were hard to measure. It could have been that this particular path (were they on a path?) had more fallen trees lying across it that required clambering over, more mysterious sinkholes of standing water heralded only by a sudden sponginess underfoot. It could be that they were only two or three straight city blocks away from their destination but that distance was meaningless given the obstacles they had still to overcome. Marina brushed her hand across the back of her neck and dislodged something with a hard shell. She had learned in time to brush instead of slap as slapping only served to pump the entire contents of the insect, which was doubtlessly already burrowed into the skin with some entomological protuberance, straight into the bloodstream.
The Lakashi women were singing now. No, they weren’t singing. It was just that so many of them were talking at once and when their voices came together it sounded vaguely like a section of Torah as sung by a group of bar mitzvah boys whose voices had yet to change. “Do you know what they’re saying?” Marina asked.
Nancy shook her head. “I catch a word every now and then, or I think I do. We had a linguist with us for a while. He had been a student of Noam Chomsky’s. He said the language wasn’t particularly difficult or even interesting, that all the languages in this region of the Amazon came from a single grammatical base with variations in vocabulary which meant at one point the tribes must have been connected and then split apart. It made me wish we had a language that was a little bit more obscure so we might have kept him. He made us some charts with phonetics so we can put together some basic phrases.”
“Thomas is very good at it,” Dr. Budi said. She held up her arm and the other two women stopped and waited while a very large, low slung lizard dragged itself across their path, its loose green skin hanging over the rib cage like chain mail. “I don’t know that one,” Dr. Budi said, watching it carefully.
Nancy leaned over to peer at the lizard as if it were someone she could almost place, then she shook her head. “Neither do I.”
It was another twenty minutes past the lizard before they came to a clearing, or, if not a clearing, a place where fewer, thinner trees stood farther apart from one another, and all the trees were the same. There was no thick coat of undergrowth covering the ground, just a light wash of grass, there were no hairy ropes of vines strangling the trees, only the smooth, straight expanse of bark. Sunlight fell easily between the pale oval leaves and hit the ground in wide patches. “It’s beautiful,” Marina said, dropping her head back. Such sunlight, such pretty little leaves. “My God, why don’t they live here?”
“Too far from the water,” Dr. Budi said, looking at her watch and making a note of the time.
A dozen Lakashi women were already there. Marina knew most of them by sight even if she couldn’t properly reproduce the series of tones that made up their names. Over the next few minutes two dozen more arrived and took their places against the trunks that were a buttery yellow color and ranged from ten to twenty inches around. Without ritual or fanfare, with no apparent consideration, the women went for bigger trees, the ones already bitten, and left the saplings alone. Pressing in like a partner for a slow dance, they opened their mouths and began immediately to scrape their teeth down the bark. The jungle on this morning was particularly quiet and so it was possible to hear them, a small sound amplified by so many women making it at the same time.
A few stragglers wandered in and stopped to greet the women at the trees around them who stopped their biting and chewing long enough to receive the greeting and return it. Two of the women who had a great deal to say to each other took opposite sides of the same tree and from a distance they appeared to be kissing. Women who had brought their children left them in a pile in the center of the trees and the older children herded the younger ones back when they tried to crawl away. One of the older women went into the group of children and led a girl of twelve or thirteen to a tree and the others stopped all at once, turning their heads from their trees to watch her. When the girl tilted her face to the side, looking uncertain of how she should approach it, the others hooted lightly and slapped their trees to make a kind of tree-plus-human applause. The thin branches trembled and shook the delicate leaves from side to side. The girl, whose hair was unbraided and disheveled by sleep, looked embarrassed to be the center of so much attention. She then began to nibble at the bark. After the others felt certain she was performing this primal act correctly they all went back to their work. From the nubile to the beldame they scraped and chewed without pleasure or distaste. They had turned the fairly exotic act of biting a tree into nothing more than factory work.
“This is important,” Dr. Budi said to Marina. “The girl has just completed her first menstrual cycle. The Lakashi rituals are very brief, unsentimental. You are lucky to see such a thing on your first day.”
Nancy Saturn turned some pages in her notebook. “I didn’t realize Mara was menstruating.”
Dr. Budi held up her book. “I have it.”
There were more than enough trees for everyone, maybe two hundred of them spread over two acres of land. The tallest climbed to a height of sixty or seventy feet, but there were plenty of new trees coming up as well. In the places where a tree had been recently eaten, the absence of bark left a mark that was soft and white; growing back, it was the palest of yellows and then darkened over time so that most of the trees at the height of a Lakashi’s head appeared to have been banded by decoupage.
It was easier to breathe in this place, and so easy to see! In every direction the vista was open. No more wondering what might be tearing through the jungle with its wet jaws hinged open. “I never thought there would be so many trees,” Marina said. “I didn’t picture it like this.”
“It’s actually just one tree,” Nancy said. She was counting the women and marking them present by name in her notebook. “They’re
“Very delicate,” Dr. Budi said, nodding to herself.
“The root system changes the acidity level in the soil so that nothing much will grow here except for the trees and a little bit of grass. In a sense you could say the tree poisons the area it inhabits to make sure that nothing else will survive in its space and take the nutrients out of the soil or grow taller and block out the sunlight.”
“Except the Rapps,” Dr. Budi said. “The Rapps thrive right where they are.” She pointed the tip of her pen towards the clusters of mushrooms that grew near the base of the trees, each cap a perfect golf ball on a tall, slender stem. The Rapps were a most unearthly shade of pale blue. They came so close to glowing in the light of day that she wanted to come back with a flashlight and see them in the dark. Marina couldn’t imagine how she had missed them.
“
“You’ve tried them?”
Nancy Saturn closed her eyes and nodded slightly, holding up one finger.
“Very sick,” Dr. Budi said. “Interesting, everything you see, but too sick.”
“So if the mushrooms are Rapps, are the trees called Swensons?” Marina asked. There was an inordinate number of lavender moths the size of quarters bobbing through the sunlight. Marina didn’t remember seeing them before but then it would be difficult to notice such a small moth in the workaday tangle of vines that suffocated the rest of the jungle.
“The trees are called Martins,” Dr. Budi said. “
“It’s actually the Rapps we’re protecting,” Nancy said. “All the secrecy about the work and the location, it’s so no one can find the Rapps. Scientifically, it’s the Martins that have presented such remarkable potential. The Martins really may prove to be one of the great botanical discoveries of our age. But people have been trying to get their hands on the Rapps ever since Dr. Rapp started writing about them. If the greater world knew where they were—”
Dr. Budi covered her eyes with her hand and shook her head.
“Exactly. This place would be overrun, drug dealers, the Brazilian government, other tribes, German tourists, there’s no telling who would get here first and what sort of a war would ensue. The only thing I know for sure is that the Lakashi would be destroyed. Their entire existence is built around Rapps and while they have easily a hundred times more mushrooms than they need for their rituals they have no interest in drying and storing them. The Rapps present three hundred and sixty-five days a year and so the Lakashi just assume they’re always going to be right here under the trees. I’ve been trying to grow Martins and, subsequently, Rapps, for three years now, and I’m not talking about growing them back in Michigan, I’m talking about growing them in the lab from root dissections, the same soil, the same water, and I can’t do it.”
