10

The Headwaters of the Amazon

Quito lies a bare twenty kilometres south of the equator. It, too, was once part of the Inca Empire. Now it’s the capital of Ecuador and is a sprawl of two million people. I’d come by bus through the Avenue of the Volcanoes, some of them still spewing ash and steam. From here, though, I would be venturing east into the headwaters of the Amazon where there are still people who are all but untouched by the outside world.

From Quito I tagged along on a series of increasingly smaller propeller planes. By the time I got to Shell, an outpost on the edge of the jungle, I was shuttled onto one final aircraft, an aging Twin Otter held together with piano wire and duct tape. It reeked of leaking diesel fuel, and the propellers whirred unevenly, spinning us crookedly into the air.

When the plane was aloft, engines whining, windows rattling, we flew over a thick jungle canopy. It stretched to the horizon on all sides like a giant broccoli pizza. There were no roads, no power lines, no signs of anything vaguely smacking of civilization, just the endless green of the Amazon in the borderlands between Ecuador, Peru, and Brazil.

I was going to see a people called the Achuar, who weren’t “discovered” until the 1970s. Today, not much more than a single generation after first contact, they still live out of reach of the modern world in thatch huts, hunting monkeys with blow darts, cultivating tiny gardens in clearings on the riverbank.

Their language exists only within a relatively small area of the Amazon River Basin. And that was what I’d been searching for. What sort of language would they construct deep in the rain forest where there were no metal objects, no stones — nothing but roots, fibres, and leaves? What sort of symbolic systems would they create, surrounded as they were by almost endless jungle?

As I’ve said, languages are socially constructed things. We all agree that a certain symbol, a word, say, has a particular meaning. In Achuar the pronunciation of ensa means “river,” but that doesn’t explain what it signifies for the Achuar — that it’s their central means of transport, that it’s easier to paddle upriver in a dugout than to try to cut through the jungle with a machete. It doesn’t reveal that they orient themselves to the world in terms of upriver and downriver. It doesn’t indicate that they count the seasons by the way the stars move over the river.

The sky was falling into darkness by the time the plane skidded onto a mud strip cut between the trees. Waiting for me was Philippe, who would be my translator. Born in Quito, he had studied anthropology and had gone through a series of rigorous courses certifying him as a jungle guide. He had been living with the Achuar people for just over a year, long enough to get to know their ways and be reasonably accepted in their community.

I followed him away from the airstrip down a muddy path through the jungle. A full moon shone above the dark branches. We still had to hike a short way to the river and then paddle up it in a dugout canoe. When we reached the river, it was silver with moonlight, a long strip of light through the dark forest.

The Kapawi is one of a thousand tributaries that eventually flow into the Amazon. It’s a twelve-day hike from the nearest road. As we slid down its muddy banks toward the dugout floating there, we came face to face with Shakai. His face was painted with thin black lines, and he didn’t look at us or smile. He was short but powerfully built, coming from a stock of often brutal and ruthless warriors.

Shakai was Achuar and would be our guide for the next five days. He was somewhere around thirty, I guessed, and he would have grown up in a world of green leaves and parrots, of slithering anacondas and unrelenting heat. We climbed awkwardly into the dugout. Shakai got in at the front and remained standing, easily balanced, gazing only at the river without the slightest acknowledgement of our presence.

I’d already learned that this was part of Achuar culture. Eye contact is seen as aggressive. Through many centuries of almost ritualized warfare with the surrounding peoples of the rain forest, the Achuar had taken on a cautious, wary air. Everything was potentially dangerous. Death hid in the water, in the forest, and even, as I was soon to find out, in their dreams.

Philippe sat in front of me, hands gripping the edge of the dugout. He spoke some Achuar, and Shakai now uttered a bit of Spanish so that between them they had worked out a sort of understanding that Philippe would then try to translate back to me in English.

The electric buzz of insects had come up with the setting of the sun. The draping trees on either side of the river swelled with life. We moved through the water slowly, and after a time Shakai began to let out a strange whistle — five descending tones that trailed off sadly, almost eerily. To our right, deep in the forest, a call came back to us: the same five-tone descending scale.

“What’s that?” I whispered at Philippe.

“Shakai is calling to one of the birds — the common potoo. This bird only sings during the full moon.”

Shakai whistled again, mimicking the bird call exactly.

“It’s one of their myth birds,” Philippe continued. “They call her Aujujai.”

“And Shakai knows its call?”

“He can imitate the call of many animals. This bird, though —” Philippe turned to look at me “— is an important one. The Achuar believe Aujujai is in love with the moon. Maybe you’ll hear the story later … when they get up for the telling of their dreams.”

“Dreams?”

