Chapter Twelve - Katani, Queen of the Headhunters

A Guiana Crested Eagle circled high in the air as a slow drizzle of rain began to pluck its drops into the red dust of the pathway, making little bombardments of red smoke that drifted off into the grass next to the trail. Several days had passed and the column of headhunters prodded their exhausted captives over a hundred miles to the summit of a mountain, where the trail wound downhill to the far side. Beyond the trees and the outcroppings of rock, the trail would lead almost straight down to the last sprawling rain forest and then the village.
By the time Mary and Carmelita’s position in the column reached the height of the overpass, Mary noticed some of the Indians stepping cautiously to the edge of the cliff and looking carefully over the side. For most of these natives of the low hills, this precarious elevation was new and a little tipsy. Mary also noticed the tops of trees beyond the ledge.

The pathway over this shelf on the side of the mountain was only a few feet wide, and the Indians walked carefully in single-file. At the far side they had to bend low to pass beneath the dangling roots of a strangler plant, growing from the limbs of a Cassias tree, and soon they would reach the safety of a wider path. Most of the Indians had already passed through these roots and were on the trail down to the valley, but some remained at the ledge, looking carefully over the side and talking in wonder of the great drop below.

From what the Indians were saying, Mary knew that it was not just a gorge at the bottom of this cliff, but a rocky canyon, and the treetops she saw were not striplings but the tops of emergent trees rising ninety feet above the rocky floor. With this realization, Mary knew what she had to do. This nightmare was going to end, and it was going to end now. Auger could not possibly have made it back against the current of the river by himself, and the Indians were getting excited because their village was getting close. She and Carmelita would be in their Shuara prison by nightfall, each in her own private hell. Since the scene outside the trading post, Riobamba had ignored Carmelita; but it was just matter of time. Mary had all but given up finding a way out, an opportunity to end the misery, but out of nowhere, here it was. A ninety-foot drop into heaven, and an end to the pain; it was time to go home.

Mary swung Carmelita up into her arms and in the same motion lunged for the edge of the cliff. The child was comatose with exhaustion and silently held her face to her mother’s breast, thankful for any respite from walking. Mary only had a few steps to take and she was running for the cliff, kicking dust and rocks into the blue in front of her as she ran. Leaping over the edge, with Carmelita clutched in her arms, and with one last scream of defiance, Mary was clear and falling.
A strong arm grasped her hair, and her body swung back and slammed against the wall of the canyon. Mary felt a great pain down her back, and her eyes flashed red as her world went black. Mary clung frantically to consciousness for Carmelita’s sake now, for she could feel the child clinging to her leg.
Riobamba had noticed the woman captive suddenly stand up straight as she walked, and guessed her intentions. Now he lay on his stomach at the edge of the chasm with Mary swinging by her hair and shirt collar clutched tightly in his hand.

The panic-stricken shaman immediately threw themselves across the young warrior’s legs to keep him from being pulled over, and they, as well as the other Indians, cried out frantically with encouragement. What would their fate be should the search party return to Jeencham without the white-haired woman?
Mary hung there at the end of Riobamba’s arm and swung slowly, as a pendulum, while Carmelita slid further down her leg. Carmelita’s grip was slipping on the slick denim fabric of Mary's jeans, until soon she was clinging in silent desperation to her mother’s boot. All this time the child had not uttered a sound. She had long ago resigned herself to any fate befalling her, as long as she was within reach of her mother’s touch.
Raindrops trickled down Mary’s face, mingling with the tears, leaving long clear paths through the red dust on her cheeks.

The excited talk and encouragement above continued, as all with the Indians was panic and confusion. But the shaman organized themselves enough to drop a rope down beside Riobamba’s arm, so he could loop it about the captive with his free hand.
Mary had accepted defeat in her efforts to end their lives, and now she did everything possible to save Carmelita. Mary tried to pull her daughter up so she could loop the rope around her instead, against the objections and protest from above. She had the rope in her grasp and was reaching down for Carmelita, when there was the sudden sensation of weight no longer there, and she could feel her own flesh beneath her fingertips. Carmelita had pulled off her mother’s boot as she fell silently to her death on the jagged rocks below.

Chapter One - Katani, Queen of the Headhunters

The boy is very interested in the drawings. Some are charcoal sketches and some are transparent ink illustrations that hang on the walls of my cantina, amid old fishnets, shark’s teeth, and a couple of rusty old pirate swords. The pages flutter silently in a breeze coming off the Pacific.
I put them up to add some color to the place, but since they were drawn fifty years ago, they mostly serve to make me feel old. The drawings are of the Indians I met upon arriving in South America for the first time. I am, in fact, at this time married to one of their daughters. Her name is Katani. She took our two kids and went with her sister to visit family and friends at her home village. My wife’s tribe is called the Mura Shuaras. These particular Indians are headhunters even to this day.
The Spanish called them Jivaros, but they call themselves Shuaras. At one time in their history they were all savage headhunters, and numbered among that handful of Indian tribes in history who were never conquered by the white man. Unless you consider civilization, with its quest for oil, gold and land, and the church, which finally brought most of the rain forest Indians to their knees. They may still carry their shotguns to church, but most of them had taken to wearing the white man’s shirt and worshipping the white man’s god.

