Aaron Elkins - Little Tiny Teeth

“Yes, he was a little… off, all right. Obviously, the guy has a problem.”

“Yeah, the problem is, his brains are fried. He’s put in a lot of years stuffing stuff up his nose, or however they do it down here.”

He wrinkled his own nose. “I smell smoke.”

Gideon pointed toward the shore. “There’s a fire. Several fires.”

Up ahead, atop a high bank, was what looked like the epicenter of a gigantic bomb blast, a huge wound in the jungle, a good three hundred feet across, littered with hundreds of felled trees and piles of burning, smoking, head-high debris. At least a hundred nearly naked men were scrambling through the hellish scene, trimming branches with machetes and chain saws and tossing them into the smoldering piles. An earthen ramp, red and raw, had been chopped into the bank, and on it lay some of the trunks, tilting down toward the river, where an old barge waited. Another group of workers toiled, their brown backs glistening, pulling and pushing one of the trunks down toward the barge with nothing but chains and ropes and rough posts used as levers. Shouted orders and cries could be dimly heard through the racket of the chain saws.

“It’s like something out of the Inferno, isn’t it?” a suddenly subdued Gideon said.

“Or the building of the pyramids,” John said. “Not a machine in sight. Not a backhoe, not a crane.”

“And how would they get a crane there?” said Vargas, who had strolled up behind them. “They could barge it down the river, yes, but how would they get it up the bank? Forty feet, almost vertical.” He shook his head. “Impossible.”

“What are they doing?” John asked. “Is it logging?”

“Oh, yes, logging. There are many such. Ugly, yes? And do you know what is the most amazing thing about it?”

They looked at him.

“It wasn’t here at all two weeks ago,” Vargas said. “The forest here was untouched. And two weeks from now, they will be gone, doing the same thing somewhere else along the river.”

“It’s controlled, though, isn’t it?” Gideon asked. “I mean, there are regulations, oversight…”

Vargas smiled. “This is Peru, my friend. It’s regulated by how much money changes hands.”

“How long does it take to grow back?” John asked.

“Oh, it grows back quickly enough. A year from now, all will be green again. From here, it may look the same, but it will not be the same, it will no longer be, I forget the word, natural forest, first forest…”

“Virgin forest?” offered Gideon.

“Yes, professor, virgin forest. No, it will be all brambles, and thorns, and swamps, and mosquitoes. The big trees won’t be back for a hundred, two hundred years.”

Silently, the three men watched the gash disappear behind a wall of jungle as the boat moved on. All were glad to see it go.

“Well, well,” said Vargas brightly, to introduce a change of subject. Had they spotted any of the Amazon’s famous pink dolphins yet? No? Well, they must be sure to look for them, they were something that shouldn’t be missed. Would they care for a drink from the bar? Technically, it wasn’t yet open, but it would be no trouble at all – it would be a pleasure – to pour something for them. In their cases, of course, he whispered with a wink – an actual, literal wink – there would be no charges at the end of the voyage, and the same went for their excellent friend Phil. Their tabs would discreetly be made to disappear, poof. Only please – he looked around and leaned closer – don’t tell the other passengers.

This offer they politely declined in their own and in Phil’s behalf, and Gideon asked if it was possible for the boat to travel a little closer to the shore so that they might perhaps catch a glimpse of the rain forest wildlife. Vargas, as always, was anxious to oblige: as it happened, there was a sufficiently deep channel on the starboard side that ran along only a hundred feet from the southern bank, and he would be pleased to have the Adelita cruise in it for the next few hours. John and Gideon were to make certain to be on the lookout for monkeys and sloths in the trees, and down below for caimans and capybara, who liked to come down and lounge along the waterside when the heat of the day was on the wane.

Indeed, as dusk approached, and enormous, pink-tinged, end-of-the-world clouds began to build on the horizon, and the light turned from brassy to golden, the small, darting swifts and swallows were replaced by larger birds: white cattle egrets and brilliant toucans and macaws. The caimans did show up along the shore, as still and gnarly as old tree stumps, their eyes and nostrils poking out of the water. And life within the trees became visible. They saw a sloth making its lethargic, languorous upside-down way along the branch of a tree – it covered only three or four feet in the five minutes it was in view – and a spider monkey and a family of squirrel monkeys chittering among the leaves.

“This is what I was hoping it would be like,” Gideon said happily.

“Yeah. Hey, is that a capybara?” John gestured at a pig-size animal wallowing in an eddy along the shore. “With the nose?”

“Tapir,” Gideon said, as confidently as if it weren’t the first one he’d set eyes on outside of a zoo.

“Well, whatever the hell it is, you don’t see them in Seattle.” He shook his head and considered. “We are really a long way from civilization here, you know?”

“Can’t argue with that.”

The local denizens, the ones aboard the ship, also began making their appearances as the air cooled. Arden Scofield, in gym shorts and with a towel draped around his neck, came out to circle the deck for exercise. “Hundred and ten feet per circuit,” he informed them as he zipped by. “Forty-eight circuits to a mile.” Apparently completely recovered from his earlier encounter with Theraphosa blondi, he merrily mimed exhaustion and panting. “Only forty-six to go, if I can last.”

Fifteen minutes later, the Adelita slowed and Vargas returned with exciting news. There was a school of pink Amazon dolphins playing up ahead and if they cared to move back to the port side of the boat they could see these remarkable creatures for themselves.

They saw three of them slipping in and out of the water in concert a few hundred yards ahead; gleaming, blubbery objects not as sleek or graceful as the more familiar dolphins of the north, but assuredly, indubitably pink.

“Aren’t they marvelous?” Scofield called out from behind them. He had finished his walk and now stood leaning against the bar, mopping his face and watching the dolphins play.

“These fish,” Vargas said, “in all the world are found only in the Amazon. On our future trips, there will be a, what do you call him, a naturist, a naturalist, aboard to-”

He was shocked into silence by a reverberating thunk that could be felt in the floorboards, and then a microsecond later a tremendous crashing and tinkling of glass. The racket had come from behind them, from the bar, which was basically a slightly modified eight-by-six-foot prefab storage shed, the back of which had been bolted to the outside of the dining room wall, beside the entrance. Glass shelves filled with bottles and glasses around three sides left just enough room for a bartender to fix drinks and serve them through the opening of the Dutch door. The walls on either side had been fitted with large, fixed glass panes so that the attractive array of bottles within could be seen from the outside.

At the moment, however, it was anything but attractive. The glass pane on the port side had been shattered – shards lay everywhere underfoot – and two of the glass shelves had come down in fragments, their bottles – those that hadn’t been broken – rolling around on the floor. The air reeked of whiskey and beer. In front of this enclosure stood Scofield, openmouthed and frozen in place, his towel clutched to his chest with both hands. His eyes popping, he was staring at the shaft of a heavy, still-vibrating six-foot-long spear that had buried its point in a half-empty vodka carton inside the little room, nailing the carton to the floor. Given where the chalk-white Scofield was standing, it couldn’t have missed him by more than a foot.