Dad’s footsteps woke me out of a deep sleep. He walked across the room in the dark. The splayed palm wood of the floor trembled lightly. A wailing, moaning sound could be heard in the distance.
I sat up. My pet lightning bugs were flickering about, like golden sparks, inside my mosquito net.
I followed Dad outside into the yard. It was misty. There was a yellow halo around the moon. Bats swooped around us, wild and precise in their flight. The earth was moist and cold and breathing.
Dad didn’t say anything for some time. He was silhouetted in the moonlight. Long black hair, strong arms. The night jasmine was rich and sweet. I could hear the ii-ii-tidi-croomp of a curassow in the nearby woods. And then the wailing, moaning sound again.
“Meñe,” my father said, raising his finger into the air. “A jaguar.”
“Is she crying?” I asked.
Dad was quiet for a while longer.
“When we die, we become jaguars,” he said. “We will live in the forest, tracking peccary and woolly monkeys. But we are not like any old jaguar. We are spirit jaguars. The souls of our ancestors roam in these woods. They remember everything. They carry sadness, anger, revenge, songs, healing powers. Only some of us can speak with them. The meneras and the meñemempos. The mother jaguars and the father jaguars.”
I remembered that Víctor would become a meñewëmpo. I wondered if maybe one day I could be a menera.
Dad was looking towards the moaning sounds. They seemed to come from near where Mengatowe lived.
“Is the jaguar across the river?”
“Yes, on the ridge.”
We were quiet for a time, listening.
“You don’t remember your grandfather, do you?”
“No,” I said.
“Piyemo held you close in his arms. He sang to you when you were born. Sometimes, I can sense my father in the woods. I can feel him when I’m alone in the forest. A wind will pick up and all will go quiet and a little dark, and I know that my father is watching me.”
“Is that Grandpa now, crying in the forest?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dad,” I said, “do some of us go to the sky when we die?”
He looked up into the moon and took a deep breath.
“Mincaye and Yowe were singing up at the sky,” I continued. “They said they had been Saved, and that they will live in the sky because they washed themselves in Jesus’ blood.”
Dad thought for a moment. Then he said: “They’re crazy.”
“But why do they say that?”
“They believe in the white man’s God.”
“Do you believe in the white man’s God?”
“No, he’s of no use in the forest.”
“But why do they talk up to the sky then?”
“For no good reason,” Dad said. “God doesn’t speak their language. He can’t understand anything they say. That’s why they talk so long to him with their eyes closed. They are waiting for him to respond, but he never does.”
“Does Rachel know how to talk to God?”
“Yes, she can talk to her Wengongi. He’s the one that told her to live with us. When Mincaye and Yowe and the rest of the Guikita clan spear-killed her brother on the beach, her God gave her power over us.”
So, I had been right! Rachel had come here to live with us and to turn into Christians, into pastors, the very men who had killed her brother.
“What kind of power did Rachel’s God give her?”
“Like when a boa mesmerizes a deer by flicking its tongue. The deer becomes weak, trapped. That’s what happened to our people. It was the things she gave us, and the stories she told. Then the sickness killed us.”
What did Dad mean about the boa’s tongue? Were the blue dress, the sugar, the pills all part of Rachel’s power?
“Is Rachel a bad person?”
“I don’t know if she is bad. She is not one of us.”
There was a long silence between us.
“Nemonte, I was only a little boy when we went to live with Rachel Saint in the village of Teweno. I saw everything. We weren’t meant to be there; that was not our place. Our clan was the strongest of all the clans. The Nenquimo-Nihua clan. There were many of us, young and healthy warriors. We walked for many moons to the river where the bocachicos run. I was very hungry when we arrived, but I closed my mouth. I would not eat the food they gave us. I spent my days trapping shrimp in the creeks and roasting them by the fire at night. I slept in the dirt and ash next to Rachel Saint’s dog for many moons.
“We were not happy there. The elders were talking about killing the white lady and leaving for good, going back to our old lands. But then the sickness crept into our bones. The sickness they called polio. Many died. Other warriors like Nënëcawa could not walk or throw a spear anymore. Rachel prayed to the sky. So did Mincaye and Yowe and the rest of them. But their God didn’t listen. ‘Our Wengongi is angry,’ they said, ‘and this is your punishment for not believing in him.’”
