We breathed together under the dripping trees. A little black capuchin monkey with a white face swung down from a lower branch and landed on her shoulder, one arm wrapped around her forehead, a look of she is mine in his eyes. Beya got to her feet, shooing away her pet, who chittered up the stairs and into the hut.

“Are you afraid I will steal your spells, your secrets?” She turned to look at me. “I have my own. I don’t need your Boston spells.”

“I’m trying, I swear. It’s just—”

“Were your potions in the bag the howler monkey stole?”

“No, that was just underwear and stuff.”

She lifted one gnarled finger. “You’re very young. And thin. Your nerves are high. Still, you’re hiding your powers from me. You are like the pygmy marmoset, see?” She pointed up to a nearby tree. A squirrel-sized creature with a ruff around its neck like a lion sat at the entrance to a dark hole in the bark, its small hands rubbing nervously together. “He has his own home in the tree, but he never relaxes in his hole. He’s always facing out, ready to react to a predator.”

“Maybe that’s a good idea.”

“He never uses the forest to help him. He’s always afraid. He will always be afraid.”

I squinted up at the nervous little creature at the mouth of his hole. “Aren’t you afraid of jaguars out here by yourself?”

She sneered at my question, the macaw feathers in her ears shuddering in the ethereal light. “The poachers took the jaguar, so the jaguar took the child. The jaguar knows I do not hunt him. He leaves me alone. So tell me, when will you die?”

“How would I know that?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Every shaman knows the year of their death. I am sixty-five. I will die at age eighty-three.”

“I’m not a shaman.”

She waved me away in disgust. “You ask about fear. My only fear is that I will die here, alone in this place. Not with my people. I think you are a message from Boston that this will not come to pass.”

“I wish that were true.”

“If I show you some of my secrets, will you show me some of yours from the forest of Boston?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering what in the world I could show her, and what she would do to me if I showed her nothing.

“Come with me,” she said. I followed her down a narrow track of cleared land behind her hut before plunging into the pathless green. I had to run to catch up with her. C shaped, eighty pounds tops—still, she was fast and strong and I had to work to keep her in sight. She stopped short in front of a young ficus tree. A termite nest as big as a duffel bag hung off it like a tumor.

“If you are hungry, you can always eat the queen termite,” she said. “These nests are everywhere.” With her machete she chopped open the blackened crust; thousands of glittering termites flooded out in panic, soldiers scrambling at the damage. Workers poured down the sides of the tree and circled it in a wave, immediately swarming back up. She held out the machete and pointed at the four-inch-long, white, segmented queen, temporarily abandoned by her workers. “You can eat it raw, or cook it. A few of these will give you strength if you are lost.”