Erika might be blonde, even though she doesn’t look quite like the pictures.”

Our lessons continued, and Rosalie persisted in surprising me with her intuition for the material. She kept me on my toes with her questions, asking about the evolutionary origins of the sexes one day, the nature of sex determination the next. Jessica, of course, was a natural at this material, and between them, my brain was tested regularly.

One day we discussed the impact of ecology on mating systems—what determines if a population of animals is monogamous, say, or polygynous? I based this discussion on a seminal 1977 paper by the biologists Emlen and Oring. One of their main points, revolutionary at the time, is that females choose their level of association with one another based on parameters such as distribution of food resources. The social system that results is largely a matter of how individual males respond to female spacing—if females are clumped in space, a single male can often control multiple females, and polygyny evolves. If females are all fertile at essentially the same moment during a brief mating season, however, polygyny is less likely—one male cannot monopolize all fertile females simultaneously. At the end of my lesson, Rosalie, as usual, had questions.

"Is the implication that, as parameters of the environment change, so too might the mating systems of animals that rely on those parameters?" After hearing a cursory review of their arguments, she had identified the take-home message that I believe Emlen and Oring wanted their readers to intuit. Here was a woman who was a natural at the logic of evolutionary biology, but would never have the opportunity to truly explore that talent, simply because of where she had been born.

Rosalie continued with her questions, asking about sexual versus asexual organisms, and we discussed hermaphroditic and clonal species. We talked of trees that, when they are isolated, can self-fertilize when they don't receive another individual's pollen, and of polygynous fish that, when the male dies, the dominant female turns into the resident male.

At the end of all these questions, Rosalie said, “I’m not very good at biology.” It was such a ludicrous statement that I had to laugh.

“Oh, that’s clearly not true at all.” She shook her head.

“No, really I’m not. I never remember the names of things.” What a common and sad misconception this is: that it is the drones who make the mind-numbing effort to memorize all the terms as soon as they are uttered who are good at science, whereas the people who think conceptually and creatively, as Rosalie clearly was, are somehow inferior. I had to correct her impression.

“No, it doesn’t take much intelligence to memorize things. With time, when you’ve heard the terms enough, you will remember them. What takes intelligence is to really understand, and that is what you do so well.” She looked down, slightly embarrassed. Then, abruptly, she asked a wholly different sort of question.

“What is homosexuality? Is it a disease, or a choice, or...what?” She was very nervous about this, and it seemed to weigh on her. I wanted to know where her interest came from, so we pursued it. It soon came out that Rosalie had a friend at University who was a lesbian. Rosalie was concerned that the woman's group of friends were at some risk of turning into lesbians as well. She seemed to have created a schema for homosexuality that involved an infectious agent. I tried to allay those fears, and we discussed some of the scant evidence for genetic bases for homosexuality. We also talked about the fact that people tend to be very adamant about it not being a choice, often saying they have known since they were very young.

“I think with her, it was a choice,” Rosalie said.

I shook my head. "When you say that to many homosexuals in the States, they say to you, ‘why would I choose this? Look at all the difficulties it causes for me. What are the advantages?’" Then I asked her more about her friend, and found that they are not still friends, but only because the other woman moved away. When they first knew each other, during Rosalie’s first year at University, she wasn’t yet out. The concept of being out was new to Rosalie, which probably contributed to her viewing her friend's apparent transition as a choice. Then Rosalie revealed the most awful part of the story, as if the naiveté of the college girls wasn’t sad enough.

Several elders in the community began asking all of this woman’s friends, including Rosalie, why she became a lesbian.

“What happened to her?” they demanded of Rosalie, and others. “Why is she doing this now, to herself and to everyone around her? You should tell her to stop.” The elders demanded of these students to explain why a friend was homosexual, and encouraged them to confront her. This only confused Rosalie and her friends more. She understood so little what any of it meant, even what a lesbian was, that she hadn't been sure what to believe.

ö

After months in the field, the season was drawing to a close. On my last Friday night on Nosy Mangabe, the horizon put on another show, tall streaked clouds tinged with yellow, wispy flat clouds in pinks and blues, the thinnest line of bright yellow-orange lying atop the thunderheads to the north. Surrounded by all of this beauty, I was itching to get out of there. I wanted to be home, and not have to face my moldy tent or cuts that refused to heal or naked sailors in the forest anymore.

But even now, I was discovering new elements of my system that fascinated. I had established artificial wells in the forest, to assess whether wells were limiting for my frogs. Like females for males, a limiting factor is any critical resource that exists at a suboptimal level, thus slowing the growth of either individuals or populations. If, in this forest, the number of frogs was restricted by the number of wells, then wells were limiting for these frogs.

In my artificial wells, we found several unexpected species moving in, including a tiny little frog called Anodonthyla boulengeri. After a male and female Anodonthyla mated inside a well, almost filling the space with their eggs, the father remained with the eggs until they hatched, then stayed with the tadpoles until they metamorphosed. On several occasions, I saw attending fathers somersault around the eggs in their wells, cycling over and around their eggs. I suspect this served to aerate the water, and keep the eggs breathing.

Back in camp, though, relationships were getting more difficult. Lebon and Fortune had returned, and the animosity between them and Rosalie was clear. I didn’t want to take sides, even though I had made a friend in Rosalie in just a few weeks, while the conservation agents had remained enigmas for months.

It was my birthday a few days before we were due to leave, a fact I made little of, but which Jessica and Rosalie took seriously. When I got up that morning, I found on the table in the lab a carved wooden dolphin, and a poem. Jessica had whittled the dolphin while doing focal watches, and written the poem about our life on Nosy Mangabe, as personal a reflection of those months as I could imagine. Every nuance was perfect. Soon our time together would be over, and I had pangs of regret for that, even as I was glad to be going home. Then, as I returned from brushing my teeth at the stream, Rosalie stopped me in my tracks.

“Happy birthday!” she announced, and proceeded to kiss me in the Malagasy (originally French) way, on both cheeks. She had a small speech prepared, about how she hoped very much that I would be successful and happy in finishing my doctorate. Then she presented me with a music tape, of a band from Fianar, her hometown. I was touched, and a bit embarrassed, by her generosity.

Later, Rosalie took it upon herself to make me a birthday treat. Having but one egg, some flour, sugar and oil, and a wood fire, she managed to make things closely resembling donut holes, with no donuts in evidence. They were extraordinarily delicious, although Lebon made a point of denigrating them, and Jessica and I both made ourselves slightly ill gorging ourselves after months of rice and fish broth.

As we made preparations to leave over the next few days, it became clear that Rosalie would shortly be seeing her sipa, the Malagasy word she used to describe her long-time mate but not husband. She never used his name, just called him her sipa. What a wonderful word, I thought, and we don’t have an analog in English. Boyfriend sounds juvenile, and under represents the seriousness of the commitment after a while. Partner is more often used to describe a romantic interest of the same sex. Significant other—too clinical.

“How do you say sipa in English?” Rosalie asked me.

“I don’t think we have the word in English.” She was dubious, then surprised, once she believed that I didn’t simply misunderstand her question.

“Why not?” Her simple questions were often the hardest.

“I think some concepts are best described in particular languages, and the attempts of other languages to describe the same thing are never quite as good. Sipa is a good example of a Malagasy word that is perfect, sounds beautiful, a word the whole world could use comfortably. Also, tsangatsangana—to take a walk, a stroll, a little hike.” Rosalie laughed. She couldn’t believe that I thought there were words in Malagasy that were better than the alternatives in other languages. But Malagasy, in particular, often uses onomatopoeia to convey meaning—tsangatsangana almost sounds like a slow lope, an easy gait.

“How about, ‘bon appétit,’ in French?” she began rifling through her language stores now.

“Yes!” I agreed. She was always a quick study. So many times people have asked me in Madagascar how you say “bon appétit” in English. At first I searched for words, but now I know: it’s bon appétit.

“Also, bon voyage,” she continued.

“Another one—in Spanish: macho. Swaggering men trying to prove how manly they are. No other language I know has as good a word.” She wasn’t familiar with macho, but later used it to describe Lebon as he chopped wood. Now she owned the word, just like she owned so many biological concepts previously unknown to her.

The day before we left Nosy Mangabe, I took pictures of Lebon and Fortune to send back to them, and they proved to be complete hams in front of a camera. Lebon posed with a book, looking pensive. Fortune giggled under his flowered hat. They broke out equipment I had never before seen—a transect tape, some flagging—climbed a boulder with it, and pretended to be hard at work. After the photo shoot, I gave them a few things I would not be taking home with me, for which they might have some use, but also offered them real gifts.

“When I come back, next year, or the year after, is there anything you would like me to bring for you?” Lebon considered this seriously for a while, but Fortune knew immediately. He pointed to my hiking boots.

“Shoes, like yours.” Fortune didn’t have anything but flip-flops, so we measured his feet, and I told him I would get him boots. Lebon, always the showman, wanted a couple of nice shirts, “ones with collars.”

Finally we left Nosy Mangabe, but it would be a long time yet before I saw home. That first night off the island, I took Rosalie, Jessica, and the good doctor, who turned out to be an old friend of Rosalie’s, out to dinner at the Coco Beach. We talked of birth control and AIDS, and the good doctor admitted that though the Malagasy government denies the existence of AIDS in their country, it is there, alive and well. He sees it, even in the small hamlet of Maroantsetra, especially in the women rented by infrequent white tourists. We talked of the children that result from these unions, and Rosalie and the doctor were surprised to hear that single women have babies in the States, too. Rosalie and Jessica both insisted on flattering me with compliments, which embarrassed me, but also left me with pride that I had impressed on these two young women what you can do if you try. They both have such enormous potential as biologists, which Jessica will surely realize, but Rosalie may not, simply because of where she was born. She sees this injustice, and feels powerless to combat it. It is simply true that it is easier to “do what you want,” as she put it, if you happen to be born American, than if you are born Malagasy.

Next week: Chapter 17 – Descending Back to Reality

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Back on Nosy Mangabe, we resumed our routine. The boat dropped us on the island a little after eight in the morning, but since the night had been cool and rainy, the frogs were still active. The island was relatively quiet. There was a clove boat moored just offshore, and some sailors investigated me as I sat doing focal watches. Another man, notable for his extremely bright red shorts, wandered into camp in the late afternoon. Down at the fisherman’s camp, six-foot-high cubes of cloves sat on shore—small amounts of cloves packed tight into woven nylon bags, then smacked into squareness and piled high. The massive clove cubes were guarded by two wispy men with squirrelly eyes.

We had found raw peanuts in town, and brought them back in excited anticipation of a bit of variety in our island diet. That night we had a dinner of rice, lentils, and peanuts freshly roasted over a charcoal fire. After Jessica went to bed, I wandered towards the dock, and ran into Lebon and Fortune coming out of their cabin, shirts draped over their shoulders. They had the air of men going down to the boat to get stoned, and hung back in the shadows as I approached. On the dock, I lay watching the stars for a while, then slowly, as if in a dream, got up and walked back to my tent. I intended to immerse myself further in War and Peace, and sleep a deep sleep.

My tent platform, a haven, beckoned. My field clothes, now perpetually stinking from mold and sweat, were hanging on a peg attached to the thatch of the roof, ready to greet me in the morning. But I had, as always, showered in the waterfall before dinner, and was wearing the one change of clothes that never left camp, clothes that did not smell. I took off my shoes, and climbed into my tent.

In my tent I keep very little, as early on Lebon and Fortune warned us that the fishermen might come and steal things. But upon returning from Maroantsetra this morning, I had been in a hurry to get into the forest, so instead of hiding my money in the lab, I had dropped most of my remaining cash into my tent, inside a ziploc, itself inside an opaque, green cordura bag. Other than that new addition, my tent had the usual collection of things: a chocolate stash, a pair of pants, some medicines, and the air mattress I slept on.

This night, the green cordura bag was unzipped, and the ziploc full of money gone. As always happens in situations that are too awful to comprehend in one blow, I first denied the obvious, and sat looking into space wondering what it was I’d forgotten. I flew past my actions in the last several days wondering if I could have misplaced it, and finally concluded I’d been robbed. This was the vast majority of my remaining cash, almost $700 in a combination of Malagasy francs (FMG) and dollars. I had our tickets back to Tana, and my international plane ticket home, but no other resources. Losing that money would mean real hardship for the remaining five weeks of this field season as, even though expenses are inordinately low in Madagascar, they are not zero.

What to do? Still disbelieving, I considered trying to sleep. I felt sure that any attempt to recover the money would be futile, and would alienate innocent people in the process. Finally, though, I decided that this was foolishness, that I would not be able to hold my head high and admit to having been robbed if I did not pursue the issue. There was only one boat near the island; the culprits must be on it. So I went to Jessica’s tent, pausing outside, not knowing if she was asleep.

“Jessica?” I asked, tentative.

“Yes?” came the prompt reply.

“Uh, Jessica, I’ve been robbed.” My voice cracked.

“Oh shit,” her disembodied voice said, “I’ll be right out.”

We decided that since Lebon and Fortune were already down at the boat, we would go down there and demand restitution, hopefully with their help. We considered several plans, including the one we preferred most: talking to the captain, allowing him to somehow receive the money anonymously, then having him give it back to us, so that nobody need pay for their thievery if they gave it back now. As we were wandering around camp, somewhat dazed, trying to get our wits together, Lebon and Fortune came back. We explained the situation to them, and they stared at us, silently, in the dark. They were probably freshly stoned from their expedition down to the boat, but rose to the occasion admirably. Jessica asked Lebon what he thought we should do.

“Well,” he puffed himself up, happy to have his opinion asked, “we must go down there.” So we did. The four of us walked, single file and silent, down the dark path. When we were almost within earshot of the remote camp, Lebon told us that there was a problem.

“The boat is docked out in the bay, and there are no pirogues here to take us to it,” he noted. At the remote camp, the high piles of cloves were silhouetted against the moonlight that glinted on the sea, and sweetened the air. The two guardians sat against them, smoking. Lebon and Fortune talked to the guardians for a while, then one of them whistled for a subsidiary boat to come, which would take us to the larger, clove-transporting boat.

“We will go out there and accuse everyone who seems suspicious,” Lebon told us, then added conspiratorially, “and we think we have an idea about who it might be. There are a guy and a girl, whom nobody likes. They seem like the types to steal money.” We soon realized that this couple was very young, very middle class, and out on their first trip together, having paid the captain of the clove boat to take them south to Tamatave. She was the only woman on the entire boat, and they both came from a higher class than the crew. Plenty to make sailors jealous—the perfect scapegoats.

Meanwhile, other pieces of news had floated our way. The clove boat was leaving for Tamatave that night, so we needed to go out now and deal with this. The man in red shorts I’d seen entering camp became another prime suspect, though I only mentioned him as a possibility. Lebon asked me repeatedly if I could identify red-shorts man, and I said, no, absolutely not, for I couldn’t accuse someone simply because he had made the mistake of walking through my field of vision. As we were standing around at the edge of the forest, waiting for the boat to come get us, Jessica and I began telling stories to fill the time.

“You should be quiet,” Lebon advised us, “and get low, as the thief, hearing vazaha voices on shore, might panic. Then he will throw the money overboard.” Getting low seemed gratuitous, but we did stop talking. “The other thing,” Lebon continued, “is that a woman visited from Maroantsetra today, in a pirogue, to visit someone on the boat, and she has already gone home. Maybe she took the money with her then.” I despaired of ever seeing my money again.

Finally, the smaller boat arrived, and we waded out to it and clambered aboard, getting thoroughly drenched in the process. It took us to the clove boat which, still having a full load of cloves aboard, smelled wonderful. It was 25 feet long, with a vague likeness to a Chinese junk—the hull was made of wooden planks, and a small wood shack sat perched at the stern. On the top, where we stood, most of the rest of the surface was covered in huge flat bags of cloves. The boat was taking those cloves to Tamatave, then returning for the load on shore.

Lebon indicated that Jessica and I should stay out of the fray, so we sat ourselves down on a clove-filled mattress and watched the goings-on. Lebon, apparently quite a diplomat, stood on the center of the flat-topped boat, where all the crew had assembled, and explained the situation in Malagasy. A single flashlight illuminated him and the assembly; Jessica and I were outside of its sphere. His address went on for five, then ten minutes, and I found myself lying back on the bed of cloves, listening to the waves against the wooden hull and Lebon’s melodic but indecipherable voice, gazing up at the indigo sky, pierced with stars. Sailors furtively stole glances at Jessica and me, more often with wonder than with animosity. I was growing concerned that this would turn ugly, but we never felt in any danger for ourselves, only for other people and their reputations.

Lebon finished his speech, and the captain stood up, holding the flashlight. He shone it into everyone’s face in succession, demanding of them what they knew. Everyone who was known to have gone on shore was hauled out, and all whom Lebon and Fortune had seen in camp were given special scrutiny.

The formalities disintegrated for a few moments, as if by fiat, and the captain approached Jessica and me. Speaking in a low French that the sailors most likely did not understand, he gave us his opinion of the situation.

“The cook is your man,” he confided in us, pointing at a little man with skin darker than the rest. “He is new to my boat, and I don’t trust him.” We didn’t respond to this newest accusation, and the captain sidled off.

“In Tana,” Jessica told me, after the captain left, “a woman had her purse stolen, and the thief was brought down by so many angry men that he was hospitalized for his wounds.” She paused, and looked at the cook, sitting alone in a dark corner of the boat. “Everyone’s enemies are being named in this witch hunt.” She looked gloomy.

As people began to settle down again, it seemed that a plan had been arrived at without consultation of the two vazaha. We were to take the four most suspicious people to shore, with their bags, and search them thoroughly. If we found nothing, we would take them to the police the next morning (for which privilege I would have to pay, with money I no longer had). Meanwhile, the boat would go to Tamatave as scheduled that night.

“But we just want to get the money back,” Jessica argued to the group, though most spoke no French. “Please, if the money is returned anonymously, there will be no retribution.” Nobody but us were pleased with the option she proposed. We had no choice but to go along with the group plan, and so reboarded the smaller boat and, with several innocent people, and at most one guilty party, went back to shore. We steeled ourselves for an ugly scene.

In the fisherman’s camp the guy and his girl, the cook, and one other sailor emptied out all their worldly belongings for us to stare at. I wanted nothing to do with it. If any of them had stolen the money, it surely wouldn’t be in their things now anyway. What were we proving by humiliating them in this way? The girl scowled as she sorted through her underwear for all the men to see, and her boyfriend made a show of demonstrating that he had nothing, absolutely nothing, to hide. As expected, no ziploc holding two million Malagasy francs was revealed.

“If the money is returned,” repeated Jessica at my urging, “everything will be fine. We don’t need to know who took it, or why. We will be satisfied.” Otherwise, we would, somehow, involve the police the next day. Thinly veiled threats were made by Lebon. We left the four scapegoats and one remaining clove guardian, as the other was leaving with the boat, and walked back to camp.

The walk back was surreal unto itself as, being a moonlit night, we decided to walk down the beach rather than through the forest. The tide was high, and the moon lit the bay. Jessica and I walked in front of the two conservation agents, relieved to be free from the process for the moment, as if the whole incident had been but a dream from which we were now in the process of waking. From behind us, Lebon called our names. We looked back to find him holding a large nasty looking fish, long and thin and blue with many tiny razor sharp teeth. We boggled at him, and asked him the first question that came to mind, though it was also the stupidest.

“Where did you get that?”

“I caught it,” he said proudly, and again had the opportunity to puff himself up. Fortune smiled shyly behind him. He was always the wifely one, supporting Lebon in all his endeavors, never demanding any attention for himself, indeed, shrugging off questions addressed directly to him as if they would cause people to think too much of him and too little of Lebon.

“You caught that?” Though I didn’t like to encourage Lebon in his manly pride, this was impressive. The fish, still struggling, looked downright dangerous. Knowing very little about fish, but knowing there were barracuda in the waters here, I thought it might be one.

“Is it a barracuda?” I asked.

“No,” Lebon stated, as if he knew what he was talking about, “but perhaps in the same family.” I just stared at him. To our sounds of encouragement, Lebon strode into camp carrying his prize, which he had somehow managed to catch with his bare hands in a pounding surf.

Before going to bed, Lebon told me to check my tent thoroughly for the money. I did, and also rechecked every inch of the lab.  Finally, near midnight, I fell into a fitful sleep. It was starting to rain.

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In the morning it was still raining and, having a day of misery with the police ahead of me, I slept in. At 7:30 I trudged to the lab, found the door closed, which meant that Jessica was still sleeping, and pushed it open. There, on the table, was the ziploc full of money, intact. I was stunned. Looking around as if expecting to see gnomes, I picked it up and felt it, to make sure it was real. In a daze, I walked over to the cabin where Lebon and Fortune were just having breakfast, the first of their three daily rice meals. They too had slept in after the late night on the clove boat. I showed the money to them, not knowing what to say, and they, too, were flabbergasted. They asked me where I had found it. No, I replied, I did not find it, it was returned, it was on the table in the lab this morning.

