Читать книгу Light at the Edge of the World - Wade Davis - Страница 8

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The Eyelids of Wolves

AS A CHILD, I WAS IMPRESSED MOSTLY BY THE cold night air, the ice cracking on the river and the lights of the Catholic seminary on the village point, where the stone windmill stood frozen by the winter. My entire world was limited to a dozen or so suburban blocks, a warren of brick houses and asphalt that sprawled over the remnants of old Québec, a rock quarry once worked by peasants, wheat fields and orchards where priests lingered on hot summer days, dirt trails that followed traplines and the paths of the coureurs de bois, the fur traders who broke open a continent. In my dreams, I wandered with them, up the St. Lawrence River to the Ottawa, past the islands of Georgian Bay to the Superior lakehead, and beyond to the far reaches of the Athabaska territory, through the lands of the Huron and Cree, Ojibway and Kaska. My waking hours were given over to more prosaic concerns: school and endless games of pickup baseball, football and hockey, the seasonal pursuits that marked the annual round for the English community of Pointe Claire.

When, years later, I returned as an adult, what astonished me most was to realize how small my universe had been and how intimately I had known it. Every blade of grass resonated with a story. Shadows marked the ground where trees had fallen in my absence. Innovations and new construction I took as personal insults, violations of something sacred that lay at the confluence of landscape and memory. Never would I know a place so completely, embrace it with such intensity. Yet the thought of never having left, of having stayed behind as some of my old friends and neighbours had done, left me shuddering with dread. For at its core, Pointe Claire remained what it had been in my father’s time, a bedroom community of harried commuters where the English did not speak to the French, and the French looked across a deep cultural divide to a society they despised. I say this not in judgment but merely to stress how narrow were the limits of my world.

At the age of eleven, I joined the commuters on the morning train, dressed like them in dark jacket and tie, heading into the city to the first of a series of respectable private schools that taught me too much of what I did not want to know and just enough of what I did. And that was to get away, the sooner the better. A first break occurred in the summer of 1968, when a Spanish teacher took six of us to Colombia. The teacher was English by birth, dapper in appearance, with a scent of cologne that in those days gave him the fey veneer of a dandy, an impression betrayed by the scars on his face and a glass eye that marked a body blown apart in the war. His name was John Forester.

At fourteen, I was the youngest of his group and the most fortunate, for unlike the others who spent a sweltering season in the streets of Cali, I was billeted with a family in the mountains above the plains, at the edge of trails that reached west to the Pacific. It was a typical Colombian scene: a flock of children too numerous to keep track of, an indulgent father half the size of his wife, a wizened old grandmother who muttered to herself on a porch overlooking fields of cane and coffee, a protective sister who more than once carried her brother and me home half drunk to a mother, kind beyond words, who stood by the garden gate, hands on hips, feigning anger as she tapped her foot on the stone steps. For eight weeks, I encountered the warmth and decency of a people charged with a strange intensity, a passion for life and a quiet acceptance of the frailty of the human spirit. Several of the other Canadian students longed for home. I felt as if I had finally found it.

Each Sunday, there were dances and wild moments when horsemen from a dozen villages raced over parched fields and along dusty roads where women offered food and teased the riders with their beauty. Though school was out for the summer, one teacher convened classes in his house and discreetly introduced themes that could not be embraced in the open: the plight of the poor, the meaning of a phrase of poetry, the fate of Che Guevara, recently killed in Bolivia. And there were darker moments: the sight of beggars, limbs swollen with disease, and armed soldiers beating ragged children, feral as alley cats, as they scattered into a black night cracked by gunfire.

Life was real, visceral, dense with intoxicating possibilities. I learned that summer to have but one operative word in my vocabulary, and that was yes to any experience, any encounter, anything new. Colombia taught me that it was possible to fling oneself upon the benevolence of the world and emerge not only unscathed but transformed. It was a naive notion, but one that I carried with me for a long time.

