A moon had passed since I had knelt in the garden of the ancestors. I hadn’t told anyone what I had seen, what I had learned there. My mother had taught me that when I was a child: speak the bad dreams and visions, keep the good ones for yourself. But now Michi had asked me.
We were standing in the rain on the Via Maxus, waiting for a bus. Michi sheltered under a shiny palm leaf. I let the rain fall on me. And he suddenly said: “What happened to you? What did you see at the ceremony?”
I thought for a moment.
“You’re different,” he told me. “Stronger. You laugh more.”
Once I would have followed my mother’s advice and turned my face away at these questions about a vision. But now I knew I should tell. I had thought a lot about the jaguar and I was beginning to realize that revealing what she had told me must be a part of my journey.
I said: “I looked into the future. And the jaguar showed me what I must do.”
He raised his eyebrows. “What will you do?”
“I will lead my people in the fight against the oil companies.”
It sounded so simple. Maybe destiny is a simple thing, after all.
He looked at me closely from beneath the dripping leaf. “You are going to be a leader?”
His voice carried no judgment. But for a moment, I doubted myself. How could I be a leader? I had done little leading so far; none, in fact. I shut my eyes and remembered the jaguar, remembered that I had looked into the past to see the future. I opened my eyes again and fixed them directly on Michi. I had never felt so powerful before, so sure of my own path.
“I will be a leader in the fight. The fight against your world.”
A rumbling sound approached. The rain pelted on the top of my head and my cheeks. The oil company bus clanked towards us.
Michi picked up the empty plastic jug at his feet.
He said quietly: “I believe you, Many Stars.”
The bus came to a halt and we got on. The driver was an unshaven, mad-eyed oil worker. He stared hungrily at the wet shirt clinging to my breasts. Two barefoot elders sat quietly in the back with spears over their shoulders. A group of young Waorani women carried infants in cloth wraps and held plastic jugs on their laps. I recognized some of them but I didn’t know their names. They were from another clan. They had been living on this oil road their entire lives.
The bus lumbered along the damp gravel towards the fenced-off depot where the women collected water each morning from an oil company hose, the very same place that I had seen from the back of the pick-up truck on my way to meet the Taromenane girls.
“Where does your aunt live?” Michi whispered to me.
I didn’t know exactly where she lived. I wondered if her house was made of leaves or cinder block. She had told me that she would meet us at the Repsol station.
“Look at that,” I said, nudging Michi.
An elder Waorani man stood on the side of the road in the downpour, wearing ripped gray underwear. He held a condor on his forearm. A toothless smile flashed across his face. The bus roared past him.
I felt laughter rising in my gut.
“Are you going to have another laughing attack?” Michi asked.
I had been laughing for an entire moon. The laughter was jaguar medicine. It was what my ancestors had been trying to teach me all these years: to laugh at my own suffering, to laugh like wind in the forest, to laugh all the way into battle. It was part of my people’s power. It was our medicine. It was the mask we wore for protection, the laughter of survival.
“Stop here,” an elder yelled at the driver. “This is my hunting trail!”
The naked, barefoot elder descended and stood in the weeds at the trail head as the bus rolled on.
“This is wild,” Michi announced.
“What?”
“That we are on a bus in the middle of the Amazon rainforest.”
I watched the elder disappear out of sight, his spear over his shoulder.
“That there are jaguars and harpy eagles and uncontacted tribes that could be watching us right now from the shadows,” he continued. “And we’re on a bus!”
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the tiny hand of a Waorani girl reaching to touch Michi’s wavy hair, jutting out from under his backwards baseball cap. I nodded at the little girl, encouragingly, mischievously.
“Did I ever tell you about the time I touched Rachel Saint’s teeth?” I asked. “Rachel was dead in a coffin, her skin was cold and blue, and I reached into her mouth and touched her teeth with my fingers.”
Michi stared at me.
“And look at my mouth!” Part of what the jaguar had taught me that night was to unbury my stories, to find the courage to laugh at them with others. I opened my mouth wide now. “See, I don’t have any molars.”