They looked at me, unsure, and seemed not quite to believe me. Having intended to tip each of them with a 25,000 FMG note, I peeled off the bills in front of them. Lebon murmured “no, no” to my effusive thanks, but I said “yes, yes,” and wandered back to the lab. Briefly, I thought the whole debacle might be over.

But what of the five hapless folk down at the remote camp, four of whom were innocent, and had been delayed by one thief? I thought it necessary to give them cadeaux as well, but decided to wait until Jessica got up to broach this subject with the conservation agents.

Sitting in the lab, having put on my field clothes just as it started to rain again, Lebon and Fortune came to me. They seemed to have something on their minds, but were not eager to say it. I tried to encourage them, but they stammered and mumbled and I couldn’t make any sense of it, except that they wanted to know what to do about the five people down at the remote camp.

“Normally,” Lebon began, as per usual, turning utterly unique situations into everyday ones, “we would radio for the police this morning and let them take care of the problem. But the money has been found. So, shall we radio the police?”

“No, no,” I hastily tried to correct them, “the money has been returned, so I am happy, content. I do not want to involve the police.” They looked at me, silently. “Is there something else you want to say to me?” I asked, truly curious what it was that was so difficult for them to address. After a few more minutes of stop-and-go conversation, we decided that, before I went down my stand, which is near the remote camp, Lebon and Fortune would go and tell them that the money was returned, and that the police would not be called, and all was well. As they left, Jessica emerged from her tent, and I called her over for help with communication.

The stickiest part of the conversation was when I introduced deception into the mix. I suggested that, if it was better for these five detainees, they could tell the captain of the boat they’d been on that the vazaha had found her money, and that none of them were implicated. This didn’t translate well at all, and Lebon seemed intent on pursuing a witch hunt. The money had been returned in the night by someone on the island, which rather severely limited the possible culprits, but taking any of those people to the police would have been a cruel thing. I reiterated our position.

Jessica and I headed off in the opposite direction, down trail F, to take plot data. When we returned in the pouring rain, all seven people were in camp. I didn’t know what it meant, but thought perhaps we should go over and address them, thanking them for their cooperation and for returning the money. Jessica said no, the woman was taking a shower, and the men were all sitting around being manly. Let them be, she said. So we did.

Later, Lebon came over to the lab to talk with us.

“What will become of the people down there?” Lebon asked.

“Do they want to go to Maroantsetra?” I wondered, thinking, for some reason, that the boat that had left last night would be returning for its cloves sometime soon. No, they didn’t want to go to Maroantsetra.

“Where do they want to go?”

“They were going to Tamatave,” Lebon replied, “but, normally, you would not pay for their trip on the boat. Perhaps just a small gift for each of them?” Thankfully, he had brought up the issue of cadeaux.

“Yes, yes, of course,” I agreed. Jessica and I conferred, thinking that 10,000 each was generous. We rummaged about and found 5 10,000 FMG notes, and came back out of the lab with them, trying to hand them to Lebon.

“No, not yet,” Lebon mumbled, “after lunch, we will all go down, and you will present the gifts to them then.”

“Always a ceremony in this country,” Jessica muttered. I found the idea quaint, if somewhat unnerving. A ceremony to present gifts to people whom we had detained because one of them stole all of my money? Let it happen, just let it happen.

Later, but still before lunch, after the four detainees had left camp, the clove guardian came to the lab to speak with us. He suggested that I give him a gift for his troubles. In fact, he was the only one of the five who had not been troubled by this incident, as it was his job to stay with the cloves anyway. Jessica told him that there would be a ceremony after lunch. He wasn’t satisfied. He suggested an additional gift for himself, for his particular efforts in coming to our aid. He reminded us that he had whistled for the boat the previous night. The man was a wolf. And, I concluded then, the thief as well.

During a lunch of rice and barracuda-esque fish, Lebon chastised me for keeping valuables in my tent, and I practiced contrition. Afterwards, we headed out in the pouring rain again. With Lebon and Fortune in massive green ponchos, we trudged through the river that had formed from the path, and finally emerged at the remote camp. Much to our surprise and dismay we found there more than 30 people, and five boats moored right off shore, in addition to the huge tarp-covered pile of cloves. All present stared at us, unabashedly.

“Do you suppose they came to see the spectacle?” I asked.

“Oh, quite probably,” Jessica responded. Lebon walked the five boat people, the two vazaha, and himself and Fortune down to the beach, where our old friends the fisher people were just pulling up. The man who sometimes sought me out in the forest to give me mangos was there, and meeting his eyes, I felt comforted. He and I both knew that this was more our home than the sailors’, even if they did outnumber us at the moment.

Jessica and I stood facing the five, and Lebon made a long pronouncement in Malagasy. It quickly became apparent that one of the many boats here was going to Tamatave, and would take the three who intended to go there. The cook no longer wanted anything to do with his old boat, but that left three more who had been detained. It seemed that full fare was required for their passage, and this had become my responsibility. Jessica asked how much, and the captain emerged from the woodwork, to say that usually it is 80,000 per person, but he would only charge us 70,000 FMG. I gasped, and tried to look faint. Meanwhile, I was trying not to stare at the captain.

The captain. A corpulent man with deep black skin, he wore a tattered white t-shirt that didn’t cover his pot-belly and had words in English on it that made no sense. “America Party Dance 100% Excellent.” Around his neck, a gold chain with a shark tooth pendant. On his fingers, chunky gold rings. On his lips, something between a sneer and a snarl. An evil looking man, and clearly a crook.

We quickly came to an impasse. Poor Jessica, always in between, was trying to make it clear that this was absurd, that it was not our responsibility to pay the exorbitant fee for these people to go to Tamatave, when all of this had happened because money had been stolen from us. We were not the culpable ones here. The captain wasn’t buying.

“If these kids,” as he referred to the guy and his girl, “aren’t your responsibility, then they should be sent to the tribunal.” He grinned at his own logic.

“No, no,” Jessica emphatically answered, “we have gotten our money back, and besides, we don’t know who took it, so it is out of the law’s hands.”

The kids, a sweet young couple whom I was convinced had had nothing to do with the theft, stood silent throughout, except for one moment of hilarity on the girl’s part when she discovered a chameleon behind Lebon. It was a female Chamaeleo pardalis engaged in the laborious process of digging a hole for her eggs, and it seemed oblivious to the gathered crowd. By this time, all of the thirty or so people had surrounded our ceremony-turned-charade. Once the Malagasy were alerted to the chameleon’s presence, however, we had to move the animal to allay their ancient fears of these slow, harmless, if otherworldly lizards.

After carrying the chameleon to a hidden spot where she could bury her eggs in peace, we resumed our negotiations. Jessica was struggling to act as both interpreter and mediator in the dispute, and I, not knowing consciously what I was doing, invoked a kind of good cop-bad cop routine. Jessica, fluent in French, and understanding some of the Malagasy spoken as well, was trying hard to make everyone happy, as was apparent to everyone. She was eager to please, presenting their proposals to me with swiftness and skill, and mine to them with the same efficacy. Meanwhile, playing like I spoke no French, I listened to what I could understand with an impassive face, then, upon having it translated, regardless of the content, scowled and cursed and said “No!” sharply several times. I stood with my arms crossed and a distant look in my eyes, except when I glanced toward the young couple, when I had to soften.

I suggested several plans of attack to Jessica, including that the corpulent shark-toothed captain and his henchmen be reminded that we were not culpable, that it was us who were robbed, not the other way around. Still, the most effective strategy I had was to stonewall. I wouldn’t respond to Jessica’s entreaties with anything but a shrug, and waited to see what kind of response that would produce in any of the other players. I didn’t hope for much from the shark-toothed captain, but thought that perhaps one of the other boats was going to Tamatave, and would propose a more reasonable price. I knew from details of the conversation I had managed to pick up that any money that we gave shark-tooth was going straight to his pocket, as there were no more taxes to be paid for additional passengers, and his boat was already going to Tamatave.

Ultimately, the standing-around-looking-grim tactic worked. The captain turned to us and said, “you are students, eh?” A very good sign. Everyone knows students are poor.

“Yes, only poor students, so you see, it is not that we don’t want to give you the money, it is that we don’t have the money.” Half true, anyway. In the long run, I could probably afford to hand over the sum he was demanding, and wouldn’t miss the cash much once I returned to a first world economy. But I was living in their economy now, and I felt that I needed the buffer of the relatively small amount of cash I had with me, in case some true emergency struck, and we needed to escape or bribe our way out of a nasty situation. Perhaps more to the point, I was stubborn, and knew I was being taken advantage of. Why did this crook deserve to unhand me of my money? That logic, though, wouldn’t get me anywhere with the captain. He needed to believe that we were impoverished vazaha, an oxymoron in this land where white skin always signaled relative wealth. The shark-toothed captain rubbed his massive belly and drew his tongue across his lips. He seemed almost contemplative, yet fiendish—the anti-Buddha.

“Well, then, propose a price,” he offered. Jessica turned to me, not betraying her surprise at this turn of events.

“What’s your best offer?” she asked me. I considered. Was this to be real bargaining, where I lowballed and he highballed and we ended up at the mean? Or was he going to take my offer seriously? Knowing the answer to this would have altered my response significantly, but I could not know. Finally, I settled on offering 100,000 FMG, which was double the cadeaux I had earmarked for the detainees. Because of the public way this ceremony had progressed, I would not have the opportunity to separately offer the young couple or the two detained sailors their cadeaux, and I did not retain much hope that the captain would share his plunder with them. Jessica was deeply uncomfortable even suggesting this number to the captain, thinking that he would consider it an insult. But the captain readily agreed.

“Just remember me next time,” he said, with a wink.

“Now, what does that mean?” I asked nobody in particular. “Are we selling our souls here?” I thought the shark-toothed captain would probably appear at some later date expecting Jessica and me to fan him while feeding him peeled grapes in our underwear. Jessica clarified with Lebon that the 100,000 was everything, and there were to be no more gifts. The captain only wished to be remembered by us the next time he was on Nosy Mangabe, recognized with a smile, perhaps a joke.

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Next week: Chapter 16 – The Dread Rosalie

As my days turned in upon themselves, the rest of the world spun forward, recklessly. Back in the States, a plan to bring luxury to Maroantsetra had long been in the works, and by April of 1997, the plan was complete. Maroantsetra gives access to the natural wonders of the Masoala peninsula and Nosy Mangabe, but this town is not for the Western faint of heart. There were two tiny but impossibly cheap pensions in town, sporting flea-ridden straw beds, chickens, and no privacy. There was the Motel Coco Beach, a quiet place, mostly clean but never luxurious, falling slowly into disrepair. And for intrepid researchers, there was a room at Projet Masoala, replete with the noises and smells of town, and a dank mosquito-filled bathroom.

Then the new hotel arrived. The brainchild of a woman who runs what was until very recently the only travel agency giving reliable service to Madagascar from the States, the new hotel was expected to capitalize on a future influx of tourists to the region. Indeed, Monique, the woman behind both the travel agency and the hotel, had begun planning organized tours from the States, thus insuring that the hotel would receive business. The problem remained, though, that aside from the new hotel, there were essentially no services in the region. Twin Otters still landed only twice a week on the decrepit runway, after bouncing through the air from Tana. There was little to buy or eat in town; nothing for a palate requiring subtle or varied tastes. And the two private motor boats that would take people out to Nosy Mangabe or the Masoala, though not expensive by tourist standards, ran on third world schedules, with little deference to the expectations of tourists only in the region for two or three days.

In March, before the new hotel officially opened, Jessica’s parents came for a visit. Hearing that an important UN diplomat was arriving in town, Monique opened her doors early. The Relais de Masoala was proud to welcome as its first guests Peter and Ros Metcalf. Jessica was excited to see her parents, and though I protested weakly at first, I accompanied the three of them to the new hotel, welcoming a brief respite from the endless days on Nosy Mangabe.

Situated well out of town, thus free from the noises of children and chickens, from the dust and the dogs, the Relais is a picture of serene escapism. On the edge of the bay, there are views of Nosy Mangabe, and of the sporadic flow of spice boats. Coming down the long private drive, itself already rutted with the rain, off the main, badly damaged dirt road, one first arrives at the central building. This is a large, one story structure sporting a few large rooms, including a kitchen and dining room, with a tiled open-air patio. Everything gives the impression of utter cleanliness. Plaster walls are a bright white. Nothing is constructed of plant material, though just outside of the Relais property, all of the dwellings are tiny shacks with walls of bamboo and roofs of thatched leaves. At the Relais, the architecture mimics reliance on native materials, but this is just a façade. Everything is under control.

From the main building, sandy paths emerge, tentacle like, leading to several bungalows, separated by improbable expanses of organized green, grass kept in check. Each bungalow has its own lacquered wooden verandah, looking out to the bay, and to the big blue island. Entering, one finds a world of exquisite cleanliness, surfaces entirely of lacquered wood, gauzy white crepe billowing in the slight breeze. Two beds—real, first world beds—are hung with immaculate white mosquito nets, soft and filmy. The linens are smooth, bright, white. At the windows are hung more dancing white, swaying back and forth with the wind, the rustling of palm leaves barely audible. Those trees meticulously planned and planted, just so, to bear down slightly but not ominously, providing an illusion of tropical life.

The bathroom is a coup de grace. After months of life in a tent, three items stand out. A flush toilet, clean, functional, with a seat, and no standing water on the floor.  Purest white sinks and counters of…granite? Marble? Immaculate, perfectly flat, cool. And, most astounding, a wall of mirrors. I almost did not recognize myself. Living without a mirror for months, you nearly forget the desire to assess yourself daily. Whatever image I am presenting to Jessica, to the conservation agents, to the naked sailors, to my frogs, that is an image that they must interface with, but not me. I am inside this visage, not responsible for it. Suddenly I knew, again, my face, my body, from the outside.  Immediately drawn in, almost as quickly wishing it gone—oh, it was easier without the reflection, without that knowledge. But once attained, it is not returnable and, living with a mirror again for those three days, unable to walk into that austere bathroom without facing it, I came to depend upon it again. Try walking into a public sphere, or indeed starting any day, without once glancing in a mirror. It is an easy, comfortable habit to lose, in the rainforest, a world without human expectation. But when the mirror is again an option, it is impossible to turn down.

Nothing is coarse or loud in the world of the Relais. There is nothing to suggest dirt or grime, or the lives lived just outside the boundaries of this fantasy realm. Those lives are explicitly kept at bay.

The people living those lives are brought in as the help. They look on in utter bewilderment at this hotel, and though there is a thin veneer of sophisticated luxury on the stuff of the hotel, that shell cracked whenever service came on the scene. Local, rural Malagasy have no reason to understand what waitstaff are supposed to do, and Monique made it even more difficult by demanding that they do everything as French as possible.

On our first night at the Relais, we had drinks on the patio, gazing out to sea, while pretty young Malagasy women dressed up as French maids hovered nervously nearby. We moved on to dinner with no decrease in the nervous energy, as the staff perpetually peered around corners at us, looking fearful. We were not given menus, nor offered a choice of meals. Instead, after a long pause, Ros and Peter were delivered large plates with a handful of sad looking pommes frites, and undecorated, cold hamburgers. After about ten minutes, the waitstaff arrived again, bearing four large plates of buttered pasta, each with a slab of overdone duck in the middle.

“There’s been a mistake,” they said. “These are for you.” They took the hamburgers and backed away.

“I understand that Monique is arranging for tours of blue-hairs from southern California to begin arriving soon,” said Ros, looking around at the scared would-be French maids peering from around corners, then back to her plate of rumpled food. “I can’t imagine everything will be running smoothly enough for sheltered old ladies any time soon.” Ros, who, with her husband, has lived all over the world, and endured all range of indignities, was absolutely right. But she didn’t know all that Monique had up her sleeve.

On Easter Sunday, Monique arranged an excursion for us, and we spent the day on a small island inhabited by eighty people. We were told that it was rich with chameleons and lemurs, partially cultivated around the perimeter, in manioc, vanilla, cloves, cinnamon. Monique hoped to make this the next Nosy Mangabe, a place to take her tourists, where she could continue the controlled experiment. In truth there were few trees, and the small community cultivated rice for food, not spices for export. We traveled to this small island by two long canoes, with an odd assortment of other people. Just before lunch, Monique’s plan became clear.

A beautifully appointed spread of freshly grilled tuna steaks and skewered shrimp, halved avocados and orchids, were arranged in the center of a large woven mat placed in the sand. Artful but impractical banana leaf place settings and a centerpiece of tropical fruit completed the stage. Then she placed us all, not boy-girl-boy-girl, but Malagasy-vazaha-Malagasy-vazaha, around the scene. Sternly advising us not to touch anything, Monique began taking pictures. Jessica and I tried to hide, but she would have none of it. Then it dawned on me that these pictures would be used ever after to sell exactly this spot, and the hotel, to little old tourists from California. The picture would probably be captioned with a brief explanation of who we are, as she introduced us all to each other on the boat ride here: “a UN diplomat and his wife and daughter; a local Muslim shop owner; a young researcher working on her Ph.D. on Nosy Mangabe; the most important Air Mad representative in the northeast; a vazaha teacher and her husband, from Tana; several relatives of extremely important Malagasy; a charismatic old Malagasy man, and his counterpart, the charismatic old French guy.” We had the same number of Malagasy and vazaha, and though most of us had never met before, and would not meet again, the image was one of racial and cultural unity and friendship.

I did not want to be used to sell Monique’s “adventure tourism” scheme. Her island was a farce if it was labeled any sort of intact ecosystem, and I believed her motives to be entirely financial, which is often at odds with conservation. Later in the day, on the boat ride back, Monique began talking about the web page she was setting up for the new hotel, and how these photos would be on it. There was nothing to be done.

The following day, when Jessica and I were due to return to Nosy Mangabe, and Ros and Peter were flying back to Tana, we spent a final lazy morning at the Relais. Monique approached Jessica and me, making sure that Ros and Peter were in earshot, and invited us to come stay at the hotel whenever we were in town, gratis. Ros was, as always, the perfect image of grace during this, but suitably sardonic afterwards.

Meanwhile, seemingly overnight, all of the employees had donned new duds. The men raking the paths were all sporting baggy yellow overalls; the women, previously made up to look like French maids, now wore orange and black mini-skirts, and yellow flowers in their hair. These costumes were designed, I expect, to look ethnic. Instead, they all looked like escapees from oompah-loompah land in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

The next time we went into town, Jessica and I accepted Monique’s kind offer, and stayed at the Relais. I knew that I would not be included in such generosity were it not for Jessica, and she understood that Monique was merely trying to ingratiate herself with Ros and Peter, but we enjoyed the privilege anyway.

We entered our bungalow, expectant, ready for a relaxing day of luxury away from both our tents and town, but as I entered the bathroom, the mirrors held a surprise. Bright white circles had appeared on my shoulders, back, arms and chest, and were creeping up my face. In less than two weeks I had broken out in spots.

“What are these?” I asked Jessica, wondering vaguely if she hadn’t noticed them before. She looked surprised when I pointed them out.

“Fungus?” she hazarded. I thought her guess a good one, but decided to try to obtain a professional opinion. The good doctor, who had lectured me on the gentle demeanor of lemurs, would surely know what kind of creeping ick I had. So we headed to town.

On our way, we ran into Armand, one of the naturalist guides who was trying hard to learn English. He was with a loud Austrian tourist, blond and sturdy, who was cultivating an image of one who has seen the world, and is mildly bored by it.

“Armand,” we called to him, thinking that he, a local who spends a lot of time on Nosy Mangabe, might have encountered the spots before. “Armand, take a look at these, what do you think they are?” The Austrian, answering for Armand, said that it was sun. He, a tourist who had been in Madagascar all of a week, decided that I was foolish to worry, I had merely burnt my skin. Armand was in the unfortunate position of being employed by this bombast, so agreed with whatever proposition was put to him.

“Do you think it could be a fungus?” I asked Armand.

“Oh yes, probably,” he agreed.

“No, just the sun. It blistered and then the skin came off and these white spots were underneath,” the Austrian blustered.

“Oh yes, the sun,” agreed Armand. He was going to be of no use to us in the presence of his Austrian, so we excused ourselves to go find the doctor. This sun hypothesis made no sense in light of how much time I had already spent in the sun without spots, how tanned I was, how localized and pain-free the spots were. We left as Armand began explaining the mysterious ways of the aye-aye to the Austrian.

Carrying my two tubes of topical anti-fungal, we strolled to the doctor’s house, which is also his office. He was pleased to see us, welcomed us in and asked us for the news. Malagasy courtesy demands that all conversations begin this way.

“Inona no vaovao?” “What’s the news?”

