The tribesman looked with derision at the weeping Christ on the balsa wood cross. “An angry jaguar spirit affects everyone. Your rotting God cannot protect you.”

The smaller tribesman, who stood closest to the jungle, took something out of a string bag. A bundle of palm thatch gathered in such a way as to look like a small child, like a doll. FrannyB waved him away, muttering a few words in Tatinga.

“She’s telling him to keep his heathen idol,” Omar said under his breath.

Anna took a step forward, blocking FrannyB’s bluster. Her voice was low but strong. “Benicio was my child. If these people have something of comfort for us, I want to know about it.”

“You’re going to send your child into the everlasting fires of hell.”

“Get out of my way.”

With fierce disgust, FrannyB took a step back, FrannyA tight to her side.

The Tatinga man held out the doll to Anna, who took it, cradled it above her pregnant belly, and fell to her knees in the wet sand as if she had just been handed the torn and bloodied body of her son. Her convulsions over the palm-leaf child put us all in shame, reminding us that this was not our loss, and we quieted so the flowing river, the sun—weak behind a scrim of cloud—the eagle pairs huddled side by side in the trees, all could hear her lament.

The Tatinga man got to his knees and began to rock, chanting over the crumpled woman and straw child, sweeping his hands through the air above them, around them, as if sending her grief away. When she had cried herself out, he gently took the doll from her arms and laid it in the small canoe the other man had placed at the shore. He nodded toward her and Franz, who, with his wife, pushed the little canoe out into the waiting water of the Amazon. The tiny craft turned in an eddy before the main current discovered it, disappearing it around a bend in seconds. By the time I turned back to the men, they were gone.

TWELVE

Night came on as it always did in the jungle, hard and fast like a shutting door at six o’clock, exactly twelve hours from sunrise, the ruthless rotation of equatorial days. Along with the rest of the villagers, we threaded through clusters of six or seven huts arranged loosely in circles as if for safety, many of them sharing a clay oven shaped like an igloo. Trawling nets hung from trees next to rows of javelins, fishing poles, and bows and arrows.

Under a narrow, thirty-foot-long thatched roof stretched a bench of equal length rubbed smooth by countless asses. Above it, the bar: another impressive slab of termite-bitten wood, this one buffed to a well-worn sheen by a thousand elbows. Suspended over a row of fat candles, an anaconda skin as long as the bar, in variegated patterns of yellow, brown, and black triangles—over five feet at its widest—had been nailed to a plaque in short intervals. Its coloring was bright and rich, as if this creature had been alive and crawling not too long ago. Its anvil-shaped head hung down on one end in a posture of utter defeat, insect-eaten eyes leaving pinched black holes, tongue hanging down a foot or so, split, red, and stiff looking. A hand-painted sign scrawled on a thin strip of bark tacked below the fattest section of snake read: Bienvenido a la Barra de la Anaconda. “Welcome to the Anaconda Bar.”