‘Quempere! Woo hoo!’ Omagewe shouted, then laughed. ‘Quempere!’
I joined in with the calling, which for some reason Omagewe found hilarious, all four foot ten of him doubled over with laughter.
‘Woo hoo!’ we shouted together, and then we both cracked up. It reminded me how much communication can be done without language. Until that day I thought the sound of a champagne cork popping was the happiest sound on earth—now I know it is a group of Huaorani laughing.
We eventually found Quempere back at the canoe, baffled at our concern, using a palm frond as an umbrella against the rain, which was once more lashing down in diagonal streaks, so thick it was blinding. Back at the campsite we gathered at the fire, those of us who were naked standing closer than the others in a communal huddle, laughing at each other’s chattering teeth.
That night my fever came back, slow-roasting me for unknown hours until it broke and rivers of sweat soaked my skin. Then, after finally falling asleep (and dribbling into my pillow), I was woken by horrific wailing.
I sat up in shock. My first thought was that our campsite was under attack by the truly wild tribes of Ecuador: the Tagaeri and the Taromenane. The shadow of the two uncontacted tribes loomed over most conversations with Huaorani; they were spoken of with a mix of mythology, curiosity and fear. Everyone had a story about these two tribes that have no contact with the outside world at all; while most of the stories tell of harmless encounters, occasionally meetings can result in great violence. Some years earlier, Huaorani had killed twenty-three Tagaeri in revenge for deaths in their community, even though it turned out the Tagaeri were not responsible. The Huaorani believe that someone is responsible for every death, be it from illness, old age or an attack, and so all deaths must be avenged.
The Tagaeri are close relatives of the Huaorani, but Otobo’s family believe the Taromenane are not. As much as the Huaorani seemed completely at one with the forest, they described the Taromenane as being more adept than them in jungle craft, and spoke with a reverence of their abilities. Not long before my visit, Omagewe went hunting for several days, and left his wife alone at their hut in Boanamo. One night she went outside and saw a group of Taromenane standing at the edge of the field. According to her, they were tall and pale—‘as tall and white as you,’ she said in Huao, pointing at me. When they spoke she couldn’t understand them; she shouted back that they could take what they wanted from the field, then went back inside and waited, hoping not to be speared.
Hearing the screams, my first thought was that surely we were under attack, and in my fevered state my only defence would be to appear so weak I might be spared. The wailing though was short lived, not cut off, and faded to the muttering of someone in a dream state. It had been a nightmare, no more, and while the screamer mumbled themselves back to sleep I lay awake, adrenalin coursing for some time, wondering how close the nearest Tagaeri or Taromenane might be.
Normally I would be excited by the level of mystery surrounding these peoples, but in the pitch black of a jungle night it was just intimidating and I was glad to have the many spears of my new Huaorani friends close by.
•
As a rule I don’t believe that any race has more smart or dumb people than any other, or good or bad, and it irritates me when people say things like, ‘Oh, you must just love the people in Africa!’ as I think it is a sign of covert racism. But among the Huaorani I met more extraordinary people than in any other small group I had ever encountered.
Otobo was a natural host and guide. He effortlessly switched between the demands of the elderly English bird watchers and the more culturally interested Americans, reading their needs as neatly as if he had been to the finest tourism management school. His father was a god in the forest, a hunter of note, capable of turning invisible when he wanted to. Omagewe might also be the most dangerous man I have ever met, with a significant body count of petroleros and illegal loggers to his name, yet his good humour and constant laughter made it almost impossible for me to imagine him as a spear-wielding killer.
