“I have heard no one whose words hold less evil.” Ubiratan looked at his hands. “He taught me the potters’ work, but I was too foolish to see all he could show.”
“But where is the land of the sleeping sun?” Pojucan asked.
Ubiratan couldn’t say.
The forest had now begun to give way to a higher country of tall grasses with patches of stunted vegetation and fewer stands of trees, those remaining galleried on the flanks of rivers or huddled at the edge of a lake.
The weather, too, was changing as the end of the long dry season approached. The heat was oppressive; a roll of thunder would occasionally promise relief, but it would pass, and the winds that brought the rain would die.
Late one morning the trio was crossing an expanse of open grassland, heading toward a clump of forest where they planned to take shelter from the heat, when they spotted an abandoned manioc field and rushed toward the precious crop, unaware that they were being watched from the trees.
There were thirty-three men, women, and children in this band, a people called Nambikwara, who spent the entire dry season roaming this high savanna in search of food. They had planted this manioc on an earlier migration, and would have feasted off it, however meager a supply remained, for through several sunrises they had eaten nothing but grubs and grasshoppers and a few rodents that had fallen to the sticks of their women.
Their leader, who went by the name Hare, was a scrawny individual with black eyes and pinched features and, at five feet one, tallest of the family, for all were interrelated. There were hundreds of groups like his dispersed over the grasslands. When the rains came, three or four of these would band together in the semblance of a village. There they’d wait out the winter.
Hare had his best hunters at his side. They spoke in whispers as they crouched behind the thornbushes at the foot of the trees.
“Let us kill them,” said a squat, fat man known to the others as Toad.
“He is right,” agreed Rock, so named after an angry young tapir had failed to knock him down. “They are three, we seven. It is easy.” His bow, a foot longer than he, and his curare-tipped arrows lay ready.
“No,” said Hare. “To take them with our arrows, we must walk beyond the trees. Surprise will be lost.”
“Does it matter?” Rock asked.
“You talk of seven, but two are old and one still a boy.”
“Our children cry for this manioc.”
“Then let them who dig for it bring it to us.”
Aruanã carried the manioc to the place beneath the trees where the men sat scraping the tubers. Next they would have to rasp them against a spiky palm and squeeze out a poisonous juice between strips of soft bark, and they sent Aruanã in search of these items.
Hare and four of his hunters, with their bows at the ready and their little bodies quivering with excitement, caught him in a small glade, surrounding him so that escape was impossible. He stood there, wide-eyed with fright, offering no resistance as they took away his bow and arrows and whooped about him, jabbering loudly.
Hare tied a vine around the boy’s neck and handed the other end to Toad. “Take the little thief to camp,” he said.
Encouraged by the capture of the boy, Hare and the others set off to find the two remaining manioc thieves. But on the way they ran into a drove of peccaries. Fifty of these bloodthirsty pigs, which could tear a man to pieces in minutes, suddenly burst from the undergrowth. Rock shot off an arrow and dropped one of the front runners. The rest of the pigs halted momentarily but then, squealing and grunting, charged the group of hunters, scattering them and sending them racing for the nearest trees.
Rock, closest to the herd, tripped over a fallen branch and three of the bristly backed beasts trotted toward him, almost leisurely, until one was close enough for the attack and rushed at the man. Rock shrieked as the peccary’s jutting white tusks gashed his rump. Gasping with pain, he managed to pull himself onto the low branch of a tree.
The Nambikwara sat in the branches, not daring to move an inch from their perches. The tightly packed dark shapes below hurried from one tree to the next, butting and rooting at the base.
“They will hold us in the trees until dark,” Rock said. “I hurt. Oh, how I hurt!”
“We must wait,” Hare said.
“And the men with the manioc?” Rock howled.
Pojucan and Ubiratan had heard the noise, grabbed their weapons, and hurried toward the commotion, fearing that Aruanã had fallen among the pigs. They crept through the forest, to where the grinding of teeth and wicked grunts were loudest, and there they saw the peccaries and the men in the trees above.
