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little girls at one end, a heavy woman perched on the other. To the seesaw she attached the tail end of the snake, placing a large wooden bowl below to catch the liquid. When the woman weighed down her end of the plank, the tension on the woven sides of the snake expelled the poisons, then the woman ran forward toward the fulcrum, and the two girls were able to pull down their end and the snake relaxed. And so it went.
    When the game ended, the dried contents of the imitation snake were ready for baking. This manioc flour was called cassava; from it, big, flat breadlike pancakes were made, and on it the Arawaks thrived.
    In Tiwánee’s village she was one of the women responsible for processing the manioc, and it was thanks to her ever-inquisitive mind as she performed this menial task that a bold innovation was introduced. In all the ages before she was born, the poisonous liquor expelled from the make-believe snake had been discarded as bothuseless and dangerous, but one day she noticed that when she inadvertently left some of the liquid in a clay bowl standing in bright sunlight, the intense heat caused it to change color to a rich golden brown, which looked so inviting that she told her husband: “Anything that looks so good ought to taste good, too.”

    “Tiwánee!” he shouted. “Don’t be foolish!” but despite his pleading she dipped a finger into the altered substance and gingerly brought it to her mouth. As she had expected, that first exploratory taste was reassuring: salty, sharp, with an invitation to try more, which she did, without apparent danger to herself. In succeeding days she kept tasting her brew, finding it increasingly good, and at last, without advising her husband of the bold step she was about to take, she gulped down such a generous amount of her new substance that had it been the original poison, she would surely have died. She didn’t. In fact, she felt extremely well, and after two days had passed without ill effect she told Bakámu: “It’s safe and tastes good.”
    Soon all the women in the village were keeping pots of the once-poisonous liquor quietly bubbling at the back of their fires and tossinginto the brew bits of vegetable and fish and even agouti meat on the rare occasions when one of those succulent little animals was caught. When sharp and biting peppers were added to the mixture, a fine, tasty and nourishing stew resulted, all thanks to Tiwánee, who by popular acclaim became the seer of the community, not in competition with the old shaman who propitiated the spirits but as the protector of the hearth where men and women were fed and revived.
    When this accolade was bestowed upon her, she became a changed woman. She grew noticeably wiser, as if powers long dormant were suddenly codified and whipped into shape, as if knowledge which she had been quietly accumulating mysteriously blossomed to produce new and totally unexpected fruit, and she was recognized as a leader. Throughout the known world this miracle was duplicated: an ordinary man or woman would be elected to some office, and during the conduct of its business would mysteriously become able enough to discharge the duties of that office, so that in the end someone who might originally have been a rather common person developed into a genius.
    Having undergone such a metamorphosis, Tiwánee now found little pleasure in her exalted position, for although she was pleased that she had brought her village wise leadership, she realized that with her new position came new responsibilities, and she continued to brood about the possible dangers that might ensue if strangers had indeed settled upon the opposite side of her island.
    One of her duties as a leader in the village was to make the decision as to when it was time to plant the manioc. But because this was of such extreme importance to the village, a matter of life and death, that decision could not be left to her alone; responsibility was shared with the old shaman