Grunting, sniffing, finally satisfied it was dead, he gripped it by the sides and stretched its main compartment over his head and face, screaming into the canvas, before slipping it by a strap over one powerful shoulder—almost like it was meant to be carried!—and launching himself into the arms of a wide-bottomed tree. His posse dangled from the branches above or squatted in the notches of trees, huffing and growling encouragingly, emitting a constant low throttle as if noise was the norm, silence an aberration, their way of saying, I’m a howler monkey, you fuckers, and I’m here, shitting and shaking the branches and hurling baseball-sized nuts down at me.

A good distance up the hill, Paco meandered between the huts, listlessly kicking around an empty corn-oil keg. He saw me jumping around and began to roll the can toward me. I ran to the tree that shook with monkeys, awed by their churning animal grace even as I screamed, “Give me back my bag!”

More nuts came raining down, followed by more branches. Grapefruit-sized yellow fruit covered with sharp thorns slapped the moist earth. Paco stopped halfway down the bank, turned the keg on its bottom and sat on it, watching the show. “Be careful,” he called out. “They’ll poop on you!”

The monkey who’d stolen my pack catapulted through the branches, threading through explosions of flowering bromeliads and epiphytes. He swung upside down from his tail, figure-eighting a landing on a thick branch, where he sat on his haunches. I grabbed one of the fruits from the ground—thorns stabbing my palm—and chucked it, missing him. He hooted at me, blowing out his cheeks with mirth. With perfect dexterity, he clutched the pack between the palms of his feet and used his arms and tail to climb higher to another favorite perch. Settling there, he grabbed the cord for the main compartment of the bag with one finger and unzipped it. Smirking down at me, he flipped the bag over and shook it out.

Tumbling down through the branches came . . . everything I owned. Charlotte’s Web seemed to toss and roll in slow motion into the waiting hands of another monkey, who fanned out the pages and, finding this hilarious, let out a series of raucous barks before ripping them out. They drifted down, most of them catching on the tangled vines and thick vegetation. My mom’s and foster mom’s photos fell next; glittering like precious leaves. One of the monkeys snatched up the bigger one—my real mom’s photo, my only photo of her—and I swear he looked at that thing like he was looking at something, like that was my mom looking back at him and he knew it. Eyeing me the whole time, he gave it a few cautious licks before stuffing it in his mouth and swallowing it.

Other stuff rained down: my only other pair of underwear; my jeans and T-shirt; my comb; toothbrush; a plastic bag with an old doughnut another monkey ate whole, including the ziplock bag. Along with everything else, a couple of Kotex I’d stolen from the Versailles in Cochabamba caught and hung in the branches like bizarre Christmas ornaments. Looping the pack over a branch by its remaining unbroken strap, the howler swung from it, braying, his magnificent ruff shaking, until he launched himself a full flip in the air, landing perfectly among his friends, who howled their approval of the show before leaping en masse and vanishing into the riotous mid-story. Torn open, empty, one strap totally gone, my backpack swayed a hundred feet up in the hot breeze, forever a part of the random insanity of the jungle.