He stared at Rick through the mosquito netting for fifteen seconds, then left.
That guy might be the village doctor, but I didn’t much care for his bedside manner. I got mad all over again.
“You should have let me take you to the station,” I said sharply.
“I wouldn’t have made it that far,” Rick replied.
“No, you wouldn’t,” said another stranger who threaded his way through the children to reach us.
This new guy was a tall, middle-aged Brazilian, wearing thick plastic-frame glasses that made his eyes the size of my fist. His long hair was tied back with a hank of leather over western jungle gear. It wasn’t until he removed the colorful bandana from his neck that I saw his white collar.
A priest? Living here? Sure, missionaries were all over the jungle busily rearranging the indigenous peoples into manageable groups, but this guy didn’t give me the impression he was interested in rearranging anybody. In fact, he had Jesuit written all over him—gentle, intellectual, pacifist.
He slipped under the mosquito netting and knelt next to Rick. “The shaman will be back soon,” he said in English as he placed a hand on Rick’s forehead. “His remedy has never failed.”
I kept my skeptical thoughts to myself. It was bad practice to dis the local wise man.
“I’m Father Dswow.”
It took my brain a minute to translate that bizarre word into what it actually was: João. And saying it wouldn’t be easy. Portuguese phonetics were beyond me. I wondered if I could get by with just calling him “padre.”
Then a black thought occurred to me. “You’re not here to administer last rites, are you?” I demanded. I didn’t even know if Rick was Catholic.
Father João smiled, radiating peacefulness through his thick lenses. “No. I’m here to keep you company until the shaman returns,” he said gently, soothingly. “Don’t worry. He won’t be long.”
If I could have freeze-dried and shipped this guy’s serenity to the States, I could’ve made a fortune off the corporate world.
“How long have you lived here?” Rick asked weakly, ever curious.
“Years and years,” the padre said, waving his hand as if to conjure aeons. “I came when I heard outside people were bringing disease to the villages. I inoculate the villagers against us and our ‘civilized’ diseases.” He raised a brow at me as if he sensed I was a big fan of civilization.
“Against us?” Rick’s slow smile drew his mouth into a pale imitation of his grin. “As in ‘corrupting cultural influences’?”
The padre shrugged. “Cultural influence is inevitable.”
“But it doesn’t have to be destructive.”
“Not intentionally, no.”
I got the impression they could go on for hours discussing cultural issues—if Rick had hours—but Rick suddenly said, “I need to see the village leader. One of the mine foremen, a man named Porfilio, wants to negotiate a partnership between the villages and the mine.”
The padre’s eyes narrowed. “The headman will be glad to hear it. You may talk to him when you’re better.”
Better? I wanted to yell. What kind of idealistic universe did these people inhabit?
The shaman stalked across the communal hut carrying a black medicine bowl, a cup and a nasty-looking stick.
The shaman motioned me and the padre out from the mosquito tent. Once inside, he gave Rick the cup and made a “drink up” motion. Rick did, grimacing. Then the shaman emptied the contents of the bowl over Rick’s head, showering him with horrific smelling crushed leaves and herbs. He shook the stick at the doorway, then at Rick’s arm, then raised it over his head, his eyes closed. I took a step toward the tent but the padre grabbed my shoulder. The shaman’s stick swung down with breaking speed toward Rick’s arm, then abruptly stopped a mere inch from the wound.
The shaman stepped back. He stared hard at Rick for a moment, then nodded decisively and swept out of the mosquito tent. The vile smell followed him. He barked a few words at the padre. Then he left.
“What did he say?” I asked Father João.
The padre smiled. “He says your friend has the heart of the jaguar.”
“Did he mention anything about surviving the snakebite?” I asked curtly, “or is ‘what is the sound of one hand clapping’ the best we’re going to get?”
“O ye of little faith,” Rick chided from his hammock.
“Damn skippy,” I retorted. I shook off the Yanomamo kid hovering at my elbow, the one who’d led us to this village, and brushed into the tent.
