Carlos dropped Beya and slammed the butt of his gun down on the bar. “Everybody calm down. Calm the fuck down. Somebody’s up there, but they’re not Tatinga. We’d all be dead by now.”

The man who’d been hit by my dart staggered off, fell to his knees and vomited repeatedly, pushed himself to his feet, then lurched into the shadows and threw up again.

“You.” He gestured at one of the men. “Get up there. Now.”

One arm still hugging the tree, I loosened Beya’s string pouch and withdrew the tube of ants. Directly beneath me, the man who’d been given the order leapt onto the ladder, climbing two, three rungs at a time. Bit by bit, I eased myself down to a squatting position, a fantastically painful maneuver.

I lay the tube just where the ladder met the edge of the platform, only a foot from me, and flipped off the rubber cap. It fell silently into a mat of leaves below.

Dozens of ants exploded out of it, most of them crawling down the ladder, but three or four made their way onto my sandal and up my leg. I straightened, flicking them off with my free hand, dancing on them, crushing them, as the man flew up the ladder like a monkey.

In seconds he began to howl. At twenty feet up the ladder, he launched himself off it, falling to the hard ground, where he cried out, rolling to one side as he favored what might have been a broken arm.

“Men!” Fat Carlos’s voice boomed. “Pick up the witch and get on the boat. We’re leaving.”

Chatter, whoops, scattered nervous laughter as the poachers mustered themselves, the one hit by the dart clasping his arm and staggering along with them. Balancing on my narrow foothold, still hugging the tree, I waited for my heart to stop slamming its way out of my chest. Bit by bit I squatted, squinting at the first few rungs of the ladder, searching out any black ants that remained on the white sisal rope.

Seeing none, I started my descent, stopping at three or four rungs down. My view was the entire village lit by scattered fires and torchlight, even as far as the beach and the roiling black river. For the first time that night I saw Franz. Crouching on the dock, he uncoiled the last ropes that tethered the poachers’ barge, vanishing for a moment as he dropped down into the shallows, head bobbing as he pushed the monstrosity into the current. In seconds, the river took it. How had he escaped the poachers? Had he hidden himself before I arrived on the scene?

In seconds, my elation—as well as pride in what Franz had done, however he’d done it!—turned to horror. A gruff panting sound from near the longhouse. A flash of yellow and black, a liquid movement. I forced back a scream as my hands whitened on the rope. The men hadn’t seen it yet, but an enormous jaguar was circling the pile of innards in the middle of the village. Ears back, her gold-and-onyx patterned coat rippled as she walked, all power and grace, her mouth open as she huffed every living thing in miles, including me, a dangling sack of flesh on a rope. Briefly she lay next to the pile of guts, tail languidly switching back and forth, sending up little puffs of earth at every slap.