State of Wonder - Ann Patchett [109]
They had passed the opening in the jungle now. Looking back over her shoulder Marina found it nowhere in evidence. Had they turned the boat around she wasn’t sure that she could find it. “No reports in the last fifty years, but it doesn’t sound like anyone is going up there taking regular surveys about their habits.”
“They’ve shot poisoned arrows at traders,” Nancy said. “Either they’re not very good shots and the arrows have landed wide of the boats, or they are very good shots and they mean it to be a warning. If Easter were at some point in his life a Hummocca, no one has plans to send him back.”
When they arrived at the trading post it seemed less like Canada and more like Florida. A dozen or so tourists had come with their guide in an open boat from their eco-lodge to watch the Jinta children in their grass skirts as they twitched their nonexistent hips in time to the thundering rhythm of drums. The drums were played by middle-aged men, shirtless and thick, who were most likely the fathers. The fathers had run stripes of what looked to be red lipstick down their noses and across their cheeks and thrashed their heads from side to side like members of a garage band. The drummers were good but their children were better, their wrists encircled in tufts of grass. There were twenty of them or more ranging from very tiny to a few who were slightly bigger than Easter, and they stamped out a complicated pattern of footwork and then hopped in a large circle on one foot while sounding out the hue and cry of warriors. The tourists, enchanted, took pictures with their cell phones. A girl of ten or twelve with a red hibiscus tucked behind her ear stepped forward to dance a solo with a boa constrictor around her neck and so nicely did it hang and sway from her arms that one could not help but be reminded that a feather boa was made to imitate a snake. The mothers of the dancers quickly spread cloths on the ground and set out an array of small blow guns, tiny carved white herons, and string bracelets woven with red seeds. Having been given an opportunity to shop, the white women began bartering, wanting a bracelet and a necklace for the price of the bracelet alone. One of the women handed her husband the camera and then came and stood beside Marina. “Take my picture with this one,” she said. “She’s twice the size of the rest of them.”
Marina, in her Lakashi dress, put her arm around the woman’s waist so that her own red seed bracelet would show in the picture.
Easter went and stood beside one of the men with a tall kettle drum and put his hands on either side of the base. After a minute he began to nod his head in time. A boy came out with a three-toed sloth and hung it around a tourist’s neck and the animal, barely awake, tilted back its head and seemed to smile at her. The sloth, for posing in pictures, was an even bigger hit than Marina. A heavyset woman in a dirty T-shirt and cutoff jeans then arrived with a struggling fifty pound capybara in her arms. She held it on its back the way one would a baby, possibly thinking the large rodent would take a nice picture as well, but the animal squealed and writhed and then finally bit her so that she was forced to drop it and watch it sprint away into the undergrowth, shrieking in fear. That was when two very old men in enormous feathered headdresses came skipping slowly out of a thatched hut shaking rain sticks, and the dancing children fell into a line behind them. The elder of the two men, the one with no teeth, stopped and took Marina’s hand, tugging at her gently.
“You’re supposed to dance,” Nancy said.
“I can’t do this,” Marina said.
“I don’t think there’s any choice.”
Marina looked at the crowd and then at the Indians and the message on every face was exactly the same: no choice. And so she took the chief’s hand which he then held high above his head, about the level of Marina’s cheekbone, and together