Light at the Edge of the World. Wade Davis
because long ago men married them and acquired this knowledge from their animal wives. Today the priests say we lie, but we know better. The white man has only been a short while in this country and knows very little about the animals; we have lived here thousands of years and were taught by the animals themselves. The white man writes everything down in a book so that it will not be forgotten; but our ancestors married animals, learned all their ways and passed on this knowledge from one generation to another.
I did indeed write down Alex’s tales, transcriptions of dozens of hours of conversations recorded intermittently over twenty-five years, committed to paper a few years before his death. Only after it was done did I realize that in a sense I had committed a form of violence, a transgression that bordered on betrayal. Extracted from the theatre of his telling, the landscape of his memory, the sensate land and the sibilant tones of the wild, the stories lost much of their meaning and power. Transposed into two dimensions by ink and paper, trapped on the page, they seemed child-like in their simplicity, even clumsy in their rhetoric.
But, of course, these stories were not meant to be recorded. They were born of the land and had their origins in another reality. Some time after I first learned of We-gyet from Alex, I asked him how long it took to tell the cycle of tales. He replied that he had asked his father that very question. To find out, they had strapped on their snowshoes in March, a time of good ice, and walked the length of Bear Lake, a distance of some 20 miles (32 km), telling the story as they went along. They reached the far end, turned and walked all the way back home, and the story, Alex recalled, “wasn’t halfway done.”
In order to measure the duration of a story, the length of a myth, it was not enough to set a timepiece. One had to move through geography, telling the tale as one proceeded. For Alex and his father, this sense of place, this topography of the spirit, at one time informed every aspect of their existence. When, at the turn of the century, a Catholic missionary arrived at their village at Bear Lake, Alex’s father was completely confounded by the Christian notion of heaven. He could not believe that anyone could be expected to give up smoking, gambling, swearing, carousing and all the things that made life worth living, in order to go to a place where they did not allow animals. “No caribou?” he would say in complete astonishment. He could not conceive of a world without wild things.
Alex lived for more than 90 years; his wife Madeleine reached 103 , passing away a few seasons before Alex followed her to the grave. A year before he died, Alex gave me a small gift, a tool carved from caribou bone. Smooth as marble, though stained from years of use, it fit perfectly in my hand, the rounded and slightly serrated spoon-like tip protruding neatly from between finger and thumb. I had no idea what it might have been used for. Alex laughed. He had carved it more than eighty years before, following the lead of his father. It was a specialized instrument, used to skin out the eyelids of wolves. Only later did I realize that the eyelids in question were my own, and that Alex, having done so much to allow me to see, was, in his own way, saying good-bye.
PERHAPS BECAUSE I never knew my grandparents, who died before I was born, I have always been drawn to elders, enchanted by the radiance of men and women who have lived through times that I can only imagine: an old school-master who scrambled out of the trenches on the first day of the Somme; a family doctor who treated the wounded along the partition line between India and Pakistan, when rivers of blood divided the Raj; Waorani shaman who knew the Amazonian forests before the arrival of missions. I am enticed by their memories, and, in a culture notably bereft of formal modes of initiation, I find comfort in their advice. From men like Alex, I have learned of a world without form, infused with spirit and prayer. But equally important to me is the landscape of the concrete, the formal realm of science.
In the early 1970s, a time of few heroes, there was one man who loomed large over the Harvard campus, Richard Evans Schultes, a kindly professor who demanded nothing but devotion to knowledge. In time, mountains in South America would bear his name, as would national parks. Prince Philip would call him “the father of ethnobotany.” Students knew him as the world ’s leading authority on medicinal and hallucinogenic plants, the plant explorer who had sparked the psychedelic era with the discovery of psilocybin mushrooms in Mexico in 1938 . Three years later, having proved that teonanacatl, the flesh of the gods, was indeed a mushroom, and having identified ololiuqui, the serpent vine, the second of the elusive Aztec hallucinogenic plants, Schultes turned his imagination to the forests of South America. Taking a semester’s leave of absence from the university, he disappeared into the Northwest Amazon, where he remained for twelve years, mapping uncharted rivers and living among two dozen indigenous tribes, all the while in pursuit of the mysteries of the rain forest. He collected over twenty-seven thousand botanical specimens, including two thousand medicinal plants and over three hundred species previously unknown to science. For his students, he was a living link to the great naturalists of the nineteenth century and a distant era when the tropical rain forests stood immense, inviolate, a mantle of green stretching across entire continents.
By the time I met Schultes in the fall of 1973 , it had been some years since he had been capable of active fieldwork. I found him at his desk in his fourth floor aerie in the Botanical Museum, dressed conservatively, peering across several large stacks of dried herbarium specimens. Introducing myself as one of his undergraduate students, I mentioned that I was from British Columbia and that I wanted to go to the Amazon and collect plants, just as he had done so many years before. The professor looked up from his desk and, as calmly as if I had asked for directions to the local library, said, “Well, when would you like to go?” A fortnight later I left for South America, where I remained during that first sojourn for fifteen months.
There was, of course, method in Schultes’s casual manner. He took for granted the capacity of anyone to achieve anything. In this sense he was a true mentor, a catalyst of dreams. Though not by nature a modest man, he shared his knowledge and experience with his acolytes as naturally as a gardener brings water to a seed. Sometimes his faith in a student would lead to disappointment, but not often. His own achievements were legendary, and merely to move in his shadow was to aspire to greatness.
In Schultes, I found the perfect complement to Maybury-Lewis, my anthropology tutor. Whereas Maybury-Lewis awakened the soul through the sheer power of his intellect, the wonder of his words and ideas, Schultes inspired by the example of his deeds. In all the years I was formally his student, we never had an intellectual conversation. It was not his style. He was a true explorer, and the very force of his personality gave form and substance to the most esoteric of ethnobotanical pursuits. He would pass along these thoughts that were both gifts and challenges. “There is one river that I would very much like you to see,” he would say, knowing full well that the process of getting to that river would involve experiences guaranteed to assure that were you able to reach the confluence alive, you would emerge from the forest a wiser and more knowledgeable human being.
Typical of the way Schultes operated was his suggestion, offered casually just before I left for South America, that I look up one of his former graduate students, Tim Plowman, in Colombia. Tim, who would become a close friend, was Schultes’s protégé, and the professor had secured for him from the U.S. government the dream academic grant of the early 1970 s, $250,000 to study a plant known to the Inca as the Divine Leaf of Immortality, the most sacred medicine of the Andes, coca, the notorious source of cocaine.
It was a remarkable assignment. Though the drug had long been the focus of public concern and hysteria, and efforts to eradicate the coca fields had been underway for nearly fifty years, astonishingly little was known about the actual plant. The botanical origins of the domesticated species, the chemistry of the leaf, the pharmacology of coca chewing, the plant’s role in nutrition, the geographical range of the domesticated species, the relationship between the wild and cultivated species—all these were mysteries. No concerted effort had been made to document the role of coca in the religion and culture of the Andean and Amazonian Indians since W. Golden Mortimer’s classic History of Coca, published in 1901. Tim’s mandate from the government, made deliberately vague by Schultes, was to travel the length of the Andean Cordillera, traversing the mountains whenever possible, to reach the flanks of the montaña to locate the source of a plant that had inspired an empire. Eventually, Tim and I would spend over a year on the road, a journey made possible by the great professor and infused at all times