The herbs’ stench set my eyes to watering. “What’s he trying to do, make you smell so bad that Death will take a holiday?” The joke sounded awful to my ear and I regretted it the minute I said it.
“Whatever works.” Rick managed a weak shrug. “I need to sleep.”
“Okay.”
I sat next to him. I kind of wanted to hold his hand while he drifted off, but it seemed too sentimental. Things like this happen, I told myself. You can’t get too attached to people because one day they’ll up and leave, and then where will you be? Isn’t that the way it always works out? Except for the annoying people. They seem to always be just around the corner. But the ones you love? You wake up in the middle of the night and your neighbors are crying and patting your head and telling you how sorry they are that the people you love most are dead. I know how that works.
And I couldn’t afford the distraction from Scooter, who was my number one priority, anyway. On the other hand, Rick was my responsibility, at least while he was alive and bitten by my snake. On the other hand—
On the other hand, I have five fingers. Give it a rest.
I gave up and took Rick’s cool hand in both of mine as he fell into a fitful sleep. The padre left at some point, but I don’t know when. Rick stopped pouring with sweat and in the next hour or so eased into a peaceful sleep. The kids finally got bored and wandered off to their family areas. The shaman came back once to put a noxious-smelling poultice on the snakebite, but ignored me. I tried to get a look at his medicine bowl, to see if it matched Harrison’s, but he kept it moving and I figured he wouldn’t give me a peek, even if I knew the Yanoman words to form the question.
The kid’s mother brought me a hunk of cassava bread and a mug of cassava beer—definitely an acquired taste—which I consumed automatically. There are times when food is merely fuel. As evening wore into true night, I knew I should go check the bug traps at first light. I just didn’t want to leave Rick alone with the witch doctor and pacifist padre to do it.
The villagers never really settled in for the night. Some slept, some wandered in and out, two talked in their normal voices for a while. One picked up a hatchet and stepped outside to hack up firewood to feed his cook fire. Each family appeared to have enough space to lie down in, their few belongings stacked neatly against the structure’s supporting poles. How they ever got a good night’s sleep was beyond me.
I checked Rick’s forehead, which was cool for the first time in hours, and stretched out beside him on a kapok-fiber pallet the kid’s mother had given me. Sleep laughed at me, though, and I kept having to get up to make sure Rick was still breathing.
As dawn threatened, I checked Rick’s arm. The swelling had gone down under the nasty poultice. I rolled the sleeve back to get it over his elbow and out of the goop. I remembered this arm tossing a fifty-pound duffel into the plane, but hadn’t noticed its lean, hard muscle at the time. His chest lifted slowly, easily, and for grins I put two fingers on his wrist. Jeez. Cross-country runners had resting heart rates in the mid to upper thirties, and his was right down there with them. Or maybe that was just an herbal effect and he actually was dying, right here in front of me. But he’d lasted far longer than he should have. He must have responded to the witch doctor’s doctoring.
I’d have to leave him to check the bug trap. What if he woke up and needed me? What if the shaman tried to give him some concoction that really did manage to kill him? But I could
n’t afford to lose another day. Heaven only knew what would happen to the moth if I left it in that trap all day. Bake in a box, probably. After a moment’s further arguing with myself, I headed into the darkness.
It was daylight when I reached the trap area. Even the Yanomamo kid, following me again and staying just out of sight, didn’t annoy me too much. I was too anxious to check the trap and get back to the village. As long as he stayed out of the way, he could watch all he wanted. And his shy eagerness kind of tickled me, in a tomboyish way.
Clipping the running anchor onto my harness, I felt a stab of loneliness that made me pause. Rick ought to be here. I pushed him out of my mind. I’ve never been lonely. Ever. I started to climb. I guessed I could blame that feeling on Scooter’s condition and me getting ready to let go of him. But that wouldn’t have been the truth. The truth was I’d gotten used to having someone else around. But I’d been fine working alone before and I would be again. Once Scooter was on the mend, my life could go back to normal.
