The guide had introduced himself as Miguel, but they had immediately taken to calling him Miggie, as if Miguel were just a suggestion. While he did not think all Americans were idiots—when he wasn’t leading expeditions of tourists on “eco treks,” he often worked with the scientists inside the park, most of them from American universities—he was beginning to think that, despite the presence of Henderson, who was by all accounts a genius, this particular group seemed to have more idiots than normal. They were not going to see a lion, and no matter what the woman said, they weren’t going to see a jaguar, either. Miguel had been working here for the tour company for nearly three years, and even he’d never seen a jaguar. Not that he was truly an expert. He had been born and raised in Lima, and the only reason he was there, instead of back in the city of more than eight million, was a girl. They’d gone to university together, and when she landed a plum job as a research assistant, he managed to squirm his way into helping out inside the park occasionally. Recently, though, things hadn’t been going so well; his girlfriend had seemed distracted when they’d been together, and Miguel had begun to suspect that she’d started sleeping with one of her coworkers.
He watched the Americans take water or little bars wrapped in plastic out of their backpacks, and then he walked a few paces farther down the path. He glanced back and saw the lion woman, Tina, smiling at him in such a way that he wondered if maybe that night, when Henderson went into his tent, she might be available for him. He’d had chances with tourists before, though the opportunity presented itself less often than he would have expected, and he’d always turned them down. But maybe tonight, if Tina offered, he wouldn’t say no. If his girlfriend was cheating on him, the least he could do was return the favor. Tina kept smiling at him, and it made him nervous.
He was made more nervous by the jungle, however. The first few months after he’d left Lima to come here he’d hated it, but mostly he was used to the closeness of it by now. The constant buzz of insects, the movement, the heat, and the life that seemed everywhere. It had all become background noise eventually, and until today, it had been a long time since he’d been scared to be in the jungle. Today was different, though. The background noise was gone. It was unsettling how quiet it was aside from the nattering of the group behind him. They had been complaining about the lack of animals, and if he had been honest with them—and he hadn’t, because that was not what a guide was paid to be—he would have told the group that he was bothered by it as well. Usually they would have seen more animals than they could have asked for: sloths, capybara, brocket, monkeys. God, they loved the monkeys. The tourists could never get enough monkeys. And insects, of course. They were usually everywhere, and when all else failed to keep the tourists entertained, Miguel, who had never been scared of spiders, would often pick one up on the end of a branch and surprise one of the women in the group with it. He loved the way they shrieked when he brought it close for them to see, and the way the men tried to pretend as though the spider didn’t bother them.
Behind Tina, he saw Henderson bending over and grabbing at his gut. The man may have been very rich—Miguel had not recognized Henderson the man, though he had certainly heard of Henderson’s company; the researchers all did their work on Henderson Tech’s small silver computers—but he did not seem particularly special. He’d been complaining the entire morning. He complained about the roads, about the lack of access to the Internet at the lodge, about the food. Ah, the food. He complained and complained about the food, and as Miguel saw Henderson bent over and making a face, it appeared that at least as far as the food was concerned, Henderson might have had a point.
“You okay, boss?” The bodyguard was ignoring the three women, who were still arguing with one another about where it was exactly that lions lived.
“My gut is killing me,” Henderson said. “That meat from last night. I’ve got to take a shit. Again.” He looked up at Miguel, and the guide motioned with his thumb for Henderson to head off the path.
Miguel watched him disappear into the trees and then turned to look ahead again. The tour company kept the path well enough maintained that it was easy to move tourists along when there wasn’t somebody like Henderson who needed to keep stopping. They’d bulldozed a strip and then tasked the guides with staying on the path so that nobody would get lost. As with any other human encroachment in the rain forest, the jungle was trying to reclaim the trail, so the company ran the machine out every few weeks. For the most part, the path made Miguel’s work much easier. He could look ahead and see clear to where they would be going for close to a hundred meters. It also meant there was a break in the canopy, and when he looked up he could see the blue sky. There wasn’t a cloud anywhere, and for a moment Miguel wished he were on a beach instead of leading this group of Americans.
A bird flew over the breach in the canopy. The guide watched it for a second and was about to turn back to the group to see if Henderson had made it back from his bathroom break when he realized something was wrong with the bird. It was flapping its wings frantically, moving erratically. The bird was struggling to stay in the air. But there was something more. The guide wished he had a pair of binoculars, because the bird’s feathers looked wrong. They looked like they were rippling, like there was—