It’s very late when we arrive. The air is thick, alive with the rhythmic drumming of a legion of insects. The dim lights of the Chevy flicker as we rattle down the dusty road that on rare occasions functions as an airfield of sorts, in emergencies, if the military need to rain their sullen apparatus down on these slumbering hills.
We drive across the gravel, crunching under our less than pristine tires. I glance to the right, into the twittering night and the even blacker billowing jungle beyond.
The car turns, a thin line of shabby wooden houses comes into view sprouting like jagged teeth along the edge, valiantly struggling against the inevitable demands of something no one understands.
Our plan is to explore the ancient Maya ruins nearby and marvel at the exotic surroundings teeming with life in that foreboding olive green forest seeking to devour everything, including us. As we turn down the rutted driveway into the beating heart of the jungle, the subdued yellow light of the small rustic hotel gladdens our hearts. We have finally arrived.
Angie and I had been trying to get to Tikal for a long time. Twenty years, to be exact. Work, and other obligations, you know. Life gets in the way. We came down here two decades before, young idealistic kids hustling for adventure, when reality intruded, as it does, slapping us in the face, waking us up, making us realize our time here is short, and we should get on with it, make something of our lives, before it’s too late and that jungle or some other part of what we call nature swallows us like the planet-gobbling affliction we are to it.
And so, we end up here on this night, of all nights.
Miguel and his brooding friend Hernando were waiting for us when we drove down the furrowed lane that leads to the rugged lodge in the heart of what is now a National Park.
The wood-frame house built two decades earlier by an American expat Señor Carl Taylor who according to the talkative Miguel, as he lugged our suitcases through the screen door slapping behind us, worked for a company called United Gulf, an oil exploration firm, if you can believe it, who at one time considered setting up a well here, until of course they uncovered what we now know as one of the largest cities of the lost empire of the Maya. United Gulf built the gravel runway and the house that now welcomes tourists like us more interested in the abundant sights and sounds of nature than in the black gold lurking below.
I fumbled for a dollar bill as Miguel cheerfully related how the airport sprouted out of a farmer’s field during the late seventies when the military needed access to these remote areas near the disputed border with what was British Honduras, and then of course Señor Taylor came. And the rest Miguel insinuated was history.
“It’s all a game,” he said, in heavily accented English with a shrug of his narrow shoulders, disappearing with his sullen friend down the sweltering path into that chirruping night. The thought of a puma prowling in the darkness, just beyond the reach of the porch light, sent a surge of adrenaline through me.
“You, okay?” Angie asked, brushing a strand of light brown hair off her face, slipping a bulging khaki pack over her shoulder. “It’s late. If we’re going to get to the temple before dawn, we need to get some shuteye.”
I nodded, although that feeling remained, the sense that something or someone was out there, stalking us.
Morning comes early in the tropics, heralded by the solemn, ear-piercing cry of the howler monkeys foraging for food or drinking from the cool blue water in the pool outside our window. A fragment of the ancient K’iche story Popol Vuh came to mind as I opened my eyes. “This is the beginning of the ancient traditions of this place called Quiché. Here we shall write.”
“We need to get the supplies unloaded. There’s a rainstorm headed our way,” Matt Stokes growled to Hernando as they lugged the last of the supplies off the flatbed truck.
The change in seasons comes hard, suddenly in these parts. No time to adjust before the rain washes down over everything and everyone, days on end.
Matt watched as Hernando disappeared around the side of the lodge, carrying a fifty-pound bag of flour on his shoulders. He’d been wondering about that man, Hernando. Ever since he hired him to help at the lodge, get it whipped into shape for a tourist season that never came. Not because of the weather, although the rain came early last year and stayed longer than expected. It was the way the man never looked him in the eye. Initially, he put it down to native shyness, but there was something in those brooding black eyes that troubled him. And the way he seemed to disappear at night into the jungle as if he was living on borrowed time or the jungle was his actual home.
Matt knew there were risks opening an eco-lodge while the civil war still raged on and on. Almost thirty years now, he reminded himself as he made his way around to the screened back porch where he knew his wife Martha would wait for him to return from town. She worried; he knew.
The past couple of weeks had seen some guerrilla skirmishes close by, near one of the border crossings. The border had been closed for some time because the government was concerned about arms and supplies slipping across. In recent times, tensions have been rising.
The Stokes had met in public school back in England. They had travelled to Guatemala during a gap year and stayed. More precocious than Matt, Martha had read about the lost civilization of the Maya since childhood. Her father taught history at Oxford, where she grew up and where she and Matt had gone to school. As a child, she devoured the tales her father told her about his trip to Central America in the Seventies.
