The Hunted: A Novel

By Peter Clenott

It is 1996 when a helicopter carrying a geological survey team is forced to land in the Amazon rain forest. There, they soon discover the only remnants of an indigenous tribe hidden for thousands of years: an elderly shaman, two boys, a girl, and an infant named Suyape. Medical tests run on the five Ipanao survivors indicate one troubling factsomething is not right with their DNA.

Years later, seventeen-year-old Suyape Goncalves is back in hiding once again. Adopted in the United States by two anthropologists when she was a baby, Suyape has now begun to remember things that happened to her people from a time when ice covered the land, when the Ipanao fled the Great Plains, and when the people of the New World scattered across the globe. Now, as she attempts to conceal herself from scientists intent on exploiting her mysterious differences and from hunters determined to kill her, Suyape reunites with her lost kin in the Amazon and is soon embroiled in a challenge she could never have imagined.

The Hunted shares the compelling story of a young woman who discovers that the mysteries she remembers may be all that lies between her and extinction of the earth.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Mar 13, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475980677

Peter Clenott

Born in Portland, Maine, Mr. Clenott graduated from Bowdoin College before setting down roots in Massachusetts. The father of three children, he currently works for an anti-poverty agency. His previous published works include Hunting the King, Devolution, and The Hunted.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

(1996 The Amazon)

"Prima Fuega down. We’re under attack!"

From where eighteen-year Antonia Carvalho sat in the co-pilot’s seat of the Bettencourt AS350 helicopter, all she could see staring down to her right was the vast green canopy of the Amazon a thousand feet below. There was no sign of the missing helicopter.

Under attack? By what? A black-eyed, black-haired coiled python, Antonia shot a glance at her father. Sitting still was always a problem for her. With Prima Fuega helpless on the ground, lost to the jungle and facing unnamed peril, she was already preparing to spring.

Repeat, please. I don’t think we heard you correctly, Prima Fuega. From the pilot’s seat, Antonia’s father Oscar studied a world with which he was very familiar: horizon to horizon, nothing but dense jungle.

You heard me correctly, companheiro. Something… Can’t see…

"Why is he even on the ground? Antonia shifted in her seat for a better view. Anything was possible among the corporate giants looking to control the great untapped wealth of the Amazon basin and highlands. Sabotage? Could someone have shot him down?"

More likely mechanical failure. These old choppers…

Run just fine, Papa. I flew Prima Fuega yesterday. Does he want us to land and give him a fly swatter?

Antonia grabbed the radio from her father and spoke into it. Prima Fuega, if this is a joke… She was definitely not amused. Sabotage was only one possibility. It wasn’t unheard of for her father and the pilot of the Prima Fuega to play games with one another and with the Bettencourt International employees they ferried above the rain forest. In the past, as a child, Antonia might have tolerated their shenanigans. But she was an adult now, heading to university soon, then to law school. And then…

I will own these helicopters some day, she planned. This company. This forest. Everything that inhabits it and everything that lies beneath.

Where are you, Prima Fuega? she demanded to know. You’re breaking up. Give us your coordinates. You shouldn’t be clowning around.

Antonia ignored her father’s frown, the way he scratched his nose, something he did in lieu of reprimanding his only child. If he said anything to her, she would simply ignore him.

There is only so much light in a day, she told him, fully aware of the rebuke behind his gaze. We have to watch our fuel.

There are other days and there is more fuel. Don’t always be so impatient, Antonita. Oscar averted his eyes from his daughter to the more important search on the ground.

I am not impatient, Papa. It’s just…

What, my dear?

Antonia hesitated. She felt a throbbing in her head. She couldn’t say exactly where it came from, but almost the moment the other pilot had radioed in his distress call, she had felt something unpleasant, unwanted, grab hold of her. It seemed to be coming from down below, she thought. Penetrating her mind. Testing her.

I don’t know, she said.

I hate mosquitoes as much as the next man, Oscar said to his daughter, but perhaps Prima Fuega is being serious.

What is serious, Antonia replied, is Bettencourt. You should understand that, Papa. I am going to marry Ernesto Bettencourt.

Good luck to him. Oscar grunted. Prima Fuega, we must have coordinates. The impatient bride-to-be wants me to land to give you a fly swatter.