“Later.” Philippe turned back toward the front of the boat. “In the early morning — that’s when they tell their dreams.”

Under the full moon the river was now a ribbon of pale, shimmering light. The forest on either side was lost in blackness, and even Shakai had become a silhouette against the starry sky.

An hour later we approached a grouping of huts set along a swampy lagoon. A few more Achuar men came down to greet us. The Achuar are one of four tribes in this part of the Amazon. Collectively, they’re known as the Jivaro, and they all speak slightly different dialects of the Jivaro language. To the west, slightly closer to civilization (and therefore slightly more habituated to the Western world), are the Shuar, who are famously known as headhunters. They were the ones who shrunk the heads of their enemies in a practice known as tsantsa. The Achuar, even deeper in the forest, don’t believe in such rituals. They think of them as cannibalistic and barbaric. Instead, they simply bash in the heads of their enemies and leave it at that.

Achuar men are meant to possess kajen, a predisposition toward anger and violence. It’s expected. Until relatively recently an almost endless series of personal and family vendettas ravaged the forest. Today, even, meetings between groups of people, anyone outside one’s own family and friends, are carefully ritualized. Eye contact, as I said, signals aggression. Eye contact between males and females is even more problematic. It signals desire. Desire begets jealousy, and so in a heartbeat, we’re right back to violence again.

These old ways, though, are already showing the first signs of change. Only a generation ago the Achuar lived in family groupings deep in the forest. Now they’ve started to congregate in larger communities, villages almost. Our plane had bumped down into one of these “new” places. The Achuar there had cleared the landing strip, and an array of huts and tin shacks had sprung up.

This wasn’t the Achuar way. Already their social constructions were changing. With the arrival of airplanes, and more specifically, cooking pots, machetes, and medicine on these planes, not to mention white adventurers like myself, their world, the very organization of their way of life, was already evolving into something new.

We had journeyed past that “new” village to a place much farther upriver where the people lived in much the same way as their ancestors had for centuries. Everything they needed came from the forest. They hunted and fished and constructed their huts according to a set of belief structures that were unlike any I’d come across before.

The next morning Shakai and Philippe took me on a jungle hike. Shakai went first, hacking through the vines with his machete. Philippe trudged behind him, and I trailed in the rear. The canopy was filled with wildlife, and Shakai stopped occasionally to point into the trees and name the animals and birds. To describe the forest only in visual terms, though, is to miss much of it. Whole symphonies of sound swelled and thrummed around us. It was muggy. My clothes, from the first hour there, were never quite dry again. They clung dankly and began to smell — a musty odour not of sweat so much as a sort of earthy scent, like that of wet grass or mushrooms.

We tramped along slowly. I felt as if I’d spent too long in a hot tub — thoroughly weighted down with the heat of the place. Everything was various shades of green. Even the sky was obscured by the forest canopy. A sort of mulch was underfoot, and if I peered closely enough at the rotting leaves and branches, I quickly discovered they were alive with wriggling things: ants and spiders and creatures I had no name for. Occasionally, butterflies as big as two hands flitted through the trees. They were a shimmering, iridescent blue, and the hue was startling in the midst of all that green.

Philippe plodded behind Shakai, translating his few words. In the long silences my attention drifted to a square box Philippe had strapped to his back. It was about the size and shape of a hardcover book, and I could see an electrical wire sticking out of the zipper.

“What’s in the box, Philippe?” I asked.

“Oh.” He stopped and proudly flipped it opened for me. Two little paddles were in there, and a battery or something.

“What is it?”

“A portable defibrillator. Look at this — twenty thousand volts!”

“Jesus, are you expecting someone to have a heart attack?” I glanced around. There was no one there except me and my companions. The air was as thick as water, and I’d been marching along lethargically, my heart thumping in my ears.

“No, we don’t use it for that. It’s for snakebites.”

“What?”

“Snakebites. It’s pretty new. They’ve just discovered that the jolt of electricity somehow dissolves the venom.”

“Are you kidding me?”

“Yeah, twenty thousand volts. I haven’t had a chance to use it yet.”

“I hope you don’t.”

Philippe’s English was perfect. To my surprise he’d lived in America and even worked for a time not far from my own home in the Canadian Rockies. He had gone through an intensive training program to become a guide and interpreter with the Achuar, though he fully admitted that his knowledge of the jungle wasn’t even a hundredth, not even a thousandth, of what the Achuar knew.

A German research team had been down here the year before, Philippe told me. The team’s members had isolated a single tree and fumigated it. When the insects dropped off, hundreds of them, the Germans found that 80 percent couldn’t be identified — and that was just from a single tree!

