Even though the village surrounding the Bornean jungle was untouched by noise or light pollution, the black velvet night air hung heavily and the thrum of buzzing insects vibrated in our bones. At least, we thought it was the thrum of buzzing insects. As we followed the long, single braid of our unsmiling guide off the only paved road in the village, my wife was whispering protests against the long reeds and muddy water that accompanied the first step off the street. We both silently noted the fact that her flashlight was quickly dying a flickering death at the start of our nighttime journey; her acknowledgment was a determined step in front of me and into the illumination of my own flashlight's beam. The reeds slowly became higher, and the marshy mud beneath our tennis shoes became more viscous as we walked away from the road and towards a dark, increasingly noisy jungle canopy. Unfamiliar and hauntingly shrill sounds staccatoed frenetically, and the buzzing was getting more palpable. We approached a fence. "Hear that sound? Electric fence. Kills elephants." Our guide was a man of few words, who often deleted entire subjects or predicates from sentences. It had a very dramatic effect. He looked back at our bewildered faces. "Just.... duck." With one swift move, he shuffled under the fence and disappeared into the velvet night air. My wife dropped to the ground as she scrambled after him, and my own frantic shuffling confirmed that the buzzing sound was actually several thousand volts of electricity as the fence hummed above me. Our guide stopped abruptly in front of a dark chasm several feet wide, across which there was haphazardly placed a single slab of plywood. He adeptly walked across the narrow board, and faced us from the other side of the chasm before stoicly stating, "Deep river," and continuing on into the darkness. Despite our being twice the guide's size, we quickly filed one after another and to the other side, the board bending into a slight U-shape under each of our weight. Darting through the black jungle to catch up, my wife gracelessly slammed into our guide, who was stood still about 50 feet from the chasm, calmly guiding the beam of his flashlight into a hole in a nearby tree. "Look at the tree." He said, stone-faced. "Do you know..... tarantula?" We both stared at the black mass nestled in the hole, mouths agape. My wife laughed nervously. "Not personally, but..." Her words fell on a stony audience, and she swallowed nervously. "In that tree... baby. Juvenile." He slowly looked at each of our faces. "But the size of my... fist." The furry, obsidian spider unfurled its legs and crawled down to the forest floor and out of the beam of light. Our guide had set the scene, and our night jungle tour consisted of spotlighting large spiders suspended mid-air by tenuous strands of web dangling down from the jungle canopy ("Jumping spiders. If you feel on your head, just.... brush."); a very angry and very vocal civet cat in a nearby tree ("Maybe mother of nearby baby. Looks angry."); amongst others. Most of these dalliances with nature were commentated with ominous observations or two-worded declarations, and occasionally a wordlessly guided flashlight beam. By the next morning, neither my wife nor I were eager to go back into the jungle, but when the guide's baby-faced, 20-something son showed up on our doorstep, speaking softly in complete sentences, our firm, predetermined "no" to the morning jungle tour was abated, and we agreed to go. We trudged reluctantly down the familiar sole paved street, and through the reeds and mud. I could feel nervous energy radiating from my wife as we approached the fence. Our guide's son saw our apprehension and smiled warmly. With a slightly bemused tilt of the head, he winked, "This will just give any of our neighbors' stray elephants a little zap if they try to enter." And with that, he slowly unlatched a small wooden door embedded in the electric fence. My wife glared as she walked through. Beyond the fence, we saw a single, wooden plank placed over a 2-foot dip in the dirt.