Nightlife (2 page)

But they had not come too late. The Colombians were still at the village; probably overnight. Their rowboat, powered by a large outboard motor, rested against the muddy bank of the stream near the village’s main entrance. A few winding kilometers downstream, it linked with the larger Orinoco River. Odds were that the Orinoco would take them back to one of the more civilized areas with its own airstrip.

Before Angus even heard him coming, the headman of the raiding tribe, from Mabori-teri, was at his side. His name was Damowä, and like many of the raiders, he had painted his body black with the pigments they used in ceremonies and warfare.

“Are the enemy still here?” he asked in the native tongue.

Angus nodded.

The black paint ended just under Damowä’s eyes; above the line, those eyes spoke a profound mixture of ferocity and fear. “Will they have the wasp-guns?”

Angus lowered his great shaggy head for a moment, then raised it. Inside, what the Yanomamö called his
buhii
— his inner self—was cold. Their expression for sadness.

“Yes,” he said softly. “I think they will.”

Damowä nodded once. “Then we will just have to kill them before they point them at us.”

If only it were as simple as it sounded. As Damowä silently padded away on his callused feet, Angus bowed his head once more. And left it there.

“Father God,” he prayed, whispering, this time in English, “there will be deaths this morning. But I see no other way. And so I ask You, if there is to be punishment for them, that You’ll heap it upon my head, and not theirs. Because I’m the one who led them into this. Through the blood of Your Son, amen.”

Some of the Yanomamö had long since accepted the presence of God. Or Dios, as they sometimes called Him, depending on the nationality of the missionaries who had first arrived to convert them. In many cases, their religion was a mixture of reverence to Dios and a tenacious clinging to the spirit world served by countless generations of their ancestors. Of the ten thousand or so Yanomamö in the rain forests of Venezuela and Brazil, many had been converted to some degree.

Angus wondered, not for the first time, how often it happened the other way around. That a missionary was converted by the Yanomamö. He was willing to bet that he was the first and only.

Angus lifted the shotgun he’d brought. He wasn’t one to leave
all
the dirty work to his primitive charges. If they were going to be risking death at the hands of an enemy village, at his bidding, he could do no less than join in the fray. And in their eyes, it made him just that much closer to being Yanomamö—and therefore, human.

The cultural values running deepest in their souls were nearly a complete flip-flop of what Angus had known as a Scotch-Irish Catholic from Boston. Christianity taught meekness, forgiveness, turning the other cheek. The Yanomamö believed that ferocity and avenging all trespasses was the key to living. Theirs was a society of small villages, usually numbering seventy to eighty, never more than 250. A village grows too packed, and it becomes one giant pressure cooker, with feuds and fights constantly erupting over sins real or imagined. Stealing food, sorcery, trysting with one man’s wife while the husband’s back was turned. Theirs was a society in which men beat their wives to show they cared, and a wife without scars was considered unloved. Should she cheat on her husband, he might go so far as to hack her ears off with a machete as just punishment. Yanomamö country was indeed a man’s world.

It was a society in which nearly every afternoon the men of the village would load yard-long hollow tubes with
ebene,
a pale green powder made from the inner bark of a particular tree. They would squat and take turns blasting the
ebene
into each other’s nostrils with strong breaths.
Ebene
was hallucinatory, putting the takers into a trance in which they met with their personal demons. Experienced shamans could sometimes even coax the demons into living within their chests.

Naturally, men of God were appalled. And over the last few decades they had attempted to dispense with the naked pagans’ filthy demons and bring them around to the ways of Western society. American Evangelicals, various Catholics, Spanish Salesians. Methodology and doctrine differed. The results were invariably the same: the gradual erosion of a culture that had heretofore remained pure for thousands of years.

Angus Finnegan had spent nineteen years with the Yanomamö of Mabori-teri. The first fifteen trying to strip them of their silly spirits. And the last four trying to repair the damage.

For in their well-intentioned meddling, the missionaries had managed to trip a row of dominos that would eventually lead to the twentieth century bulldozing right over one of the last sovereign Stone Age tribes in the world.