Shakai stopped suddenly in front of a strange tree. He glanced at Philippe, then started to explain something. Philippe translated. “He wants you to know this tree is called the walking palm. It’s the only tree that walks.”

I wrinkled my brow. “Walks?”

“Yes, if you look at the roots …” Philippe began. Shakai was gesturing at the base of the tree. It was held up on a thicket of branches, a cage of root fibres. “Everything in the forest competes for sunlight,” Philippe explained. “The roots don’t have to go far to find water. It’s everywhere. But the canopy can become so thick that all life here must find ways to get to the sunlight. In this case, if a larger tree grows over the walking palm, the roots on one side will die off and it will grow new roots on the other side. Since you can see that the tree is held up by the roots, it literally walks back over into a patch of sunlight. The tree can move about sixty centimetres in a year, about five centimetres a month.”

Shakai said something again. Philippe leaned toward him. “He wants you to know that the jungle is always changing. It’s evolving all the time.” Shakai reached for a leaf from the next tree over. To me it looked like all the others. Philippe translated. “This kind of leaf is toxic. In fact, almost everything is poisonous here in the forest. In this case, the ants — see here, there are little holes where they’ve eaten a part of the leaf in the middle — know this leaf is toxic in certain doses and they know exactly how much they can eat before it kills them.

Shakai spoke again. The language sounded clipped and staccato, vaguely like Japanese. “He’s saying now that a few months ago they started to notice that the leaves of this plant were growing in a different way. The leaves started to grow with the little holes already in the middle of them. The leaves were mimicking the holes made by the ants, and now the ants will come to one of these new leaves and think that leaf has already been eaten. So the ants move on to the next plant. Do you see?”

He held up the leaf. A scattering of tiny round holes were clearly visible. “The eco-system is incredibly dynamic here. It’s like a race between the predators and the prey, one always trying to stay a step ahead of the other. The Achuar understand this. They’re a part of the place.”

Throughout the day Shakai showed us the medicines, or tsuak, that are harvested from the forest. One leaf, dried and crumpled up, smelled exactly like garlic. The Achuar use it to boost their immune systems. In another case, a parasite that causes a form of flesh-eating disease is treated with the roots of a particular cactus plant. At another little clearing Shakai dug his machete into the white bark of a large tree, and it bled. A bead of thick red liquid dribbled from the wound, exactly like blood.

Shakai dipped his finger into the fluid and invited me to do the same. I tasted it. It was vaguely sweet. “In Achuar,” Philippe explained, “this is called arushnumi numi. Numi is the word for ‘tree.’ In Spanish we call this sangria de dragon — “dragon’s blood.” Now there’s a medical company interested in this ‘blood.’ It’s a natural antibiotic. The Achuar use it to clean wounds. It’s good for mosquito bites, too. It makes the swelling go down.” Philippe paused. “In my trips into the jungle I’ve counted more than fifty-two different plants that the Achuar use as medicines.”

“What about malaria?” I asked.

Even Shakai turned at the sound of that word. “Chukuch,” he muttered.

“That’s the word for malaria,” Philippe told me. “For this they take wayusa. They make it into a tea, and every morning they drink it. That’s also when they tell their dreams and myth stories.”

“Yes,” I said, “you were going to tell me the story about the bird that was in love with the moon.”

“Ah …” Philippe began, but just then Shakai turned quickly and grunted something at him. “Rain is coming,” Philippe translated.

We both looked up, and it was true: something was different in the air. Shakai began to pick up his pace, and we hadn’t gone more than a few paces before we heard a distant clap of thunder.

“When we get back to the huts, remind me to tell you about the wayusa, but now I’m sorry … we have to move quickly.” He darted after Shakai, and I sighed and clumped after them.

Before we reached the dugout the sky opened up. Rain splashed down unmercifully. Even the birds grew silent. Huge cracks of thunder rolled across the sky. They rumbled on and on before finally tapering into the soft slap of the rain on the river.

The first extended contact with the Achuar came in 1976 when a young Frenchman named Philippe Descola came to study them. Descola was a student of the great anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, who taught him to look for the underlying meaning of things, to search for the fundamental structures on which Achuar society was built.

Descola stayed for two years, and from his field notes he cobbled together a remarkable book called The Spears of Twilight. I had an English translation of it, though it was already musty with jungle air. I read it with my flashlight when I couldn’t get to sleep.

The Achuar, Descola contended, don’t have the same sense of space we have. They have no place names to speak of except the names for their rivers — the Kapawi and the Pastaza. They wouldn’t be able to tell you where they were born, not because of forgetfulness or ignorance but because the place had ceased to exist. There are no large rocks in the jungle here. Everything is organic material, so there are no landmarks of permanence. Even the lifespan of a broad, tall tree isn’t long in comparison with trees in temperate forests. Things grow incredibly fast so that any given patch of jungle will look completely different, in fact, will be completely different, in only a few months. Remember, this is the place where some trees can literally walk.