“Too much sugar, Many Stars?” Michi asked, peering into my mouth, and swiping his hand behind his head. He still hadn’t noticed the little girl.
“No, not sugar!” I exclaimed. “I hammered out my own teeth so the missionaries would give me new ones.”
I looked out the window so I could not see his reaction. The bus lumbered over a bridge and pulled off the road, halting before the oil company fence, where a crowd of Waorani women had already gathered with their empty jugs.
What did I want to achieve by telling him these stories? Just to be at peace with them.
I got off the bus, feeling lightheaded. The sun slanted through the clouds, casting a stark chain-link shadow upon the crowd of Waorani women. The water poured out of the hose warm and frothy into their empty jugs.
Aunt Kope was standing barefoot in the blocky shadow of the giant Repsol sign at the entrance to the oil depot, a half-filled jug of water beside her. She had that same lonely look as her older brother, my dad.
“Who is the cowori?” she asked, shifty-eyed.
“A friend.”
“An engineer?”
I shook my head.
“A missionary?”
I shook my head again.
“That’s good,” she said. “The missionaries are liars.”
I stood beside my aunt, glimpsing strands of white hair and wrinkles in the sunlight. I hadn’t seen her in many years, not since my childhood. Her body was strong, yet her spirit was worn down. I could feel it in the way she breathed.
“I heard that you went to see the Taromenane girls,” she whispered. “And that Kaguime almost speared you.”
The scratches on my forearm had disappeared long ago.
“Those girls, they are wearing clothes now,” my aunt said. “They are in the government school.”
I nodded, painfully remembering what Boya had said that night in the strange garden at the Hotel Auca, the very night that I had met Michi.
“So, why do you come here, niece?” my aunt asked.
“Because . . .” I paused. I couldn’t tell her about my visions. She would think that I was becoming a sorcerer.
“I have been living in Lago Agrio with the Kofan, the Siona, and the Siekopai peoples,” I said. “The oil companies have poisoned their water.”
“And . . .?” she asked suspiciously.
“We are building rainwater systems in all the villages,” I said, “so that our women don’t need to suck this milky water from the oil company hose.”
“That’s good!” My aunt laughed at the raunchy image.
“Look, there is clean water everywhere . . .” The rain was easing now, but I gestured at the sky. “And we are standing in line for something we can collect from outside our houses!”
She was silent.
“And then once the people have clean water,” I added, “we will make an alliance between our peoples to fight the oil companies.”
Alliance. That was a good word. It was the first time that I had said it. The power of an alliance struck me. I thought of my friend Flor, the way her face had twitched with rage as she said: We must do something! Something! Something!
Is that what I had felt that afternoon in Lago Agrio? Was that the reason that we had gathered? Because we were going to bring our tribes together?
“So you’re with the white man?” my aunt asked bluntly.
Michi was now kneeling in the shadows of the fence, surrounded by barefoot Waorani women, filling the jug and talking to the oil company security guard.
“Yes.”
“White people always try to save us,” my aunt said cynically, “and they end up causing harm.”
“We have come here to help,” I replied.
“Help!” she exclaimed. “You sound like a cowori! The young men have forgotten how to hunt. And the young women . . . they’d rather stare at their cell phones than make a garden. The men work for the company all moon and then they pour alcohol into their souls. What are you going to do about that, Inés?”
I winced at my missionary name, at my own aunt calling me that. She reached out and touched my hand.
“Father Oil got inside of us,” she said, a wry smile flashing across her weathered face. “Deeper even than Jesus.”
I nodded my head and walked away from my aunt into the crowd of women, wearing my laughter as a mask.
One moon later, the sun burned along the Via Maxus.
“This doesn’t feel good,” Emergildo said, fastening a plastic tube to the gutter of my aunt’s house. He had been quiet and nervous since arriving here. “That we are alone, that your people aren’t helping build the water systems.”
Michi was maneuvering a huge empty tank onto the metal structure. I was kneeling in the shadows, tightening a nut with a wrench.
“The boys went fishing,” I said cheerfully, “but they will come back soon to help and we will eat well tonight!”
