NOTE #2 THE SHAMAN´S DREAM

Kemperi, the 94-year-old Waorani Indian, limps but is still surprisingly agile as he balances across two tree trunks to his hut made of dried jungle leaves. A narrow strip of swamp, repeatedly nourished by the torrential rains of the Amazon, separates his home from the old airstrip that oil companies built in the Ecuadorian rainforest in the 1970s to establish a prosperous oil production facility in the middle of the Waorani's sacred forest. No one asked the Waorani for permission at the time. Nor do they today. But Kemperi, already chief and shaman of his Waorani tribe at the time, ended the oil company's invasion with a handful of spears. He killed two of the oil company's workers with his own hands. It was a battle between David and Goliath, which David won, but once again, the wrong people were among the victims. Simple oil workers who just wanted to earn a living and knew nothing about a jungle that had been the basis of survival for a unique Indian culture for centuries and which they were about to destroy forever in just a few hours. After successfully driving out the oil company, Kemperi's tribe settled around the constructed runway as a symbol of resistance and an unspoken warning.

Now I sit in front of him on the trampled, cleanly swept earth of his small hut and furtively observe his naked body, criss-crossed with countless wrinkles. His eyes tell me everything that his mouth conceals from me, the stranger. I become strangely aware that this is the first time in my life that I have met someone who has taken other lives with his own hands. At some point, he tells me about his dream in which a jaguar predicted the violent death of his grandson by an enemy spear. A few months later, the dream had come true and Kero, Kemperi's young grandson, had been killed by an enemy tribe on his fourteen-hour river journey to the end of the Waorani rainforest. The low river level during a dry spell, which forced him to leave his raft briefly, had become a deadly trap for him. Different laws apply in the Amazon rainforest. Laws that we outsiders do not understand. Anyone who crosses the red zone, the territory of the enemy brother tribe, must beware. Only now do I understand my guide's nervousness when we too had to cross the red zone for hours in our boat to reach Kemperi. I try not to think about the return journey.

I ask the old shaman if he can foresee his own future and that of his people. As I do so, I think of the devastated edge of the Amazon, which I crossed for hours in a pick-up truck on my way here. Cleared trees, metre-high oil flames in the middle of a desolate landscape that was a magnificent jungle just a few years ago, countless oil pipelines next to the newly built asphalt road and construction machinery, machines and noise everywhere. This time, Kemperi looks me straight in the eye, as if my images were his, and just nods, but says nothing more. He remains silent for a long time, and just as I am about to leave to give the old man some peace, he takes my hand again and tells me the end of his dream: the jaguar has predicted the imminent death of three more people at the hands of the warlike brother tribe. I look around and start counting: Pako, my guide and me. We look at each other anxiously, all three of us thinking the same thing. But then I remember the shaman Saintsegeg, a Dukha reindeer nomad I had met in northern Mongolia, near the Siberian border. She had predicted a long life and a happy future for me. The jaguar had not meant us.