That morning, I was the first to hear the distant drone of a plane. It sounded like a wood-bee buzzing in the rafters.
I was sitting by the fire with my little brother, Víctor, reaching my hand into a warm pot of boiled petomo fruit. Víctor was talking to our pet nocturnal monkey as he forced grasshopper guts into her mouth. Amonka had big, bulging yellow eyes, like two suns.
“Víctor! Is that a plane or a bee?”
I lifted my finger to the sky and tilted my head slightly, like Dad does when he suddenly stops on hunts in the forest, listening for signs of movement in the canopy.
For a moment, the sound of the plane disappeared completely. I held the oily petomo fruit out to my little tanager birds and they tickled as they picked at my fingers.
“Víctor, I told you already, give the grasshopper to Amonka in her hands, so she can feed herself. She’ll never learn if you just force it into her mouth like a brute.”
Even though I was only six years old, I was always telling Víctor what to do. Plus I liked the way our pet monkey dismembered insects with her tiny fingers. Amonka would need to learn how to do that so she could feed her own monkey babies one day.
Then the humming noise reappeared over the ridges. This time I was sure it was not a wood-bee. It was a plane, an ebo. Bringing white people to our village.
“Ebo, ebo, ebo!” I shouted loudly, so that all my brothers would know I was the first to hear the plane rumbling down from the sky where the white people lived.
As I rushed to put my birdies back in their hanging basket in the corner of the longhouse, I heard my mom’s voice in my head. Earlier that morning, as she had left with Dad for the garden, a big woven basket dangling from her back and my baby sister, Loida, curled up in a wrap around her chest, she had called to me.
“Nemonte, take care of your brother. No running around the village.”
I knew that I should stay at home. But I reasoned that we’d come back as soon as the plane had landed. “Víctor, let’s go see the cowori!” I said.
Cowori is our word for outsiders, like white people, and when a plane landed you could be sure that cowori would get out of it.
Outside in the yard, my two older brothers, Ñamé and Opi, were amusing themselves by shooting blow darts at the hummingbirds zipping between guava flowers. They soon overtook us on the trail to the landing strip. And, annoyingly, they were shouting, “Ebo, ebo, ebo!” as if they had been the first ones to hear the plane.
Barefoot, we sprinted past the home of Aunt Wiamenke and Uncle Nënëcawa.
“Nemonte!” my uncle shouted from his wheelchair as we ran by. “Don’t get too close to the ebo! It will suck you right up and cut you into little pieces!”
At the edge of the village landing strip, we climbed into the star apple tree, one of our many hiding places. The plane was still far off in the distance, a speck above a fold of forested ridges. The star apples were not quite ripe, but we tried them anyway and began to play one of our favorite games. We liked to pretend our lips were stuck together.
“The white people live in the sky,” I mumbled to Víctor, my lips pursed, nearly numb from the sticky fruit.
“Really?”
“Why do you think they’re so white?”
“From the clouds?”
“No, from the sun,” I said, forgetting to keep my mouth closed. “The light of the sun. Wanna know why they’re so tall?”
“Why?”
“Because there’s no forest up there. They don’t have to crouch under any branches. They can just keep growing and growing.”
As the plane circled overhead, I looked out at the whole village. The bright-green cut-grass that grew around the lagoon where the giant anaconda dwelled. The trail that led to my mother’s garden. Beyond that, the swamp where the packs of wild peccary feasted on morete fruits. I could see clear across the river to the steep ridge where Mengatowe, the jaguar shaman, lived. And to the creek where we washed clothes. And then to the compound of the Baihua family, where the old warrior chief, Äwä, would get possessed by visions in his hammock. My mom had warned us about Äwä. He was a dangerous sorcerer.
There were thirty, maybe forty families in our village – Toñampare – and each had its own longhouse, or oko. Each palm thatched roof stretched right down to the ground and there was nearly always a fire inside. The okos listened to our stories at night, their leaf walls fluttered like butterflies when we laughed, shivered when we were sick, thrashed when we were angry, sheltered us when the rains crashed and the winds stormed.
Next to the oko was usually a small sleeping hut on stilts. This side of the river there were okos and sleeping huts in the woods, and some lining the creeks, and some nestling amidst the fruit trees that grew along the grassy landing strip. We could see the woodsmoke rising from them. And we could see all the way down to the end of the runway, to the House of God. Next to that was the house of Rachel Saint, the missionary lady, the only white person to live with our people.
