A couple of days in the jungle. It was dark, muggy and hot. It was a real Indian hunting. With a blowgun. And with the everyday ritual of smearing the body with animal dung (in order to kill the human smell).

Once, in a hunting shop in the USA I was offered special “perfume” that has the same effect. I smelled it and left the shop quickly with the opinion that its owner is dangerous. One bottle of this scent thrown into the ventilation shaft of the Pentagon and you would have to build a new one (Pentagon). The same bottle dropped on the floor in some building and the whole province would have to be reshuffled. Now, being in the jungle I regretted not getting any of it. Oh… if I only had that gizmo with me now…

The smell has in a form of hygienic drops that you put on your skin behind the ears. That would be a piece of cake comparing to the Indian procedure of camouflaging binding me at the moment. It consists in dipping your hands in brownish-green soft droppings of wild animals (that had a severe indigestion in my opinion). Then you have to rub it in. All over your body! Including your face. Sometimes, when we couldn’t find any flat, soft droppings, we used droppings in the form of little donuts instead. They came from the same… let’s say source. But they had a fault (apart from all the OBVIOUS faults): they were hard so had to be soaked first. And even after that they scraped your face like pumice. But they smelled much more intense, which made my Indians happier. Slowly I learned not to have an opinion about it. It was a couple of days through the humid jungle. A monotonous walk from dawn till dusk, so always about twelve hours. A detail such as foul smell didn’t matter anymore.

There were three of us: two redskins and one whitey. But if someone looked at us, we were the same color – all of us identically shitty. Pardon, the color of the rotting ground beneath our feet.

We chose a track along a river without a name – it’s easier to find prey near the water.

A river without a name… actually it had a name, but it was one of those Indian words that are impossible to pronounce for a white person – he would have to have a second nose. And to pronounce it you have to use only the letters m, n and b and a whole bunch of accents, apostrophes and other marks symbolizing sounds you can’t hear.

So there were three of us walking in a file. I was at the end, instructed to do exactly what my guides were doing. I even had to put my feet on their footprints so that I wouldn’t trample on anything that bites, jabs or has venom.

This way of walking is irritating, but in some circumstances it’s the only way. We were surrounded by a damp jungle. The most dangerous one. The paths cut out with a machete disappear within a couple of hours. The tracks left in the damp ground filled with water and disappear immediately. If I got lost here, I wouldn’t have a chance. No one would. Even Indians. They always went in pairs or in bigger groups in this part of the jungle, never alone.

At one moment both of them fell flat on the ground and hid their faces in their hands. Then they started moving back towards me. They kept their faces near the ground. They were digging the mud with their faces, as if trying to bury themselves.

According to the rule I did the same thing. That means I threw myself to the ground, covered my face with my hands and tried to move back. But why were we doing all this?
- Don’t breath, gringo – one of the Indians shouted my way.
I wasn’t. Because it’s impossible to breath with your face buried in mud.
- And don’t look! – The other Indian added.

That’s how he saved my life, because I just started to open one eye to check what it was that we were hiding from.

You meet the most beautiful species of butterflies in the Amazon Jungle. They’re beautiful, even breathtaking. It’s hard to believe they could hurt anyone. With what? With the silent flutter of wings? Yet they can be dangerous. Terrifying. So much, that they are breathtaking, and this time I mean it literally. And finally. Because they’re venomous butterflies. They produce a poison that creates tiny needles while crystallizing. Something like glass wool. When the butterfly feels threatened it flicks its wings with a sudden motion of the wings. Then, the small pieces of venom break off and start to float in the air. A cloud of death. Almost invisible. It sparkles a little… shimmers… and then your heart flickers – you have auricular fibrillation, and that’s it. The end. Eternal darkness. A monkey dies immediately. It takes a little longer for a human. One inhalation and you breathe your last. The venom can get through the mucous membrane of your nose, larynx, bronchus, or an open eye. They say that blood thickens like tar. Nonsense. Up till now no one has ever had a chance to tell us if anything thickens.

The Killer Butterfly – it sounds like a fiction from a horror movie.

- That was (…) – here the Indian said a word that would be possible to say for a white person only if he had three noses.
- The Killer Butterfly – the other one translated.
- What did it look like? – I asked (while spitting out mud)
- Nothing special. Completely normal, it was (…) – here the Indian used a word that translated to our language would be: “thecoloroftherottinggroundunderneathourfeet”