Secret Reserves

I

Just a half turn and Manari takes a glance at her. He smiles a vaporous smile. His hands stay glued to the nine-foot pole plying us upstream, cigar-sized toes fastened tightly to the hull of the canoe that his brother Andrés built years ago out of one solid trunk of cedar.

“Have you ever been to Venice?” the visitor repeats from under her hat.

Chewed up by chiggers, Manari’s calves twinge simultaneously. We are crossing a swell of whitewater on a bend of the Conambo River, deep in the Ecuadorian rainforest. This is Sápara territory, and Manari is their leader.

“I’ve heard of it,” he responds, shaking the question off.

From where I am sitting, I can see his scapulae rotating, his carved spine, his back muscles rising and falling like piston rods: a gargoyle on a ledge, poised to jump. He is as tall as the tallest Sápara can be, jet-black hair raining on his lashes, with the full Indian features of a regal Chief Bromden: proud cheekbones, lips thick as snakes.

Every time a rock breaks the surface of the stream, he pries it away curtly with the stick, steering us clear. Manari and his eleven siblings, and practically every other Sápara in the land, grew up navigating wooden canoes along these rivers. He is almost forty now and has seen black anacondas lurking underwater for their prey, capybaras crowding muddy landing strips, and a jaguar raring to feast on his sister’s flesh. Manari has fished for barbudos, mota, kungukshi, silver piranhas, and giant catfish. He has had caimans as pets. He has eaten monkeys and frogs, and once owned a peccary that would chew on the pulp of his mother’s manioc beer, only to run, piss-drunk, back into the forest. Those were the good old days, when his father, one of the greatest Sápara shamans of all time, was still alive.

“You are like the gondolier of Amazonia,” the visitor prods. “You need only to sing.”

More than six thousand miles separate us from any gondola in Venice. The sun in the rainforest is lip-bursting and the air smells like warm green tea. At times we can hear the chirping of capuchin monkeys and the roaring of Juri Juri, a spirit buried underground by the ancient gods—or, as someone later explains, a type of bullfrog that dwells beneath the cool earth on the shore of certain lagoons.

My home for the past two days has been a pebble beach at the edge of a reserve the Sápara created within their territory—an Amazon within the Amazon. Unnamed, this wildlife nursery is a safe haven at the core of one of the...