Her house was made from wood boards and sheet metal that groaned in the sun and roared in the rain. It had a door and grilles over the windows. You couldn’t just wander in and out of Rachel’s house or put your hand through a window.
“Víctor,” I yelled. “Here comes the ebo!”
Amonka shrieked at the wild, gusty wind of the plane as it descended over the ridge, its tires skirting the canopy. Nothing in the forest compares to the unreal sound of a plane: not thunder and lightning, not the bass-like umps of black caimans, not the underwater explosions of anacondas, not the howling moans of jaguars nor the racket of wasps.
The plane bounced and skidded to a stop on the runway. Silence.
“Ebo fell asleep,” I told Víctor.
And then the doors of the plane creaked open and the white people stepped out.
They were wearing floppy hats, long-sleeved shirts, and rubber boots. White cream was smeared on their noses and ears. Rachel Saint had a talking box next to her house, mounted on a tree trunk and sealed off with chicken-wire caging. That’s how she spoke to the cowori who lived in the sky and asked them to come down to visit.
I had even gotten close enough to smell the white people once and one of my friends had touched a man’s leg; she’d said it was hairy and soft. We all believed that white people never peed. None of us had ever seen Rachel Saint pee.
I knew I should have taken Víctor home then. But I didn’t. The cowori nearly always went from the plane to one particular stretch of sandy beach on the other side of the river. Now I wanted to follow them, to find out what they did there. And perhaps I hoped one of them might give us a gift.
The cowori always brought gifts. Rachel Saint called these “God’s gifts” or “gifts for believers.” They were miraculous: candies sweeter than wild fruits, baby dolls with blue eyes and blonde hair, balls that bounced, toys that rolled. But what I wanted most was a dress. Some of the other girls had dresses that fell softly to their knees. No root, no flower, no bark could make colors as bright as those dresses.
My family had few clothes because we didn’t go to the House of God on Sundays. That was the day when Rachel talked to God. It was when the Waorani pastors sang songs, sad songs, unlike any of our elders’ dawn songs or our women’s garden songs. And it was the day for gifts. On Sundays, the other girls streamed out of the House of God with their new dresses flowing in the sunlight.
I had only underwear. The red pair was my favorite and I was wearing it now as Rachel Saint, carrying a parasol to shield her from the sun, led the way down to the river. We followed, watching the cowori as they sank in the wet sand and stumbled into the dugout canoe.
“Víctor, you see, I told you they live in the sky. They don’t even know how to walk on the earth.”
The river was low and we didn’t need a canoe because we could read the ripples on the water, could see the contours of the sandbanks glistening in the late morning as we crossed to the opposite beach. The water rose to my chest, but the current was kind. Amonka crouched on Víctor’s head, eyes bulging, her fingers clasping his long hair. A school of bocachicos darted upriver, like shadows. Crisscrossing the beach were the mysterious patterns left by river turtles.
The cowori formed a circle, clasping each other’s hands. Three Waorani pastors – Mincaye, whose name means wasp, Yowe and Kemo – stood with them. These men were once our warriors. Now they believed in Wengongi, the white man’s big spirit in the sky. Rachel had told them to cut their hair and she had given them shirts and long pants to wear. But they were barefoot still, and their earlobes dangled low, and their skin gleamed dark, like mine.
What were they all here for?
I already knew the story of how the white people had come to save my people before I was born and how our warriors had riddled them with spears. We were fierce in those days and killed anyone who dared to enter our lands. They had been left dead on the beach, face down in the water. One of the missionaries was Rachel Saint’s brother. She had come to live with us after his death to continue his work, and somehow we had let her in. It seemed even murder wouldn’t keep the missionaries away. She had explained that we should not have killed him when he had come to save us. I wondered what this meant. What is Saved? Saved from what?
Now I suspected that the missionaries had been killed on this very spot. Maybe that was why Rachel always brought the cowori here, so they could see where her brother had died?
Víctor was peeing, watching the thirsty sand drink his water. Rachel Saint shot him a disapproving look. She was always reprimanding us, even our elders, for nakedness. God gave us clothes to wear, she said. The devil took them off.
“The cowori don’t pee,” I whispered harshly to Víctor. “Didn’t you know that?”
Rachel asked Mincaye to talk to God and he beamed with pride, tilted his head to the sky, shut his eyes, and began. Cryptic words hummed like a hive within his mouth. He spoke in our language and soon Yowe and Kemo were muttering along.
