Сhapter NINE
TARA AND I DECIDED to go to Aucre the following summer. We believed Paiakan's invitation was sincere, and the children already had a lot of wilderness experience and were keen to go. But I was also worried. After all, Sarika was only seven and Severn was ten—what if something happened to them? We would be so far away from help. I knew Tara was as concerned as I was, but she expressed only excitement and enthusiastically went about arranging the myriad details of the trip. Our Haida friend Miles Richardson decided to join us, along with his girlfriend, Patricia Kelly, from Chilliwack in the Fraser Valley, east of Vancouver.
After the Altamira protests, the Brazilian government was worried about troublemakers who might make contact with Indians and get them all stirred up. We heard an edict might have been passed requiring anyone wanting to visit an Indian village to first apply for permission. We knew we would never be approved, so we decided to ignore it and go in without official permission. We flew to Redenção, a rough-and-ready frontier town where we had to find the plane we had bought and a pilot to fly it.
The pilot we found flew us across the river and then mysteriously landed the plane on a road, where he got out and walked away. He reappeared with his girlfriend, who made one more person than the aircraft could handle, so one of us had to be let off. Miles gallantly offered to stay behind in Redenção, and although the pilot promised to pick him up the next day, it was a pretty courageous decision. I had flown into Aucre not speaking a word of Portuguese, but at least I had Paiakan as a friend; Miles knew no one and ended up using sign language to the few Indians who were around. He reached the village, found a place to stay, had a meal, and got back out to meet the plane next day.
After we left Miles, we flew over a sea of unbroken green for almost an hour before an opening in the forest canopy appeared, revealing the circle of huts I had visited just under a year before. We were a great curiosity to the Kaiapo, especially our two daughters. Two young boys hauled our bags as we were led to an empty hut and told we could hang our hammocks there. When it became clear that we didn't have a clue how to hang a hammock, the villagers dissolved in laughter. It was the first of many amusements our ignorance provided the community.
Like all the other huts, the one that was to be our home for two weeks was made of mud plastered between vertical sticks and had a thatched roof. The floor was dirt, and soon everything was covered in a layer of red dust. The children, most of them naked except for strings of beads around their necks, wrists, and ankles, crowded around to watch our every move as we unpacked our bags.
Soon we were invited to Paiakan's hut, which was next to ours, and treated to a meal of fish, beans, and rice. Sev and Sarika were happy to be back with their friends Oe and Tania, who took them out to see the river nearby. We learned to spend hours in that pool during the heat of the day and never once even felt a piranha; Paiakan assured us these fish were only a problem if water levels dropped—and they are delicious to boot.
We went to sleep that night refreshed by dips in the river, well fed, and only anxious for Miles to join us, which he did next morning. We had brought mosquito nets to wrap around the hammocks, as well as light sleeping bags for the early morning cold. After a couple of days of struggling with the netting, we gave up, as there weren't a lot of mosquitoes and Paiakan assured us it was the farmers and miners from cities who brought the malaria with them.
Each morning we woke up to find a row of faces staring at us. Children (and sometimes adults) would sit along the walls just watching—I guess we were their equivalent to early morning cartoons. All of our possessions were on the ground or in open bags and we never lost a thing, though we had many coveted items; everyone was delighted when we gave away much of our stuff before we left because it was too heavy for the plane.
We had to gather fresh food every day, a great experience for us because that meant we spent most of our time fishing. The first day, Paiakan took only Miles and me on a fishing expedition in the dugout canoe. But the females in our gang were very unhappy and demanded they be included. From then on, they were, although none of the women from the village accompanied us.