SOME YEARS LATER, after finishing high school in British Columbia, where my father had been raised, the son of a doctor in a small mining town in the Canadian Rockies, I returned east to attend university at Harvard. When the time came to select an academic major, serendipity played a hand. Faced with a dazzling array of options and with the deadline hours away, I stood on a Boston street corner in the bright light of a spring afternoon, trying to determine where my destiny lay. Earlier in the day, I had happened upon the Peabody Museum and wandered through its dusty halls, past dioramas of waxen figures dressed impeccably in the costumes of another time: Sioux warriors in full regalia, Haida women clothed in cedar bark robes, Huichol shaman enveloped in all the colours of the rainbow. With these images still swirling in my mind, I was approached on the street by another freshman, an intriguing character whom I had met just days before. When he mentioned his intention to study ethnology, my fate was somehow sealed. In the morning, I signed on as a student of social anthropology.

Sentiment alone, however, did not prepare me for what lay ahead. Within weeks, I fell into the orbit of Professor David Maybury-Lewis, who became my tutor. A man of searing intelligence, whose formal eloquence masked a deeply humane spirit, Maybury-Lewis remains one of the great Americanists, a brilliant scholar who had lived for years among the Akwé-Xavante and Xerente Indians in central Brazil. A student of Rodney Needham at Oxford, he had come to anthropology after earning a degree at Cambridge in Romance languages. His German, Russian, Danish, Spanish and Portuguese were flawless, but it was the way he spoke English that fired the senses. His accent implied erudition. Combined with the precision of his thoughts, the effect was mesmerizing.

Maybury-Lewis had travelled to central Brazil in the mid-1950s to investigate and, in a sense, celebrate the so-called Gê anomaly. Throughout the nineteenth century and well into the first decades of the twentieth, anthropologists had maintained that technological sophistication and material well-being were a direct measure of the complexity of a culture, a convenient concept that invariably placed Victorian England at the top of a Darwinian ladder to success. Modern ethnographers rejected the notion out of hand, arguing that every human culture had, by biological definition, the same mental acuity. Whether this potential was realized through technological prowess or by the elaboration of intensely complex threads of memory inherent in a myth was a matter of cultural choice and historical circumstance. Nowhere was this modern notion more perfectly displayed than among the peoples of eastern Brazil, the complex of fierce tribes known as the Gê.

Living in the forests of Mato Grosso and on the arid savannahs and uplands that separate the southern Amazon basin from the Atlantic coast, the Akwé-Xavante, Xerente, Kayapó, Timbira and a host of other peoples all spoke dialects of the Gê language family. Semi-nomadic hunters and gatherers, they ranged across vast territories, hunting peccaries for meat, birds for brilliant plumage to be woven into ceremonial coronas that shone like the sun. Their material culture was exceedingly rudimentary. They knew nothing of canoes, though rivers dissected their lands, and as late as the 1950 s were still dependent on the bow and arrow. They cleared the savannah, but their harvests were meagre, their sparse plantings reminiscent of the dawn of agriculture.

Yet beneath the primitive veneer lay an astonishingly rich and complex worldview, a tangle of religious beliefs and myths that informed all of life and gave rise to patterns of social organization Byzantine in their sophistication yet perfectly elegant in their elaboration. This apparent contradiction of a marginal people, technologically backward yet mentally and intellectually afire, confounded many early ethnographers. Hence, the notion of the Gê anomaly. But the great French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss saw the situation quite differently. For him, a scholar of immense vision capable of embracing all of the Americas in a single thought, the cultures of the Gê represented nothing more than a simple triumph of the human spirit and imagination.

