He points to a thin palm. "Maquenque!'

He fells it with two swats of his machete, swats off a two-foot length, then swats this lengthwise and peels off an outer layer, all the while explaining. When he first came to the Chagres River basin, he took occasional work with a company that exported the sap of the nispero tree. This was near the end of World War II; nispero made a decent rubber substitute. He was off one time finding trees, setting and collecting sap buckets, and ran out of food and could find no fruit or game. Hunger made him weak; he fell asleep. He dreamed of his father, who advised him to find maquenque. Zarco had forgotten it was edible. His father, in the dream, reminded him.

By this time he has extracted a yellow-white tube, slick and moist, about three-quarters of an inch thick. He bites a chunk and chews it, holds the rest out for me. I nibble gingerly. Palmetto! I've had it in salads, a bit insipid undoctored, but very good with oil and vinegar and salt.

Zarco grins and pats his stomach. "I find maquenque. New man after that."

Farther up he takes hold of a vine hanging between two trees beside the trail at chest level. He chops out a three-foot length. Water begins to drip from it. He lifts the vine and drinks, letting the water flow onto the back of his tongue in the same fashion as one drinks from a wine sack. He passes it to me. The water tastes a bit barky but is cool and refreshing.

We move along a ridge. Zarco shows me a beehive in the boll of a dead tree, a four-foot-high oval termite colony suspended from a branch. A partridge flushes with an explosive rush, but otherwise we see no game, although sometimes we hear an iguana rustling to one side of us.
 

We descend to a rocky brook along whose banks great tree roots lie like serpents. Our route is steep now, crossing and recrossing the brook; then Zarco steps a few paces to the right and we emerge into a clearing, his father-in-law's maize field, which clings raggedly to the hillside. The transition is abrupt: one moment forest gloom, the next brilliant sunlight. Halfway across the field, with no appreciable darkening, the sky opens to let down a torrent, which the ground at once gives back in wraiths of steam.

We reenter the jungle on a broad trail. Zarco plucks an unappetizing green pod the size of a pigeon egg and slices off the top with his machete. He mimes sucking on it, then hands it to me. Inside is a sweet-tart jelly, lemony quince. He warns me away from a low plant with round leaves. He cuts the stem. Out flows a white sap. Zarco's hands scrub at his arms and chest: super poison ivy. The peripatetic lesson continues until we reach his house. Our five-mile circuit through the forest has given me some grasp of its complexity, and much respect for Zarco's lore.

Zarco's master was his father. His school was the area along the Rio Chico in Darien province, where he was born and grew up. A segment of the Choco nation, whose main locus is south of the Atrato River in northern Colombia, moved into this region about 300 years ago, after disease and other effects of the Spanish conquest had depopulated it of its original inhabitants.

The Choco do some slash-and-burn farming in yuca, plantain, and maize but are mainly hunters and gatherers. In the early days they were warlike enough for both the Spaniards and the Cuna Indians, who made a parallel migration onto the Isthmus of Panama but stayed north of the cordillera on the Atlantic coast. The rain forest of eastern Panama is one of the densest on earth. Darien has a few river-mouth towns but is only now beginning to be developed. The Choco, who are extremely resistant to the influence of alien cultures, have maintained their traditional way of life, although it is doubtful they can do so for much longer.

The Choco have no tribal organization and are essentially nomadic. In order to furnish them medical, educational, and other services - and, of course, to integrate them into the state and open their region to economic development - the Panamanian government is, of late, encouraging them to form permanent villages. But normally they group in extended families of from one to three dozen individuals living in thatch-roof huts set up on stilts a few hundred yards apart over a wide area; when the area is farmed and hunted out, they move on to another.

Zarco's family ranged the Rio Chico basin, where his father taught him to fashion the dugout piragua (canoe), and to manage it on jungle rivers. He learned to make and use the supple jirawood fishing lance, the bamboo javelin, the cocobolo stabbing spear, the black palm bow, and three-pronged reed-shaft arrows, which do not kill by penetration but whose barbed tips are smeared with the poisonous skin secretions of a certain tree frog.

He learned the habits of animals, to track and stalk. He learned which plants are edible and which are poisonous, which are good for snake-bite - different plants for different snake venoms, some brewed and taken internally, some mashed and applied in poultice - and which are good for stomachache or fever. He learned the tropical rain forest, the most complex ecosystem on the planet, amassing a store of practical zoology and botany, what Claude Levi-Strauss calls "the science of the concrete." Until he had acquired this body of knowledge and mastered the technology of his culture, no man would give him his daughter in marriage.

