Rain began again with no delicate warning; a crashing deluge that pounded every leaf and branch, muting the night jungle sounds. The canopy lit up like stained glass with every boom of thunder and flash of lightning. Swept in by the rain, coal-black bats swarmed over our heads, flapping and gathering in the rafters in a smutty cloud. They hung from the wooden struts, two-foot-long draculas languidly opening and closing their wings as if to dry them.

One of the bats dropped from the ceiling to the floor just a yard away. Gleaming black against the blond balsa wood, its veined wings shuddered as the small grappling hooks at its wingtips scrabbled at the air. As if it knew it was dying, it grew calm, gazing at me peacefully with ball bearing eyes.

I woke with a mesh imprint of hemp hammock pressed deep in my cheek, shocked that I had fallen asleep at all. The hammocks were empty, the smell of fried eggs in the air. Dishes teetered in piles next to smoking ovens. The place was deserted; even the bat was gone. My mosquito netting had come loose around my head and shoulders; a cloud of them took advantage, swarming so thickly I breathed in a fistful. Coughing and waving my arms, I twisted myself into my hammock like a straitjacket until I finally got free and dropped to the floor on my elbow and hip. Embarrassed, I was relieved to see that I was alone, until I heard someone laughing shamelessly and loudly, but also very strangely. Someone’s pet parrot perched swaying on Paco’s deserted hammock, cackling its blue head off. I despaired of ever getting used to the crazy randomness of this place, this collision of exotica and humanity of which I was now a part.

The parrot continued to guffaw at me as I dove into my backpack and pulled out my sadly almost empty can of bug spray, in desperation blitzing the cloud of mosquitos still on the attack. I ran down the stairs—like running helped—all the way to the beach, where the women were gathered near a fire that burned under an immense metal pot. Only the three long canoes knocked gently against the dock; the poachers were gone.

“Time to go to work, Princess America who sleeps all day,” Doña Antonia said. “We have to feed the dogs.”

As I made my way to her, I could feel the eyes of the women watching from the bank. Most stood around the pot, tossing pieces of something into it; the others stirred its contents with a blackened tin ladle or washed off their hands in the river. Mangy-looking dogs—I counted a dozen, one with just three legs that moved with astounding agility—circled the pot, snarling and nipping at each other’s heels. Doña Antonia smacked them on their asses, pushing them away from the blistering hot metal.

She motioned me over to two dead pirarucu, which meant “red fish,” that had been laid out on the shore. Shaped more like some prehistoric eel than a fish, they must have weighed over two hundred pounds, each as long as a man. She handed me a serrated knife with a sharp point and gestured at the fish. “You cut out their stomachs now, okay? Cut off their heads and put them in the pot.”