I hit the canopy in record time and transferred over to the main swing. The trap, a high-tech polyurethane and high-density plastic affair, clamped on to the branch directly over my head. I unfastened the straps. Holding my breath, hoping against hope, I drew the trap down to eye level.
A huge moth, its body half my palm’s width, fluttered harmlessly inside the trap. This sucker could easily have been mistaken for a small bird from a distance. No wonder people hadn’t seen much of it, or recognized it if they did.
And it was black as night, with pearlescent black markings on its wings.
Just like Harrison’s medicine bowl.
Heart pounding, I took my time scanning the canopy but saw nothing the moth might have been attracted to other than the trap’s scent. No blooming plants. Certainly no flowering orchids.
But if this bad boy was in the area, the Death Orchid would be, too. It was just a matter of finding it.
I clipped the trap on to my harness and dropped from the canopy. My high-speed descent brought the wide-eyed Yanomamo kid close. As I detached from the climbing rope, his busy hands ran all over the shiny carabiners. Infernally curious, these Yanomamo, with no sense of privacy whatsoever. The kid may never have seen anyone whiter than Father João and he certainly had never seen a white Americano before, especially a female rigged with climbing gear that lowered her as fast as I liked. I unfastened my harness to remove it, but paused when Marcello fingered the wide webbing and looked up.
“Do you want to climb up there?” I pointed to the canopy.
His black eyes widened. Did he understand what I’d said?
I fastened my harness again and grabbed one of the running anchors. “Here’s how you do it,” I said, wrapping the anchor around the tree’s broad trunk. I walked up a couple of steps. Below me, Marcello’s grin lit up his nut-brown face and the whole darned morning.
“Come on. You try.” I hopped down.
Marcello pointed to my harness, then at himself.
“I know. I’m going to make you one.” I dug through my pack for a spare piece of webbing, then gestured to him. “Come here.”
I wrapped the webbing around Marcello’s tiny waist and threaded it into a makeshift climbing harness, careful not to crunch his little nuts with the leg straps. It would’ve been easier if his people wore clothes. After the webbing was secure, I stepped back. Yep, Day-Glo green webbing wrapped around a nude kid’s groin looked pretty funky.
After I’d made sure his reproductive future was still intact, I shortened the running anchor to match his leg length. Then I held it out to him. Marcello studied the anchor and its carabiner, turning it in his hands. He brought it to his face and sniffed it. For a moment I thought he was going to gnaw on it to see what it tasted like.
What wheels were turning in this kid’s head? He came from a people whose lifestyle was Stone Age. Did he understand the carabiner’s clasp mechanism or was his brain stuck relying on tools that could be woven from bamboo or carved with sharp stones?
A slow grin that reminded me of Rick’s spread over his little face. He pressed the carabiner’s lip with his thumb and opened it. After snapping it open and closed for a minute, he clipped the carabiner on the harness. The pleased, questioning look he gave me—so open, so innocent—made me wish I spoke his language.
I motioned him over to the tree and ran the other end of the anchor around its trunk. He grabbed the free end and snapped it in place on his harness. Quick learner. I smiled at him and got back a cascading laugh in return. The Yanomamo, I was beginning to see, laughed at just about everything.
“Go ahead.”
He put one bare foot on the tree’s trunk. I pushed back on his bare chest to get him to lean away from the tree. He batted his eyes at me. Flirt. Where did he learn that? I tapped his other leg and pointed at the tree. He picked up that foot and promptly fell on his butt. He would have rolled over laughing but the anchor held him tight. As it was, he lay on the thick moss and cackled.
When his giggles subsided, I said, “Try again.”
He wrenched himself to his feet, then made a show of putting his foot on the tree, testing the spot, batting his eyes at me, smiling. Little ham. This time I stood behind him and wrapped an arm around his waist to hold him up. That set off another round of giggles. I couldn’t resist and tickled his ribs. Suddenly I had seventy pounds of squealing, bouncing, squirming little kid in my arms. I let him go and stepped away.
