On another river trip, Paiakan and one of the young men stood on the bow of the canoe as we paddled along and with great expertise they cast a circular net. The net had weights along the edge; when it was cast properly, centrifugal force on the lead sinkers splayed the net into a perfect circle that trapped fish beneath it as it sank. A rope tied to the center of the net caused the weights to move toward each other as the net was drawn up; fish were entangled in the mesh. I tried several times but failed miserably to duplicate the cast. All of the schooling I had spent so long to acquire was useless here.
One day, we asked to walk through the forest. Irekran's brother, Diego, and a friend of his were assigned to accompany us. As we followed a path, we were struck by the number of trees bearing fruit or nuts. Diego pointed out other edible plants everywhere. As we walked, the painted bodies of our guides blended into the pattern of shadows and light and rendered them virtually invisible to our unpracticed eyes.
We were enjoying ourselves, eating bananas and mangoes, swinging on vines over creeks, or slicing pieces of certain vines to drink the water that gushed out of the cut end. But we were incredibly vulnerable. Our guides would appear and vanish, and if they had taken off for any reason, there was absolutely no way we could have found our way back to the village. There were moments when I wondered if Tara and I had been foolish to put our children in such precarious situations. But we weren't abandoned, and soon we were back in familiar territory, walking through the small clearings where plants were cultivated and farinha was roasted.
Before we had decided in which month to go to Aucre, we had asked Darrell Posey when there might be a festival or celebration. “Oh, go on down anytime,” he advised. “They have celebrations all the time.” Sure enough, we had been there for about six days when the women appeared with their bodies painted very dark and wearing only a sash of the kind they carry their babies with. For perhaps an hour, they danced around in rows on the grounds the huts were facing. We learned it was the start of a three-day celebration to honor women.
Next day, the women appeared in far more elaborate regalia, beads, and feather headdresses, and sang and danced for a longer period. On the third day, their adornments were spectacular, with feathers woven into wooden frames that towered over the women's heads. Elaborately painted, the women began to dance just before sundown and continued into the pitch-dark night. Then we were told in not-so-subtle gestures that it was time for us to bugger off, which we did. We felt privileged to have witnessed this amazing ritual.
After we had been in Aucre for about a week, Sarika asked Tara to take a sliver out of the bottom of her foot. Tara looked at it and called me over; a small volcano was erupting from Sarika's skin. Tara disinfected a needle and the area around the “sliver” and began to pick an opening to remove the object. She got it out and put some more disinfectant and a bandage on as Sarika went off happily. Tara held up what she had pried out — a small, fat worm. It was a parasite that apparently infects mammals during a certain time of the year. It sheds its eggs in the ground, and as animals pass by, the parasite attaches to the skin and burrows in. I later heard of a German cameraman who had picked over seventy of them from his legs.
Earlier, I had stubbed my toe on a sharp stick projecting out of a wall. One of our biggest worries was getting an infection in a cut, so I sloshed on disinfectant and bound my toe tightly with tape. That night, the toe began to hurt, and by the second night, it was throbbing each time my heart beat. “Dammit,” I thought, “it must be infected.” Next morning, I tore off the bandage. The throbbing stopped; I had bandaged it too tightly. When I looked at the cut, it was healing well. But beside the cut under my toenail were three worms. Tara dug them out for me and I stopped wearing sandals.
Two days after we had arrived in Aucre, a woman had fallen from a roof and gashed herself very badly on a machete. We learned then that there was a radio phone in the village for emergencies, and frantic calls were made to send the plane in to take her out. After a day, the plane arrived and she was taken to Redenção, where she developed an infection and died. In a community of two hundred, an accident of this severity was upsetting to everyone.
About five days after our arrival, I woke early to wailing all around us. I woke Tara and suggested something bad had happened; perhaps someone had died. We got up and watched people streaming toward one of the huts, where a woman was screaming and trying to flagellate herself with pots and machetes — anything within reach. Other women restrained her and wailed with her. It turned out that an old man had died unexpectedly of tuberculosis. Next day we tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as the body was taken into the forest, where, we gathered, in the customary way it was left on a platform to be consumed by wildlife. I don't know the details of how his wife was dealt with, but somehow she was calmed, and the grounds were “cleansed” by a single male who walked back and forth for hours with a broom, sweeping away the spirits.
Two tragedies in a week were a lot for a small community to bear. After we had been in the village for some time longer, I woke in the night to shooting and yelling outside. It sounded as if people had been drinking and were now shooting wildly, though we had not seen alcohol or guns during our stay. Tara and I got up, and as we went to the door of the hut, there was Paiakan as if standing guard. “What's wrong?” we asked. He looked very grave and pointed to the full moon. “The moon is sick,” he said, “and my people are frightened. They blame it on brancos [white people].”
I had no idea whether he meant that the conjunction of the two tragedies earlier in the week, and now the moon, meant we were being blamed, or whether it was Brazilians in general who were being held responsible for the disasters. We looked at the moon, and it was a strange orange-brown color with blotches on it. “Is it an eclipse?” wondered Paiakan. We couldn't tell; the moon looked distinctly odd.
“The people are chanting the moon back to health,” explained Paiakan.
“Are we in danger?” Tara asked.
I expected him to reassure us, but his answer was, “Não sei [I don't know].” Now that worried us.
“Do you think people will calm down?” Tara persisted.
Again the chilling answer came back, “Não sei.” Patricia, Miles, Severn, Sarika, and I could claim “we're not brancos!”, but Tara says she felt her white skin shining out of that hut.
What were the odds of going to the heart of the Amazon at the same time a lunar eclipse would occur? An hour later, Tara looked out and saw a clean white moon, a telltale bite out of one side. To the Kaiapo, such an extraordinary occurrence is filled with significance, indicating the order within their world has been disrupted and somehow has to be set right. Could these “signs”—the deaths and the eclipse — be punishment for something they had failed to do, or a portent of something extraordinary to come? In a worldview in which everything is connected to everything else, these occurrences cannot be dismissed as meaningless.
Thoughts surged through my head. The Kaiapo are famous for their ferocity. In 1990 two Kaiapo parties of warriors attacked illegal settlements in their territory and claimed to have killed thirty peasants; Raoni, Sting's friend with the plate-sized labret, had led one of the parties in Xingu National Park. In Gorotire, I had met a Brazilian nurse who loved the Kaiapo. She had been living in one of the villages for twenty years when a rumor spread there that white people had attacked a Kaiapo in Redenção. The villagers were so infuriated that they went after the nurse, who had locked herself in her hut. She laughed as she recounted the incident, but she had warned me: when there is a crisis, it doesn't matter how well received you've been; you are not Kaiapo.