Aaron Elkins: Little Tiny Teeth

But in the early 1970s the Malaysian plantations of the giant Gunung Jerai rubber conglomerate were having troubles of their own; their trees were being decimated by a vicious disease that was known as South American leaf blight but was capable of attacking Hevea anywhere in the world. As it happened, Arden and Theo, who followed such things, had heard from one of their professors about an isolated region near the junction of the Huitoto River and the Amazon, only about thirty miles upriver from Iquitos, where rubber trees grew that were remarkably resistant to the blight. Arden, the quickest-minded and most decisive of the three, had contacted Gunung Jerai to determine if they were interested in seeing some of the seeds from these trees, the location of which he sensibly kept to himself.

They were interested all right, enough to cover the costs of a three-week expedition to the Amazon for Arden and Theo, who would pick up Theo’s brother Frank in Iquitos. Gunung Jerai would pay two thousand dollars for a viable sample of one thousand seeds. If they proved on testing to be truly blight resistant, there would be another ten thousand dollars. And in five years, when the young trees were tapped for the first time, they would pay an additional one hundred dollars for every surviving, productive tree. The money was to be paid to Arden, who volunteered to split it evenly with his two partners.

The likely total was upward of a hundred thousand dollars, and it was as good as in their bank accounts right now. In Arden’s backpack was a net bag layered with gauze, in which nestled twelve hundred blight-resistant Hevea brasiliensis seeds. Collecting them had not been easy. In the Amazon, as almost nowhere else, trees did not grow in stands, but rather in widely scattered ones and twos, often miles apart. It had taken the three Tikuna Indians they had hired five days to harvest them. The Indians had been paid the equivalent of two American dollars a day per man, and had chuckled among themselves at the foolhardiness of the white men, who paid good money for things that anybody could go out and find just by walking around the jungle and keeping his eyes open.

“Let’s get going,” Arden said, standing up and hefting the precious backpack onto his shoulders. “If we get moving, we should be back in Iquitos by tonight.”

“Iquitos,” Frank said with a sigh. “Hot food, cold beer, showers…”

“Clean shirts, shaves…”

“Girls who wear clothes,” Theo put in with an eyebrow-waggling leer, and they all laughed.

It took only a few minutes to roll up and pack their hammocks and mosquito nets, and they were soon once again on the rough path – an old deer or capybara track, probably – that led back to the shore and the broken-down old Bayliner they had rented in Iquitos. Its outboard engine had coughed and stuttered worrisomely all the way up, and even died on them a half dozen times, but the way back would be easier. Iquitos was downriver. They could float back if they had to.

After just a few minutes, the path took them to a large, cleared, relatively orderly patch of head-high shrubs with bright, yellow-green leaves, tiny yellow flowers, and red, coffee-beanlike fruits.

At the entrance to it, Frank put up his hand. “Whoa, hold it. You know what this is, don’t you? It’s hayo. Coca. I think maybe we want to go around it.”

“Around it,” Arden said with an edge to his voice, “means around the swamps on either side of it. That’s a lot of extra ground to cover. I don’t know about you, but I’m bushed. And I want to have my dinner tonight in Iquitos. I never want to look at another piece of manioc.”

“Sure, me too, but we’re on the border of Chayacuro country here,” Frank said. “This could easily be theirs, and they’re not exactly as, shall we say, “hospitable” as our Tikuna friends. I’ve worked with them once or twice, and trust me, you don’t want to make them mad.”

“Our good Tikuna friend Tapi,” Arden said, referring to the Indian guide who had brought them this far and then returned home the previous night, “told us to just stay with the path, and we’d be back at the boat in a couple of hours. With the compass not working right, don’t you think we ought to just follow his instructions? You really want to chance getting lost again?”

“Well, no, of course not, but I think I could find the path again-”

“You think. Oh, that’s just great.”

“Look, Arden,” Theo said. “Frank’s got a point. We don’t want to mess with the Chayacuro. I like my head the size it is.”

“For Christ’s sake, what is it with you two?” Arden erupted. “It’s five o’clock in the goddamn morning. You think these guys have guards out this time of day, monitoring the hordes of people that come through here? They’re still asleep, which is what I intend to be at this time tomorrow.”

“Yeah, sure, but-”

“Look, we’ll be in and out of it in less than a minute. We’ve spent more time arguing about it than it’ll take to get through the damn thing.”

“I don’t know…” Frank muttered, chewing on his lip. Although the oldest of the three, he was by nature the least assertive. “Theo?”

Theo’s shoulders rose in resigned submission. “What the hell, let’s do it. Arden’s the boss.”

“I am?” Arden said. “Hey, thanks for telling me. How about letting your brother in on it?”

Frank gave in too. His open face relaxed into a smile and he waved Arden on with a flourish. “Lead on, Macduff. Just walk fast, will you?”

The Chayacuro had followed at a hundred feet, slipping silently through the undergrowth and hanging vines like the jaguars they revered. They watched as the strangers entered the coca garden. With only a look between them and a barely perceptible dip of the chin from Jabuti-toro, each man pulled from his quiver a dart dipped in poison before they had left the village. A pinch of kapok was taken from each woven bag, moistened with saliva, and wadded onto the back end of the dart. This was partly to make it fly true, but mostly to stop up the hollow interior of the blowgun so that the coming puff of air would not pass uselessly around the dart but would instead propel it forward. The long tubes were lifted to their lips and aimed. Both men gathered in quick, shallow mouthfuls of air, and…

Ffft.

Ffft.

A Chayacuro blowgun dart is made by cutting away the leafy part of an ivory nut palm leaf, leaving only the straight, slender central rib, which is then whittled to a point with a few expert strokes. It is about ten inches long and not much thicker than a toothpick. If it were to appear beside a barbecue grill among the wooden canape skewers, no one would look at it twice. The poison into which it is dipped is a curarelike extract pressed from the skin of the poison-dart frog, Phyllobates terribilis, and is among the most potent poisons known to man. A bird struck with such a dart will fall paralyzed from a tree in ten seconds and be dead in thirty. A squirrel or small monkey will take three or four minutes to die, a sloth or tapir fifteen, a human being anywhere between thirty minutes and three hours, most of which is spent in total paralysis. Death results from asphyxia. Curare and its relatives are neuromuscular blockers that first turn the muscles limp and unresponsive, then paralyze them altogether. When the muscles that control the lungs are no longer capable of inflating them, the victim suffocates. It is a particular horror of curare poisoning that consciousness is not affected until very near the end. A human victim can think clearly and feel himself becoming progressively incapacitated, but is very soon unable to speak, to call for help, or even to gesture.

In the hands of a Chayacuro marksman, the dart can be accurate at over a hundred feet, a distance that it travels in a shade under one second. Once it leaves the blowgun, there’s no sound. An entire troop of monkeys can be brought down before they grasp the danger. Browsing animals who are narrowly missed continue their peaceful grazing, unafraid. But Chayacuro marksmen don’t often miss.