I wanted to love my people. I wanted Emergildo, my new friend, this Kofan man who had lost his children to the oil companies, to see the power and beauty of my culture. And I was convinced that by building the rain-water systems, by sweating and laughing and building as a community, my people would see that it was possible to live well without standing in line for the oil company water. To live, perhaps, without the oil companies. To untangle ourselves from their trap.
“I don’t feel safe here,” Emergildo said solemnly, stepping down from the ladder. It was an unusual thing to hear from a grown man.
Michi peered at Emergildo from around the water tank. His face said that he didn’t feel safe either. I was falling in love with him more and more every day. But I was hiding it from him, hiding it from everyone. I was scared of love still.
“I haven’t been dreaming well,” Emergildo said gravely.
An oil company truck careened around a bend in the road, screeching to a raucous halt in front of my aunt’s house.
“The boys are back,” Michi whispered.
My heart sank. They were stumbling drunk. Their eyes were hollow. They were shoveling rice into their mouths out of plastic containers that the oil company had given them. I looked away. I wanted them to go somewhere else.
“I am jaguar,” one of the young men shouted idiotically, throwing a rock at a dog.
A bolt of lightning flashed upon my spirit. My tongue soured like a snake.
“If you are a jaguar, then why don’t you help us?” I gripped the wrench in my hand, tightening the nut fiercely.
“Water is for women,” the man muttered, sitting on an upside-down, dog-chewed oil worker’s helmet beneath the blaring sun. “The jaguar only works for money.”
I closed my eyes tightly and saw the macaw feathers twirling into the grave in the garden of the ancestors, twisting and turning into crinkled, moldy money. And I felt a pang of despair in my gut. What if my aunt was right? What if the trap was too tight? What if my vision was untrue? What if there was nothing I could do to stop the conquest?
When we had built the last rainwater harvesting system in the villages along the Via Maxus, I knew that it was time to go home. The oil companies had invaded the old lands, strangled my people’s spirits, drowned their visions with alcohol and money. But the forests where I was born, where my parents still lived, were free. No roads, no oil wells. At least not yet. If my vision was true, if I was going to become a leader, I knew in my bones that the path would begin in the village of Nemonpare.
The plane was circling over the canopy now, like a condor, and I peered through the window at the children running along the trails, at the smoke seeping up through the leaf thatch. I squeezed Michi’s hand tightly.
Michi smiled. “It’s beautiful.”
Opi craned his neck sideways, peering back at us. He was sitting in the co-pilot’s seat, wearing a headset.
“Sister,” he shouted over the drone of the engine, in Wao Tededo, “now we’ll see if your white man can handle the jungle!”
Michi grinned. He knew we were talking about him. I could tell he was nervous about meeting my parents. I was nervous too.
The plane skidded and bounced on the hard earth and came to a stop at the end of the runway. Mom stood in rubber boots and a ripped dress in the late-morning sun, holding a machete at her side, squinting into the windows of the plane. Dad was beside her, resting a machete over his shoulder. They didn’t know we were coming and, when they saw that we were on board the plane, their eyes lit up. My heart fluttered and flashed like a hummingbird as I walked towards them.
“Daughter, you have come home!” Dad’s eyes were watering.
“Uuuu,” I said, holding back tears.
My little sister Natalia was barefoot and shirtless, wearing only underwear. She looked just like me. She stood in Mom’s shadow, gripping her dress, peering fearfully at the white man that I had brought with me.
“Natalia, are you scared?” I laughed.
“The cowori eat little girls that are scared,” Opi teased.
Emontay was standing in the shadows, shaving the tip of a palm-wood dart with a small knife. He grinned, then disappeared down the forest trail towards our family’s house.
“Waponi,” Michi said, reaching his hand out to my father.
My dad looked at me curiously and extended a limp hand to Michi’s, avoiding his eyes.
“My dad doesn’t shake hands,” I said. Michi blushed, embarrassed.
“Waponi,” my dad responded warmly.
My mom’s eyes seared me with questions.
“Where is the bread?” I asked, turning back towards the plane. The elder Watora was standing in the tall weeds, wearing an ankle-length floral dress that missionaries had given her many years ago. Her eyes were full of expectation.
