We tied up the canoe and piled our electric orange life jackets at the feet of a painted wooden sign welcoming us to the wildlife reserve. 

A woman with a dark bob identified herself as the NGO’s director, pausing to clarify that this was a zoological education center, not a zoo. “We rehabilitate injured animals and release them when we can,” she said. 

A slim French volunteer stepped forward to explain that the animals we would be seeing could not survive in the wild on their own. Those deemed suitable for release would remain as far from us as possible, so we would not desensitize them with our curious hands and unwilding eyes.

By then, I’d been traveling Ecuador with the same group of feral students for months. We were studying in Quito for most of the summer but leapt at the chance to spend ten nights at an ecolodge in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Every day, we piled into a canoe and set off for the deep green wild, lucky and privileged to learn from everyone and everything around us. On the third day, we went to the not-zoo.  

At the reserve, I walked with resident naturalist, Ángel. He was born and raised in Arajuno, and worked for the lodge as a native guide, translator, and educator. He spoke Kichwa and some Spanish, so we got by with fragmented phrases and semi-interpretable hand gestures.

“Soy Molly.”

“Yo soy Ángel . . . como . . . un ángel.” He fluttered his hands like wings.

We followed the French man like a string of leaf-cutter ants into the first clearing. A fish tank clouded with algae sat perched on a thick tree stump. Twisted branches hung from above the clearing, looming toward the tank as if to dip their fingers inside.

The French man turned toward the dull glass. “Hola Esmeralda,” he cooed, “mi dragonita.”

Esmeralda, a female boa constrictor, is a permanent resident of the not-zoo. Volunteers rescued her from a street artist in a nearby pueblo. He told us that she was about four meters long but should have been larger. The toxic lotions and sunscreens slick on the hands of those who paid to touch her had rubbed off on her shiny scales, preventing her from molting and growing. The tiny dragon was trapped in her own skin. 

I stepped up onto a sliced tree stump and peered into the murky tank. My eyes adjusted to the decoys—ropy vines and protruding sticks—and then I saw her. She was an ancient thing, a shimmering serpent with skin sectioned off by scales like a child’s drawing of a tortoise shell. She was perfectly still, more so than the tree branches looming, perhaps straining under the weight of her wild sisters. Her eyes protruded, tiny dark globes with muted shine. I hoped these were false lids attached to a decoy. 

“She has lost her hunting instinct, so we can’t release her,” said the French man. “She’s content.” He beckoned us to an enclosure of squawking toucans. 

Boas are pure, winding muscle, whip-strong, keystone to the jungle energy exchange. Esmeralda belonged in the treetops as predator and prey, creator and destroyer, life and death. 

Ángel must have noticed my expression, because he slowed to walk with me. He was laughing. 

“Mija, Esmeralda no está . . . enfermo.” She’s not sick? But he’d used the male form of the word.

“¿Ángel, what do you mean?”

“Esmeralda is small because he’s a male,” he giggled. “He doesn’t have an appetite because he doesn’t move. He’s pretty fat.”

“Oh shit,” I laughed. Esmeralda wasn’t a female suffering from human perfume poison seeping into her skin and stunting her growth. She . . . he . . . was fine. Ángel told me that judging by the width of his tail, Esmeralda is a male. He had no room to move, no appetite to fill. Content, maybe, but experiencing neither life nor death. 

In 2008, Ecuador established a new constitution. The seventh chapter is called “Rights of Nature,” and establishes the wild as a legal entity. For the first time, Mother Earth was given the legal right to respect, and to the maintenance and regeneration of her life cycles. The law was passed as an expression of a cultural concept: sumak kawsay in Kichwa, buen vivir in Spanish, a good way of living. It is an Indigenous way of knowing that acknowledges Nature’s principles of feminism, community, and harmony—an attempt to rebalance a tilt to the capitalistic, a reset. The law proclaimed to the world that Sachamama, the Earth Mother, is not to be exploited, but protected. She is not to be stolen from, and she just might provide. 

That night, back at the lodge, I lingered in the dining cabin with a few other students, surrounded by cards and candles, listening to the frogs chirp and sing. I asked Ángel about the snake, and he told me a story.

One evening, an Indigenous huntsman went deep into the Ecuadorian Amazon to hunt for game. Then, the sky darkened, as it often does without warning so deep in the jungle. The huntsman lit a bonfire to keep warm, but the earth shook his fire out. The huntsman, spooked, set up camp for the night. At sunrise, he tried to cut through the bramble, but his machete struck a large, ancient tree trunk sixty meters long, blocking his path. As the sharp metal sliced into the bark, thick, red blood spilled from the wound.

The huntsman stood there in shock, watching the liquid drip from the edge of his blade. A deer appeared, stopping before the fallen trunk. As it began to walk toward him, the deer suddenly disappeared into the base of the tree. The huntsman realized then that this was not a fallen trunk. A dragon lay across his path with a gaping mouth, wide open to swallow the mesmerized deer and any other soul that came her way. And now, the serpent was bleeding.

