hout salt, it is good. But only
ten minutes later, our three companions begin to whimper:
“We’re sick! We’re so sick!”
“What’s wrong?”
“You made us eat raw meat!”
Their bad faith is cynical, but there is something comic in watching these sturdy men rub
their bellies and look as though they will burst into tears. Surprised perhaps by our teasing, they
decide that to cure themselves they will have to eat a little more. One goes off to fish, another (who
knows how to shoot) takes the rifle and tries to retrieve the forest partridge we heard singing in
the vicinity… One gunshot goes off, and a partridge is killed. The fisherman soon returns with two
big piranhas. These waters are swarming with the cannibal-fish. If the partridge flesh is delicious,
the fish on the other hand is tasteless. This does not prevent the Indians from boiling everything
all at once in a stew… Soon, all that is left are the bones.
The next day, we come across four canoes. The Yanomami go down the river to trade with
the downstream tribes. The boats are filled with packages of drugs. All the Indians (at least the
men) are great users of ebena, and the shamans would not be able to function without consuming
(snorting) it in very strong dosages. But the trees that produce these hallucinogenic seeds do nor
grow everywhere, so that certain tribes, such as those of Sierra Parima, hardly have any at all.
On the other hand, the Shiitari maintain a quasi-monopoly on production of the drug; they do
not even need to cultivate the trees, which grow naturally on the savanna of their region. They
harvest much of it, and through successive trade agreements from tribe to tribe, ebena eventually
reaches those who are deprived of it.
We stop for a few moments to chat with the Indians. Upon learning that we’ve planned a visit
to their home, three of them —two young men and one older man — jump into our canoe and go
back up with us. Shortly before noon, we arrive at a small cove. These are the Aratapora rapids.
According to our passengers, the chabuno is still far away. We have, therefore, to unload the
canoe, carry the baggage five hundred meters up the river, then pull the canoe through foaming
waters. The current is strong, but there are a lot of us. Almost two hours of effort nonetheless. We
rest for a moment at the edge of the cove. The area is pretty, the forest less suffocating, revealing
a beach of fine sand from which emerge enormous boulders. Dozens of grooves, some more than
two centimeters deep, are etched in the surface: these are blade polishers. Everything one might
need for the manufacture of polished stone hatchets is here: the sand, the water, the stone. But it
is not the Yanomami who desecrate the boulders this way; they do not know how to work with
rock. From time to time, they will find a polished hatchet in the forest or at the river’s edge, and