The Kaiapo were amused by my collapsible rod and tiny Seiko reel with four-pound test line, because my fishing gear was too light for the fish I might hook. I figured I'd show them; after all, a good fisherman is supposed to be able to land huge fish by playing them to exhaustion. On our first trip, I assembled the rod, put on a spinner, and cast into the murky water. Blam, ping. A fish hit and snapped the line. The tension was too tight, so I adjusted it, tied on another spinner, and cast—blam, ping: same thing. Hmm. The Kaiapos' eyes were crinkling in amusement, and when I cast for the third time and the same thing happened, the Kaiapo were roaring. Thank goodness they didn't know how to say in English “I told you so.” So much for “civilized” technology, although they themselves did use nylon lines and metal hooks.
When I finally hooked a tucunare, that incredible fighting fish snapped my rod in two! I wasn't going to let it get away and began pulling in the line by hand, when wham, an arrow impaled my catch right behind the gills. I was too busy fighting the fish and hadn't noticed Paiakan as he raised his bow and shot an arrow. As far as I was concerned, I caught the fish . . . well, I hooked it, anyway.
Each time we made a trip, Paiakan took along Caro, a boy of about six. Caro would hand tools to Paiakan, jump out of the canoe to pull it to shore, or follow him into the forest to gather bait. He was obviously being taught in the very best way.
The river, Rio Zinho, was a wonder, narrowing to a swiftly flowing channel, widening out into long, deep pools, or becoming shallow with long riffles, each area containing a different array of fish. One day we paddled down the river to a wide, shallow area with rocks sticking out of the water. Paiakan got out with his bow and very long arrows. He carefully walked from rock to rock, staring into the clear water, and finally shot. The arrow had struck something. It waved about until eventually Paiakan carefully lifted an immense, snakelike fish from the water. It was an electric eel, capable of delivering a hefty electrical wallop that could be fatal to a small child.
Paiakan clubbed it repeatedly, then, making sure it didn't touch him or any of us, laid it in the bottom of the canoe. I don't know how long the dead animal takes to discharge its biobatteries, but it was quite a while before Paiakan touched it. The fish must have been close to six feet in length and four inches in diameter, and when Paiakan cut into it, I saw the flesh was milky white. Apparently it is a highly prized delicacy, but we didn't try any as it was divided among the elders of the village.
Paiakan (right) lifting an electric eel while Mokuka dispatches another one.
That's me on the top left, with Caro.
On one trip upriver, we came to a large, deep pool that must have been a hundred yards long and perhaps ten or more feet deep. We couldn't see the bottom. Paiakan drove the canoe into reeds along the bank and leaped out, accompanied by Caro. After a few minutes of thrashing and splashing, they emerged with a string of fish, each about six inches long. These, it turned out, would be the bait. They tied sixteen-foot lengths of thick line, with a large hook on one end of each, around pieces of wood that would act as floats. As we pushed off, Paiakan hooked a fish on each line and tossed the floats into the water as we continued upriver.
Hours later, on our way home, we came back through the pool and saw several of the floats buzzing around as if they were motorized. Beautiful catfish were hooked on the lines. And they too were delicious.
One of our longest trips was an all-day venture downriver. We would pull ashore to eat and then drift down. Paiakan had a small motor on his boat but only a tiny can of fuel, and I worried about getting back upriver. At one point, we were caught in a tropical squall, and we pulled in to a bank and huddled together while Paiakan cut down several huge banana-like leaves to hold over our heads as umbrellas until the rain passed.
For dinner, we got a fire going and Paiakan cut up a big tucunare we had caught and put the pieces onto a large leaf. He squeezed a lemon over them, put on some salt, then wrapped the leaf around the fish and tossed it into the fire. Half an hour later, he opened the leaf to reveal a steaming meal that was absolutely delectable. I told Paiakan that where we came from, people would work for years to save enough money to take a trip to spend two weeks doing what he and his people do every day. He seemed amused, if not confused.