“Tsy misy vaovao. Inona no vaovao?” “No news. What’s the news with you?”

“Tsy misy vaovao.” “No news.”  Then the conversation proceeds to encompass the news.

After a few moments of small talk, in which he revealed that he had just been in Tana visiting family, he asked after us. This seemed a good opening, so Jessica said, “Well, Erika thinks she’s got mushrooms.” (In French, the same word is used for any fungus, be it edible mushrooms or mold, and my English-trained brain always hears “mushrooms.”)  The good doctor’s eyes opened wide, and he came around the desk to investigate. Within seconds, he’d come to a decision.

“Yes, definitely mushrooms. It’s quite common here, actually.” He turned to Jessica, “and you don’t have it?”

“No, no,” she said.

“Oh, be careful then, for just brushing up against her,” he gestured to me, “might transmit it.” He again looked me over. “Yes, it’s mushrooms, but no big deal. Probably you got it from swimming in the sea.” Marine fungus? I was doubtful.

“Use your anti-fungals,” he advised, after investigating my medicine, “and in two weeks you should be better.” Is it just a Western affectation to be relieved once you have a name to call your condition, even though no treatment has yet begun, and you don’t even have any evidence that the diagnosis you’ve been given is true or good?

We wandered back through town slowly. Severe storms had again hit the Bay of Antongil, and life was not entirely back to normal in Maroantsetra. Several people had drowned when their pirogues capsized, as most fisher people don’t know how to swim. We saw a dead cow in the river. But it was market day, and the vendors were out, each selling their one specialty item—charcoal, fish, rice, baguettes.  Troops of well-dressed young men strutted through the sandy streets. And one woman was particularly striking, utterly beautiful and coifed in an aquamarine skirt, whitest blouse, hair piled elegantly on top of her head, with lipstick and a parasol. I had never seen anyone like her in Maroantsetra before. Jessica, who was in the habit of looking down at the ground, from months watching terrestrial frogs, saw none of this. What she saw was this woman’s feet, which turned inwards, ninety degrees askew from the normal direction. The woman placed them carefully, slowly, one in front of the other as she walked. The only piece of her clothing that was not immaculate were the flip-flops she’d thrown onto her feet, made more conspicuous by the lack of attention and care. We were intensely curious about her—clearly wealthy by local standards, she had an impediment that would have made life hard and cruel for anyone born with it, especially here. When she disappeared into a shack selling cooking oil, we continued on.

Shortly we ran into Armand again, without his Austrian. We told him the diagnosis for the spots, and he seemed unfazed.

“Where are you going?” he asked, noticing that we were headed out of town, away from Projet Masoala.

“To the Relais,” I mumbled, slightly embarrassed to be staying in such luxury.

“Oh, the new hotel!” he beamed. “I think it is a wonderful thing. The other guides and I, we have been talking about it, and we think there will be more tourists now. This means more work for us.” It seemed reasonable to expect such a thing. The guides were organized, and they had agreed on set rates for a half day, a day, and a night’s work. All of the guides were to request and be paid the identical amount, so that the only competition between them for individual tourists would be based on skill. And with every dollar earned, a set percentage went to a communal pot, which was used for purchases or projects that would benefit the group. I never expected to find labor organization of the workers and by the workers in northeastern Madagascar. But among the guides, the most knowledgeable of the local people, there had been a careful analysis of what was best for them in the long run. Now they looked forward to the economic boost they hoped the Relais would bring. I only hoped they hadn’t overestimated the integrity of the vazaha who ran it.

In the still of predawn, I lay struggling with sleep in white linens, under beautifully appointed though less than effective gossamer mosquito netting. I woke into a clean white world, where all is shushed and spirited away before it can make a sound that might disturb the still to arrive guests. A boat bearing cloves, moored nearby, scents the cool early morning air. I come out to the steps of the bungalow, pale sky turning faintest blue overhead, still translucent, shades of pink and yellow near the horizon. The sun has not yet risen. Near the beach, a man with a coupe-coupe, a long handled cutting tool with a sickle blade, hacks at dead wood. It is the only sound in this stillness, except for the sounds of dripping from the palm trees, though no rain is falling. The faintest breeze causes the vertical, topmost leaf on each palm tree, the cowlick, to sway slightly, without rhythm. The sand paths connecting bungalows and dining room are raked into orderly arrays of parallel lines. Nosy Mangabe looms large across the bay, just a silhouette now, the sun coming up behind it. Frogs are determining what they will do for the day.

A large red boat bearing metal-encased stores of cloves is performing a slow and arduous about-face near shore. Finally accomplished, it moves backwards out into the bay, thrice blowing its horn to warn hapless fisher people of its approach. It will be their responsibility to get out of its way, pulling up their nets and rowing furiously before being borne down on.

The clove boat disappears behind a planted cycad, an ancient cone-bearing tree obscuring this startlingly modern vehicle, incongruous amid the motley assortment of wooden barges, small motor boats, and the myriad pirogues that make up Maroantsetra’s usual marine fleet. Out to sea, south through the Bay of Antongil, the many tiered clove boat departs, a bright behemoth on cool blue water, heading toward a cloudless horizon.

Soon it is time for breakfast, which at the Relais de Masoala is a surreal and ridiculous experience. The night before, the guests advise the waitstaff what time they would like breakfast. In the morning, at the appointed time, the guests—just the two of us, we think—wander in from our bungalow and sit down at one of the tables on the covered patio. After a few minutes, during which time we feel alone in the Universe, a charming but terrified young Malagasy woman appears, bearing a plate, on which sits three white leaf bowls, in which are three kinds of jam. A spoon rests beside each leaf bowl, delicately poised, ready to fall off. The scared young woman places the plate of jams squarely in front of Jessica, and walks off resolutely. This task, at least, is finished. One less thing to worry about. Jessica and I look at each other quizzically, then she pushes the jams toward a more central spot on the table. Shortly, the young woman appears again, with an identical plate of jams, and places it, this time with no hesitation at all, squarely in front of me. She leaves, and Jessica subtly pulls the first plate of jams back in front of her. We decide not to fiddle with anything else until all breakfast accoutrements have been revealed.

A second but equally young and terrified young woman, in identical oompah-loompah wear, comes to us bearing a bowl of sugar, with a spoon. Hesitating, she finally places it just to the left of Jessica’s plate of jam. A few moments later she returns with a second, identical, bowl of sugar, and places it just to the left of my plate of jam. Jessica and I look wide-eyed at each other, but so as not to further scare the waitstaff, do not laugh. Shortly, plates, each bearing a spoon and a knife, arrive, and are placed just out of reach of each of us, making a symmetrical if unuseful array of china on the table. We have six bowls of jam, two bowls of sugar, two knives, and eight spoons. We continue our resolution to wait.

A third but still equally scared young woman comes out bearing two white pitchers—everything, as always, is white, immaculate, un-town. These are placed between Jessica and me. I investigate, and find one half full of coffee, the other with tea. We do not yet have cups. Two or three minutes later one of the first women reappears with a small pitcher of milk. This is placed, after much confusion, at the edge of the table, where one of us is sure to knock it off. Discreetly, when nobody is around to view this act of defiance, we move it to a more secure location. Shortly thereafter, yet another large white plate with six cubes of butter on it is brought and placed just out of reach of both of us.

A previously unseen woman comes out with saucers and, positioning herself such that she has to reach in front of each of us, in turn, to put them down where she deems they belong, makes as much of a nuisance of herself as possible. Still, the appearance of saucers is promising. Perhaps cups, for the coffee and tea, are forthcoming. Or, perhaps not. Peut-être demain.

One of the women comes out bearing a glass of orange juice on yet another plate. She walks around to the left of Jessica and tries to put the glass down but, finding this rather difficult, with the array of plates and spoons already there, reaches across Jessica to put it at her right. Exactly the same sequence of events then occurs when my orange juice arrives. Having ample sugar and spoons to stir into the typically acid tropical orange juice, we proceed with this endeavor, as no other ensemble is yet complete—coffee, tea, milk and sugar without cups, jam and butter without bread. We sip our orange juice quietly. One of the slightly less terrified young women comes out to us and takes a sugar bowl off our table. She moves the remaining sugar bowl to the spot the first one inhabited, fiddles it to what she perceives to be exactly the right spot, then walks off to a newly arrived guest, who has appeared out of thin air, carrying the sugar bowl she has retrieved from our table. We are left with six bowls of jam, and I realize we’ve probably gotten his jam as well. It strikes me that the concept of eating anything without a large bowl of rice is so foreign that they must have thought, upon seeing two neatly arranged plates with three bowls of jam on each of them, that this is what the vazaha eat for breakfast. Not eating rice for breakfast is the epitome of odd; it can’t get any stranger.

The other guest having settled down, the same charade is being played out for him, leaving us with our orange juices and an otherwise full table, but nothing else to eat or drink. Ten or so minutes pass, and one of the young women comes to us carrying a basket with four small baguettes in it. We beam at her, and dig in. Meanwhile, the coffee and tea, carefully prepared and brought to us so long ago, are growing cold in their pitchers.

Jessica finishes her two baguettes and, hungry for more, asks the woman who comes to spirit away the empty basket if we might have more bread. She looks doubtful. After some coercion she agrees, walking slowly back to the kitchen as if wondering how to steel herself for the cook’s rage at this request. Almost immediately, a large plate of freshly baked biscuits is brought to our table, by the same woman, who announces proudly that our bread is coming shortly.

“Oh, but the bread is not necessary,” Jessica says, looking at the biscuits covetously, “you see, we did not know there were biscuits coming.” The woman looks unsure, and walks slowly back to the kitchen staring at her feet.

About halfway through the plate of biscuits, the majority of jam now gone, orange juice long since finished, cups arrive. Not only cups, but cups with saucers, leaving one wondering what the first delivery of saucers was about, and what it is we’re supposed to do with them now.

Finally, as the last dregs of breakfast are being swallowed, yet another gleaming white plate is borne out by yet another terrified young Malagasy woman. On the plate sit two nicely folded napkins. The plate is placed in the one spot on the table that is not already covered in gleaming white plates, firmly out of reach of both of us. And so ends breakfast at the Relais de Masoala.

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Next week: Chapter 15 – A Sea of Moral Ambiguity

Time passes on this rich green island, this soft distant island, this verdant tropical island afloat in expectation and history, this big blue island, this nosy mangabe. Days slide past, identical in their schedule, subtly varying in detail, and there is no future to imagine but more like these. I wake in my tent, faintest hint of pink in the air through the gossamer walls, and lie still, listening. Night frog song ceding to day frog song, nocturnal mouse lemurs nesting, brown lemurs rising. They do not worry if today is like yesterday, nor even if somehow today were indeed yesterday.

Time continues to pass, and I become wary, convinced in my less lucid moments that my personal vigilance is all that keeps time moving forward here in this forgotten world. I must be fully aware that today is Tuesday, for if I do not keep track, tomorrow may also be Tuesday, and I will be forever here, cycling through endless Tuesdays. Even the smallest cues can remind us of what day it is. In Maroantsetra, the market bustles more on Wednesday, the doors of the church are open on Sunday. In the west, Monday has a palpable reluctance, Friday an exuberance, and Sunday drags its heels. On Nosy Mangabe, these names identify nothing—lemurs and lizards have no concept of a week, every day like the last, sleeping, eating, waiting.

Sometimes, thankfully, I lapse in my vigilance, and pass a moment, even hours, without pondering the passage of time. But then I am reminded, and wonder if the time I live now might come back to be lived again, erasing the first life? Or perhaps that mirror-time will compound the first life, reminding me of time already spent, but ruthlessly demanding that I relive moments, rather than giving me new ones. So many of my thoughts are the same, daily, that I might not know if I went through an entire day with exactly the same complement of synapses firing in my head.

March arrives, and the countdown continues: nine more weeks in the field. Nine more weeks of ethereal sky. The moon veiled by a faint mist, its border soft and imprecise. Tiny slivers of pale yellow slip through the thick clouds, crowning the mountains. The sky overhead is a middling blue that has no name, not sky and not midnight, as those names evoke noon, and night. There is no color called dusk, for dusk changes with the season and the climate and the number of people dwelling in your midst. This dusk is a steel blue with no end, gray clouds wisping at the edge, as if there are margins. But dusk has no borders, it goes far, continues out of the atmosphere into dark, and once there, dusk is gone, and you cannot name the place where it first began to disappear.

In Jamaica, one of Bret's friends asked him, “Is our Jamaican moon the same moon that you see in America?” Just think, if every place on this Earth had a different sky, if we could not link ourselves with the constellations and moon phases and the rising and setting of the sun. We are already so small and insignificant. How much more so if we were in smaller boxes yet, and could not see out of them into other peoples' skies.

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As in all lives, food provided a regular diversion from thoughts of eternity and echoed days. Meals broke up our days at noon and at six, plates piled high with rice. Jessica was writing to her parents one day, intense, focused, when under her breath she muttered, “I meant to write bread, but I wrote rice...that says it all, doesn’t it?”

Our diet is rice. Rice with beans, sometimes. Rice with potatoes and carrots if we’ve just been to town and there were vegetables to buy, and if they haven’t rotted yet. Rice with ramen noodles. Rice with fish broth. Rice with more rice, finished off with a glassful of ranon’ ampàngo, essence of rice.

Some mornings I find evidence of rats in the lab. There is no way to keep them out. They gnawed through the bindings of some of my books, beginning with a theoretical book on sexual selection, then moving on to Updike. They left a few rolls of flagging tape strewn around the lab like party streamers. I asked Lebon if it were possible to buy rat poison in town. He looked dismayed.

“If you poison the rats, the things they leave in the rice will also be poisoned.”

“What do they leave in…?” I began, then caught up, a bit too slow for Lebon’s generous interpretation of rat droppings.

Later, he produced an old, rusty rat trap. We set it, and caught two giant rats over the next three nights. These aren’t fascinating rodents known only from Madagascar, but the same big rats humans have been transporting around the world in cargo ships for centuries.  After this effort, our rice was a bit cleaner, and my books suffered fewer bite-marks.

The previous year, when Bret and I were on Nosy Mangabe with Emile, he came to us one day and asked what we had in mind for dinner, though there is but one thing to eat.

"Rice?" we hazarded to guess. Emile was annoyed.

"Yes, rice, but what about the broth?" he persisted. Broth? Perhaps he was making soup?

"Broth...hmm, yes, well, we do have those bouillon cubes..."

"Jumbo cube for broth?" Emile repeated, invoking the name blocked in large letters on the wrappings of these cubes.

"Yes, jumbo cube." We agreed. He seemed satisfied, and left to attend to the making of the broth. Only as we sat down to our meal did his meaning become clear. We had the usual heaping plates of rice. And we had jumbo cube broth, to spoon over the rice.

"No beans?" I asked, quietly.

"You said you wanted jumbo cube for broth." Emile was peeved. If the vazaha had a normal, Malagasy understanding of food, none of this would have happened. Rice is a constant. If you choose to put something on top of your rice, that is okay. But it is secondary, usually trivial. There is rice. And there is broth.

By the time Jessica and I were being graciously fed by Lebon and Fortune, at least I understood this much. For broth, the conservation agents have a predilection for fish. Almost every day, our broth consists of a weak fish stock, fish heads swimming in pale red water, eyeballs viscous and staring. The fish, though caught every day, is not eaten fresh, but smoke-dried, then reconstituted to form broth. It is not good. Sometimes, as a treat, there are crabs on top of the fish heads, their asymmetrical claws dangling loosely outside of the bowl, their flat bodies stewing in the same pale red broth. Crabs that have sat in a fisherman's pirogue for two days, steaming dead in the sun.

"We can't eat this," we explain apologetically to Fortune as he insists, like a good mother, that we eat, eat.  "The vazaha, we have strange ways, and one of them is to avoid feasting on long dead crustaceans." He looks betrayed, saddened by our rejection of this special meal.

"More rice?" he asks, hopeful, plying us with fresh mounds of the sticky white morsels. We nod enthusiastically, for we are falling in line, slowly coming to require enormous quantities of rice in order to feel full. A smile spreads over Fortune's lethargic face. We have brought him some joy, by feasting on rice.

One day a package arrives from Ros, Jessica's mother. She has sent us a hunk of cheddar cheese, now slimy and molded from the trip. We are in ecstasy. I found real macaroni in town, and we ask Fortune to boil it for us. We spend our free afternoon cleaning off the cheddar, washing it in the stream, admiring it, anticipating its sharp bite atop pasta. At dinner we carry in, triumphantly, a bowl containing small hunks of cheddar cheese. Fortune is in agony as we drop cheese on top of macaroni, and swoon.

"More rice?" he asks, scared that tonight we might say no. And we do.

"Tonight we have pasta, Fortune. Do you want to try it?" He backs away from the table, terrified of our cheese.

"Lebon, would you like some? It's delicious." Lebon, though unconvinced by our palates, wants to be heroic in our eyes, so he bravely takes a bite. This is all he can manage. What is this cheese, this curdled milk product? And why won't the vazaha eat fish eyes when they are offered?

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And so this life continues. I am, alternately, stunned by the beauty of this island, the serenity and odd twist on luxury that living in a rainforest affords; and bored, counting the days, eager for new diversions, craving foods, information, entertainment. The weather, even when it is reminiscent of past motifs, provides mystery, something on which to focus.

Rain falls in patches across the bay. At the farthest point, bright yellow lights the horizon, a thin cloud layer letting through the sun’s last pure rays before they color with their slant. So cool here, calm. The distant laughter of Lebon and Fortune, replete and satisfied after dinner, is the only human noise. Organic sounds of the night begin to emanate from the forest, frogs and insects mostly, clicking and pulsing with life energy. The bay laps the coarse sand beach. High tide, which can be rough, is tonight tranquil, the water barely undulating with the ripples that end on shore, surges of soft water on receptive sand. The large gnarled driftwood that usually rests underneath a tree overhanging the bay has been pulled out by the tide, freed by the water to do nothing in particular. I feel like that often, that my freedom here is laughable because there are so few options. It is such a feeling of endlessness.

At night, when I am trying to sleep, the rain is a gift, it secludes, gives privacy, and I cannot hear the muted conversation of Lebon and Fortune, rising softly, now falling, as they sit on the steps of their cabin. I have with me my headlamp, my only remaining source of electric light. All others having succumbed to the persistent wet. The only thing that wakes me, so often, throughout the night, is the need to pee, that urge brought on by the anti-malarials.

One dark, drizzly night, I get up around one in the morning, the third time that evening, feeling the pressure from my bladder. I grope around for my headlamp and, having secured it to my head, leave my tent. There is so much rain here, and the soil so sandy, that I do not need to go far, for the smell of urine is gone almost as soon it is made. I squat at the edge of my tent platform, holding on to one of the wooden poles that holds the thatched roof on. My head falls slowly forward as I near sleep again. Before I wake and snap it back, my headlamp is sliding forward off of my head. It falls off, directly into my stream, and goes out.

I am left in complete darkness. For a few moments I remain there, squatting, considering the situation. I will certainly need the headlamp in the future. Hopefully it will dry enough to work again. I have no other working light sources—candles aren’t useful in the forest, or in a tent. Since there are no poisonous snakes in Madagascar, rooting around in the dark for a urine-soaked headlamp won’t be particularly dangerous. So I do just that.

The weather is on my side, and it is hot and dry the next day. Before I leave for the field I rinse the headlamp off, and leave it in the sun to dry. When I come back from the morning’s work, the headlamp works, and if anything I am pleased to have had the distraction. Small things break up the coming and going of dawn, of rain, of moons new  and full.

Periodically, a strange, cyclic weather pattern emerges, in which clear, cloudless skies in the early morning yield to high clouds and hot, oh so humid late mornings and early afternoons. By mid-afternoon, a variation in the cloud pattern acts, rumbling constantly in the distance, moving a single patch of blue around the sky, thunderclouds moving gustily against thick wispy gray. It begins to rain, the thunder increasing in volume, and I feel that this will be a great storm, a storm that, if it were possible, would warrant staying indoors, positioning myself in comfort to hear and watch the storm, but not be in it. But this is not a great storm, it is only a few strong gusts, some brief downpours, and before the sun has gone very far toward the horizon, the rain has stopped, and the clouds are thinning. The thunder, too, recedes. Alas, I cry, the storm that wasn’t. By dinnertime, however, it is brewing again, and as we sit in the little cabin and eat it begins to rain again, lightly at first. Then, suddenly, the sky opens up, and swallows the island we are on in its entirety, lightning breaking the sky with jagged cuts, thunder by turns simultaneous with the light and almost minutes from it. The winds come again and tear at trees, dead wood falling, the lemurs hanging on, whimpering softly in the rain. And then, sometime deep in the night, calm returns. The rains stop, the winds die, and though the sky does not clear enough to bring moonlight back, not until very early morning, it is almost as if there was never any storm.