The wailing on the ridgeline had ceased. We stood silent beneath the stars. I wanted to ask my father about old man Mengatowe. Had he really turned into a jaguar to heal my little brother? I wanted to ask him why the jaguar spirits didn’t protect our people from the white man’s sickness. But Dad was already walking back up into the house. The sun wouldn’t rise for hours.
Many moons passed. My parents stopped going to church. Mom knew that Rachel was angry with her for what she had done: summoning old man Mengatowe to heal my little brother for all the village to see. Using witchcraft when she should have trusted in God.
Church was over but Mom sent me to Sunday school each week, even though I didn’t want to go. One morning, as the rain crashed on the tin roof of the House of God, Rachel opened a picture book and held it up for us.
“Do you know who this is?” she asked. The thrash of water above drowned out her voice. Then she shot me a cold smile. “Inés, do you know who this is?”
I squirmed in my dress, which was now not sky but cloudy-blue. Inés was my Christian name. It had been given to me by Dayuma, the most powerful Waorani woman in our village. Long ago, Dayuma had fled from the forest during fighting and found her way to some place – possibly up in the sky – where she had met Rachel. And Rachel had asked Dayuma to bring her safely into the forest. She had wanted to live with the Waorani. Now Dayuma helped Rachel to run our village and they called each other “sister”. We all knew that whenever Dayuma spoke to us, Rachel was usually speaking through her.
Dayuma was holding open the picture book with Rachel. I glanced at her to see if she could help me answer the question. She looked away.
“This is the devil,” Rachel announced impatiently. “Kids, what color is the devil’s heart?”
“Black!” exclaimed a chorus of children. “The devil’s heart is black!”
“Good!” Rachel nodded. “The devil is a trickster, the one who puts dark thoughts into your hearts.”
I was startled. The devil had bushy eyebrows, a squat nose, and thick lips. He was dark-skinned and hairy. In fact, he looked exactly like my mom’s father, Donasco. I felt a chill on my skin. I had two grandfathers. Dad’s father, the mighty warrior Piyemo, was a jaguar that howled in the forest at night. And Mom’s father was the devil.
“What color is God?” Rachel shouted above the thunderous rain.
“White!” all the kids cried. “God is white!”
Several days later, while I was splashing in the shallows of the river, I saw Grandpa Donasco appear around the bend, poling slowly up the current.
“Devil!” I shouted. “The devil is coming!”
It was a playful cry – a mix of excitement and fear and wonder. I ran barefoot back to our oko.
My mom scolded me: “Shut your mouth, little girl,” she said. “Why would you say that about your grandfather?”
Mom was always worried whenever Grandpa came to visit. Everyone knew that he was a shaman. But not like the jaguar father, Mengatowe, or the sorcerer, Äwä. He was different. He wasn’t Waorani, he was Záparo, a neighboring tribe that was disappearing. They were mixing their blood with the Kichwa, yet everyone knew they had special powers. And Mom was scared that the villagers would think that her father was a sorcerer, that they would blame him for any sickness, for any accident, for any misfortune that struck the village.
His wide, flat nose, his hairy chest, his searing black eyes made him look like the devil from the picture book. He had a strange way of walking too. As if he was slithering, undulating. Mom said that he had the power of the anaconda – that’s how he summoned the fish and healed the people, how he cast spells and saw the future. He also had the power of the stones. They came to him, the rocks, shaking and trembling, and he carried them and hid them and used them in mysterious ways.
“Someone bring this fisherman a gourd of strong chicha!” Donasco announced as he entered our oko, slinging a bulging, fish-filled chigra bag onto the earth floor. His first wife, my mom’s mother, had died while washing clothes by the river, when my mother was a tiny girl. Her death was mysterious. Now, his second wife, a Waorani woman named Ero, entered our oko. The yellow-striped beaks of two dead toucans, freshly hunted, jutted from her basket.
“Tell me, little one,” Donasco said to me, “why did you run from the river when you saw me?”
I shook my head. Mom handed him a gourd of yellow chicha – a sort of beer made from manioc – with a sizzling, foamy ferment on the surface.
“I had a dream last night of this little one,” he said to Mom, blowing on the chicha. “And lo and behold, here we are with a pair of toucans and wild honey.”
