“What is she asking me?”

“If you have milk.”

Laughing uproariously, she pressed her palms down hard all over my enormous belly, breaking her merriment only to bust out into a staccato burst of words. Finally she walked away, smiling and clapping her hands.

“What did she say?” I whispered.

“She said it’s a boy.”

Only later did I learn that if she had thought my child was a girl, chances were they would have gotten it out of me and kept it, since the tribe had too many boys and men, and not enough girls to keep their numbers steady.

A wide-eyed young woman, black lines staining her face in an intricate mazelike design, hands dyed deep blue and just showing her own pregnancy, handed me a calabash of water with a shy smile. Freshly cut cicatrizations, tiny ritual scars, oozed red on either side of her navel. I took a long drink, the light glowing amber through the skin of the womb-shaped gourd. Behind my closed eyes, my baby boy floated, waiting. I called to him for strength, told him I wasn’t going to fuck this up, that we were going to live. He nodded with his closed, swollen eyes, his Mona Lisa smile, amniotic. It was the first time I can remember feeling something like love for him, a budding devotion.

The young girl took my hand and pulled. We followed her. MiddleEye stalked darkly behind us along with several of the other hunters. Omar asked the young girl something; she nodded solemnly. We entered the welcome shade of the roundhouse. Hammocks, drying vines, and tobacco leaves hung from the rafters. Woven baskets brimmed with grinning monkey heads, turtle eggs, water gourds, green bananas, baked white bones, and explosions of brilliant bird feathers.

From behind a bamboo screen, a high-pitched screeching, metal on metal. Seated in a wheelchair rusted to a crusty flaking orange, a man wheeled himself out from his sanctuary. He wore a headdress of black-and-white harpy eagle feathers, the bodies of multicolored macaws sewn by their beaks between the larger feathers. An old Timex watch with no hands hung loosely on his wrist, the metal band stretched out. His shoulders and midsection were wiry and strong, rippling with muscle, but his legs were atrophied, thin as a girl’s. His wide, flat feet—one of them split halfway up the middle—were planted firmly on the footrests. Along with half a dozen quills, scraggly silver hair sprouted from his face. Large hands—nails dark and chipped—came to rest on his lap where a bone needle, ball of palm-fiber thread, perforated nuts, and hawk feathers lay, a project we had interrupted with our visit. He studied us with deep-set, weary eyes.

Swollen with his news, MiddleEye rushed toward his father and barked out the story again, brandishing his knife, pointing at Omar, at me, at the forest beyond the walls of the roundhouse.

Omar approached the man in the wheelchair, dropping his eyes as MiddleEye rattled on in Tatinga. Color drained from his face, from pain or fear or shame or some combination, I couldn’t be sure, I only knew his knack for hiding emotion seemed to be failing him. Finally, MiddleEye wrapped up, struck a wide stance, and folded his arms.