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Suriname (formally Dutch Guiana) is one of the least traveled countries in South America, a little-known land of myth, magic and ecological wonder just north of Brazil and the Upper Amazon Basin. As an aspiring primatologist of 23, I spent a year living deep inside this country's primordial jungles. My home was the remote Central Suriname Nature Reserve, the largest tract of pristine protected rainforest on earth. I was sent there to study monkeys.

When I finished my research contract I left Suriname right away, but the country itself stayed with me. I read everything I could find about the place: riveting stories about mysterious Amazonian shamans; animist tribes of rebel West African slaves; overzealous Dutch missionaries; outlaw Brazilian garimpeiros; a massive jungle goldmine owned by Canadians; a fetid lake with the dead canopy of a drowned rainforest at its surface; the aftermath of a 6-year civil war; an unsolved murder mystery that continues to haunt the nation.

Finally, five years later and now an aspiring writer, I returned to my old jungle home to satisfy my long-standing fascination with the place.

The Riverbones describes my five-month odyssey-of-return to the untouched rainforests of Suriname. Through an assortment of adventures - such as my perilous friendship with a bodyguard of the former military dictator, my compulsive search for the rare and beautiful blue frog called okopipi, my adoption by the Saramaka royal family - I explore the natural and human geography of this haunting country while hunting for closure to my strange obsession with it. Along the way, I become immersed in a mysterious and globally unique Afro-American culture, that of the Surinamese Maroons.

Combined with memories of my monkeys and wondrous photography, The Riverbones tells a pretty darn good story (if I do say so myself) of adventure, heartbreak, mystery and murder. Ultimately, it illustrates how the modern struggles for human rights and ecological preservation can often vie, with tragic consequences, with the economic needs of a proud people. Oh, and it's a love story, too.

And a love letter to the country where, in many ways, I finally grew up.

Once traded to the Dutch by the English in return for modern-day Manhattan, Suriname is one of those rare countries few people can locate on a map. Nestled between Guyana and French Guiana on the northeast shoulder of South America, Suriname sits atop the Guiana Shield, one of the oldest terrestrial environments on the surface of the earth. The Shield has been "geologically silent," or free of tectonic and volcanic disruption, for at least 550 million years. Therefore, according to David Hammond, the leading expert on the topic, the Guianan forests provide a "snapshot of the evolutionary process extending back to a Cretaceous Gondwanaland, more than 120 million years ago," truly an "ancient land in a modern world."

Although many untouched corners of the world have been hailed as The Last Eden - think Patagonia in Argentina, the Okavango Delta of Botswana, the Ndoki Region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the wild island of Borneo - Suriname has a legitimate claim to the title. Ninety percent of this mysterious nation is covered in thick neotropical jungle, and only 430,000 people live here, with a population density similar to that of Russian Siberia. Most importantly, as the Amazon rainforest to the south continues to be slashed and burned, the jungles of Suriname - widely considered the most pristine on the planet - might represent our last chance to save what remains of the New World's once-sprawling forests.

On the night of December 7th, 1982, a group of prominent military officers, lawyers, journalists, radicals and academics - all vociferous opponents to Commander Desi Bouterse's military regime - were rounded up from their homes and offices in Suriname's capital city of Paramaribo. The dissidents were taken by force to Fort Zeelandia, the colonial-era military barracks built by the Dutch on a broad bend in the Suriname river, where they were brutally interrogated and tortured. The next day, fifteen mutilated and gunshot-riddled corpses were dropped off at the Academic Hospital morgue.

The events at Fort Zeelandia, now known as the December Murders, are still shrouded in mystery. No one has ever been held responsible for the killings, and the crime is arguably the keystone trauma of Suriname's modern history. When I arrived in Suriname for the second time, twenty-three years after the killings, the first formal investigation into the crime had been dragging on for nearly five years and appeared no closer to laying charges. Though deeply curious, I had few contacts in the city, and those I did speak with were unwilling to go on record.