He motioned me to come back, but I didn’t know whether it was to tickle him again or help him climb the tree. Whichever worked for me. Climb the tree, it turned out. He settled down once I got my arm around him, and he put both feet on the trunk. All at once I caught his young-wild smell, musky, full of rain and sunshine, like someone coming indoors on a clear autumn day. I tipped him back until the anchor caught. He took a single, cautious step up the tree, then seemed to understand almost instinctively how to keep his weight back against the anchor. I watched him walk up until he reached the limit of his running anchor and looked down at me, just over my head.
“Come back.” I gestured. “I have to go. See how Rick is doing.”
He obediently stepped back down into my arms. I unclipped him and gave him the running anchor to carry for me. He seemed to want to keep his harness on, so I let him. I didn’t need that extra piece of webbing anyway.
“Let’s go,” I told him.
Leaving the long climbing rope hanging in the canopy made the most sense. The next logical step would be to bring the moth back and turn it loose. With any luck, it would lead me to the Death Orchid.
As soon as I convinced Rick that releasing his precious moth to find a Death Orchid was in his best interest.
Shouldn’t be too hard. He was, after all, a bug nerd. No, an entomologist. Entomologists understood the delicate balance between the objects of their lives’ pursuits and the rest of nature.
But when I returned to the village, I realized he knew a lot more about delicate balance than I could have guessed.
Chapter 8
The crowd standing in a circle on the village outskirts was mostly children. I started to go around them, but then caught a glimpse of dark brown hair—not black like the Yanomamo—and white T-shirt. What was Rick doing up and around? Had he collapsed? Why wasn’t anybody helping him? I jogged up to the circle and looked over the kids’ heads.
Rick sat on the ground in lotus position, his thumbs and forefingers pressed together in okay signs that rested on his knees, his eyes closed. After a moment, he smoothly bent forward to place his forehead to the ground, untangling his legs as he did so. Then he rolled into a headstand, his legs straight up, his hands placed at a comfortable distance to give him a three-point stand.
I gathered he was feeling better.
The twenty or so kids planted their heads on the ground and flung themselves into the air. A small forest of feet sprouted around me, wavered, then collapsed in a chorus of laughter and squeals. None of the ruckus seemed to bother Rick.<
br />
He moved his hands a little, arched his back and lifted himself into a handstand. I could have pegged him for a yoga boy, sure enough, but I had no idea yoga boys could do push-ups from a handstand like he was doing now. Or balance themselves so easily while they did it.
His long, lovely leap into the mining pit suddenly made a lot of sense, and it kind of got me wondering about those smooth shoulders and that smooth chest. His arms were as strong as advertised, so didn’t it make sense the rest of him would be strong?
But he was foolish to be pulling this stunt after being bitten by a viper last night. I cut through the confusion of flailing limbs, fuming.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I demanded.
He paused mid-push-up, then dropped his feet gracefully to the ground and straightened his strong torso to meet my gaze. Pumped up with the exercise, what I’d originally thought was his thin chest strained his T-shirt. Not bulky like a weight lifter, but lean, sculpted, sexy. He’d taken off his glasses and his inner bad boy grinned at me. Dammit. I suppressed the sudden images of Kama Sutra flexibility that flashed in my head.
“I feel good,” he said, smiling at me.
He looked good, too. Too good.
Even the color had returned to his face. He held out his snakebite for my inspection like an obedient patient. The fang holes had closed and pinked, healing with new scar tissue. No sign of infection. And his skin was cool, fresh, as though he hadn’t nearly died.
“Damn,” I said despite myself, turning his arm this way and that, amazed.
“Good medicine,” he said softly, but he was looking at me when he said it.
I dropped his arm. “How long have you been awake?”
“Long enough to see the headman.” He turned and we started walking back to the village. The children scattered. “He’s interested in talking to Porfilio if I can set up a meeting. I’ll send a message to the mine arranging the time and place by Marcello.”
The Orchid Hunter Page 12