Then there was Penti, who I met in Bameno. Unlike most Huaorani, who are a stocky people, Penti was slender, and sported a natty Clark Gable moustache. But it was what he said that made him stand out. For more than twenty years he had fought to protect his home from oil companies, and he was articulate and knowledgeable about the challenges the Huaorani face from those who would take their land. Recently, illegal oil exploration had taken place; Penti told me that if he couldn’t stop this through legal means it would be solved the Huaorani way, with a spear. He explained that twice before oil companies had been allowed to extract oil from within the national park, and both times it was disastrous. Texaco spilled more oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon than the Exxon Valdez did in Alaska in 1989, and the roads that were built through the forest to facilitate the extraction are like leukaemia, spreading the poison of illegal logging and poaching, along with the colonists who move illegally in from outside areas and whom the government has no will to move. These invaders continue to make their way deeper into the park, sullying once pristine blocks of wilderness and encroaching ever more into Huaorani territory.
Many of the Huaorani came to visit our campsite, downstream from Bameno, in canoes, and we travelled back to visit them in Bameno, a torturous journey for me as my fever returned with a vengeance. The sunlight off the water was like spears in my eyes, the roar of the motor deafening. When we arrived in Bameno, Tom, Mariela, Allan and Fernando would fly out, and with some trepidation, but mainly enthusiasm for adventures ahead, I would be left alone with the Huaorani for two weeks.
‘Did I scream out last night?’ Fernando asked on the canoe. ‘I think I was having a nightmare.’
That explained the scream that had woken me the night before. I wasn’t surprised Fernando had experienced a nightmare: the very air in this place felt hallucinogenic, or maybe it was just my fever. As soon as we made it to Bameno I curled up to rest in a hammock in Otobo’s Bameno home. The house was made of palm poles and thatched with leaves, which offered some respite from the blinding heat outside.
I was woken some time later by a squawking macaw that wandered in, screeched at me several times, then ambled back out. Through gaps in the rough walls I could see village life as it puttered all around, some people cooking, some snoozing, and a desultory soccer game being played so lazily I almost felt well enough to join in. People in various states of undress walked in and out, some shaking me awake to ask questions like: ‘In the United States how many wives do you have?’ (It didn’t matter how many times I said I was Australian, all foreign cowodes are from America.)
‘I have only one,’ I said (they also make no distinction between a wife and girlfriend), ‘but she is in England.’
‘Huh,’ they scoffed, ‘you should get more,’ then they walked away, chasing out the chickens that came and went as freely as the people.
Otobo told me he needed more than just his current sole wife, but was too busy with his ecotourism business at the moment. The two travelling bands of the last week were the first foreigners many of the Huaorani had seen in more than a year. ‘Yes, but I am the busiest tourism operator here!’ Otobo said proudly. ‘I have many more tourists than anyone else!’
•
As I sat down to write in my diary on the second-last day of 2010, I realised that and I had no idea what day of the week it was, nor any interest in finding out. Dates were becoming as irrelevant to me as they are to the Huaorani. Huao numbers only go as high as twenty; after that they simply use the words for ‘a lot’ (nange) and ‘many’ (baco). Even the numbers they do have are complicated to say—their count goes ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘two and one’, ‘two and two’, ‘five’, ‘five and one’, and so on. Technically you could go higher than twenty, so for example to give my age—thirty-six—I would say: ‘Bototepenpoga go tepenpoga go tepenpoga go emempoke go arokai.’ Or I could simply say ‘Baco.’
This complexity is probably why most Huaorani will tell y
ou some patently absurd figure when you ask how old they are. When I asked Quempere’s age I was told, variously, ‘More than one hundred’, ‘Somewhere near sixty’, and one youngster gravely told me that he was ‘probably more than twenty’, clearly impressed at such longevity. (‘He’s probably in his eighties,’ Tom had said, ‘just based on the age of his children and their children.’)
The tribespeople jabbed at my notebook now as I wrote; only the youngest among them and the educated Penti were able to read (and even then they learnt Spanish, not English), but they were all fascinated by the marks I made on the page. It would have felt like a breach of privacy anywhere else, but here it was not at all unpleasant or invasive.
As I wrote that morning the same macaw had walked into Otobo’s house again, spoken a few words, laughed, and walked out.
‘Great,’ I thought, ‘even a bloody parrot speaks more Huao than me.’