Having lived briefly among the Bororo, a people whose social structure was very closely related to that of the Gê tribes, Lévi-Strauss had come to see their world as a universe of oppositions: man and woman, light and darkness, good and evil, the sun and the moon, the raw and the cooked, the wild and the tame. Every facet of their society—every ritual and institution, every concept of kinship and procreation, the very cycles of life and death, the transitions of birth and initiation, even the architecture and settlement pattern of the seasonal encampments—reflected a subconscious and indeed conscious attempt to resolve in harmony these opposing elements. Thus, there were two moieties, and two exogamous patrilineages entwined by cross-cousin marriages. The men lived apart from their families, in a ceremonial structure at the centre of the enclosure. The women dwelled with the children in huts on the periphery of the encampment, at the edge of the human realm. Outside the domestic space was a ring of fields, feral and unkempt, where women birthed and husbands coupled with their wives. Beyond the clearings, the forest and savannah reached in all directions to the horizon.

This quest for balance, Lévi-Strauss maintained, was a fundamental human urge, a key adaptive trait that allowed peoples such as the Bororo to come to terms with the fragility of their lives and the harshness of the natural world that surrounded them. At the very least, it provided an illusion of control, that in their scattered encampments they were not utterly at the mercy of the fickle forces of life and death. Modern industrialized society has precisely the same need to insulate the individual from nature and indulges in similar illusions that it can be accomplished. The difference lies in the medium. We build machines and dwell in cities. The Gê peoples find protection in a web of ideas, beliefs and ritual practices dreamed into being at the beginning of time.

From these insights, Lévi-Strauss elaborated a model of dualistic societies so simple and yet so all-encompassing as to almost defy belief. Clearly, it allowed for a better understanding of the Bororo. But what of the other societies of Central Brazil? It was, in part, a desire to challenge Lévi-Strauss, or at least to test his model, that in 19 57 led David Maybury-Lewis to travel up the Río das Mortes, the River of the Dead, and to fly into a remote mission adjacent to the lands of the Akwé-Xavante, at the time the most feared and warlike of all the indigenous tribes of Brazil.

“From the air,” Professor Maybury-Lewis recalled one afternoon when we met for a tutorial in his book-lined office overlooking the courtyard of the Tozzer Library, “everything looked right.”

Laid out before him, just as Lévi-Strauss had described, were the men’s circle and ritual shelters at the epicentre, the concentric rings of houses, fields and forest. But after months on the ground, and despite having mastered the language, Maybury-Lewis was more confused than ever. There were not two patrilineages, but three, and the marriage rules were inconsistent with the simple bilateral pattern that Lévi-Strauss had reported for the Bororo. What’s more, the bonds of kinship were crosscut by age sets.

Irrespective of lineage, every male of the same age shared the same age set. Each spanned five years, and there were eight in all. Thus, all boys aged five to ten, for example, or men thirty to thirty-five, were united as members of a named age set. Those few who lived beyond the age of forty once again became members of the first cohort. Several times a year, the age sets would divide into two teams for a race, with cohorts 1, 3 , 5 and 7 going up against 2 , 4 , 6 and 8 , an arrangement that ensured that each side would have a similar mix of infants, boys, men and elders. The race itself entailed each side carrying a large and heavy log for long distances across the savannah, a marathon of dust, sweat and endurance that left every participant spent and exhausted.

Maybury-Lewis loved the excitement and avidly took part, though once again he found the ritual confusing. For one thing, no one was particularly concerned that the logs carried by each side be of similar weight. For another, it was not uncommon for the leading side to pause in the midst of the race, allowing the other to catch up. The first time Maybury-Lewis ran, his team did well, crossing the finishing line hours ahead of the opposition. He revelled in the victory, until he noticed that all of his teammates were downcast. The next time they raced, several weeks later, the other side won decisively, and everyone seemed crestfallen. Totally bewildered, Maybury-Lewis took part in yet a third race. This time, to the disappointment of the competitor in him, the sides approached and crossed the line at the same instant. To his utter surprise, both teams and the entire community erupted in a whirlwind of celebration.

“The goal wasn’t to win,” he recalled with a smile, “it was to arrive together.”

All the tensions inherent in three competing lineages, every conflict within the culture, are distilled into two opposing factions, the two teams that give their all in a frenzied effort to reach a tie. Opposition and harmony, the resolution of conflict in ritual balance. It was more complex than Lévi-Strauss had ever imagined. The dualistic notion permeated every aspect of the culture, as did the central quest for resolution and equilibrium.