So occupied were the beasts with shaking their enemy out of the trees, they didn’t heed the new arrivals until arrows flew into their midst, killing two more and sending the rest bumping and crashing into one another as they hurried away.
The Nambikwara stayed where they were, for they had dropped their weapons in their flight and now feared that the men they’d been on their way to attack might be a worse threat than a herd of angered pigs. But Pojucan and Ubiratan stepped toward them, lowered their bows, and indicated their friendship.
The little hunters stood huddled together, chattering animatedly, unable to make themselves understood to their rescuers. Now they also began to worry about what would happen when these men learned that they had seized the boy. Rock grew quite frantic when reminding Hare about this and Hare, himself deeply troubled, tried to calm him. “They show no anger,” he said. “They help us.”
“And when they see we have the boy?”
Hare immediately determined to make peace with these men.
It was more difficult than he had expected, and took many signs and gestures to indicate that they had “met” the boy and had sent him to their camp with one of their hunters. Hare did his best to assure them that the boy would be unharmed and waiting at their shelters.
When at last he understood, Pojucan, furious, grabbed Hare about the neck and shook him. “This is my son,” he growled. “If there is pain, you die.”
Hare motioned that they should all return to his camp, where they would be reunited with the boy.
“We have to go with them,” Pojucan said to Ubiratan.
“I have no fear,” the other said contemptuously. “They are children.”
While Pojucan took Hare to collect the manioc and their belongings, Ubiratan made the boy-hunters prepare two pigs for carrying to the Nambikwara camp.
The party set out with Pojucan and Ubiratan at the rear, ready with their bows should one attempt flight. Rock walked painfully, holding a bunch of leaves to his torn flesh with one hand, as he struggled to help a boy-hunter carry a peccary.
At the Nambikwara camp, Aruanã had spent one of the most confusing afternoons of his life.
Dragged through the forest by Toad, he had grown more apprehensive with each step that took him away from Pojucan and Ubiratan. The gallery forest followed a river course, and the Nambikwara encampment was along its bank, opposite a small cataract, where the water flowed weakly at this end of the dry season.
Aruanã saw seven lean-to shelters erected wherever a bush or tree offered support for a row of leafy branches or palm fronds. Tall baskets of plaited bamboo for transporting goods lay near the shelters. Aruanã saw a few calabashes, some crude blackened pots, the scattered remains of animals — bits of fur, teeth, claws — and some dried plants and roots. The men, Toad included, wore no more than a tuft of straw dangling from a belt above their genitals, the women nothing but a few strands of shell beads.
The hunters’ wives and the old men were lolling in the sand, some preparing the forest fruits they’d gathered that morning, but most reclining lazily in the shade while the group’s children played at the river’s edge.
At the approach of Aruanã and Toad, all had rushed to examine the newcomer, jabbering at the same time, touching his body, dancing round him with unbridled joy, as if welcoming back a lost son. Most enthusiastic we
re the young women, only three in this family — small, graceful, elegant creatures with velvety beige skins. Two reached for the vine around Aruanã’s neck, pulled it away from Toad, and, giggling, led him to a pool below the cataract where they plunged into the water, splashing and playing and crying happily when the “prisoner” began to join in.
When the water game had ended, the prettiest girl grabbed his arm and pulled him out of the pool, laughing merrily as she took him back to the shelters. When they passed Toad, the man said something and pointed to Aruanã’s penis, and this provoked shrieks of laughter from the bystanders, but the girl hanging onto his arm only smiled sweetly.
She was slightly shorter than Aruanã, slender, with firm, round breasts, smooth skin, delicate features, and clean black hair, long and shiny.
She had led him to a place between the shelters and indicated that he should sit, and soon most of the people were on the ground around them or standing within earshot.