"Not flies. Not snakes. Something else! In my head…"

In your head? Angered by the increased pounding inside her own skull, Antonia studied the endless primordial forest. The Bettencourt AS350 had left the Porto Jurua airport an hour after Prima Fuega, delayed by the late arrival of the security team they carried whenever they were exploring new lands. A rich mineral deposit had been discovered quite by accident in the highlands near the Peruvian border where thick forest begins to surrender to the majesty of the Andes. Antonia could see the snow white peaks in the distance.

In your head? she said into the radio. Something else? She was trying to get a visual of the downed Prima Fuega but so far could only see impenetrable vegetation and the wide brown ribbon of the Rio Purus. Be more specific. Crocodiles? Piranha?

They move like the wind. Branca …hit. …no doctor, but he looks dead to me.

People are either dead, or they’re not, Prima Fuega, Antonia insisted. Give us a proper fix on your location.

Silence.

Antonia heaved a sigh, bit her lower lip, a trick she had been taught by her deceased mother. The lip nibble sufficed when instinct preferred she get angry.

I say, give me your proper location.

Silence.

Prima Fuega, come in. You’re wasting time.

Still nothing. Antonia pressed the palms of both hands against the sides of her head. The pain was turning to nausea, and she would not allow herself to be embarrassed.

The pilot of the Prima Fuega wasn’t the type to panic. He had flown hundreds of expeditions over the Amazon in a decade of working for the Bettencourt mining concern. Antonia knew for a certainty that the pilot carried a pistol on board his helicopter. When she was fifteen, he had taught her how to use the weapon. She had impressed him when she shot out the eye of a jaguar, and jaguars can move like the wind, too.

Is there a problem? came a third voice.

Prima Fuega is on the ground. Antonia didn’t bother to look at Colonel Casagrande, the Bettencourt chief of security, who entered the cockpit at that moment. We’ve lost contact with it.

Shit. Where?

Down there, Colonel. You tell us.

Casagrande imposed his bulk between pilot and co-pilot to get his own perusal of the jungle. Broad-shouldered and full-bellied, he stretched his uniform to its cottony limits, but not the outfit of the federal army or the local police. The yellow letters on his green cap spelled BETTENCOURT.

Senhor Branca may be dead, Antonia’s father said.

Dead? Branca? How?

Something that moves like the wind, Oscar said. In the Amazon, I don’t want to think what that could be.

Well, you’ve got no choice, the security officer told them. Take us down.

Where? Antonia asked. Her lip biting drew blood. The taste of it on her tongue fueled her reckless side, a desire to land anywhere, to hunt down and kill whatever it was that had dared to attack Bettencourt property. If we…

Her radio crackled again.

… things…

Prima Fuega!

…poison…

Say again, Prima Fuega. You broke up.

There should always be a doctor on these flights, Casagrande mumbled. Force of habit made him rest one hand on his revolver. His security team of six armed former Brazilian soldiers waited in the hold of the helicopter. If Branca is dead, we’re all in trouble.

Poison, Oscar said. He distinctly said poison.

Maybe you misheard him. Why would he say such a thing?

Because, Colonel Casagrande, Antonia said, something is down there with them. In his head.

Taking her eyes off the approaching Andes, Antonia opened a compartment beneath the control panel. She withdrew a pistol. Her eyes gleamed. She ignored the throbbing in her head. Whatever it is, she told the men, we can’t let it stop us.

At last, it was her father who spotted the glint of sunlight off metal that caused him to bring his helicopter around for a second look.

There! Without giving either his daughter or the security chief any warning, he brought the helicopter so close to tree level that the storm it generated startled a band of red-furred monkeys. Antonia could see them hop from branch to branch causing the vines and leaves to sway and shake with their flight. Dozens of finches and macaws, their colors abruptly splashing against the green backdrop of the jungle, took wing, too. Antonia knew all about the fauna of her home land. One-fifth of the world’s birds found home in the Amazon. Some barely missed being chopped into flesh and feathers by Oscar Carvalho’s flying fortress.

Hold tight, he told his passengers. We’re about to land.