“What would happen,” Maybury-Lewis asked me, “should the race not occur, or should it never end in a tie?”

I hesitated, uncertain how to answer. Then I heard myself say, “The culture would atrophy.”

“Yes!” he exclaimed triumphantly.

To this day, I am not certain how I came up with that answer. Much of the content of what we had been discussing, patterns of kinship and marriage rules, subtleties of social organization, lay beyond me. But the log races I could understand, and intuitively I grasped their significance. For the first time, I understood the lesson of anthropology. I saw that as a people the Akwé-Xavante were profoundly different; but more importantly, I came to understand that those differences held the key to their cultural survival.

AS A YOUNG anthropologist I never understood how I was supposed to turn up at some village—perhaps of the Barasana, a people of the Anaconda, who believed that their ancestors had come up the Milk River of the Amazon from the east only to be disgorged from the belly of the snake onto the banks of the upper affluents—and announce that I was staying for a year, and then notify the headman that he and his people were to feed and house me while I studied their lives. If someone that intrusive appeared on our doorsteps, we would call the police.

I learned, instead, to seek the proper conduit to a culture, the most appropriate means or metaphor to break down the inherent barrier that exists between a stranger and a people with whom that outsider finds himself living as a guest. In the Northwest Amazon, for example, and along the eastern flank of the Peruvian and Bolivian Andes, in the cloud forests of the Kamsa and Inga, and among lowland tropical peoples as diverse as the Chimane and Machiguenga, Kofán and Cubeo, the obvious vehicle was the botanical realm. These, after all, were societies that existed because of their plants. Their basic food was bitter manioc, a poisonous root rendered edible by women using a complex process mediated by ritual and infused with myth. From the astringent bark of lianas, their hunters extracted poisons that could kill, as well as potions and stimulants that conquered sleep, allowing men to move by night in the shadows of jaguar. Their shaman listened and heard voices, plant songs that provided clues to hidden pharmacological properties that, once exploited, allowed them to journey in trance to the stars. Plants fed the children, healed the elders, vanquished enemies. I became an ethnobotanist because I could not imagine any better way of understanding the lives of the people of the forest.

In the Canadian north, by contrast, in a world where animals dominate and the dialogue is between predator and prey, the central metaphor is the hunt. Unless one is able to follow caribou over the tundra, track moose through the forest, one can never fully embrace the rhythm of the culture. To record the myths of Athabaskan elders, one has to become a hunter, for the myths are an expression of the covenant that exists between men, women and the wild, a way for the Indian people to rationalize the terrible fact that in order to live, they must kill the creatures they love most, the animals upon which they depend. Like so many lessons of anthropology, this was something that I learned through experience, living amongst a people, frequently making mistakes but always paying attention to the consequences.

In northwestern British Columbia, a year or so after graduating from college, I was hired as ranger in the Spatsizi wilderness, a roadless track of some two million acres (800 000 ha) in the remote reaches of the Cassiar Mountains. The job description was deliciously vague: wilderness assessment and public relations. In two long seasons, our ranger team, myself and one other, Al Poulsen, a six-foot four (193-cm) vegetarian who grazed through meals and could conjure golden eagles out of the wild, encountered perhaps a dozen visitors. Wilderness assessment was a licence to explore the park at will, tracking game and mapping the horse trails of outfitters, describing routes up mountains and down rivers, recording what we could of the movements of large populations of caribou and sheep, mountain goats, grizzly bears and wolves.

In the course of these wanderings, we came upon an old Native gravesite on an open bench overlooking Laslui Lake, near the headwaters of the Stikine River. The wooden tombstone read, simply, “Love Old Man Antoine died 1926.” Curious about the grave, I crossed the lake to the mouth of Hotleskwa Creek, where the Collingwood brothers, the outfitters for the Spatsizi, had established a spike camp. There, I found Alex Jack, an old Gitxsan man who had lived in the mountains most of his life. His Native name was Atehena, “he who walks leaving no tracks.” Not only did Alex know of the grave, his own brother-in-law had laid the body to rest in it. Old Man Antoine, it turned out, was a legendary shaman, crippled from birth but possessed of the gift of clairvoyance. Alex had walked overland from his home at Bear Lake in the Skeena, 150 miles (240 km) to the south, in order to meet Antoine, only to arrive on the day of his death.

