the Testament (1999) by John Grisham

Author:John Grisham [Grisham, John]
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-12-19T00:41:57.359000+00:00

TWENTY-EIGHT

ATER NINE HOURS of sleep, the Ipicas arose before dawn to begin their day. The women built small cooking fires outside their huts, then left with the children for the river, to collect water and to bathe. As a rule, they waited until first light to walk the dirt trails. It was prudent to see what lay before them.

In Portuguese, the snake was known as an urutu. The Indians called it a bima. It was common around the waterways of southern Brazil, and often fatal. The girl's name was Ayesh, age seven, helped into the world by the white missionary. Ayesh was walking in front of her mother instead of behind, as was the custom, and she felt the bima squirm under her bare foot.

It struck her below the ankle as she screamed. By the time her father got to her, she was in shock and her right foot had doubled in size. A boy of fifteen, the fastest runner in the tribe, was dispatched to get Rachel.

There were four small Ipica settlements along two rivers that met in a fork very near the spot where Jevy and Nate had stopped. The distance from the fork to the last Ipica hut was no more than five miles. The settlements were distinct and self-contained little tribes, but they were all Ipicas, with the same language, heritage, and customs. They socialized and intermarried.

Ayesh lived in the third settlement from the fork. Rachel was in the second, the largest. The runner found her as she was reading scriptures in the small hut where she'd lived for eleven years. She quickly checked her supplies and filled her small medical bag.

There were four poisonous snakes in their part of the Pantanal, and at various times Rachel had had the anti-venom for each. But not this time. The runner told her the snake was a bima. Its antivenin was manufactured by a Brazilian company, but she had been unable to find it during her last trip to Corumba. The pharmacies there had less than half the medicines she needed.

She laced her leather boots and left with her bag. Lako and two other boys from her village joined her as she jogged away, through the tall weeds and into the woods.

According to Rachel's statistics, there were eighty-six adult females, eighty-one adult males, and seventy-two children in the four settlements, a total of 239 Ipicas. When she began working with the Ipicas eleven years earlier, there had been 280. Malaria took the weak ones every few years. An outbreak of cholera killed twenty in one village in 1991. If Rachel hadn't insisted on a quarantine, most of the Ipicas would've been wiped out.

With the diligence of an anthropologist, she kept records of births, deaths, weddings, family trees, illnesses, and treatments. Most of the time she knew who was having an extramarital affair, and with whom. She knew every name in every village. She had baptized Ayesh's parents in the river where they bathed.

Ayesh was small and thin, and she would probably die because there was no medicine.

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