“Get her get her get her!” Another round of laughter, gunshots.

Marietta tore across an arc of land toward the longhouse, pursued by a poacher in ragged shorts; he caught her easily and dragged her to the ground. She screamed as he pawed at her, twisted in his grip, got up and ran again; he let her get away like a cat might play with a mouse before finally ending the game at its leisure. He got up, dusted himself off, and followed her.

I peered out from under the longhouse. Torches blazed from all four corners of the Anaconda Bar. Poachers—I stopped counting at twenty—danced with reluctant Ayacheran women, throwing them around or grappling them tight into an unwanted embrace. Fat Carlos, in a sweat-stained undershirt and filthy khaki pants, a purple kerchief tied across his missing eye under his frayed sisal hat, sat at the bar holding court, clutching a woman I was too far away to recognize. A small figure lay trussed and gagged on the ground, motionless.

I had mere seconds to do what I had to do. Breathing hard against cramps that would have felled me at any other time, I pulled the dead paca by its back legs from my shoulder bag, laid the rigid body on the ground in front of me. In the darkness my fingers found his little sternum and rib cage. I slipped my knife into his fur and flesh and drew it to his pelvic bone, gutting him. I parted the skin and scooped out the still-warm entrails with my hand, cutting around with the other to free them. Making sure no one was watching, I darted out to the bald earth of the village between the bar and the longhouse, lay the hot pile on the ground, and disappeared back into the forest.

Second by second, I drew closer to the Anaconda Bar behind my shroud of jungle. The trussed, gagged body was Beya; she lay motionless on her side in a circle of jumping torchlight. Carlos held Anna on his lap, his hands traveling where they wished, tossing her back and forth like a doll. I spotted Doña Antonia, Paco, the other women and children, a few elderly men including Anna’s father, and all the hunters except for Franz. Huddled half in, half out of the light, most of Ayachero was patrolled by a couple dozen poachers who corralled them into a tight circle, barking at them nonstop like they were hopped-up on something, occasionally shooting near their feet or into the black clouds above.

I huddled in the shadows just feet from the rope ladder to the jaguar platform.

“You’re a gorgeous little thing,” Fat Carlos said, holding Anna tight. “Maybe I’ll take you with me, would you like that? Wouldn’t you like to be rich and fat, traipsing down the streets of gay Pareee, farting through silk?”

She turned her face away from him, but kept her body limp. A shout came from up the hill. The man who had been groping Marietta thundered down the slope to the bar.