I didn’t understand what the toucans or the honey had to do with me.
“How old are you now?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“She’s seven years old,” Mom said.
“Have you cured her tongue yet for making sweet chicha?” he asked between noisy gulps.
Soon, Ero was prying open the beak of one of the floppy-headed toucans, clutching its razor tongue and slicing it gently with a rusty knife. Then she removed a fist-sized clump of honeycomb from a leaf bundle. Black bees were drowning in the golden, viscous honey. She dipped the toucan’s tongue into it.
“Open your mouth!” She started to sing:
“Manioc grows well in the garden,
When Waorani women sing.
Toucans eat wild fruits,
While planting the seeds from the sky.
Manioc grows well in the garden,
When Waorani women sing.
The bees make sweet honey,
From the fruits of the forest.”
My eyes were closed. The honey dripped sweet from the toucan’s tongue onto mine. Bright feathers flashed across the green canopy of my mind, as if in a dream, as the honey droplets filled my mouth and a sweet burn vanished down my throat into my chest.
“It’s done!” Donasco bellowed deeply. A proud grin swept across the stony ridges of his nose and cheeks. “Now my little granddaughter will make the sweetest chicha in all the forest!”
After that, Víctor and I delighted in our secret powers. I made good chicha. And he didn’t get sick anymore. He bristled if we didn’t call him by his new name, his powerful name, Mengatowe. Although I often still called him Víctor in my head, I tried hard to respect his new name. It was serious stuff. He even made it his mission to teach our talking parrots how to pronounce it: Meng-ahhh-toweeee, Meng-ahhh-toweeee.
And the birds learned. Too well. They announced my little brother’s arrival into our oko by repeating his new name so often that even I, big sister, best friend, and someone who greatly respected the shaman, became annoyed.
Then one evening something funny happened, the kind of funny that made Mom wince and Dad chuckle as he wiggled his toes in the embers.
We were making chicha on the earth floor of our oko. We had already boiled the cauldron of manioc, poured the steaming water into the ash of the fire, and macerated the tubers into a warm puree with wooden sticks. Now it was ready to be chewed, transformed by our saliva into a softly fermented brew. Chicha was the staple of our existence.
I had been chewing manioc puree and spitting it back into the cauldron since I was old enough to climb into a hammock by myself. But now it was different. Donasco and Ero had given me a secret power. I squatted beside my mother, listening to the talk of our elder women. Auntie Geca and Auntie Wiamenke were resting in hammocks.
“School is a waste of time,” Auntie Geca announced. She was my father’s older sister. She looked just like him, only her eyes showed she had a little more fire inside. “What can Waorani children possibly learn in a sweltering box like that?”
I stuffed a warm wad of mashed manioc into my mouth and chewed it slowly, massaging it with my tongue, imagining my mouth transforming the dough into wild honey.
“Children should be in the garden with their mothers,” Wiamenke added. “Walking the trails with their fathers.”
I nodded in agreement, as if I were not just a child but one of the women. I often missed school. The schoolhouse was small and cramped, and the teacher was always angry with us and he only spoke in Spanish. He yanked and slapped our ears as if the problem was our hearing, when really it was understanding. He was controlled by Rachel.
Suddenly, our pet macaw flapped her wings and squawked to announce that a visitor was arriving. The leaf entrance to our oko rustled gently and, as we turned to see who the visitor was, the parrots began their usual shriek: Mengatowe, Mengatowe, Mengatowe.
Mom spit a wad of chicha into the cauldron, squirming uncomfortably. The parrots were repeating the name of the jaguar shaman again and again . . . in front of our visitor, Dayuma.
She pretended that she didn’t hear the parrots. But we knew that Dayuma told Rachel everything, and that whenever she paid a visit to our oko, Rachel was the reason. To tell us Rachel was upset or to give us information, or perhaps to keep tabs on us for Rachel.
Dayuma wore an ankle-length floral dress that covered her rubber boots. Her hair hung over her shoulders, perhaps to hide her dangling earlobes. She knelt beside the cauldron of chicha, smiling brightly. Dayuma was beautiful and she was one of us but she was set apart because she had traveled in the sky with Rachel. She had stories of unimaginable places – things called buildings, where the white people lived. She didn’t make gardens anymore, like the other Waorani women. She lived in a wood-board house at the other end of the village beside Rachel, beside the House of God. But her time was mostly spent in a little room with Rachel. They were making something mysterious together, something that they called “God’s carvings.”
