He howled, dropping to the earth in a crouch just as the hunter who’d shot him dropped noiselessly from the trees above us, landing with another arrow already drawn and trained at Omar’s heart.

I knelt down beside him, my face inches from his. In his, agony, but also a command: Do not fall apart. Keep your cool.

Omar snapped the arrow close to the top of his foot and tossed away the shaft. Lifting his foot from the ground, he reached under it and pulled out the arrow from the other side, then threw it at the men’s feet. Something about this seemed to change the power dynamic among the men. A smaller hunter with close-set eyes and a shaved head began to argue with MiddleEye, jabbing his finger in the air at me, then Omar, then me again. MiddleEye bickered back at him, but it seemed like a draw, and in moments they turned, vanishing in an ocean of waving ferns.

Limping, Omar leapt after them. I froze in place, immobile with fear until the tribesman who had shot him through the foot screamed in my ear and I broke into a stumbling run, the hunter on my heels.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Zigzagging behind the hunters, Omar left bloody tracks on a path less than six inches wide. The Tatinga walked in silence, dodging evil pools and stepping over fallen logs swiftly and without pause. Every now and then I caught a glimpse of the spider monkey’s dangling arms bouncing against a slender back, or a warrior’s wide leathery foot padding along, their shoulders and arms just brushing the narrow confines of a path only they knew. Their brown legs were thin but sinewy, their chests concave, shoulder blades wide and sharp, flashing in the many-hued shade. Not a sign of fatigue even from those carrying thirty-, forty-pound animals on their backs. Hesitant light sifted through the understory, sizzling the moisture on the sweating plants.

Pain glowed brightly from deep inside my blighted skin; the suffocating heat of the afternoon intensified. My vision blurred with exhaustion. I wasn’t walking, I was falling forward with each step. We passed a tripped snare, a lethal contraption of fire-hardened bamboo spears balanced under a rock. The hunters paused to free a trapped howler monkey, its neck broken, before tossing the animal across their backs and pushing on.

Glimmers of light poked through the wall of trees in front of us. A clearing. As we approached, I hallucinated an ocean beach opening up before us, choppy blue waves full of sailboats, happy families swimming and picnicking on the sand.

The jungle expelled us onto the cleared area. Instead of dozens of huts and a longhouse, here, a moat of hard mud surrounded one fifty-foot oval roundhouse—I saw no other structures. Palm thatch sun-bleached to a silver gray stretched from the ground all the way to a thirty-foot peak. Full sunlight drenched us before we passed through a low entryway into the huge open plaza in the middle of the structure, the roof cut away from its perimeter to let in the sky. The clearing was littered with small fires, palm-leaf baskets, and a couple of old dugout canoes used as troughs. Young children, naked except for adornments like the red-and-black beaded bracelet Anna had given me, ran through the center, young boys with child-sized versions of their fathers’ bows and arrows or blowguns taking aim at small lizards. Odors of grilling meat, burning cecropia wood, the dense smell of humans in close proximity overwhelmed me. Dogs yelped, pet macaws screeched, a baby sloth wrapped itself around a young girl who wore it like a shawl as she dropped still-moving larva from a palm leaf into her mouth.