But it was Tikal that called to her. The ancient ruins rising out of the jungle, the flora and fauna, and especially the big cats, the elusive jaguar and black as night puma.
Matt, a tad shorter than Martha, with wiry black hair, had always wanted to study business; so, when they found this old collection of dilapidated huts not far from the ruins, they both instantly knew this was what they had to do—open an eco-lodge here in the jungle. It would be perfect.
Except it wasn’t.
The National Park designation made it difficult to get the paperwork to have the most basic of improvements completed.
Matt had to make many trips to the regional centre in Flores an hour away to meet with officials. And sometimes he had to fly to Guatemala City to meet with senior government people to get the paperwork needed to complete the simplest of projects like the new septic system they recently installed. Matt knew, eventually, the lodge was going to have to make money. They couldn’t survive forever on handouts from their parents back in England. A business must make money or die.
He knew Martha was in love with the place, wanted it desperately to succeed. But the news from his recent trip troubled him. He needed to tell Martha. But not today. Martha was keen to open the lodge. She would be in the kitchen with Paola, the Italian cook, singing snippets of some aria getting ready. Their first guests would arrive soon.
I didn’t sleep well. I couldn’t settle. Something about the place unnerved me. I got up in the middle of the night to use the washroom. The dull light of the moon through the bathroom window cast a pale muffled light across the checkered tiled floor. An intrepid spider half the size of my hand froze on a white square, suddenly aware of my intrusion into its world.
In a couple of hours, we’d make our way through the jungle, watched by who knows what, as we fumbled our way in the dark behind our guide Hernando, hoping to catch the sunrise at the top of Temple Two. However, the fog that morning hindered us from achieving our goal. We sat quietly at the top, in the place where people made human sacrifices to the gods of nature a thousand years ago. Reluctantly, we descended the steep incline and returned to the lodge, our stomachs growling.
“I’m famished,” Angie said, beaming, as we walked into what passed for the lodge’s foyer, more of a living room in some rundown cottage than a resort. Old furniture and dusty volumes rescued from a charity shop lined the walls. But our brief excursion energized Angie, as if she’d just been out for a brisk walk instead of crawling through the jungle in the dark in search of a sunrise that remained elusive behind a leaden grey sky.
Suddenly a high piercing sound rang out, not a scream exactly, a mournful cry, a pitiful wail… then silence.
Hernando’s round, sweating face broke through the doorway in a panic. Perspiration glistened on his round cheeks. With each step, Hernando’s black boots squeaked, soaked in reddish mud. Seeing him again took me back to our futile trek to the ruins.
It took some time for Hernando to warm up to us. He wasn’t the talkative type. If it had been Miguel leading the excursion to the temple, he would have regaled us with lurid tales of times long gone when the denizens of the surrounding villages hunted the elusive big cats that stalked the area. But that morning Hernando seemed to be brooding about something. His dark almond eyes stared blankly back at me when I asked him if there had been any trouble in the area recently, any guerrilla activity, as we stepped out of the darkness of the jungle into the dull gray light of that hazy morning, the silent stone ruins of a long-lost world looming before us, as we watched Angie slowly, methodically began to climb the steps of the temple. Something he said made us wonder who Hernando really worked for, and who was really pulling his strings.
“It’s easy for you,” he said, grinding a thumbnail between his teeth. “You do what you want. I must do what the jefe commands.”
“Your boss? At the lodge?”
“No,” he said, spitting harshly. “The ghosts of this place.” And he gestured with an outstretched hand at the crumbling ruins around us. “You gringos and your secret army. They run everything now.”
Angie and I had been surveying the dusty titles on the shelves. Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, and several of Joanna Trollope’s lesser-known works. Hernando’s dark eyes glanced our way briefly before he dashed furtively towards the kitchen.
Hernando was a big man, not tall or fat, but what you might call stocky, a solid frame, honed over many years of work outside. His sturdy boots left a trail of mud on his way to the kitchen.
“Something’s happened,” Angie said, a worried look on her face. She put the title she was perusing back on the shelf. Her long chestnut hair was radiant after a quick, mostly cold shower in the wake of our less than stellar sunrise trek to the top of Temple Two.
“We should stay out of it,” I said, looking into Angie’s worried green eyes. “We’re only guests here.” Then I added stupidly, “we don’t live here.”
But before we could do anything, Paola appeared from the kitchen wearing a grey tee-shirt and faded jeans, her brown hair tied behind her head. She held a flour-stained hand to her face.
“Está muerto,” she mumbled, hazel eyes drowning in a sea of red.