The other pilot had managed to set down his craft and crew of five, including Horacio Branca, Vice President in Charge of Mining Operations, on what appeared to be a grass-covered rise in the forest floor surrounded on all sides by trees, the one open space in the entire tropical ecosystem within ten kilometers. A neat trick that Antonia’s father would have to mimic with less room to spare.

There’s probably gold under there, too, Antonia said. This is the beginning of the highlands. We can’t be scared off by ‘something else’.

Not just something else. The security chief shook his head, eyes fixed on the approaching grassy mound. The natives say this is a place of spirits and black magic. Be careful, Carvalho. This is the last place in the world we want to get stuck.

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They moved like the wind, and, like the wind, they knew how to keep their silence, how to move without being seen, how to hear without hearing, how to speak without speaking. This had been their existence for millennia. This was how they had survived.

But for all of their tenacity, for all of the skills they had learned and passed down from generation to generation, there were only eight of them left. Disease took its toll. The forest. The river. The sky. It was the latter they feared the most. Myth, lore, stories enacted by their shaman all recounted the days of peril and loss and how the Ipanao had come to live in this difficult land. What they knew, or at least what they believed they knew, was that death came from the skies. So that when the Prima Fuega army helicopter sputtered and whined and tore through the forest canopy disturbing the site where the Ipanao buried their dead, they had no choice but to hunt down the enemy, to drive them from the spirit land.

Whatever the pilot of Prima Fuega might have imagined, crouched beside his helicopter protecting the body of Horacio Branca with a loaded Colt .357 Magnum, the wind was really nothing more than four male Ipanao, two adults, two young boys. Painted in the colors of the forest from head to foot, they blended so well with the fronds and leaves, the dog ears and the monkey ladders, the papaya and willows, that had the chopper pilot been equipped with a telescope manufactured by NASA, he still wouldn’t have been able to identify them. One of the boys was called Tinqo. Among the four Ipanao he was the most adept at spitting poison darts honed from sharpened animal bone. Waiting for the proper breeze, he could launch a deadly missile from his two foot long bone pipe from behind the cover of the forest. The projectile, whose tip was coated with tar from curare bark, could travel up to fifty feet as did the one that struck the Vice President in Charge of Mining Operations in the back.

Tinqo’s young companion Ushon was fearless. No amount of restraint could keep the dark-skinned boy from taunting the invaders with his imitation of the harpy eagle. Every time Tinqo would attempt to hold Ushon down by the shoulders, Ushon would pop up, make his call, and goad the being from the downed bird to take a shot at him. Neither boy had any idea what a Colt .357 Magnum was or what it could do. Nor did they recognize the language the man with the weapon shouted. Tinqo and Ushon didn’t have to speak.

Be careful, was the thought, the sense, that imposed itself on both their minds in the same instant. Antanajo, their shaman, was thinking to them. You do not know what these creatures can do.

I know, thought Tinqo.

I don’t care, thought Ushon.

All of the Ipanao had coffee-colored skin. All had jet black hair. None of them stood over five and a half feet. Like their females, they preferred ornamental paint and jewelry made of bone to clothing, though the girls like Jana and Papanagua also liked to adorn themselves with flowers and feathers.

Slender and mobile on the hunt, they never left the thick protection of the forest. They skirted grasslands and even avoided the open water of the rivers, preferring to fish from shore, pulling in their catch by long netted strands of wound hemp. Antanajo, the last of the elders, liked to smoke a drug that put him into days-long trances. Because he was under its spell even now, he could communicate with the four other males of the tribe just by thinking.

Quepas is dead, he told them.

How can he know that? wondered Tinqo. Quepas is with us.

No, he isn’t. Quepas is dead.

Unlike the fidgety Ushon, Tinqo remained as still and silent as a rock behind the bushes that separated the two boys from Prima Fuega’s pilot and his Magnum and helicopter. Three other people from the outside world were peering out at the enclosing jungle from inside the great bird. Tinqo wasn’t afraid of them. He wasn’t afraid of anyone. But then neither had his elder Quepas been afraid and Quepas was dead now, struck down by the thing that the man from the great flying bird held in his hand. Tinqo was watching it to see how it worked. He pointed in the direction of the trees on the far side of the helicopter where Quepas had fallen, hopefully to rise again to a better world where all their Ipanao ancestors lived.

Is Huska dead, too? asked Ushon.