The jungle is ever-changing. Even the various twists and bends in the river transform as large trees fall into the river, pulling away the earth underneath them, eroding the bank, and altering the course of the river. A typical Achuar settlement has garden patches of manioc, yams, and sweet potatoes, but these last only five years or so. House beams resist the elements for perhaps ten years, and when their homes eventually collapse, the Achuar simply move on and leave the remains to the encroaching jungle. Nothing in the environment can be counted on as an unmoving point of reference. Everything constantly grows and changes.

The Achuar don’t even have directional terms for north, south, east, and west. Instead, their only words of direction are the relative terms for upriver and downriver.

By the time I arrived, all that was beginning to change. Forty years ago there were no metal tools here. Now everyone seems to own a machete. Shakai was especially adept with his, swiping away overhanging roots and vines, or with a simple tap of its sharp tip, cutting off a piece of fishing line.

I asked Shakai about his machete through Philippe, and for a moment the Achuar seemed perplexed. He didn’t know where the machetes had come from. In his youth they had used stone axes. These new tools were much better. The Achuar dubbed them “polished stone axes,” or simply adopted the Spanish word machete.

Certainly, a long metal blade is a handy piece of technology in the forest — so much so that it’s now almost indispensable to the Achuar. What’s more, this piece of technology — and to us an extremely primitive one — has radically changed the Achuar way of life and their whole sense of space. It’s now possible for them to move through the forest quite easily. The singular importance of travelling solely by water no longer holds the precedence it did only a couple of decades ago. The Achuar can clear out landing strips for airplanes, and invariably villages of a type that never existed before spring up along these same airstrips. Permanent villages. I’d already seen the one where we’d landed. There was a clapboard school there, even a soccer pitch. All of this was completely new.

It’s almost scary to think how much a new implement like a machete can change a way of life. And think of the barrage of technology facing the Achuar in the very near future. All of them are now aware of the airplanes coming in from some unknown outer world, great metal birds that carried both the strange and powerful white people, as well as their goods — cooking pots, machetes, and weapons far superior to anything the Achuar had ever previously used.

So, though languages and cultures are both socially and environmentally constructed, one might also say there’s an element of something we might call technological construction. There’s a lot of overlap between these different sources of cultural construction, of course. That a hut is built along parallel lines with the river is environmental. The family groupings that occupy them are societal constructions. But the tin roof I saw near the airstrip is a technological innovation. And clearly this sort of thing, this introduction of metals, is going to have a profound and irreversible effect on the Achuar way of life.

No one really knows where the Achuar people originally came from. The Amazon River Basin is perhaps the least-studied linguistic area on Earth. As many as three hundred languages are spoken here, belonging to some twenty different language families. In addition there are a dozen or so isolate tongues.

Some things seem quite simple in Achuar. This language, for example, classifies all animals into two general groups: yojasmau yatia, which means “animals that smell good,” and yojasmau yuchatai, which means “animals that smell bad.” Essentially, it’s their coding for animals that can be eaten and animals that can’t. Monkeys, for example, are widely consumed, taken from high branches with lethal blow darts. Strangely enough, though, the word hunting doesn’t really exist. A vast range of euphemisms and circumlocutions are used instead, the point being that any word directly referring to the chasing down and killing of an animal might anger the spirits of the forest. So, for instance, an Achuar hunter might come to a place underneath a tree and say, “The parrots have pissed here.” This is a code, almost slang, and anyone familiar with this particular group of Achuar would know instantly that it means there’s a monkey in the branches above them. They don’t want to alert the monkey’s spirit, the animal’s wakan, to the dangers of human beings. Something about an animal’s wakan still understands human speech, so it’s best not to say anything out loud. It’s prudent not to refer to them directly.

All living things in the forest are invested with wakan. A loose translation might be “soul,” but such words are loaded with cultural baggage and translation of this term into English is particularly difficult. For one thing, when an Achuar dies, his or her wakan will be lodged in a particular spot in the body. It seems to move around, this wakan, and according to Achuar belief, if the wakan at death resides in a human’s liver, then it will next become an owl. If it’s stuck in the human’s heart, it will become a grosbeak, a small yellow bird. And if the wakan is in the flesh or even in the shadow of the dead person, it will then become a small red deer. Sometimes a person’s wakan can even end up in the ears or eyes, and when that happens, it reincarnates into one of the huge neon-blue butterflies I’d seen. The Achuar are vaguely afraid of those butterflies. They know these huge insects carry the souls of the dead so that when I pointed one out to Shakai, asking what it was, he shied away from the question and said it wasn’t important.