“I am visiting all the okos in the village,” she began, her voice soft, “to say that soon there will be a group of men arriving here.”
“Who?” Wiamenke asked.
“Very important men. The chiefs of the oil company.”
The parrots were unrelenting: Mengatowe, Mengatowe, Mengatowe. Mom hissed at Víctor to silence them while Dad just chuckled. But I could see that his ears had pricked up at the words “oil company.”
“Why will they come here?” Geca asked severely.
“Because they will come,” Dayuma said. “But don’t worry. Rachel knows them well. She says they are God-believers like us.”
As Dayuma was leaving, she glanced at me tenderly.
“I heard your tongue was cured for sweet chicha, Inés.” She smiled.
My mouth was swollen with spit-logged puree. I nodded at her. I wished she would call me by my real name, Nemonte, and not the Christian name she had given me. Deep down, I understood that there were two worlds. One where there was our smoky, firelit oko, where my mouth turned manioc into honey, the parrots echoed “Mengatowe,” and my family called me Nemonte – my true name, meaning “many stars.” And another world, where the white people watched us from the sky, the devil’s heart was black, there was something named an “oil company,” and the evangelicals called me Inés.
My favorite days were those when Mom was too busy in the morning to notice us. It was on those days – when she was breastfeeding my newborn brother, Emontay, fanning the fire with turkey feathers, shooing the monkeys away from the meat smoking on the grill – that, instead of setting off for school, we would go into the woods with Dad.
Dad knew all the trails, and all the trails held stories. Sometimes, we would spend the day tracking a pack of peccary through morete palm swamps and over high hills. The swamps were easy tracking and we children were allowed to lead. But on the hard, dry ground of the hills, Dad took over. We always returned to the village with good things: baskets of fruits, game meat, palm leaves to make hammocks, cords of bitter lianas for hunting poisons.
On this morning, not very far from the village, we stood on a fallen log in a muddy stretch of forest at the foot of a canyon, staring at a lifeless giant anaconda. She had swallowed too much. Waited, flickered her tongue, lured the mesmerized deer close. Wrapped her and sucked her inside.
But the snake had made a terrible mistake. It had been lying in deep shade, where the mud was cool, when it took the deer. Maybe it was too young to know that it should slither into a sunny spot before eating a sinewy old deer. In the cold, Dad explained, the red brocket deer’s legs will straighten as it dies, and the colder the snake the stiffer the legs. This deer’s hooves had poked right through the snake’s muscles and burst open its shiny, oily skin. Her prey had killed her. Now she was surrounded by a maze of animal prints. Ocelots, pumas, anteaters, capybaras. A lone tortoise was gnawing at the rotting flesh.
“Look! A condor!” Víctor exclaimed, pointing up through the canopy.
“All the animals of the forest will come to pay their respects to the anaconda,” Dad said. “That condor has flown from the mountains, very far away, to pay tribute, to gorge on the powerful energy of the snake’s flesh.”
As I gazed into the sparkling light of the canopy, searching for little glimpses of the circling condor, I heard a faint whipping, chopping sound in the sky.
“Ebo, ebo, ebo!” I exclaimed.
Dad tilted his head, then lifted his hand, demanding silence.
“No, it’s not a plane,” he said. “It’s a helicopter. An oil company helicopter.”
When we got back to the village, my big brothers, Opi and Ñamé, were crouching with other kids in the shade of the helicopter, touching its big, bumblebee belly. Down the runway, villagers were milling about outside Rachel Saint’s house. Some of my friends, dressed in their blue and white school uniforms, were playing up in the branches of the miwagos. We followed Dad past the church and stood in the shade of a grapefruit tree.
“Cowori from the company have come!” Paa, one of the Waorani pastors, told us. “They are inside talking with Rachel and Dayuma.”
“Víctor, let’s crawl under the house,” I whispered.