But the animals know. When I go out to watch frogs at 5:30 in the morning after such weather, under a bluing sky showing no clouds, they are exuberant, singing to the world. The males call for mates and to taunt their competition, because an important resource has just fallen on them in abundance, equally on all, and it is now up to them to define who can best take advantage of this windfall.

There is a coup in the works, a hostile takeover of the territory of the alpha frog, whom I call Frank. He is a successful frog, if perhaps greedy, defending five of the seven viable wells in the entire bamboo stand. This leaves most of the other males with no chance to reproduce. I have given these principal players names only for ease of reference, because their marks are various and inconsistent, so one would be “left anterior two scar, right posterior one scar,” another “pink orange green waistband.”

Two other contenders to Frank’s throne are making him fight to retain his preeminence. George came in from the east, Caesar from the north, both courting females, and looking as if they intended to mate in Frank’s defended wells. Frank attacked both of the males, and the five of them scrambled around, jumping on each other and fighting. Whenever one of the females tried to leave, Frank jumped on her and thrust at her in agitated amplexus, until she succumbed and sat still, ready to be trampled in the fray again. In the end, Frank lost everything, as both Caesar and George ended up mating with females in wells that were in Frank’s territory. He sat in the middle, mute and still.

But even in defeat, Frank is not vanquished. All is not lost, as Caesar’s hard work may have gone only to provide lunch for Frank’s child. Previously I’ve observed that these tadpoles rely for their nutrition on the eggs of their own species. Sometimes tadpoles get fed by their mothers, and often tadpoles cannibalize eggs not meant for them. The well in which Caesar was mating already had Frank’s tadpole in it, so any eggs Caesar pried from a receptive female might promptly get eaten by Frank’s offspring. Caesar, the worthy competitor, would have his efforts parasitized after a long battle. While Frank, the male who looks to the horizon, who defends wells at all costs—he may be the one who wins.

Every two and a half weeks we go into town to replenish our provisions, to get a decent meal, to reset the clock and establish a baseline vigilance again. Once we go specifically to buy a chicken. Jessica and I no longer stay at the Coco Beach, as Clarice allows us to sleep in a room on the second floor of Projet Masoala. It is free, and central, if a step down from the Coco Beach in cleanliness and charm. It has two rank foam mattresses on which are draped single sheets, and holes in the wall called windows that look out on the streets of Maroantsetra. The mosquitoes are thick, the bathroom foul. But across the dirt road, under the thatched roof of the open air market, a young Malagasy man sits and strums his guitar, two friends by his side. The music lilts, smooth and light. This scene lingers, seeming to hang in time whenever I come to town, the men no older, the music no less enchanting.

The restaurant that we frequent, now that we are away from the Coco Beach, is across the street from an establishment advertising wine and rum, the prices scrawled on the outside wall. At the tables in front, a beautiful, slinky young Malagasy woman is arrayed in tight-fitting clothes and a fashionable purse, ready to take off at any moment on a scooter parked in front. Also, an odious white man: a dwarf with a serious stoop, no neck, and a Napoleon complex. He chats with a Chinese man, eyes the woman, and speeds off on his scooter, only to return shortly and resume the cycle. We imagine that there is a rental agency in town, one that loans out scooters and lush young women, perhaps both, for the price of one.

This woman who works across the street from us is stunning, bearing curvy hips on long legs, and an angular jaw with pronounced cheekbones. She holds herself with what appears to be confidence and self-admiration. Has she really kept her pride, when she is being bought by grotesque men for a few dollars? Perhaps she has managed to retain those human emotions even as she necessarily turned off the physical responses of her body, sliding only partway into an automated existence.

We leave town quickly, as always, after getting our fill of poulet au coco and views of the village prostitute's life, and after acquiring a chicken. Arriving at Nosy Mangabe with this bird, Lebon and Fortune grow excited, ready for a good meal. But this is an experimental chicken.

Mantella laevigata, my frogs, are brightly colored and toxic. They probably get the building blocks for their poisons from something in their diet, as it dissipates when they’re kept in captivity. Lacking both teeth and bad attitudes, they don’t use their poisons offensively, only as defense. They are fine examples of aposematic, or warning, coloration, which is also found in coral snakes, monarch butterflies, and many species of caterpillars. Being toxic is very well and good, but if your predator has already eaten you before he realizes you're poisonous, your personal toxicity does you no good at all. Best if you can warn the predator before he takes a bite out of you. Bright coloration is one way to warn predators, but for the unfortunate fact that many potential predators don't see color. Some lizards and snakes do. All birds do. But among mammals, only primates and a few scant others see color.

I wanted to determine if potential predators are actually discriminating between the aposematically colored Mantella, and non-toxic, probably tasty, but cryptic (drab, camouflaged, brown) frogs. So we got ourselves a color-seeing chicken. We also caught a slew of zonosaurs, since we had seen one of these lizards eating a Mantella. Then we rounded up three species of frogs: some Mantella laevigata (bright and toxic), Mantella betsileo (drab and toxic), and Mantidactylus betsileanus (drab and edible). Meanwhile the chicken is becoming acclimated to forest life, where it wanders on a long leash, picking seeds off the forest floor. We use tarps to turn the unused tent platform into a large arena. Using homemade collars and leashes on both the chicken and lizards, we tie them inside the arena, drop in the various species of frogs, and wait for predation to happen.

All of the frogs hunker down in one corner of the arena. The chicken takes one flying leap and escapes from its walls. We return her, but she is intent on perfecting that leap. The lizards make repeated run-ups to the slick sides, always falling backwards into the arena at the last moment, before attempting their getaway again. Nobody eats anyone else. Lebon and Fortune huddle in the far corner of camp, frightened by our newest game, occasionally shooting wistful glances at the persistently escaping chicken.

Finally we unleash the zonosaurs, return the frogs to their homes, tear down the arena, and convey the chicken to the still trembling conservation agents.

"Here," we say, disgusted with the chicken's behavior, "we have no more use for it. Why don't you make a nice broth?" Our experimental forest chicken proves extremely tasty.

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The southern summer is ending. On the fall equinox in northeastern Madagascar, the days will soon begin growing slightly more perceptibly shorter. So close to the equator, day length never fluctuates widely. There are not the wide swings of long lazy summer evenings, warm with light, ceding to short winter days that darken before five. Back home, in the northern temperate zone, the same moment is the spring equinox. On this day the sun passes over the equator to bring more rays, longer days and stronger light, to a northern hemisphere now tilted toward the sun. There the days grow, not shrink, in length. Here, I spin into a mild tropical autumn.

When, as now, it has not rained for almost a week, tadpoles and eggs dry up, the frogs hide, and none of them are interested in sex or fights. I am left to ponder the shimmering bay, until a change in weather reinvigorates the frogs. It is impossible to tell if I am working too hard, or not hard enough. There is no gauge. There is nothing to compare to, only mounting boredom or panic at moments when I’m not working.

Jessica keeps me on track, keeps me sane. She has begun to hypothesize about what she is seeing, which is wonderful, for two brains are more likely to arrive at truth than one. She goes out to watch frogs even in ridiculous weather, always eager to help carry gear, to talk about what we are seeing. One stormy morning, when I had not gone out because of the weather, and assumed she was still asleep, she bounded into the lab, dripping wet, full of frog stories to recount and interpret. Between her enthusiasm, and the various projects I have going now—daily focal observations, taking data on well inhabitants throughout the forest, experiments underway to assess female choice and population limitation—I should be confident that all is well. But how does one know for sure, when there is no authority nodding approval from a comfortable chair?

A comfortable chair. This becomes one of my most persistent cravings. We sit on wooden stools in camp, three-legged pack stools when observing frogs, and rocks and leaf litter in the forest. Our backs become twisted, sore and tight, from never being able to recline except in sleep. How much I would give for a bit of comfort in this forest paradise.

Four days of solid rain, four days boxed in by a cement bunker while outside it pours down, mocking my scientific intentions. Four days is an eternity. I take a long wet walk, slipping down trails, up hills, across the forest, sighting lemurs huddled miserable in the trees, the flash of a tail as a snake slides out of sight. I reflect on this non-linear forest-world where one hour is the next hour is tomorrow's hour. Again I worry, concerned that time will begin to cycle, and I will relive this day endlessly, never being any closer to an end, or a reprieve.

Finally I realize that the vigilance is not necessary, that paying heed to passing time or no, it will indeed pass, and will not return. I sit, mindless, waiting for a new today.

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Next week: Chapter 14 – The New Hotel

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The flora and fauna of Nosy Mangabe coexist with me when I am here. The people of Maroantsetra, though they no longer visit very often, allow me to stay. The fisher people who sometimes camp overnight, during storms or good fishing runs, grant me access. I have no such power to grant, as I carry no authority. But I do share the space with a variety of people, some of whom I feel, with my foreign skin, don’t belong; others I know belong far more than I ever will.

My parents treated me to a cruise with them down the Nile a few years back, just after New Year’s. We all began the week expecting cushiness and little real interaction with local people. I was pleased to find that the itinerary on our frequent stops, with the advertised goal being to see ever more fantastic ruins, was flexible. If the ruin of the hour seemed just like the last, or if the number of tourists who had gotten there before us was too stifling, we could wander about the streets of whatever town we were in.

We were exploring Edfu together, but my mother was suspicious of those we encountered, registering her distrust by scowling at them. She didn’t love my choice of streets to drift down, finding them a bit daunting by virtue of their narrowness, the number of children playing with metal shards in the middle of them, the domestic air of laundry hung out to dry in the sharp heat. She allowed me to drag them down these places, but her discomfort showed on her face. We were not interacting with anyone. The locals backed off a bit when we came by, and no laughter served as backdrop to our slow conversation.

“If you smile at people, they often accept you as an ally, and smile back,” I gently suggested. I was surprised at how easily this point was made. My mother began to smile, and our joy increased immediately, as locals greeted us, children ran about, and native conversation ceased to halt in our wake. We quickly acquired a guide—a little girl named Sylvia who spoke some English, and seemed to enjoy skipping along beside us. The lesson was simply this—why not expect good things of people, until they have given you reason not to? This is especially valuable when the stakes are low, or your initial hostility gives you no real advantage anyway. In Madagascar, the lesson is critical. When I act distrustful and nasty, I get the same back at me; with just a bit of courtesy on my part, everyone, including me, receives more respect in the end. Positive feedback is a powerful thing.

About half a mile south of camp on Nosy Mangabe, along the coastal trail, is a bridge over a rocky stream. Gushing out of the side of the mountain is a waterfall, shorter than the one in camp, but still quite forceful. When boats come to the island to moor, the sailors on board come on land to get fresh water, or to bathe. Though their activities frequently go beyond these legitimate ones, while the boats stay three, four, five days, in which time the tide gives them countless opportunities to leave, I try to appear gracious and unperturbed when I run into groups of sailors at this small waterfall. Unlike fisher people, sailors do not include women in their ranks. Most of these men have rarely seen white people, much less a white woman, before in their life.

My first interaction with naked sailors was late one afternoon when I was returning to camp after a long day. I was tired, dirty, and the gear on my back was heavy. I just wanted to get clean, have a big plate of rice, and lie on the dock watching stars. I wasn’t paying particular attention to my surroundings when I came upon the bridge, looked down, and saw four naked men staring up at me. They looked so utterly harmless that it didn’t occur to me to be worried about the situation, so I continued on after nodding in a universal human sign of recognition. Shortly, though, I heard rustling behind me, and when I snuck a peak, I found the men, still naked, tip-toeing behind me on the forest trail.

“At least I know they’re not armed,” I thought, glad to be grateful for anything at the moment. They seemed merely curious, and the situation simply silly, rather than dangerous, so I kept on at the same pace, every now and again looking back to find them on their tippy-toes, trying to be silent while crunching through the leaf litter. When I arrived back in camp, Lebon was there, and as I strode past his cabin, naked sailors in tow, he called them to him. Would he reprimand them? No—he just wanted company. For the rest of the afternoon, they sat on the stoop of his cabin. One of them was draped with Lebon’s only towel, while the others remained naked, and chatted with him.

The following week, I came upon approximately fifteen men in the same place, some in little bikini briefs, some totally naked, half of them soaped up already, the other half just getting into the action. I walked over the bridge wearily, hoping to merely shock them with my presence, and then be gone. The quickest among them recognized me as human before I passed, though, and yelled a hearty “bonsoir!” He was quickly joined by others among them, so I responded, if not with much enthusiasm.

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Living in a tent for months on end has its advantages. The phone doesn’t ring at three a.m., electricity bills are low, and I never find myself wandering from room to room, wondering what I was looking for. Mud wasps do build their homes on mine, though, their crusty mazes growing until I knock them off, and they must begin anew. Mold grows into the very being of my simple home, leaving behind a persistent smell, and creeping black spots. Lizards take advantage of the sleeves holding my tent poles, moving in to these new haunts that are so tight the animals have to back out when they leave.  One night I woke to find a soft, slightly moving mass beneath me. Prodding it carefully, the form revealed itself as a large snake, curled up warm underneath my tent, perhaps waiting to strike at a hapless lizard emerging from the fragile walls. But these are minor inconveniences. I have free waterfront real estate, and when day breaks, I don’t need an alarm clock. The forest and I wake together.

This forest, though, is different. It is not simply that all Madagascar forests are unique. Indeed, some families of organisms are well represented both here and in the neotropics, such as the understory melastome plants, with their slightly fuzzy, latticed leaves and small blue fruits. Of course the lemurs and chameleons and leaf-tailed geckos of the Madagascar forest are wildly different from the monkeys and parrots and toucans that one is likely to see with some regularity in a neotropical forest. But there is more. This place doesn't seem saturated.

When a tree falls in a neotropical rainforest—and they do, often—it creates a light gap into which light loving, pioneer species move, using, in part, the nutrients left by the tree now fallen. There is evidence of a tree fall for many years after the fact. The canopy is no longer closed. The plants that thrive under these conditions include spongy-wooded species such as many palms, balsas, and Cecropia—light-adoring species that will disappear when the canopy above closes, and the light dims. The many vines that the tree brought down with it grow up from where they fell, producing a shrubby area, ripe with smaller, tangled vines. There is, however, often no evidence of the actual tree that fell within months of its falling. It is utterly absorbed, first by fungus and termites, ultimately by all the things that grow to take its place. There are no spare nutrients in a neotropical rainforest system, so a windfall of organic matter is immediately seized upon. When a tree falls on Nosy Mangabe, though, it lingers where it fell, not immediately sinking into itself, eaten from within by microbes and fungus. Its carcass remains an impediment to those wishing to pass for many years.

On Nosy Mangabe, in particular, many groups are simply missing. There are no members of the Carnivora. The niche that would be filled with big cats or hyaenas in Africa, or mongooses in the rest of Madagascar, is apparently unfilled. There are relatively few birds. Only four species of lemur are present, two of which were introduced by humans, or more likely re-introduced, after being hunted out many years ago. The only group that seems to be well-represented is frogs.

Even the ants are scarce. In a neotropical rainforest, when you drop a piece of food, it swarms with ants within minutes, and is completely gone soon thereafter.  On Nosy Mangabe, when you drop a piece of food, it may stay there for weeks. Bananas hung on a string are a sure attractor for lemurs, but don’t generate streams of ants. In a Costa Rican forest where I worked, I had a poison-dart frog in a plastic container for the afternoon, intending to use it in a behavioral experiment the next morning. I thought, in my naiveté, that the frog should be fed, so put a very small piece of banana in the container with the frog, to attract ants, which the frog could then eat. Half an hour later, the little girl who lived there ran up to me, panicked. I had attracted ants, sure enough, and they had devoured my frog. In the neotropics, ants are unstoppable. On Nosy Mangabe, they seem to beg for encouragement.

Spiders, on the other hand, are prevalent. In my experience, people who like snakes are often repulsed by spiders, and vice versa. To my mind, the smooth muscle of a snake body is an invitation to touch, whereas spiders have far too many legs to contend with. I hate walking into spider webs. Every day, every trail I walk on has fine threads woven into elaborate patterns strung across it, and every day, I get covered in them. This gossamer string, faintly sticky and imperceptibly strong, covers me, nets my hair, drips from my arms, masks my face. Occasionally, I see them before I walk into them, and tear them down with my arm. Usually I walk unaware through the thick juicy center of the spider’s lair. When it stops raining, the spiders all put up webs. When it ceases to blow, or becomes very sunny, the spiders put up webs. And I come along and destroy them.

Many of the forest spiders and wasps are in a continual struggle, the wasps aiming to parasitize the spiders, the spiders hoping not to be used for someone else’s goals. Parasitoid wasps are relatively common throughout much of the world, and Madagascar is no different. Some wasps paralyze large spiders, then drag them back to a hole in the ground, where the female wasp lays her eggs in the still-breathing but immobile spider. That spider, slowly eaten from the inside by developing wasps, will feed the next generation of parasitoids. Smaller mud wasps pack huge numbers of tiny spiders into their little mud homes, where they, too, serve to feed the young wasps.

The trails are rife with spiders. Higher up, lemur troops hoot and whistle, scream and cackle. The ruffed lemurs are intensely curious, grasping branches firmly with their hands while peering down at the odd bipedal primate on the forest floor below. A mile and a half from camp, along hilly trail F, I had set up a new experiment. A troop of ruffed lemurs often hangs out in this area, making terrifying noises and peering with their improbable dog faces from the trees. They started screaming while I took data on a precipitous slope, matted wet leaf litter beneath my feet, and I fell. The tumble was minor, but annoying, and surely scared into silence the frogs I was hoping to find. The lemurs continued on, though, cackling and bounding through the trees, while I lay in a wet heap at the bottom of a tired trail in the darkening forest.

Back in camp, protected from some of the hazards of the forest, there are still few barriers between nature and people. All over the world, people invent stories to explain what they see around them, but these may serve mostly to betray human fear, rather than real understanding. Jessica and I stood at the gateway to Lebon and Fortune’s world and looked in, confused and wary.

We were sitting in the lab transcribing field notes when Lebon came to us, holding his right hand limply in his left.

“I am in much pain,” he said. He was staggering slightly as well, though this was purely for emphasis.

“What from?” Jessica asked.

“A fish bit me,” he said, producing his limp right hand as evidence.

“A barracuda?” I asked, knowing there were barracudas here, and thinking this was the only fish that would have hurt a man, except for the great whites, which would surely have done more damage. I had not yet looked at his hand.

“No.” He looked morose.

“What kind of fish?”

“A little fish,” he said, then added, “I didn’t sleep all night.” Jessica and I caught each other’s eyes, amused, confused.

“Misy maharary?” I asked Lebon, using my paltry knowledge of Malagasy to say, “Is there pain?” He looked at me startled, surprised to hear Malagasy emanating from my mouth.

“Misy maharary,” he affirmed, cringing. Yeah, there’s pain alright. I had learned the word, maharary, pain, from Bret, during our first trip to Madagascar. He had learned it from the nurse-nuns who were stitching up his leg after he ripped it open on barnacle-laden mangroves. We got him to the nearest medical facility, but they wouldn’t let me go in with him, and he spoke no French at all. They were trying to anesthetize the area so they could give him stitches, but they couldn’t read his vazaha facial expressions, so didn’t know if the anesthesia had taken yet. Finally they managed to communicate the only two phrases he needed to know. Maharary(pain)? Or, tsy maharary (no pain)? When next I saw him, he was several stitches, and one Malagasy word, better off. I needed such a simple, binary system now, with Lebon.

“Do you want something for the pain…”

“Yes.”

“...or the infection?”

“Yes,” he agreed. I tried again.

“Do you want something for the pain, or the infection?”

“Yes.” I looked gloomily at Jessica, hoping she could discern what it was that the man wanted. She asked the same question, and again received simply an affirmative answer.

“He wants some of everything,” she said to me, not surprised. Rural and small-town people in much of the developing world seem to be in awe of the human pharmacies who come in from the west. We appear to have panaceas for every disease, every physical ailment, and there is little understanding that these same cure-alls often have side-effects, and must be taken in their entirety to be any use at all.

Finally, I went over to Lebon, to look at his hand. There was a tiny cut, hardly visible.

“Is this a deep cut?” I asked him, testing.

“No,” he admitted. I went to my first aid kit and got topical antibiotic, a Band-Aid, and some ibuprofen. He held out his hand, and I put some Neosporin on the slight cut, covering it with the bandage. I handed him the pill.

“This will keep the pain away for at least eight hours.”

“Eight hours?” he repeated, looking at it.

“Yes, eight hours.” I wanted him to go away and let us get on with our work.

“I swallow it?” he asked.

“Yes,” I was exasperated with him, but the question made sense. He had little access to pills—who knows what you might do with them.

“With water?” he pursued.