Intrigued by this link between a living elder, raised in seasonally nomadic encampments, totally dependent on the hunt, and a shaman born in the previous century who read the future in stones cast into water held in baskets woven from roots, I left my job as a park ranger and went to work with Alex. As we wrangled horses, repaired fences, guided the odd hunter in search of moose or goat, I would ask him to tell me the stories of the old days, the myths of his people and his land. He happily told tales of his youth, of the hunting forays that brought meat to the village and of the winter trading runs by dogsled to the coast, but he never said a word about the legends.

Long after I had given up on hearing the origin myths, I went out one morning to salvage a moose carcass abandoned by a trophy hunter. When I returned after a long day with a canoe full of meat, Alex was waiting for me. As we walked back across the meadow with our loads, he said very quietly that he remembered a story and invited me to drop by his tent later in the evening. To this day I do not know whether Alex had simply achieved a certain level of trust, or whether I had finally inquired about the stories in the correct manner, or whether the gift of meat had some greater significance. But that night, I began to record a long series of creator tales of We-gyet, the anthropomorphic figure of folly, the trickster/transformer of Gitxsan lore.

They were almost all whimsical stories of moral gratitude played out against and within the backdrop of nature. We-gyet, for example, eager to eat, swims beneath a gathering of swans and greedily grabs their legs, only to be dragged from the water as the flock rises in response, soaring toward the sun. Stranded in the sky, he lets go and comes crashing back to the earth, the force of the impact imbedding him in granite. A lynx comes by, and We-gyet, using his charm and guile, persuades the cat to lick away the rock. We-gyet rewards his saviour with the tufts of hair that have since that time decorated the ears of every lynx.

To kill a grizzly, We-gyet takes advantage of the creature’s pride. Moving with the speed of the wind, he flies past a berry patch, astonishing the bear with his grace and movements. The grizzly looks up, only to see We-gyet race by once more. After three passes, We-gyet stops, breathlessly approaches his prey, and collapses with laughter as he points disparagingly at the bear’s testicles. “No wonder you can’t run,” he comments, “with those things dangling between your legs. I cut mine off years ago. See?” We-gyet has stained his groin with the blood-red sap of a willow. The grizzly, eager to remain the dominant creature in the forest, slices off his genitals and promptly bleeds to death.

Animals large and small featured in each of Alex’s tales. A hunting party away from home for many days grows tired, the young boys restless and bored. To pass the time, they cast a squirrel into their fire, a cruel gesture repeated again and again until the creature, unable to escape, disappears in the flames. The following morning, the hunters awake to find themselves camped in a circle at the base of an enormous cylinder of rock that reaches to the heavens, bluffs on all sides, no escape. Perplexed, a warrior tosses a pack dog into the fire, and to his surprise, the animal appears at the top of the rock face. One by one, each hunter slips into the flames and materializes alongside the dog, thus miraculously escaping the trap. They head for home, but when they enter their village and approach their loved ones, no one sees them. They reach out and try to touch their wives and mothers. Their hands pass through the bodies, like air. They are all dead, ghosts empty of will, punished for the crime of having, as Alex put it, “suffered that small squirrel.”

Darkness is the time for stories, and in the glow of a kerosene lamp, with wind and rain falling upon the canvas, the tent that first night took on the warmth of a womb. Alex’s words themselves had a certain magic, a power to influence not only the listener but the land itself, the very moment in time. When he told a story, he did not, as we might do, recount an anecdote, which by definition is a literary device, an abstraction, the condensation of a memory extracted from the stream of experience, a recollection of facts strung together with words. Alex actually lived the story again and again, returning in body and soul, in physical gesture and nuance, to the very place and time of its origin. At first, I thought this merely charming, and only after many years of listening, often to the same account told in the same way time and again, did I understand the significance of what he was sharing.

