Jaguars, toucans and talking kangaroos

In point of fact, everyone around here is already living with jaguars — southern Belize has the highest concentration in Central America, and 40 of the big predators have been counted within the 60,000 acres that Karas has secured protection for. But they are masters of camouflage and the jungle is thick, so the captive experience is virtually the only guaranteed way to see them. That’s true not just for guests of the lodge, but for school groups who are invited to come and learn about wildlife to encourage their environmental awareness. Locals have traditionally had a reverential yet adversarial relationship with jaguars, which they regard as a threat to their cattle and goats. Karas urges them to build fences and promises to compensate them for lost stock if they call on him to come remove the problem animal. This is where his trapping experience comes in handy: He puts the fresh kill into a cage; when the cat comes back to dine, it gets captured and is then released back into the wilderness.

As Karas’ prior livelihood uniquely qualifies him for his present vocation, so does that of Nathaniel Mas. A Maya himself, he worked on the excavation and renovation of Nim Li Punit, the ruin situated a couple hundred yards uphill from Indian Creek Lodge. “If it was the old times,” says Karas, “Nathaniel would be the head mason for the Maya ruler.” So Karas put him to work building stone walls for the lodge and showing guests around the site. He does so with an obvious sense of pride — we discovered these artifacts of our culture, and I myself discovered this tomb.

Built in the 8th century, Nim Li Punit was a royal observatory. The on-site museum’s claim to fame is the second-largest Maya stela, whose chiseled legend Mas decodes for us. As he guides us around the grounds interpreting the altars, tombs and ball court, he also stops at all the major plants to demonstrate the bushcraft that goes into living off the local environment. As a bonus, he takes us to his family compound between the ruin and the lodge to show the results. His home is made of tree trunks and planks bound by vines and topped with thatch, as Maya homes have been for eons. Hammocks are slung across barely furnished rooms. I take the opportunity to ask Mas’ 41-year-old mother to compare the time when the acreage across the road was farmed and logged with the eco-sensitive era brought on by development of the lodge. I’m surprised to learn there’s no difference as far as she’s concerned.

But to Nathaniel and another BLE guide, Thomas Pop, who takes us on a cave trip the following day, things are much better now. The lodge employs 125 people, many more than the farm did — all the men from neighboring villages can now find work without having to leave their families and can afford to send their children to school, which most of their parents could not do. And the work is more agreeable, too. Pop, 39, worked the banana fields for nine years and spent four years in the army. “I guarantee this is a better job,” he says. “In the army you have to sit in the water for 12 hours at a time, making river crossings. Now I’m driving around with a cooler in the back.”

Zach Stovall

On the way to Tiger Cave, Pop stops in a Maya village to pick up Pablo Ack, a local guide who reports that he commonly sees fresh jaguar tracks hereabouts. After a short hike through a broadleaf forest, we come to a gash in the face of a karst wall and duck in. The entrance quickly opens into a vast cathedral-like space, dimly limned by a slash of sunlight piercing the ceiling eight stories overhead. Ack shines his flashlight on the cave floor, playing over pottery shards estimated to be 500 to 600 years old. He explains that until the cave became a tourist attraction in recent years, Maya elders performed rituals here. We come to a perfectly sculpted altar that looks handcrafted, but it’s a natural formation made of sparkly limestone. This is where the elders would sacrifice mice to the corn gods so the rodents would stop devouring their crops; such practices are still carried on today, Ack says, at a more discreet locale.

Zach Stovall

We delve deeper into the cave, and at one point Ack suggests we stand still and douse our lights in order to experience the powerful combination of pitch-blackness and silence broken only by the cheeping of bats overhead. We clamber onward. At some points the cave is silty and slick like a riverbed; at others the path becomes a rocky tunnel that requires climbing. I gradually feel myself regressing to a childlike apprehension of the cave as font of mystery and myth, a role it has always played for the Maya as part of the multi-layered Underworld. As the journey becomes more and more strenuous, and we all become covered with a heady patina of sweat, mud and batshit, the divide between guide and guest dissolves; we’re all in this together, and it’s officially an adventure. It’s a great feeling, as is the post-spelunking picnic lunch and swim in a pool formed by the fresh headwaters of a river as they spill from the mountain.

Golden Stream is not only the main artery of the ecosystem Karas is working so hard to preserve, it’s also the only way to reach his Jungle Camp. Which is why I’m paddling a kayak down a jungle waterway overgrown by trees with patchy camouflage bark. We’ve pushed off in mid-afternoon because tapir are often spotted in the stream as the day wears on. I’m eager to see Belize’s national animal because, well, they’re funny-looking: up to 875 pounds, thick of body and short-legged, with trunk-like snouts. But all I can spot are the mudslide tracks where they enter and exit the stream. I perk up when I hear some snorting and snuffling, and find myself locked in eye contact with a curious-but-wary wild pig that quickly turns and scoots off into the bush. The stream is draped with vines covered in little white bouquets that create sweet pockets of fragrance, like honeysuckle but stronger. Those spots are an antidote to the other vines that give off a smell more evocative of a 7th Avenue subway staircase in late July. That’s biodiversity for you.

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