We Will Be Jaguars: A Memoir of My People

Chapter 26

The waterfall echoed in the hollows beyond the ridge trail. A family of woolly monkeys watched from the canopy. Dad was shimmying up the slender trunk of a petomo palm to fetch the wild fruits that dangled beneath the crown of fronds. His toes clutched the coarse bark. His bare feet pressed against the liana rope, a sturdy circle of woven vine, an ancient tree-climbing technique that our ancestors had passed down to us. My mom crouched beside a fallen log, weaving freshly cut palm leaves into temporary baskets.

With each swift cut of the machete, the fruits rained in purplish-black clusters. My little brother Miguel and my little sister Natalia scrambled down the hillside to gather the hard-shelled palm fruits, cradling them in their ragged shirts.

“Many Stars, how old do you think your dad is?” Michi asked. He was watching my father descend.

“We don’t know.” I twisted an egg-sized fruit off its stem, scanning the dry leaves cautiously for hidden scorpions and bullet ants. “My dad was born before there were years, before calendars, when there were only moons and seasons.”

Michi knelt beside me, inexpertly yanking the fruits from their clusters.

“You won’t see many old-timers up in the United States climbing trees like that,” he said.

“Because your people cut all the trees down.” He gave me a look. “Oh, I know there are still trees in your land. But your people don’t gather wild fruits. You buy apples and bananas and strawberries at grocery stores.”

He chuckled, then wiped sweat off his brow.

“And you all sweat too much anyways,” I continued. “You’d slip right down the tree before you got two feet off the ground!”

The baskets brimmed now with the oily purple gleam of the palm fruits. My mom carried one, hoisting it effortlessly onto her back, the weight sustained by a strap of bark pressed against her forehead.

At a steep bend on the shoulder of the canyon, my dad veered off the path to examine the scrapes of a jaguar’s claws on the bark of a hardwood tree.

He sniffed the jungle air. I imitated him instinctively and smelled a mix of wild garlic, sour honey, bitter roots, leaf mulch. His nose knew more than mine. He followed the hidden scent until he vanished, then reappeared behind us.

“Fresh jaguar scat from earlier this morning,” he said. “That’s why the woollies were making that purring sound with their ribs.”

I hadn’t even heard the purring sound. My dad had powers, ways of perceiving, that I had lost during all those years in the city. He carried the language of our ancestors too. Nuanced descriptions of forest life, words that honored the ancient fear of jaguars that purred in the chest of woolly monkeys.

On the banks of the stream flowing into the falls that had named our daughter, Opi discovered the jaguar’s tracks.

“Block 22,” he muttered under his breath, curling his fingers to fit the paw prints in the mud. “And they thought they could call our forest Block 22!”

I waded into the shallow waters, stepping lightly across the slippery stone bed, weaving through the mysterious holes our ancestors had carved above the falls. It had only been a few days, but the courtroom already felt like a strange and distant dream. Our victory had erased the violent red lines on the government map, the awful shape of the oil block that threatened to cage our territory, to pock our woods with oil wells and pipelines.

We had protected half a million acres of our rainforest. And we had opened a legal pathway, a bright trail, that other Indigenous nations could follow to protect their territories as well.

And now we were home, standing in the heart of our lands, at the edge of a light-well, where the crystal water streamed from the hills, pitching endlessly into the cavern below.

Time stood still there in the stream above the falls. The sunlight played on the leaves, like children splashing in the water. The beauty prickled my skin, made my body shiver. We were not alone. We were not the only ones with eyes. The woods were watching. Listening.

And so too was Víctor. I felt him in my bones. My little brother was the scent of the jaguar, the claws on the bark, the paw prints on the banks. His death was a secret pain that had hollowed me out, a darkness that I had nearly surrendered to, a constant reminder of that other conquest we faced, the conquest of the boa’s tongue. But I knew then, by the waterfall, more than I had ever known anything, that he had never really left us at all. My little brother was with the ancestors. He was the jaguar that had bellowed in the garden, that had taught me the laughter of survival.

And I was sure that Víctor was watching me now. A jaguar. Proud of his big sister.

Images — Rachel Saint in 1993, orchestrating a village welcome at Toñampare for Maxus Oil General Manager William Hutton. (© Christopher Walker)