The huntsman ran. He tried to alert nearby villages, proclaiming how he’d burnt the god-like snake with his bonfire, cut her with his machete, witnessed her massive fangs swallow the deer, and still escaped with his life. He told them that her mouth looks like a jungle cave, a cool sanctuary, but she sucks victims inside. She has magic. She is Sachamama, the Earth Mother.

Legend has it, Sachamama remains still for centuries at a time, lulling animals and humans into her open mouth while victims’ skeletons pile up outside her cave. She is patient, still for so long that trees, mushrooms, and herbs like boa huasca and puma sanango sprout from her back. She provides, but she also takes, triggering rain and lightning, and fevers and headaches in those that threaten her peace. She brings life into the world and takes it out, as is her right. She is life and death and blood and rain. 

You must watch for her skin—stone-like plates, her iguana head, and a blade under her neck that looks like a . . . like a . . . “¿Cómo es la máquina que hace el suelo como un panqueque?”

“¿Flattens the ground like a pancake? ¿Un . . . bulldozer?” I suggested.

“Sí, a blade under her neck como un bulldozer,” Ángel whispered. 

He concluded the story as the sun set over the cabin. Rays bounced off flat leaves, one last burst of energy before all light abandoned us to fall asleep in the weeds. I asked Ángel if he had seen this Sachamama, this Earth Mother. He told me no, but his grandmother had warned him of her magic. She is a woman of the jungle. She gives, creates, forgives, and punishes, as is her right. 

Ángel and I talked until the spindly white candles melted into the balsa wood and the darkness tried to break into the dining cabin. Ángel tossed me a flashlight and waved goodnight. I was still fumbling with the switch when I broke into a run to my cabin, my bare feet equally fueled by the thrilling wet jungle scent and my fear of stepping on anything poisonous and angry. I was at her mercy, as is her right. 

As darkness dripped into the trees, the sky lit up with too many stars to make into constellations. Frogs shrieked, crickets sang, and I collapsed into my bunk and unfolded my mosquito net. Two other students, my cabin-mates, were already sleeping peacefully beneath the yellow geckos flattened against the ceiling. Maybe Sachamama was nearby. Maybe we were camping on her back. My hammock swung slowly to the hum of the rainforest, and I rose and fell with her breath beneath me. 

The next morning, the birds woke up the sun around 5 a.m. Dawn yanked off our covers and we stumbled into the dining cabin. 

Ángel manned the coffee over the woodstove. He filled our mugs with steaming liquid black and smooth as oil poured out of a barrel. 

We had a free morning, and the humidity was already wrapping its hands around my throat, so I sought breeze at the riverbank. I sat up against a tree and watched a line of leaf-cutter ants carry tiny green sails across the mud. Three young boys rowed by in a muddy blue canoe with a wet-nosed mutt pointed off the bow like a mermaid carved of oak. 

I didn’t hear Ángel’s footsteps before his feet appeared at my side, the tip of his machete just barely breaking ground. He squatted next to me and waved at the boys. They shouted and splashed in return. He jerked his chin toward the woods, revealing a clearing and the mouth of a trail with one swipe of his arm. 

“¿Where are we going?” I asked but followed him anyway. 

Ángel swung his machete and chopped off three feet of a fallen palm branch. He picked up the severed limb and smacked it against his forearm. It bloomed on impact, splitting into flat layers like book pages. He ripped off four slats and wove as he walked and began telling another story.

Indigenous tribes have been living in the Ecuadorian Amazon for centuries. The Huaroni are known for their poisonous blowpipes and spears. The Shuar are fierce warriors and “do ‘head shrinking’” (he didn’t explain this). The Achuar tribe live in small groups. The Taromenane people are uncontacted, dwindling in numbers in Yasuni National Park. The Kichwa, whose land we walked on now, are famous for their shamans, elders that heal people with medicinal herbs from their gardens. 

The Kichwa people live on the Arajuno river, which feeds the Napo. Hundreds of rivers overflow with food and medicine. The Arajuno is our garden, our road, our god, Ángel explained. 

A hundred years ago, the land was inhabited by a shaman, Domingo Arahuano. A woman, Roque López, was accused of witchcraft in a nearby town, so she brought her children to this land, where Arahuano lived. The two shamans became great friends and lived on the land of abundance with their families. 

He continued to weave.

When Arahuano died of malaria years later, López lived out the rest of her life with her children. No one knows whether she overlapped with the coming storm.

“The coming qué?’ I asked. 

In 1941, Shell stole the land to search for oil. They employed many native Kichwa people to help build the—

Ángel raised his arm and spread his fingers out flat like plane wings. He mimed the plane coming to a stop.

“Landing strip,” I offered.

“Si, eso.”

