On the evening before we left, Sprouting Leaf watched me admire the young boys practicing their blowguns. They could nail a butterfly jig-jagging in the air or a lizard zipping across the dirt. With a few words in Tatinga, I commented on their uncanny aim. She ran off to her family’s area of the roundhouse and returned with a foot-long child-sized blowgun, a bamboo container filled with five palm spikes—darts—and a much smaller section of bamboo sealed with rubber and filled with curare, the poison to dip the darts in. Smiling, Omar translated that she was afraid I would stab myself with the darts, so that’s why she kept the toxin separate.

“She wants to make a trade,” he said. “She says the blowgun is for our little boy, if she can have some of your hair.”

“What do you think?”

“Just say yes,” he said. “Always say yes here.”

Drink the masato. Eat the monkey arm. Let the women coat you in green mud. Give Sprouting Leaf a lock of your hair; yes, yes, yes.

That evening, “some” of my hair quickly turned into all of my hair when the women sat me by the fire. Singing the whole time, they shaved my head with a set of piranha jaws. Sprouting Leaf did her work with such care I barely felt it, not once nicking my scalp; in half an hour I was a bald, green-fleshed, hugely pregnant gringa. Afterward, she took me aside and showed me how to use the blowgun, demonstrating how to sight my target through a V created by two paca teeth set inside the pipe, and how to lay each dart along a nest of kapok fluff to steady it. She gestured for me to practice, the hollow eyes of a monkey skull grinning from the rafters my target.

Omar and I left at dawn on the sixth day. Mist boiled over the roundhouse, the desolate cries of the piha bird announcing the new morning. Wearing a liana belt and several bracelets shot through with the shining copper of my own hair, Sprouting Leaf stood under the palm eave of the main entrance to the roundhouse. Her goodbye was just a solemn nod, but I had to remind myself that hugging and smiling and expressing big emotions wasn’t something that happened in this place. I slung a string bag over my shoulder, another gift she had made for me out of woven chambira fronds; she swore it was strong enough to hold a hundred-pound peccary. Now it contained the blowgun, darts, and curare. I touched the bag and nodded back at her before turning away from the roundhouse and the people who had saved my life, following Omar and a few Tatinga hunters into the green morass.

MiddleEye blasted along the jungle path, two more hunters behind him, all of them carrying leather bags on their backs filled with the heavy plaster. I carried a much lighter bag packed full of the leaves, as did Omar. These we could mix with fat in Ayachero. Chunks of the green clay flaked off my arms and legs as I walked, the edges of the lesions crusted over but still weeping. Twice I doubled over with shooting pains in my belly and back; this time the ache radiated down my legs. Were these real contractions? All Omar could do was help me to my feet again. There was no time for discussion: the hunters never slowed down, and we would have been utterly lost without them.