We are all dying. It is a bad day today, thought Antanajo.

Ushon, the youngest male of the Ipanao, studied his friend. It amazed him how Tinqo could sit still for hours at a time without moving arm or leg, then, in an instant, lash out not in physical movement but with a thought or idea that Ushon could never comprehend.

Don’t listen to the old man. We will not die today, Tinqo insisted.

How do you know? Ushon wondered.

Su-ya-pe says so.

Tinqo and Ushon glanced at one another. A female voice had answered Ushon’s question. Neither of the boys wanted to die. Not today, as Antanajo claimed, nor later. But how could Su-ya-pe know their fate much less communicate it to the two boys?

How can she know? Tinqo wondered. She is still feeding at Papanagua’s breasts.

Su-ya-pe remembers, came the insistent thought from Jana, a young Ipanao female.

The notion was a puzzling one to Tinqo. Su-ya-pe remembers? Tinqo could barely register the events of the previous day he was so intent on the moment. Frightened and alert, he had no time to ponder Jana’s meaning. Instead, his eyes traveled skyward just as a strong unnatural wind toppled him onto his back. Every branch in every tree began to dance and shudder wildly. Tinqo was afraid the root of every plant in the jungle would be torn from the ground and hurled upwards into the sky. Rich soil and gritty pebbles were flung into his face and against his bare skin.

Another sun bird, he shouted.

A second creature, whirring and screeching just over the tops of the trees, descended towards the Ipanao holy ground, a hill built up over the millennia by the remains of the tribal dead composted with jungle foliage and plant life. At the base of that hill lay the hip fragments, skulls, broken pieces of fingers and toes from people who had occupied the rain forest before the pyramids were built, before the ice had retreated from the land. At the top lay the most recent deceased, including Tinqo’s mother and baby sister, dead in child birth despite all of Antanajo’s medications.

Tinqo grabbed hold of Ushon. ‘We must go to the females.’ There were so few of them left, how could the Ipanao continue?

I will stay. I will fight, Ushon insisted.

No, you won’t.

If Quepas and Huska had entered the spirit world, leadership of the Ipanao had fallen into the twelve-year-old hands of Tinqo. He grabbed Ushon roughly by his lone black braid and pulled him back into the forest. They could afford no more death. And, besides, hadn’t the thought abruptly appeared in Tinqo’s mind that they would not die this day? Antanajo was wrong. Someone else was right.

Su-ya-pe, Tinqo’s daughter.

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As it turned out, Horacio Branca was not dead. Tinqo’s curare, intended for small mammals, had only paralyzed the mining corporation executive. It was Antonia who pulled the crude dart out of his back side. Once he found his voice, however, he was able to state with very audible and clear rancor, Kill whoever did this to me!

Gladly, Senhor Branca, Antonia said. Her pistol was locked and loaded.

We don’t know what’s out there, Antonia, or who. Casagrande, the security chief, aimed his concerns at his team of armed private police. You can see what they did to Senhor Branca.

Those may be indigenous people, Oscar Carvalho reminded his daughter. You are part Indian yourself. Brazil has laws protecting them.

And laws, as well, against murderers, she replied. My blood is my own.

Out here, Branca said, we make the laws. Bettencourt International.

But what do you know of the jungle? Carvalho asked. You’ll get lost.

Bah! was Antonia’s position.

She lifted her nose to the air as if she could sniff out the culprits who had tried to kill Senhor Branca. She had been a soccer star in school. Lean, athletic, single-minded and utterly focused. There were those who believed that a hunter took on the spirit of the animal she killed. If so, jaguar sleek and deadly, Antonia was ready to push Casagrande aside and lead his men into battle. She stuck sun glasses in the back pocket of her jeans and took a swig of water offered to her by her father, watched the security officer buckle on a bullet proof vest unmindful of the terrible humidity of the jungle.

Now are we ready, Colonel? she said. Then, before he could signal his men to follow him with caution into the undergrowth, she was off.

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Seven-year old Jana finished daubing Papanagua’s face in green ochre. Then she sat for a while beside the unmoving woman, the last of her kind, trying to reach her mind. All the while, she held the infant Su-ya-pe in her arms feeding her a concoction prepared by Antanajo that Su-ya-pe would have to drink if her mother, Papanagua, did not recover.

