Pathways - Jeri Taylor [12]
“Antonio,” his father called. “Come here and see what my son found.”
Antonio, a cheerful man in his thirties, with dark hair and a brilliant smile, joined them, inspecting the marking. “We’re getting close, Kolopak. Your son is quite a scout.”
Kolopak beamed with pride, making Chakotay uncomfortable. “I was just looking at a lizard and I saw it,” he muttered self-deprecatingly, but Kolopak wasn’t dissuaded.
“Well, your eyes saw it, no one else’s did—that’s the important thing.”
Chakotay sighed inwardly, barely listening as his father launched into a dissertation about the symbol, an ancient blessing to the land, a kind of apologia for cutting down the tree. Why did he have to be told all this, over and over again? He had absolutely no interest in these old customs. He wandered back onto the trail, wondering how long it was until lunch, and hence didn’t see the disappointed look on his father’s face.
The discovery of the huge snake came shortly after they had eaten a midday meal. It was a decidedly unnerving event to Chakotay, and left him with a cold knot in his stomach.
It was Antonio who found it, a boa constrictor over three meters long, grotesquely swollen from a recent meal. The snake was torporous from its ingestion, which Antonio surmised was a small boar, or peccary. Chakotay stared in disgust, envisioning the slow devouring. The constrictor would have crushed the boar first, wrapping its coils around the pig’s rib cage and then tightening slowly, inexorably squeezing air from its lungs and making it impossible for the pig to breathe. As its ribs snapped, it would pass into blessed unconsciousness.
At that point, the snake’s jaws would spread wide, allowing it to envelop the boar’s head, and gradually, using its powerful muscles, it would gulp the creature into its stomach. Then, worn from the effort, sated as it began to digest its meal, it would sink into languor, able only to lie on the floor of the forest until the boar was completely digested, some weeks hence. Then it would begin its relentless search for the next repast, sliding silently and surprisingly swiftly through the undergrowth until some other animal was caught within its powerful coils.
Chakotay hated snakes. As a child his nightmares were those of being pursued by giant reptiles, or of being shut inside a dwelling where somewhere, he knew not where, there was a snake that would spring at him when he least expected it. He would wake crying aloud, damp with sweat, and creep into bed with his mother and father, a place where snake dreams wouldn’t dare to pursue him.
Of all the creatures Earth had spawned, these were the ones Chakotay had difficulty countenancing. They seemed to strike at some primal fear that couldn’t be rationally understood; his people, after all, had been at one with all animals, and some had even worshipped the serpent, or at least put it in a position of special reverence. Their creation myth certainly spoke with awe about ancient and mysterious reptiles.
But to Chakotay they were discomfiting for reasons he couldn’t articulate. The sight of one produced a slight chilling in him, a faint but pervasive sense of unease. He disliked their colorations, their scaliness, the undulating way they moved.
Now, as Chakotay was confronted with the gruesome sight of the bloated constrictor, his stomach contorted and he turned away in revulsion. He felt his father’s gaze on him, but didn’t care. This was just one more example of the horrors and indignities that were being thrust on him in this foolish quest for their forebears.
“Serpents have been devouring their prey here for thousands of years,” offered Kolopak. “Our ancestors worshipped these majestic reptiles because of their powerful ability to shed their skins and be reborn.” Chakotay could tell that his father viewed this discovery as another sign of the symbolic significance of their journey.
“Tell that to the boar,” he said churlishly.
“Animals have killed each other for food since the dawn