“Yes, with water, swallow it with water.” He limped off. We never heard anything more about the aggressive little fish. Probably, though, it was not a bite he had suffered, but contact. We later learned that stonefish were common off the shores of Nosy Mangabe. Contact with the extremely toxic spines of these bottom-dwellers can be deadly, and are reputed to be fiercely painful. Lebon didn’t have the words in French to explain this to us, so he said simply, if incorrectly, that he was bit. He was always trying to prove his manliness to us, and this unexpected display of weakness made no sense unless he had truly been in distress.

Later that week I was going into town to get provisions. Lebon took advantage of the boat I had arranged to get to town as well.

“Why are you coming to town?” I was curious.

“My wife and child are very sick.”

“Your wife?” I couldn’t help myself. “But you said you didn’t have a wife…”

“Uh,” he stammered, “my future wife, and her kid.” The next day, when I was returning to the island with provisions, he met me while I was waiting for the boat. “Um, Erika, I will not be coming back today...my wife is still very sick, uh, future wife.”

“And the child?” I asked.

“Child?” he echoed.

“You said the woman and her child were very ill?”

“Oh, yes, the child,” he looked bewildered, as if the child were a figment of my imagination.

“Do they have malaria?” I asked. Just a guess, but since it was a common disease, it seemed a good one.

“Yes, malaria,” Lebon nodded, once again looking morose. I’d seen him wandering around town with his buddies the week before, not looking in any particular hurry to attend to a sick woman, but he seemed affected now.

“Does she have medicine?” I pursued.

“Oh, yes,” he affirmed, enthusiastically.

“Nivoquine?” I prodded, knowing that I was breaking one of the first rules of third world communication—never suggest the answer you are expecting. You will almost inevitably get that answer, and then will know nothing. In this case, though, my slip didn’t cost.

“No. Aspirin.”

“Aspirin?” I repeated, dumbfounded. Aspirin is medicine for malaria? “Is there no nivoquine in Maroantsetra?”

“Oh yes, there is nivoquine...” He trailed off. I didn’t pursue this, understanding that if it was available and she didn’t have it, it must be too expensive for them to buy. It occurred to me that I might buy it for them, but her malaria is likely chronic—given that I couldn’t afford a lifetime supply, how much would I buy?

The conservation agents were a mystery to me. Sometimes they reminded me of Stoppard’s reimagining of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. But in this case, Lebon and Fortune were not dead, only highly ineffectual.

After several weeks on the island, I had never seen the conservation agents enter the forest. They frequently walked along the coast down to the fisherman’s camp, when there were boats moored down there. But they didn’t go inland. Partly, they were afraid. Every day at lunch, in almost reverent tones, they asked Jessica and me if we were going back into the forest. Sometimes they made excuses, asserting that, since we would be in the forest, it was not necessary for them to go. They eyed chameleons warily, too, unnerved by these marvelous lizards.

One day I found Lebon and Fortune giddy with joy, jumping off the dock into the pale green bay, splashing with excitement. Each time one of them hit the water, the other would laugh like a little boy. Most Malagasy don’t swim, so this was a surprise, not least because they were so carefree and exuberant. It was also inconsistent that they should be afraid of the mostly harmless forest, but at home in a sea known to harbor sharks and barracuda.

Even though I understood that they suffered from forest fear, I had little sympathy. It was part of their job to clear trails, and keep unpermitted people off the island, and they weren’t doing either. At my research sites, particularly in the bamboo stands, I began to notice clear signs of human intrusion—axe marks on bamboo, trees gone missing. There were often boats, of all sizes and types, moored in the little bay. At lunch one day, we asked the conservation agents why there were boats here.

“Because they are too big to dock in Maroantsetra, so they come here with their cargo.”

“But…” I began, then stopped. Protesting that this was a nature reserve wouldn’t do any good. Lebon understood that I was annoyed. That afternoon, I watched as the crew of one boat unloaded hundreds of bags of cloves onto land. They then sat around smoking, then strolled through the forest looking for fruit, terrified each other with chameleons, and chopped trees. From the bowels of the spice boat spilled jarring, garbled Malagasy rap music, which permeated the forest. Some of the men spent the day in camp with Lebon and Fortune, where the smell of marijuana was thick. Fortune looked glazed.

The next day the spice boat was still in the bay. A wholly different breed of seafarers, a family of fisher people, floated past in their pirogue, making landfall to smoke their fish. Fisher people, unlike sailors, are always local, and often travel in small, family groups. They are also extremely poor, and usually landless, needing just a small dugout canoe and their own ingenuity to survive. The fisher family set up a fire, and the smell of aging fish smoldering slowly wafted through the forest. Much more pervasive was the sound of chopping wood by the spice boat, the yells of sailors on land. That night, over our bowls of rice, Lebon announced that he had made the fisher people leave. He thought I would be pleased. I was ashamed.

The spice boat was leaking gasoline, leaving a rainbow sheen on the water. Earlier a tanker had spilled oil in the bay, and for a week I went to sleep in my tent with the acrid taste of oil on my nostrils. Lebon’s position is that the bay is not the reserve, and is therefore outside of his jurisdiction. When wealthy Frenchmen arrived in a yacht, cruising the Indian Ocean and wanting to walk the beaches of Nosy Mangabe, Lebon welcomed them on shore without permits. These tourists, like me, were exactly the people who should have been paying for access, but Lebon didn’t want to upset them. Besides, he argued, the beach is not the forest, and Nosy Mangabe is only a forest reserve. The border between protected and unprotected nature was fluid.

To Lebon and Fortune, this was a job to be taken advantage of at every opportunity. If they didn’t follow the instructions, it was just the ungrateful and stingy boss who was losing a few pennies over his employees’ behavior. But the bribes didn’t cost Projet Masoala, CARE, or WCS—all of the larger, faceless organizations—a few pennies. These bribes ran against the very philosophy of conservation. As Jessica and I had daily interactions bordering on dangerous with sailors, Lebon and Fortune sat back at camp, lounging.

“It is lonely here, with just the two of us,” Lebon explained over rice one evening. “The work is hard, and the island so big, it is impossible to do everything that an island of this size requires. We are always patrolling. And we do not even have a boat. And there is no radio, no music. Now that you are here, though, things will be a little better.” Lebon smiled at us.

It was true that they had no motor boat. They had a pirogue, which Lebon sometimes fished in. But the island isn't that big, and they put in no effort. Every time I returned to camp, expectedly or no, the two of them were there. Sailors frequently gifted them with fish and marijuana; in exchange, they looked the other way when the island was abused.

They were lonely, though, and this made their jobs more difficult than I could understand. Across the water from their families and friends, all they had was each other, the two distant vazaha women, and whomever came by boat. They had little in common with the fisher people—of the lowest class, uneducated—and so it was these people whom they kicked off the island when the mood struck them.

Fortune did even less than Lebon. Every morning, he got up and raked the camp, leaving parallel lines of sand among the water-apple trees and tent platforms, totally incongruous in the forest. He reminded me of the children’s poem about an old woman who rakes the beach, keeping things neat and tidy until the tide comes in again, but making no difference in the larger world. After raking, he was done for the day. A pot-bellied, quiet man, he sat on a rickety bamboo bench and stared into the middle distance, wearing a pair of old shorts that was ripped at the hem. When he went into town for vacation, he put on a shirt and flip-flops. On the island, he wore just shorts, and sometimes, a flowered hat.

Women in town weave baskets and hats out of plant fibers. The most decorated hats have plastic flowers on them—a pink rose, a white carnation. In town, men don’t wear flowered hats. But on the island, Fortune wore one adorned with a large pink bloom. Rooted on his bamboo bench and stoned most days, he scowled, watched Lebon cooking rice or chopping wood, and wore his flowered hat.

One day Felix came to the island with a tourist. Fortune wasn’t feeling well, and languished on the bamboo bench, looking stricken. When I returned to camp after focal observations, I found Felix on his knees, giving Fortune a foot rub. Fortune, still wearing his flowered hat, was looking much better.

While Fortune hardly interacted with us at all, Lebon tried to impress us with his knowledge. His French was about as good as mine—which is to say, not very—but we had largely non-overlapping vocabularies, and he wanted to learn English. One day he sat in camp on the bamboo bench with a book in front of him. He looked studious, and turned the pages at appropriate intervals. The book was in English. It was also upside-down.

At night, when there were boats in the bay, Lebon and Fortune waited until they thought I was asleep, and snuck past my tent platform to the fisherman’s camp to cavort with the sailors. They would come back an hour or two later, trying to stifle their laughter, tripping over themselves, high as could be. When the sweet smell of marijuana hung over their cabin during the day, Fortune would, once again, sit on his bamboo bench and stare, watching time pass.

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Next week: Chapter 12 – Naked Sailors

A hurricane was spinning towards us across the Indian Ocean when we went into town with the errant lemur. Without connection to the outside world, even in Maroantsetra, we didn’t know what to call the week of almost solid rain and punishing winds until later.

We were stuck in Maroantsetra for three days while the rain poured down and spindly palm trees twisted in the fierce winds. The short trip across the shallow bay to Nosy Mangabe was impossible. We stood on the second story balcony of Projet Masoala and looked out on the swampy marketplace, where even the rice vendors had abandoned their posts. Early on the fourth morning there was a break in the wind, and the captain took us back to the island, grudgingly, for he was scared that the weather would turn ugly again before he could get back to town.

Would we have gone back to the island had we known we were about to get smacked with a hurricane^[1]? Maroantsetra had services, and the theoretical possibility for escape, but it was dense with other people who needed services and food. On the island, isolated though it was, we had enough food for three weeks, and our water supply wasn’t at risk of contamination with only a couple of residents.

Three Weeks

Day 1

Finally back on Nosy Mangabe, I’m eager to resume my work. In the pounding, ceaseless rains, Jessica and I went out to search for frogs, demarcating areas of particularly high density, mostly bamboo stands where they congregate. We numbered bamboo stands as we found them, and each took one as our personal “stand” that we would go to every morning and sit in, watching, waiting for revelations from the frogs. My stand, number four, is a small affair with a lot of activity. It is on the coast, a frontier between the rainforest and a thick-grained sand beach. A mango tree hangs over the water. The canopy is open, the rain immediate. Inland, when the rains grow fast and sharp, there is a delay—you can hear them begin, pounding the leaves above, but the water doesn’t reach the forest floor for a minute or two, and then it is subdued, softened. After the sky has emptied, water percolates through the understory for half an hour, as the drip tips on leaves empty the foliage of water.

In between squalls, the waves coming up almost into our stands, Jessica and I alternated between watching unmarked frogs and chasing them with green mesh aquarium dipnets. We captured them and took down their length and mass data before adorning them with snazzy little beaded waistbands. We also clipped their toes, so even if they lost their belts we could identify them.

When it rains hard, even the frogs dive for cover. A Costa Rican frog biologist once told me that a single raindrop can kill a small frog. This is an exaggeration—small frogs survive being nailed by a rapid succession of rain drops all the time. Still, it doesn’t look comfortable. When the rains lash the ground, I search for frogs, but after a while give up, retreating to the fisherman’s camp just 300 feet away to wait out the downpour.

Day 3

It has been raining for days. My frogs are ample, but are doing nothing I understand. Half of each day is spent marking individuals, a thankless task. When I am not marking them for identification, I’m out again in the pouring wet, watching them. We’re trying to get a feel for what they do, not coding any behaviors yet. Neither Jessica nor I are making much sense of them, but patterns take time to reveal themselves. Who knows how much of what we see now is due to the ceaseless rains, the howling winds, the high, ominous seas. The usually inconsequential streams that come down from the summit are powerful and hungry now, breaking everything in their path.

These frogs mostly call from or near natural wells—tree holes and broken bamboo filled with a cup or two of rainwater. Maybe only males call, as is true in the vast majority of frogs, but nobody has investigated this species before, so I have to figure that out myself. I found one bamboo well with eight frogs inside, all amplexing each other—the near universal position for frog mating, male on female. This amplexus was extraordinary, though, eight frogs lined up, one on top of another, in one long string of frog sex.

Other organisms in this forest move in more easily interpretable ways.  I have seen frogs from a different evolutionary lineage engage in paternal care of their froglets. I watched a chameleon laboriously dig a hole into which she then deposited a clutch of eggs. Zonosaurs—speedy ground lizards—engage in breakneck courtship and sex. But what can I do with these observations? They are anecdotes, not science. I enjoy theory, and the forest, but haven’t yet put the two together, so that they sing.

Day 4

Hailing rain again, the sound of giant liquid pellets penetrating the ground. The drops are reviled, the soft earth full. The streams are gorged, running pregnant, foaming. A boat moored in the bay slipped its anchor and slammed into the dock in the night, crushing a piling. The sea fights back with intolerably high tides, waves slamming the newly broken dock, making cliffs of the coarse sand beach.

A brief radio transmission from Maroantsetra tells us that this is a hurricane, and is one of the worst they’ve seen in years. In the river in town, corpses are flowing down from the hills. Pirogues are necessary to get through the streets of town, and only the few buildings with two stories are still accessible. Rumor has it that the French have lent the Malagasy government helicopters so that newly elected President Ratziraka can come and investigate the disaster that is northeastern Madagascar.

Day 5

The beaded waistbands we have been putting on the frogs for identification are failing. Most have fallen off, and those that haven’t must be removed, for they are constricting the animals. My new marking plan is to stitch unique combinations of beads into their backs, but for this I need smaller needles than I have here. There are tailors in town, so we radioed Projet Masoala and asked Lebon to bring needles with him when he returns on the boat tomorrow. But the rains continue, and we do not have faith that the boat schedule will be adhered to.

The sea is agitated, high and gray. The tides have disappeared into the storm, and the dock is pounded day and night by white caps. My tent platform is fifteen feet from the dock, which is itself almost submerged. The water is but one vertical foot below my tent. Soon we may have to move to higher ground, perhaps to the cemetery cave, among the body and bone boxes of the ancestors.

Day 7

Still no boat, no Lebon, no needles, and no explanation. The rain is still constant, though not as rageful as a few days ago. The radio isn’t working, so we are here, Jessica, Fortune, and me, on this small island, expecting a boat with provisions and necessary equipment, incapable of knowing when it might show up.

In the meantime, we have identified six coastal bamboo stands that are home to hundreds of Mantella laevigata. Males defend the bamboo wells, extended courtships lead to them, mating and egg deposition occurs in them. I tagged 99 wells, largely in the six bamboo stands, and am taking data every three days on each of them. I have two, consistent goals: to understand everything about this system, and to keep downtime at bay. When there’s no work to do, the hours stretch endlessly, with nothing to do but watch the sea rise.

Day 8

Finally, a break in the rains. The boat came, and with it, the needles we radioed for. The needles work wonderfully in marking the frogs, piercing their skin with relative ease, but they are the only aspect of this frog marking campaign that is going well. Less than 10% of the frogs we are finding now are recaptures—what happened to all we marked with waistbands? Are there many more animals than we had imagined? Are the animals previously caught more wary of us, so harder to catch? Worst, did many of the animals die from our first marking campaign, only to be quickly replaced by eager competitors from the sidelines, the forest?

Lebon came back from town with more stories of utter destruction. Houses washed away, corpses floating by in the streets, and in the middle of everything, two helicopters landing in town. He regaled us with stories of the helicopters, how they landed, what they looked like. When I asked him about the president, who was in one of those helicopters, he didn’t have anything to say. He hadn’t noticed the president.

Day 10

Now that the hurricane is past, the reliably unpredictable weather has returned. We had a lazy, gorgeous afternoon, wind and blue clouds washing in and out of the hills across the bay. The Masoala, they say, is the rainiest spot in Madagascar. It is a place of many clouds, of interminable rain, of unending damp. Even when the rain has isolated us for days, we can expect a respite, a golden day of sun and scattered clouds, a day with enough heat to finally dry the socks that were beginning to befoul everything they came in contact with, a day to walk around barefoot, to have a swim in the sea and a shower under the waterfall. A day to let everything dry. All things must be attended to, or else they will rot, and mold, and fog over and be ruined. After a night of piercing rain, the sun shone so fiercely that by midday all was dry—perfect frog watching weather.

The world never goes blankly gray here. The sea has intrigue even when gray, whitecaps receding to a blue mountain horizon, a gray sky with flecks of white, blue, green. This morning, a rainbow over the distant gray sky plunged on to layers of hills. Electric sounds from cicadas, tiny birds and frogs pierced my ears like flashes of hot color. And the depth of the sky held in it such dimension that even when entirely gray, it was a palette of hundreds, sometimes yielding to a perfect white, or black.

Day 11

The only way to enjoy the forest is to accept dirt and sweat, to immerse oneself in getting filthy. I came in from two hours of focal observations—in which the observer watches a single animal for a set period of time—just as it began to rain. I was on the fence. Should I stay in camp, changing into dry clothes and staying still so as not to dirty them with sweat, moving one step closer to having nothing dry and clean at all? Or should I hike to stand three, forty minutes away along a hilly trail, knowing that I would be dripping wet within minutes of embarking, as the rains began pouring down?

Stand three beckoned, and the rain freed me from trying to feel clean. I was quickly soaked, and by the time I arrived, had no inhibitions about crawling around on all fours looking for frogs, reaching under logs, or sitting on the wet litter striving to become part of the background. As the rains eased, I was in the perfect position to watch the frogs emerge after the downpour. Sure enough, they began to appear, calling, fighting, courting, patterns unfolding in front of a soggy but satisfied biologist.

Day 12

Today was hot, bright, dry. I sat out in my stand trying to watch frogs, but when there is no nighttime rain, they tend to spend the day hiding under the litter. So I sat idle, waiting for my animals to reappear, watching anything that showed up. Unlike the wet-skinned frogs, most animals like the hot dry days. A brown lemur troop came overhead, the males yelling at me. Later they came back through, stopping to feed at the mango tree that overhangs the beach. A resident chameleon was also out sunning herself today, and she accommodated me by turning a bright green when I touched her, then a deep, scary brown. She opened her big jaws and assumed an aggressive pose. As she reached out with a strange mitten-hand, she lost her balance and fell, catching herself with her tail. Hanging from her tail while scrambling to reattach herself to the plant she was on, she became an artist’s palette. The frogs remained hidden.

There is a fisher-family who use this island, respecting it and treading gently. It is a second home for them, and they treat it as such. The matriarch is often out in the family pirogue, casting nets, along with the little boy. Today, the adult son had a guest, a pleasant young woman.

With new people come new ducks. I do not know if these ducks are valued for the eggs they lay, if they will someday be eaten, or if they are just hangers-on, but the fisher-family seem always to have one or two ducks with them.

Sitting in bamboo stand 4, trying to observe frogs that were nowhere in evidence, I found myself gazing out to sea. Suddenly, the young woman, bare-breasted, ran past, laughing, looking back over her shoulder. Five seconds later, the young man ran past, in pursuit, also naked to the waist, also laughing, also looking back over his shoulder. Five seconds later, a duck ran past, chasing the hominids. Was he laughing? I didn’t have the presence of mind to ask.

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People the world over find comfort in cute and furry animals. Throughout the developing world animals are taken from the forest as pets. Then, when the animal grows too large, or too difficult, it is returned, sometimes to a different forest entirely. People think they are doing the animal a favor. In truth, that animal, all other individuals of its own species that it may encounter, and often any humans that it meets, are worse off for its existence after being an ill-treated pet.

The term pet may be misleading for those in the developed world, who conjure up images of a well-groomed dog, lovingly taken for walks, played with, and given food designed for the well-being of the animal. Pets in the developing world are a different phenomenon, and exotic pets, such as primates from the forest, are yet one more step removed. Some of the omnipresent dogs in developing world villages are pets, insomuch as someone would notice if they died. Similarly, the rarer cats are tolerated in people’s doorways, more occasionally inside a shack, as they keep the rodent population down. They are pets, as cats on a farm are pets—acknowledged, but not necessarily enjoyed.

Exotic pets are unique. The owners of such animals have recognized in their surroundings some element of the local biota that fascinates. You do not find marmosets as pets in Africa, nor lemurs in Central America, nor scarlet macaws in Madagascar. Exotic pets in these locales are taken directly from local habitats. Many middle class families in Tana have had a lemur as a pet. It is chic, and suggests a sophisticated recognition of the animal’s unparalleled persona. Many of those people have later discarded their animals. It is no great loss for the families, for these animals were never loved, or treated as one of the family. Primate pets are often kept in cages, sometimes outside on a dead tree, tied with a short lead, unable to climb, obtain fruit, or escape from their own excrement.

A spider monkey I once met in the Osa peninsula of Costa Rica, a frugivore, was being fed bread and milk by his master. The man objected to my giving the monkey bananas and mangoes from the local market, which the animal ate with a voracious appetite, having knocked over the unwanted plate of bread and milk in his eagerness for the fruit. The man explained to me that fruit is bad for monkeys, and that he was doing it a service by generously giving it expensive milk. In truth, milk can’t be digested by most adult mammals, as we often stop producing the enzyme that breaks down milk sugar when we mature, and the milk that monkey was being fed probably caused him painful stomach cramps, besides lacking the fruit pulp his anatomy demanded.

