Ghost Flight

52

The food and the sense of security must have lulled him to sleep. He awoke to find the fire pit glowing a dull red and the feasting long done. The odd star glinted in the heavens high above, and a warm stillness seemed to have settled over the hut, mixed with an undercurrent of expectancy; of anticipation.

Jaeger noticed that the same thin and gnarled old man who had stared deep into his eyes was now the centre of attention. He bent over something, busy with his hands. It looked like a shorter, thinner version of one of the Amahuaca’s blowpipes, and Jaeger could see him stuffing something into one end.

He glanced at Puruwehua enquiringly.

‘Our shaman,’ Puruwehua explained. ‘He prepares nyakwana. You would call it I think “snuff”. It is… I forget the exact word. It makes you see visions.’

‘Hallucinogenic,’ Jaeger volunteered.

‘Hallucinogenic,’ Puruwehua confirmed. ‘It is made of the seed of the cebil tree, roasted and ground into a fine powder, and mixed with the dried shells of a giant forest snail. It sends the taker into a trance state, so he can visit the spirit world. When you take it, you can fly as high as the topena – the white hawk that is big enough to steal a chicken from the village. It can take you to far distant places, and maybe even out of this world.

‘We sniff maybe half a gram at a time.’ Puruwehua smiled. ‘You – you should try no more than a fraction of that amount.’

Jaeger started. ‘Me?’

‘Yes, of course. When it reaches here, one of your party will need to accept the pipe. Not to do so – it would undo much of the good achieved tonight.’

‘Me and drugs…’ Jaeger tried a smile. ‘I’ve got enough on my hands without a monged-out head. I’m good, thanks.’

‘You are the leader of your group,’ Puruwehua countered, quietly. ‘You can let another take the honour. But it would be… unusual.’

Jaeger shrugged. ‘I can do unusual. Unusual is okay.’

He watched the pipe do the rounds of the spirit house. With each stop, a figure placed one end to his nostril, while the shaman blew the snuff deep into his nose. Minutes later, the taker would get to his feet, chanting and dancing, his mind clearly far away in another world.

‘Via the nyakwana we commune with our ancestors and our spirits,’ Puruwehua explained. ‘Those anchored in the world of the jungle – the animals, birds, trees, rivers, fish and mountains.’

He pointed out one of the entranced sniffers. ‘So this man – he relates a spirit story. “Once there was an Amahuaca woman who turned into the moon. She had climbed a tree, but decided to stay in the sky, because her boyfriend had found a rival love, and so became the moon…”’

As Puruwehua talked, the pipe drew ever closer. Jaeger noticed that the chief was keeping a careful eye out for what would happen when it reached him. The shaman stopped. He crouched low, the snuff piled on a length of smooth wood, the long, ornately carved pipe clutched in his hand.

As the snuff was readied, Jaeger found himself remembering a different pipe, one offered to him long ago and a whole world away. Momentarily he was back in his grandfather’s Wiltshire study, the familiar smell of Latakia oak and pinewood cured tobacco strong in his nostrils.

If his grandfather had felt able to offer a sixteen-year-old boy that pipe, maybe Jaeger could accept a different type of pipe, prepared by a different set of hands – a different elder – now.

For a moment he wavered.

The shaman looked at him enquiringly. Barely had he done so when Joe James practically knocked everyone out of the way in his rush to be first.

‘Dude, I thought you’d never ask!’ He sat before the shaman cross-legged, his massive beard reaching to the floor. He grasped the near end of the snuff pipe, placed it in his nose and took the shot. Moments later, the big Kiwi’s mind had clearly gone into warp factor.

Good on James, Jaeger told himself. Cavalry arrived in the nick of time.

But the shaman didn’t move. Instead he readied a second pinch of snuff and loaded it into the pipe.

‘You are two groups,’ Puruwehua explained. ‘Those who came first – they have already opened their minds to the nyakwana. It is not James’s first time with the pipe. And then – the new arrivals. This second pipe, it is for you.’

The shaman glanced up.

His eyes – the same as had peered deep inside Jaeger’s skull – fixed him with a look. A testing one. Jaeger felt himself compelled forward, drawn inexorably towards the proffered pipe. He found himself sitting before the Amahuaca shaman just as James had done before him.

Again his mind drifted to his grandfather’s study. But he was no longer that sixteen-year-old boy. As his grandfather had been, Jaeger was now a leader, a figurehead – albeit in a very different place and time, but somehow still connected by a common enemy.

The men and women in his charge needed him to be strong, constant and lucid. Despite the Indians’ customs and their hospitality, Jaeger was here to do a job, and he was determined to stick to it. He held his hands up in front of him, in a gesture signifying stop.

‘As I think you know, I have many ghosts,’ he remarked quietly. ‘But right now I also have a mission to lead. So those ghosts have to remain caged, at least until I’ve pulled everyone through the jungle and back to their homes.’ He paused. ‘I can’t take the pipe.’

Puruwehua translated, and the shaman searched Jaeger’s gaze intently. Then he nodded, briefly, a look of respect flashing through his eyes.

He lowered the pipe.

It was some time before Jaeger came back to his senses.

He was lying against his rucksack, eyes closed. After being forgiven the snuff pipe, he’d clearly fallen asleep – his full belly and the warmth of the spirit house lulling him into a deep rest. His mind remained a complete blank – all except for one mesmerising image that seemed seared across the inside of his eyelids.

It was a scene he’d clearly dreamed, one no doubt provoked by the close encounter with the shaman. It was one that he’d begun to think was a total impossibility, but right now it seemed so utterly real.

It was of a beautiful green-eyed woman, a child standing protectively at her side. The woman had been speaking, her voice calling to him from across the missing years. And the child – he’d seemed so much taller. In fact he’d seemed the right height for an eleven-year-old boy.

And he was even more the spitting image of William Jaeger.