That afternoon we went still farther upriver to visit another Achuar community, specifically the house of a man named Naanch. Achuar names are really quite beautiful. They’re meaningless on the written page, so I urge you to try them out loud. They need to be heard to be fully appreciated. Men’s names crackle with consonants, names like Kawarunch, Washikta, Tsukanka, Wajari, Jimpikit, and Yurank. Women’s names, as in many cultures, seem softer and lighter: Atinia, Entza, Chawir, and Senur.

The jungle around the Kapawi is constantly alive with sounds, and the Achuar language mirrors it. Achuar dialogues are peppered with onomatopoeia, words that sound like the thing they’re describing. Pak is the sound of something cracking, like a twig when it’s stepped on, and puj is the noise of falling water. Of course, the written letters here are based on Spanish pronunciations so that the final j in puj is an aspirated h (just as in the Spanish name Juan). The sound then of puj is more like poohhhhh, letting the h rasp a bit at the back of the throat so that it does sound vaguely like flowing water. With the same aspirated h, the Achuar say juum, juum, juum to mimic the growl of a jaguar. They’re a very aural people and live in a world without books, without written texts, so their words and phrases are often borrowed from the noises around them.

Achuar is also a highly ritualized tongue, and we were about to see one of those rituals. A visit to another man’s house is an elaborate affair, studded with regulations and protocols. Philippe told me, as we were getting out of the dugout, that there were very strict rules for our visit to the hut of Naanch. There was to be no photography, for one thing. Once, said Philippe, a tourist took a photo of a pet monkey, and a few days later the monkey died. Some Achuar believed the camera was to blame for the animal’s death.

“Also,” Philippe continued, “when we go into the hut, you must follow Shakai carefully and do everything he does. At the doorway you must say ‘Winiajai.’ ”

I’d already learned this word. “Isn’t that the greeting — like hello?”

“Well, yes, sort of, but it’s really used only when a visitor has come, and only the visitor will say it. It means, literally, ‘I come.’ And then Naanch will answer you with ‘Winitia.’ That means ‘Come’ — like ‘Come in.’ This is part of the ritual.”

Inside the thatch hut the mood was vaguely tense, slightly uncomfortable. In the middle of the dirt floor perched on a small carved stool like a throne sat Naanch. As we paraded in, each of us stopped at the door and pronounced the ritual greeting.

Shakai had gone in first. This wasn’t Shakai’s village, but he was apparently known and accepted here. A long, low bench was wrapped around the outside of the hut, at least on the side where the door was. Shakai sat and then I did likewise beside him. Philippe parked himself on the other side.

We were sitting in the front part of the house, known as the tankamash, the men’s area. All Achuar huts are divided carefully along an imaginary line down the middle, a demarcation that usually runs parallel to the direction of the nearest river. Behind the imaginary line lies the women’s area, the ekent. This division of the hut is still apparent in all Achuar homes. It’s the kind of social construction that anthropologists delight in, though, truthfully, they aren’t strictly women’s and men’s areas.

The idea of the tankamash, the so-called men’s area, is that it’s the part of the house where visitors are received. The ekent, meanwhile, is the sleeping and cooking area. Naanch, the husband, plainly lived in the women’s area, though no other adult males, besides himself, were allowed in that area.

Naanch was on a stool directly on the line between the women’s and men’s areas, and behind him in the ekent, his pregnant wife scurried about getting the nijiamanch ready. Nijiamanch is a sort of beer made from manioc roots. It’s fermented by human saliva, and as Naanch’s wife crossed into the men’s area to hand out our wooden bowls of the stuff, I got my first close-up of it. Long, cloudy threads swam in the soupy mixture. I couldn’t bear to look at it, much less raise it to my lips. Philippe took a few tentative sips and tried not to grimace too noticeably. Shakai gulped it down with relish, and the pregnant woman hurried over to him with a second bowl. She also had a baby hanging from her hip, and two other children, both girls, played behind Naanch in the ekent. The oldest daughter, a girl of about five, was fiddling with a sharp machete. It was as long as her arm, but no one snatched it from her. Neither of the parents even looked at her. It was perfectly natural for a child to twirl this dangerous slice of metal. Its cutting edge glinted in the shadows, and I had to fight the impulse to get up and take it away from her.

When we were all served our bowls of manioc beer, the ritual dialogue began. This ritual dialogue is called aujmatin, and it goes on for quite some time. Shakai spoke without gazing at Naanch. Naanch, in turn, answered, keeping his eyes firmly off to the side.