In Tana, the most obvious place to abandon lemurs is at Tsimbazaza, the underfunded zoo in the middle of a poverty-choked city. Already swamped with more animals than it can handle, Tsimbazaza receives these pets, born wild, taken into captivity and treated badly, now loved and wanted by no one. When Tsimbazaza can truly take no more, people do what must seem like the right thing to do, the kind and generous thing to do—they put their pets back into the forest. There is, however, especially among the urban middle class of the developing world, an utter lack of recognition that one wilderness differs from another. Thus, an animal that came originally from the spiny desert of the south might be replaced in high elevation cloud forest, or in the lowland rainforest of the east coast.

People who do not know America, and do not recognize its vastness, may assume that we all know one another. “Ah, an American. I have an uncle who moved to America, to Norfolk, Virginia. He is a mechanic, balding—do you know him?” All Americans look alike to those without practice discerning our features, and a country of this size is too large to believe. We make the same error, of course, when we assign to people a nationality—Chinese, for instance—which speaks hardly at all to the experience they have had in the specific region of China from which they come. Even Madagascar, a comparatively small country, has more than twenty distinct tribal affiliations, and the plateau people, the Merina, are offended at any suggestion that they look similar to people from the coasts, or the south. Within our own worlds, we recognize subtle differences between communities, based on neighborhoods that may be but a few blocks long. But still we have the impulse to assign character traits to whole continents worth of other people.

Similarly, most people assume that one lemur is like another, and can live anywhere that lemurs exist. Recognition of an animal’s need for certain trees, or a particular kind of terrain, is understandably beyond most people. When a lemur of a lowland rainforest species is placed in a forest on the cold plateau, it will not fare well, and will never find any others of its kind. Its existence will be solitary and short. Even when care is taken to provide an animal its native habitat, no individual—human or other—without experience in that habitat can be expected to assimilate and survive. Imagine a Los Angeles native being yanked from his comfortable urban existence, washed up on the southern shores of the Mediterranean, and told to thrive.

At dusk on our first day on Nosy Mangabe, as I returned barefoot from showering at the waterfall, Lebon called to me from the steps of the conservation agents’ cabin. He was picking through rice, culling the stones from it.

“Close the lab,” he suggested. “At this time of night, the lemurs sometimes try to steal things.” As he said this, a female brown lemur, Lemur fulvus, the most widespread of the non-human primates on Madagascar, scampered by on the ground. She made what I took to be a playful swipe in the general direction of my leg. I laughed, made noises at the animal to discourage her from getting any friendlier, and continued on toward the lab. There is a troop of brown lemurs resident in the camp area at Nosy Mangabe, and I took this animal to be one of them.

The next evening, as I again returned from the waterfall at dusk, the same lemur ran by my feet, grabbing at them but missing. The lemur also made a swipe at Jessica as she left the lab. She responded as I had, shouting at the animal unconcernedly, but in order to dissuade, so as not to encourage the lemur to develop a habit of such behavior. We never saw the lemur approach Lebon or Fortune this way, and they said nothing further to us about her. We were not even certain that it was a single lemur who was so playful, but perhaps several females in the resident troop who were a bit aggressive.

On the third day, I rose at five, dressed for the field on my tent platform, and took my toothbrush and paste to the place where the small stream pools. It is where we wash dishes, and clean our faces and teeth. I sat on a rock and bent down, splashing water onto my face. Dawn is a meditative time on Nosy Mangabe, still cool and subdued. The nighttime frog song is dissipating, the squabbles of diurnal lemurs and insects have not yet begun, and the understory is tinged a deep blue. My mind floated easily in this place so far from home, as I considered the work of the day ahead.

Searing pain suddenly enveloped my left arm. The female lemur raced by me, not two feet from my face, up to my right, where she perched in bamboo, eight feet away. I stood abruptly, uncomprehending. She made another movement in my direction, and as I picked up a rock to throw at the beast who bit me, I felt the blood flowing down my arm.

Twisting to look at my wound, I was horrified to find a deep open gash, looking more like a knife wound than an animal bite. The muscle, my triceps, was exposed, bubbling out of the wound, and bleeding profusely. Before I could internalize this, the lemur was coming at me again, on the ground, across the rocks. I kicked at her, and yelled, and she retreated. Hurriedly, confused, I splashed my arm with cold, clean water, and picked up my things. Walking slowly back to the lab, I couldn’t think, didn’t grasp how this fit into any bigger picture, refused to comprehend how bad it might be. I called to Jessica, told her I’d been bitten by a lemur, and showed her my arm. She was horrified by the wound. My fears were validated. I had indeed been ripped open by a wild animal, unprovoked. The wound would surely demand stitches; the behavior, an explanation.

I was dazed. The wound was open to the air, attracting the biting flies which pervade the forest during daylight hours. I slathered it in iodine and Neosporin, but this didn’t provide much of a barrier to the outside world.

“Can you stitch me?” I asked Jessica. She was pallid. She had never had stitches herself, had never even seen them. Despite this, I believed, naively, that she could sew me up without much trauma to either of us. Before proceeding, we got Lebon’s attention. He was just waking up, preparing to rake the camp, the one job that was done every day. He was suitably appalled with the situation.

“Do you know how to give stitches?” I asked him.

“Ah, stitches are very difficult, I think.” This was his polite way of saying “I can’t do that.” I had failed to include sutures in my medical kit, but I did have a set of sewing needles, including a thick, curved mattress needle. I appointed myself on a wobbly bamboo bench, held my arm over my head so Jessica could access the bite, asked Lebon to hold my wound closed as best he could, and told Jessica to puncture my arm with the mattress needle. After about two minutes of this, the needle was halfway embedded in my arm, no stitch was yet apparent, and all three of us were shaking. I suggested, much to the relief of Jessica and Lebon, that we abandon the plan.

“I’ll need to see a doctor,” I told Lebon. He would have to radio Maroantsetra to arrange for a boat to come pick me up. He looked alarmed.

“No need for that. Earlier someone was bit on the foot by the same lemur, but it was not bad, so you will also be better soon.” I was feeling unsure of my judgment, but did think I needed to get to a doctor. I waited for him to expand on his position.

“Perhaps,” he continued, “you should just sit here, wait for a few days, and see what happens.” He and Fortune were already demonstrating expertise at sitting around and waiting to see what happened, but I was not of a mind to follow suit. I did, after all, have a gaping hole in my arm, possibly inflicted by a sick animal. By this time my thoughts had turned to rabies, then to other infections, like gangrene, and all the possible nasty things that can happen as a result of a deep animal bite in a persistently hot, wet place.

“No, I must see a doctor. Now.” My mind was growing more confused, but I could repeat myself with some success.

“But it’s only six in the morning, and I cannot use the radio until eight, because nobody is on the other end until then,” Lebon argued. Even then, there was a chance that the communication wouldn’t be possible, as the radio was frequently low on batteries or shorting out.

“Okay, I’ll come back in two hours.” I started myself on a course of antibiotics, and retreated to the dock to lie down and consider my fate. My arm throbbed, and my thoughts raced, then flitted, from one incoherence to the next. Why would a wild animal attack a person, unless it was rabid? How did Lebon know that this was the same lemur that previously bit someone else? Could I go home now?

After two hours of this, I stood up, light headed, already imagining every ache as the beginning of the end. I staggered the thirty feet back to camp, and asked Lebon to radio Maroantsetra.

“Why?” He looked genuinely confused. I repeated my plan to go see a doctor.

“But,” he warned, “the park boat is not in town, so you will have to hire a private boat, which will be expensive.” The Projet Masoala motorboat was on the other side of the peninsula. There are only two other boats for hire in the area, and they are, as he said, quite expensive. For Madagascar. Even if they had been expensive by American standards, it hardly seemed relevant. I wasn’t going to risk my arm, perhaps my life, to save a few dollars. Finally I persuaded him that I was going to town, with his help or not. He radioed, and arranged for a private boat to come out and get me immediately. He was outraged at the price they would charge me for the three mile trip—the equivalent of $25 in Malagasy francs—and tried, again, to dissuade me. He knew I was being robbed. But he had no idea how little that mattered. The economies we live in are too different for Lebon to comprehend. I spent on a single boat ride what he and his family might spend on life in a month.

Jessica and I got to town as it was turning into a steamy, swooning day. Nosy Mangabe is always cooler than town. The forest, long gone from Maroantsetra, helps insulate against heat on Nosy Mangabe. Water surrounds the small island, and the waterfall is always there, beckoning. Maroantsetra, by comparison, is hot and dusty, cramped with people.

In town, Clarice’s compassionate nature came through, and she took us to a man I came to refer to as the good doctor. The good doctor’s French was easily understandable, even by me, but it was a relief to have Jessica there for translation help just in case. He worked in a small, cool building with bamboo walls and a thatched roof, and his manner was professional but amused. I watched carefully as he poured alcohol over all the tools he would use on me, then set them on fire to sterilize them. I carry my own sterile syringes in the field, but not a complete doctor’s kit, and there is always the fear of disease. AIDS is not formally recognized as a problem by the Malagasy government, but it is surely there.

Once the good doctor anesthetized my arm and had me lying helpless on his examining table, he began extolling the virtues of lemurs.

“Lemurs, you know, are smart and funny, quite clever, and beautiful, too.” I gaped at him, asked Jessica for a translation just in case I had got it wrong. I hadn’t. He continued, “They don’t usually do this sort of thing. You mustn’t hate lemurs because of this.”

“I love animals, that’s why I’m here in Madagascar,” I paused. This was true, but incomplete. “But I’d like to have this particular lemur for lunch.” He laughed.

“Oh no, we can’t eat lemurs. Some people do, of course, but it’s not right…” he trailed off.

“I don’t want to make a habit of it, you understand, just this particular one.” I wasn’t making myself clear. Having a lemur for lunch may have been the wrong way to convey that thought. I asked Jessica to step in and help me. The doctor seemed relieved with her explanation.

“Oh, yes, that particular lemur. What were you doing to provoke her? Did you try to pet her?” The good doctor was beginning to get to me. Did I try to pet her? A wild animal? Did I look mad? Was the rabies manifesting already?

“No, I was only sitting at the stream, brushing my teeth.”

“Ah, they love toothpaste. She probably wanted your toothpaste.” I cast a glance at Jessica, who is expert at looking simultaneously bemused with and removed from a situation. She was doing it now.

“Lemurs like toothpaste?” I repeated back to him.

“Yes,” the doctor nodded again, his needle in my arm. “Really, they like anything that’s sweet. They eat fruit, you know.” I was beginning to understand. This good doctor did know something of lemurs, and couldn’t put my story together in a way that made sense to him. It was possible that the lemur liked toothpaste, but I doubted it, as mint has a very particular aroma, and besides, she didn’t make a grab for my toothpaste, just me.

“Voilà, we are done.” I twisted to look at my arm, and was surprised how quickly he had put in several large stitches. “Come back in three days—I’ll check for infection again then. And don’t have the lemur for lunch.” He chuckled. We had come to an understanding. As long as I wasn’t living out on Nosy Mangabe with a yen to eat all lemurs, he could accept my ire at one of them.

Jessica and I walked back through town, and ran into Felix, perhaps the best of the local naturalist guides, along the way. Felix is the happiest person I have ever met, with the possible exception of his young son Alpha, who shares his father’s exuberance at all that comes his way. Felix is a young, smart, almost trilingual, forest-loving Malagasy man with no chance of ever living a life outside of Maroantsetra. He is just Felix, with no last name, and when I’ve asked him about it, his eyes grow distant, and he says his mother just called him Felix, that’s all. He is enchanting, with deep soulful eyes, a wide smile, and a laugh like wind-chimes. The story of the lemur attack on one of the two vazaha women living on Nosy Mangabe was already circulating through town, and he had come to find us and hear the story firsthand. I recounted it. He looked as serious as I’ve ever seen him, then announced,

“The lemur must have wanted your toothpaste.” My mouth hung open.

“You think so?”

“Why else would a lemur do something like that?” I had to admit he had a point. He continued. “You weren’t trying to pet her were you?” I almost yelled at Felix, even though he is the last person who could deserve my anger. NO I didn’t pet the lemur, NO I didn’t bring this on myself, NO I’m not the one acting unpredictably here.

“It’s the lemur!” I wanted to scream, “I’m the victim, not her!” Instead, I said, “No, I didn’t try to pet her. She’s rather mad, you know.” Maybe if I started saying that, it would catch on and circulate through town. The lemur’s toothpaste alibi would disappear into her madness.

The truth eventually did come out, emerging slowly from many sources. A woman in town had been keeping this lemur as a pet for a few years. The lemur was never socialized, never even allowed to climb trees. She didn’t know any of her own kind. Over time, she did seem to grow mad, and began lunging at the neighborhood children who tormented her with sticks and taunts. The lemur’s human owner wouldn’t tolerate such behavior, so looked for someplace to discard the animal. The woman was a member of Lebon’s extended family, and when she approached him, he was all too eager to help. This, he was sure, was a clear example of what conservation agents should be doing—saving poor lemurs, and putting them back in the forest. He had done this the day before I arrived on Nosy Mangabe.

Though I now recognized that the lemur was probably just crazy from having been chained up alone for years, she was still a threat. When we returned to the island that night, we went with instructions from Projet Masoala for the conservation agents: trap the lemur, and bring it to town. For the next two days, nothing happened. I was jumpy, scared at forest noises when I’d always been comfortable before. And the lemur continued making advances on Jessica and me. Raised among people, perhaps she mistook us for females of her own kind, encroaching on territory where before there had been only males.

Finally we gave Lebon and Fortune an ultimatum: trap that lemur, or we’ll find a way to do so, and it may not be pretty. The next day, a lobster trap showed up in a tree by the lab. I’ve never caught lobster myself, but I have a feeling that they are, well, different from lemurs. I laughed at the trap, and wondered how long it would be before I went into town again to find—-what? Twine? Lumber? How would I trap a lemur? I had no idea. But it seemed clear that I would have to.

When Jessica and I returned to camp that evening, the lemur was sitting in the lobster trap, eating fruit Lebon had given her.

The lemur and Lebon had a relationship, but nobody else could get close. I congratulated him on having caught a lemur with a lobster trap. He thought nothing of it.

After the lemur had been caught and caged, Lebon radioed for a boat to come get us. It was time for me to go in for my follow-up with the good doctor anyway. On the short, choppy ride across the bay to Maroantsetra, the lemur looked stricken in her lobster trap. She threaded her hand through the wire mesh towards Lebon, and he took her hand in his. They sat, hand in hand, for the ride to town.

Later that day, Lebon asked me if I knew why the lemur had to be taken away. I boggled at him, and, rather than sharing the rather obvious answer, I asked, “No, Lebon, tell me—why did this animal have to be removed?”

“Because,” he answered, speaking with authority, “if she stays here, she will get sick and die. As a conservation agent, it is my job to keep all lemurs healthy.” This concept of conservation—to simply keep all that is charismatic alive—had never before occurred to me. It scared me. The conservation agent charged with protecting a fragile nature reserve had failed to internalize the difference between protecting whole ecosystems, and protecting individual animals. Of course, many Americans make exactly the same mistake. One reason the cause of environmentalism is at risk in the States is because people erroneously think it pits spotted owls against working men and women. But spotted owls, charismatic as they may be, are only a proxy for the entire, threatened ecosystem that we hope to save.

Lebon’s vision of the lemur’s future was also sadly ironic. Information travels slowly, and with much mutation, in Madagascar, like a massive game of telephone. Early rumors that the animal was headed to a retirement home for old and disturbed lemurs in southern Madagascar were probably false, possibly started to soothe Lebon. It is far more likely, as later reports suggested, that the animal was put down. Tsimbazaza, the zoo in Tana, already had far more unsocialized lemurs than it could handle. And this animal would never successfully reenter lemur society. Killing it was the most humane thing to do.

ö

I have repeatedly entered the lands and cultures of the developing world and started making value judgments. Don’t tear down trees for crops that are pure luxury. Don’t hunt bats if you have other things to eat. Don’t take wild animals out of the forest and keep them as pets. Don’t tell me about conservation and saving mad lemurs, for I know better. Where do I get off?

Left to their own devices, pre-industrial people don’t tend to destroy the land they live on. The fisher people of Nosy Mangabe disobey the letter of the law regarding coming on to the island, but that law shouldn’t be enforced on them anyway. They smoke fish with dead wood they have collected, and spend the night camped on the beach, but they use this land well, as their ancestors have been for hundreds of years. They respect the land, and use it sustainably. Most importantly, this island was taken from the local people and made into a reserve some years ago—some of these fisher people were using this land as a base for their fishing, their livelihood, before it was ever designated a reserve. The land belongs to them. It does not belong to the Malagasy sailors who come off spice boats for fresh water and lemur meat, nor to the Western conservation NGOs who administer it with the best intentions, and certainly not to me, a foreign researcher who comes to look at frogs.

But the Western NGOs come in and declare, with the tacit approval of the Malagasy government, that this land is theirs to protect. Wisely, they hire local people like Lebon and Fortune to act as guardians. The guardians get the fancy title of conservation agent, so their friends and family in town don’t so easily see them for what they really are—policemen keeping local people off their ancestral lands. The problem is, these particular conservation agents don’t understand conservation. They, like so many in the Western world, make the mistake of believing that only those things that are big and cute and engaging should be protected, and they fail to protect all that doesn’t so easily grip their imagination. Lebon’s mistake in understanding is not so different from the one we make when giant pandas and lions and whales are paraded in front of us to evoke a visceral reaction of guardianship and compassion, and we respond with our pocketbooks. How much of our grassroots money-from-the-gut goes to protect eels, after all?

The customs of the local people usually make a lot of sense in context, even when the vazaha who effectively parachutes in from outer space can’t make sense of them. Problems tend to arise at the junction between native and Western culture, and Westerners shouldn’t point to these, nod sagely, and say “what would they do without us?” I desperately want vanishing Malagasy ecosystems to be protected before they are entirely lost, and I don’t know how best to help the cause. I do know, though, that going halfway is not the answer. Putting local people on the payroll and telling them that they are conservation agents, without insuring that they know what that means, is irresponsible. If these men don’t understand why we might want to protect a whole forest, rather than a single lemur—and why should they, at first?—it is our job, if we are already intervening, to insure that they learn.

ö

As my wound healed, so too did that part of my brain which had, in an instant, searing flash, turned on me and warned me repeatedly that lemurs were dangerous. On full moons when the water apple trees in camp were fruiting, the resident troop of brown lemurs spent all night awake in a long fruit fest, dropping the cores and bad fruit down onto the roof of my tent platform. Sometimes a lemur would scamper by on the ground, going after a piece of good fruit, and if I was in my tent trying to sleep, I would wake and tense in that moment, fearing, irrationally, that it would come for me too.

By the time I was again able to sweat during field work without wincing from the salt in my wound, and shower in the waterfall without constantly trying to keep one arm out of the spray, I enjoyed the lemurs fully again. The comic ruffed lemurs make such a production of a human going by, it’s almost impossible not to hoot back at them, egging them on with cackles as they peer out of the trees at the strange being on the ground. The brown lemurs did show a noticeable interest in the lab whenever we returned from town with bananas, and their spirit was contagious. Lemurs were again wonderful co-inhabitants of my small world, rather than unpredictable and treacherous foes. And it turns out that rabies isn’t known in lemurs, so I probably was never at risk of turning up rabid. All the same, I’d rather not put my arm to the lemur test again.

Next week: Chapter 10 – Weather is Everything

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Town life does not prepare one for forest life. After two hours of lovely boat ride across the Bay of Antongil, we arrived at the mouth of the river that Andranobe (“big water”) is named for. The last hundred feet of the trip to Andranobe is accomplished in an unstable pirogue piloted by Solo. He paddled out to the boat, where we sat bobbing in heavy surf, and his face broke into a wide grin when he recognized me. Finally, someone who knew I was coming, and was glad to see me.

Before sinking into that comfort, though, we had to get ourselves and all of our stuff into the small dugout pirogue and to shore. Malagasy pirogues are particularly prone to tip, and even the calmest voyages are precarious. It took seven trips, each one likely to tip and deposit our gear at the bottom of impossible waters. Great white sharks had been spotted in the rough, unswimmable sea. Transporting heavy equipment in that pirogue, through high surf, was one of the most arduous parts of the entire journey.

Once safely on land with our gear, I admired Andranobe anew. The Masoala peninsula, on which Andranobe sits, contains the largest tracts of lowland rainforest still standing in Madagascar. The world’s remaining rainforests tend to be in inconvenient places—extremely steep, or remote, or both—and the Masoala peninsula is no exception. This is no accident. It is precisely their inconvenience that has protected them from being cut by people needing to plant crops or wanting to harvest wood. These inconvenient places are not immune, though, just lower down on the list. The whole region, including the Masoala and the island of Nosy Mangabe, had recently been named a national park, which is named for the peninsula on which it sits.

