I saw Omar before he saw me. Suspended between his and another man’s shoulder was a thick bamboo pole from which hung a dead juvenile tapir, lashed there by its strange three-toed hooves, head dangling from its broken neck, cropped elephantine nose hanging down. Three four-foot black caiman clamped fierce jaws around the center of the pole as if they were still alive and fighting, but the loose, boneless way their bodies and limbs swayed told a different story. At the end of the pole, just before Omar’s bronze shoulders, hung a couple of dead spider monkeys tied in two furry balls, heads tucked under arms, knees bent and stored up under their chins, tails trussed around them, as if they were sleeping. I wondered: Omar had told me once that Ayacherans never ate monkey—only the tribes “stooped” to that sort of thing—but obviously desperation had come into play. Eyes on the ground and bent under his load, Omar, smiling and joking, carried the game to the already blazing fires near the longhouse.

I ran up to him, tasted the sweetness of his name in my mouth as I said it. He took me in his arms as soon as he was able to lay down his load. I went to kiss him, but he took me firmly by the shoulders, held me away from him, and took a good look at me.

“Why are you wearing that?”

“Someone stole my clothes.” I became conscious of my uncombed hair, my now chronic sense of uncleanliness, hideous sack dress, legs and arms covered with welts. “A monkey stole my backpack.”

His face broke open in a smile. “My poor Lily. The jungle’s treating you badly, I think, because it doesn’t know you yet.” He smoothed my hair from my eyes, kissed me quickly and drily on the lips. “Are you sick, Lily?”

“It’s this food. I can’t get used to it.”

Torchlight leapt up into the evening sky on either end of the Anaconda Bar. A party was revving up on the hill, Bolivian pop tunes blaring. Over the river, remnants of daylight backlit the darkening clouds in brilliant orange, as if a fire burned somewhere beyond the hanging green. Among the trees, light tightened in the way it always did before a jungle night.

His hands dropped from my shoulders; I felt bereft of his touch.

“I brought you a present.” From a leather sack he carefully lifted out two turquoise-and-yellow fist-sized balls of fluff with tiny black beaks and spiky green tails: baby macaws. He tumbled them into my palms. They squawked and blinked and bit at my fingers as I petted them with my thumbs.

His face grew serious. “Fat Carlos and Dutchie and his men. We got to their camp just after they left. They were too lazy to climb the trees, so they cut them down and left the babies to die up by the river cliffs. By the ironwood trees where they nest. We couldn’t save all of them.” He shook his head. “I had to choose. There were yellow ones, green ones, purple, red . . . we got to these before the snakes, or the other birds. But we had to leave most of them.”