This is a bad day, Antanajo said. A very bad day.

Jana didn’t glance behind her at the tribal shaman who was perched on a branch five feet off the ground issuing smoke into the air from rolled leaves and the ground bark of the Ucuuba tree that he had become addicted to. His thoughts occasionally struck her like lightning from the sky, painful and sharp and erratic. Jana didn’t like them.

You should talk, she told him. You should pray. Papanagua is sick.

Papanagua is dead, corrected the shaman.

No, she isn’t.

As Jana cuddled the quiet, meditative infant Su-ya-pe in one arm, she stroked the long strands of black hair belonging to Papanagua. The woman’s brow was hot with fever.

I can hear her, Jana said. She sent a thought into the sky to stop the hunter gods from coming. So did I.

Did it work?

No. They are here.

You see? How can you hear her, if I can’t? You’re no shaman. You’re a girl.

I can hear her. Jana’s insistence was accompanied by her own bolt of emotion that struck Antanajo right between the eyes almost costing him his perch on the tree.

She’s green, Jana said. That means she’s still alive.

Antanajo dropped to the ground. How can you see her aura without the Ucuuba in you? I tell you, she’s dead, as we all will be.

No, we won’t, Jana said.

All we have left for females are a child and an infant. I foresaw this day. It’s a bad day. A very bad day.

Because Antanajo had silver hair and had seen more sunsets and sun rises than all the remaining Ipanao combined, Jana supposed she should have shown the old man greater deference. But a young Ipanao girl who can swing with the monkeys and fly with the birds isn’t obligated to bow to anyone. Once Antanajo died, if he ever did, she intended upon becoming her family’s shaman.

Tinqo and Ushon are coming, she said. We must hide.

From the hunters? Hunh! Where will you hide from the air?

Nevertheless, placing Suyape in a hide sack hung from her shoulders, Jana patiently dragged the larger Papanagua away from their collection of thatch huts into the surrounding bushes. She covered Su-ya-pe’s mother with leaves and vines and crouched in the humid, lightless gloom beside the last of the Ipanao shaman.

She shows no green aura, Antanajo persisted.

Yes, she does. You smoke too much.

Jana held on tightly to the unconscious Papanagua’s hand. She refused to show Antanajo how frightened she really was. The stunning, unexpected descent of the hunter gods, bursting so suddenly above the trees, had instantly set the four remaining Ipanao males… Quepas, Huska, Tinqo and Ushon… into gathering their arrows, spears and darts as if they had known all along this day would come. Jana had stayed behind to tend to Papanagua and Su-ya-pe, all the while her mind reeling from a multitude of sensations, emotions, thoughts imploding in a confusing chaotic array that kept her from sorting out what she must do. It was Su-ya-pe’s vigilant black eyes, never leaving Jana’s, that reassured the seven-year-old.

I’ll never leave you, she told the baby. I have no milk for you, but we’ll disappear into the forest together, you and I. The hunters will never find us.

Her heart leapt when she saw Tinqo and Ushon tear through the undergrowth, the one her brother, the other the boy she loved.

Come, was all Tinqo said. He was bathed in perspiration, dripping green droplets of paint onto his bare chest.

Jana said, I can’t leave Papanagua.

She’s dead, Antanajo maintained.

No, she’s not.

Jana stood up, cradling Suyape, and refused to budge. She knew Tinqo would pick them both up, girl and baby, and carry them deeper into the woods where even the hunters would have trouble finding them. She glanced towards the unseen sky from where the hunter gods had come. A single raindrop takes ten minutes to reach the forest floor from the moment it first strikes the leaf ceiling two hundred feet up. Jana prayed that the impenetrable wall of flora that had protected her kind since their arrival from the northern plains thousands of years before would keep their enemies at bay.

She was wrong.

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It was the infrared goggles that the Bettencourt security chief, Colonel Casagrande, brought that would do the trick. Anything giving off heat, and that meant any living human, would be detectable in the darkest night or the densest forest, and that troubled Oscar Carvalho.

He would have stayed by his helicopter, remained with his friend the Prima Fuega pilot and the corporate big shot Branca, let the security chief do his job, except that something was drawing him away towards the intimidating unknown. It wasn’t his daughter who concerned him. Even as a child Antonia had been fearless as if she possessed a genetic right to be safe and unharmed no matter how impetuous her behavior.

