Raucous Summer - Feral: Rewilding the Land, the Sea, and Human Life - page 5

A young man came through the crowd and gestured that I was to
help them build an extension to the communal maloca : they wanted
me to climb to the top of the roof and tie on a tarpaulin they had been
given by the miners. I stayed on the roof for a couple of hours, mend-
ing holes under his direction. When I came down I asked Barbara why
he was so bossy.
'He's the chief,' she said.
'But he's only eighteen.'
She looked around. 'All the older men are dying or dead.'
In the living space of the maloca , the hammocks were filled with the
sick. As I sat beside a feverish boy, two old women broke through the
screen of banana leaves, shuffling on their haunches, roaring and
sweeping sticks across the ground, their eyes screwed shut. I was hit
on the ankles before I could get out of the way. The women stamped
around the hammock, screaming, beating the air with their sticks.
The roaring continued for most of the day. I was later told that
female faith healers were almost unknown among the Yanomami:
only the absence of men could account for it. The old women led me
to the hammock of a teenaged girl and showed me what I must do. I
stamped and shouted, sweeping my arms through the air, scooping
something from the surface of her body and pushing it away from the
maloca . Urged on by the two women, I danced and yelled faster and
louder, stamping and leaping over the hammock, until I almost fainted
and fell into the arms of the healers.
When I had recovered and washed in the stream, the women
brought me food laid out on a banana leaf: baked plantains, toad-
stools and beetle grubs, foetally curled, still writhing. My hand
hovered over the leaf. 'Go on,' they gestured. I picked up a grub and
opened my mouth.
I leant on my spade, staring at the ground. On that raw December day
soon after I had arrived in Wales, I was struck by the smallness of this
life. Somehow - I am not quite sure how it happened - I had found
myself living a life in which loading the dishwasher presented an
interesting challenge.
The invasion of Roraima, which I had witnessed almost twenty
years before, represents everything I hate. The miners, many of whom