That is, all but my wife’s tribe. Her father, Jeencham, is their witchdoctor. He is a also their leader; a horrible man with an immense ego, prone to ridiculous tantrums, but he possesses powers of magic that are legendary throughout the rain forest. Jeencham would never be chief of the Mura Shuaras. His would never be the responsibility of settling earthly squabbles between villagers over chickens, wives and daughters. Jeencham’s is a magic that comes directly from the demons, and he wands it about as his mood or whim suggest. He is Jeencham the heartless, even to his friends; those who think best of him.
His powers are far beyond the simple shaking of gourd rattles and incantations whispered into the flames of a fire. He could turn the course of a river, if that river was flowing against his canoe, and I’ve heard he imprisons an enemy inside a boulder next to a path, and people passing by would hear a muffled voice calling, “Let me out; let me out.”

Jeencham is most of all a survivor. Where the throwing about of evil spells is the lifeblood of this clan, who more than the witchdoctor is to be suspected when things go wrong. The life expectancy of a witchdoctor in the rain forest is a month or two, but Jeencham has been around for decades. The backbone of the Shuaras is spirit worship and revenge of the highest order. If a neighbor got sick and you had been seen arguing with him, then he got sick because you sent him an evil spirit. Even as he lay dying, this neighbor would be holding his brother’s hand in his, and in his last throes of death his lungs would collapse with one last, desperate, gasping plea for revenge, “Get the sonofabitch for me!” There is not a path down which you would be able to travel, nor a drink you would be able to sip from a jungle stream, that you would not be expecting the bamboo knife to fall.

None is more feared than Jeencham. The witchdoctor is god over everything within reach of his adequate wrath, and he has in him not the slightest trace of pity. He ego allows him to remain in the Shuara village only because his daughter, Katani, was born there. Though only as frightened spectators, the villagers had been witness to a divine happening. They were all part of a great moment in time; the day the witchdoctor’s daughter was born. That child of course, is my wife, Katani.
Life has been good for us here on the coast. Katani inherited this cantina, on whose walls I hung my pictures, from an old man I remember only as Uncle Eli. His devotion to Katani and Sumaya was for daughters he never had, so when he died he left them everything.

The cantina sits at the intersection of the Coastal Highway and a road coming down from the dunes. Not much traffic, just the locals and a traveler now and then, and a serenity that can only be found living near the ocean. We sleep in a room out back, on a double bed beneath an open window, with sugar cane stalks scattered on the floor for a rug.
We all got drunk one night and painted a sign to put over the door; La Cantina, the sign reads, no shoes allowed, open all night, hot chili, cold beer and Tequila, papaya wine, oysters, and a local marimba band every Saturday night. That is, after all, all we ever wanted. The sun gleams off a lady’s mirror lying in the clutter on an opposite window, and its radiance sparkles like rolling diamonds across the glasses above the bar. Like everything else, it reminds me of Katani.

The boy Miguel is still looking at my drawings. “Tengo oystras y’ Cevasa,” I say to him. “I have oysters and beer. That’s the epitaph I want on my tombstone, and my wife promised she’d see to it.”
“Si, Señor,” Miguel replies, lost in the illustrations. In his ragged shirt and bare feet he is himself some kind of portrait. He came with his parents from a small fishing village up the coast. They bought a bottle of tequila and returned to the bus parked outside. Through the window I see the old mixto. The half-bus, half-truck looks to be held together with tattered rope and rusty bailing wire, a few nails here and there hold the seat boards in place, and the roof is stacked high with bundles and boxes, including a crate of clucking chickens. Most of the passengers siesta outside in the shade of the palms.
Miguel’s attention is now on a charcoal sketch of a beautiful, white-haired, teen-aged Indian girl and her strange baubles, a tsantsa, a shrunken head, hanging from the lobe of each ear. “Quien es la hermosa muchacha on la cabeza encogida?” the boy asks, referring to the girl with the shrunken heads.
“She is my wife,” I tell him offhandedly. It amuses me that this makes perfect sense to him.
“Bella. Y’esta?”

Now he is pointing to an ink painting of a B-24 Liberator Bomber skimming close above the sponge-like treetops of the Ecuadorian jungle.
“Inside that plane my life in Ecuador began, Miguel,” I tell him. “It was on that plane that my life changed completely from the way it was one day to the way it would be for the rest of my life.”
“Oh, Señor, porfavor, please, mister,” he pleads. “Please tell Miguel the story.”
“But what about your bus?”

“Mi mama esta en el bus, she will not let the driver leave without me. Dille a Miguel la historia del avion. And tell Miguel story of pretty lady with shrunken heads.”
Taking a beer from the cooler I hand it to Miguel; he slides onto a seat across the bar, his eyes wide with anticipation. I pull out one of the empty fruit crates that serve as bar stools in our humble place; a cat skits from beneath it and leaves through an open window. “Sure, Miguel, I’ll tell you the story of the girl with the shrunken heads. But first, I need to tell you about the airplane. That’s how I came to South America. The day I met Katani she was searching for the Shuara village where she was born, and confront her father for the first time. It was fifty years ago; she was fifteen; I was seventeen.
“The year was 1965, my best friend and I were on that bomber. I had begged him to take me along until finally did. That’s where I should begin my story, Miguel, all of us on that big B-24 bomber heading for Ecuador to pick up a planeload of Marijuana.”

