Sports: Hunting by hand

Hunting by hand

In the Amazon, pursuit of a caiman requires courage and "a pair of quick hands.'' Adventurer Mark Plotkin has both, and relishes the chance to overcome his fear.

By TERRY TOMALIN

ARIAU RIVER, Brazil -- The night life in the Amazon leaves much to be desired. You sit around, sip beer and swat mosquitoes until somebody gets a bright idea.

"Hey ... let's go on a caiman hunt," my friend, Mark Plotkin, suggested. "You don't need anything except a pair of quick hands."

Plotkin, a 44-year-old ethnobotanist, has spent nearly half his life traveling through South American jungles looking for new species of plants and trying not to get killed.

His work has taken him through most of Venezuela, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil and the Guyanas. Through the years he has encountered jaguars, giant anacondas, disgruntled revolutionaries and Indians armed with poison tip arrows. But nothing makes his spine tingle like a big black caiman.

"To be honest, they scare the s--- out of me," said Plotkin, who holds degrees from Harvard, Yale and Tufts. "I don't even like being in a boat when they are in the water around me."

The black caiman, the largest of various caiman species, is a maneater that can attain lengths of up to 15 feet.

Like other members of the order Crocodilia, the black caiman has powerful jaws with which it grabs its prey and then spins around in a "death roll," which breaks the victims back.

Although not as aggressive as the dreaded saltwater crocodile of Australia, the black caiman, like its North American cousin, Alligator mississippiensis, still is a beast to be reckoned with.

It is a big, mean, nasty reptile with a brain the size of walnut, making it an even match for a couple of bored gringos with a flashlight and cooler full of cold ones.

"The problem with black caimans is that they eat people," Plotkin said. "Most of the locals travel in shallow draft canoes or boats ... very close to the water."

Too close in caiman country. But that's why you bring friends on a hunt of this nature. If you should, God forbid, find yourself in the river, you don't have to outswim the caiman. You only have to outswim your buddies.

"They get quite large," Plotkin said. "Once in French Guyana, we came across a dead black caiman floating down the river that was so big we couldn't drag its body out of the water.

" "That's nothing,' the boatman said at the time," Plotkin said. " "There are much bigger ones swimming under the boat right now as we speak.' "

Caimans are nocturnal hunters. They spend most of their time prowling the banks of rivers and other bodies of water where a chance encounter with a mammal is most likely.

On this particular night, we worked along the tall grass of the river's edge until the flashlight beam picked up the red eyes of a reptile waiting for a meal.

"Its a small one," Plotkin said, spotting a

pair of narrow eyes off to our right. "Everybody get ready."

Caiman hunting is a team sport. One man, "the spotter" holds the flashlight while the second man, "the snatcher," moves to the bow and grabs the beast. The third man, "the medic," waits in the stern with an old T-shirt to wrap the bloody appendage if the need so arises.

"Got it!" Plotkin yelled as he held up a healthy white caiman. "Look at those teeth."

Plotkin posed for a few photos then dropped the annoyed reptile back in the water.

We continued our journey, traveling across a large inland bay, then spotted another set of eyes glowing in the darkness.

"Judging from the distance between the eyes, that is a black caiman," he said. "It isn't huge, maybe a 6- or 7-footer."

But as we got closer, the eyes disappeared beneath the inky water, which was just as well, I thought to myself, because their was no way I was going to share a small boat with a lizard that was bigger then me.

The next day, as we motored back to Manaus, the largest city in Amazonia, aboard a 3-story yacht, we stopped in the middle of the main river, the Rio Negro, to swim.

I must admit that I thought for a second or two about black caimans before I hopped over the railing and did a perfect cannonball into the river below.

We swam in the deep water for a few minutes, trying to stay in one place despite a strong current. Then I spotted my friend a few feet away, and as luck would have it, he had his back turned toward me.

So I dove, grabbed him by the ankles and gave a good tug. For a second, however brief, he probably thought about that caiman too. My only regret is that I couldn't see the look on his face.

"Very funny," he said. "Very funny."