“Right here,” Michi said, opening a big bag of assorted bread that we had bought at the bakery in Shell.
“If you give Watora the whole bag,” Opi joked to Michi, in Spanish, “she might fall in love with you and teach you about the jaguars!”
My dad erupted in laughter and Michi grinned. A feeling of relief washed over me. My muscles relaxed. Watora grabbed a piece of bread from the bag and cackled: “Only if the cowori can hunt peccary would I fall for him!”
I was home. For the first time since I had left the forest on the missionary plane, I was really ready to be home. I knew in my gut that everything was going to be different this time.
“Your father had many moons to patch the holes in the roof,” my mom jeered loudly. We were now in the oko, and Mom was poking at the fire and squinting into a cloud of white ash. “I don’t even know what he did the whole time I was gone!”
It was funny. I felt liberated from anger. There was no bitterness in my throat, no sourness on my tongue. No instinct to defend my father and attack my mother. Only a pleasant buzzing in my chest. A simple joy. My mom had gone to wash the oil workers’ underwear, and now she was teasing my father. She was home, just like me. It was that simple.
I glanced at Dad. He was sitting by the fire, massaging his knee, smiling.
“Does he know how to drink chicha?” my dad asked quietly, nodding at Michi.
My sisters were kneading manioc dough into a gourd of water. Michi was crouched in the corner of the cookhouse with my little brother Miguel, examining the patterns on the shell of our pet tortoise. My brother Emontay watched him stealthily, with sideways glances.
“Yes,” I said. “He loves chicha!”
“Is he your boyfriend?” Emontay asked, grinning.
My mom glanced at me sternly. I didn’t know how to answer the question.
“Yes,” Opi exclaimed. “They are inseparable, like a pair of macaws!”
I blushed, embarrassed, swaying in the hammock. A look of confusion washed across Natalia’s face.
“It’s true,” I said to Natalia. “Your big sister is with a cowori.”
My dad announced: “He has very strong legs.”
Mom burst into high-pitched laughter by the fire.
“That’s all your dad has to say!” she yelped. “His oldest daughter brings home a white man, and the only thing that crosses his mind is the muscles in the man’s legs!”
Michi could tell that we were laughing at him. He grinned wildly and received the giant gourd of chicha from my sister Nengere.
“Cowori loves chicha,” he said comically, drinking enthusiastically. “I’m still waiting to taste Nemonte’s chicha. I heard it’s the sweetest in the entire forest!”
Opi whooped. Nengere and Natalia giggled. And I blushed red.
In the evening, we set a cauldron of manioc to cook on the fire and I prepared chicha and told my family about my life. About my little room at Connie’s house in the valley outside Quito, how I fell in love with our stories and songs and typed them into the computer. About the red feather and the yellow feather, and da-da-da-da in the shed at the end of the road. How the Taromenane girls scratched my forearms, pleading with me not to leave them. How I met Michi in the courtyard garden of the Hotel Auca in the oil town of Coca.
We lifted the cauldron of manioc off the fire and poured the steaming water into the ash. I talked about what I had seen in the land of the Kofan and Siekopai and Siona people. How the companies had spilled oil in the rivers. How Emergildo had lost his children to the contamination. How the company brought the villagers rice and chicken to eat in little plastic containers. They listened in silence.
We set out early the next morning on a trail that led from the village into an area of forest that my father called Gontiwano, a canyon carved by a meandering creek where the songs of the curassow bird echoed across the depths of night.
“Your white man makes a lot of noise when he walks,” Emontay said, slipping past me on the narrow trail. I was carrying a small rucksack over my shoulder and a yellow bucket filled with chicha, maybe the very same yellow bucket that I had carried on the trail to Damoïntaro.
“Then teach him.”
“Teach a cowori to walk lightly!” Emontay disappeared into the woods with a spear and a blowgun over his shoulder.
We arrived in the late afternoon at a small clearing in the forest on the bend of a shallow creek. There were the remnants of a moons-old campsite: black ash and burnt wood, a palm-leaf lean-to, a neat pile of wild peccary bones covered in jungle brush.
