Little Tiny Teeth

fronds.) Gideon could see that the vicious, ropy, white furrow of a scar extended upward from his nose, over his right brow all the way up to and under his clipped bangs. Below, it ran down his left cheek to the corner of his jaw. It was deep enough to have done some serious bone damage, and indeed, his left malar—the cheekbone— was conspicuously caved in, making one eye appear weirdly lower and bigger than the other, like a head in a Picasso painting. Clearly, someone had once tried to cleave his head in two and very nearly succeeded, but here he was, spectacularly disfigured but otherwise apparently hale. I’d hate to see what the other guy looks like, Gideon thought.

“Come? Come where?” Vargas demanded, gathering up a few shreds of his dignity. “I am the captain of a ship, I have a ship to—”

“You come,” he repeated in exactly the same toneless tone, and at his nod the other two unshouldered their shotguns. Gideon noted that a firearms safety course had not come with the weapons. Each carried his gun with the action closed, and with his finger curled on the trigger, not alongside it or on the trigger guard. He had no doubt at all that there were live shells in the chambers. A jag of one of the double muzzles in Gideon’s direction made it clear that he was included in the invitation as well. He thought briefly of yelling for help, but

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everybody else was back on the Adelita, and the Adelita was at the base of a forty-foot bank that was sixty or seventy feet away. It was unlikely that they’d hear him, and even if they did, what would ensue in the thirty or forty seconds it took anyone to reach them? Besides, what could they do against three men, whatever their size, who were armed with shotguns and machetes?

“We’d better go with them, Captain,” he said.

“You come, yes?” He was grinning now, and his voice had taken on a wheedling, nasty tinge, like a Japanese soldier’s in a World War II movie. “Now.”

With one of the Arimaguas in front leading the way, and the other two behind them, Vargas and Gideon were marched into the bush.

“Captain Vargas, what’s this about? I think you know more—”

“No talk,” said Split-nose. An unexpected and painful jab of the gun into Gideon’s lower back emphasized his point. Both of the following Indians chuckled merrily at Gideon’s “Hey!”

The jungle closed in at once. In thirty seconds, the warehouse clearing was completely obscured from sight. In a minute, they were unable to see more than ten feet in any direction. The path, if there was a path, was invisible to the two white men, although the Indians clearly knew where they were going. Their naked, callused feet moved with speed and certainty over the uneven ground.

Gideon absently watched their rhythmic, confident motion for a few moments, and then did a double take that nearly brought him to a standstill (and no doubt another jab with the shotgun). These were feet such as he’d never seen in life before, and they filled him with a sense of wonder that almost made him forget the uncomfortable circumstances he was in. He’d read descriptions of tribes with feet like these in the accounts of nineteenth-century jungle adventurers, and

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had even seen group photographs of them, but he’d thought of them as historical curiosities at best; things of the past, long disappeared from the earth. Certainly, he’d never expected to see them for himself, except in a rare individual case, and here were three pairs of them!

In most respects they were like anybody else’s feet; a bit broader across the sole perhaps, and more callused, but not all that different, generally speaking. But the big toes were another thing entirely, twice the size of normal big toes—three inches long, at least, and proportionately thick. Moreover, they were splayed outward at an incredible angle, very nearly a right angle, from the rest of the toes. This was a deformity not unknown in the modern world. Hallux varus it was called, and you saw it once in a while, usually as the result of a botched operation for bunions, although it could also show up as a congenital deformity. Three-million- year-old footprints in Africa showed that it was nothing new in the human condition. But to see three sets of them at once ...!

Clearly, the huge, muscular, near-prehensile appendages would permit their owners to easily clasp two-or- three-inch-thick branches between their toes and give them a far more secure grip on branches that were larger. “Real tree climbers,” in Vargas’s words, these people were what the old explorers called “arboreal dwellers,” thinking that they pretty much lived in the trees. Whether the condition was genetic in these cases, or rather the result of behavioral adaptation, was unknown then and unknown now. There had been argument, in fact, among the learned professors of the nineteenth century, as to whether they were humans at all, or some kind of tree apes. Well, they were indisputably human, all right, and here they were, alive and well, in the middle of the Amazon, in the twenty-first century!

For a very little while, his extreme gratification at seeing them for

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himself and his similarly extreme regret at not having a camera with him were his uppermost thoughts, but others soon enough intruded. Where were they going, and why? How would they possibly get back? Would they be permitted to come back? But within an hour— it seemed like five, but the sun had barely moved and wasn’t yet directly overhead—even those concerns about the future had been driven from his mind by the present, by the nightmarish immediacy of the trek itself. The jungle they were slogging through—the Indians so effortlessly, so sweatlessly, the two white men stumbling and cursing at the thorns and bugs—was nothing like what they’d been in during the last two days. This was not Scofield’s “awe-inspiring” virgin rain forest, but second- or third-growth, scrabbly and wretched in the extreme, not mature enough yet to have created its own high, protective canopy. It was all thorns, mud, brambles, ankle-grabbing ground vines, mosquitoes, and terribly persistent clouds of vicious, biting, black flies. And except for the occasional blessed patch of shade from a quick-growing ceiba tree or banana bush, all of it in the roasting, shriveling heat of the sun.

Once they had to cross a small, fast-running green river on a “bridge” consisting of a section of an old, rotting tree trunk, twenty feet long and slimy with algae. The first Arimagua trotted easily across—those toes were prehensile, a marveling Gideon observed; he could see how they clutched the curving, slippery surface and pushed off from it—and turned, beckoning with his shotgun. A motion from Split-nose’s gun encouraged Vargas onto the log, on which he managed two wavering steps before losing his balance and tipping over, arms swinging, to plunge backside first into the river, which was fortunately only about four feet deep.

The rest of his crossing was accomplished in the water alongside