Alex did not come from a tradition of literacy. He had never learned to read or write with any degree of fluency. His soul had not been crushed by the priests in the residential schools. For most of his adult life, he had been a seasonally nomadic hunter, and his very vocabulary was inspired by the sounds of the wild. For him, the sweeping flight of a hawk was the cursive hand of nature, a script written on the wind. As surely as we can hear the voices of characters as we read the pages of a novel, so Alex could hear in his mind the voices of animals, creatures that he both revered and hunted. Their meat kept him alive. Their brains allowed skins to be worked into leather for moccasins and clothes, packsacks and the traces of his sled, the scabbard for his 30.06 rifle. Their blood could be cooked, the marrow of their bones sucked out and fed as a delicacy to children.

When Alex told a story, he did so in such a way that the listener actually witnessed and experienced the essence of the tale, entering the narrative and becoming transfixed by all the syllables of nature. Every telling was a moment of renewal, a chance to engage through repetition in the circular dance of the universe.

Alex never spoke ill of the wind or the cold. When hunting, he never referred to the prey by name until after the kill; then, he spoke directly to the animal with praise and respect, admiration for its strength and cleverness. His grandmother was Cree, people of the medicine power, who believe that language was given to humans by the animals. His mother was Carrier. In 1924 , two years before Alex left Bear Lake to walk overland to the Stikine, an elder from the Bulkley Valley, quite possibly one of Alex’s relatives, revealed something of the Carrier world to the anthropologist Diamond Jenness:

We know what the animals do, what are the needs of the beaver, the bear, the salmon and other creatures, because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has only been a short while in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught by the animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.

I did indeed write down Alex’s tales, transcriptions of dozens of hours of conversations recorded intermittently over twenty-five years, committed to paper a few years before his death. Only after it was done did I realize that in a sense I had committed a form of violence, a transgression that bordered on betrayal. Extracted from the theatre of his telling, the landscape of his memory, the sensate land and the sibilant tones of the wild, the stories lost much of their meaning and power. Transposed into two dimensions by ink and paper, trapped on the page, they seemed child-like in their simplicity, even clumsy in their rhetoric.

But, of course, these stories were not meant to be recorded. They were born of the land and had their origins in another reality. Some time after I first learned of We-gyet from Alex, I asked him how long it took to tell the cycle of tales. He replied that he had asked his father that very question. To find out, they had strapped on their snowshoes in March, a time of good ice, and walked the length of Bear Lake, a distance of some 20 miles (32 km), telling the story as they went along. They reached the far end, turned and walked all the way back home, and the story, Alex recalled, “wasn’t halfway done.”

In order to measure the duration of a story, the length of a myth, it was not enough to set a timepiece. One had to move through geography, telling the tale as one proceeded. For Alex and his father, this sense of place, this topography of the spirit, at one time informed every aspect of their existence. When, at the turn of the century, a Catholic missionary arrived at their village at Bear Lake, Alex’s father was completely confounded by the Christian notion of heaven. He could not believe that anyone could be expected to give up smoking, gambling, swearing, carousing and all the things that made life worth living, in order to go to a place where they did not allow animals. “No caribou?” he would say in complete astonishment. He could not conceive of a world without wild things.

Alex lived for more than 90 years; his wife Madeleine reached 103 , passing away a few seasons before Alex followed her to the grave. A year before he died, Alex gave me a small gift, a tool carved from caribou bone. Smooth as marble, though stained from years of use, it fit perfectly in my hand, the rounded and slightly serrated spoon-like tip protruding neatly from between finger and thumb. I had no idea what it might have been used for. Alex laughed. He had carved it more than eighty years before, following the lead of his father. It was a specialized instrument, used to skin out the eyelids of wolves. Only later did I realize that the eyelids in question were my own, and that Alex, having done so much to allow me to see, was, in his own way, saying good-bye.