Chapter Two - Katani, Queen of the Headhunters

“We’re halfway there!” Ed called over the roaring drone of the bomber engines. To each side of us burned two Whitney Stratton engines with all the power in the world churning through the cloud-filled miles. At least, that’s the way he would describe it. Ed had done this many times.
“Great!” I replied, having no idea what he said. Who could hear above this? That we were halfway to some little back-country village was all I knew, somewhere in the depths of the Ecuadorian jungle, where the local’s under the direction of their police chief would block off a dirt road where we would land. And within the area of this little landing strip, nobody could enter unless they were with our group or theirs; or if they brought more guns. We were flying into Ecuador to load up the Liberator with pot. My capacity was that of an observer. From the journal I intended to write and illustrate, would come a freelance story about the pot smuggling business, for a fledgling underground newspaper in San Francisco. I was learning fast, and one thing was already clear; never had anything this exciting happened to me in my life.

I knew absolutely nothing about South America other than what I had picked up in magazines like National Geographic. I knew the people there spoke Spanish, so I brought along a little English / Spanish dictionary in case I got a chance to interview somebody. That’s pretty funny now. I also knew that through the middle of South America ran the enormous Amazon River. Most of the air they breathe in the world comes from the trees in the Amazon River Basin. And I knew the equator runs right through the center of Ecuador.
Our plane was taking this route instead of the more popular Colombian route for exactly that reason. In 1965, Colombia had become too dangerous for the traffickers. The country had been chopped up into little squares on a map in some office back in Washington, and designated with a little red flag as being target numbro uno. The surveillance was stepped up and there were some busts. But this came and went with the elections back in the States. The people in charge of the busting on this end were usually the heads of the cartels themselves, taking from both ends. This, of course, could only be done by working within the law. Regardless, when the politicians in America started putting on the pressure, Colombian policemen were forced to actually arrest somebody. Well, as my friend Ed pointed out, it wasn't going to be us.

In a month or two the skies over Colombia would be clear again, and the pilots could return to the shorter run. However, nothing but great things had been said about the pot we were flying in to pick up. It was grown right there on the equator; how hot do you want it? The only thing about this particular pot is it’s grown on a mountainside right in the middle of headhunter territory, by some of the relatives gone civilian. The only kind of pot of this quality in the world and the only way you could get it by taking it from the headhunters. Anyway, that’s the way I felt. I asked Ed, “Where’d you get a plane like this?”

“David borrowed it from a cousin of a cousin back in Florida who owned an air museum. It's a B-24 Liberator bomber. A classic. I don’t think you’ll want to put that in your story, though. You have to be careful, for my sake, too. Never put in any real names, and sketching likenesses is out of the question. You don’t ever want to do anything to cross these guys.”
“Lawrence and Dave?”
“Lawrence, one of the pilots, came into some money, so he and David put this Ecuador thing together. Dave borrowed this huge bomber because it could hold so much pot. If he was going to risk his ass hauling pot, it was going to be worth his trouble. But being loaded with this weigh means we’ll be riding slow and heavy on the way out.”
Right now we were skimming along nice and easy, the warm air rising from the jungle below to carry us along. I was hoping to get a firsthand feel for the job at hand, and it was all garnered on Ed's word of honor. I wouldn't have done that. But, here I was, heading into the unknown with an excellent chance of facing death or prison. I was out to answer some questions, like, how do these hippie-types of the mid-sixties feel about running Marijuana into the States, risking their lives or freedom? What is it about what they do that makes them genuine American heroes? To think that in the 60s you could do the same amount of time in jail for smoking a joint as you would for shooting somebody amazed even me, who hadn’t smoked Marijuana. And what if you happened to get caught with a huge plane like this loaded down with five thousand pounds of it? It would matter little at that point whether I smoked pot or not.

Along on the haul were a couple guys Lawrence decided could help with the counting and loading. Bugs and Daffy were the names I had given them, because they wouldn't tell me what their real ones were. And, well, they didn't like me. They thought my being along was wasted space and extra weight, which may have been the case; however, they had their reasons for being there and I had mine. The minor skirmishes I’ve encountered in life seem pale in the shadow of the one happening now. Up until now my life had been somewhat boring. If we were caught, I would do heavy time for even breathing the same air as traffickers who dare bring this much Marijuana into the States. Strange and new things were happening all around me, and I was going to get a great story. Some risks need be taken.

Chapter Seven - Katani, Queen of the Headhunters


Carmelita was seven years old the first time Auger Crank stopped in at the Cross's trading post. He had just moved into the region from the Chiribibequete area to the North, and was heading into the deep dark, as he called it, with his then-partner Croach, a good and reliable man long since dead. They were talking idly around the wood stove with Abel about their plans for the trail ahead, when out of nowhere Croach pulled a tsantsa from his pouch. The shrunken head was blackish gray and not that long deceased, and it swung from his fist in a quick, pendulum-like motion like a watch on a chain. Croach had picked it up along the way like so many others, but he pulled this one out now to put a scare into the little girl playing close around the counter behind them.
Abel said nothing and only watched as Carmelita walked over to Croach and stroked the tsantsa like a kitten. “Poor man,” she said, with the sincere compassion of a seven-year-old. Carmelita knew well what it was. All the kids had them; or their families did, stuck away here and there in drawers and on shelves about their houses, and they were long past being a source of surprise or astonishment to the Cross’s daughter. Shrunken heads went with the territory.

Auger’s mud caked boots clumped heavily on the boards of the dock, as he set the heavy bag down as he lifted Carmelita. Auger was huge like a mountain and dark like the Indians and his every movement spoke of danger and adventure. He swung the beautiful blonde child of happiness up into his arms and hugged her as her father approached.
“Nostros tambien ohmos los rumores,” Abel said, stepping down from the landing. “We heard the rumors, too. But I never thought it was anything that would bring you back from your daily wage and an extra night in mother jungle. At least not for safety’s sake.”
“What's in the bag?” Carmelita asked, “What's in the bag?”
“It’s not my safety I’m concerned about,” Auger said to Abel. He looked into Carmelita’s smiling face. “It’s for your mother, Paharita,” he said, kissing her cheek and letting her slide to the dock. The two men hugged, and Auger hefted the bag back over his shoulder. “Abel, this latest twirl involves that old sonovabitch, Jeencham. He’s decided he needs to mate with a white woman or the entire Jivaro race will come to an end.”
“Mate with a white woman?” Abel asked calmly, as he watched Mary come out on the deck. “Well, there aren't many of those around.”

The sun sparkled on Mary’s long, white hair, as a soft mist of rain began to fall, appearing in the sunlight like tiny, multi-colored snow. Mary was short and gaining a little, but definitely thirties-sexy. Her navy blue shirt hung sweat-ringed and loose around her shoulders, to where it was tied Jamaican-style in front. She wore a pair of Abel’s old denim jeans, with colorful patches sewn into the knees, and the bottoms of the hems hung loose and frayed about her ankles. Mary was barefoot, and crossed her legs as she leaned forward on the railing. The white hair fell long and shiny over one shoulder and poured down the front of her shirt like the San Rafael. She was the grown-up version of Carmelita, and their fun, laughter and beauty were known for miles around.
“Traiganlo adentro!” Mary called down.
“Coming!” They answered in unison.

Auger said quietly to his friend, “I think we need to take Mary and the Princess downstream for a while.”
Abel said nothing right away because he was still taking it all in, and Carmelita was asking too many questions to allow room for a more serious discussion. But Abel knew that Auger Crank was not one to take unnecessary precaution, and as they climbed the steps to the landing, he listened as the big hunter explained, “Jeencham’s not just ordinary witchdoctor,” he said. “This boy has magic powers the rain forest has never seen. He don’t open a gate, it just opens and he walks through. He doesn’t have to kill an enemy; he has the enemy kneel down in the dirt in front of him and cut off his own head!”
“Right,” Abel smiled.

“Abel, listen to me. It’s not worth it. What’s a few days on the mainland?”
The professor got out of the canoe and ventured to the top of the grassy bank, and, wiping the sweat from his eyes with a rag from the canoe, called out again, “Mr. Crank, you promised!”
“The professor’s getting antsy,” Auger said to Abel. “I need to talk to Mary.”
Mary was waiting and she held the door open as they entered the store. Auger slumped the burlap bag and its contents onto the counter; then lifted Carmelita up beside it.
“Is the professor coming in?” Mary asked.

“He’s in a hurry, Mary. Said he’d wait with the canoe.”
“We’ve heard some rumors, too. Is that what brought you back early?”
“Well, the rumor that convinced me was when a screaming, bleeding Indian came stumbling into our camp two nights ago, and died with his hands in a death grip clenching the professor’s collar. The professor knew the language too, and upon hearing this man’s dying words, he changed suddenly from this rude, nervous, busy-body, little crumb sonovabitch, into my most humble servant. From then on he was more than willing to roll a tent or anything else needed to get the show on the road home. Before the Indian died in the professor’s arms, he told the little guy that the Mura Shuaras were coming, and in fact, were at that moment raiding his village, murdering and taking heads. Well, if the previous rumors weren’t enough; that did it. The professor’s been on me to make miles ever since.”

Carmelita pulled down the edge of the burlap bag and her look of wonder made Auger laugh. “It’s an old Victrola,” he said, pulling down the rest of the bag. “A record player; the old, wind-up kind. Haven’t seen one of these since I was little back in Chicago.”
“It sure is different than the record player at grandma’s,” Carmelita said. “And what’s this?”
Mary stepped closer and picked up the horn. “This makes the music loud,” she said. “You hook it up like this.” Attaching the morning glory-shaped horn into place, she scooted the machine around. “An antique like this should be worth some money,” she said to Auger. “Very rare you’d find one that actually works.”
“It’s supposed to work. I haven’t tried it. I got it from old Santos off his tug at Wild Bend. Said he got it in Iquitos for his wife, but they had a fight and she left him. So, would I trade him that last bottle of Old Jack I kept in my pack? With the professor pestering me every minute to speed up I didn’t feel like drinking, so we traded. It’s yours, Mary.”

“Auger, you should keep it. It’s an antique.”
“Si, pues yo tambien,” he said. “What would I do with it? I move around too much, and the professor don’t like it when I dance in the canoe.”
“Well, thank you,” she said, laughing. From the bag Mary pulled three black discs, wrapped in old newspaper. “Are these the records?”
“That’s the only drawback, Mary. Santos only had those three records. He got them from his uncle who must have run a funeral home. They’re weird stuff, soundtracks from horror movies in the thirties. His wife threw the other ones at him, and they all got broken. You’ll probably want to trash em and get some real music the next time your ol man takes you jookin in Andoas. Maybe Carmelita can bring you back some of that jazz stuff from the States next time she visits grandpa.” Auger ran his huge hand over the top of Carmelita’s smooth white hair.
The child laid a disc on the turntable while Mary carefully wound the handle. They all watched and waited as the needle pulled and scratched, and then smiled with amazement at the incredibly morbid, haunting sounds that came droning from the funnel; a funeral dirge of sorts, with the sad moans of cello and organ. They all looked at each other and laughed.

“Me gusta!” Carmelita smiled.
“I like it, too, baby,” her father said with a slight cough. “Turn it up so the neighbors can hear.”
“We won’t have any neighbors if they hear this,” Mary offered.
“I warned you,” Auger shrugged, motioning Abel to the refrigerator.
“Let it play,” Mary said. “It’s the only music we’ve had since the radio wore down. There is something attractive about it.”
Abel pulled three beers from the refrigerator, and popped the caps with an opener from a drawer. After handing one to Mary and Auger, he pulled out a chair and leaned back against the wall. The room was quiet but for the music, a clock ticking somewhere in another room, and distant calls from the monkeys and parrots. The front room stretched around past the doorway to the kitchen area, and from there it was walled from floor to ceiling with shelves. These shelves were stacked with everything a traveler or hunter might need, from tents to blankets to food both dried and canned. Lazy, lazy, summer was written into every shadow througout the store, as the hot wind caressed the Palms outside, causing their fronds to make occasional rustling sounds against the window glass. Auger and Abel looked at each other and smiled at Mary and Carmelita’s interest in the morbid strains of the music. Finally Auger asked everyone, “How would you people like to follow me and the professor back to civilization for a couple days?”

Mary put her arm around Carmelita. She was afraid Auger was going to say something like that. Auger Crank was stone-cold bravery incarnate, and for him to even hint at being worried was cause for stern contemplation. She waited.
Abel had been listening, but now he said, “Auger, I didn’t think the Jivaros took heads any more.”
“Abel,” he replied bluntly, “they're looking for a white woman.”
“Yeah, we heard that, too,” Abel said. “The drums have been going day and night. But, a White woman? Jivaros hate white people. And they have even less regard for woman in general. The Jivaros around here may get drunk now and then, just like we do, but they would never harm anyone.”
“Wampimi Jivaros,” Auger scoffed, “basket weavers. The Jivaros coming this way are the real thing; the last holdouts from the good old days when your head wasn’t worth a nickel this side of the mountains. And true, only a sacred quest like the one riding on these rumors would bring these Indians out of the hills. But sacred to these people means the worshipping of demons, living their lives by mad prophecies chanted by witch doctors beneath spells brought on by hallucinogenic drugs, and ritualistic, incestuous orgies to which their daughters succumb from the time they are able. No, people, I’m thinking this will be different than anything we’ve seen before.”
Mary lifted Carmelita to the floor and turned her toward the shelf behind them, as the men continued talking. She sat down on a box and began handing Carmelita food cans from a box, which the child put onto rows on the shelves. The sound of the crickets rose with the setting of the sun, and all across the jungle the air whirred with symphony. Abel lit a kerosene lantern as the sun shone its last through the leaves outside the window, its final golden rays streaking through the room. And then it was gone. The people were silent but for a word or two of mumbled conversation, lost in their thoughts, until they turned to the sound of crunching feet coming up the heavy plank stairway.

The professor was angry, and he shook his head and waved an extended index finger in unison. “You promised, Mr. Crank. You promised we’d be out of here by sunset. Well! It is sunset! It’s dark! It's night outside! And we’re still here in some fish market when we should be making our way to civilization! Surely you don’t doubt my translation of that poor Indian’s words.”
“We all speak Jivaro, Professor,” Auger reminded him.
“Shuara, Mr. Crank. The Spanish conquistadors called them Jivaros, but they’re all dead now. These Indians call themselves Shuaras (Schwa).”
The old man seemed stiff and rigid, sweating in a tight tweed coat, and bottom-heavy because of the oversized pants stuck into boots that came up to his knees. His shirt was white at one time, but now it was wrinkled and torn and matted like his face with dried mud and streaks of grass stain.
“I have Doctorates in both Botany and Anthropology, my man,” he continued, “and the true meaning in the words of God's chosen traveler that night in our camp did not pass without special meaning through these old ears. I want to leave here now! I want to get back to civilization so that we might return as soon as possible!”
Now the others indeed stood silent. A whole minute went by as the professor continued his tirade, walking back and forth before them while flailing his arms, but his listeners were too stunned to hear what else he had to say. Auger realized, with unmasked astonishment, that he had been wrong. The professor was not leaving because he was afraid; he was leaving so that he could regroup, re-supply, and come back!

“It might interest you to know,” the professor continued, “that these Indians are the most fearsome, and yet the most noble Indians that ever walked the earth. They take heads at times as you and I might pick berries in the park, and they worship spirits of a nature that we have yet to imagine. But at the same time they have no word in their vocabulary for lie. Imagine! The truth is all they know. They’ve already found man’s purpose here on earth and they don’t even know it! I want to contact my sponsors on this, gear up a team with equipment and return to the fray with cameras rolling. Do you know what something like this would be worth on the Movietone market?”
The others watched and listened and still no one moved, except for Auger, who was slowly shaking his head. “My, my, professor,” he said, “I guess I owe you an apology. I thought you was runnin.”
“Running?” the professor said, stopping and turning to the big hunter. “Yes, yes, of course, that would figure in the mind of a rural soul like yourself, and the others who cling with wheatstraw vision to the corn and the soil and the roots. I am no dreamer. I am an Anthropologist, Mr. Crank, and a good one. I know exactly what is happening here. The vision of this witch doctor, Jeencham, is not unlike the one we ourselves cling to with such passion concerning three wise men and the birth of a child upon a cold and distant desert! It is my duty to record this phenomenon, be it ritual or superstition, or the true act of the demons, so it will have its true place in history. I shall record it exactly as it comes down the pike, Mr. Crank!”

“You’ll be coming down the pike, professor, with your head held high above the chanting mob on a stick. Are you crazy? Nobody’s gonna bring you back up this river!”
“I remind you that I have the substantial backing of a government in need of quinine. Quinine is the essential destroyer of malaria, and without it this country’s armies in the tropics would die rapidly, a process that would render them quite inadequate at their jobs. And considering every acre along this bottomland contains at least 150 species of trees, what do you think my chances of finding enough Cinchonas to guarantee a quota reasonable enough to secure sponsorship for any field trip I wish to make.”
Mary watched Auger and she took another sip of beer. She could see him wince in the light of the lantern as he looked across at Abel.
“I know you got a whole warehouse of guns in here,” Auger said to his friend, “and all the ammunition on the Pastaza. And I know you think you’re going to be safe and you’re not coming but I have to ask; will you come with me?”

“Auger,” Abel said, “we’ve never had trouble from that far away before. Those renegades are probably hundreds of miles away. It’s incredible to think they would come here. We appreciate your concern, but you already know the answer. We’ve been here too long to run away now.”
“You wouldn’t be running away; we’d just be getting out of a neighborhood ruckus for a day or two.”
Abel continued, “In the end it would pass over like all the other scares that have rolled through this region over the years, and nothing ever came of them. We can’t leave here and have some drunken misfits in their mad stupor trash the place and destroy all that we’ve built. Auger, they could burn the place to the ground.”
“Let em burn the place down. Lo reconstruiremos de nuevo. Abel, you weren’t there! That dying Indian was wearin a mask of blood and it dripped upon my sand a morbid prophecy. We need to leave this place for a while. At least let me take the girl.”
The girl.

Carmelita finished shelving the cans and now sat listening passively to the grownup talk from the other side of the lantern’s glow. She flicked small potatoes onto the floor to a monkey who picked them up, smelled them, tasted one now and then, and tossed them all into a small paper bag. The monkey soon worked its way to the screen door, dragging the bag behind him, and Carmelita got up to let him out. Outside she took a seat on the steps, in the twilight beneath the stars, and watched as the monkey swung away in one great glide off the top railing into the trees. From there he sailed across the clearing with the bag of potatoes clutched in his hand.
Carmelita became lost in thought. She had heard them talk like this before, when she wasn’t supposed to e listening, and although it wasn’t scary then, it was getting to be now. The grownup talk was strange and unusual, and what she was hearing was concern for her and her mother’s safety. Like her mother, the thing that worried Carmelita most was not the fact that the renegade Indians were killing up in the hills, for that happened now and then; what concerned Carmelita was the effect the were having on Auger Crank. Auger Crank was not some mainland tourist guide passing through on his way to another dollar. Nor was he like old Santos who delivered supplies in his sputtering tug to theirs and other outposts along the river. Auger was far above the best of the elite, even the quiet ones who knew their trade well, with their shiny rifles and sweating squadrons of helpers and followers, the quintessential white hunters of lore and legend on the Pastaza.
Auger Crank was a class unto his own.

He was the guide and the hunter of all time. Carmelita could remember watching from her window when Auger would arrive at their dock, and lines of the roughest adventurers and Indian guides, all savages themselves with their own reputations to tingle the back of the neck and humble the very shadow of the Devil, while loading their supplies from the dock into their boats, would stand aside and part a path all the way to the trading post, even before Auger Crank disembarked his canoe. His was the reputation and legend to shame all the rest. He was her uncle, her hero, her very own person of mystery and secrets. If ever there was ever a strength so powerful it conquered simply by its presence, that was Auger Crank.
Carmelita’s roots had not had time to grow so deep as to understand what was now so confusing, but she was old enough to realize that the man for whom the world stood still was here in her home and he was asking her parents to leave until the danger passed. The night was full upon the landing when she stood up, dusted off her pants, and went back inside. One thing was certain, Carmelita thought to herself, she was not going to leave without her parents.

The professor walked past the young girl in the doorway without speaking, and hurried back down the steps to the canoe. Carmelita could hear heard her mother telling Auger, “The ride down the Pastaza this time of year is dangerous. I know she’d love the ride on the river and hang out in a real town with Auger Crank, but I’d like to plan things a little better before sending my only daughter out on the Amazon at night, with the crocodiles and the rising water. And it would take days to get back against that current. Even under the circumstances, I believe Carmelita is safer here.”
“Mr. Crank!” Elroy Clanston called from the darkness of the riverbank. “They’re not coming. We do not have any more time to argue!” He had failed badly in his attempt to push the canoe to the water’s edge by himself. “They’ll be fine,” he added. “This thing may all be over before I can return!”
Auger lifted Carmelita into his arms and they all descended the steps together. “Well, Abel,” he said, “the rumor’s at least two days behind us, so maybe things will be all right till I get back. Maybe by tomorrow night, if I can find a safe place to drop the professor. I'll take him as far as I have to, then I’ll come on back and hang around for a couple days, just in case. Traere mas cerveza.”
“Do that,” Mary smiled.

Auger slid the canoe back into the current, with the professor sitting in the front, and moved into it with the same motion. With one cut of the paddle they were off again on the cold, white water of spring, as hands of farewell floated here and there behind them. “Stay close, Abel!” Auger called back, and they were gone around the bend.
Carmelita stood with her parents for a while, listening to the river slapping against the piling of the dock, with the waxing moon hovering above them. And with the rush of the water and the tambourine rattle of the cicada in the grass, they turned and walked slowly back to the trading post.

Chapter 31- Katani, Queen of the Headhunters

Zamora prepared her smoked fish in a hand-built smoker, hammered from a sheet of tin, and Esmeralda would trade these smoked fish for other food and supplies that the family needed. To do this, Esmeralda would go on journeys lasting several days to the mainland, taking a path that wound in and out of the villages and homes of her many friends along the way. At the end of this trail was the river and a trading post where a goodly portion of the goods were exchanged for Tequila. Esmeralda’s journeys when Tirisa was along were a lot different than those with Zamora. While trips with Tirisa were wonderful, listening to the imagination of a 23-year-old, her plans and problems, and life in general, trips with Zamora were of an entirely different scale.
For one thing, Zamora and Esmeralda would start hitting the mescal in the store where and while they were buying it. They would pass the bottle between themselves and the store person, and anyone else around, and from there the journey home would begin.

On one such occasion Katani and Sumaya were with them, followed close behind, playing and busying themselves in their own world, but always listening. Great insights into life and happiness were reached in these discussions between Zamora and Esmeralda. When one or the other of the women would languish on some memory from their past, or would tell a particularly interesting story, the kids would get quiet and follow and listen closely, because some of it was really good stuff, about the outside world and things they would never see in the rain forest.
They were all nearing the inlet where they had left the flatboat, when Esmeralda asked Zamora, “Have you ever been in love?”
Zamora, at a hundred and four, took a seat on the side of the boat. “Seguro. En algunas ocasiones,” she said.
“When?” Esmeralda asked.
“Once, when I was young. And again, years later, after I had been in South America for a while, I met Magalla. Magalla was an old headhunter, just like every other man around here over the age of forty. I met him when he came to the store where I bought provisions. I was living with a European couple at the time, teaching their daughter English. The family lived in a large house in a town about fifteen miles outside of Francisco de Orellana. I had been a teacher’s aid in Spanish back in the States, and found when I got here that I could support myself tutoring the children in reading. At least I could get traveling money.

“And then I met Magalla. He came in to the trading post from the river running past the town, with two younger men he called his guarda espalda, his bodyguards. They were really his sons. Well, we all met there and we talked a bit. Magalla was strong and big like the trees and his face and chest held the scars of his colorful past. He was likable and he liked me. From the moment I first smiled at him, his young men set up a wall of safety around me that exists to this day. One of the boys died, and the other you know, is Perriot. Magalla took me to the lake and I’ve been living there since. Magalla had his tsantsas, too, and he got them by protecting the forest. Magalla would not let anyone cut down the trees. He said that the Amazon rain forest was the fountain that gave life to the world. “The trees are our mother, and our mother is worth dying for,” he would say. “And many did, if you listen to Magalla.”
“Magalla,” said Esmeralda, “I feel as though I know him.”

