The Language of a Hunt
THE AX CRACKS through the last fibers of the palm, and I watch the tree creak slowly over, ripping strangler vines to the ground with it. The fall tears open a wedge in the canopy, letting through dappled light that speckles the ground like rain. Gloria steps on top of the tree, hacking apart its root to expose a mass of fat tuco grubs, each about the size of two thumbs, white with brown tips like tiny hats. She picks them up assuredly and doles them out to the dozen or so members of the hunting party, of which I, by circumstances that are almost incomprehensible, am one.
I bite cautiously. The leathery skin of the grub is more delicate in my mouth than it felt in my hands. The body explodes under the pressure of my jaw, filling my mouth with a warm, oily substance that tastes of fat and palm hearts. I breathe rapidly through my mouth, the phantom feeling of writhing still alighting on my tongue, and look at Gloria, standing a few feet away, leaning on her ax, observing my reaction with a half smile. She offers me a piece of the palm heart to chase down the oily residue, and I savor the starchy, crisp taste. My revulsion to the experience will become a source of inspiration for reenactment among the rest of the hunting party. Their laughter will echo up the ridge of the hill, filling the valley with reverberations that slowly fade into the occasional rustle of leaves beneath feet, and then the silence of the forest.
TWO DAYS AGO, a tiny Cessna plane dropped us off in the middle of the Ecuadorean Amazon on a hand-dug runway carved out of the rainforest seemingly only with machetes and sheer will. We are forty-five minutes south of Shell—a small, charmless town named after the Dutch energy company, who in the 1940s constructed a large asphalt landing strip on the edge of the Amazon in its hunt for oil. Shell, the company, abandoned its efforts a decade later, and the landing strip has since become the main port of connection for the seven Indigenous nations of this southern Ecuadorean province in their attempt to keep new oil drilling out of their territories.
The woman in front of me, Gloria, is a leader of the Sápara, the smallest of the Indigenous groups here. She inhabits multiple worlds, standing on stage at the U.N. as an advocate for her people, helping behind closed doors to foster the next generation of international messengers. With only a primary education, she first formed the association of Sápara women and later joined forces with other Indigenous women’s groups, helping to lead a ferocious pan-Indigenous women’s movement in Ecuador against oil drilling in the rainforest. Right now, she is like a child in a playground, making blowdarts out of hollowed wood, climbing trees to collect fruit, regaling us with stories of her childhood in the forest, and snacking on grubs.
We are standing less than a hundred miles south of Yasuni National Park, in the middle of one of the most biodiverse places in the world. Here in this very spot I can walk just a few hundred feet and see in that short span more species of plants, animals, and insects than I would in an entire lifetime in New My tongue feels naked.
