Parrots fly up, screeching. Nelson lifts the snake from the stump with the barrel of his gun, the animal’s head blown off by the shot. He points to its horned tail. The Brazilian lancehead is the most feared snake in Latin America. Because of its camouflage, it’s like a mine: it explodes when you step on it, but sometimes even before. Its bite is not only painful, but due to the amount of venom, life threatening. The further we get from Airão, the denser the vegetation becomes. Grass and thorns cut through my skin like razor blades, tree roots reach up to my ankles.
Back to the river. This used to be a commercial center, but since the last inhabitants left Airão in the early sixties, it has become a ghost town. Only the cemetery remains almost intact, as if the looters did not dare to go there. André, Nelson’s father, sometimes goes there to pick coca plants among the old graves. The indigenous people use the crop to make epadu, a ceremonial stimulant whose use has come under pressure. Frustrated by the lack of success in the fight against cocaine smuggling in the Amazon region, the federal police have begun destroying indigenous community gardens where coca was grown for personal use only.
André sits by the fire, carving arrows for his blowpipe. Tomorrow he will return to his house on the Camanaú, a tributary of the Rio Negro and the gateway to the Waimiri-Atroari reserve. He exudes serenity in everything he does. Only this afternoon, when I asked him about the poison for his arrows, his eyes flickered.
“Be careful,” a friend who regularly visits the Waimiri had said. “They don’t like it when you ask for too much. They can talk to you and kill you the next moment.”
It is night. I am awakened by the sound of grinding and breaking branches, as if something large and heavy is being dragged through the forest. “A giant otter,” André whispers. There is a tone of respect in his voice. I listen to the rustling of the leaves and the sigh of the wind. Fireflies move like ghost lights along the trees. An eerie laughter comes from the top of a stump.
To be continued…
