SACRED TIME. Pichugi having just given birth, Chachugi prepared his bow for the hunt. Like all Guayaki men, Chachugi was a hunter, but that was not why he headed into the forest on this cold morning in 1963. As father of the child, he had to go hunting because Pichugi, "letting fall" this new life, had made him bayja, one who attracts living creatures. It was a dangerous state, bayja, but a propitious and sacred time. Dangerous, because if he failed to return today with the prey for which man and jaguar always competed, he was most at risk of becoming the prey of jaguar. Propitious, because animals would be drawn to him despite the cold, leaping into the arc of his arrows. Sacred, because bayja and the hunt were as much a part of the ritual of birth as the taking of a bamboo knife to...