“Lord God, we did not know you then. But now you have forgiven us. We have washed ourselves in your son’s blood. We have rinsed ourselves in Jesus’ blood.”
Hmmm. I knew about blood. I always helped Mom butcher the animals that Dad hunted in the forest, reached my hands into the stomachs of wild peccary, tugged at their intestines, felt the warm blood cooling in death. But Mom said our own blood was sacred. She got mad when we scraped ourselves or pricked our fingers with fishhooks. Bleeding was not good, so why would Mincaye talk about rinsing himself in the blood of Jesus?
Suddenly, one of the cowori men dropped to his knees. His face was covered with hair that hung below his chin.
“Hallelujah, hallelujah, hallelujah!” he screamed at the sky. His arms were outstretched. Tears streamed from his bright-blue eyes, then vanished into his beard, like Víctor’s pee in the sand.
Could this be the Jesus man? He certainly resembled the Jesus in the pictures that I had seen. Instinctively I looked at Rachel Saint for some explanation. She lived with us and knew our language. But she was not one of us and now her eyes were watery and vacant and she was silently mouthing those same words: “Hallelujah! Hallelujah!”
I wanted to go home. I turned to Víctor. But he was not there. Something had happened to him. He was lying in the sand behind a log, trembling and shivering, his fingers curling in terrible knots.
Shocked, I knelt over him. His teeth were grinding together. His jaws were clenched. His eyes were so still they were alarming. As if he had been trapped inside himself. Amonka clung to him.
“Víctor, stop it!” I said sharply.
And in that moment, Víctor’s fingers uncurled. His mouth relaxed. His eyes softened.
I clasped his hand. It was cold and clammy. But he was starting to get up. He was okay.
I turned back to the circle and was relieved that they were still praying and no one had seen. We surely would have gotten in trouble for whatever just happened. Rachel would have told my parents. And then the cowori would never give me a dress.
The group was making its way back from the beach now. Mincaye and Yowe walked ahead, talking loudly, telling each other the story of the missionary plane, how it had landed on the beach and how they had waited in ambush. They spoke as if they had been there, as if they were remembering.
And then I realized. They were the men who had spear-killed the missionaries! Mincaye and Yowe had killed Rachel’s brother! Rachel had taken them back to that spot to show her cowori visitors how she had turned them from warriors into pastors.
I didn’t tell Mom we had been to the beach and I did not tell her what had happened to Víctor there in case it was all my fault for following the cowori when I should have stayed at home.
Then, a few days later, it happened again. This time, we were in the garden with Mom and Aunt Wiamenke.
“Nemonte,” my mother yelled from behind a patch of plantains, “throw more of the termite nest onto the fire so the bugs don’t wake Loida!” Her voice was stern.
I broke off a brittle clump, letting some of the termites onto my hand, and placed it on the fire. The smoke was milky-white and pungent. I pushed my younger sister Loida in the hammock, which was strung between two small trees.
“Where is Víctor?” Mom called.
“He went off with Opi,” I said. “They are looking for ripe papayas.”
The garden was a short walk from home. My mom made more gardens than any of the women in the village – along the river, at the edge of the lagoon, in the hills – because she wasn’t Waorani. She had different blood. Her father was a Záparo shaman and her mother had been Kichwa. She always said that she had gardens in her blood.
The sun was directly overhead so I covered myself with a giant plantain leaf and sat beside the hammock, rocking my baby sister to sleep. I had avoided being out under open sky ever since that visit to the beach. I didn’t want the cowori living up there to see me and tell all the other cowori that I did not deserve a dress.
I closed my eyes. The snapping of twigs and branches, the rhythmic crackle of the small fire, and the sound of machetes scraping the earth lulled me to sleep. But a moment later I was startled awake by the strange, thrashing noise of a wild animal. I jumped up.
It was Víctor, stumbling through a tangle of manioc plants. He reached the path and collapsed. There was spit and foam coming out of his mouth.
“Mom, Mom!” I shouted. “Víctor has been attacked!”
Feet came rushing from the other end of the garden.
“What happened?” Mom shouted at me angrily.
“I don’t know. He just fell and started shaking.”
She knelt over Víctor and checked his entire body for snake and scorpion bites. She cupped his head in her hands. Her cheekbones glinted in the sun and her long black hair swept across his face as she leaned into him, blowing and chanting.