I had never been to this part of the woods before.
“This is one of my parents’ hunting camps,” I said to Michi, setting down the rucksack and the yellow bucket.
His face was bright red and his shirt was soaked in sweat. I could tell that his feet were hurting in his rubber boots.
My parents and sisters and brothers scattered, noiselessly, into the woods to collect firewood and vines and tent poles.
“Are you thirsty?” I asked. “Do you want to drink my chicha?”
“This feels sacred,” he said, blowing on the surface of the gourd. “The sweetest chicha in the forest, right?”
“Just drink it,” I laughed.
He tilted the gourd back and gulped my chicha with relish. Then he smiled, recalling the story I had told him. “Wild honey and a toucan’s tongue.”
“Just drink it!”
“Are you sure it wasn’t a macaw’s tongue and a little refined sugar?” He laughed, then gulped some more. “Well, it’s definitely the sweetest chicha I’ve ever tasted!”
When night fell, the moonless black of the jungle swallowed everything around us except for the small fire at the center of our camp. It had been many years since I had stayed like this in the pulsing heart of the forest at night.
“I’m going to take your cowori man on a night hunt,” Emontay announced, poking a stick into the fire.
“Just let him rest,” my mom said, with surprising affection. “What if something happens to him?”
Emontay whispered: “Then we will know that he was not right for my sister.” The shadow-flames flickered on his severe face.
I said quietly: “He has lived with the Siekopai and Kofan and Siona people. He has been hunting with them. He has told me stories.”
Emontay rose to his feet suddenly, and his face disappeared in the darkness above the flames.
“Michi,” he whispered. “Are you ready?”
“Uuuuu.” Michi was rummaging for something in his backpack.
“What are you looking for?” I asked impatiently. Emontay had already disappeared, soundlessly, on the trail towards the creek. “Waorani hunters don’t wait for anyone.”
“My knife and headlamp!” Michi shoved his feet in his boots and hurried down the trail. He was a bright white light swiveling chaotically across the forest.
We sat in silence around the fire, Dad holding firmly at his feet the two hunting dogs that had followed us to the camp. Michi’s whispers became faint. The sound of his boots on water and rocks and mud was absorbed slowly into the croak of frogs, the roar of the howlers on the canyon ridge, and the melodious tromboning of the curassow birds: ii-ii-tidi-croomp, ii-ii-tidi-croomp.
“I have missed their song,” I said, breaking the silence of our camp.
“Gontiwa?” my dad asked, petting the neck of one of the hunting dogs. “Are there no gontiwa birds in the forests of the Kofan people?”
“No, it’s all oil wells and generators and outboard motors. And the thumping of nightclubs in the settler-towns along the roads,” I said. “You would hate it, Dad. If it happened here.”
Opi was hunched by the fire, eyes closed. He rustled awake. “We got lucky. It’s not happening here just yet. But it will.”
“What do you mean?” Mom asked, throwing the last chunk of flaky white rockfish onto the ground for the dogs.
“The government tried to auction our forests in the Oil Round, but they were too greedy. They wanted too big a cut of the oil revenue, so the companies didn’t even bid on our lands.”
I realized suddenly that although I intended to become a leader of my people, my brother actually knew more than me. I didn’t understand enough about the Oil Round that was threatening our forests.
“So now they can’t sell our lands to the oil companies?” Mom asked.
Opi swatted, swiftly, at a mosquito on his leg. His palm was stained in his own blood. “The government lives off the oil in the forest like mosquitos live off our blood. They will try to sell our lands again. It’s just a matter of time.”
“That’s why . . .” I paused, staring into the fire. “That’s why we must bring our peoples together to defend our lands. The Kofan, Siekopai, and Siona people are just like us. They are connected to the spirits. Their ancestors speak to them. They respect the forest.”
“And?”
“And they know about oil.”
I remembered then what Emergildo had said the first time I met him – that oil has a way of ending things.
“They have lost so much.” My voice was trembling. “They can teach us. We can learn from their stories and inspire them to keep fighting, despite everything they’ve lost.”