I knew the entire floor plan of Rachel’s house. I knew where she slept, where she kept all the toys and the dresses and other gifts, where the sugar, rice, and noodles were stored. Sometimes we would sneak right under the room where she scribbled in her book as she whispered questions in a serious voice to Dayuma. Questions about the best way to say things in our language, Wao Tededo, things we had no words for: heaven and hell, sheep and oxen, forgiveness and faith. I knew that the scribbling sound was the sound of “God’s carvings,” the project they were working on together, but I didn’t understand what it meant.
We crawled on our knees on the damp earth. Through the slats in the floorboards I could see there were several white men now sitting around a table. They were laughing with Rachel in their own language. She looked very old and tired. She coughed a lot too. The white men were different from the other cowori that visited the village. They wore strange-looking hats – white, hard, and shiny – and orange uniforms.
Dayuma was sitting at the table, along with her husband, Komé. He had the biggest hands in the entire village and was always chasing us kids down and whipping us with stinging nettles for misbehaving. I was afraid of him. Both Dayuma and Komé were smiling and laughing, but I knew they couldn’t understand because they didn’t speak the cowori language. Dayuma had taught Rachel our language but Rachel had taught Dayuma only about God.
“How many of our men will go with the company?” Dayuma asked Rachel in Wao Tededo.
“Very many will go,” Rachel said.
“Will they go far away flying or will they be close walking?”
Rachel spoke with the white men and then turned to Dayuma. “If it goes well, then the men will go everywhere across the forest. Flying and walking.”
“Will they be gone long?” Dayuma asked. I knew she was asking so that she could report back to all the villagers.
“Many moons.”
Soon the cowori with the hard hats stepped out of Rachel’s house. Víctor and I scrambled away so no one would see us. Rachel pointed to the House of God, and to the school, and the men nodded.
Villagers were following them, asking questions.
“We are busy now,” Rachel said in a stern voice. “We will talk later.”
The white men carried black boxes with little handles. When they got to the helicopter, they shook Rachel’s hand and nodded their heads and looked right into each other’s eyes. Then they waved to all of us and said something that no one understood. The helicopter began to roar, making more wind than an ebo. I felt scared until I saw my older brothers, their arms outstretched, leaning into the wind and yelping with delight. I closed my eyes and leaned into the wind too. My hair blew in all directions. As the helicopter lifted off the ground, I saw my dad among the crowd. His mouth was wide open.
Amidst the storm and racket the helicopter made, a stillness came over me, a quiet aching thought: Those men are going to take my father away.
That night, there were no stars. A wet, cold draft blew into the oko. Dad was huddled by the fire, feet outstretched, toes wiggling just out of reach of the flames. Mom was kneeling over a pot of tortoise stew, squinting her eyes in the smoke.
“Your father must have eaten a lot of tortoise hearts when he was a little boy,” she said to all of us. “That’s why he has no direction. Just like the tortoise, he goes wherever!”
She laughed. Her laughter was unkind. Only my brother Ñamé chuckled.
I didn’t like Mom being hard on Dad. He always took it though, staying silent, never rising to the bait. That made Mom even madder.
“Nemonte, did you know your dad was gone with the company for the entire time you were in my womb? He didn’t even let me know! He just got in the helicopter and was gone. He almost missed your birth.”
I was crouching in the corner of the oko, feeding bits of grilled plantain to our pet coatis, little creatures a bit like raccoons. Opi was sitting next to me, whittling a piece of balsa wood with Dad’s knife. I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want my parents to get into an argument.
“Dad, tell us about the Tagëiri and the Taromenane people that you saw when you were with the company,” said Ñamé. “Tell us about all the cowori they killed!”
I walked over to the fire and pulled out a piece of half-charred manioc. I knew by the way that Dad sat up in the hammock that he was going to tell a story now.
“When your mom was first pregnant with Nemonte, white men arrived in a helicopter. Just like today. They worked for the company. They talked with Rachel in her house. Rachel stood in the doorway and called my name, along with several others. She said: ‘Tiri, I need you to go with these men! Your uncontacted relatives are behaving badly. Over the last moon, they’ve spear-killed several company men. God wants you to go with the company and tell your relatives that killing is the devil’s work.’”
I chewed the manioc and leaned forward, watching Dad’s face in the firelight.
