Finally I remembered the place she always went when she couldn’t bear it anymore.

“Anna!” Franz’s voice thundered from the longhouse.

I stood at the base of the tree where the jaguar platform shadowed the moonlight from the Anaconda Bar. A sob filtered down from high up in the branches. “Anna!” I called. “Are you okay?”

“No. I’m not okay,” she cried pitifully. “I’m never going to be okay.”

Franz sprinted down the stairs and to the rope ladder. “Anna, come down. Please.”

She stood, smoothing her dress over her body. Lit from beneath by torchlight, her pregnant belly nearly obscured her tearstained face. “No! You come up here.”

The crowd quieted. Waiting. Only the clink of glasses on the bar. Franz looked at the ground, placed one foot on the ladder’s first rung.

“You need to come up here right now,” she said wretchedly. “This is where you should have been for the past two weeks. Hunting the jaguar that killed our child, Franz, our child, do you hear me?” Her voice broke. Someone snapped off the radio. The jungle shuddered and hissed.

“Just come down from there. It’s dangerous, Anna, come on.” His face beet red, never looking back at the ogling crowd, he stayed on the ground.

She threw down a heavy, overripe sugar apple that splatted to bits near his foot. “I will never come down until I kill this thing. Do you understand? Now come up here and help me do it.”

“Anna, you’ve been drinking.”

“Yes, I’ve been drinking—”

“Calm down and get—”

“If you were any sort of man, you’d come up here and get me.”

He put his other foot on the first rung, hauled himself up, and hung there, swinging, head drooping forward. The crowd watched. He took another step up, then one more, heaving his body up as if its weight were unbearable. He stopped at the fifth rung, eight, ten feet in the air, swaying, ropes creaking.

“You can’t do it. Even now.” She threw another piece of fruit at him; it smashed wetly on his shoulder; pulp rolled down his back. He didn’t react, only stayed where he was, head down. She huffed a shotgun higher up on her shoulder. Disappeared from view.

Franz jumped down, ran a short distance away, and vomited. Omar ran to put his arm around his brother; they went into a huddle. Soon the crowd lost interest in the drama and picked up the pace; the dancing, bragging, laughing, and betting all started up again. Doña Antonia, obviously enjoying her aguardiente, gave me the slightest half smile as she passed by with a large plate of grilled meat.

The hardest part about climbing the thirty-foot rope ladder was the way it kept swaying with my weight. I found Anna crouched on the far side of the platform, pointing her gun down into a nest of leaves.

“He’s afraid of heights,” she said. “And of planes—flying, I mean. That’s why he didn’t go to Cochabamba to find Omar.”