And then I befriended a man named Bodi, one of Commander Bouterse's personal bodyguards, a plainclothes commando with many secrets. Through our dangerous friendship, I would inch closer to the violent truth of the events that night in December, 1982, the night the young Republic of Suriname lost her innocence.

In 1968, the Dutch herpetologist Marinus Hoogmoed discovered a remarkable new species of frog living in Suriname's remote Sipaliwini Nature Reserve. He called it Dendrobates azureus after its stunning azure-blue skin. The Trio Indians, in whose territory Hoogmoed was traveling and who had known of the frog's existence for centuries, already had a name for it. They called it okopipi.

Today, okopipi is considered one of the most vulnerable frog species on earth, a worrying claim-to-fame because frog populations - long considered the "canaries in the coal mine" of ecosystem health - are in severe decline across the globe. According to the World Conservation Union, at least one-third of all known amphibian species on earth are on the verge of extinction. The total number of okopipi is thought to be no more than 300 individuals, and they can only be found in the valleys of the Four Brothers of Mamia, a small mountain range on the Surinamese border with Brazil.

When I first heard of this "blue jewel of the jungle," I realized it might be the perfect metaphor for a country so ecologically, economically and politically fragile, the delicate spirit of The Last Eden. For an ex-biologist determined to locate Suriname's quintessential soul, this little frog seemed the perfect quarry - elusive, endangered, desperately rare. So I began planning an expedition to find it.

I had no idea how difficult, dangerous and ultimately humbling this journey would be.

The Trio have no words for measures of distance. Instead, distance is expressed in terms of the amount of time it takes to travel it. We have travelled one sunset so far. We have two more to go.

I roll out of my hammock at four thirty. It is dark and so time still sleeps. I am anxious to wake the crew and get on with the day. Our trouble with the motor coupled with unexpectedly shallow water has set us back at least six hours. If we want to make it to Sipaliwini tonight we're going to need at least eleven hours on the water.

Ipiroke is the first to rise. He emerges from beneath his palm-frond roof wearing only a blue Speedo-style swimsuit.

"Andu!" he yells, as he makes his way to the river by flashlight. "Andu!"

We are on the water by seven. The motor behaves itself and we let out a cheer. The river winds as if carved into the earth by a child. We pass a pile of boulders in the middle of the river and a colony of bats bursts out, enveloping the boat for a few seconds in a squeaking black cloud.

After we pull the boat through the first set of rapids, the sun finally breaks above the canopy and washes the river in light. To my left, a thick bamboo stand turns translucent in the sunshine, like the filaments of insect wings. We pass a kankan tree that leans over the river with the weight of more than fifty orapendula nests. Then Lukas cuts the engine and Ipiroke stands with his rifle. Mawa jumps out of the boat, wades to shore, and disappears into the bush.

Ipiroke aims at a branch fork near the top of the majestic tree and fires off a round. The gunshot echoes up and down the river and a huge mass of green plummets from the branch. It lands with a thud in the underbrush and Mawa yells. A chase ensues. From the boat, all we hear are Mawa's yelps and frantic footsteps. Suddenly, the injured animal crashes out of the bush — an iguana, nearly two metres long, desperate to save itself. Just as it stumbles to the water's edge, Mawa bursts out of the forest behind it and snatches it up by the tail.

He hands the writhing reptile to Ipiroke as Lukas starts the engine. Ipi digs the blade of his machete into the iguana's chest and I hear the whoosh of life escaping its body. He splits the animal open from its neck to its tail, its innards splashing into the water as he cuts them loose. In ten seconds the animal is empty, nothing but meat on bones, its lifeless fingers long and wrinkled, its gorgeous rack of blue-green spines slumped into its gaping body cavity. Ipi tosses the corpse into the hull and rinses his hands in the river.

Lukas taps me on the back.

"Ewana switi," he says. Iguana tastes good.