On our way back, as I had suspected it might, fuel became a real concern. Here at the equator we were soon enveloped in the black of night with a couple of flashlights whose batteries could go flat at any time. As we putt-putted against the current, those flashlights reflected off eyes in the shallows—crocodiles! Everywhere. Fortunately, this particular species is quite timid with people. Miles has a great dislike of snakes, and we'd heard of the giant anacondas lurking in the rivers. Whenever we had to get out of the canoe in shallow, rocky stretches to push the boat along, I felt bad for Miles, but he never complained.
We alternated between pushing and putt-putting along until we finally ran out of fuel and had to paddle. Paiakan kept unnerving us by gazing intently ahead and saying in Portuguese, “What happened to the village?” There were no bright lights or search parties to greet us when we finally turned a bend and recognized our swimming hole. It had been a wonderful adventure, but I sure was glad to be back in our hut, which had become home.
On one trip, we traveled far down the river to a place where sand-bars arose in the water. We beached the canoe and Paiakan showed us how to recognize places where turtles had laid their eggs. For my girls it was like an Easter egg hunt, and they scrambled along the sand looking for the telltale signs and digging deep down to find the buried treasure. “Don't take them all,” we were told. “Always leave some to hatch.”
Suddenly, Paiakan looked up and saw that the girls had wandered far away. He tugged my arm, clearly alarmed, and told me to call the girls to come back right away: “Tem onça!” We were in jaguar country. It was the first time I saw him express fear. Without alarming the children, we called them back. We found the boiled eggs to be chalky and unappetizing, but of course it's a matter of personal taste and experience; the Kaiapo love turtle eggs.
On another river trip, Paiakan and one of the young men stood on the bow of the canoe as we paddled along and with great expertise they cast a circular net. The net had weights along the edge; when it was cast properly, centrifugal force on the lead sinkers splayed the net into a perfect circle that trapped fish beneath it as it sank. A rope tied to the center of the net caused the weights to move toward each other as the net was drawn up; fish were entangled in the mesh. I tried several times but failed miserably to duplicate the cast. All of the schooling I had spent so long to acquire was useless here.
One day, we asked to walk through the forest. Irekran's brother, Diego, and a friend of his were assigned to accompany us. As we followed a path, we were struck by the number of trees bearing fruit or nuts. Diego pointed out other edible plants everywhere. As we walked, the painted bodies of our guides blended into the pattern of shadows and light and rendered them virtually invisible to our unpracticed eyes.
We were enjoying ourselves, eating bananas and mangoes, swinging on vines over creeks, or slicing pieces of certain vines to drink the water that gushed out of the cut end. But we were incredibly vulnerable. Our guides would appear and vanish, and if they had taken off for any reason, there was absolutely no way we could have found our way back to the village. There were moments when I wondered if Tara and I had been foolish to put our children in such precarious situations. But we weren't abandoned, and soon we were back in familiar territory, walking through the small clearings where plants were cultivated and farinha was roasted.
Before we had decided in which month to go to Aucre, we had asked Darrell Posey when there might be a festival or celebration. “Oh, go on down anytime,” he advised. “They have celebrations all the time.” Sure enough, we had been there for about six days when the women appeared with their bodies painted very dark and wearing only a sash of the kind they carry their babies with. For perhaps an hour, they danced around in rows on the grounds the huts were facing. We learned it was the start of a three-day celebration to honor women.
Next day, the women appeared in far more elaborate regalia, beads, and feather headdresses, and sang and danced for a longer period. On the third day, their adornments were spectacular, with feathers woven into wooden frames that towered over the women's heads. Elaborately painted, the women began to dance just before sundown and continued into the pitch-dark night. Then we were told in not-so-subtle gestures that it was time for us to bugger off, which we did. We felt privileged to have witnessed this amazing ritual.
After we had been in Aucre for about a week, Sarika asked Tara to take a sliver out of the bottom of her foot. Tara looked at it and called me over; a small volcano was erupting from Sarika's skin. Tara disinfected a needle and the area around the “sliver” and began to pick an opening to remove the object. She got it out and put some more disinfectant and a bandage on as Sarika went off happily. Tara held up what she had pried out—a small, fat worm. It was a parasite that apparently infects mammals during a certain time of the year. It sheds its eggs in the ground, and as animals pass by, the parasite attaches to the skin and burrows in. I later heard of a German cameraman who had picked over seventy of them from his legs.
Oe and Tania with their aunt before a festa in Aucre
Sarika showing where the parasitic worm was in her foot
Earlier, I had stubbed my toe on a sharp stick projecting out of a wall. One of our biggest worries was getting an infection in a cut, so I sloshed on disinfectant and bound my toe tightly with tape. That night, the toe began to hurt, and by the second night, it was throbbing each time my heart beat. “Dammit,” I thought, “it must be infected.” Next morning, I tore off the bandage. The throbbing stopped; I had bandaged it too tightly. When I looked at the cut, it was healing well. But beside the cut under my toenail were three worms. Tara dug them out for me and I stopped wearing sandals.
Two days after we had arrived in Aucre, a woman had fallen from a roof and gashed herself very badly on a machete. We learned then that there was a radio phone in the village for emergencies, and frantic calls were made to send the plane in to take her out. After a day, the plane arrived and she was taken to Redenção, where she developed an infection and died. In a community of two hundred, an accident of this severity was upsetting to everyone.
About five days after our arrival, I woke early to wailing all around us. I woke Tara and suggested something bad had happened; perhaps someone had died. We got up and watched people streaming toward one of the huts, where a woman was screaming and trying to flagellate herself with pots and machetes—anything within reach. Other women restrained her and wailed with her. It turned out that an old man had died unexpectedly of tuberculosis. Next day we tried to be as inconspicuous as possible as the body was taken into the forest, where, we gathered, in the customary way it was left on a platform to be consumed by wildlife. I don't know the details of how his wife was dealt with, but somehow she was calmed, and the grounds were “cleansed” by a single male who walked back and forth for hours with a broom, sweeping away the spirits.
Two tragedies in a week were a lot for a small community to bear. After we had been in the village for some time longer, I woke in the night to shooting and yelling outside. It sounded as if people had been drinking and were now shooting wildly, though we had not seen alcohol or guns during our stay. Tara and I got up, and as we went to the door of the hut, there was Paiakan as if standing guard. “What's wrong?” we asked. He looked very grave and pointed to the full moon. “The moon is sick,” he said, “and my people are frightened. They blame it on brancos [white people].”
I had no idea whether he meant that the conjunction of the two tragedies earlier in the week, and now the moon, meant we were being blamed, or whether it was Brazilians in general who were being held responsible for the disasters. We looked at the moon, and it was a strange orange-brown color with blotches on it. “Is it an eclipse?” wondered Paiakan. We couldn't tell; the moon looked distinctly odd.
“The people are chanting the moon back to health,” explained Paiakan.
“Are we in danger?” Tara asked.
I expected him to reassure us, but his answer was, “Não sei [I don't know].” Now that worried us.
“Do you think people will calm down?” Tara persisted.
Again the chilling answer came back, “Não sei.” Patricia, Miles, Severn, Sarika, and I could claim “we're not brancos!”, but Tara says she felt her white skin shining out of that hut.
What were the odds of going to the heart of the Amazon at the same time a lunar eclipse would occur? An hour later, Tara looked out and saw a clean white moon, a telltale bite out of one side. To the Kaiapo, such an extraordinary occurrence is filled with significance, indicating the order within their world has been disrupted and somehow has to be set right. Could these “signs”—the deaths and the eclipse—be punishment for something they had failed to do, or a portent of something extraordinary to come? In a worldview in which everything is connected to everything else, these occurrences cannot be dismissed as meaningless.
