among the Akawaio for having climbed the
1,500-foot Prow route of Roraima with a British
expedition in 2019. They didn’t know it yet, but
we had brought medals from Guyana’s newly
elected president, Mohamed Irfaan Ali, to
present to them in honor of their feat.
Short, rippling with muscle, and constantly
smiling, Edward, 55, had accompanied Bruce and
me on our previous expeditions to the region.
He’d grown up in this forest and could survive
out here more or less indefinitely with little more
than his trusty machete, which he kept razor
sharp with a file he wore on a string around his
neck. He told me that since our last expedition,
he’d been working off and on as a mining pros-
pector, or “pork-knocker,” a Guyanese term that
refers to the miners’ backcountry practice of
living on pickled wild bush hog.
Since I’d last seen Edward in 2006, Guyana
had been gripped by a gold rush. A few thousand
artisanal mines had been dug throughout the
country’s interior. Like most Akawaio, Edward
had spent much of his life farming and hunting.
But the lure of earning cash, maybe even find-
ing life-changing treasure deep in the jungle,
was impossible to resist. He described how the
miners would dig down to a layer of clay, then
inject high- powered jets of water to blast the clay
into a slurry, which then was pumped to the sur-
face, sluiced and rinsed, and then mixed with
mercury, which binds to the gold. The chemical
process especially worried Bruce.
“A teaspoonful of mercury can contaminate
an entire river system,” he told me.
An Akawaio named Denver Henry showed me
a map detailing the location of dozens of mining
claims scattered across the rainforest surround-
ing the Paikwa River. So far, the pork-knockers
had been held off by the inaccessibility of the
terrain and the Akawaio’s resistance to build-
ing an airstrip in their villages. But Edward told
me that during the last rainy season, when the
lowlands flooded, outside prospectors had come
in with boats from Kamarang, one of the biggest
villages in the region, to explore claims. Every
year these mines get a little closer to the Paikwa
River Basin.
Around the table, we agreed Bruce needed
time to recover, so we decided to split up. The
climbing team would move ahead to cut a trail
to the base of Weiassipu’s north face, about five
miles away, while Bruce and a team of Akawaio
collected specimens at Double Drop Falls.
B
RUCE EMERGED from his
hammock the next morning
wearing only muddy briefs and
was met by a group of Akawaio
holding gallon-size Ziploc bags.
At the beginning of the trip, he’d
announced that in order to sample
the biodiversity, he would pay for specimens. The
payout was 100 Guyanese dollars (about 50 cents)
per creature, with a premium bonus for a
Stefania frog, which immediately created a
thriving microeconomy in a land where there is
little opportunity for Indigenous people to earn
hard currency.
Bruce opened his journal to a blank page and
started taking notes. Edward was first in line. HisSome of the frog
species encountered
on the expedition:
TOP LEFT
MacConnell’s pebble
toad (Oreophrynella
macconnelli) inhabits
the forest near Double
Drop Falls and is one of
two known species of
pebble toad that don’t
live on a tepui summit.
TOP RIGHT
An unnamed species
of Stefania was found
in the cloud forest
below Weiassipu.
BOTTOM LEFT
The Roraima tree frog
(Boana roraima) lives
between the leaves of
arboreal bromeliads.
BOTTOM RIGHT
The Kanaima tree frog
(Nesorohyla kanaima)
has unusually dark
eyes. “Few other frogs
have irises so black
that you cannot see
their pupils,” Bruce
Means says. It’s unclear
what advantage black
irises may have over
colorful ones.
RYAN VALASEK (TOP LEFT AND
BOTTOM LEFT)64 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC