Pass the Butterworms

by Tim Cahill

  They wanted to do something about it. Alleviate poverty. Expose injustice. That sort of thing. But neither of them was naive. They knew you couldn’t do it all at once, and maybe there was very little you could do at all. A guy had to start with the little shit. Which is why Josh and Patchen had spent the first part of their trip to South America working at an orphanage in Ecuador. They were there for ten days or so, over the Christmas holidays.

  The orphanage was called the Garden of Eden, in the town of Salcedo, and was an evangelical Christian kind of place—not exactly Josh or Patchen’s cup of tea—but the kids were great. Mostly, they were street kids abandoned in the bigger cities, presumably by prostitutes and drug abusers.

  Patchen built a chicken coop out of bricks and mortar. Josh put together a medicine cabinet. They welded a broken door, regraded the driveway, and spent a lot of time playing games with the kids. The place wasn’t exactly a model of hygienic food preparation, and Patchen got pretty sick for a while, which, he figured, was pretty much par for the course when you ate out of the kitchen at the Garden of Eden.

  At night, they played music. Josh was okay on the mouth harp, but Patchen was, in Josh’s view, “a brilliant, unbelievable percussionist.” It was like he’d grown up in Jamaica instead of an A-frame in the New Hampshire woods. He’d played professionally for a while, in bar bands that toured around New England, but Patchen didn’t drink or smoke, he loved being outdoors, and the rock-and-roll life wasn’t for him. Still, the man could play pots and pans with a pair of spoons. In one of his college courses, the Quest for Human Meaning, Patchen submitted an audiotape of his music as part of his final project. He thought rhythm had a lot to do with human meaning. The kids who gathered around him at the orphanage seemed to think so, too.

  Patchen and Josh left the Garden of Eden, hitchhiked south, crossed the border into Peru, bought provisions at the town of Bagua—rope and soap and six weeks’ worth of food—then built their raft in a settlement called Muyo. They used tools and a workshop lent to them by a friendly local carpenter. It took them two days. Then they had to arrange for a big truck to take the raft down a muddy dirt road to the Marañón port city of Imacita.

  The raft had been mostly Patchen’s idea. He thought a fairly stable platform would be the best way to get photographs of the people and wildlife along the river. There was a chance that he could sell some of his photos, maybe even make it as a professional photographer, like his father. That kind of life would allow him to travel the world, experience what he saw as a vanishing wilderness, and, yes, maybe even expose injustice. Help people.

  Or … it was just possible that he could make a living as a writer doing the same sort of thing. Patchen kept a journal. People who read his work always said he ought to think about writing as a career. “Excellent essays, demonstrating considerable analytical skills,” one of his Friends World College professors wrote.

  Another professor thought that “Patchen … demonstrated a solid understanding of complex text and lecture material in the course Topics in American History. One of those topics was “The Expropriation of Native Americans.” As part of his course work, Patchen Miller had spent two months living with an American Indian family in New Mexico. He had been interested in shamanism, and ended up herding sheep for a born-again Christian Navajo.

  And now here they were in Indian country, and it was probably not a good idea to stop and talk with anyone about shamanism or anything else. Hell of a way to learn about Indian culture.

  Still, they weren’t sure exactly where they were, and needed some local expertise. Had the river crested, or was it going to rise some more? How far were they from the Pongo de Manseriche? About dusk on that third day, a young Indian guy in a dugout paddled by, and Josh hailed him. They spoke, in Spanish, at a distance; about the river. Slowly the guy pulled closer, until he was sitting right up next to the raft.

  Eventually, this shy young Indian fellow got up on the raft, and they were all shooting the shit, in Spanish. He was a kind of nondescript-looking guy, maybe twenty years old; it was hard to tell. He wore his hair cut short in front, long in back, and had a strange kind of nose that came flat out of his forehead, made a perpendicular turn to the world, and formed a kind of box, right there in the middle of his face. It looked, to Josh, “like the guy had a Dick Tracy nose.”

  The Americans gave their visitor a few small presents: some matches, batteries. The three drank some coffee and by then it was dark, about eight in the evening. Another dugout came by. The two Indian men in it must have known the kid on the raft, and they spoke for a while in their own language: a lot of long and short vowels separated by sharp consonants. Aw waka nepeenakata. Those weren’t the real words, but it sounded like that. There was none of the soft sibilance of Spanish.

  The two men in the dugout were drunk, “fully inebriated,” in Josh’s view, but they were friendly enough in the you’re-my-best-pal-wanna-fight manner of drunks the world over. Mostly they just spoke with the kid in that Indian language.

  The men left. There was a big rainstorm then. When it was over, the kid wouldn’t leave. He wanted to see everything on the raft: the clothes and tents and boots and backpacks and headlamps and cameras and binoculars and all the provisions they’d bought for a trip that might be six weeks long. It seemed like the kid looked everywhere, just searched every storage place on the raft.

  They traded songs for a while, and this kid with the Dick Tracy nose sang some beautiful, haunting melodies in his own language. The melodies, the strange rhythms, reminded Josh of the South African singers on Paul Simon’s Graceland album. Ladysmith Black Mombasa, from the black townships. Remarkable similarities.

  It was now about nine-thirty, and the two men in the dugout came back. They weren’t nearly as friendly this time and only spoke to the kid for a few minutes before they left.

  About ten minutes later, both Josh and Patchen heard some rustling in the bush, beyond the big tree at the end of the island.

  “What’s that?” Josh asked the kid, in Spanish.

  “It’s my father,” the young man said. “He’s an evangelical minister. He wants to meet you.” The kid yelled into the bush, something quick and sharp, in his own language.

  Patchen got up and walked to the back of the raft with his headlamp. He’d light the way for this kid’s father.

  Josh Silver heard the shot: the booming blast of a shotgun. He saw the muzzle flash in the foliage. He didn’t see Patchen get hit, just saw his body pinwheeling off the raft. Josh reached for him in the dark water—there were bubbles there—but he came away with nothing. And then he was fighting with the kid, screaming at him, and there was another shotgun blast in the night and something tore into Josh’s left thigh.

  The kid wasn’t surprised, wasn’t shouting; nothing. He’d set them up: Josh knew that at a level of instinct, where there were no words. He knew that the shotgun was a single-shot model and that the killer in the bush was reloading even as Josh dove into the waters of the Marañón.

  They were there, behind him, on the raft, shouting into the jungle night, that Indian language—crack, crack, crack—and there were probably flashlights scanning the water. He didn’t look back. The kid’s dugout was still tied up to the raft. They could come after him at any time.

  Josh swam sidestroke, holding his leg with one hand, applying direct pressure to stop the bleeding. He made for the near bank, the north side, away from the major current, which ran along the south side of the island and into the pongito about three hundred yards, downstream. The north bank was one hundred yards away, and the water was fairly calm.

  Josh Silver hid in the foliage there. He found a vine and tied it above his wounds. He’d taken a dozen or more pellets—birdshot, it looked like—and one of them had passed directly through his thigh. An entry wound and an exit wound.

  Josh couldn’t believe the kid with the nose case had set them up. He’d looked at everything. When he yelled to the man in the bush—the one with the shotgun�
�he was probably telling him that there were no weapons on board. “They’re not armed. Kill them!” Something like that.

  The man in the bush hadn’t stumbled, and the gun hadn’t gone off accidentally. He had stood there in the darkness, taken aim at Patchen—illuminated by his own headlamp—and shot him at point-blank range. They meant to kill, and now they’d have to kill Josh.

  The Indians must have thought: Two gringos on the river; they disappear. Who’s to say that they weren’t sucked down into some ugly pongo? And if that’s your plan, Josh thought, you can’t leave a living witness. So they were looking for him, and they were going to kill him, and Josh could hear their voices calling across the water.

  Time passed. Then Josh saw a man moving along his bank of the river, shining a flashlight back and forth, as if he were looking for someone. The beam of light passed very close to where Josh was hiding.

  He couldn’t stay there, and he needed to find help. The last military checkpoint he and Patchen had passed was, Josh thought, about four miles upriver. It was two nights after the full moon, and black clouds were scudding across the sky. Josh was wearing river shorts. That’s all: no shoes, no shirt. His skin, in the moonlight, looked impossibly white. He smeared mud on himself and started upriver.

  He ran for a time, jarring the hell out of his wounded leg, then slowed down to a walk. Sometime later, Josh saw a dark figure moving along a path beside the Marañón. The man was carrying a rifle or shotgun of some kind. Josh didn’t think the guy had anything to do with the people who were looking for him. They were too far back, and Josh had heard that these Indians generally carry guns at night and that they are night hunters.

  Still, he didn’t know, and he hid from the man.

  He was, he knew, never going to make it to the military checkpoint. He’d have to stay deep in the foliage, off any trails, away from men with guns; and traveling that way—barefoot, with a wounded leg—was impossible.

  But … if he let the river carry him, he could swim downstream, staying close to the banks and out of the pongos. There was sure to be another checkpoint where he could get help. Seemed like they had checkpoints about every five or ten miles. Just stay in the water all the way past the island. He had to keep his head low and make as little movement as possible.

  The water was cold, and Josh could only stay in it for half an hour or so at a time. He’d pull out on a bank, warm up with some push-ups and some sit-ups, then swim again until he began shaking.

  Nine hours after he dove off the raft, at about dawn the next morning, Josh took a big chance. There was a man working on his boat, an Indian doing something with the tiny outboard, and Josh spoke with him. The guy put the wounded American in the dugout, fired up the engine, and together they sped across the river to the military checkpoint at a place called Urukusa.

  He’d been shot by one Indian and rescued by another.

  At the army base, they put him in some kind of medical place and patched up his leg. There were sixteen pellets in his thigh. Josh was feverish, and his leg was badly swollen, infected from the river water. Later in the day, Peruvian police from the town of Santa María de Nieva arrived. Josh was transported downriver to that town. Someone called Lima on the radio telephone, and the news was relayed to Consul General Thomas Holladay: An American citizen had been shot and was being treated for his wounds. Another was missing and feared dead. The assailants, apparently, had been Indians. Aguaruna.

  The Aguaruna

  Late in January, while Paul Dix was in Lima, pitched battles broke on Peru’s northern border. It wasn’t the first time.

  In 1941, Peru fought an undeclared war with Ecuador over a persistent boundary dispute. In 1995, the dispute erupted into a mini-war, like the one in 1951–1952 and the one in 1981. The fighting was centered on the upriver sections of the Cenepa, which flows into the Marañón not far from the island where Patchen Miller was shot. Though official figures were lower, it looked as if several hundred soldiers on both sides had been killed.

  Paul Dix and Thomas Holladay were forced to postpone plans to visit the Marañón ambush site. Paul, working out of the youth hostel in Miraflores, began researching the Aguaruna people. He made several visits to the Indian-run Center for Amazon Anthropological studies in Lima. I spoke by phone with people who’d visited the area: anthropologists, botanists, missionaries, and Indian-rights advocates.

  The Aguaruna were part of the Jivaro linguistic-cultural group and had never been conquered by the Incas or by the Spanish; nor had they been militarily vanquished by the nation of Peru. They were a proud people, unconquered, and perhaps unconquerable.

  Until about fifty years ago, the Jivaro had been headhunters. The only eyewitness account of a Jivaro head-hunting raid I was able to find was written by F. W. UpdeGraff, an American who tramped around the area in 1894. It is fair to say that the book he wrote, Head Hunters of the Amazon, lacks a certain degree of cultural sensitivity.

  UpdeGraff was living in an Aguaruna village. There was a battle with a rival Jivaro group, the Huambiza. The victorious Aguaruna lopped off the heads of the dead and dying. UpdeGraff felt he couldn’t interfere, in that “we were but five in a horde of fiends, crazed by lust and blood.”

  UpdeGraff waited almost twenty-five years to write his book, which is to say that he lived through the First World War, in which millions died, killed in a more sanitary fashion, and not by blood-crazed fiends at all but by patriots: white people, for the most part, who, clothed in glory, dispatched the enemy for God and country. Fiendish blood lust hardly entered into it.

