Little Tiny Teeth Read Online Free PDF Page A

administrators.
    And that was the plan. She would come along on the Amazon cruise, paying her own way, but assisting Arden as needed. That part of it was quite appealing, really. She had done her graduate fieldwork on the Rio Orinoco in Venezuela fifteen years ago and had made several subsequent trips there, but this one would be to the great Amazon Basin itself. She would do some collecting – a lot of collecting – and she was eager for the chance to sit down with local shamans and curanderos. These “uneducated,” unworldly Indian healers, carrying in their heads the results of thousands of years of experimentation with barks, roots, leaves, and flowers, were the world’s first and best medical ethnobotanists.
    So many medically useful herbs and drugs had already come out of Amazon Indian healing practices: analgesics, astringents, expectorants, hypnotics, steroids, antiseptics, antipyretics, anaesthetics. Even their poisons – their neurotoxins and paralytics – had turned out to have enormous potential benefit. D-tubocurarine, an extract of curare, was a blessed muscle relaxant that had transformed surgery. Rotenone, the safest biodegradable insecticide in the world, had first been extracted from plant materials used by Amazonian Indians as fish poisons. What untold treasures were still locked up in the minds of those mysterious jungle scientists awaiting discovery? Cures for AIDS? Alzheimer’s? Cancer? Delve into their ancient lore, and you unlock the gate to the greatest storehouse of natural medicine in the world. But time was running short. They were a vanishing breed, these old shamans, and no one was taking their place. It was an opportunity she wouldn’t have missed under any circumstances.
    After the cruise was over (and this was the part that had her grumbling to herself between sips), she would fly on with Arden to Tingo Maria to discuss the details of the appointment: responsibilities, lab facilities, accommodations, and so on. Then, assuming she was interested, in a little less than a year she would fly to Tingo Maria again, but this time on a one-way ticket.
    The question was: did she want to? Her Spanish was rusty, but with a year to work on it, that was no problem; it had been one of her two qualifying languages for the Ph. D. And the salary was attractive, more than she was getting at UI, plus all kinds of great perks. Beyond that, it would be a distinct and not inconsiderable pleasure to outrank Arden, technically a mere adjunct professor, in the faculty hierarchy. But, Jesus Christ, the Universidad Nacional Agraria de la Selva? The National Agrarian University of the Jungle? How appealing was that?
    And what about the town, Tingo Maria? Arden, who lived down there for a good part of every year, had talked it up, but Arden was the kind of person who didn’t much care or even notice where he lived. Maggie did. When she had Googled the city to get some other points of view, the descriptions hadn’t done much for her spirits. “Tropical, hot, and wet,” “a tatty, ugly town,” “the drug-trafficking capital of Peru,” “the saddest kind of ‘modern,’ ramshackle South American town, cobbled together out of nothing in 1938, and already rusting to pieces.” Not a lot to draw her there.
    On the other hand, what did she have in Iowa City?
     
    “Ouch.”
    Mel Pulaski gingerly peeled the Band-Aid – well it wasn’t a Band-Aid, it was a lump of cotton held on by a scrap of masking tape; the Providence County Health Department was making a point about its dissatisfaction with its current budget – from his beefy upper arm.
    Standing at the bathroom counter in his undershirt, he checked the swollen, reddened site of his tetanus booster shot in the mirror and gingerly touched it with a finger. “Ooh.”
    At the twin sink beside him, his wife Dolly, in the flannel nightgown she’d taken to wearing lately, was applying a squib of toothpaste to her brush. “That last shot’s bothering you,