Andranobe hadn’t changed much in the five months since I’d been there last. There were still a few roofless tent platforms, five small cabins measuring perhaps eight by ten feet each, a pit toilet, some laundry lines, and an old fence which had sprouted, becoming a living fence. There were two different Malagasy Peregrine Fund employees living there now, mist-netting for birds. Wood smoke drifted out of the kitchen cabin. Within hours of our arrival, Solo transformed the porch of his cabin into a tiny area in which we would eat.

When I had gotten back to the States after my previous trip, I wrote the people who made my jacket, Helly Hansen, and described the situation: Andranobe, Solo, his desire for a jacket like the one I had, and included with it some photographs that Bret had taken of the place. They sent me a free jacket to give Solo, in exchange for the negative of one of Bret’s photos. Solo had apparently been talking about my return for months, and when I arrived in Andranobe, rain jacket in hand, Solo was rewarded for his patience. Though silent, his eyes grew bright, and he received the gift with obvious gratitude.

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Beginning of Part II

Five months later I returned to Madagascar, unnerved and excited by what awaited me. Jessica had been exuberant about the opportunity to be my field assistant, and was waiting for me in Tana.

For this trip, I had to pack research equipment, in addition to my usual collection of field clothes, tent, pharmaceuticals, and gifts. Assuming that nothing would be available to buy, I second-guessed what I might need; since I didn’t yet know what the animals did, I couldn’t predict what experiments I would design. So I took scales, a dissecting kit, calipers, rubber bands, a hacksaw, stopwatches, sound-recording equipment, tiny beads and needles, paracord, Tupperware, turkey basters, and epoxy. This list is not exhaustive. Were there turkeys in the field? No. But most of the specialized objects of our first world existence have uses far beyond their names.

I also put together a small solar electricity system, to power my laptop computer. The energy output of such a system is dependent on weather conditions, and it is impossible to predict how often the sun will actually shine in the rainforest, so none of my calculations were certain. Most of the components for such a system are straightforward, but the battery that I would use to store energy coming in from the sun, before it would be discharged to my computer, proved more difficult.

Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of batteries in the world—those that “like” to be discharged, and those that do not. Car batteries fall into the latter category—when fully drained, they tend to need replacing. Rechargeable NiCad (Nickel Cadmium) batteries, which come in AA, C, and D—these need to be discharged regularly to function at top form. They develop a memory if you top them off frequently, and stop holding as much charge in the long run.

Given the job I was trying to do, I needed a battery that could be discharged regularly, as my demand for electricity, though small, was going to be fairly constant, while my energy source, the sun, would not be. Deep cycle, 12 volt, absorption glass matte (AGM) batteries are designed to be discharged regularly, and are fully sealed, so the acid in them cannot escape. Superficially, they look like car batteries, but they are functionally very different. They were also, at the time, the only kind of 12 volt battery that was legal and safe to transport on a plane.

So I embarked with a 50 pound AGM battery, connected to countless wires of various gauges and ominous looking switches, and a digital multimeter that flashed incomprehensible numbers when turned to the wrong setting. I feared my bag would get torn apart by overzealous bomb-seeking dogs as soon as it was out of my sight.

Landing in Tana 35 hours after I left home, I was bedraggled and unhappy. But I was whisked through the normal protocol by virtue of being accompanied by Jessica and her father, Peter Metcalf, who was then the Resident Representative for the UN’s Development Program (UNDP) in Madagascar. This would have taken my stress to an all-time low in Tana, but for one snag. The small plastic crate containing my AGM battery, inverter, and most of the hardware for the solar electricity system didn’t come off the plane.

After some discussion with the airport employees, the lid of the crate appeared, and the workers were astonished that this wasn’t satisfactory. I had hand-carried the solar panel from the States, and could piece together the rest of the system with the redundant hardware I had packed, except for the storage battery and inverter. Without these things, I had no system. Clearly, some lucky Malagasy airport worker was now the proud owner of a brand new AGM battery. Even with Peter’s intervention on my behalf over the next several days, Air Madagascar (usually aptly shortened to Air Mad) refused to take any responsibility. American FAA guidelines dictate that Air Mad, as the final carrier, were responsible for the loss, but not even the UN could convince them to do the right thing.

The Metcalfs, Ros and Peter, took good care of me. As I was slipping into incoherence and panic, they were contacting a friend of theirs who was in New York and coming back to Madagascar shortly, and she agreed to bring me another inverter. Inverters turn the 12 volt DC energy stored in a battery into the 110 volt AC energy used by computers and other tools. Thankfully, they are light—just a few pounds.

The battery was another issue. I had no chance of getting an AGM battery, with their high power ratings and impenetrable cases, in Madagascar. The Metcalfs’ driver took Jessica and me to a row of shacks in town selling 12 volt batteries. I picked one out, blindly. There was no indication of amp-hours; I had no idea how much battery I was getting. I assumed it was a car battery, and designed not to be discharged. So for the use I intended, I was sure to destroy it. Hopefully it would last four months.

On the box my new battery came in there were Chinese characters, and a single English word, in large red letters, on the side. EXCELLENT. I had to buy the lead acid separately. I toted the toxic liquid, along with my new EXCELLENT battery, away, bitter at the fates for smashing my plans to have a smoothly running solar electricity system in the field.

While in Tana, I also had to go through the usual rigmarole of obtaining research permits. The various offices are scattered widely throughout the sprawling capital city, and it can take half a day to get between them. The employees at the various government bureaus that administer the lands and waters of Madagascar see no reason to hurry unless there is evidence of a deadline. The vazaha’s diminishing sanity is not viewed as an immutable deadline. A plane ticket is.

At the Department des Eaux et Forets, we were told to come back the following day, with four copies of my research proposal in French. The next day Jessica and I were back, and they told us they needed six copies. Come back tomorrow. The next day there was nobody there to help us. The day after…well, by then I had bought us plane tickets. I told them we had a flight to Maroantsetra in three days, and they gave me my proto-permits. From there, it was another several days of wrangling with a different government office before I was finally handed the actual permits, which were made of flimsy brown newsprint, and covered in official red stamps.

Meanwhile, Ros and Peter showed me all possible hospitality. I stayed in their house, made use of their car and driver, and had several doors open for me that otherwise would not have. Out the window of the room in which I slept, I looked across a lake, on the shores of which clothes were drying in the summer sun. Children bathed and ran naked at each other, and errant rice plants grew out of their paddies, into uncared for waters. Past the shimmering lake were mountains that turned pink at sunrise and sunset. In this house, books lined the walls, the conversation was stimulating, and the people deep, warm, and comforting. This was a Tana far more peaceful than one I had ever imagined.

Jessica and I flew to Maroantsetra, gateway to the Masoala, where the airport was still without a door. Bret’s legacy lived on.

In town, little had changed but the season. The people were still walking barefoot, or in plastic sandals, through the sandy streets. The dirt roads were now spotted with dark puddles, which took over when the rains persisted. Despite the lack of road connections to the rest of Madagascar, Maroantsetra is a port, and boats often come in from Tamatave to the south. The Masoala is the primary supplier of spices for Madagascar’s export business, so the marine traffic usually consists of spice boats, come to pick up a cargo of cloves, nutmeg, cinnamon, or vanilla. There are a few pickup trucks in town—a few more than there had been only months earlier, it seemed—though one wonders how they got here, and if they stayed only because there is no way out. The single road running through town, a strip of two or three miles, turns to dust and rocks as the hustle and bustle of the rice market of Maroantsetra recedes. Bicycles are increasingly popular, and two of the Indian-owned shops have gleaming new Huffys for sale on their patios. A few young Malagasy men have little motorbikes, as do the of couple of vazaha in town, which their slinky young Malagasy girlfriends sometimes ride.

The best bet for a night’s lodgings in Maroantsetra was still the Coco Beach, where Bret and I had stayed the year before. Coco Beach’s grasp on electricity is somewhat tenuous. I specifically requested a room with electricity, but found, when I plugged my computer into the single outlet, that I got no response. My voltmeter told me there was no current coming out of the wall. I went to the main building to ask if it could be fixed, or if we might get a different hut, one with juice. Monique yelled for a small barefoot man to come back with me to investigate the problem. He brought a fork.

When we got to our hut, the man went straight for the socket, looking at it inquisitively. I explained the problem, then produced my voltmeter as evidence. I put the two leads into the socket, and it read zero volts. The small man wasn’t convinced by my electronic answer. He took off his shirt, and wrapped it around his left hand. Placing that hand firmly on the wooden bed frame, he then grabbed the fork with his right hand, and jammed it into the socket. I was shocked, though I knew he wouldn’t be, as the socket was dead.

The man came to the same conclusion I had, and motioned for me to follow him. I took my voltmeter with me, and we went to the bungalow next door. He found the socket, and began to arrange himself in a similar manner. I tried to stop him, suggesting that I could again test it with my voltmeter. He would have none of it, however, as he had been called on to do a job, and he was going to finish it. So, this time in horror, I watched as he wrapped his left hand in his shirt, grasped the wooden bed frame with his mummified hand, then, grabbing the fork firmly in his right hand, jammed it into the socket. A small spark, and the man flew backwards onto the bed. 220 volts could easily have killed him. He got up, retrieved the fork, which had flown to another corner of the room, welcomed me to my new room, and left.

Our next task was to visit Projet Masoala, the regional office of both the Wildlife Conservation Society and CARE. Between them, these two non-governmental organizations are largely in control of administering the protected areas of northeastern Madagascar. There are several such NGO conservation groups in Madagascar, and they have divvied up the island, each taking some region so as not to step on each other’s toes, and plans. I had gone by the WCS office in Tana, where they had approved my research permits, and assured me that the employees at the office in Maroantsetra knew I was coming.

Projet Masoala is headquartered on the eastern side of the Masoala, in the comparatively rich, vanilla exporting town of Antalaha. The vazaha who runs WCS Madagascar, Matthew Hatchwell, lives in Antalaha, at the eastern edge of the new national park. The Maroantsetra office, at the western edge, is but a poor cousin.

It was two in the afternoon, during the daily sieste, when everything and everyone shuts down. We looked inside, found nobody, and climbed the stairs to the second floor, where a balcony looked out over the center of town. Dogs wandered by. Two year old children ran past, exuberant and bow-legged, followed at a distance by their older siblings, seven or eight year old caretakers. The air did not move.

By a quarter to three, things began to pick up. Vendors in the market emerged from underneath their wooden tables where they had been napping. Even the chickens seemed more energized. Soon we heard rustling downstairs, and went down to look. At the desk, a dark wooden affair with a grimy rotary phone on it, sat a woman with a hostile glare. She eyed us with suspicion. I wasn’t sure exactly what I needed from her, but knew I was supposed to check in, find out what the boat schedule was, and ask when we could go to our first site.

“Hi,” I stumbled, “I’m Erika, this is Jessica. We are here to study frogs. On the Masoala. The WCS office in Tana has approved all of my paperwork.” I stopped. The woman just looked at me.

“Well,” I continued, “we would like to go, with our provisions, to Andranobe as soon as possible. When will the boat be available?” I asked.

“Not today.” She said.

“Okay. Fine. But when…?”

“The boat is busy. For how many days do you want to go?” This was a question for a tourist.

“We will be here for four months.” She exhaled sharply, a sort of hiss. I had surprised her with this bit of news. I tried another tack.

“I have been told that, as a researcher, I can use the boat for the price of gas…?”

“No. The boat is very expensive.”

“But…” I stammered, and looked helplessly at Jessica, hoping for some fluent French to bail us out.

“We were told by the office in Tana that we could use the boat to get to our sites for the price of gas. If you would like, you may call them.” Jessica gestured to the phone.

“The phone is not working,” said the woman, without batting an eye. “The phone only works occasionally.” She was probably telling the truth. Phones rarely worked in Tana. They would be even less likely to here. I remembered that, upon arriving in the Maroantsetra airport, I had seen a sign for the Coco Beach. On it was a phone number—incongruous enough given that there were no phones with which to dial the number. But odder still was the number itself: 57. A two-digit phone number.

“Perhaps you can radio Tana,” Jessica continued. With her experience in Ranomafana the year before, Jessica knew that radios were the usual mode of communication. The woman looked at her with some interest.

“No, the radio only connects to other places on the Masoala. Sometime the phone will work. Until then you pay the tourist price.” I didn’t have the funds to pay tourist rates, and ultimately she conceded. We scheduled a boat for three days hence.

“Now, why are you here?” she asked me.

“To study frogs,” I told her again, “I was here last year, too. Didn’t WCS tell you I was coming?”

“No,” she seemed irritated, but not, for the first time since our conversation began, at me. I had a glimpse of the frustrations of being a small town administrator, the sort whom nobody tells anything, even information of direct relevance to her job. I decided then and there to win her over, though I had no idea how I would do it.

“Would you like to see our permits?” I asked, eagerly, thinking that all of those red stamps might impress her.

“No,” she waved her hand dismissively. “Later, before you leave town.” It seemed she wanted us to leave her alone.

“Well,” I said brightly, “can you tell me one more thing, before we leave?” She looked skeptical.

“What, please, is your name?” A slight smile. Recognition of humanity behind the desk.

“Clarice,” she said.

“It is a pleasure, Clarice. Thank you for all your help. We’ll come back tomorrow.” And we left.

By the time we left Projet Masoala, word had gotten around that two vazaha had arrived in town. As usual, this had the effect of attracting old friends, and the merely curious. Patrice, one of the guardians whose job it is to guard the Projet Masoala building against theft, began talking to us in his unique blend of Malagasy, French and English. When Emile and Felix arrived—the guides I knew from the year before—Patrice spoke to them using the same garbled language. For once, I wasn’t the only one having trouble with the native tongue. Emile was looking better now—probably his chronic malaria was latent—and Felix, as always, was cheerful. After opening pleasantries, I asked Felix about Clarice. He indicated that the two most important things she did was make the programme—the boat schedule, which meant I relied on her to get to my research sites, and back to town to replenish provisions—and she manned the radio. There was a radio on Nosy Mangabe, and one in the village of Ambanizana, five miles from the site at Andranobe. The phone in the office, Felix agreed, rarely worked. It was connected to the phone at the post office, the central phone in town. It, too, rarely worked.

A slight man, paler than most Malagasy, approached. Emile introduced him as Yves, the boat captain. His eyes skittered across our faces, landing briefly on Jessica’s. Then, without a word, he left. By way of explanation, or apology, Emile told me that Yves’ father, whom he had never met, was French. Emile, book-educated man that he was, knew that differences existed between the vazaha. Though he didn’t know what it meant to be French, or American, he understood that we were divergent, somehow.

Before Emile and Felix left us, disappearing into town to pursue their normal lives, I asked them how much rice Jessica and I would eat. We needed to shop for provisions. They assessed us, couldn’t quite get a fix on how the vazaha differed from the Malagasy in this regard, and finally concluded that since the Malagasy eat three kapoks of rice a day, we should plan on doing the same thing. A kapok is a medium sized tin can, a standard measure in Madagascar, used by vendors to measure out uncooked rice. Three kapoks cooks up into more than ten cups of cooked rice. Ten cups of rice, per person, every single day for four months. Rice was to be our primary, and often only, source of nutrients, but we couldn’t possibly have eaten that much. We didn’t know that, though, and began the long process of buying rice, beans, cooking oil, candles, and scant other provisions in the market, and hauling them away.

The shops in Maroantsetra—true shacks, with walls and ceilings, as opposed to the open stalls in which rice and other staples are sold—fall into three categories: food and sundry shops lining the market; drinking establishments; and general stores. The food shops lining the market offer brightly colored plastic cups and bowls, candles, mosquito-repellent coils, biscuits, salt and cooking oil. The oil is spooned out of a large, dirty vat swarming with flies into the container you bring; if you don’t have a container, you don’t buy oil. Stores selling liquor offer beer, toka gasy (local hard alcohol), and Coke. There are few bars in Maroantsetra, and even these seem like family establishments, not places for men to go when they want to escape.

The general stores, unlike the rickety food stalls at the market, sell rare specialties that come in on boats—mustard, chocolate, vinegar, and Lazan’i Betsileo wine, the one and only Malagasy vintage. Each shop has some item that is not available elsewhere in town. One of the general stores has chicken wire. Another sells screwdrivers. A third offers brooms, with hand chiseled wooden handles, for 1500 FMG, 35 cents. I tried to buy one of these, but there were no more. I had to put in an order for one to be made.

“How many do you want?” they asked me.

“Just one,” I said, before I knew how inexpensive this act of labor was to be.

Everything centers around the zoma, the marketplace. The stalls and commerce are there every day, but on market day, when people come in from the countryside, it teems with life, and then becomes truly the zoma of Malagasy legend, rich with activity and commerce. A sand road broadens, and narrow cement platforms, poured into place in the ground, identify the marketplace. The covered part of the market consists of a large cement floor, covered with a corrugated zinc roof. Under this roof are tables with slabs of meat on them, swarming with flies, and small piles of onion and garlic, waiting to be purchased by discerning but parsimonious buyers. Women sell baguettes and baskets, pineapples and brede, a local weed boiled into a broth and then eaten. As potential customers walk by we are plied with their prices, though sometimes what we want to hear is an explanation of what they’re selling.

“500 per kapok,” offers a rice vendor.

“One thousand each,” as I walk by neat triangles of golden brown.

“What is it?” I ask. I am intrigued.

“One thousand,” the seller repeats, “one thousand.” He is eager now, pursuing a sale as best he knows how, iterating the price until it becomes a mantra, until the consumer can do nothing but buy it, for fear the price will suddenly change. If I guess at what the product is, he will agree even if I am wrong, for he is eager to please. These crisp golden triangles smell like honey, but maybe they are soap—the vendor nods in agreement to both possibilities.

Buying rice is the central activity of provisioning yourself in Madagascar. It would be an absurd understatement to suggest that rice is the staple of the Malagasy diet. The Malagasy are intensely proud of how much rice they eat. Every meal that a Malagasy eats consists primarily of a plate piled high with slightly sticky rice. The market in Maroantsetra is dominated by the rice vendors at rickety tables, neatly lined up, with umbrellas overhead.

There are so many rice vendors, it is difficult to make a choice. There are slight variations in price, but vast differences in quality, if you believe the experts, which is every Malagasy who has eaten the many subtly variant forms of white rice.

Questions from the vazaha are gross, tactless, uneducated.

“Is there any brown rice?”

“How can you tell the difference between the rices?”

“Does it really matter?”

Brown rice, with the husk still on, increasingly the rice of choice among gourmands in the first world, is low class, not pure, somehow sullied.

If you have to ask about the differences between rices, you are perhaps not fit for the job of choosing your own rice.

And finally, of course it matters, for rice is central; if one does not care about rice, what is there left to concern oneself with?

Next week: Chapter 8 – Maybe Tomorrow

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Back in Tana, city of contrasts. Gated houses with freshly painted blue shutters sit, protected, next to three-walled shacks, next to rice paddies. Old men rummage through burning piles of trash, keeping ahead of the smolder, picking out pieces of rags, half a bottle with no bottom. Smartly dressed women in fitted suits gingerly walk through this city of sudden holes that drop thirty feet to sewage below. Children in t-shirts down to their ankles, eight or ten holes in the backs and sides, always of the same dingy hue, wander barefoot through remnants of chicken butchering. Some wait in line at the neighborhood water pump, where families come to retrieve water with which to cook and wash, brightly colored buckets at their sides. The taupe of their shirts, deep brown skin showing through, on red clay earth, all dims next to the vibrant artificiality of their buckets—red, blue, yellow.

We struggled to escape Tana’s grasp as soon as possible. Next we were headed to Ranomafana, the park with the most logistic support in all of Madagascar. We were staying at a house in Tana reserved for researchers working at Ranomafana. Every day we visited ICTE (the Institute for the Conservation of Tropical Environments), also called Projet Ranomafana, the organization funded by American universities and some government monies to help administer the park. Benjamin Andriamihaja, the chief of operations there, is a highly organized, efficient, honest, and warm man.  He is also perennially stressed, as he has to take care of all the mistakes made by those less organized, and less honest.

Because we were going to Ranomafana, Projet Ranomafana was going to allow us the use of one of their vehicles and drivers to get to the park, which is about a twelve hour drive over horrible roads. Vazaha don’t drive themselves in Madagascar, as a rule, and certainly not long distances in vehicles owned by other people. Unfortunately, none of the Projet Ranomafana vehicles were in working order. A couple of Toyota quatre-quatres were the least compromised, and they had different things wrong with them. So it was logical that ICTE attempt to hybridize the two. One had no tires or brakes. The second had an inoperable piston ring problem that caused the car to be filled with smoke when the engine ran, which itself was rare. Unfortunately, they weren’t the same models of Toyota. After two days, the effort was abandoned.