The aujmatin carries little real meaning in itself. It’s a repetition of stock phrases designed to point out some aspects of the Achuar value system: things like the importance of a visit, rules of hospitality, the duty of relatives to help one another, and most important, the obligation of men to display bravery.

Translated, the start of the aujmatin sounds something like this.

“Brother of my brother-in-law, I have come.”

“Haa. You have come to visit. It is right. I have been waiting.”

“Aih.”

“To do what I should be doing, I am here, waiting.”

“Brother of my brother-in-law, you are here for me.”

“Haa. Without knowing the news you bring, I am here. I am at home.”

“Aih.”

“I am waiting here for you to tell me the news that you bring. That’s why you have come.”

“Aih.”

And the ritual continues like that for quite a while.

As Shakai spoke, Naanch punctuated the speech with frequent grunts of “Aih” and “Haa,” which basically meant “It is true.” When Naanch talked, Shakai performed similar sets of punctuation. Neither one really got to any sort of point, but that was the point. The language was highly ritualized, a sort of disarming of any possible tensions before the real purpose of the visit commenced.

I peered into the wooden bowl on my lap. Naanch’s wife kept her eyes on our bowls, waiting to refill them should they become empty. A chicken lurched into the house through a hole in the fencing that served for walls. Naanch’s wife shooed it out and ordered the second child to take the baby from her.

Shakai sipped at the sloshing white gunk in his bowl. I considered mine, and a lump built in my throat. Occasionally, Naanch, as the host, turned in his conversation and spat. Even this was part of the ritual. It underlined, accentuated, what they were saying.

At last the ritual talk began to slow, and for the first time Naanch’s eyes drifted toward us. His eyes glanced off us and darted away. His voice, finally, started to loosen up a little, the mood to lighten. Shakai began to turn toward us more often. Naanch acknowledged our presence now and even asked me a question. Did I have children? he wanted to know. When I answered no — translated through Philippe into Spanish and then through Shakai into Achuar — Naanch seemed momentarily confused. How was that possible? I must surely not be much of a man.

We drifted back downriver in our canoe. Shakai was listening to us, though I didn’t think he was picking up many English words yet. Clearly, though, he was learning.

Philippe was explaining some of the misunderstandings that crop up from time to time. “There’s a medical team that comes in here every few months to check on things. The last time they were here they told the Achuar to boil their water before drinking it.”

“That sounds reasonable.”

“Yes, but I noticed that after the team was gone, the Achuar weren’t doing what they said. They certainly weren’t boiling their water. It took me quite awhile to finally figure it out.”

“Figure what out?”

“Well, what was really going on was that the Achuar thought the white doctors were telling them to drink boiling water.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, that’s how they understood it. And, of course, they thought that was pretty crazy to do, so they ignored the advice and went on drinking their manioc beer.”

That’s how it goes with misunderstandings.

“Another time,” Philippe continued, “someone brought in a little TV and a VCR. They must have rigged it up to a car battery or something. The Achuar were entranced with the movies. Whoever it was had also brought a bunch of Jackie Chan movies.” Philippe laughed. “So here were these Achuar men huddled around a little TV screen. Jackie Chan was dubbed into Spanish, and only a few of them even understood that. They liked the fighting, though. They thought it was pretty fierce. I think they watched the first movie about a dozen times, but when they got to the second Jackie Chan movie …” He laughed again.

“What?” I prompted.

“Well, this one guy came up to me. He asked about one of the minor characters, some actor in the movie. Well, I guess what happened was that this character — a bad guy, I suppose — got killed off in the first movie. And then in the second movie, a whole different one, different plot, different story, well, there was that same actor again. The Achuar didn’t get that. They thought he was killed in the first movie.”

“Wow!”

Philippe chuckled some more.

“Philippe?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you tell me the story now?”

“What story?”

“The story about the bird that fell in love with the moon.”

He nodded. “Okay, tomorrow. Bright and early in the morning.”

That night we saw the yellow eyes of caymans, a kind of crocodile, popping up from the surface in the lagoon beyond the huts. The evening sizzled with crickets and the curious plops and croaks of nocturnal frogs. It washed over the whole forest and lulled me into sleep.

In the very early hours, long before dawn, I got up with the Achuar. In a little shelter up from where I’d been sleeping, they had already stirred the coals of a fire. They had gathered for one of their most important practices.

This was the time for drinking wayusa tea. Each day starts like this, and the rituals around it serve many purposes. The first is medical. The Achuar served up the wayusa tea in steaming wooden bowls that they held in both hands near their faces. The air was surprisingly chilly, and we huddled around the fire. They talked as they drank.