And then his face did something very awful: a sort of grin. A strange, faraway grin. It spooked me and I looked away. Was this all because we had gone to the beach with the cowori that day?
Uncle Nënëcawa’s oko was only a stone’s throw from our family compound, and while all the other adults of the village would leave each morning for the forest or their gardens or the river, Uncle Nënë spent his days whittling palm wood into perfect blow darts. He sat by the fire on his throne: a rusty wheelchair.
My brothers and I used to spend endless hours with Uncle Nënë. He was our daytime storyteller. I wouldn’t have been able to say this then, as a child, but I knew it: Nënë could see into the soul of things. And that’s why I was kneeling, just me, in the ash beside the fire one day, spinning blow darts tipped with poison over the smoldering embers. Tiny shafts of late-morning light pierced through the leaves and the palm thatch and the slow, billowing smoke of the fire.
Nënë had a big head, and his upper body was round and strong, like an anteater. His hands were enormous too. But his legs, oh, his poor legs and feet, they were withered. Like dry lianas. They were twisted inwards and he had no muscle at all in his calves. I reached out quietly, without thinking, and touched his thin foot with my fingers.
I said, “Nënë, why are your legs like that?”
There was a moment of silence. And then a faint hissing sound.
“Take the fish off the grill, Äwäme!”
My uncle’s private nickname for me was Äwäme. It means puma, and I loved it.
“Äwäme, put them in the basket! They’re burning.”
Nënë was always smoking up fish in his house: catfish, bocachicos, sabalos, motas, carachamas. He could not hunt so he traded his poison-tipped blow darts for firewood, fish, and wild meat.
I put the char-blackened fish in the hanging basket above the fire.
“Haven’t I already told you why my legs are like this, Äwäme?”
I remained silent, biting my lip. I wanted to tell him about Víctor. I thought maybe his own story would help me understand why Víctor had been sick ever since we went to the beach with the cowori. I took a piece of smoked fish, my favorite, sabaleta, and nibbled quietly.
“Äwäme,” he began, “these legs, these feet, these toes of mine, they have walked on every trail, climbed every tree, swum every river. These legs of mine were as strong as ironwood! These legs of mine are like our people, Äwäme! Do you understand? No, you don’t understand. You’re just a child.”
He stopped whittling the tip of the blow dart and watched me eating the fish.
“Äwäme!” he suddenly cried. His voice was humorous. “Have you seen the way the white people eat food? Quietly chewing, as if they are about to faint! Look at you with that sabaleta – are you copying them? Like you are embarrassed to eat the fish? No! You must eat with big energy! Eat with your fingers, with your hands. Bring the fish head up to your mouth! Crave it. Suck at the fish eyes. Make sounds: slurping, sucking sounds. Suck the juice of the fish’s brains. And when you’re done, don’t just sit there meekly. Rinse off your hands, then walk across the oko full of life and clap loudly. Clap three times! Let all of the women and all the men know that you love the food! Let the hunters know you love the food! Let all the fish and animals know that you are grateful for them!”
I put the fish on the grill, took another blow dart from the pile, and spun it back and forth between my fingers over the embers. I did not look at him.
“But why are your legs like that?”
“My legs are like this because . . .”
He went silent. I reached out to touch his toes and he seemed to come back to himself.
“We were in trouble in the old lands. The cowori shot us with their guns. They stole our women. They tracked us with dogs. We started fighting amongst ourselves. There was bad sorcery too. Omens all around. We shouldn’t ever have left. But the planes circled over the forest. They lowered down gifts from the sky. It was powerful. The things that the white ladies gave us were very powerful. Pots that didn’t break! Machetes that could cut through trees like the trunks were made of papaya! We thought the white people were like gods. How could they make these things? When we arrived in the white ladies’ village, Mincaye and Yowe and the rest of the Guikita clan were already there. They had killed the missionary men and then surrendered to the missionary women! They were wearing clothes like the cowori, singing songs like the cowori, eating rice and chicken like the cowori. Oh, and they were drinking Rachel’s sugar water!
“We saw all this and we wouldn’t have stayed long, Äwäme, I promise you that. Rachel gave us clothes, and we walked around naked, holding the clothes in our hands, swatting at mosquitos! But then . . . we started dying. So many of us. The planes brought the sickness! They say it was something in the water. But no, it was on their breath and in their songs.”