Missionaries led to mission posts. Posts led to airstrips. Airstrips led to increased contact with foreigners, including tourists with a yen for the exotic. Which led to exposure to diseases that the Indians had never encountered and, therefore, had no resistance or immunity to. A measles epidemic could kill, and had. Trinkets of the West had wormed their way into the Yanomamö way of life, even in the most remote villages.

At first such trade goods were innocuous—machetes, aluminum pots, steel axes and knives. Later came boats with outboards, and clothing. And shotguns.

Once the Yanomamö roamed their homeland nearly naked. All the men wore was a narrow waistcord, to which they tied the foreskins of their penises to keep them from dangling. That the sight of a naked body stimulated thoughts of lust had never entered their minds until the missionaries insisted so. Increasingly the Indians felt ill at ease without some sort of covering. Swimming trunks, loincloths, even Fruit of the Loom Jockey shorts were often the rule rather than the exception now. Headman Damowä had come by a pair of which he was extremely proud—boasting drawings of a jubilant Mickey Mouse, whom he called “the happy rat.”

But whereas clothing was harmless and sometimes even amusing, the arrival of shotguns was not. They were finding their way more and more into Yanomamö warfare. And where a quarter of adult male deaths were already due to warfare, an arms race was the
last
thing they needed.

A lot of the shotguns had even come from the missionaries themselves. Give them flashlights and shotguns, went the sentiments of some, and the Indians will be forever dependent on you for batteries and ammunition. Even the missionaries were not above petty squabbles over who would be first to reach uncontacted villages.

Angus was fully aware that violence and treachery were a part of daily Yanomamö life. Still, as bad as it could get, that seemed far preferable to hypocrisy. And hypocrisy was something the Yanomamö did not know.

It was learned by example.

Angus had long resided in
hushuo
— emotional turmoil. For he had come to know the Indians on a level that most of the missionaries never would. With dignity, nobility, wit, with a strength of kinship unsurpassed anywhere.
As fellow human beings.
While some of the missionaries outspokenly professed beliefs that the tribesmen were subhuman, on a par with animals.

Well then, let him who is without sin cast the first stone,
Angus had thought at his breaking point four years ago.
As for me, I’ll have no part in destroying their lives any longer.

Not that they shouldn’t come to know God. But God dwells in unspoiled jungles as readily as in suburban tract homes. There had to be a happy medium.

But the die had been cast, and its path was downhill all the way. Change could not be stopped. Impeded, perhaps. Which meant knowing what to expect. It was only a matter of time, then, before they were contacted by traffickers in the drug trade. At least in Iyakei-teri.

Angus still kept a calendar, kept track of days and dates. This was April, tail end of the dry season, and that had been of enormous benefit to hopes of ending things here and now. Intervillage gossip ran rampant during the dry season. During the rainy season, the trails between villages became impassable swamps, isolating each tribe for the duration. Had the Colombians come between next month and September, he would never have heard the news. About men from the outside world coming to trade fabulous supplies for a magical powder recently cultivated by the Iyakei tribe. A powder called
hekura-teri,
which had made them the most feared tribe around.

May God have mercy should it reach the outside world.

The raiders could see thickening plumes of smoke rising from within the village. Newly awake, the Iyakei were stoking their dwindling fires with fresh wood. It wouldn’t be long now.

The raiders nervously worked wads of green tobacco in their mouths. They were edgy. Mabori-teri was a three days’ walk away. Their traveling food—the bananalike plantains, a dietary staple—was nearly gone. And last night they could have no fire, since it might have gotten them spotted. As a result they were cold and feared spirits that might have approached overnight. Raids were always like this.

They could hear voices now, steadily increasing chatter.

Yanomamö villages consisted of an oval-shaped succession of huts called a
shabono.
Each hut was built adjacent to its neighbor, until the oval was enclosed. An open plaza in the middle. A log stockade surrounding the huts. Periodic gaps in both for entrance and exit. Overnight, these were filled with brush, a first-defense burglar alarm.

Angus watched and listened as the Iyakei removed the deadbrush and a few emerged. Voices mostly announced intentions to defecate. Bodily functions were as ripe for talk as plans for later in the day.

