“No,” he said.
It had been several minutes since John had asked the question and people looked confused.
Phil spoke for them. “No, what?”
“No, it’s not what John thinks it is.”
John’s eyebrows shot up. “It’s not a shrunken head?”
“It’s not a shrunken
“What the hell is it, then? A monkey head?” He frowned. “Do monkeys have eyebrows?”
“Not so to speak, no, but it’s not even that. It’s not a head at all.
This is a tourist item. They make them from monkey skin or goatskin, and carve them and mold them to look like this, and add a little hair where they need to.”
“It’s true,” Vargas said. “You can buy such things in Iquitos.”
“You can buy them on eBay,” Gideon said.
All the same, Duayne Osterhout was intrigued. “But it looks so ...Why are you so sure it isn’t human?”
“Oh, a lot of things,” Gideon said. “This is a pretty good one, as they go, but there are some things that are almost impossible to duplicate in a fake head.” He turned the head upside down. “For one thing, as you see, where’s the neck opening? But, more important— there’s no nasal hair.”
“If it was real, it would have nose hair?”
“Oh yes. I’m talking about the bristly little things in the nostrils—they act as filters—that everybody has. They stay right there even when a head has been shrunk. To fake them, you’d have to plant each one separately, which would take a long time, and even then it’d be hard to make them look authentic. But since just about nobody knows to look for them, they don’t bother with it. And then, these threads from the eyes, from the lips—they’re obviously commercial twine, the kind you can buy at the local hardware store, not the kind you get from slicing palm fronds into narrow slivers and twirling them into a cord. And the ears . . .” He pushed back the hair. “Human ears are very intricately shaped, very difficult to reproduce convincingly. You can see how crude these are. That’s why these things always have so much hair hiding them.”
“Yes, yes, I do see,” Duayne said, nodding.
“And then the skin itself. There are tool marks on it, see? Burn marks too, right under—”
“Okay, enough already, Doc,” John said. “Now the next time we’re in the market for a shrunken head, we’ll know if we’re getting ripped off. But what’s it supposed to mean? Is it some kind of curse or something?”
“A warning?” Tim suggested. “Are they threatening us?” His eyes slid sideways to the slowly passing shore, now a safe three miles away.
Gideon put the head down and straightened up. “Beats the hell out of me. I’m reasonably sure it’s not meant as a gesture of welcome, but I’ve never run into this custom before: tying a head to a spear. On the other hand, I’m not exactly up on South American ethnography.”
They all stood staring down at the head as if expecting it to open its sewn-together lips and provide answers on its own.
“Chato says he knows what it is,” Vargas announced into the silence. Chato, the Indian crewman who had mutely conducted Gideon, John, and Phil to their cabins earlier, had appeared a few minutes before to begin mopping up broken glass and spilled liquor. But now he was standing on tiptoe, whispering excitedly into Vargas’s ear.
The Indian began to whisper again.
“Speak up so everyone can hear,” Vargas ordered.
Chato, looking uneasy at the attention, raised his voice to just barely above a whisper. Not only was he almost inaudible, but he spoke in a Spanish-English-Indian patois with which even Phil had a hard time.
“Translate, will you, Captain?” Phil said.
Vargas accommodated him, translating after every couple of phrases. “He has heard of it before, this custom. . . . In olden days, one of the native groups used it as a—a what, Chato? . . . ah, a death-warning, a revenge warning, to an enemy tribe. ...They would
use . . . no, they would take . . . no, they would shrink the head of a killer, someone who had killed one of their own people, and they would attach it to a spear...and they would, they would throw the spear into the hut, into the wall of the hut, of the family of this killer...to tell them that one of them would soon die too...for the purpose of . . .” He searched for the English word.
“In retaliation?” Gideon suggested.
“Yes, professor, that’s correct, in retaliation.” He thought Chato was done and began to say something else, but Chato hadn’t finished. Vargas listened some more.
“Ah. You see, the fact that the victims received the shrunken head of their own kinsman back, that was to show the contempt that the attackers had for them...that the head wasn’t even worth keeping. And sometimes it would not be the head of the actual killer, but the head of another member of the enemy tribe. Sometimes