Meanwhile, Bret and I loitered in the small courtyard, told every hour or so that we would be leaving for Ranomafana shortly. We amused ourselves in the mornings by getting patisseries from one of the city’s fine bakeries. The French first imagined baguettes, croissants, and pain au chocolat, and they sold their recipes to the Malagasy for the small price of imperialism. We occupied ourselves midday by going to the Indonesian restaurant up the street, an unexpected find. Its only drawback was the proprietor, who took a liking to us, and insisted, every time we came in, that we come visit his private museum. This alleged museum was mysterious, and a bit scary. We had only a murky understanding of the museum’s contents or purpose. The proprietor made allusions to Malagasy-American collaboration and richly decorated rooms, but we never learned more.

After days of this, Benjamin suggested that we rent an entire taxi-brousse for the journey, and that ICTE would split the cost with us, as they needed to send down some luggage for Earthwatch volunteers currently in the park. Alas, the drivers went on strike—against whom was unclear—and blocked all the roads out of the city. We went back to the Indonesian restaurant for lunch and another invitation to the private museum. The drivers abandoned their strike, and the search for a rentable vehicle was back on. Finally one was found, and we were off on a long, grueling nighttime road trip to Ranomafana.

Ranomafana is in the long, lone remaining strip of eastern forest still standing in Madagascar. Higher in elevation than the lowland rainforests of the Masoala, with a base elevation of 2600 feet and rising from there, Ranomafana’s two basic seasons aren’t wet and dry, but cool and cooler. We were there in the cooler season. The forest is dense and steep, and many small rivers snake through the region. Rainfall is in excess of eight feet a year, most of which falls as drizzle during the cooler season. We were in for a cold, damp time of it. The lemurs, not themselves immune to the constant spitting rain, hunkered down and made a habit of looking miserable in trees overhead.

Base camp at Ranomafana, in keeping with its reputation as a logistic powerhouse, has a kitchen building, a one-room library/laboratory, and several cleared areas where tents can be pitched. When we arrived, all tent areas were taken by the Earthwatch volunteers who had been welcomed with open arms by Pat Wright, the American primatologist who founded the park. The place was a zoo, with vazaha do-gooders crawling all over it, and no research being done. We remembered, from our previous trip, that there was a remote camp at higher elevation, Vaturanana, and decided to hike to that as soon as possible. Pat Wright wished we would stay—more researchers interacting with Earthwatch volunteers meant a better experience for them—and to entice me, she insinuated that there was a high density of Mantella near base camp. Bret had made it clear that he hoped to find the endemic sucker-footed bats that hung out, suction-cupped, to the insides of young rolled up leaves, and she suggested the presence of many of these bats as well. After a cursory look around the area near base camp, with the ambient noise level high due to so many people, and most animals hiding as a result, we decided it wasn’t worth staying more than one night. We set up our tent and then played along, interacting with the innocent but research-obstructing Earthwatchers, and with one distinctly non-naïve young woman who called herself Jessica.

Perhaps she had heard Pat Wright talking about us and our research interests, or perhaps she was being ingenuous. Regardless, when Jessica introduced herself to us as a future biologist who wanted to work on herps, or bats—she hadn’t decided which—we were completely charmed.

“Are you one of the Earthwatchers?” Bret asked.

“No no,” she waved her hand dismissively, “I’m volunteering here, watching propes for Pat Wright’s project.” Prope is researcher slang for Propithecus, a remarkable genus of primate unique to Madagascar.  Technically not lemurs, but close, they are sifakas, and sport long lithe limbs and pointy, quizzical faces. They bound through the trees in a unique form of locomotion called vertical grasping and leaping.

“They’re wonderful,” she added, “but I’d rather watch herps. Nobody seems to know anything about the frogs or lizards. There’s female dominance in lemur society, and gripping social interactions, but lemurs aren’t the only things behaving in this forest.” She seemed downright passionate.

As a student of behavior myself, I have long felt it critical that the organism of choice spark deep interest in the researcher doing the work. Scientist or no, we all have to follow our passions. As with good literature, I find the stories of what animals do timeless, and deeply engaging. The natural histories that weren’t good have disappeared, continually replaced by classics, so every bit of animal behavior is rich with history and possibility. Unraveling the patterns that define animal lives, and explaining them, is a puzzle I enjoy.  The same was apparently true for Jessica.

I asked her where she was going when she was done volunteering at Ranomafana.

“I’m starting at Oxford in a year,” she said, a bit abashed, as if this were a strike against her. I assumed she was starting a graduate program there, taking a year off between college and grad school. But no. She was only 17 at the time, had just graduated from the French lyçee in Tana, and was taking a year off between high school and college. The daughter of a UN diplomat, she is British, but had never, at that point, lived in Britain. She grew up in Kenya, Swaziland, Burkina Faso, and Madagascar, and is fluent in French. Her keen mind for evolutionary biology had her looking for field adventures until she started school in September of the following year—she wouldn’t be volunteering at Ranomafana for the entire time.

The next day we hiked to Vaturanana—Vatu, for short. There were four researchers there already, which was for the best, as if there had been nobody, we wouldn’t have known when to stop hiking. Vatu is a research site, in so much as there is a space flat enough to have a food tent, fire, and table. A river runs nearby, but unlike in Ankarana, water isn’t limited in Ranomafana. Flat spaces are. Two of the researchers were working on lemurs, the other two on the elusive fossa, the largest member of the carnivore family in Madagascar. There aren’t any cats, dogs or bears native to Madagascar—no leopards, grizzlies, jackals, or hyaenas. The native predators are all mongooses and their ilk, and the fossa is one of these. Unlike the cute little red and black critters we had seen playing in Ankarana, the fossa was reputed to be the size of a German shepherd, sand colored and fierce. Cryptoprocta ferox. Even the Latin name sounded menacing.

Luke, the graduate student studying the fossa, was pissed off. A juvenile fossa he had put a radio collar on had gone missing. Carnivores are rare in any ecosystem—it takes a lot of space to house enough rodents and other prey to feed a carnivore—so the loss of one marked individual was a big problem for a carnivore project. Luke suspected that villagers living in the park had killed it, as he had originally trapped it by baiting with live chickens, and it had developed a taste for them. Now it was probably stealing villagers’ chickens, which wouldn’t make the villagers happy.

The Ranomafana forest was strangely quiet. The constant buzz of frog and insect calls of other forests was missing. Many tropical frogs aestivate, or go underground, during the cold season, as during dry periods, emerging once the conditions are again to their liking. In my few days at Vatu, I found no Mantella at all, though I was assured that they were there in the “right” season. Odder still, I found very few of the other frogs that were prevalent elsewhere—none of the pale green treefrogs, and few of the drab brown numbers so common on the Masoala. There were some lovely geckos, living in prickly palm-like plants called Pandanus. But even in a swampy section, where I sat for a day, silent and still, waiting for animals to emerge from the gray and drizzle, the forest was eerily quiet.

At night, the six of us sat around eating rice with vegetables and soy sauce—big bottles were available in town, and every week a local man was hired to carry supplies up to Vatu, an all day trip. Sitting with the other researchers, we heard the park gossip.

There was ongoing logging, and a generator, the generator, had been stolen by one of the park employees. To put this in perspective, Pat Wright, who has arguably done more than any other vazaha can hope to with regard to conservation efforts in Madagascar, hired essentially the entire town of Ranomafana, in various capacities, to help with the new park—porters, drivers, and the elite positions, naturalist guides. She brought in money and resources. Still, one of the top people in that local organization was profiting from logging in the park. And the generator that was bought for base camp was stolen.

But this was old news to the researchers at Vatu. The sudden death of the brother of one of the guides was breaking news. When Bret and I hiked back down to base camp in pursuit of promised bats, we found that another man had died in town, and a third was deathly ill. A nasty gastro-intestinal infection appeared to be eating holes in their intestines, and causing them to vomit up black sludge. When we suggested that it sounded rather ominously like Ebola, which isn’t known in Madagascar, we were silenced. One of the bodies was transported back from town in an ICTE car. Plans were made for the Earthwatch volunteers to attend the funeral. No mention was made of the potential for the spread of infectious agents this way.

We were finding no frogs or bats, and the possibility of an outbreak of something truly nasty scared us, so we decided to leave. Ranomafana offered up the car that had transported the dead man, but we declined. Thanks to Luke, who was Pat Wright’s student and had decided to leave as well, we got a ride in an uninfected car. Three quarters of the way to Tana, in dead of night, the vazaha had to pee, and we asked the driver if he could pull over to the side of the road. The Malagasy don’t often reject the suggestions of the vazaha, so he pulled over. The men stayed near the car, while I walked a short distance away to a ditch where I could squat in relative privacy.

“Hurry up! Get back here!” I heard Bret yell. I was annoyed. What was the hurry? We were making good time, especially for Madagascar. I got back to the car, and we sped off.

“What the hell is going on?” I asked the car. Bret explained.

“The driver told us there have been shootings here recently. People killed on the side of the road.”

“In Madagascar?” I was incredulous.

“That’s what he says.” I was never so pleased to get back to Tana.

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With one week left in Madagascar, we headed to the final region I had been considering as a research site, even though I had already decided on the Masoala and Nosy Mangabe. Less than 100 miles from Tana by either train or surprisingly good road, the reserve called Analamazaotra by the Malagasy, or Périnet by the French, is probably the most visited, and certainly the most crowded, of Madagascar’s nature reserves. A huge area around the reserve, an area known as Mantady, had been slated for national park status for years, but nothing had yet come of it, perhaps because there was mining interest in the area as well. The town of Andasibe is the closest human settlement to all of these areas, and it was there that we went.

This town, unlike many of the places we were revisiting from three years prior, had truly changed, and it seemed possible to point to a single cause. Previously, there had been two hotels in town: the old Buffet de la Gâre, a grand old French colonial hotel with polished floors, rundown about the edges but with an air of grace, on the edge of town at the train station, now being run largely by local people. And the Orchidées, a Malagasy version of an old Western bar and whorehouse, complete with wooden balconies running around the building and swinging doors. The floors were splintery, the rooms spare and none too clean. This Malagasy-owned establishment sat right in the middle of town. Most tourists stayed in the Buffet de la Gâre, removed somewhat from the daily activity of the townspeople, but still contributing to the local economy. We had stayed in the Orchidées before, and intended to do so again.

This year there was a new hotel in town, a grand vazaha-owned and -operated affair with individual bungalows, and no glitches in the electricity or service. Most importantly, this tourist hotel offered the implicit promise of a buffer from the local culture. There would be no chickens or small children running past you as you sipped your drink here. No wooden-wheeled wagons rumbling past at six in the morning, on the way to market. No sad eyes or hands extended, no shouts of “vazaha, vazaha!”

In the wake of the new hotel, the Buffet de la Gâre had fallen on to even harder times, and the Orchidées was close to ruin. Few people but tourists had reason to need a hotel in a town like Andasibe, and the new hotel had attracted most of them. In town, the locals were less friendly than before, less eager to interact with the backpack-wearing vazaha as we walked into town. Walking through the doors of the Orchidées, the dank, dark room took a few minutes to get adjusted to. Two Malagasy men sitting at a table began talking to us in boisterous, largely unintelligible French. A pretty young woman sat with them, staring down at her plate, while the two men tried to engage Bret in increasingly loud conversation. We stood looking dumbly at them for a while, until finally I understood their meaning.

“They’re trying to sell her to you,” I said to Bret. The woman still hadn’t looked up from her empty plate. We escaped from the would-be pimps, got a key, and went upstairs to a room far darker and scarier than three years earlier. What had once been a town of dirt roads and open air shops selling the usual assortment of toothpaste, twine, biscuits and rice, where laughing children pushed rings of metal with sticks, now seemed poorer, more desperate and, understandably, more filled with resentment at its fate.

Later that night, Bret went out for a night walk into the forest in search of wildlife, a little tsangatsangana, with the only other resident of the hotel. I stayed in the room alone, nursing a head cold, uneager to go out into the cold drizzle that had stayed with us since Ranomafana. In that small space, with only three empty rooms and an open air communal bathroom sharing the second floor of the Orchidées, I began to hear footsteps on the balcony outside, and taps on the wooden shutters I had bolted shut. Men began to sing outside the shutters, slightly off key. I heard no women. Anyone who had been paying attention in this small town would know that a white woman with a lot of gear was alone in a room at the Orchidées, an unlit part of town where vazahadidn’t go. The strains of song rose and fell, and occasionally there was a crash, which started dogs barking. If they had really wanted in, they could have broken the shutters, by standing on the balcony outside and forcing them in. But they didn’t, and a few hours later, when Bret returned, I wasn’t ready to talk about the noises, preferring to wait until morning, when I could confront the place that had scared me, even if not the ghosts who had roamed and sung and tapped the night before.

The next morning, Maurice the Naturalist took us into the forest. Maurice didn’t remember us from three years earlier—a naturalist guide near Périnet sees a lot of vazaha come through—but we remembered him and his proclamation of belief in Nature, as there had only been a few Malagasy guides in our lives. The rates for guides were hourly here, and extremely high because of the rich tourists who came to see the forest for an hour, then retreat to the new hotel for drinks. Maurice had assured me I wouldn’t find any Mantella this time of year—winter here meant average temperatures of less than 60 degrees, and a lot of fog and drizzle.  So we hired him for two days, one day to show us a region most people not hunting lemurs or cutting wood didn’t see, the second to hike us in to a remote spot where we could camp, and hopefully find our way out again on our own.

The first day we rose in the chilled pink dawn, and walked through rock quarries and tiny shacks with smoke drifting from them. By the time we went past the last shack, we had been walking long enough that its inhabitant was already out working. In this landscape of massive rock formations, the Malagasy government had hired poor men to break rock for roads. Some men quarried large pieces and collected them in piles. Other men broke these pieces into gravel, with hand-sharpened, human-powered metal tools. This man was enormous for a Malagasy, probably six feet tall, muscles rippling with each stroke at his pile of rocks. He gave us a huge smile as we walked by, then asked a question, in Malagasy.

“He wants to know if the vazaha have had their rice yet today,” Maurice translated for us. We shook our heads “no,” assuming the beautiful rock-breaking man spoke no French.

“I have already had one bowl,” the man told us in French, surprising us—a day laborer bilingual in the language of the colonials, he could hardly have routine use for his French. “We Malagasy,” he continued, “have many bowls of rice a day, to keep us strong.” He flexed his biceps by way of demonstration. I was almost ready to sign on to the all-rice diet. He looked at us with some pity. “How do the vazaha stay strong?” We had no answer for him. “Eating vegetables and carrying heavy packs around” seemed a weak response at best. Breaking rocks into gravel by hand and eating several bowls of rice a day was clearly a quicker route to impressive strength.

Maurice thought we should press on, so with promises to eat more rice, we left the man to his rocks. That day and the next, the three of us engaged in mild competition to find the most, the best, and the most agreeable lemurs. Indri, the largest of the non-human primates on Madagascar, were plentiful in this forest, and though they were skittish, bounding away from noises on the ground, with patience we were able to find a few couples. Indri are monogamous, pair-bonded, and vocal, their twice daily duets reminiscent of the songs of humpback whales. There were also more sifakas—Jessica’s propes—a species of almost pure white. When we found them in large groups, they made alarm calls before leaping away through the trees. The related Avahioften sat in the crooks of trees and stared, unblinking. Maurice asked us if we wanted to see more Avahi, then took us to a spot in the forest, non-descript to our eyes, and told us to wait.

“Just after dusk they will be here,” he said, peering up at the fading light. Sure enough, at 6:40 by our watches, several Avahi bounded through. The next night we went back, and at the same moment, we again saw these graceful primates leaping in to our field of vision, from tree to tree, then gone.

Bret and I stayed a few days in the forest alone, camped at the top of a glorious waterfall.  We were looking for animals of all sorts, and found no Mantella, but plenty of lemurs and geckos. The forest was dense, and we neither saw nor heard any other people during this time. When time grew short, we packed up our tent and hiked out several hours to a dirt mining road that led back to town.

A Frenchman in a truck laden with Malagasy workers stopped to pick us up not long after we reached the road. His Malagasy was fluent, his English non-existent, and though his name was McDonald, he insisted that he was a real Frenchman. He had lived in Madagascar since 1964, and was currently heading a road crew to improve the existing mining road. He was picking up workers to take them home for the day, though it was early in the afternoon. As we stopped to pick up a man digging white quartz by the side of the road, our man McDonald said to himself “it’s two o’clock, he’s worked hard, he is done for the day.” He volunteered, then, that each member of the road crew earned 130,000 FMG per month. A little over $30.

“Is that sufficient for a family to live on?” I asked. He smiled ruefully.

“If a man is single, it is enough, but for a family, no.” It struck me that Maurice, with his marketable skills as a naturalist guide, made one and a half times the monthly wage of these road workers in just two days. But his work, and therefore his pay, wasn’t consistent, so some months he might make nothing. When Maurice left us, he returned to his wife and four-day-old son with full pockets, money enough to feed them, at least for a while.

Our plane left Tana on a Sunday night. On Monday morning, President Zafy was due to be impeached. Parliament had voted him out of office, but he had already declined to leave once, arguing that the army was on his side. One might speculate that the only reason for Madagascar to have a military is to back their favorite governmental factions. The existence of a prime minister, in addition to a president, and a shadowy king figure who might not even be real, makes the balance of power opaque to outsiders. I asked Benjamin, who had been a government official before taking the job with ICTE, who wields the power in Madagascar.

“You know how it is,” he shrugged his shoulders. I didn’t know how it was. That’s why I had asked. I asked two other Malagasy at ICTE, as well as a woman selling patisseries, and they all gave me the same shrug, the same non-committal, “you know how it is.”

The night we left, there were rumors that military helicopters were flying in erratic circles over the city, as if taunting Parliament to try, just try. I hadn’t suspected, before then, that Madagascar owned any military helicopters.

“You’re leaving at the right time,” Benjamin told us. “Probably nothing will happen, but just in case, better to be gone by tomorrow.”

As soon as our plane left the ground on what was to be a multi-day, seven leg journey home, the experiences in Madagascar began to fade, hard to recall in vibrant, living detail. Did I remember correctly that no diagnosis had come of the strange GI-related deaths at Ranomafana, and no autopsies were scheduled, as that would be disrespectful to the dead? In the air, on hold between two worlds that couldn’t understand each other, this seemed implausible. I took Vermox, a dewormer available over the counter in Madagascar, not because I really thought it would treat whatever had struck people down in Ranomafana, but because it was the only thing in my arsenal that seemed vaguely relevant. And I thought about returning to Madagascar.

“I don’t want to work there completely alone,” I told Bret while we sat on the ground in Djibouti, tucked in between Ethiopia and Somalia.

“I don’t think you should,” he agreed. “It wouldn’t be safe.” I hadn’t even been thinking of my physical safety. I was concerned about my sanity. I was going to need someone to talk to besides frogs over the course of several months. Then it came to me.

“You know who would be perfect, as a field assistant? Jessica, from Ranomafana! She wants to do behavioral work on something other than lemurs...and she’s already in country...and she speaks French. It couldn’t be better.” I was immediately focused: if only I could compel Jessica to come be my field assistant, all would be well.

I fell into a reverie, trying to recall some of the wonder and craziness of being a vazaha in Madagascar, now that it was remote, but only hours in the past. As Madagascar receded as daily reality, it came back in slow, dreamy waves that suffered from a lack of plausibility. The tsingy of Ankarana, and learning from Angeluc to suck the insides of gourd-fruits for their precious water. Being ferried to shore in a pirogue by Solo, ripe forest glistening ahead of us. The ghosts from the balcony of the Orchidées, and the curious native primates nearby.

But the reason for all of this experience, the science, came back, too. Discovering Mantella laevigata in bamboo wells, fighting and mating, was glorious. There is such grand biodiversity in the tropics. All seems disorder at first glance, but it can be parsed, identified and understood. In the tropics, many of the rules made by temperate-based ecologists fall apart, and field biology explodes in a chaos of unknown vectors, uncontrollable variation within and between seasons, watersheds, populations. In the tropics discovery can still happen routinely—it is almost difficult to avoid, if only you keep your eyes open.

Waiting on the tarmac of the St. Louis airport, our last stop before home, the little boy next to me asked his mother persistently, but pleasantly, “Are we up in the sky now? Are we up yet?” He had been told he could have his tuna once we’d taken off. Tuna, he knew, was what he wanted. Being airborne was only incidental. Finally we departed, and four year old Scott had his tuna at last. Then he looked out the window, in disbelief and wonder at the scene below. On the final leg of this particular adventure, I shared the company of a curious little child, who was just beginning his. Tuna was his goal, but flight, with its surprises and discomforts, may prove to be just as enduring.

So ends part I.

Next week: Part II, Chapter 7 – Reentry

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