Mukoli

The Yielding

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He had done well; he had done things right for himself and his family, he thought, as he looked at the growing trees that protected the small yerba plantation on his farm. The rows of dark green bushes seemed to shuffle in the light, enjoying the “Sustainable Shade Farming” scheme. He was one of the first farmers to adopt it, and he never regretted it.  Now he licked his lips as he calculated for the third time the amount to be sold in two months’ time. And a new field would improve the yielding even more; the NGO’s representatives could be fooled into believing a whirlwind had toppled the trees in the neighboring jungle, and some had to be taken down. A whirlwind, he repeated to himself, and he smiled.

As he sipped his tereré infusion on that warm afternoon, he slipped off his flip-flops and sighed. He had not yet seen the small, dark figure at the plantation’s edge, watching him with yellow eyes.

His house patio was like every other one in that area of small farms in Misiones: a circle cleared out in the red soil around the wooden house −painted yellow to state civilization− and only a few meters away, the jungle like a tall green wall. He could never understand why his father and his grandfather before him had left it standing in the times when you could cut trees down. On the other side, on a gentle slope, the planted fields were interspersed with young native trees, protecting the yerba plants and regenerating the necessary “Green Corridor” between the large reserves to the north and south of his land. The scheme had been presented to local producers more than five years ago, and at first, he had accepted it just for the easy money. But with time, the benefits of the plants’ genetics donated by INTA and the shade provided by the saplings had ended up showing them that production was improved, and the plants were healthier. That the people behind desks and soft-hearted naturalists felt happier about it in faraway cities was not his priority. His farm was thriving, and so were his neighbors’, and the water in the brooks had become more abundant and cleaner after they all planted more of the donated trees in the margins.

His wife smiled more often, too, and had become friends with the other farmer’s wives thanks to the planting days. He could hear her soft singing in the mornings as he went out and she stayed washing the clothes or giving the young ones breakfast before walking them to school, a mile away on crooked red roads surrounded by farmland. It was taking time to see any prominent trees develop shade along the arid settler’s roads. The only part that was fresher still was the large expanse of rainforest at the side of his field, he thought, but then again, there weren’t many patches of wildland like that one left.

Yet, a new field would make the yielding even better. Not that he didn’t appreciate the green breeze coming from the forest on days when temperatures reached 45 degrees C. But just a strip, he thought. How would that alter the rest of it, really? Wouldn’t he be planting saplings anyway? And as he returned in his mind to the image of a new red motorbike he had seen at Cerro Azul, he noticed the figure, dark and short, at the farthest edge of his field.

Was he wrong? He straightened in his plastic chair and turned to lower the Brazilian rhythm sounding on his radio. What was it? He wanted to call his wife, but he remembered she had left for the Ibañez’s farm a while earlier with the children. He felt the sudden urge to look for his old rifle and desisted, narrowing his eyes to try to distinguish the shape he thought he was seeing at the edge of the jungle. It seemed to be just standing in its small, obscure non-human shape, all hair and long arms like the tales said The Pombero was.

Then he heard its characteristic whistling. Not that he had never heard it before. As everyone knows in Misiones, you never answer it back, even less so after dark. He had never paid attention to night whistling, and if anyone commented on it with a shudder, he would always dismiss it as some kind of night bird. He had never met The Pombero personally, despite the thousand stories about this dwarf that circulated in the area, always concerning tobacco offerings for protection, the punishing of hunters gone over the top, or its preference for women pregnant with a baby girl. But why would the Pombero come to visit him now? He had not made any bond, he had not promised the daily offering of tobacco and caña that ensured its protection, he had not hunted; he had not even mentioned its name lately—a sure way to call him, according to tradition.

He squinted his blue settler’s eyes and decided to stand up to scare it away. He started clapping his hands loudly and shouted. All his dogs started making a hell of a noise around him, imagining some kind of celebration or a chance at food. They had not sensed it yet.