One of the few terms I had become proficient with was ‘waponi’, a versatile word that means ‘hello’, ‘thanks’ and ‘good’; when said with a smile it covered much of what needed to be said.
Earlier that morning I’d been woken up by the sound of voices. Looking out of my hammock I could see a gap in the wall; peering through this, straight at me, was the jaguar shaman.
‘Waponi, Quempere,’ I said, then added, ‘Ibanoimi?’ which means ‘How are you?’ In reply he laughed, walked in and sat beside me, his wife following. With clawed hands he picked up and studied my hair, teeth and palms, before clapping my hands together, laughing heartily once more.
As he chatted to me in soft tones, his wife (a sprightly sixty or so to Quempere’s estimated eighty) laughed at everything he said. The only person I’d felt sorry for in my time there was the aggressive man who on my very first night had spoken at us about his life, including his time with the missionaries, and all he had learnt from them. Throughout his diatribe he’d had his hands clasped in supplication, with the lightless eyes and forced grin of someone who has been told to be happy. Maybe it wasn’t the fault of the missionaries, but something was lost in him; he seemed to lack a brightness, a beauty, that the other Huaorani carried so casually.
That afternoon we made our way back upriver to Otobo’s place by canoe. After a short break we travelled another hour along the river to an even smaller village than Otobo’s. This was the home of a friend Otobo employed to cook for tourists when they came through, who perhaps due to his muscular physique had chosen to go by the Western name of Conan. Many Huaorani used a Western name when dealing with outsiders, perhaps because they couldn’t bear the mangling of their native names. In Conan’s village, I was surprised to meet the man with the clasped hands from our first night, and to learn he was Conan’s brother. He went by the name of Joseph, and was, to his credit, very generous and while he and I practised throwing spears at a banana tree his wife cooked us manioc and fish, served on a palm leaf and eaten with the fingers. We all rinsed our hands in the same tea-coloured water first, and my already queasy stomach initially rebelled. I ate it all though, with a smile as credible as our host’s, and had not a single ill effect afterwards.
I began to change my judgement of the man, as his spear-throwing lesson had been a patient and gentle one, despite my obvious ineptitude. He had also pointed out to me some monk sakis in nearby trees, a beautiful woolly-coated species of monkey I’d only seen once before. Joseph was Huaorani, just different, more exposed to the outside world but retaining a generosity common to them all. Maybe this is what all Huaorani would become as the world closed in, maybe not.
Don’t Let Me Die This Way
The never-to-be defined illness was just part of a catalogue of misadventures I experienced during my time with the Huaorani, but I was still enjoying every day—apart from a moment on the evening after visiting Conan’s village when I almost died.
Earlier that day we stopped at Otobo’s place in Boanamo. I helped unload the boat, hauling seats, tanks of water and gas cylinders up a muddy slope. Suddenly everything wavered and I briefly fainted, something I had never done before. Just as Roy had tried to hide his weakness from me, I didn’t want the Huaorani to see I was still unwell, so popped back up. The Huaorani laughed, not out of malice, but because it was clearly not anything worth worrying about. And because no matter your culture, a man falling face first into mud is funny. So I burst out in guffaws too, until it made me feel woozy again and I staggered on, followed by chuckles.
An hour later I went to bathe in the river, barefoot and wearing nothing but a swimming costume (this was more clothes than I was normally wearing, but I felt it was an important precaution against candiru). Most of the embankments by the river were muddy and any foot traffic quickly turned the ground into the consistency of chocolate mousse. The trail I walked through led to Otobo’s ‘beach’, a sandy patch that only turned muddy once you were ankle deep, meaning that with some tricky foot shaking you could emerge clean.