Thoughts surged through my head. The Kaiapo are famous for their ferocity. In 1990 two Kaiapo parties of warriors attacked illegal settlements in their territory and claimed to have killed thirty peasants; Raoni, Sting's friend with the plate-sized labret, had led one of the parties in Xingu National Park. In Gorotire, I had met a Brazilian nurse who loved the Kaiapo. She had been living in one of the villages for twenty years when a rumor spread there that white people had attacked a Kaiapo in Redenção. The villagers were so infuriated that they went after the nurse, who had locked herself in her hut. She laughed as she recounted the incident, but she had warned me: when there is a crisis, it doesn't matter how well received you've been; you are not Kaiapo.
Now, I have a curious trait. When confronted with an emotionally charged situation, I become sleepy. It seems to be some kind of defense mechanism, perhaps a way of avoiding further anxiety. In any case, I felt there wasn't much we could do but wait it out and hope things would be calm by morning. Normally I'm the worrywart, but I climbed into my hammock and went back to sleep. Tara lay there listening to bullets whiz past our thin mud walls. Boy, was she mad at me. But we survived.
Morning came. The girls woke up unaware of what had gone on. We ventured out cautiously, wondering what would happen. Superficially, life seemed to be normal as people went about cooking, fishing, swimming. We couldn't decide whether it was our imagination or whether the people were cooler toward us. Our idyllic stay in Aucre had come to a crashing end. We had planned to stay for a few more days, but some of the joy had gone out of it, displaced by our ignorance and fear.
When Paiakan announced that the plane was coming in to take him and Irekran and their children out of Aucre, we decided to leave too. This had been an experience of a lifetime, a step back thousands of years in time to the way humans have lived for most of our existence. We had reached across that huge chasm in friendship and had been accepted in return, yet the eclipse had brought each side back to the reality of how differently we perceive the world.
We had to lighten our packs for the plane and gave away T-shirts, flashlights, fishing gear, knives, whatever we felt would be useful. A young man who had hung around me on our fishing trips shyly gave me a feather necklace he had made. As we left, I didn't know whether the ritual weeping was just for Paiakan and Irekran or whether the Kaiapo also liked us and were wishing us the best.
Severn and Sarika didn't want to leave. It had been an enchanted experience for them, and they wanted to stay the full shot. But once again we were airborne, leaving Aucre and passing over that immense expanse of green.
After forty minutes, we passed a brilliant slash of red through the forest—it was a placer gold mine, and the destruction of the river was unbelievable. The water looked a foamy cream color. Soon we began to see smoke, at first small wisps here and there and then large plumes that blocked the sun—this part of the forest, home to the Kaiapo, was on fire. Sev, especially, became very agitated to realize her friends' habitat was being destroyed.
We stayed overnight in a motel in Redenção. In Aucre, money meant nothing. There, life depended on the skills and knowledge of the people, and the forest and rivers were abundant and generous. Suddenly we were thrown into a world where money was everything. After the mud hut and the Kaiapo children underfoot and the swimming and fishing, even this small town seemed noisy, polluted, and inhospitable. After a sad farewell to Paiakan and his family—who knew when we would see each other again?—we caught a plane to Cuiaba for a short visit to the Pantanal, a wetland fabled for its birds and crocodiles.
As we flew out of Redenção, Sarika complained that her eye was sore. It was red and bloodshot, and within minutes, a thick, milky mucus began to pour out of it. It was terrifying to watch the speed with which this infection developed. By the time we arrived in São Paulo, en route to Cuiaba, her eyelid was swollen shut. We rushed to a drugstore in the airport, where the pharmacist looked at her. I had expected him to jump back and shout, “Oh, my god!” or something equally dramatic, but he indicated it was a common problem and calmly handed us a tube of medicine. I was dubious, but we squeezed the medication into her eye, and within minutes the swelling began to decrease. In a few hours, her eye was free of infection.
While we were waiting for Sarika's eye to subside, Miles began to mock me about the parasites I had pulled out of my feet. How many had I had? Why had I worn sandals? He heaped scorn on me because I should have taken better care of myself. “Do you mean you didn't get any?” I asked. “You don't have any sore spots?”
“Of course not . . . ” he responded, then stopped in midsentence. He plunked himself down on a sofa, tore off his shoe and sock, then saw the volcano between his toes. “Take it out, take it out!” he wailed. I could only laugh at this brave Haida warrior.
PAIAKAN BECAME A GLOBAL hero for his battle to protect his home. He was honored and feted in Europe and the United States. In 1990 he was elected to the United Nations Environment Program's Global 500 list of world environmentalists and, along with former U.S. president Jimmy Carter, received a prize from the Society for a Better World. I flew to New York to celebrate the award with him.
In 1992, an Earth Summit drawing participants from around the world was to be held in Rio de Janeiro in June, and as the date approached, we prepared to return to Brazil. Paiakan's renown had grown, and despite being a thorn in the side of those who would develop the Amazon, he was expected to play a central role at the summit. I heard the Tibetan religious leader the Dalai Lama had asked to share the stage with him.
We arrived in Rio and settled into an apartment on the Condado, just north of Ipanema. The night before the summit, Tara went out for groceries, only to see Paiakan's face on the cover of a national magazine with the words “O Savagem”—“the Savage!”—printed across his image. Paiakan was accused of picking up seventeen-year-old Letiçia Ferreira in a car on the way to a picnic near Redenção and of attacking and raping her with Irekran's assistance and in the presence of their children. The sensational charges, described as “facts” in the most lurid language in the Brazilian news magazine, were announced by the young woman's uncle, the mayor of Redenção, who had campaigned on a virulent anti-Indian platform. Paiakan and his family had retreated to the safety of Aucre.
The whole thing stank to high heaven, but as a tactic to keep Paiakan out of the limelight, it worked brilliantly. At meetings of non-government organizations (NGO) at the Hotel Gloria during the summit, Paul Watson and I shook our heads as one by one the spokespeople for environmental organizations distanced themselves from Paiakan.
In 1994, Paiakan was acquitted in absentia for lack of evidence. But years later, the charges were reinstated. I have pressed Brazilian lawyer Frank Melli, who is a staunch supporter of Paiakan's, to see whether Paiakan can be granted a pardon now that more than thirteen years have passed. He has been silenced far more effectively than if, like Chico Mendes, he had been martyred by assassination. In the meantime, we have set up a trust that will enable Paiakan's children, as is his wish, to go on to university so that they can be educated and work for their people if that is their goal.
When we had visited Paiakan in 1989, he mused that in Canada we pay our scholars and experts to teach at universities and pass on their knowledge to young people. “Our elders are our professors,” he said, and told me he would like to have a Kaiapo university where elders could teach young people how to live in the forest. He wanted to show the forest could be valuable left standing. He wanted, for example, to establish a research station in a pristine area to which scientists would pay to come from the outside world; they would hire Kaiapo cooks and assistants, and they would both teach and learn from the Kaiapo.
Tara and I thought it was a great idea, and with the help of Barbara Zimmerman, the Toronto-born herpetologist who had worked in the Amazon for years and invited us to the Manaus research station, we began to set it up. To pay for it, we organized small, exclusive tours to Aucre and its fledgling station fifteen miles upriver, starting in 1990. People could experience a traditional Indian community and a tropical rain forest. Barb is a remarkable woman and scientist, the only person we could imagine who could pull off this research station project in so remote a place. She handled the Brazilian end of the visits, and Tara looked after the complex arrangements at home.
Severn with Iremaõ, Paiakan's son, at the Pinkaiti research station
Using the money brought in by these tours, the first scientific research station in the eastern lower half of the Amazon watershed was successfully established. After the David Suzuki Foundation was born, we transferred the project to the foundation. But it was a huge drain on Tara's time and energy, and when Conservation International, a well-funded American environmental organization that works to protect wilderness, offered to take charge of the project, we were happy to hand it over.