Toad told how they’d captured him, and reported that the others had gone to fetch the manioc.
When finally the file of hunters began to emerge from the trees, Aruanã leapt to his feet, and grew wide-eyed when he saw the two figures bringing up the rear. They were greeted even more enthusiastically than he had been, the little people dancing between the pigs and the tall strangers.
Hare called for silence and made a welcoming speech, telling his people that these great hunters were his guests, for as long as they wished. He ignored the fact that they’d been marched back to the shelters as virtual prisoners.
Aruanã ran to Pojucan and wanted to embrace him but instead said quietly, “My father, I saw much.”
Pojucan looked at him expectantly.
“I was a prisoner, and I was waiting for the dark.”
“And then?”
“I would have run into the forest.”
“But this is not the way of a Tupiniquin,” Pojucan said, almost gruffly.
“I wanted to be where Ubiratan and you sat — not here in the shelter of these people.”
Pojucan smiled. “They have treated you well?” he asked.
“Oh, yes,” he said brightly.
“It is good,” Pojucan said.
The Nambikwara knew that they were at the end of this year’s trek, and already were thinking about the journey to their wintering ground. The pigs and manioc provided the grandest finale they’d ever known to a “happy” season, and they feasted and sang and danced for hours.
When they’d all gorged themselves until their bellies were swollen and their faces shining with grease, Hare and Rock and Toad lapsed into a nostalgic recounting of how wonderful a season it had been.
One couple, though, was seen to sit slightly apart from the rest. The woman had a child at breast, and Hare, who was also medicine man, had decreed that until the baby was weaned they must not partake of a variety of forbidden foods, and that the man was not to hunt. But the worst prohibition was that they were forbidden to have sex. Sex, above all, was the Nambikwara’s delight. Making love was good, they said — and they did so with gusto whenever the opportunity arose.
Now, as they lay around the fire after the feast, couples snuggled together, whispered, and caressed each other gently. One of the young hunters helped his wife to her feet and led her to the darkness beyond the shelters. These two were still young and modest; later they might think nothing of making love right there at the fireside.
Morning Flower, the young girl who had taken such an interest in Aruanã, sat by him all night; she shared her bowl of manioc with him.
When the speeches were over, and Pojucan lay dozing on the ground, Morning Flower held out her hand and Aruanã took it in his own. They lay like that for a time, this moonless night, until all around them slept. Then, with a finger to her lips, she bade him follow her.
Morning Flower led him to the sands by the pool below the cataract, where, in the gentlest way a Nambikwara woman knew, she made love to him.
The first rains came soon after the two men and the boy had decided to accompany the Nambikwara to their winter grounds.
The rains were heralded by a terrifying show of force. Great winds roared through the forests and swept down the cerrado, the vast plain, churning up dust clouds where the earth was bared. The skies opened first with jagged gashes of lightning that often cracked against a forest giant or sent fires racing through the brush. Then the rains erupted — short, violent storms that burst over the land, filling the forest canopy and streaming down the trees beneath. Whatever was weak, whatever was rotten crashed to the ground, huge trunks tearing away from the lianas that supported them and exploding on the forest floor. On the open cerrado, sheets of water fell upon parched earth and a thousand runnels gone in the dry season came to life, uniting in flash floods that carried all before them.
This prelude to the long wet season was erratic, driving away the dry mists and oppressive heat, then abruptly breaking off and leaving a cloudless blue sky. Gradually the storms would give way to a gentle, steady rain, till the lower banks of rivers disappeared and still the waters continued to rise, inundating vast areas of forest and drenching the dry cerrado.
The travelers walked in single file, the women carrying bamboo baskets as heavy and tall as themselves, balancing them on their backs and holding them in place with a strap that went round their foreheads. The Nambikwara men walked up front with their bows and arrows. Mud-splattered and shivering, they stumbled through the storm till they could go no farther, then huddled in little groups of misery between the grasses.