On the trail a column of ants, maybe twenty wide, swarmed laterally across my path in a hypnotic stripe of constant movement. I hopped over them, identifying them as army ants. These ants are so feared that even a jaguar will walk around them. Army ants don’t look much different to a common garden ant, apart from being slightly larger. Their main difference is the sheer numbers they gather in to launch their marauding attacks, and the columns they travel in. When they fan out in a swarm to forage they devour everything that does not move out of their way, and there are stories of chickens trapped in coops that the ants stripped to the bone in minutes.
The trail of ants doubled back, and crossed the path at another point. I hopped over it again, but soon after the column turned and began to march down the centre of the trail. I waddled along straddling it until it split into two columns, then split again, and I found myself surrounded by multiple lines of ants. Glancing back I saw that the way I had come was now covered, and with no time to think I launched into a run, my tender feet seeking the places with the fewest ants. But the first bites came immediately, causing excruciating pain in both feet, and I broke into a sprint, no longer caring what I trod on.
I would probably have been better off turning back and trying my luck that way. After sprinting for a few steps the world lurched and I felt another faint coming on. I had no time to process the thought, but I instinctively knew that falling here and blacking out would leave me so covered in bites they could be fatal. ‘Don’t let me die this way,’ I thought briefly, recalling stories of elderly people killed because they couldn’t move fast enough. A few more bites and the pain they brought, plus a shot of adrenalin, kept me upright until I was finally past the rapidly expanding swarm, and I threw myself down, my feet aflame as I swatted at the ants digging their mandibles into my flesh.
Standing again, I staggered to the water and flopped in, only to find that the bites had paralysed my feet to a degree but hadn’t deadened the pain receptors, so agony flared anew. Looking back at the river bank, I could see every grasshopper, mantis and other insect capable of flight taking off in waves as they escaped the voracious army. Soon the beach was covered in black bodies. It was only around a fifty-metre swim to another exit point, but my feet were numb and useless for propulsion, the river was filled with snags, and I knew I was prone to fainting. Swimming back was lunatic. Yet I took one more look at the beach and began careful strokes into the current.
Buggered if I was walking back.
•
After what must have been my first booze-free New Year’s Eve in two decades (I was in bed pretty much as soon as it was dark), I spent another feverish night but woke feeling the best I had in some time. So I took a beautiful wooden canoe that was sitting at the village edge filled with water and mud, bailed it out and spent several idyllic hours paddling up the small river that flanks one side of Boanamo before it joins the murky Cononaco.
As I paddled I saw my first ever Jesus lizard, a creature straight out of a cartoon—when startled on the river banks that are its home it rears up on it
s back legs and whirrs them so fast that it literally walks on water until it reaches safety on the other side of the river. I spent the rest of the day with Omagewe and his wife, who decided to make me some armbands out of palm cotton and strands of Omagewe’s hair that he had crudely hacked off with a knife. To make the armbands she quickly built a loom from kindling-sized branches and the tough aerial roots that the Huaorani use for twine, then threaded the cotton and hair round and through these to make a tight weave. These armbands could be worn for dancing, or just because someone felt like having them on. Omagewe sometimes sported a headband when he set out hunting; apparently it signified a message along the lines of ‘I come in peace,’ should he encounter Tagaeri or Taromenane. This was as elaborate as any clothing went for the Huaorani, and led me to musing about their adoption of Western attire and how they wore it.
A Huaorani fashion parade would be a curious affair. It is only the elderly who regularly dress (or undress, I should say) traditionally, but even Quempere wears a necklace made of red and blue plastic beads interspersed with beads that have random letters of the alphabet he cannot read printed on them. Omagewe walks around in shorts most days, but at home or out hunting he goes naked save the string. One day though he strolled over to me wearing saggy grey underpants so large he had to tuck them into his string, and an oversized fluorescent green T-shirt with ‘Abercrombie and Fitch’ in grand lettering down the side, a fine counterpoint to the Dolce & Gabana T-shirt Bartolo had sported the day before. They are of course cheap Chinese knock-offs and often have misspellings, or whole words missing, so I was really hoping at some stage to come across someone with an FCUK shirt.
How to Walk a Puma Page 17