The Luck of the Maya. Theodore Brazeau
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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 to also imply that they had a pretty good idea of where Kanan Óox was but weren’t exactly sure.
After a while and more passing of the bottle they had become frustrated with their captives not knowing the answers they thought they should know, and were sure that if they beat them they’d suddenly acquire the knowledge. Or maybe they just enjoyed beating helpless people. Ah Cuxtal didn’t regain consciousness until the next morning and found that the men were gone and his brother was dead.
The ropes were also gone. Why waste good ropes to tie dead men to trees? Ah Cuxtal in a panic escaped into the forest to the north of the kidnappers trail and had been running ever since, blundering through the trees.
He had seen Arnulfo and, at first, was terrified that he had stumbled back on the killers. He realized that that couldn’t be and, in fact, vaguely recognized that Arnulfo was a sometime chicle gatherer and not an enemy. Certainly not a foreigner.
Arnulfo and Lucy questioned Ah Cuxtal at some length as to where this had taken place and what direction the group was headed. Ah Cuxtal said it was near tunich b’ox k’as—place of the big black rock—and they were headed west.
“I know the tunich b’ox k’as,” said Arnulfo. “If they start there and head west, that will put them in the general area of where we think Kanan Óox is.”
Lucy also wanted a description of the men in the group, which Ah Cuxtal was glad to supply in detail and with some animation. She told me later she had been sure that the Runt would be among them but, if he had been, Ah Cuxtal hadn’t seen him.
“I told Ah Cuxtal he was free to go back to his family, and that we would supply him with enough provisions to get there. He told me ‘my family is dead. I am dead’. I want that…something…to be dead’, he used a Lacandón word I didn’t know, but I can guess.”
Do you think that’s a good idea? I asked. This could all be a set up. “No, I don’t,” Lucy answered, “but I wanted to know what he’d say. I don’t know how much he understood last night, since we were speaking Spanish and English. I have no reason to believe he knows anything about our purpose but he does understand that we are going in the same direction as the guys who killed his brother. He wants to come with us and I would rather have him here where we can keep an eye on him. Lacandones are sometimes not too trustworthy, but I basically believe him.”
He might try to sneak off in the night, I said. “True,” Lucy agreed. “The night guards will have to watch for that, difficult as it will be in the dark.” Yes, I agreed, and he is a woodsman. “So are we,” she answered, “some of us are pretty good at it.” I had to agree with her on that and that it was better to have him around where we could see him. We talked to the rest of the crew. They made it unanimous.
We sat in the dark around our non-fire and discussed developments. We decided we had better change our course to find Kanan Óox and beat that bunch to it.
“We start at dawn, or just before,” Arnulfo said, “and now we’ll have to start pushing it. We will travel more quietly without the horses and after a certain point we’ll need to. There is a place we can leave the animals about halfway there and pick them up on the way back.”
I drew the straw for the last watch. That made for early rising,