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would surely worsen it.
    The men had come a very long way—that much was now clear. I found moments of comfort in the likelihood that they would only carry very important cargo for so many miles into the jungle. They didn’t act like warriors celebrating any great feat, nor like mindless savages given to causing disturbances.
    They carried themselves with utmost assurance and purpose, sure of their every move, contained and unruffled. They dominated their world without fear. Indeed, they seemed rather bored with it all.
    When it seemed to me that nothing would ever change, our journey upriver came to an end sometime after noon on the third day.
    For the first time since I’d joined them, my captors began to speak freely as they pulled the canoes up the bank with me still aboard. Their tones were low, and the speed of their speech rather than its volume expressed a new enthusiasm among them.
    I’d surrendered my exhaustion to the unceasing murmur of paddles dipping into water, and to the gentle, musical quality of their voices, comforted by the fact that they had not killed me. But now any semblance of peace ended and my skin prickled with the uncertainty that faced me.
    Two men hauled me out of the canoe and dropped me onto firm ground. I landed with enough force to knock the wind out of my lungs.
    One of them gently nudged me with his foot and spoke what I assume were instructions. When I failed to respond, he nudged me again and presumably asked if I’d understood him.
    Still gagged, I offered him the only thing I could, a mere grunt.
    This seemed to satisfy him. My hands and feet were loosed, then strapped securely to a pole. In less time than it took me to grasp their intentions, they had me hanging from the pole between them and were marching into the jungle.
    My sore neck couldn’t support the weight of my head, so I let it hang. My skull struck objects on the ground twice. Both times I cried out into my gag. Both times the carrier at my feet expressed surprise and lifted the pole higher for a moment before setting it back on his shoulder.
    This is how, in August of 1963, I came into the valley known as Tulim: strapped to a pole like a bag of beans, carried like a bundle of bananas, swinging above the ground like a slain pig.
    Surely I had been presumed lost at sea along with Stephen. Someone would find the shattered pieces of sailboat, and after a cursory search along the coast my sisters would weep and hold our funeral in the graveyard behind the First Baptist Church. My father would weep, my mother would cry.
    But my father and mother were already dead.
    And now so were my son and I.
    I knew by distant cries that we had reached a village. At first there was only one utterance, a long whooping call that I briefly mistook for that of a bird.
    Within moments the single cry was joined by a dozen more, and then by hundreds of voices whooping in unison, and a stampede of bare feet. They began to pound the earth with their heels, carefully in time with the chanting, making a kind of music of its own.
    Uhm, uhm, uhm, uhm.
    Deep and guttural, the sound shook me to my bones. This was the warriors’ welcome home.
    Inside the bag my eyes were wide and my breathing was frantic. Imagined or not, I could feel hundreds of eyes staring at my cocooned body as my captors marched me through the throng.
    A single voice silenced the others, calling above them in a long, melodic string of words. Within a few seconds the caller stopped and the chorus resumed.
    Uhm, uhm, uhm, uhm.
    We marched on.
    I began to tremble in my sack.
    Then the solitary melodic voice again, followed by the chorus and the pounding agreement. Uhm, uhm, uhm, uhm.
    Children ran alongside us, whispering and giggling. Women joined in with high cries between the lower chants, like cymbals between drumbeats.
    And then the pinpricks of light vanished from my hood. The rhythmic mantra fell away. The darkness deepened and the air grew slightly cooler, thick with an