The raiders, concealed in brush and gloom, were as silent as ghosts, notching arrows into their bowstrings. Ready. Meat-hungry for war. They waited patiently as the Iyakei, armed even during this commonplace activity, relieved bowels and bladders. Alert for any sign of discovery. Angus tensed as a taller man in bush pants came out to do his duty as well, fifteen feet away. Long hair; certainly not Yanomamö. They kept theirs trimmed by razor-grass into bowl-shaped cuts, men and women alike.

Colombian. Toting along a small machine pistol. What Damowä had called a wasp-gun, because the spray of automatic fire reminded him of an attacking swarm of angry wasps. No doubt these were their fundamental trade gifts for the
hekura-teri
powder. Keep the tribe full of incentive for continued cooperation. All they’d have to bring next time would be ammunition. If the missionaries could play that game, why not the drug exporters?

Fifteen minutes later, the same Colombian led two others out, armed as well. Couldn’t be any more left inside. Three men and their load would be pushing it as it was, given the size of the boat. They stood guard and oversaw Iyakei tribesmen, who came out toting canvas bags to load into the boat.
Now or never.
Angus signaled.

Damowä was the first to let his arrow fly, and a second later some twenty more went streaking in. A Colombian was the first hit; he took Damowä’s arrow in the throat, the war tip snapping off as the shaft fell to the ground. As one voice, the Mabori roared their savagery.

In answer, the wasp-guns roared back.

Angus unleashed his own war cry and erupted from his crouch. He let the shotgun do the talking from then on.

His first blast peppered the leg of another Colombian and sent him sprawling into the mud of the stream bank. He jacked another shell into the chamber and spun, an avenging angel with broken wings, and blasted a tribesman clumsily attempting to sight in on him with a machine gun.

Pandemonium had arisen from within the village. Screams from the women and children, enraged cries from other warriors who came out to join the battle. Arrows whizzed back and forth, bullets chewed up trees and foliage all around the Mabori. Twenty feet to Angus’s left, the machine-gun fire nearly tore one of the raiders in half. Six guns were firing at once, two with the Colombians and four in the inexperienced hands of the Iyakei.

Experienced or not, it didn’t matter as long as they pointed in your direction and squeezed the trigger. You were just as dead or wounded. And the casualties began to mount up on the raiders’ side quicker than on the Iyakei’s.

Angus fell to the ground as bullets chopped at a tree above his head, then took out one of the gunners with another shotgun blast. One of the Mabori, Kerebawa, took out another one with an arrow. The wound itself, in the thigh, would never be fatal. But the curare wasted no time in taking over, paralyzing him from the outside in.

The Mabori were pinned down behind their cover, with little recourse left but to fire blindly into the air and hope the arrows got lucky. Dumb luck and instinct. While the injured Colombian laid down covering fire from the ground, his longhaired partner and a tribesman crouched low to finish loading the boat.

Another gunner fell, after which a Mabori warrior loosed an arrow and sprinted closer. With a quick burst of fire, his head showered apart.

Another Mabori screamed for vengeance and charged from his cover, a machete held aloft. He actually managed to outrun the path of bullets sent after him, and Angus watched as he descended upon the hapless gunner and hacked him across the face. A moment later, the avenging Mabori was skewered by the sharpened end of a seven-foot club.

The one saving grace for the Mabori was the Iyakei’s unfamiliarity with their guns. Ammunition was wasted, long bursts were fired instead of short ones. And once their clips were empty, the attempts to reload were clumsy, those who had extra clips to begin with. It was the only thing preventing Mabori extinction.

Still, the Iyakei had managed to buy enough time to finish loading the boat. Angus swore aloud and clenched his teeth firmly when he heard the outboard fire up. He rose again, heedless of the danger, an arrow nearly skinning off his nose. He unleashed two rapid shotgun blasts toward the boat. When the injured Colombian rose to return fire, he took an arrow in the belly.

But the third throttled the engine and kicked up a sudden wake as the boat took flight. Angus could have wept with frustration. Unless a wild arrow claimed him, and this seemed less and less likely the farther away he got . . .