“Those were happy days,” Zamora continued. “We drank and we fished and at night we danced and sang on the dock. Just like we do now. Only back then there weren’t any shrimp to boil. Those happened when Katani tasted one on a trip to the coast.”
“Los Frailes,” Katani said, without thinking, such was the intensity she had been listening to the story. This was her grandmother. She loved to hear Zamora and Esmeralda tell stories of their past, especially the things that happened to them when they were young. It was a history of both, the massive, beautiful country, and the two wonderful women. Katani acquired her taste for shrimp while on a trip with Auger Crank and Sumaya to the west coast. He peeled some boiled shrimp for the girls, and cracked a few oysters, and a miracle happened. Immediately upon their return to the lake, one of the springs let go salt water, alive with shrimp, and the sandy area around this spring became stocked with oysters.

“Who was I to complain?” Zamora said afterward, “I like those things, too.”
Esmeralda sat don the side of the boat next to Zamora while Katani and Sumaya listened from where they waded in the shallows. The sun was overcast, and thunder rumbled across the dark green of the jungle far off in the distance. The water in the inlet was still, with ripples pushed up by the wind, and these lapped softly against the hull of the boat. Above where Zamora and Esmeralda sat, there stood elephant ear plants with leaves twice the length of the boat. The girls explored the shallows, and the women basked in the comfort of the afternoon. Zamora pulled a second bottle of Tequila from her bundle, and set it on her knee.
“It wasn’t until Magalla was gone I realized how much we were in love. He was the best man friend I ever had. But that was a long time ago.”

“Who was the other?” Esmeralda asked. “Who was the other man you were in love with?”
Zamora twisted the cap from the bottle, tilted it to her lips, and sipped. She handed it to Esmeralda as she wiped her mouth and shriveled up her wrinkled face. “Well, it was nothing like Magalla. But it was another time I was in love. His name was Marty. He wasn’t a man yet; he was just a boy, about my age, seventeen. I met him one day in the town, a small village on the east bank of the Cumberland, when I went to school there. Well, not too many boys paid a lot of attention to me. I wasn’t pretty, and this clubfoot has always been a hindrance; at least it bothered me then. I had lots of friends, but no boys that I could get to know personally. I had all but resigned myself that I never would.
“It had been a long and cold winter and all the store fronts stayed covered over with snow most of the time, and this day there weren’t a lot of people on the streets. Marty was shoveling snow in front of his father’s store, and had scooped the drift aside from the doorway down to the street where I was passing. I had not yet met Marty.

“You missed a spot,'’ I said in jest as I walked by, thinking it was Mr. Jonas. By the coat and hat, I thought it was his father, but when he turned around, I came face to face with the most handsome, beautiful boy I had ever seen in my life, then or since. Like I said, his name was Marty. Well, something else was happening that hadn’t happened before. Though I had never before met this boy, I felt right away that I had known him all my life. And I cared for him more than anyone I had ever known. And right there on that cold, mid-morning street I fell in love and it was as if it had always been so. He did not take his eyes from mine either, and I was forced to stop at the end of the walk before the street, and I, too, was still looking back. He said something I could not hear, so I returned to where he was to ask what it was he had said. It was at that point I realized that Marty was blind.
“ ‘I like the sound of your steps,’ he said, repeating the words I had not understood.
“ ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘There is something musical about hobnailed boots on ice.’ ”

“He laughed. ‘Your name is Zamora,’ he said, sticking the shovel into the snow beside him. I said that it was. He then told me how he asked his father who the girl was that passed by the store every day wearing hobnailed boots. ‘That is Zamora,’ his father had replied. Marty’s mother had died, out west where he had been living, and he moved back to help his father with the store. That day began a wonderful friendship for him, and an excruciating love for me. I tried not to let on, but did anyway. He told me that he was already engaged to a girl he knew out west. She was, in fact, moving to our town and they were to be married.
“A month came and went and then another. I continued using the street past the store to get to school, and some days I would see him and we would talk. Then one day he told me that his fiancé had met someone else and wasn’t coming; the wedding was off. In time he seemed to be getting over her and we even began having lunches together in the park across the street from where I lived.
“Several months and it seemed that we were going to make it. And then, on the day he first kissed me, his fiancé arrived in town. She came for him right there in the park where we sat, not five minutes after he kissed me.

“ ‘I have to talk with you, Martin,’ she told him. She was even less pretty than I. It was probably the only time in my life I actually had someone beat in that area, and the boy in question couldn’t even bear witness to it. The girl walked right up and told him to leave there and go with her. He didn’t know whether to stay or go at first, but his will to do otherwise gave in and he walked away with her. There is nothing like the cling of an original love, my friends, and this one was in his bones. He left me there in the cold grass holding a handful of wilted flowers. I never saw Martin again.”
Esmeralda handed the bottle back to Zamora, and the old woman took another sip, and sat quietly looking at the ground. Then Esmeralda laughed. She couldn’t help it. She chuckled some more and reached out and snatched the bottle back. “What a story,” Esmeralda said. “The only time you had someone beat in a beauty contest and the man was blind.”
This time Zamora laughed with her, and the girls smiled at each other like they always did, and the two women laughed some more as each took another drink from the bottle.
Esmeralda hugged Zamora and called to the girls, “Time to go home,” and they pushed the boat away from shore.

CONTACT

This book has thirty-two more chapters.

Copyright, Rudy Young, 1972