  According to UpdeGraff’s account, skulls were removed from the Huambiza heads; the skins were sewed and soaked and heated, and generally shrunk down to about a third of their size. The heads, he learned, were brandished only during the victory festivities, after which they were discarded. UpdeGraff knew that such trophies were of value to American collectors and pointed out, in pornographic detail, the authentic markings of a genuine Aguaruna shrunken head.

  It is not clear to me exactly where UpdeGraff was, but he was probably very close to the Marañón. Today, a large portion of the Aguaruna people live along the banks of that river, in the area between Imacita and Santa María de Nieva. There were, at last census, about thirty-eight thousand Aguaruna, and they had combined with their traditional Jivaro enemies, the Haumbiza, about six thousand strong, to form a political organization called the Aguaruna Huambiza Consejo.

  The Aguaruna and Huambiza tend to live in family clans of thirty to forty people. They are hunters and small-scale farmers, who sometimes sell produce at markets. Their language, unlike Spanish, uses a lot of sharp consonants: yugkipak for forest pig; ikamyawaa for jaguar.

  The men hunt and weave. The women tend children, grow manioc, and make pottery. The men sing songs for success in hunting; women’s songs encourage the manioc to grow. Some Jivaro songs use a five-note scale. The rhythms are complex and irregular, a bit like the music that comes out of the black townships of South Africa.

  Masato, or manioc beer, is an Aguaruna dietary mainstay. Women boil the tubers, pound them, chew the pulp, then spit the mash into a large pot to ferment. Masato, called nijamanch in Aguaruna, is nutritious and intoxicating.

  Each traditional village has its shaman. When people fall ill, the Aguaruna use herbal cures along with what might be called household magic, but are in no way opposed to modern medicine. In cases where these methods fail, a shaman is called in to remove “spirit darts,” likely implanted by a sorcerer, who is an ordinary man motivated by spite or envy. The shaman performs various ceremonies, under the influence of a powerful herbal hallucinogen called ayahuasca.

  Michael F. Brown, an anthropologist who spent two years living with the Aguaruna, cites a 1976 case in which a village elder died suddenly of unknown causes. The village shaman was pressured to identify the sorcerer responsible. “From the images of his ayahuasca vision,” Brown wrote, “he drew the name of a young man from a distant village.… The man was put to
death in a matter of days. Because Yangkush [the shaman] was widely known to have fingered the sorcerer, he became the likely victim of a reprisal raid by members of the murdered man’s family.” Brown rarely saw Yangkush leave his house without a loaded shotgun.

  These conventions—cycles of vengeance, family feuds—persist despite the work of various missionaries who have been working and living among the Jivaro for generations.

  One of my contacts had the phone number for the Aguaruna Huambiza Consejo in Lima and I gave it to Thomas Holladay. The consejo speaks with a voice that is heard internationally. It was formed in the late 1970s, and quickly found itself at odds with Werner Herzog, a German film director obsessed with the idea of making a historical film in the area. The producers of the film refused to enter into negotiations with the consejo and its head, Evaristo Nugkuag. They argued that hundreds of Indian workers were being paid twice the going wage and that the Aguaruna opposed the film solely because Huambiza people had most of the jobs. Evaristo Nugkuag replied that the movie, Fitzcarraldo, showed the historic oppression of Indians without ever addressing itself to that issue. The film set, which was located at the confluence of the Marañón and Cenepa rivers, was destroying the forest and disrupting people’s lives. Or so the consejo argued. On December 1, 1979, a party of Aguaruna men burned the set to the ground. The film crew fled to Iquitos.

  When I spoke with one of the principals involved in the film, he said he didn’t want to get into it again. Not with Evaristo Nugkuag. The Fitzcarraldo burning had brought the man international fame. He was politically astute and knew how to focus the world’s attention. You couldn’t fight the consejo.

  Thomas Holladay called and spoke with Evaristo. He said that as soon as the war cooled down, he wanted to visit the site where a young American had been killed. He would be bringing along a couple of journalists and the murdered man’s father. Holladay called me and said Evaristo had been very helpful.