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By Root 382 0

some questions. Roht nodded her consent. She sat upright on a bench, with her two hands joined together on her lap. I started by asking if she could explain how she had become a healer. She said her great-uncle was a healer, and that she was born with the gift. She said that plants speak to her, telling her when they are most potent and when to pick them; this sometimes happens at night, while she is resting; she receives instructions, gets up, and goes to the plants she has just been told about. The information she receives is always correct, she said. And when people tell her of their illness, she feels the sickness in her own body, which acts as a mirror. Later, when she learns which plants will heal the illness, she feels relief in the part of her body that has the empathy with the sick person. She did not elaborate on how she receives instructions from or about plants.

Her views reminded me of the notions held by some Amazonian shamans I had met. I decided to go straight to the point and asked what she could tell me about natureâs intelligence. She shook her head, and said: âNobody has asked me this before. It is difficult to penetrate nature. I have no words for it. There will never be such words. No one will ever know how plants and humans are made, or what will become of them. This will remain a secret.â

I found her pale blue gaze hard to sustain. When she spoke, I could listen only to the melody of her voice. Estonian is not an Indo-European language, and I found it difficult to make out a single word. When she paused, I listened to the translation and noted word by word what she had said. See jääb saladuseks. This will remain a secret. The word saladus means secret.

I asked her why nature likes to hide. She replied: âWe will get punished for giving away natureâs secrets. You should not know everything. You should deal in a proper way with knowledge, heal people and treat them well. Secrets can fall into the hands of the wrong people.â

Her reply did not make me feel like prying any further.

She showed us around her garden and pointed to the plants she used to cure different conditions. We were reaching the end of the encounter. I felt moved to thank her for her time and consideration and went to the car to fetch a copy of my book in Estonian. The book has a serpent on its cover. She accepted it with both hands, glanced at the cover, and said: âI have something for you.â

We followed her over to the main house and waited outside. She soon returned with a large glass jar containing alcohol distilled from the fruits of her garden and a dead viper. She explained that she had caught the viper in her garden several months ago and had dropped it into the alcohol while it was still alive. On expiring, the snake expelled its venom into the mixture, which, she said, would give us vitality and protect us from illness. She filled a shot glass with snake medicine and offered it to me. I knocked it back in the name of anthropology. It did not taste so bad. The first effect was a tingling warmth and a diffuse sense of well-being that seemed unrelated to the small amount of alcohol in the dose she had administered.

We thanked her once again and took our leave. I drove the return road in a state of grace, and during the weeks that followed, I felt glowing and full of energy. Once I returned home to Switzerland, people around me remarked on my good form. By telling this story, I am not trying to convince anybody of the efficacy of this particular batch of âsnake oilâ (though more research would be interesting if only because snake venoms tend to contain substances that act on neurons). What really remained engraved in my mind were Laine Rohtâs words. This will remain a secret. Did this mean I should not investigate natureâs intelligence?

I turned these words over in my mind for months. I did not want to break into natureâs box of secrets, but I did want to locate it and consider it from different angles. I traveled to the Amazon and met with indigenous people, then visited science laboratories in different countries. I found