“I didn’t know how long I would be gone. I got in the helicopter with those men and we flew over the forest. I didn’t bring anything with me! I was barefoot and shirtless—”
Mom interrupted: “He left just like a hunting dog would! Following the cowori without a thought in the world.”
Dad muttered something under his breath and then continued: “When we got close to the Toroboro River, I saw the hills where we used to live when I was a boy. I saw peach palms that my grandpa had planted. We flew over a big road that went right through our old lands. There were many cowori living there now. They had cut down the forest, and there were cattle everywhere. Then we landed in the town of Coca.
“A man was waiting for us. He was the boss of the company. ‘Texaco,’ he kept saying. ‘Texaco.’ He gave us clothes and boots and hats and machetes and files. We were happy about that. We didn’t stay in Coca for very long. Although I wanted to see if the mighty warrior Nihua was buried there.”
“Nihua?” asked Opi. We knew the name from fireside stories. He was not our blood relative but he had close ties with our clan.
“The soldiers shot him and then cut off his head when I was a boy. That’s when all the trouble started within our clan. But there was no time to find out where he was buried; the helicopter soon took us away.
“We flew with the bearded boss into a small clearing in the forest. They called it a camp. There was a plastic tarp for shelter. The boss liked everything orderly. He barked instructions at the men. He said that anything we wanted must be given to us. We liked that very much.
“Then, before he left, he showed us pictures. In one picture, there were two spears crossed on the trail. We could tell they were the spears of the Tagëiri clan, our relatives who had decided to stay behind in the old lands, the ones who didn’t want anything to do with the white people. Their spears were just like ours. They were adorned with feathers of war, red macaw feathers. And little bits of red plastic that the Tagëiri must have found in the river.
“I think the boss wanted to know what it meant: two spears crossed on the trail. We didn’t say anything. Everyone should know what that means. Then he showed us pictures of a white man the company called ‘the cook.’ He had spears through his chest and neck. He was lying in the creek next to pots and pans that he had been washing.
“We didn’t know what we were supposed to do. The next morning, the workers started cutting down the forest. They had chainsaws. We had never seen anything like it! How fast they could cut through hardwoods! It would have taken days to cut through trees like those with a stone axe. We ventured off into the woods, but the chainsaws had scared all the animals away. That’s why the Tagëiri were unhappy. The cowori were making too much noise and scaring away all the animals.
“One night, while most men were sleeping, I heard the snapping of twigs on the forest floor. I stood up. I listened . . .”
Dad had walked over to crouch beside the fire but now he stood up, showing us how he had listened.
“I could sense that the Tagëiri were nearby. I told one of the cowori men to be quiet. But he got crazy-eyed. He walked to the edge of the forest and started shooting his pistol into the darkness. After that came silence.
“The next time I heard the Tagëiri, I didn’t tell anyone. It was daytime. They were making birdcalls to each other. I took several machetes and axes from the camp and walked into the woods. I called to my cousins and uncles: ‘I am Tiri, son of Piyemo, grandson of Nenkemo. We are living with the cowori now. We wear their clothes and eat their food. They do not kill us. I am leaving machetes and axes here for you. With these you will live well. You will make many gardens and have many children. I am Tiri, son of Piyemo. Who are you?’
“I knew they were there. I could hear them breathing. Later, I returned to the spot where I’d left the machetes and axes. They were gone.”
There was silence for a moment. Ñamé broke it.
“When I’m older, I’m going to go find the Tagëiri and live with them!”
“Don’t talk nonsense!” Opi muttered. “They would spear you in a second.”
“Dad,” I said, “why were the cowori cutting down the forest?”
“We didn’t know why! They cut big trails. Straight lines in the forest. It didn’t matter if there was a huge tree in their way, or a morete swamp. They cut from dawn until dusk, and then fell hard asleep. They all smoked cigarettes and snored like peccary at night. The boss came back every couple of days. He brought orange cables, thick like lianas, and bundles of what they called dynamite. They made holes in the ground and dropped the bundles deep into the earth.”
“Will you go with the company again?” I asked.
“If he goes,” Mom said, “he’d better bring something back with him. Our kids don’t even have shoes for school, or a change of clothes. And look at our pots! Last time, your father was gone for seven moons and all he brought back was a bunch of stories!”
Dad didn’t say anything. He just looked down at his feet by the fire and wiggled his toes.