A primal scream echoed through the jungle.
Dani D'Annunzio was weak in the knees. Even with everything she'd been put through over the previous twenty-four hours, this was too much. Her stomach was churning, and had it not been for the support of Gabriel Benitez Serrano, she might have collapsed there, in the dirt. Only now, as the yips and whines dissipated into the Bolivian night, did Dani truly understand what was being asked of her, what these people expected her to do.
It made her sick.
She turned, disgusted by the scene that had unfolded before her, disgusted in herself, and pushed her way through the crowd of gathered Huaca. Benitez was behind her, calling to her, telling her to slow down. But Dani simply needed to get away. She found open space beyond the far edge of the clustered little huts, but stumbled over her own feet and fell to her knees. Tears streaming down her face, she threw up the rice, the fish, the fresh fruit, and the fermented carambola juice she'd feasted on earlier in the night.
Naked, save for a lacy pair of red panties and a ridiculous set of ankle-laced espadrilles, Dani held herself up on all fours, her breasts exposed and dangling beneath her torso. Benitez came up from behind her, crouched down, and without thinking, touched her naked back to see if she was okay. "Do you want some water?" he asked.
Dani shook her head. She didn't want anything from him. She didn't want anything from any of them. She just wanted to be far, far away from here.
A necklace of alternating jaguar teeth and silver beads hung around her neck. Her hair had been done up to perfection by one of the girls in town, laced with strands of sapumpa fern from the jungle. Even in her present state, wiping that night's dinner from her lips and weeping all the while, Dani was a sight to behold. Dark, Mediterranean skin, deep brown eyes, full lips, and an even fuller chest, the girl was accustomed to being the center of attention, the object of desire for men in Bolivia, Honduras, or back in rural Vermont. She was twenty-four years old and blessed with the sort of figure that might've landed her on pages of a lingerie catalog -- thin, five-foot-ten, and completely toned. She was a vision.
No one but Benitez was paying her any attention, however. Not Tutakuru. Not Taksa Kuchu. Not Uturunku or Qaray Puka. They were fixated on the river here in the little village of Aya Pampa, the entire population gathered to watch the flesh sacrifice to the goddess Sipusiki.
In the distance, Dani could still hear Summer Monroe screaming out in sexual pleasure over the chanting crowd. Her cries were increasing in intensity, and it was clear to everyone present that she was about to crest.
"I can't," Dani cried to Benitez, staring blankly ahead. "I can't. I can't do this."
"Ssshhh," Benitez soothed her. "That's okay. I understand. She'll understand, too."
Dani sobbed loudly. "I just can't..."
Summer screamed behind her one last time, and the crowd erupted in cheers and jubilation. She had reached her climax. She had cum. And the village of Aya Pampa had pleased Sipusiki once more.
***
Dani had been on the big yellow school bus from Rurrenabaque for the better part of the past two days. A trip that might have taken about eight hours during the dry season had cost Dani thirty-nine to that point. They'd back-tracked more times than she could remember after repeatedly finding parts of the so-called highway washed out. She'd slept on the bus the night before as they waited for the sunrise in order to clear away fallen branches blocking their way. And they'd enlisted the help of a local campesino and his tractor after getting trapped in a mud puddle four-feet-deep earlier that afternoon.
The bus was half-empty already, and Dani felt real heartache for her fellow passengers who were continuing on to Riberalta or Guayaramerin. Travel in the yungas this time of a year was not for the impatient, and riding on a badly aged American school bus with most of the padding stripped from the seats was not exactly an easy ride in even the best of times. The shocks were gone, the engine was less than reliable, and glass was missing from half of the windows, making the not-infrequent rainstorms an absolute pleasure.
But Dani was here, at last. San Eduardo. Capital of the Valle de los Reyes. Jumping-off point for destinations further down the Rio San Clemente and the Rio de los Reyes both. Trading post for Benianos, rural campesinos, and Huaca Indians alike. San Eduardo was no sprawling metropolis, but it was the biggest little town that Dani had seen since leaving Rurrenabaque the previous morning. There looked to be a handful of small storefronts, a run-down old Catholic church, and a handful other non-descript buildings erected out of cinderblocks and corrugated tin. And, at the far end of "town," recessed into the jungle, was the Oveja Negra.
Dani gathered her backpack, and began bidding goodbye to the people she'd gotten to know over the past two days. The brothers Koque and Juan. Señora Orteguilla and her two little girls. The bus driver, Arturo, who still had a long, long journey ahead of him. None of them were getting off with her in San Eduardo. And none of them had expressed anything more than a passing disinterest in the work she had come to do with the Indians living here in the Oriente.
From how Dani understood it, this wasn't an uncommon reaction when it came to the Huaca. Even at the height of their power, the Inca had been more or less content to call the Andes home and leave the lowland tribes to the East to themselves. The Spanish and Portuguese had carved South America into colonies and countries, but the Huaca continued to cross back and forth between Bolivia and Brazil for generations with little heed to the borders imposed upon them. They sat out the War for Independence, the War of the Pacific, and the numerous little cocaine wars that enveloped the rest of the country. Overlooked and undisturbed, the Huaca continued to carry on in the very same fashion as their ancestors had, slipping through the cracks of history.
And yet, these were a people who'd almost been wiped out -- not by any sort of external factor, but because of they had suffered from a low birthrate for almost a full decade. The cause was still a bit of a mystery to Dani, but from how she understood it, the work shouldered by the Huaca Public Health and Fertility Initiative -- "La Iniciativa" - had helped turned things around. After two years of leading a frustratingly ineffectual public health campaign of her own in Eastern Honduras, Dani was looking to finally make an impact, and it seemed as if Summer Monroe's non-profit might just allow her to have that opportunity.
For twenty-six months, Daniella D'Annunzio had given talks and speeches throughout the Gracias a Dios department as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras, doing her best to help improve the lives of the Kwirku people living in the pine savannahs. Filter your water. Wear shoes. Don't dump waste upstream from where you get your drinking water. Twenty-six months later, Dani was not really sure about what, exactly, she had accomplished. The Kwirku humored her while she was among them, but went back to their same ways the moment she turned her back. Disappointed, and more than a little jaded about wasting two years of her life, Dani wasn't ready to return to Vermont just yet; not without doing something, anything, to help those people less fortunate than she.
A friend of a friend of a friend had heard about an opportunity opening up in Eastern Bolivia with the Huaca Public Health and Fertility Initiative. The head of La Iniciativa was a research professor at the Universidad de La Paz, an American biologist by the name of Summer Monroe. A Rhode Island native who'd moved down to Bolivia years earlier, Summer spent her autumns and winters on campus at the university, and her springs and summers in the Oriente traveling from one little Huaca village to the next. Summer and Dani wrote each other back and forth as Dani's Peace Corps service was coming to a close. And Summer offered the girl the chance to come down to South America, see the sort of fertility work she was doing with the Huaca, and maybe, possibly, help La Iniciativa cover more ground that coming spring.