I touched the strange metal machine that seemed almost to be a part of Nënë’s body. I ran my finger over a wheel.
“Yes,” he said, watching me. “They gave me the sickness and then they gave me the wheelchair.” He started to laugh, a laugh full of sadness. “That’s why I always tell you to stay away from the planes, Äwäme. You’re better off in the garden with your mother. You’ll get into trouble with the white people. They bring many different kinds of sickness.”
I had hoped for reassurance but I left Nënë’s oko feeling even more scared. It seemed clear that Víctor was sick because I had taken him too close to the white people. And soon his attacks became more frequent.
One day, at dusk, I walked with Mom into the drizzling woods. We were looking for medicine. The rain pattered. The leaves dripped. Mom was having bad dreams about Víctor and she was getting worried. She walked along a creek and looked into the canopy, crinkling her eyes, seeing everything. She came to a tree with cedar-like bark and spoke to the tree in Kichwa. Her people’s language, the language of her mother and of her father, Donasco, the shaman.
I could only understand a few words. She was asking permission. She was thanking the tree. Her hair glistened raven-black in the light. She cut at the tree with short strokes, grunting quietly, and then stuffed the bark into her woven-palm chigra bag.
Back at the house, Víctor was lying motionless in the hammock. Aunt Wiamenke was there and Dad was sitting on a stump by the fire, warming his feet. He had speared a peccary earlier in the day. I could tell he was waiting for the right time to tell everyone about the hunt.
Mom emptied the contents of her chigra and brought the medicine to a boil, so that our oko smelled of burnt peccary hair and wild garlic. I crawled underneath the hammock, bumping Víctor with my back and pressing down on our pet tortoise so that it would make that funny groaning noise, like a fart, which always made my little brother laugh. He remained totally still. No laughter. His eyes were open though.
“Drink this, Víctor,” Mom said sternly to him. He didn’t budge. She blew on a spoonful of amber tea and brought it to his lips. He shook his head violently at her. She forced the spoon into his mouth, grabbing his chin. I didn’t like that at all. I turned away.
“Tiri, we need honey,” Mom said to Dad. “It’s too bitter for him.”
Dad removed his feet from the fire. “I’ll look in the forest tomorrow.”
“If he needs it tonight, you should go ask Rachel for sugar,” Wiamenke said, slurping up peccary broth. “She always has sugar.”
“Ba!” Mom said. “No! I don’t like asking her for anything.”
I waited for Víctor to get up slowly, as though nothing had happened, the way he had at the beach that day. But he didn’t.
Later that night, without words, I followed my mother down the damp, grassy runway towards Rachel’s house. The stars flickered in the misty night. I wondered if the cowori lived above the mist, if they slept above the sharp pitter-patter of rain that fell from the moon.
“Uuuuuuuuu,” Mom said quietly as we approached the house. The half-moon glinted off the metal roof and shone through the miwago trees beside the church.
Rachel opened her door and stood above us, squinting into the night.
“Who is it?” she asked sharply.
“Manuela,” my mother said. “I am Manuela.”
“What a surprise that you’ve come to visit,” Rachel said. We knew that she was not pleased with us because we didn’t go to church. “How is your family? Why have you come?”
“My baby daughter, Loida, is sick,” Mom said.
I stared at her. Why was she speaking untruthfully?
“What is wrong with Loida?”
“She has a fever and she won’t take my medicine. I have come to ask you for sugar.”
Rachel looked tired and old standing in the door frame. She held a candle, which cast trembling shadows on her face.
“I do have sugar, Manuela. But you know that if I gave everyone in the village sugar and pills, then I would soon run out. Listen to me. I have heard about your son, Víctor, so there is no need to speak untruths to me. I have been praying for him.”
So was that what it meant to be Saved? To have sugar and pills and prayers?
“I have been talking to God, telling the Lord Wengongi that He should be kind to you, even though your family has not accepted Him in your hearts. I have told Wengongi that Víctor is not to blame for this sickness. I will give you sugar tonight. But you must promise me that you will come to church.”
How could she know what had happened to Víctor? The white people in the sky must have looked down on us and told her.
“Uuuu,” Mom said meekly. That means yes. Mom was different here, now, in front of Rachel. She wasn’t the powerful medicine woman of the forest. She looked ashamed. I disliked Rachel for reducing my mother.