Zarco excelled as a student; he married young. He had leadership qualities and acquired followers. By age 25 he led an extended family of about 30. Needing more room to support it, he moved northwest onto the headwaters of the Rio Chagres, near what was then the Canal Zone in the watershed of the Panama Canal. This region was closer to centers of advanced culture but still wild and empty, a terrain of rugged hills and steep escarpments, of narrow ridges and tangled, deep ravines. Here he lived mainly by hunting. He also began to have contact with the world beyond the forest.

He met and sometimes assisted employees of the Panama Canal Hydrographic Office, which monitors river levels in the watershed. Now and then he guided hunting and fishing parties. In 1952 he met a young student, H. Morgan Smith, who was on the upper Chagres doing research for the anthropology department of Florida State University. By then Zarco was fluent in Spanish. He furnished Smith information on Choco culture, particularly the use of plants. It was the start of a 30-year friendship.

Three years later the U.S. Air Force established the Tropic Survival School in the then Canal Zone. The idea was to teach airmen how to stay alive should they be forced down in a jungle environment. Smith returned to Panama as the school's founding director. He chose the upper Chagres as suitably rugged ground for a field training area. Now chief of the Environmental Information Division of the Air University Library at Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, Alabama, Smith tells of Zarco's gradual involvement with the school.

"At infrequent intervals, Chief Antonio or some of his people would appear at the classes and assist in one thing or another. When we had people lost, they helped us find them. While Antonio was doing this, he was teaching us very good lessons in how to deal with so-called primitives. He's the one who taught us not to use the word primitive to describe human beings."

The involvement deepened. Zarco began showing up more or less regularly, passing his Choco science on to Americans. He taught the students how to catch animals, how to identify edible plants and tubers, how to get drinking water from roots and vines, how to stain their bodies with the juice of the jagua berry to keep off mosquitoes. He helped Smith make a training film on jungle survival. He played "friendly aggressor" in escape and evasion exercises.

"You're never going to see him," Smith would tell the students, "but if he steals your hat, you owe him a dollar." Zarco ranged beside the students, unheard, invisible, harassing them gently to keep them alert but mainly watching over them. If one became injured or was snakebit, then he'd bring him out.

In 1962 he entered into a formal agreement with the air force. He taught students during the field phase of survival training and established a parallel program of cross-cultural communication to prepare them to deal with indigenous peoples. Lack of a common language was, oddly, a benefit. He taught by gesture, the same means of communication a downed flier would likely be constrained to use. For me, he recalled the procedure he followed with his students after they were brought in by helicopter and left on their own.

"I would find them in the jungle and show them how to get food. The next day I would bring them to my house."

The house, unused now except for occasional visits, is on a bluff above the river. Its almond-wood pilings and thatch roof are still sound. There is a mandarin orange tree beside it, a lime tree and a cashew tree farther down. Below, a fine sand-spit beach pushes out into the river, and just upstream of it a set of rips.

"I would show them things about the Choco people and our ways. We would eat together."

These lessons were documented in a second film, which is still being used by the military and some universities. Between 1962 and 1975, when the Tropic Survival School closed, more than 11,000 students came under Zarco's tutelage: officers and men of the U.S. Air Force, of other U.S. services, of the armed forces of allied countries; ambassadors, embassy staff, civilian scientists. Starting in the early 1960s, astronauts of the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and space-station programs were trained at the school. Later on in the decade, many of Zarco's students found practical application for his lessons in the jungles of Southeast Asia. His lore and his unique gifts as a teacher saved many lives. His good cheer and self-command won him the respect and friendship of exceptional men, including Senator John Glenn, Eastern Airlines president Frank Borman, and moon walker Charles "Pete" Conrad. With the escalation of the Vietnam War in the mid-1960s, the magnitude of activity at the survival school dictated that its field training area be located closer to the Canal Zone. Zarco moved with it. His first wife died nine years ago, and he has since remarried and started a new family. Since the closure of the school five years ago he has gone back to living off the land, although he does some work for the Hydrographic Office.

On subsequent visits Zarco showed me how to make and use Choco weapons. He showed me how to build a jungle shelter, cutting five-foot lengths of palm sapling, setting two pairs in the ground in inverted V's, lashing on a crossbar with thin vine, thatching this frame with palm frond. It took him about as long as it takes me to change a tire. The shelter was large enough for one person and quite dry, even in heavy rain.

He showed me a plant root the Choco use for toothache. Three minutes chewing on it deadened one side of my mouth almost as effectively as Novocain. According to Zarco, the root is therapeutic as well as anesthetic: the abscessed tooth falls out after a few days, no pulling required. He cured a molar of his own in this fashion.