To get to the forest where they could winter, they had to cross a finger of territory where their enemies, the Shavante, hunted. Powerful and ferocious, the Shavante also spent part of the year on trek, and their hunting season closed with the coming of the Nambikwara — a final and deadly pursuit they followed as keenly as the chase of game.
A full moon had passed when, after a particularly violent rainstorm, they had first warning of the Shavante. Toward noon, as they were climbing the muddy slope of a long, flat-topped hill, Pojucan broke away from the others. He’d spotted something on the ground a distance to the left and below them. Hare and Ubiratan came up as he was examining the bones of a tapir.
“Many have eaten,” Ubiratan said, noting their size.
Hare moved about excitedly, poking through the wet ashes of these hunters’ fires, scratching in the undergrowth near the camp. “Shavante!” he announced. He indicated the remains of their sapling shelters, circular and hutlike He paced out an area where the grass had recently been flattened by Shavante mats.
They camped that night in a valley behind the same long hill, keeping their fires low, though these could still be seen from afar, for the grassy depression was open and treeless. They were tense and nervous, awaiting the worst hour — just before dawn, when the Shavante were known to attack.
The Shavante attack did not come the next dawn but three mornings later, on the beaches of a gravely river the Nambikwara and the Shavante called Yellow Water. At the end of every dry season, hundreds of turtles would swim to these sands to lay thousands of eggs. The eggs and the hatchlings were voraciously sought by a multitude of hunters on wing and foot.
When the Nambikwara had seen the tamped-down earth at Yellow Water, the women dropped their baskets and ran to it, falling to their knees and scattering the sands in their haste to uncover the treasure. The men splashed into the stream and in no time had captured ten fine turtles.
Several young Shavante warriors, advance party of a group much larger than the Nambikwara, reached the river late afternoon and saw the enemy tending fires they had built for their feast. They watched angrily from across the water and then slipped away, back to the rest of their party. While the Nambikwara ate and sang and filled their bellies to bursting with turtle meat and eggs, the Shavante took up their war clubs.
They approached before dawn, when their enemy lay heavy with sleep, and the slaughter would have been terrible had Aruanã not b
een awake to warn of their advance. He and Morning Flower had chosen a spot away from the others, at a beach farther upstream. The night had turned bitterly cold and he awoke; but, since Morning Flower still slept peacefully beside him, he stayed where he was, dozing fitfully.
Aruanã saw the figures moving along the opposite bank. He shook the girl awake. “Shavante!”
In what little of her language he knew, he told her to stay while he went to warn the others.
He cut away from the riverbank, hunched over as he ran through the tall grass and dodged between the bushes, until he judged he was behind the Nambikwara encampment.
A thick growth of spiky plants barred his way, but he did not notice the thorns that raked his flesh when he plunged in. Blood came, and he began to feel pain, but by then he was through the tangle of brush.
The camp lay straight ahead, and nothing stirred among the dark shapes around the fires. Through every night since Pojucan had found the tapir bones, they had mounted a guard. But this night’s limitless fare of rich food, and the heady beer the women had made from the buriti palm, had been too much.
Aruanã burst among the prone figures. “Shavante!” he cried. “Shavante coming!”
Almost as one person, everyone came alert.
Aruanã bounded over to where Pojucan and Ubiratan were reaching for their bows. “I saw them at the river,” he said. “Many, many of them.”
For a while, there was panic. The women and children shrieked and cried as though the Shavante were already swinging their war clubs in their midst. Hare ordered the women to take the children and flee beyond the thornbushes and keep running. If their men were victorious, it might take a day before they caught up with them. If they weren’t, they’d at least have a chance of evading this enemy and falling in with another Nambikwara band.
The first Shavante cry pierced the predawn. The opposite bank was densely grown, giving good cover almost to the edge of the water. But it also gave the Nambikwara an advantage: It was slightly lower than where they were encamped.
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