COUNTRYMAN – A primal, only-in-Guyana Creek Excursion – Part 1

Nov 30, 2014 Countryman, Features / Columnists

---

By Dennis Nichols
Guyana has no crystal blue waters and silver beaches, nor many of the common tourist adornments some of our

Caribbean neighbours exhibit. Our jewels are rarer, therefore harder to access, like Roraima, Kaieteur, Orinduik, and hinterland excursion nuggets than aren’t easily captured in glossy brochures and snappy sound bites. But for those who embrace depth of perception and primordial mystique, there are moments waiting to be experienced in profoundly simple pleasures like the one I am about to share with you, straight from the heart of ‘bush’ life.
It was like nothing I could have ever imagined – an overnight fishing expedition and hang-out with my a buddy friend up the gloomy Hanaida Creek that branches from North West’s Aruka River. I am drawn to black water, I love paddling canoes, and while fishing is not my forte, the lure of the trip was compelling.
It was thirty years ago. I was teaching on the river, and my wife had recently given birth to our fifth son right there in the teacher’s cottage. I’d just reaped a half acre of corn and yams, and felt as much an Arukan as my travelling companion Lewis ‘Uncle Lew’ Walker. One Saturday morning, the two of us left from his house in a corial laden with the gear we would need for the journey.
We had a couple of kitchen utensils, a box of matches, some cassava bread, salt, pepper and cassareep, two cutlasses, a shotgun, and fishing gear which included a number of spring hooks, (tiny baiting contraptions) and a piece of seine. I asked Lew to let me sit at the back so I could do the major part of steering the canoe while paddling, or pulling, as the river folk called it. Although I was the novice in the undertaking, he unconcernedly agreed.
By midday we had turned off from the river on to the creek, and into a different world. The meandering stream was a relatively small one, about 30 to 40 feet in width, but narrower at some points, and as we progressed, the colour of the water changed almost imperceptibly from brown-black to a darkish amber. It flowed smoothly but with a noticeable swell, through the dark, flanking vegetation which at times formed a canopy of shade from the noonday heat.
It soon became cooler though, and as it did, I was aware of that uncanny silence you can almost hear in such settings. Even so we did in fact discern, with startling clarity, some of the eerie sounds made by forest creatures still unknown to me at the time. The most common were the piercing, unnerving cry of a particular jungle bird that seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere at the same time, and the howling chatter of monkeys, a few of which we glimpsed cavorting in the treetops.

I could hear too the occasional crash of vegetation as one of the larger denizens, maybe a tapir or jaguar near the creek line, was disturbed by the boat’s approach and the possible threat of human predators. But I was more thrilled than scared at the idea of a confrontation, and reassured by Lew’s loaded shotgun resting at his side. He however told me that the purpose of having the gun nearby was mostly to scare the sleek-headed water dogs (giant otters) that were repeatedly popping up close to the boat, and which if threatened, could become extremely aggressive.
Adrenaline and anticipation coursed through me as my partner announced that we were nearing our destination. After about four hours paddling my shoulders didn’t hurt as I had imagined, and I wasn’t tired. Mind was decisively conquering body. It got cooler, and there was a stillness in the atmosphere that I’d never experienced before. Everything began taking on a kind of surreal overtone. And even now I recall it as a disturbingly beautiful and timeless interlude. An only-in-Guyana moment.
It was about five ‘o’ clock when Lew signaled me to pull into a tiny waterway diverging from the main one. The first thing we did was to unpack our stuff in a small clearing about 50 yards from the creek. Then we quickly cleared about 20 square feet of jungle brush and set up a makeshift camp with a frame made of mahoe, (a straight, slender tree) and troolie trunks and branches.
We chopped up some firewood and in another small clearing made a fire that would warm us, cook our food and keep the snakes and ‘tigers’ away. Then we ate some cassava bread and fried fish that Lew’s wife, Dorothy, had prepared us. We washed it down with creek water, and relaxed for a few minutes as the fire flared outside and we sporadically slapped mosquitos off our faces and arms.
Just as it was becoming dusk, we went out and set the seine. Then we set the spring hooks. With me again steering the corial, Lew would grasp a sapling at the water’s edge, bend it and attach the tiny device with a baited hook in such a way that it remained flexed while anchored to some foundation below. I didn’t pay much attention to this process, but I knew that a successful culmination would be the bite of a fish triggering the mechanism, releasing the sapling with the hook, and suspending the fish about two feet  above the surface of the creek.
After baiting we returned to camp, but not before Lew had hooked and dispatched two houri, each with an expert head chop. In less than five minutes they were stewing in cassareep broth seasoned with salt and pepper only, and about fifteen minutes later I was soaking my cassava bread and devouring the freshest, tastiest fish dish I’d had in a very long time. After we were finished eating, I added a couple of chunks of wood to the dwindling fire. The flames leaped up. And the stories began.
Lew was a great raconteur, his specialty being supernatural tales, and he was good at it. He started with ‘Turn Tiger’ and had my brain spinning with his recollection of seeing a man transformed into a jaguar after climbing up into the rafters of a benab in a state of semi-intoxication. He told of an entire Amerindian family that shape-shifted in similar fashion and covered on foot a distance of about 50 miles (of bush trail) in a few hours, outpacing a jeep that was proceeding along a parallel path to the same destination.
A third story dealt with him getting lashed unconscious with a piece of wood by an unseen entity while paddling on the river, and finding himself wedged among some wild mango roots when he came to himself the next day. The fourth was a disquieting recollection of being separated from a base camp in the jungle, and miraculously rescuing himself through a bit of supernatural ingenuity which he refused to share with me.
I hadn’t much to share with him; in fact I don’t remember if I said anything, so enthralled was I by his gripping, and admittedly at times, quite incredible yarns. It was a good thing that I had some salt to swallow them with. Meanwhile the night grew older, the fire crackled and sputtered, and the nocturnal creatures kept their distance. Outside in the creek the fish were beginning to bite and, as we were to find out later, they were not the only dwellers of the Hanaida that were hungry for food that night.
(To be continued next week)

---

---