Night of the Jaguar Read Online Free PDF Page A

city at night, looking like the city in his dream, with bright dots of light streaming from its cliff houses, like captured stars. A roaring thing crossed the air above the river and disappeared. He had heard that the dead people had metal canoes that flew like birds and he saw it was true. Moie himself flew through the air silently using a different method.
    After more days, there was another great city and then the palm lands turned to swamp and the river divided itself into narrower streams. He let Jaguar guide his direction and one day he dipped his hand into the river and drank and found the water was salt. He had heard from Father Perrin that the sea was salt, and had not really believed it, but now he knew it was so.
    He passed mangrove forests and mud flats and ahead lay a flat sheet of water and in the far horizon a brown smudge that he thought must be Miami America. He tied his canoe to a mangrove root and, taking his blowgun, he waded along the edge of the sea. Before long he came to a shallow bay full of feeding flamingos and other seabirds. He shot two flamingos. On the beach he built a big fire and dismembered the birds and scorched their feathers off and then wrapped the meat in palm leaves and mud and buried them in the hot coals. He ate the stringy flesh and drank water from his skin. Then he headed his canoe out into the gently rolling waves.
    It took him all day to cross the ocean, and when he got to the other shore, he was mildly surprised to see that America looked very much like San Pedro Casivare. Father Perrin had told him many stories about his home and it was not like this: only a shambling wooden dock, some low shacks among the palm and pepper trees, and black-skinned people going about their business. He dragged his canoe to the sands and went ashore, properly dressed in his feathered shoulder cape and quetzal-feather hat, for he wanted these people to know he was a jampiri and so to be respected. There were some black people standing and sitting in front of a small building and he went up to them and in Spanish said, “Pardon, sirs and madams, is this Miami America?”
    They gaped at him. He asked the question again, but they just chattered in a strange tongue and their children surrounded him, staring. A woman ran off down the street and returned with an old yellowish man. This person spoke Spanish. He asked Moie where he came from. From Home, said Moie, and I want to know, is this Miami America, for I have crossed the sea after traveling on many rivers and I have heard it is on the other side of the sea.
    The man said, no, it was not Miami, it was the town of Fernandino on the island of Trinidad, and he also said you have not crossed the sea at all, but only the Gulf of Paria. He explained that the sea was much, much bigger and that one could not cross it in a canoe. And would the gentleman like something to drink?
    So they sat on chairs in the shade and drank a kind of chicha from bottles, which Moie had not done since he was a boy, and the man, Ezra, told him that he had at one time traveled the whole world, working on the white man’s ships, which were canoes as large as hills, and he knew both Spanish and English, the language they spoke in America, although in Miami they spoke Spanish, too. And he said that if the gentleman wanted to go to Miami, he should go to Port of Spain, north of here, and find a ship and get aboard it secretly at night and hide and it would carry him to Miami. Ezra told him many things about how to do this, and the many dangers involved, for in the old days when he was a sailor he had in this way helped many people go to America, to become rich, as he had become rich working for the ships.
    Then Ezra called out, and a woman brought a thing, and Ezra put another shining thing on his face that made his eyes look like a fish’s eyes and studied the thing the woman had brought, which was white as a cloud and rustled like leaves and was covered with little black marks,