Alex Shakar The Savage Girl (pdf)

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filling with thrill-seekers of all kinds, from weekend campers to apocalyp-
tic cultists. Ursula can t blame any of them, really. She can t even bring her-
self to hate the people who come here to hunt the remaining leopards, or
the speculators who bottle rain-forest air and laminate leaves in plastic.
She can t blame people for wanting to experience this place in whatever
272 Al ex Shakar
limited way they can. After all, consumption is a kind of love, she thinks,
the only kind most of us happen to be any good at.
Yo, Walt. The shaman takes a couple of steps toward them. His bald-
ing head is blanketed with white down, and his face is painted brown,
with an orange stripe running down the center. He is short and thickly
built, and his large, hairy belly is peppered with short, impressionistic
paintstrokes. His penis is thicker than it is long, as though it had gained
muscle mass from the daily exercise of resisting the crushing weight of his
belly.
Yo, Dan. You ever meet Ursula?
Yo, Ursula, he says, holding up a meaty hand. Coincidentally, Yo is an
actual Yanomama word, used in greeting. Not surprisingly, it s one of the
few Yanomama words that have caught on here.
Dan turns back to Walter. See you got a bird.
Threw itself on my arrow.
The shaman nods somberly, then leads them back to the rest of the
group, who are now sitting cross-legged in a circle. All of them are already
painted and topped with down. The women s bottom lips are pierced in
the traditional three places, and the holes have small sticks stuck through
them; the large holes in their earlobes are filled with red and yellow flow-
ers. Their breasts have already begun to make peace with gravity, aureoles
turning toward the ground. The owner of the breasts she s staring at waves,
and Ursula looks up, embarrassed. The woman s name is Giselle; they ve
talked before. Giselle makes room for her and Walter in the circle.
Walter begins to pluck the bird, doling out feathers that the tribes-
people proceed to dip in paste and affix to their shoulders in fanlike pat-
terns. Dan walks into the middle of the circle, carrying a long stilt-palm
root and a wooden bowl full of powder. He sits down and snorts some
powder from his pinched fingers, then packs the end of the tube with the
stuff and holds it out to a tribesman, who guides it to his mouth. Dan
blows on the other end while the tribesman inhales. He then repacks the
tube and holds it out to Giselle.
What kind of drug is this? Ursula asks.
Ground-up epene seed, Walter says. A hallucinogen.
Very trippy, Giselle croaks, massaging her throat.
The tube comes Ursula s way, and she declines. It moves on to Walter.
So are you looking forward to going back? Giselle says.
Ursula looks at Giselle s prismatically decorated face. I know I m going
to miss this place, she says.
The Savage Gi r l 273
Why don t you stay, then, join the tribe?
Ursula follows the smoke rising from the fire. The sky is beginning to
cloud over, soaking up the forest moisture for the afternoon rain.
Giselle, she says, where will you go when the forest is gone?
What are they going to do, run their bulldozers right over us? After
she speaks her eyes betray a glimmer of uncertainty, as though her ques-
tion had been posed in earnest. But then she smiles, gathering in the
mounting euphoria of the epene seed. Let em try, she decides. We ll
give em a faceful of darts.
For all these people s apparent flakiness, Ursula knows this isn t an idle
threat. They will defend this place however they can. They ll make of their
bodies links in the human chain and fight for every last tree. And at night
they ll sleep soundly, secure in that rarest of modern-day certainties, the
conviction that their lives, if not necessarily helping the world, at least
aren t making it any worse. For these reasons Ursula finds the invitation to
stay with them more than a little tempting, but she knows this isn t her
tribe. Her tribe, she s pretty sure, is back in Middle City, and in other
cities and suburbs and towns a tribe of scattered, isolated individuals, a
tribe that doesn t yet know it is a tribe. With any luck, though, she ll find
at least a few of its members. And in the meantime, she has her plans.
Back at the station she has a small box containing a few sample materials
she s culled from the forest over the last few months cloudy cocoons,
diaphanous webs, blood-red root systems, pale fungal threads and even
more important, she has her sketchbooks, filled with studies for the new
work she s planning, not a painting this time but an installation. The
webs, she imagines, will ensnare. The cocoons will pacify. The roots and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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