Lalo and Licha said they thought they had been there, from the description we had, but it was a long time ago and they couldn’t be sure of finding it based just on that. Better than nothing, though.
“Whether or not it’s at Kanan Ka’a,” Lucy said, “we’ll leave one of our replicas there. I don’t think it is going to fool anyone who knows much about the real thing but, if they don’t, it might confuse them for a while. As I’ve said, I’ve been told you can feel the real one’s presence when you’re close. No one has been able to explain to me exactly how. Some sort of vibes. They say it’s something you can’t have ever experienced before and once you have, you won’t forget it, so I guess that in itself is a description.”
I turned in early since I had to be up at midnight for my shift. The forest was noisy, but oddly calming. The tone had changed, I supposed the day critters had gone to bed, like me, and the night critters had come out to play. I hoped none of them were hungry for juicy morsels dangling in hammocks. Arnulfo had told me to watch out for the dreaded nauyaca snake, especially if I got up in the night, as there might be one hanging out underneath my hammock.
“They won’t go looking for you,” he said, “but if you annoy them, they’ll bite you a good one. Then you bleed out, you know, from your eyes and ears, nose and so on. The only advantage is that you die real fast. No painful lingering.”
I was reassured.
My shift at guard duty was uneventful, the best kind. I stayed awake and was very watchful, but I didn’t see any nauyaca snakes. No snakes at all, actually. Three o’clock came around fast, and I wasn’t even bored. Lalo relieved me and I crawled back into the hammock to nap until dawn.
As the forest brightened from pitch dark to twilight dim, we packed up our camp, saddled our horses and moved on. The day proved long and without surprises. Later the evening and night were repeats of yesterday except that I drew the early shift. I was in the hammock by midnight and sleeping five minutes later.
The next day, however, did harbor an ‘event’. We were, as usual, plodding along at our horse’s walking speed, a little slower than we had been. The trees had thinned slightly, letting more underbrush get a foothold. It was beginning to impede our progress and I hoped it wouldn’t get thicker. Arnoldo assured me there was nothing to worry about. In terms of brush, at least.
LUCY
The next day was uneventful. I love riding through the forest, especially on Nelda. I think she enjoys it, too. I hadn’t realized how tense I had gotten. When people shoot at me it tends to tense me up. There was no good reason to start relaxing. We were heading into a tricky situation, but even so, the forest had a relaxing effect on me.
The following day, we did have an event. Arnulfo, scouting in front of us as usual, had stumbled on a Lacandón, who was staggering through the forest in a disoriented sort of way.
I went to speak with the man. He spoke a few words of Spanish, but basically only spoke Lacandón, which is a little hard to follow, but I could get most of it. The poor man needed some medical attention, too, so we got out the first aid kit and did what we could.
He had an appalling story to tell. His brother had been murdered, and he himself left for dead at the hands of a party of vicious men who sounded a lot like Macalusa’s crowd.
As near as I could figure from what Ah Cuxtal—that was his name—said, they were headed to the area where Kanan Óox was, so after some discussion, we—I—decided that we had better head there, too. If the Pol was actually there, and they got there first, we might be out of luck. Literally out of Luck.
We didn’t want to go charging into the Kanan Óox area on horseback. A more stealthy approach was indicated. Arnulfo said he knew a place where we could leave the horses and mules, but we’d have a good walk to where he thought Kanan Óox was.
So be it. Walking is good exercise. Firms up the old butt.
CARLOS
Arnulfo’s birdcall on our right changed subtly. If I hadn’t been hearing it constantly for two days, I wouldn’t have noticed anything different. We all stopped. Lalo and Licha motioned us to stay where we were and faded into the undergrowth to the right.
In a few minutes, Lalo reappeared and approached Lucy. “Your Mayan is better than ours”, he said, “come and help, if you would.” We stood up from the log we had been sitting on. “Just Lucy for now, please, we’ll be back and explain,“ said Lalo. They went off in the direction he had come from.
As it was described to me later, Arnulfo had contacted or been contacted—this was unclear—by an individual in the brushy area he was pushing through. Arnulfo and the others accompanied the new arrival back to our group.
He was dressed in a long garment that had once been off-white but was now stained and torn and in rather bad shape, as was its owner. He had a woozy look about him and was covered with bruises and cuts wherever we could see.
Lucy was talking to him. I couldn’t understand the words, but her tone of voice was calm and reassuring. She sat him down on our log and examined what she could see of his wounds. Lalo handed her the medical kit.
Lucy and Licha went to work cleaning the cuts and spreading antibiotic on them. Their patient bore up stoically under this treatment but his eyes had a look of fear and misery.
Lucy was still carrying on the reassuring sounding monolog in Mayan with Licha throwing in the occasional supporting word. As they were finishing their ministrations, Arnulfo announced that, it being late in the day and time for a consultation about our plans, we would call it quits and set up for the night. No fire, he said.
Our new friend, it turned out, was a Lacandón named Ah Cuxtal. One of the Haah Wiinikoob—Real People—as the Lacandones call themselves. He was a bit outside of the usual Lacandón roaming area, but not that far. He and his brother had been hunting a little north of their usual haunts, he told us, when four or five men suddenly surrounded them. Outsiders, not locals. Not even Mexicans, much less any kind of Mayans. Foreigners that sometimes spoke Spanish. Ah Cuxtal knew some Spanish, but they also sometimes spoke some other language. English? We asked, but he had never heard English, didn’t know what it was.
Apparently these men had also been out hunting and had stumbled on Ah Cuxtal and his brother. They took them to their camp where there were “many many people”—Ah Cuxtal was not good with numbers—and they tied them to trees.
The strangers had been preparing their camp for the night and continued to do so. They cooked their food, not offering any to their captives. “We would not have eaten it anyway,” Ah Cuxtal said. “But we were very thirsty.”
The meal finished, a bottle was produced and made the rounds. After a while two of the group came over to the captives and began asking questions. The biggest one seemed to be in charge and the other one did as he was told. The big one started asking questions in Spanish, and when he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere, directed the smaller man to translate.
Ah Cuxtal was not impressed with the short man’s Mayan, but it was comprehensible, if barely. Lacandones speak their own version of the language, some say it is a purer version, but it is understandable, with difficulty, to those speaking Yucateco and Itzá and most other Mayan languages.
As near as we could figure, given the language problems and the lack of detail in our questions, these people were headed for where we thought Number Three—Kanan Óox—was located. The questions they had asked Ah Cuxtal and his brother seemed