We pass Agarapi Kreeki and the river narrows. Again we pull our boat up rapids, each of us up to our waists in rushing water, struggling to keep our footing. Lukas decides to motor up a particularly rough patch so we climb back in, and as the engine struggles against the current a metre long anyumara — an oily river fish built like a tank — leaps into the boat. With a flash of steel, Mawa pins the fish to the hull with his machete. In seconds, its liver, intestines, and air bladder are floating past me.

This jungle teems with life. During the dry season, hardly a soul travels these waters, and even when the rains come it is rare for anyone to make the trip. Consequently, the region is stocked like a supermarket. We come upon a forest turtle swimming across the river. Lukas aims straight for it and Mawa scoops it out of the water and places it in the boat.

Walaba trees line the shoreline, their seed cases like thick boomerangs hanging from pieces of string. As we pass beneath a massive wasp nest, two metres long and thick as a tree trunk, Lukas yells something in Trio and turns the boat down a side creek.

Mawa and Ipiroke quickly reach for their rifles again. They load their guns as Lukas aims the boat at the shore and cuts the engine. The boat scrapes up onto rocks and the men leap out. They scramble up a steep embankment into the bush and I scale the pile of equipment and follow them.

The jungle floor is still dark. The men race through the underbrush and I struggle to keep up. When I finally reach them, both men are whispering to each other and staring straight up into the canopy. A lump forms in my throat as I recognize the scene. The men are hunting monkey.

Forty metres above us, an adult red howler monkey sits with his back to a trunk. He does not move. He just stares down at us through the thick foliage. His bearded face is dark and ghoulish, his fur glimmering gold where it catches the rising sun. These are the monkeys who howl like banshees.

Mawa raises his gun but cannot get a clear shot. Lukas strips a young sapling and, hefting it like an axe, bashes it against the trunk of the monkey's tree. Now both men grunt loudly from deep in their throats, impersonating a predator or perhaps a jungle spirit. They are trying to scare their prey into moving, into exposing itself to Mawa's rifle.

In seconds, the monkey is leaping through the canopy. The men keep grunting as they track the animal. My training in primatology kicks in. I see flashes of red escaping to the west — two juvenile females, one juvenile male, an adult female with a baby on its back. I almost yell to the others but stop myself. Instead, I watch the monkeys disappear into the green, leaving their doomed patriarch behind.

I used to study monkeys. Now I'm hunting them.

A gunshot shatters the morning.

"Andrew Westoll went deep inside the jungle, looking for a sacred, tiny, shining, blue frog, and discovered that perhaps hell and heaven have the same address." Eduardo Galeano

"... a freewheeling and vividly written essay on the mysteries and longings of what it is to be human in a world of cynicism and loss -- and more significantly, what it is to be hopeful, to persevere, in the search for redemption and beauty." - The Globe and Mail

"Among the questions our future hangs on is this: Can we begin to care about the world's forgotten corners? Andrew Westoll finds an answer in the jungles of Suriname, which in his fevered words contains every threatened treasure, every blood-stained secret, and every possible last chance. Great writing is borne of obsession, and The Riverbones is the pure stuff--a headlong plunge into darkness in search of the light." J.B. MacKinnon, award-winning author of Dead Man in Paradise

"The Riverbones is a fascinating journey through a landscape thick with tragedy, rot, mystery and searing beauty. Andrew Westoll moves with a poet's eye and an adventurer's hunger."
Charles Montgomery, award-winning author of The Last Heathen

 "The visions it conjured to me of the country, of the landscape, of the heat and misery and beauty, was overwhelming, like a fever dream. Absolutely breathtaking."
- Carolyn Smart, poet and author of Hooked

"Not only is The Riverbones a great travel read, it is a brave book that ends with a plea for social justice for the Surinamese Maroons.... A fascinating journey through a country little known... this is a book about a place you may well never visit except through the eyes of an author." - The Sun Times

"Beautifully written.... for every answer this book provides, it raises a clutch of questions--oddly in keeping with Suriname itself." The Irish Times

"A compelling travelogue... it's a privilege to go along for the ride." Wanderlust