Little Tiny Teeth

with bright, yellow-green leaves, tiny yellow flowers, and red, coffee-beanlike fruits.

At the entrance to it, Frank put up his hand. “Whoa, hold it. You know what this is, don’t you? It’s hayo. Coca. I think maybe we want to go around it.”

“Around it,” Arden said with an edge to his voice, “means around the swamps on either side of it. That’s a lot of extra ground to

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cover. I don’t know about you, but I’m bushed. And I want to have my dinner tonight in Iquitos. I never want to look at another piece of manioc.”

“Sure, me too, but we’re on the border of Chayacuro country here,” Frank said. “This could easily be theirs, and they’re not exactly as, shall we say, “hospitable” as our Tikuna friends. I’ve worked with them once or twice, and trust me, you don’t want to make them mad.”

“Our good Tikuna friend Tapi,” Arden said, referring to the Indian guide who had brought them this far and then returned home the previous night, “told us to just stay with the path, and we’d be back at the boat in a couple of hours. With the compass not working right, don’t you think we ought to just follow his instructions? You really want to chance getting lost again?”

“Well, no, of course not, but I think I could find the path again—”

“You think. Oh, that’s just great.”

“Look, Arden,” Theo said. “Frank’s got a point. We don’t want to mess with the Chayacuro. I like my head the size it is.”

“For Christ’s sake, what is it with you two?” Arden erupted. “It’s five o’clock in the goddamn morning. You think these guys have guards out this time of day, monitoring the hordes of people that come through here? They’re still asleep, which is what I intend to be at this time tomorrow.”

“Yeah, sure, but—”

“Look, we’ll be in and out of it in less than a minute. We’ve spent more time arguing about it than it’ll take to get through the damn thing.”

“I don’t know . . .” Frank muttered, chewing on his lip. Al

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though the oldest of the three, he was by nature the least assertive. “Theo?”

Theo’s shoulders rose in resigned submission. “What the hell, let’s do it. Arden’s the boss.”

“I am?” Arden said. “Hey, thanks for telling me. How about letting your brother in on it?”

Frank gave in too. His open face relaxed into a smile and he waved Arden on with a flourish. “Lead on, Macduff. Just walk fast, will you?”

THE Chayacuro had followed at a hundred feet, slipping silently through the undergrowth and hanging vines like the jaguars they revered. They watched as the strangers entered the coca garden. With only a look between them and a barely perceptible dip of the chin from Jabuti-toro, each man pulled from his quiver a dart dipped in poison before they had left the village. A pinch of kapok was taken from each woven bag, moistened with saliva, and wadded onto the back end of the dart. This was partly to make it fly true, but mostly to stop up the hollow interior of the blowgun so that the coming puff of air would not pass uselessly around the dart but would instead propel it forward. The long tubes were lifted to their lips and aimed. Both men gathered in quick, shallow mouthfuls of air, and...

Ffft.

Ffft.

AChayacuro blowgun dart is made by cutting away the leafy part of an ivory nut palm leaf, leaving only the straight, slender central rib,

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which is then whittled to a point with a few expert strokes. It is about ten inches long and not much thicker than a toothpick. If it were to appear beside a barbecue grill among the wooden canape skewers, no one would look at it twice. The poison into which it is dipped is a curarelike extract pressed from the skin of the poison-dart frog, Phyllobates terribilis, and is among the most potent poisons known to man. A bird struck with such a dart will fall paralyzed from a tree in ten seconds and be dead in thirty. A squirrel or small monkey will take three or four minutes to die, a sloth or tapir fifteen, a human being anywhere between thirty minutes and three hours, most of which is spent in total paralysis. Death results from asphyxia. Curare and its relatives are neuromuscular blockers that first turn the muscles limp and unresponsive, then paralyze them altogether. When the muscles that control the lungs are no longer capable of inflating them, the victim suffocates. It is a particular horror of curare poisoning that consciousness is not affected until very near the end. A human victim can think clearly and feel himself becoming progressively incapacitated, but is very soon unable to speak, to call for help, or even to gesture.

In the hands of a Chayacuro marksman, the dart can be accurate at over a hundred feet, a distance that it travels in a shade under one second. Once it leaves the blowgun, there’s no sound. An entire troop of monkeys can be brought down before they grasp the danger. Browsing animals who are narrowly missed continue their peaceful grazing, unafraid. But Chayacuro marksmen don’t often miss.

“OUCH,”Theo said. “Damn.”

Arden glanced at him and saw, to his horror, the slender dart protruding from the back of Theo’s neck. Theo, possibly thinking he was

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brushing off a stinging insect, reached for it and plucked it out. He and Arden and Frank stood staring at it for a second, then looked up at each other, their eyes frightened. All knew what it was. All knew what it meant. Theo uttered a half sob and flung it to the ground.

When a second dart struck Arden—but miraculously lodged in his backpack—they broke for the cover of the