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too,” she concluded, pointing at the mountains.
    Huaycos! Lituma had heard about them. None had happened here, fortunately. He tried to imagine the avalanches of snow, rock, and mud that came down from the top of the Cordillera like a whirlwind of death, flattening everything, feeding on the hillsides they dislodged, filling up with boulders, burying fields, animals, villages, houses, families. Huaycos were schemes of the devil?
    Señora Adriana pointed again at the ridges. “Who else could loosen all that rock? Who else could send the huayco to exactly the place where it can do the most harm?”
    She fell silent and snorted again. She spoke with so much conviction that Lituma was shaken for a few moments.
    â€œAnd the men who are missing, señora?” he insisted.
    One of TomaYs pebbles hit the mark with a metallic sound that echoed down the mountain. Lituma saw him lean forward to pick up another handful of ammunition.
    â€œThere’s not a lot you can do against them,” Doña Adriana continued. “But you can do something. Soothe them, distract them. Not with those offerings the Indians put by crevices and gorges. Those little piles of stones, those flowers and animals, they don’t do any good. Neither does the chicha they pour for them. In the Indian community here they sometimes kill a sheep, a vicuña. All foolishness. Maybe it’s all right in normal times, but not nowadays. Human beings are what they like.”
    It seemed to Lituma that his adjutant was holding back laughter, but he had no desire to laugh at what the witch was saying. Hearing talk like this, even if it was the bullshit of a charlatan or the ravings of a crazy woman, made him jumpy.
    â€œAnd in Demetrio Chanca’s hand you read…?”
    â€œI told him just for fun.” She shrugged. “What’s written is what happens, no matter what you do.”
    What would they say at headquarters in Huancayo if he wired this report on the camp radio: “Sacrificed in manner as yet undetermined to placate evil spirits of Andes, stop. Written in lines of hand, witness claims, stop. Case closed, stop. Respectfully, Post Commander, stop. Corporal Lituma, stop.”
    â€œI talk and you laugh,” the woman said in a quiet, sarcastic voice.
    â€œI’m laughing at what my superiors in Huancayo would say if I sent them the explanation you’ve given me,” said the corporal. “Thanks, anyway.”
    â€œCan I go now?”
    Lituma nodded. Doña Adriana struggled to her feet and without saying goodbye began moving down the slope toward camp. From the rear, wearing her shapeless shoes, swaying her broad hips and making her green skirt flutter, her big straw hat bobbing up and down, she looked like a scarecrow. Was she also a devil?
    â€œHave you ever seen a huayco, Tomasito?”
    â€œNo, Corporal, and I wouldn’t want to. But when I was a kid, outside Sicuani I saw where one had come down a few days earlier and cut a huge furrow. You could see it plain as day, it came right down the length of the mountain like a toboggan. It flattened houses, trees, people of course. It brought down huge boulders. The dust made everything white for days.”
    â€œDo you believe Doña Adriana is an accomplice of the terrucos? That she’s handing us a load of shit about the devils inside the hills?”
    â€œI can believe anything, Corporal. Life has made me the most believing man in the world.”

    From the time he was a boy, they had called Pedrito Tinoco halfwit, moron, dummy, simpleton, and since his mouth always hung open, they called him flycatcher, too. The names did not make him angry, because he never got angry at anything or anyone. And the people of Abancay never got angry with him, either; sooner or later everybody was won over by his peaceful smile, his obliging nature, his simplicity. They said he wasn’t from Abancay, that his mother brought him there a few days