Deep within the tropics of Peru...

...mosquitoes circled like miniature vultures around the lone woman. Hunched forward, steady as a living statue street performer, her long, blond braid trailed down the slope of her back.  Her right eye pressed against a spotting scope as if nothing else existed – only the scope, her eye, and the object in view. Hovering insects could not break her deep concentration. Nor could songs, squawks, and trills from tropical birds that under other circumstances would have piqued her interest. With self-discipline honed from years in the woods, she commanded every fiber of her body to hold steady, to wait, to be patient. Several minutes sloughed into history while the biologist continued her frozen stare.  

Whoosh— a large shape plunged into the ironwood tree one hundred yards away. The biologist spun her finger on the spotting scope and brought into focus a creature that seemed more mythological than real. Obsidian black eyes, ghost-gray face, a crown of white feathers radiating skyward: a shaman’s mask. Even from a distance, the power of the animal was palpable; it locked her gaze and held it, almost against her will. The hair on her scalp raised and her pulse quickened – the primeval reaction to a predator. The creature was an adult harpy eagle, royal giant of the Amazon – the 3-foot tall raptor that impaled primates with dagger-sharp talons and ripped them open for lunch. These opening lines of my unpublished novel, Shadows in the Selva, lure you into the Amazon rainforest of Peru, where temperatures soar with the eagles and mysterious birds give birth to caterpillar-like offspring. Yet this wild, tropical world also spawns human encounters as complicated and unsettling as those we face in our urban lives.