Doña Antonia stepped forward and handed me a calabash.

I took it but stood frozen as the dogs strained at their leashes and snapped at the entrails. Suddenly I became aware of the women yelling something at me: Come on, pick them up! I scooted the ladle under the quivering pile and heaved scoop after scoop into the boiling pot, wondering how anything could be hotter than the punishing air.

It was only then that something broke among the women. Murmuring, they withdrew their own knives from the folds of their skirts and stepped around to the other gigantic fish. Each dropped to her knees. One by one, they expertly drove the blades deep in, holding an empty calabash against the inevitable flow of guts, or sawing at a gigantic head. Cutting and scooping, cutting and scooping, we began to fill the pot.

Though the women worked in silence, efficiently, a few slipped me an encouraging nod or smile. The vat of boiling guts belched giant taut bubbles into the blistering morning air. At one point, Doña Antonia left the group, disappearing up the hill for several minutes. Huffing, she returned dragging a woven basket of bananas—her height—that had turned black and soft. Countless flies and gnats flocked to the stench. A few women ran up to help her, peeling and throwing the rotted fruit in the pot, now a thick gluey stew.

Doña Antonia tossed a dozen shallow clay bowls at a good distance from each other near the pot, then handed me the ladle. “Fill them,” she grunted.

Over time I learned that we had to cook the dogs’ food because eating raw flesh was a death sentence for them. Like the jaguars, once the dogs learned the taste of raw meat, they acquired a blood thirst they never forgot. Instead of circling and cornering prey so the hunters could close in, they would attack, getting themselves gored by the tusks of the wild pigs the men were trying to capture. Here, dogs weren’t kept to be petted, bathed, and adored, they were kept to hunt peccary or tapir; to sniff out shyer game like tortoises and armadillos, alert families to snakes that sometimes snuck in the village at night. To show them affection was considered lunacy.

When I was done ladling, Doña Antonia macheted the liana that held the dogs. Wild-eyed, they raced for their meal, yelping and nipping at one another, each of them—in an attempt to steal the other dogs’ share—wolfing their food so fast they barely swallowed their own portion. One runty mongrel with sweet brown eyes and a skunkish white stripe down her back ate far too slowly and was soon nudged aside. Whimpering, she tried her luck at the other bowls, but the three-legged dog—the most vicious of the bunch—bared her teeth in a snarl, scaring the sweet mutt witless. There wasn’t a scrap of food left.

“This one, Mariposa, she pees when she sees a jaguar skin.” Doña Antonia eyed the dog as it scampered up the hill, tail between her legs. “We should get rid of her.”