Opi leaned into the fire, breathing heavily. “The government and companies have money and lawyers and weapons and all kinds of technologies. They have satellites that are floating in space that might even be watching us right now!”
“Can they see through the trees?” Dad said, sounding worried.
“No,” Opi scoffed. “All I’m saying is that we can’t fight the companies with spears, like our ancestors.”
“An alliance,” I announced, watching Dad scatter the burning logs, as if putting out the fire would hide us from the eyes above. Red embers flashed in the sudden darkness, like lightning bugs. “What if we form an alliance between our peoples?”
“And do what?” Opi asked.
“Band together as warriors. Learn from each other. Fight for each other. And use the tools of the cowori to defend our territories and our way of life.”
My heart throbbed at the idea. My thoughts raced as we turned in to sleep. I made a pillow out of a spare shirt and dried leaves, wrapped myself in a blanket, and lay down on the hard earth inside my mosquito net.
“Nemonte,” my dad whispered. His voice was slipping into my dream. “What do the Kofan, Siekopai, and Siona people eat?”
“What?”
“Are there animals in their forest? Are there fish in the rivers still?”
“No,” I said, already half lost to the dream world. “When the company spills oil in their river, they give the people little bags of groceries: canned tuna, rice, lentils, cooking oil.”
My mother scoffed.
I rolled onto my side, fighting sleep.
“Father,” I said, “the jaguar spoke to me.”
My dad inhaled deeply.
“And?”
“I’m going to be a warrior. I’m going to bring the people together.”
An aching silence, the gentle crackle of embers, mom’s soft sleeping breaths in the depths of the forest. I was beginning to drift away.
“Wisdom,” I whispered. “We’re going to need your wisdom, Dad. The wisdom of our elders.”
Then I fell fast asleep, floating on the echoes of thousands of gontiwa birds singing from the hollows of the canyon.
I awoke at first light to the chaotic, snarling yelps of the hunting dogs, and the heavy pounding of Michi’s waterlogged boots on the trail behind the camp.
“Holy shit!” Michi exclaimed. “This croc is still alive.”
Opi woke up. “What the hell’s going on?”
I looked for my headlamp. It was still too dark to see. The forest was a shimmering, misty haze. I walked barefoot and sleepy on the cold, damp earth towards the commotion by the creek.
“It’s still twitching!” Michi said, astonished.
“What is it?”
“Your cowori man killed a crocodile.” Emontay was grinning. “And the dogs startled it back to life.”
I knelt next to Michi in the shallow waters. The crocodile was about 5 feet long, and headless.
“What happened to its head?”
Michi said: “I speared it. I speared it dead. But it kept snapping, so we cut off its head.”
“And?” I was laughing now.
“I carried it over my shoulder. And when we got to camp, the dogs started barking and the croc came to life again.”
Opi picked up the twitching, headless crocodile by the tail and began bellowing with laughter.
“Do you like to eat crocodile meat?” Michi asked me suddenly.
“It’s not my favorite,” I admitted.
“Nemonte likes pancakes,” Opi jeered. “Way back in the day, she used to make pancakes with the missionary girl!”
By mid-morning, after the sun had burned away the dew and mist, we sat around the campfire breakfasting on the rubbery-white meat of the crocodile and feeding the charred skin to the dogs.
“Is it true?” Natalia whispered timidly, holding the smoked foreleg of the caiman in her tiny hands.
“Is what true?” I asked.
“That Michi is a person?”
I tried not to laugh. “What do you mean, little sister?”
“If he hunted the crocodile,” she said, “that means he’s like us, right?”
Mom burst into laughter. Dad choked on a piece of meat.
“You are a person now,” Emontay said, grinning. “Natalia says you are one of us!”
Opi hooted and slapped Michi on the back.
“Tell us how he hunted the crocodile,” Natalia whispered excitedly.
“He just followed me, quietly, into the darkest hollows of the woods,” Emontay answered. “Like a good menki.”
My heart soared with joy. Menki is the Waorani word for brother-in-law. I had accepted a cowori into my heart, and my family had accepted him into our lives. Love was part of the warrior’s path.