“Manuela, one more thing. These are fever pills. Give them to Víctor when his body burns. And I don’t want to hear about you taking Víctor to old Mengatowe for any of that witchcraft stuff. That will only cause more harm to your son. Mengatowe is under the spell of the devil. He angers God greatly. Give Víctor these pills and come to church, Manuela, and everything will be all right.”
“Uuuu,” my mom said. “Wa kevi, thank you.”
As we turned away, Rachel said, with a laugh: “And remember, don’t tell any of the other aucas that I gave you sugar. They’ll be climbing all over my house for it if you do.”
“Auca” is actually the word the Kichwa use for the Waorani. But somehow it spread and the cowori use it too. Rachel used it a lot. It means savages.
If Rachel Saint was the ruler of the village, Mom was the ruler of our household. None of us wanted to go to church. We never went to church. But suddenly Mom was dead set on it. Because Rachel gave her the sugar and the pills, or because she really thought that Wengongi would protect Víctor?
When the church bells rang in the morning, Dad said with a laugh: “I’m going hunting today!”
Mom glared at him, silently, from across the cookhouse.
“The missionaries say the animals rest on Sundays,” Dad continued, talking to no one in particular. “But that’s a big lie. I had a good hunting dream last night. I’m going to track me some peccary.”
Mom looked at him hard. Soon afterwards, Dad was walking with us down the runway towards the House of God.
We didn’t have any church clothes. We were all barefoot. Dad wore a pair of red shorts, and a shirt stained and ripped by the jungle. Mom wore her only dress, which hung to her knees. My big brothers, Opi and Ñamé, had already run ahead to go climb in the miwago trees. I knew they wouldn’t go to church.
Rachel’s eyes lit up when she saw us. We took our seats in the back of the bare, wooden church. There weren’t many families there, maybe four or five in total. Rachel stood at the front talking about horses, sheep, and oxen. She wore a pair of glasses and her hair was tied up in a bun. She was holding up pictures in a book, but they were too small to see from where I was sitting.
I couldn’t imagine what the animals she talked about looked like. She said that Jesus was born in a house where the horses lived, in a trough where the horses ate.
“Horses are a bit like tapirs. They have the same-shaped skull as tapirs,” Dad whispered to me. Why was the son of Wengongi born with tapir-like animals? I thought.
Several mothers at the back of the church were picking lice out of their children’s hair.
Rachel scolded: “No picking lice in Wengongi’s house.”
There were many kids outside. I could hear them playing and laughing. Mincaye stood up and began to pray. His words were gibberish to us. My dad had an empty look. My mom’s hands were clasped together and her cheekbones looked like they were carved from stones upriver.
One of my friends whispered: “I need to pee. Let’s go outside.” But I shook my head firmly. Rachel had told us that God was watching. What if it were true?
When the church service was over, Rachel called to my mother, a secret gesture. I stood with Víctor outside Rachel’s house as one of the Waorani pastors, Paa, announced that he would take all the children into the forest to harvest oboye fruits. Paa was one of the best tree-climbers in the whole village. His big toes jutted out sideways so he could grip the bark and vines. I wanted to go with the other children, but I stayed behind, listening to Mom’s footsteps and quiet whispers within Rachel’s house.
Mom’s face was flushed, almost embarrassed, when she reappeared. What was she holding? It couldn’t be what I thought it was. I reached for the bundle that she pressed discreetly to her side.
“Not now,” she whispered. “When we get home.”
“What is it?”
“Church clothes,” she said breathlessly.
“A dress for me!”
“Be quiet,” she hissed. “Rachel told me to give it to you when we get home so the others don’t come asking her.”
The dress was a sign. It was a sky-blue miracle that I wore every day. It was proof that the white people were pleased with me. We started going to church each Sunday. I no longer hid from the sky. Víctor’s attacks were subsiding. Perhaps the prayers at church were working!
Or maybe it was the smoke too. Every day at dusk, my mother would burn all sorts of dried plants: chili pepper leaves, wild garlic, barbasco, tobacco. She would hold Víctor for several seconds in the pungent cloud, and then he would cough and she would chant a verse in Kichwa and waft the smoke around the yard. She gave him bitter tea each evening, sweetened with wild honey that Dad had brought home from the woods.
But then it happened again.
An attack in broad daylight for all the village to see.