Pressed to explain why he should risk his employment, perhaps even his life, Carvalho could only reveal that a feeling had entered his head, a plea for help, from someone or something who could only express themselves in the most fundamental of ways. Not with words. Not with gestures or cries. But rather with a gentle tug, like a baby’s tiny hand latching onto his finger and urging him to come, hurry, save us.

Carvalho’s fellow pilot called to him. Are you crazy? At least take a gun.

Carvalho could only shrug. That baby’s grip was tighter than he could ever have imagined. It pulled him into the pathless undergrowth where leaves, hungry for light, topped him and poked him in the eye. It compelled him to keep up with the security team unmindful of the clouds of mosquitoes eager to jab and feast on his flesh. It guided him in ways sonar, radar and the finest GPS systems could not.

At last, when it seemed to him they were all hopelessly lost, Carvalho stopped. He saw Antonia up ahead leaning against the massive trunk of a tree, her gun poised at shoulder height, ready to fire.

Casagrande, using his goggles to peer into the forest darkness, raised his hand, and said to his men, There. They’re there.

Where? All Oscar could see was jungle life, brilliant flowers, snakelike vines, tree trunks that soared without end. Insects.

"Over there," repeated Casagrande.

"Where?"

Carvalho crept forward, eying the way his daughter was managing the trigger of her weapon. One slight touch and, boom, something would die. Bent low to the ground to avoid the deadly poison-tipped darts, he was sure that none of the security team could see beyond ten feet in front of them. Only their barrel-chested boss seemed able to make out human forms, shapes hunkered beyond normal unmechanized view.

Then abruptly, something odd, unsettling, happened. As though the jungle had launched its own surprise attack. Carvalho keeled over from nausea as if his flesh had been pierced by a curare-tipped dart. Right in the head. Worse, he felt as if whatever had attacked him was now crawling inside his brain, making him feel things, see things, he ought not to be able to. But when, finally, the disorientation passed and he was able to right himself, he blinked his disbelieving eyes and witnessed a miracle.

One of the hunted was standing. Surely, Casagrande’s men could see her. A little girl, a very brave young girl, Carvalho thought. He wanted to reach out to her, to shout to her to get down, to get away. Then, just as suddenly as she had appeared, as the security chief pointed, yelling, There! There, damn it!, the girl was gone.

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The foolhardy Jana stood her ground with Suyape in her arms, defying the creature with the strange eyes to hurt her or any of her family. Thoughts of intense anger, blazing pride and a lesson in Ipanao history, astonished the mind of the man wearing the frightening mask who, when he recovered from Jana’s angry flash, could see nothing of the Ipanao girl even with his infrared goggles. It was as if the child had vanished from the earth.

Never mind, Jana heard him say. Shoot.

The fat man unholstered his pistol. His men took aim, waiting for him to give the order. Innocent Jana, attention focused on a young woman who was pointing something at her, remained steadfast listening to the words of Antanajo.

This is a bad day, a very bad day.

At that moment the fat man instigated a fierce volley of gunfire that pierced leaves and tore the bark off trees. Fire! he yelled. Birds, screeching, scattered. Bullets flew by Tinqo and over Ushon’s shoulders. Antanajo’s Ucuuba cigar was shot out of his fingers.

Astonished, Jana’s mouth fell open. She couldn’t move her feet. She couldn’t move any part of her. Even when the girl standing beside the Ucuuba tree fired her weapon, Jana didn’t budge.

A bullet took off out of the barrel and sped right at Jana. It was too late to avoid the collision. When the ball of lead grazed her arm, she cried out and her magic evaporated. Suddenly, all of the Ipanao were visible to the outsiders, the hunters.

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What had saved Jana’s life, what had caused Antonia’s normally precise aim to misfire was another of the strangers, who launched himself at the girl by the tree just as she was about to shoot.

Stop! he yelled. Stop, Antonia! All of you! Stop or I’ll have the Brazilian government on your ass!

Papa! The girl was outraged, missing a clean shot. What prevented her and the security force of Bettencourt International from firing a second volley was not fear of government authorities who could be bought off. It was the Ipanao themselves. Three children, a baby, and a very old man.