PERHAPS BECAUSE I never knew my grandparents, who died before I was born, I have always been drawn to elders, enchanted by the radiance of men and women who have lived through times that I can only imagine: an old school-master who scrambled out of the trenches on the first day of the Somme; a family doctor who treated the wounded along the partition line between India and Pakistan, when rivers of blood divided the Raj; Waorani shaman who knew the Amazonian forests before the arrival of missions. I am enticed by their memories, and, in a culture notably bereft of formal modes of initiation, I find comfort in their advice. From men like Alex, I have learned of a world without form, infused with spirit and prayer. But equally important to me is the landscape of the concrete, the formal realm of science.

In the early 1970s, a time of few heroes, there was one man who loomed large over the Harvard campus, Richard Evans Schultes, a kindly professor who demanded nothing but devotion to knowledge. In time, mountains in South America would bear his name, as would national parks. Prince Philip would call him “the father of ethnobotany.” Students knew him as the world ’s leading authority on medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, the plant explorer who had sparked the psychedelic era with the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1938 . Three years later, having proved that teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods, was indeed a mushroom, and having identified ololiuqui, the serpent vine, the second of the elusive Aztec hallucinogenic plants, Schultes turned his imagination to the forests of South America. Taking a semester’s leave of absence from the university, he disappeared into the Northwest Amazon, where he remained for twelve years, mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen indigenous tribes, all the while in pursuit of the mysteries of the rain forest. He collected over twenty-seven thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand medicinal plants and over three hundred species previously unknown to science. For his students, he was a living link to the great naturalists of the nineteenth century and a distant era when the tropical rain forests stood immense, inviolate, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents.

By the time I met Schultes in the fall of 1973 , it had been some years since he had been capable of active fieldwork. I found him at his desk in his fourth floor aerie in the Botanical Museum, dressed conservatively, peering across several large stacks of dried herbarium specimens. Introducing myself as one of his undergraduate students, I mentioned that I was from British Columbia and that I wanted to go to the Amazon and collect plants, just as he had done so many years before. The professor looked up from his desk and, as calmly as if I had asked for directions to the local library, said, “Well, when would you like to go?” A fortnight later I left for South America, where I remained during that first sojourn for fifteen months.

There was, of course, method in Schultes’s casual manner. He took for granted the capacity of anyone to achieve anything. In this sense he was a true mentor, a catalyst of dreams. Though not by nature a modest man, he shared his knowledge and experience with his acolytes as naturally as a gardener brings water to a seed. Sometimes his faith in a student would lead to disappointment, but not often. His own achievements were legendary, and merely to move in his shadow was to aspire to greatness.

In Schultes, I found the perfect complement to Maybury-Lewis, my anthropology tutor. Whereas Maybury-Lewis awakened the soul through the sheer power of his intellect, the wonder of his words and ideas, Schultes inspired by the example of his deeds. In all the years I was formally his student, we never had an intellectual conversation. It was not his style. He was a true explorer, and the very force of his personality gave form and substance to the most esoteric of ethnobotanical pursuits. He would pass along these thoughts that were both gifts and challenges. “There is one river that I would very much like you to see,” he would say, knowing full well that the process of getting to that river would involve experiences guaranteed to assure that were you able to reach the confluence alive, you would emerge from the forest a wiser and more knowledgeable human being.

Typical of the way Schultes operated was his suggestion, offered casually just before I left for South America, that I look up one of his former graduate students, Tim Plowman, in Colombia. Tim, who would become a close friend, was Schultes’s protégé, and the professor had secured for him from the U.S. government the dream academic grant of the early 1970 s, $250,000 to study a plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality, the most sacred medicine of the Andes, coca, the notorious source of cocaine.