But it didn’t retreat. It stood there, half hidden by a large alecrín tree at the edge of the denser forest, and he could swear it was looking straight at him. 

Baffled, he decided to go and check if perhaps it was just a fallen log against the tree that was deceiving his eyes. He grinned at the thought of how Don Belisario would laugh at the tale of him being spooked by a blackened piece of wood –however true The Pombero was for Don Belisario, or for anyone else in that place, even if it was not a subject that should be brought up in conversation.

Before walking up to the side of the plantation with his dogs barking along, he grabbed the wooden stick he always kept at the door in case any dog fight arose. Then the dogs suddenly saw the figure too, resembling a Carayá monkey but much larger than one. Yet, instead of barking madly like they do when a cart or a car goes by, or the occasional cougar –or jaguar− roars at night lurking in the edges of the forest, they stopped barking suddenly and started whimpering. The three of them stayed well behind him as he walked on, in the slow and patient assuredness of the non-believer, toward that distant alecrín tree and the legend waiting there.

He thought he heard the not-so-distant sound of the brook that ran at the end of the yerba plot, he heard the song of a lone potoo, and in spite of the dampness and the warmth, he shivered slightly. 

Undeterred by his height, his dogs, or the thick wooden stick, the creature held its ground and the stare of his flat yellow eyes reminded him of a big frog’s. There was an imperturbable quality in its stare, as if it said  “This place is mine” even if this was his land, his plantation, his hard work to improve it under the modern standards required nowadays, his family, his motorcycle, and all that was undeniably his.

As they both stood their ground, the man and the monster, the farmer raced in his mind trying to figure out what he could have been doing wrong in any way so as to conjure the one-meter-high horrid mass of hair and disjointed woolly arms that stood in his land, staring at him as if time did not exist. The dogs had not come this far. The Pombero and he were around two meters away from each other. The dogs whined from far behind, as if calling.

“Go away!” he shouted as he brandished his stick, not knowing what else to say.

The creature only seemed to shift its weight from one of its large feet to the other.

“I have done everything right!” he insisted, knowing that somehow anything he could argue would be useless. The yellow flat eyes glowered.

“Why are you angry? What have I done wrong? I almost never even hunt anymore!” he said, and spat on the ground beside him as if to state his rural innocence.

The thing signaled the forest with a long dislocated arm, and started walking with clumsy slowness into it, in its owl-like silence. 

He followed, surprised at his own bravery in trailing after a myth down a pathless stretch of jungle, with the afternoon starting to vanish in orange on the other side of his field. The dogs did not enter after them.

As he plodded along, he thought of Mariano, his four-year-old child, and his pimples. And of Juan, the older one, and the way he pushed his hair sideways when he wanted to be heard. The creature lurching without a sound over the forest floor and its decaying leaves was barely taller than the younger one, and it smelt like earth, and meat, and mushrooms. The dead leaves did not rustle as it walked, but his own footsteps seemed to rumble on them, which reminded him of one of the creature’s nicknames, ‘Woollen feet’.

He knew well all those stories in which The Pombero gets you lost in the forest, only to be found days later, unconscious and bruised. He wondered once more, why he might have been picked by it, taking into account he was doing things right. Many years ago, he’d have understood: his forefathers were the ones who had razed most of the jungle and turned it into cattle fields, or tobacco plantations. His father came to his mind, and his account of how his grandfather spoke of the creaking before the fall of the tallest trees, and how the vines crashed down along with them and thumped and rattled for a while before becoming silent. His father, who had atypically left this same stretch of rainforest untouched.

But now there was no way he was being lured into the forest as punishment; he seldom hunted, except to teach his children the basics. The yielding of the new arrangement was plentiful, and there was always money for the grocer, and no need to borrow on credit anymore.