Matt rose early. He knew Hernando was taking a couple of guests to see the ruins that morning. But ever since he’d returned from the capital, Matt had been feeling troubled. One official pulled him aside in the long, echoing empty hall in the basement of the National Palace.
The man was tall and thin, wearing a white suit with a pale-yellow shirt, open at the collar. With his long, narrow face, short, dark hair, and a meticulously groomed pencil mustache, he had a distinctive appearance. With every word he uttered, he unconsciously gestured with flapping hands at his side. Matt couldn’t shake off the image of a bird with the charisma of David Niven when he looked at him.
“You have a spy in your midst,” the man flapped in a Catalan accented English. His dark eyes narrowed behind the thin silver-framed spectacles. They kept walking.
They had been strolling together down the long hall on their way out of the building after the meeting with the Interior Minister. The meeting had gone well. Matt had received the approval to open the only hotel in the park. Quite a coup. Matt felt elated.
He didn’t know the name of the man beside him. No one had introduced him to the man beside him, which wasn’t any surprise. Many of the meetings he’d attended here included nameless men. They were always men, come to think of it, who said nothing.
Matt stopped.
“What do you mean?”
“Hernando Santiago Lopez.”
Matt’s eyes searched the long, empty hall. Hernando? His heart sank. In the distance, he could hear heavy clicking heels on the polished floors.
Before Matt could collect his thoughts, the man darted into one of the many offices along the corridor, closing the door behind him. The hall was empty and cool, away from the sweltering mid-day heat outside.
The long trip back gave Matt ample time to consider his options. He would confront Hernando after he returned from the excursion to the ruins. Who was he spying on? And who was he spying for? The CIA or possibly the Soviets? Was it even true?
The world is a troubled place, he thought as he waited in the garage beside the blue Toyota Land Cruiser. Hernando always took the truck into town early in the morning. He’d never wondered about it before, assuming he was picking up supplies for Paola. But as he leaned up against the cold metal that morning, he had the awful feeling of being watched, when out of the corner of his eye something dark, big, and feline rustled the foliage beside the house.
Angie rushed to Paola, put her arms around the young woman. Instinctively, I charged out the front door just in time to see a massive black cat slide into the thick jungle across the road. I knew then how the place goes its name. But as I glanced to the right, I could see a figure slumped against the rear wheel of the Land Cruiser. Walking around to the other side, the full horror of it stared me in the face.
The body of Matt Stokes, the owner of the Puma Lodge, lay slumped against the rear tire in a large pool of blood. Someone had cut his throat, almost completely severing his head from his lifeless corpse. I drew back in horror. That big cat came back into my mind. But no, animals in the wild do not kill like this. They kill to survive. But are we really any different?
A bloody machete lay on the ground next to the body. Someone, whoever it was, and I was pretty sure it was not feline, hadn’t bothered to dispose of the weapon, as if to say: see, this is the power we have here.
Hernando came back with an old tarp and threw it over the body.
“Who could have done this?” I muttered, shaking my head.
“Many troubles,” he offered without explanation, nodding, as we both stared down at the dusty brown boots protruding under the tarp.
Eventually the police came or what passes for law enforcement in these parts. They didn’t even speak to Angie or me. They took the body. I assume there was an autopsy, but I never knew. Angie and I packed our things and sat silently in the library room, waiting for our ride to the airport in Flores.
On the way to the airport, Miguel chattered endlessly. He said the police told Martha it was the work of the guerrillas; the communists trying to overthrow the government, and they killed poor Señor Stokes to scare away the gringos.
That much had worked, I thought, as we arrived at the rural airport in plenty of time for our flight. But I couldn’t get that horrific scene by the Land Cruiser out of my mind. And for a moment I saw what the puma had seen that morning, gliding silently through the humid jungle across from the lodge. A stocky man raising his arm, just the glint of a blade, and the familiar hot red juice of life seeping into the earth. I recalled what Hernando said to me at the ruins about the gringos and a secret army. Who his boss really was. And it was then I knew what had killed the owner of the Puma Lodge. It wasn’t an insatiable hunger. No, it was basic human greed.
Peter Vaughan received an appointment to the Order of Canada in 2021 and the Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal in 2022. A former RCAF Special Operation Flight Surgeon, he flew on C130 medevacs to Sarajevo during the war in Yugoslavia, and he served as Colonel Commandant of the Royal Canadian Medical Service for three terms during the war in Afghanistan. He received the Canadian Forces Decoration in 2010. Vaughan has over 50 publications, including travel features in The Globe and Mail and a humorous short story (“Plato’s Flan”) published in the Danforth Review. For a decade, he was news correspondent to The British Medical Journal, The Lancet, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal. He wrote the script for the television pilot MD TV that aired on Global Television.