It was a remarkable assignment. Though the drug had long been the focus of public concern and hysteria, and efforts to eradicate the coca fields had been underway for nearly fifty years, astonishingly little was known about the actual plant. The botanical origins of the domesticated species, the chemistry of the leaf, the pharmacology of coca chewing, the plant’s role in nutrition, the geographical range of the domesticated species, the relationship between the wild and cultivated species—all these were mysteries. No concerted effort had been made to document the role of coca in the religion and culture of the Andean and Amazonian Indians since W. Golden Mortimer’s classic History of Coca, published in 1901. Tim’s mandate from the government, made deliberately vague by Schultes, was to travel the length of the Andean Cordillera, traversing the mountains whenever possible, to reach the flanks of the montaña to locate the source of a plant that had inspired an empire. Eventually, Tim and I would spend over a year on the road, a journey made possible by the great professor and infused at all times with his spirit.

We knew, of course, that coca was the most revered plant of the Andes. The Inca, unable to cultivate the bush at the elevation of the imperial capital of Cusco, replicated it in fields of gold and silver that coloured the landscape. No holy shrine in the land could be approached unless the supplicant had a quid of coca in his mouth. No field could be planted, no child brought into being, no elder released to the realm of the dead unless the transition was mediated with an offering of coca leaves for Pachamama, the Goddess of the Earth. To this day in parts of the Andes, distances are measured not in miles or kilometres but in coca chews. When Runa people meet, they do not shake hands, they exchange leaves. Soothsayers divine the future by interpreting the patterns of leaves cast onto cloth and the patterns in the venation of the leaves, a skill that can only be possessed by someone who has survived a lightning strike.

In time, Tim would solve the botanical mystery, identify the point of origin of the domesticated species and reveal how they had diverged through centuries as their cultivation had spread over much of a continent. But perhaps his greatest research contribution came about from a simple nutritional analysis, the results of which horrified his government backers, even as they transformed scientific thinking about this most sacred of plants. Coca leaves do contain a small amount of cocaine, but only about as much as there is caffeine in a coffee bean. When the leaves are chewed, the drug is absorbed slowly through the mucous membrane of the mouth; it is a benign and useful stimulant in a harsh and unforgiving landscape. Highly effective as a treatment for altitude sickness, the leaves proved also to be extraordinarily nutritious. Rich in vitamins, coca has more calcium than any plant ever assayed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, suggesting a vital role in a diet that traditionally lacked dairy products, especially for nursing mothers. It was also suggested that the plant enhances the ability of the body to digest carbohydrates at high elevation, again an ideal complement for a diet based on potatoes. In one elegant scientific assay, Tim revealed that coca was not a drug but a sacred food, a medicinal plant that had been used without any evidence of toxicity, let alone addiction, for over four thousand years by the peoples of the Andes. This revelation put into stark profile the draconian efforts underway then and continuing to this day to eradicate the traditional fields with herbicides that poison the myriad streams cascading out of the mountains to form the headwaters of the Rivers Amazon.

COCA WAS THE lens through which the ancient rhythms and patterns of life in the Andes gradually came into focus. Wherever Tim and I travelled, we encountered evidence of worlds that had never been vanquished, indigenous communities that despite desperate struggles remained inextricably linked to their homelands. Nowhere was the spirit of survival stronger than among the Ika and Kogi, descendants of an ancient civilization that had flourished on the Caribbean plain of Colombia for five hundred years before the arrival of Europeans. Since the time of Columbus, these Indians have resisted invaders by retreating higher and higher into the inaccessible reaches of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, the highest coastal mountain range on Earth. Ruled to this day by a ritual priesthood, they consider themselves the Elder Brothers. We, who to their minds have ruined much of the world, are deemed the Younger Brothers.

Tim and I entered the mountains from the south, along a narrow track that rose in a day and a night through cactus and thorn scrub to a steep river draw carved into the rising flank of the massif. Just after dawn, having made our way through the shadowy darkness, past scattered houses of stone linked one to another by small fields of coca, leaves translucent in the early morning light, we came upon a portal to the sun. Framed within its arch was a solitary figure, a silhouette blocking entry to the upper valley of a river known to the Indians as the Donachuí.