You see your enemy, Colonel Casagrande? Jana’s savior shouted. A waste of bullets, wouldn’t you say? Antonia, you should be ashamed of yourself.

The angry girl with the long black hair shrugged, holstered her pistol, and even offered a smile to the little dark-skinned indigenous girl she had just wounded.

Papa, you worry about mosquitoes, she said and cast a weary look skyward, to the jungle canopy that blocked out the sun. In doing so, she didn’t see a bluish-green light rise from the forest floor until it became absorbed into the mist of the ancient Amazon.

The Ipanao saw it, of course, and knew it for what it was. Perhaps the end of their kind. Grasping Suyape to her small breasts, Jana watched Papanagua’s soul join her ancestors, become one with Mother Earth.

Now, she is dead, the girl thought.

A bad day, Antanajo said. A very bad day.

CHAPTER 2

(1996 Papua New Guinea)

A woman seven months pregnant had no business climbing the mountainous interior of the island of Papua New Guinea. But Cecelia Goncalves’s argument to her husband David was that the non-contacted people of this largely unexplored territory would see the birth of her baby girl as a positive omen.

One thing all women everywhere have in common, she said between deep breaths, is childbirth. We all know what it’s like. The anticipation. The pain. It’ll allow us to bond with the Kerawan.

Is that notion going into your thesis?

David Goncalves lent his wife a hand up the rocky forested slope towards a Kerawan village they had only discovered a few days before. Both Goncalveses were cultural anthropologists out of the University of Rondovia, Brazil, David Cecelia’s senior by five years. Both specialized in studying the language and folklore of ‘non-contacted’ people, those humans with little or no direct contact with twentieth century civilization.

I think it’s reasonable, was Cecelia’s reply. She paused to take a gulp of bottled water. Perched on a boulder beside her husband and a local guide, she gazed down into a lush valley that had been the undetected home of the Kerawan for as long as thirty thousand years. Hard to fathom. So close to the end of the millennium, and there were still people on the planet with whom the world had had no commerce. For her, each contact was a trip back to the time in history when humans worked in stone.

The problem, her husband said, isn’t reaching the people. It’s keeping them alive. Alive, at least, in the world they know. The timber here is priceless.

Cecelia shared her bottle. David took a drink then handed it off to their guide, the member of a tribe familiar with the Kerawan.

Watch what you think, this man said.

"Watch what we think? David asked. You mean, say?"

The guide shook his head and pointed. The Kerawan village, thirteen wood and grass structures inhabited by approximately forty adults and children, occupied a nook in the valley on either side of a stream whose origin was in the highlands. Several of the Kerawan had noticed the arrival of the two anthropologists. One, a pregnant woman with a protruding belly, possibly even further along than Cecelia, was clasping the hand of a little boy.

See, Cecelia said. Discarding her backpack and removing her extra large ‘Save the Planet’ tee shirt, she revealed her own round baby-filled front.

Uh, Cecita, David said.

Cecelia smiled. Her breasts were already swollen with milk destined for their daughter-to-be. She enjoyed the way David, a devout Catholic, still blushed at Cecelia’s nakedness even after two years of marriage. The guide didn’t notice. He held a finger in each ear as if that way he could block out his thoughts.

Down we go, Cecelia said and literally bounced down the slope, smiling, proud of her impending motherhood. It would be her and David’s first.

Not so fast, David warned her. This is our initial contact.

Might as well make it memorable.

The Kerawan were not big people. Cecelia had played high school and university basketball and had even tried out for the Brazilian Olympic squad. Close to six feet, she towered over the pregnant Kerawan female. Her effervescent smile and an upraised open palm that she lowered to rub her full belly put the darker-skinned girl at ease.

Tell her in two months I’m having a baby daughter. Fabia, Cecelia told the guide.

By now most of the village had gathered around the two strangers, who were taller, lighter-complexioned, David with a full beard and glasses. The Kerawan children exhibited curiosity, a sense of humor, and absolutely no fear. A boy and girl tried to pull David’s radio out of his backpack.

Oh, not that, he told them with a smile.

"Apanie," said the pregnant Kerawan teenager. She patted her belly.

"Apanie, Cecelia repeated. You