Contact

CHAPTER TWO

“Don’t you want to go and work in the Oriente?” asked Marcelino’s wife’s uncle as he handed him a business card from a tourism company that had just set up a lodge deep inthe forest.

It was 1991, and the proposal was unusual, to say the least. Marcelino, a civil engineer specialising in road construction, returned home to Ibarra to tell his wife about the opportunity. The only thing he knew about the job was the telephone number printed on the card.

So he decided to call.

To do so, he had to travel into the center of Ibarra, where he lived, to reach the telephone office, as phones at home did not yet exist. It was common in those days to queue to use a public phone; often one had to wait hours for a call that lasted only a few minutes.

“The person in charge has just gone to the bank, please call after lunch, ” they told him.

Marcelino went home determined to call again, and somehow, without receiving any further information about the job, he secured an appointment to be interviewed in Quito, two hours from his home.

The neighbour from the street where he had grown up turned out to be the man who would interview him.

“You’ll work as a night guard, ” he said.

After accepting the job, his friend gave him directions for reaching the site and, before finishing, surprised him with:

“You have to leave tomorrow. ”

So he returned home to share the good news with his wife. She could hardly believe that her husband had just accepted a job in the forest that required twenty-one days of work followed by seven days of rest. For many families at the time, such an arrangement meant long silences, absences, and the challenge of waiting patiently.

“If I like it, I’ll stay, ” he replied.

Getting to the lodge wasn’t simple, either. He had to travel from Ibarra to Quito, then down to Coca, and finally, spend hours navigating the Napo River.

The landscape transformed with every mile he traveled: first the cold Andes, then the humid foothills, and finally the thick, scorching, teeming rainforest. The journey was long, yet also a kind of transition into another world.

Nights in the forest were not easy. There was no electricity, and the darkness was so dense it felt solid. Insects and nocturnal birds filled the air with strange sounds, as though the forest itself were keeping watch.

For a newly arrived guard, accustomed to the calm of Andean Ibarra, it must have felt like living in a parallel universe.

Thirty-three years have now passed since that conversation in his living room. What began as an unusual offer ended up shaping an entire life in the forest.

And truly, who wouldn’t be marked for life after seeing an anaconda? As Marcelino recalls, it happened unexpectedly one day when he had been asked to leave a canoe at a site not far away. He had to row there himself.

As he approached the spot, he noticed something unusual among the logs where he was meant to anchor the canoe. Something moved — something yellow-brownish, with a slightly rough texture.

Between curiosity and fear, he realised it was an anaconda. Frozen with terror, he allowed himself a moment to observe it, to fall under its spell. Slowly, guided by instinct, he tied the canoe to another tree nearby, until fear — and reason — made him decide to flee.

He walked quickly back without ever looking back, knowing that he had been extraordinarily lucky to witness such a monumental living creature so close.

That is how the forest rewards good-hearted people. It can often be unkind, depending on the energy of the person who enters its realm.

Like the day when a famous birding guide visited the lodge with the sole purpose of spotting the majestic harpy eagle, accompanied by the guests he was leading.

They had spent a week at the lodge, living the experience of being part of the jungle; but the eagle never appeared. They waited until the very end, always alert, binoculars pressed to their faces. Paul walked the trails in silence, fine-tuning his hearing, attentive to any crackle or shadow among the canopy. But nothing.

It never showed.

Finally, the guests and their guide boarded their canoe and made their way back across the Garzacocha lagoon. The light was soft, almost a farewell, and the surface of the water shone with that tranquil glow that appears as the afternoon falls.

When, suddenly, Marcelino and the entire crew saw it.
It appeared.

Perched on an impossibly tall tree, it sat, almost sculpted. The silhouette was unmistakable: enormous, powerful, with a white breast that shone like a beacon between the shadows, and a plummed crest on its head that lent it an almost mythic presence. Its talons, as thick as an adult’s wrist, clasped the tree’s branch with a quiet authority, as though this entire kingdom belonged to it.

It gazed over the lagoon with an ancient patience, as if aware its immobility made it master of all it surveyed.

Marcelino froze.

His heart pounded, the way it does when one witnesses something that hardly feels real.

They shouted like madmen for Paul and his guests, who were further across the lagoon by then, to return, to see this fabled creature they’d lusted after for days. But the canoe was already too far away, and the forest swallowed their echoing calls.

That eagle was there for one purpose: to be seen and appreciated by Marcelino.

The following year, when Paul returned to the lodge, they told him he had been seconds, metres, or perhaps a slightly sharper ear away, from laying eyes on his long-desired harpy eagle.

But that is the forest: it gives when it wishes to give, when it believes it must… and only to whom it chooses.