Joseph O'Neill - Netherland

“You owe me an apology,” I said. “An apology and an explanation. I don’t want to listen to this.”

Chuck put up assenting hands and said, “There’s a place that the Shango Baptists like to go called the Maracas Waterfall.” Running east — west across Trinidad, he explained, are the mountains of the Northern Range. In those mountains are remote and wild valleys, and one of these, the Maracas Valley, is the site of the famous Maracas Waterfall. Chuck said, “It’s quite something: the stream flows to the edge of the mountainside and drops three hundred feet. If you go there, you’ll see the flags and chicken heads left by Shango Baptists. It’s pretty spooky if you don’t understand what it all means.”

Leaning back in his seat, he told me that the waterfall may be reached only by walking for a few miles along a trail through one of the last virgin forests in Trinidad. It is in this highland forest that you may hear, and if you are lucky even see, he said, one of the most wonderful songbirds of Trinidad, the violaceous euphonia, known to everybody on the island as the semp. The male semp is a golden-yellow bird of four inches or so and for as long as anybody can remember, according to Chuck, the children of Trinidad have trapped and caged it on account of its beautiful call, a practice that has resulted in the species now being close to extinction. Chuck said that it shamed him to admit that a large part of his own boyhood had been spent trying to capture songbirds, usually the seedeaters and finches that were then common in the grassy plains around Las Lomas. “There are many ways to catch birds,” Chuck said. “My own method, with the semp, was to use a caged semp as a lure. I fixed a stick to the cage and spread a gum, laglee, we call it, on the stick.” The semp, attracted by the song of its fellow creature, would land on the stick and become stuck in the gum for a few seconds. “This was my window of opportunity: I’d jump out from my hiding place and grab the bird before it could fly away.”

Chuck, squinting in the sunlight, put his cap back on his head. It was a bright day. Autumnal colors were firing in the woods.

One day, he told me, he traveled to the Maracas Valley to catch a semp. He was thirteen or fourteen. He was slightly familiar with the area, having previously accompanied his father on a hunting trip there. It was a weekday. Young Chuck — or Raj, as he was called — walked in solitude up the path to the waterfall. On both sides of the path grew the immense trees of the forest. About a mile or so into the forest, he came upon a spot that suited his purpose. He deposited the caged semp on the edge of the path and crouched behind a tree at the side of the road. From down below, in the valley, came the sound of water running and falling on rocks.

After a short while, the semp began to sing. Chuck sat still, waiting.

It was about then that he noticed something unusual: a small dirt track, going into the forest, clumsily covered by branches. Chuck followed the track. It led to a tree. Stowed by the tree were farming implements and materials — rakes, hoes, fertilizer, a cutlass. Chuck noticed something else: seedlings in a cup. He knew straight away what this meant. A friend had only recently shown him: you put the marijuana seeds in a cup, and they germinated.

At exactly that moment, Chuck heard voices coming up the trail, the voices of men. It came to him immediately that these were the marijuana growers. The voices grew louder, and then he saw them through the trees, coming up the main path — two black men, one with long dreadlocks, the other an East Indian with sunglasses covering his eyes. “The fear I felt at that moment,” Chuck said, “is something I’ll never forget. Never. It felt like a kick in the chest. Those sunglasses were terrifying. They were black, black — the kind Aristotle Onassis used to wear.” He shook his head. “I knew I was in danger,” he said. “These men are ruthless. They wouldn’t hesitate to chop me. Some men can kill so easily. I knew the semp would alert them. A semp in a cage, left out in the open like that? Everybody knows what that means. So I began to run — down the mountain, toward the sound of water. It was the only way to go. I heard shouting behind me, this noise of branches and bushes. They were coming after me.”

The moment you stepped inside the forest, according to Chuck, you were under a thick, almost unbroken canopy. Where a tree had fallen down, the sunlight came through; everywhere else was dark. “So you have these brilliant columns of sunlight in between the trees. That’s where you’ll find undergrowth. Otherwise the ground is almost bare. People think of virgin forests as jungles, but they’re nothing like that, not these mountain forests. I could run freely; I had to grab on to saplings to slow me down, stop me from falling down the hill.”

Chuck stirred. “God, I nearly forgot: the snakes. This forest is the domain of the mapepire snakes — pit vipers. There are two kinds, the z’ananna and the balsain. There is an antidote for balsain venom, but the z’ananna, the bushmaster, fifteen feet long with diamond markings on its back — boy, if one of them bites you, it’s certain death. They’re night animals, but it’s easy to disturb them. So while I was terrified about the men running after me — who I couldn’t hear, by the way, I just sensed them — I was also terrified about snakes. My God, when I think back…” Again, Chuck shook his head. “I remember the sound of the stream getting louder. I come down to a dry ravine, a gully. I jump across the ravine and climb up the bank, holding on to roots to pull myself up. Now I’m heading down again, straight for the stream. It’s a clear stream, very rocky. I don’t have to worry about snakes anymore. I don’t hesitate: I go downstream. I have no choice — upstream are these huge rocks, and straight ahead is a sheer escarpment, then more snakes. But the terrible thing was, I couldn’t see where I was going. Fronds, thick heliconia fronds, hung over the stream, and I had to fight through them. I had a horrible feeling those men knew of some shortcut — you know, I’d push aside the fronds and they’d be waiting for me. Anyway, I just kept going down the streambed, walking through these cataracts, trying not to slip on rocks. Then — and here’s where it really gets like a movie — the stream dropped twenty feet into a pool. I tried to edge down the side of the waterfall, but it was no good. No way down. Then I heard voices, not far away, not far away at all. ‘Dread! Dread! He down there!’”

Chuck paused. “Let me ask you this: have you ever run for your life? I don’t mean what happened at that cricket match, although that was pretty dangerous. I mean, a real do-or-die situation?”

I didn’t humor him with an answer. But we didn’t have too many do-or-die situations in The Hague.

In a wondering voice, he said, “What I think about now, when I look back, Hans, is how, when you’re running for your life, you have this strong sense of luck. You don’t feel lucky, that’s not what I mean. What I mean is, you feel luck, good and bad, everywhere. The air is luck. Do you understand what I’m saying? I tell you, it’s a horrible feeling.”

He paused, frowning. “Anyhow, I decided to jump. We’re talking twenty feet, into water that may or may not be deep. It was a real situation, because I couldn’t swim — I still can’t. And let me tell you, I can barely walk up a staircase without getting vertigo. But somehow, I forced myself to jump. Lord, the fear I felt as I dropped…” Chuck shivered heavily. “I was lucky. The pool was deep enough to break my fall, but shallow enough for me to splash out. I banged my knee, but I could walk. I struggled onto the rocks and kept going. I was exhausted, finished. But I pushed myself on, trying to breathe, trying to forget about the pain in my knee. What I can’t understand, now,” Chuck said, “is my pursuers. I was running for my life — but these men? So much determination, just to catch a boy? Why, Hans? I wasn’t any threat to them. I was just this small kid with a semp…All I can think is, it has something to do with hunting. The hunt triggers some deep instinct within us. These men were hunters, for sure.