All this he thought as he trudged behind the impossible creature, expecting perhaps the worst of the outcomes the stories had: to go mad or to go dumb. It was the conviction of his innocence that made him go after it along the dense undergrowth. And as he walked further, he could understand his forefathers: There is something in a jungle that makes you want it pulled down. Too many bird sounds, too many hanging plants and vines over your head creating a dark cave, too much of everything that is green, and wild, and doesn’t control itself.

Once in a clearing, the creature turned and looked at him with its large yellow eyes, and there didn’t seem to be any anger in them, but somehow a suggestion of a pleading.

Remembering the traditional offerings given to The Pombero, he searched in his pockets to see if he had any cigarettes left. Not that it was advisable to give it offerings: once started, it would expect a daily one of tobacco or drink to look after your farm and your family. If you failed, even just once, he’d throw stones at your house, give its characteristic whistling or chicken sounds in the middle of the night, and spook you in various ways. No, he’d never looked for such an agreement many other people who thrived in his neighborhood were rumored to have.

There was a sudden silence in the clearing, with no birds or insects sounding. Slowly, a wind started growing in circles around them, a whirlwind, a small tornado it seemed—even though he could see across it and the leaves in the trees around them didn’t move at all. He later remembered the strange beauty of the multi-colored leaves raised from the forest floor circling and circling around them, and in the middle, man and monster, those yellow eyes asking for something he could not understand.

Then it summoned the animals. At first, only birds landing on the nearby branches: jays in their blue, toucans and their bright beaks, great yellow kiskadees. Owls. Many owls. Then a few squirrels came, and capuchin monkeys—a whole troop of them. Behind a group of giant ferns, he could see a herd of peccaries standing and, like the rest of them, staring. Next, he noticed an ocelot on a nearby branch. A tapir appeared on the other side, with its huge nose raised, surely smelling the human. And last, almost in a dramatic entrance, a jaguar and its cub strolled in and sat outside the circle of wind. He had seen this mother’s tracks a few months ago and had just simply recommended his wife to keep a closer look at the smallest child, just in case, especially at night.

He wondered for a moment if he was going to become prey on that day, and tightened his grip on his stick as if it were a magic wand. He thought the creature of legends would speak to him, but then he remembered The Pombero never speaks, in none of the stories, not even in one.

All the animals and the dark creature who had summoned them only stared at him. There was this look in their eyes, as if they were children.

The black creature with dangling arms touched the soil with one of its deformed fingers.

Then the wind stopped, all the leaves fell to the ground, and there was a pond moment in the clearing where rounded waves of air expanded in rings along the underbrush, while the animal assembly calmly watched them fall to the ground. And in that moment, in the deep hushed moment of silence, he understood. He lowered his head, and nodded. He squatted, and now, at the same height as the monster’s eyes, he looked into them and nodded again. 

The Pombero took a pinch of red earth with his fingers and ate it. He did the same, and as he swallowed the mixture of dust, dead leaves and seeds, he fainted.

He remembers nothing else.

They found him late that night as the party search organized by his wife and his fellow farmers went into the rainforest with torches and dogs. His dogs found him, tangled in vines as if tied to a palo rosa tree, yet looking as if he had fallen asleep against its trunk resting from the hard day’s work, his head lopsided like a bird’s. He was alive, and awoke at the sound of his name as though he had just taken a nap. His wife embraced him, and his friends felt the relief of when lost cattle were found. They took him back to his yellow house and gave him caña to drink, and he smiled at them, baffled. He only said that he didn’t remember well and that he must have fallen asleep, as he had been so tired. No one really believed him but assented, as they all knew how The Pombero works on the people it takes. No one insisted on the fact they had passed by the place where he was found at least four times, and he had not been there.

His wife and children made a point to kiss him and embrace him every morning from then on, and the gossip around his disappearance fell into the usual category of campfire stories, and was then forgotten as well.

He never opened the new field he had spoken so much of to his family and friends. When asked about it, he changes the conversation  and speaks about how warm the previous night war, or how much he loves his old green motorcycle.