It was the day before the white people from the Land of Rachel were scheduled to arrive again. The entire village had gathered together to clear the landing strip after Rachel Saint had scolded us in church, calling us lazy for letting it become overgrown. For us kids, these were some of our favorite days because, as the grown-ups hacked away at the grass with their machetes, we went chasing after the fleeing mice, rabbits, and birds. I didn’t care that my blue dress was already stained with the stickiness of wild fruits, the resins of plantains, the garden soil.
Dad took us to our yard to make a house from bamboo for our new pets. Víctor had caught a tiny bird in his palms, and as Dad cut the bamboo he held it close. And then I noticed that his head was quivering. Within seconds, he was convulsing on the ground. More than I had ever seen. Foam came out of his mouth, and little hisses and groans. His back arched and his neck strained.
Mom did not hesitate. She shouted to Aunt Wiamenke: “Get Mengatowe!”
Mengatowe lived on the hill across the river. Smoke was billowing from his oko.
Aunt Geca approached us from the landing strip. She looked at Víctor, trembling on the ground. Her eyes were filled with a calm light. “He’ll be here soon.”
It was strange: Mengatowe appeared almost immediately. He walked lightly and had small twigs, broken leaves, and dirt on his shoulders and back. His long black hair partially covered his dangling earlobes, with two round balsa plugs stuck neatly in the giant holes. He wore a green liana around his head. His penis was tied upwards with a bellyband, and his dark testicles bobbed. He was carrying bundles of leaves and had a bright smile on his face. It was hard to tell if he was young or old: he was ageless.
He looked at Víctor intently from a distance. Then he came closer and put one hand on Víctor’s forehead, covering his eyes, and began speaking. I couldn’t understand anything. His mouth moved rapidly, but the sound came from his throat. Or maybe even deeper, from his chest.
“Who is he talking to?” I whispered to my mother.
“Shut up.”
Mengatowe’s body started quivering and the voice within became louder and further away. It seemed like it was coming from behind the woodpile or from within the fever bush. And then suddenly it stopped. There was total silence and Víctor became still. Mengatowe was in a trance. His eyes looked like jaguar eyes. I felt afraid of him.
He crouched near Víctor and blew on the crown of his head: Whoosh, woosh, wishooo, wishoooooo. He cupped one hand and scooped the air over Víctor’s eyes and then he crushed the air and rubbed it between his fingers before blowing harshly on it. Wiamenke brought him a small gourd half-filled with water. Had he told her to do this? I hadn’t heard them speaking.
He kneaded a fistful of plants in the water, and then he took a gulp and gargled it in his throat before spitting it back into the bowl.
“Drink this,” a voice inside him intoned.
Many villagers had gathered in our yard. They stood at a distance under our fruit trees, holding their machetes silently. Even Nënëcawa had wheeled himself out to watch the healing.
Víctor was in a trance. He sat up, took the gourd, and drank the entire bowl in several breathless gulps. Then my father gathered him into his arms and walked him into our oko.
Nënëcawa broke the silence.
“What are you all looking at? Get back to work! If I had a good pair of legs, I could clear the landing strip all on my own!”
The villagers laughed, and what seemed like a wasps’ nest of conversations, of gasps and whispers and giggles, broke out at once.
Inside our longhouse, Mom served Mengatowe a bowl of peneme, a thick, sweet plantain drink. Víctor lay at rest in the hammock.
“There is witchcraft,” Mengatowe said, looking at the fire. “Envy in the village against your family. Manuela, you have many gardens. You are growing more manioc and plantains than the other women. But you are not sharing. Tiri, you are a great hunter. You track the peccary further than anyone else. You are not lazy to carry it and monkeys too on your back. Every day you bring home meat for your family. But you are not sharing. There is talk in the village. And envy. They have done your little boy harm because they are envious. This boy is special: he will grow up to be the best hunter. And he will have contact with the jaguar spirits.”
I could feel a chill in the cookhouse. A lone blue flame hissed from an ash-white log. Mom clenched her teeth hard. This was her greatest fear in life: sorcery. Sorcery was something you couldn’t see and couldn’t touch, and you didn’t know for sure when someone was using it against you, but its effects could be terrible.
Mengatowe, his eyes soft, looked at Víctor in the hammock and said: “Little one, you will be a jaguar father, a meñewëmpo.”
Then he looked at my parents and said: “Your son will speak with the jaguar spirits, as I do. I have given him my power. Don’t call him Víctor anymore. Call your son Mengatowe. He will be safe with my name. When the spirits hear my name, they will be afraid to attack and your son will live well.”