When we push off and head downriver, the old shaman stands alone on the bank and follows us with his eyes till the leafy canopy descends between us and hides him from view.

We’re soon in the vast flooded forest. It took Eko and me days to paddle through it, but we’re following a different route out. Kidah rides in the lead canoe, picking his way carefully. He seems to navigate by instinct, and is never at a loss over which branch of the maze to take. “How does he know where he’s going?” I ask Eko.

She shrugs. “The same way he healed that boy’s leg. Magic.”

“I don’t believe in magic,” I tell her. “I believe in medicine and global positioning devices.”

“At a certain point,” Eko responds, “sorcery and science become one. Kidah was our top scientist. He used mathematics and physics to design powerful weapons, like Archimedes three thousand years earlier. Then he left the People of Dann to live alone on a mountaintop, cultivating the secrets of mind over matter that I started to teach you on the Outer Banks. You learned to bend lines of sand, but he can make boulders fly through the air. Over time, his scientific studies and his psychic gifts merged, and he became” —she pauses—“what he is today.”

“And what is that?” I ask, studying the little man in the canoe in front of us as he paddles tirelessly forward.

“Unique,” she says.

“Let’s just hope he’s up to the task,” I mutter, remembering the candirú pool. “I have a feeling that losing a battle to Colonel Aranha is no fun at all.”

We’re cheered along on our journey by an ever-changing menagerie of birds, beasts, and fish. They dip low overhead, watch us from fern-curtained banks, and swim lazy circles around our canoes. It’s fun to be the center of rain forest attention, although sometimes it’s also a bit perilous. A manatee, slow-moving as a garbage scow, gets so close that he nearly overturns our canoe.

Kidah’s new route soon pays dividends. We leave the flooded forest in the early afternoon, and enter a fast-flowing river system. An hour later, the warriors who are accompanying us start to look nervous. I watch how they urgently whisper back and forth from one canoe to the other, sometimes using words and other times relying on anxious-sounding birdcalls.

“They must be freaking out at being so far from home,” I speculate to Eko.

“No, that’s not what’s spooking them,” she says. “We’ve moved into an inhabited area. They’ve picked up the scents and sounds of another tribe.”

Kidah soon slows his canoe till it’s barely moving and drifts toward a bank. The rest of us follow his example.

The leaves part as we get close, and we see several dozen men in war paint standing with weapons raised.