The effectiveness of Choco medicine was attested to me by Hydrographic Office director Frank Robinson. Twenty years ago a Choco saved Robinson’s life with native remedies after he was bitten by a fer-de-lance.

"I still don't know what he gave me or how it worked. I was delirious for two days. But when I got back to the Canal Zone, the doctors at Gorgas Hospital admitted there were things they could learn from the Indians."

Choco culture, though, is facing extinction. I talked with Zarco about this on the evening of my last visit.

The jungle wakes up at sundown: bird calls, the buzz-saw whine of locustlike cocorrones, now and then a monkey's phlegmy bark. A squadron of parrots flew in from the northeast, seven flights of two, and settled in a glade across a cove of the lagoon, adding their treble squawks to the frogs' bass grumbles. Before setting off for Gamboa, I asked Zarco about the culture of his people. For the first time he grew grave.

Unlike the well-organized Cunas, who can bring political pressure to bear on the Panamanian government and who, some decades ago, obtained a large grant of land as their reservation, the Choco are entirely defenseless against what we call progress. The erection three years ago of a dam on the Bayano River in western Darien forced hundreds to relocate. The construction, now in progress, of the last link in the Pan-American Highway through Darien will dispossess many more as the province is opened to economic development.

The present, too, is bleak. The government, concerned about erosion and the silting of rivers, has forbidden slash-and-burn farming in the jungle and has established a corps of forest rangers to enforce the ban. Increasingly, besides, well-outfitted parties of sportsmen, using four-wheel-drive vehicles, are hunting in Choco regions, competing at an advantage with the Indians.

"How can we live?" asks Zarco.

The government's answer is for the Choco to locate in large settlements where they can receive formal schooling and learn modern methods of farming - in brief, where they can become integrated into modern civilization and its economy. That way they will live, but quite differently from the way they have lived traditionally.

Zarco resists this. He plans to go to Darien soon to conference with elders in the settlements. But finding an alternative will require tribal organization and concerted action, while Choco individualism - an integral aspect of the way of life Zarco hopes to protect - militates against such action. The likelihood is that Choco culture will perish.

This, of course, is the world's way and has always been. Cultures, peoples, species prevail or perish. Physical features themselves are not immune. The rain forest is probably doomed to extinction. Already large tracts of jungle have disappeared and are disappearing in Africa, in Asia, in South America, under the pressure of settlement and cultivation. In the past, continents have shifted. Mountain ranges have crumbled. So have civilizations. Our own will go soon enough. There is no point being mushy-minded about the process.

Irony is inevitable, however. For 20 years Chief Zarco gave unstintingly of his knowledge and love to representatives of the culture that is destroying everything he knows and cares about. That knowledge, built up by painful trial and error over the course of millennia, will likely be lost in one or two generations. Yet there are possible scenarios - the Pentagon conjures them daily - in which Choco science of the concrete would be infinitely more valuable to those who survived nuking than anything our own science has revealed.

Grief is, perhaps, permissible as well. I felt it that evening with Zarco. It is possible to mourn before the event. The world goes its way, and clever men move with the current; yet I could not help regretting that his culture, so lately recognized by our own, will surely vanish soon, along with the free life in the forest, at harmony with one's natural surroundings. I shouldn't care to live it myself, but I mourned its passing, there at the edge of the jungle, by the frog-loud reeds, the parrot-raucous glade. 

Author's Postscript

The most memorable part of my visit with Tony Zarco didn’t make it into the article. I came to write the piece because Bob Schnayerson, editor of QUEST, had been to the Explorer’s Club in New York to hear Tony lecture with Morgan Smith as interpreter. Bob called me in Panama, where I’ve lived since the late 1950s, and I arranged through Frank Robinson to visit Tony. On the afternoon of my fourth day we were sitting on a fallen tree in a warm deluge. I’d asked all the jungle questions I could think of, and said, “Tell me about New York, Tony.  I was born there. What do you think of it? What impressed you most?”

I think I recall his answer word for word. “Morgan and I went into a little room, and the door shut. When it opened again, we were somewhere else.”

Nothing in all the anthropology I’ve read says as much as that comment about how far technological society is from traditional society, and how estranged we are from nature.

I used to mess in U.S. politics, and in 1982 I found myself having breakfast in Philadelphia with John Glenn and some other politicians. I told Glenn, “We have a mutual friend, Tony Zarco.” For the next twenty minutes we listened to Zarco stories.

It pleases me that a man who didn’t understand elevators could make a lasting impression on a man who had traveled in space.