IN 2001, SEVERN RECEIVED a research grant from Yale University, where she was a junior, to study a species of tree in the Amazon rain forest in that same research station her mom and I had helped get going, now called Projeto Pinkaiti. With the funding of Conservation International and under the supervision of Barbara Zimmerman, the station was flourishing, with a steady stream of scientists and students from Europe and North America.
After hearing Sev's stories about being back in the Amazon, I decided to return to Aucre to see Paiakan while we were in Brazil filming for The Sacred Balance. Paiakan was heavier, and the village too had changed since my last visit. For some unfathomable reason, the thatched roofs had been replaced with metal. A dispensary with a concrete floor had appeared, staffed by a Brazilian who gave out medical drugs; a solar-charged television set was turned on for a few hours a night to show soccer while I was there, and a hut had been built for people who were coming and going to the research station upriver. In Aucre, I woke to the tap, tap, tap of metal devices being used to shell Brazil nuts for the Body Shop chain, which uses the extracted oil in its cosmetics. The plane we had delivered in 1989 still linked the Kaiapo villages together.
The cook for the camp at Aucre was a Brazilian who had a genuine affection for the Kaiapo and had been adopted by them as a Kaiapo, which is a tremendous honor and act of trust. To be adopted, he had to fast for a day, have his hair shaved off, and undergo an entire day of ritual dancing and painting.
Another big change was that Paiakan's daughters were being educated away from the village, in Redenção. Paiakan allowed mahogany trees to be selectively logged for the money he needed to keep the girls in town, and Juneia Mallus is disillusioned by this, but Barb Zimmerman believes such selective logging has a relatively small ecological impact. Paiakan still hopes to rally more outside supporters for preservation of the Amazon, but time has gone by and he has been stuck in the village, marginalized, forgotten by the media.
While I was there, Paiakan and I went fishing again. Unlike our summer visit of 1989, this one took place right after the rainy season and the river was quite high, flowing over the banks and into the forest. As we started off, Paiakan drove the boat right into a bush overhanging the river and began picking the walnut-sized orange fruit and dropping them into the bottom of the craft. When he had accumulated quite a large pile, he backed the boat away and, as we began our trip downriver, he told me to bait up with the fruit. If I hadn't known any better, I would have thought he was playing a trick on this gringo, and I was a little skeptical, but I dutifully pushed a hook through the skin of the fruit.
“Cast it out,” he urged me, so I began to cast in a half-hearted way. I just couldn't imagine fishing with a fruit on my hook. What if someone saw me? Paiakan killed the engine, baited a hand line with another fruit, and began to throw it toward the trees along the river's edge. Right away he was hauling in a huge, flat, silvery fish. Well, I began to cast in earnest then and immediately hooked a fish, which broke my line. Paiakan caught three fish, while I hooked several and lost them all. We drifted down to a place where there were large rocks and pools; Paiakan jumped out and cast a hand net, pulling in several of the same species at each throw. In the end, we had ten beautiful fish, and once again I was awed by Paiakan's skill and knowledge. I caught no fish that day.
All too soon, my short visit was over, and I began to prepare to leave. Irekran offered to paint my body, which I had always hoped for, but I knew I would have to be filming again in a few days. “Not my face,” I told her, with mixed feelings. Severn had been painted and I would love to have had that experience, but it would also have made me stand out and be subjected to stares in airports, which did not please me. So Irekran painted me up to my chin, with long, vertical stripes of dark-black dye. When I asked her how long the paint would last, she answered, “About ten days.” Wrong. It lasted a month and created a buzz when I went to the gym back in Canada.
The day I left Aucre, I was wakened by a horrendous racket, which I learned was the pharmacist spraying insecticide around the village—malaria had come to this part of the forest. It seems there is no way to escape the forces of change, even in the deepest part of the Amazon.
Paiakan and me displaying his wife Irekran's paint job