Shakai showed me some wayusa leaves. They smelled a little like tobacco — the kind found in good cigars. Philippe was there, too, and said something to the effect that wayusa contained traces of quinine, an age-old remedy for malaria. I might have heard that wrong, because quinine is supposed to come only from the bark of the chinchona tree. At any rate, the Achuar drink this tea in large quantities until the sun comes up, then go outside the hut and vomit it all up.

That’s not because it makes them sick. Shakai told me, through Philippe, that their bellies get so full of the stuff that after a while they have to throw it up. And that’s the point. It’s a cleansing of the system. Shakai told me, by way of Philippe, that they actually think of it in the same way we might brush our teeth. It’s a daily ritual, a cleansing, and it’s one of their many methods to ward off the countless parasites and bacteria that infest the rain forest.

However, that’s only one element of the wayusa ceremonies. What’s even more important is the talk that goes on in the predawn darkness. This is the time for the telling of dreams.

The dreamtime they have just awakened from is, for the Achuar, something to pay careful attention to. A dream, a kara, can be an omen for hunting. Through an elaborate and highly creative deconstruction of dreams, the Achuar determine which species is best to hunt on a given day. They also predict from their dreams where these animals might be found and in what numbers. This, of course, is called a “hunting dream.”

There’s another sort of dream, as well, and it’s the most important kind. These dreams are called karamprar or “true dreams.” In a karamprar dream the Achuar believe they’ve been visited by a spirit, a wakan. It could be the wakan of an animal, especially a representative from the animals they often hunt, or it could be the soul of a human who has died.

I was told by Philippe the story of a young man who, in youthful exuberance, shot an iwianch japa, the kind of small red deer that inherits a person’s wakan if it resided in the person’s muscles upon death. The young man in this story only wounded the deer, in itself a sort of disgrace, and later had to chase it down with dogs. He was too young to realize that this animal shouldn’t be hunted because it could hold the wakan of a dead person. That night the boy was visited in his dreams by a dead man he’d known. The dead man’s head was bloody, and he complained loudly that a great injustice had been done to him. The boy, I presumed, never shot at another deer.

The verb kajamat, “to dream,” also applies to the vision quest that all males undergo. The women of the Achuar can also go on these vision quests, though it isn’t mandatory for them. For the kajamat the Achuar ingest a variety of hallucinogenic plants. One in particular, called juunt maikiua, induces several days of intense hallucinations and is used primarily to contact a being known as an arutam. This, apparently, is a sort of ancestral spirit, an ancient “warrior soul.”

It’s a complicated rite, but it seems that if one of the Achuar has killed another (which was, until a decade or two ago, a fairly regular occurrence), then that warrior’s wakan must be rebuilt or at least strengthened again, and this can only be done through contact with the mysterious arutam. It can only be accomplished through a vision quest.

This kajamat, or vision quest, is often described by the Achuar as “setting off on the path,” and I can’t help but notice similar practices among many of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. The vision quest, wherein a young warrior sets off on his own, starving himself, taking hallucinogens, until finally being “visited” by a spirit being is a rite found thousands of kilometres away in peoples with wildly different languages and beliefs. Why this should be isn’t clear. Was it a practice that developed spontaneously in different places, or was it a useful idea that was traded across the lands and peoples — like a new piece of technology?

Anthropologists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, who famously worked throughout the Brazilian Amazon, tend toward the idea that such practices and ideas develop spontaneously, that they arise almost naturally from some deep structural hardware in our brains. There are all sorts of cultural rituals that seem strangely similar across cultures, vision quests and creation stories being two. In fact, much has been made of the presence of flood myths around the world. But whether they developed spontaneously in different cultures (being somehow hardwired into our genes), or whether they migrated across continents and centuries, is a question that’s very difficult to answer. The point is they’re everywhere … and that makes one ponder the phenomenon.

As the first tendrils of light started to inch across the river, and even as the first bird calls tentatively peeped out of the shadows, the Achuar turned slowly from the examination of their dreams to the myth stories of their people. Another round of wayusa bowls was raised, and everyone settled in to listen.

These stories are called yaunchu aujmatsa mu, and all of them begin with the single word yaunchu, sort of an all-purpose “Once upon a time …” On this morning the Achuar had arranged a telling just for me — the story at last of the bird that fell in love with the moon. A younger man named Wahai spoke it. He sat well back from the fire. His face was in darkness, but every once in a while the crackling fire flared up and I saw him clearly, eyes glistening with the telling.

In the myth time the animals of the forest were all humans, and a man named Nantu was married to a woman called Aujujai. Nantu went out hunting every day, while Aujujai cultivated the crops on a little patch outside their thatch hut. She grew squash there, which was Nantu’s favourite food.

