The Jaguar's Children by John Vaillant Page A

quiet and don’t get the heat stroke, maybe longer if we drink our urine. Someone has to find us by then. I have to believe this because my water is almost gone. More than forty hours I made it last. It is easier when you are not moving, when you are breathing air that is so wet, even if it smells like the sewer. And when I imagine it is my abuelo holding the bottle, saying, Only one taste every hour. The heat makes you stupid and angry, and the thirst can make you crazy so you must fill your mind with something else—something stronger. For me it is my abuelo, the father of my father who was no blood to him or me but who always felt closer than blood.
    The only way out is into your mind so that is where I go, trying to rest, trying to breathe only through my nose so I don’t lose too much water. When I drink now it is only a cap at a time and I hold it in my mouth as long as I can. Then I imagine Abuelo’s voice and it carries me out of here. I don’t think I slept last night, but I dreamed so many things and my abuelo was there also. He was called Hilario Lázaro after a saint and the Spanish family that once owned the land around our pueblo. To this my abuelo said, “¡Hilario! ¡El Dios español es un bromista cósmico!” My abuelo was a bromista too—a funny guy, and when I hold this little jaguar head, I feel that he is with me.
    In my dream he was sharpening his machete. It is something he did many times a day, right up until he died last year. I cannot say he was a good Christian, but this sharpening was for him a telling of the beads and it worked very well. He ground that blade so fine he could take the hairs off his face with it, and cut an ox bone in the air. “Throw it this way,” he says to me in Zapotec, and he shows me how to do it so the bone is floating there in front of him. Then he takes his machete in two hands and says,
“Lédá!”
I throw the bone up and one moment there is a bone floating and that blade is only light, singing in the air and
Ya!
—there are two bones falling on the ground.
    â€œAbuelo!” I say. “You can play for the Guerreros!”
    He laughs and makes his machete sing again. “Only if they want to have two baseballs.”
    Abuelo was a real campesino, a kind of workingman that maybe you don’t have in el Norte. He was even shorter than me and his feet were thick like a car tire. The lines in his face were so deep you couldn’t see the bottom and his nose was a dark mountain standing by itself. He always looked old to me, but when I was little if his hand got hold of you, you could never get away no matter how you twisted. He worked his whole life in the milpa that he cleared himself from the forest and planted with corn and beans, squash and chiles and many other plants. It looks simple from the outside because you see only the corn growing, or maybe the beans climbing the dead stalks, doubled over, but inside there is a small jungle—a world of plants all connected. Es un sistema complicado and it takes a long time to learn. I know only part of it.
    The pueblo where I was born is built on a ridge and you get to it by a dirt road off the highway. On a clear day you can see off both sides into different river valleys with the green mountains all around. When I was young and my father was away, I would go with my abuelo into the milpa after he burned off the old crop of corn and beans and we would plant the new crop together. Abuelo went first with his machete, stabbing it into the ground to make the hole, and I would follow, taking the seeds from the little sack my abuela made for me, dropping them in there and mounding the dirt over. It was a good job for small hands and we made a steady rhythm together, back and forth along the rows from the bottom of the milpa all the way to the top—and ours were steep up there, almost too steep for a plow.
    In the heat of the day we would sit under the