Unfortunately, it was her favourite, too, and after she finished cooking it, inevitably, she would eat it all herself. Terrified of her gluttony being discovered, she sewed her mouth partially closed so that her husband would see she couldn’t possibly have eaten it all. To further hide her transgression, she picked some unripened squash — green squash — and cooked it up as well as she could before Nantu returned from hunting.

When Nantu arrived, she fed him the green squash, but he knew immediately that it wasn’t ripe. “Where is the good squash?” he asked.

“There isn’t any,” his wife lied.

After that happened a number of times, Nantu knew something was up. So one morning, rather than go out to hunt, he hid in the forest near the hut and watched Aujujai as she cooked the good squash. She undid the stitches on her mouth and stuffed in the squash. Then she sewed her mouth shut again and set about harvesting the bad green squash for her husband.

Nantu had trapped Aujujai in her lies and selfishness, and he decided to leave her. She pleaded with him, crying pitifully, but he wouldn’t relent. He gathered up his things and departed their house forever. Aujujai followed him, begging him not to leave, but Nantu’s mind was made up.

He walked to the Monkey Ladder, the Auju Watairi, a giant vine attaching the earth to the sky, and began to climb it. Halfway up, he spotted his friend, the squirrel, and said that if Aujujai tried to follow him up the Monkey Ladder, the squirrel should bite through it.

Aujujai, of course, did try to climb up behind her husband. The squirrel nibbled through the vine with his sharp teeth, and the earth and sky were forever sundered. After this Nantu became the shining moon and Aujujai, in despair, became a bird. To this day, at the full moon, one can still hear Aujujai’s plaintive call — the five-note descending scale — that she sings throughout the night to the distant moon.

The bird (nyctibius griscus in its scientific delineation) does have a beak that looks as if it’s been stitched shut. In Achuar the bird’s name — ahjou jou jou — mirrors the sound of the bird singing. That was the same cry I’d heard Shakai imitate in the boat on my first night in the forest.

Many Achuar myth stories are morality tales, not unlike Aesop’s fables. In fact, from this particular myth, from the name of the bird, the Achuar people take the word ujajai, which means “I warn you” or “I advise you.” The stories are meant then to instruct as much as entertain. This one tells us that deceit and gluttony can’t be allowed in the forest, nor can selfishness. The community and the family, in particular, require that everything be openly shared. It’s critical for the Achuar’s very survival.

The rains came on the day I was to leave. The skies grew thick and exploded in a torrential downpour. Philippe came meekly into my hut to tell me that it was impossible for the plane to land. He had radioed ahead and was told that the landing strip was a slop of mud and that even if the sun came out it would take another full day for everything to dry.

There wasn’t much to do, so Shakai took us fishing after the rain stopped. The Kapawi River actually takes its name from the hand-sized silver fish that are abundant here. The Achuar indicate directions from the Kapawi, and through this river they also mark time. It so happens that the star cluster known as the Pleiades moves across the sky throughout the year in a direction that follows the river from upstream to downstream.

To the Achuar the Pleiades are the Musach, and that’s another one of their myth stories. The Musach were seven children, orphans, who fled from an angry stepfather downriver on a raft. It’s a tale, I suppose, that’s vaguely Cinderella-esque … at least in its portayal of an evil step-parent. The raft in the story is represented by the constellation Orion, and the father by the star Aldebaran — ever chasing them across the sky.

The word musach is also the Achuar name for counting a year. But it’s nothing like our own sense of time. In the Achuar language there are five forms of past tense. One of them is called yáanchuik wémiaje. This is the remote past, a time that can’t be remembered. Quite often it’s the same thing as the myth time.

Few Achuar know the names of their great-grandparents. Anyone who was alive before they were born isn’t remembered, so family lineages aren’t critical. In fact, when a person dies, there are a number of ceremonies performed to erase that person’s memory from the group. That’s not cruel. It’s actually related to the Achuar’s conceptions of the freeing of a dead person’s wakan. It’s a process in which the wakan is let loose to inhabit the form of another creature. So anything that took place more than two or three generations ago, or even as recently as thirty years, is already relegated to the remote past, to the time of the myths.

I’d found in the Achuar a people as untouched as I was likely to find on this spinning green planet of ours. But the world was surely sneaking in on them slowly and inexorably, but not completely yet. Our own fine technology — the great silver bird to get me in and out of here — was still no match for the rain forest’s torrents. We were, for the moment, stranded in the jungle. I was a twelve-day hike from the nearest road, and there was nothing to do but sit back and enjoy myself.

“Time,” Philippe Descola wrote in one memorable passage, “is not cumulative.” By that he meant the Achuar aren’t caught up in the idea of progress. They orient themselves in a time and space that aren’t fixed. There’s nothing here beyond the stars and the flow of the river to mark the gradual turn of their days.