Most of the Sachamama sightings happened during the rubber boom. Unlucky rubber harvesters accidentally invaded Sachamama’s home. One day, a man and his wife were collecting rubber deep in the Amazon, near Kichwa land. They found a huge fallen tree and cut into its bark with their machetes. Instead of the milky white sap, the tree spilled thick, red blood into their bowls. 

The two were afraid, but too deep into the jungle to leave before night. As soon as they built a fire, the trees shook, and a huge rain drowned it. They ran home. The next day, when the couple returned with people from their village, the fallen tree was gone. In its place, a wide road threaded far into the distance.

The man consulted a shaman, who explained to him who he was dealing with. The shaman told him that Sachamama lives in one place for many years but will move if she is bothered. She doesn’t like visitors. 

Despite this, the man decided to pursue Sachamama. After many miles, he found the end of the trail. He spotted a tree trunk in a meadow, surrounded by bones. He walked through the meadow and found a cave full of mesmerized animals gathering under the spell of the dragon, the serpent, the Earth Mother. The man realized his mistake, cut through the trance with his machete, and ran for his life. 

Shell finished building the base with the help of the people living here, said Ángel. However, before they could begin the mass commercial tapping of the rubber trees, the company abandoned Ecuador completely. They never explained why. 

“Maybe it wasn’t profitable,” I suggested.

“Maybe it was a dragon,” he grinned. 

“Always, the woman is invaded,” Ángel continued. The masculine intrudes, and the feminine seeks revenge, slowly or all at once. She creates and she destroys, but she always gets her way in the end.  The feminine is the most mysterious, the most cunning, the most—” Ángel stopped walking and turned to me. 

“Poderosa,” he said. He tied off the loop of his weaving, sealed it with two thin strands, and presented the braided palm crown. Powerful. 

On our final morning in the jungle, Ángel tossed us life jackets and told us to pile into the canoe. He had a dozen long logs, a few coils of rope, and a mischievous smile, but didn’t give away where we were going. We piled in, giggling like normal, and he paddled upstream, slipping through the reeds and flat water as smooth as oil. 

A half hour later, he beached the canoe, and we piled the logs and rope on a sandy island. Then, he told us that we would be responsible for our return trip. 

Some balked, some laughed, and Ángel’s stern expression broke into a grin. He wasn’t kidding, but he would help us build the raft. 

As we tipped and wobbled on the bobbing logs, the whole operation floated precariously downstream, back toward the lodge. We crawled around, avoiding the spiders that had been living in the logs before they became waterborne. Ángel laughed and we took turns paddling. 

Then, the slow ripple of the river began to churn, rolling and bubbling a bit more than usual. The sounds of the water heightened, and we giggled until it was louder than us, and our laughs got louder and more nervous. 

Above us, the clouds darkened. The growing waves leapt up over the bow of our canoe and spilled onto my bare feet. We were heading directly toward the darkening sky. Sleek dark shadows slipped quickly beneath our craft, heading the other direction.

I wondered what it must have felt like to be the first to trespass onto this land as a stranger seeking riches—one of many white men in a canoe keen on extracting, processing, and selling. They were the targets of poisonous blow darts and boa constrictors, and yet they still felt ownership over the land. How could they have felt superior in the face of such raw power? How could they take and take and take and not expect a fight? At the very least, a lightning storm and a frothy brown river to flip them over and feed them to Sachamama? 

I looked back at Ángel. He stood upright, still paddling. He grinned and glanced up at the dark clouds, then faked a dive into the water. 

I shook my head. 

He mimed the beginning of a backflip. 

No fucking way, I mouthed. She will swallow me.

He put the oar down. Lightning lit up the sky ahead of us. 

Don’t you dare. 

Slowly and then all at once, Ángel was beneath the raft. He looked like a fish. He looked like water. 

A crack of thunder split the sky like a machete, and the water came down as if it had been collecting there for a century. 

I hesitated. The river would feel powerful, maybe. Cold, definitely. The life and blood of the Amazon rainforest. Perhaps she would spit me out, tired of the taste of white skin. Maybe she would snake towards me in the frothing current, a river dragon coming to swallow me for revenge. The water would taste muddy and metallic, one of many reasons to keep my mouth shut tight. 

Lightning split the sky open. 

I jumped.

That afternoon, we were quiet. Our canoe slipped toward La Isla de los Caimanes, where we were to learn from the caretakers of a nearby medicinal herb garden. Even Ángel seemed stoic, taking in the smooth sounds of the reeds and flat water gliding by. 

When we arrived at the island, a woman with gray braids stood waiting to greet us. She held a clay bowl and beckoned us into a structure with cool dirt floors and a roof of wide leaves. 

Ángel introduced her as the wisest in the village. Sacha warmi. Woman of the jungle. Her smile was deep. She had wisdom in her teeth. Her gray eyelashes fanned out to dark brown eyes. Her arms were thin, wiry, strong and wrapped around a wooden bowl. 

She is making Chicha, Ángel told us, a ceremonial drink of fermented yucca and sweet potato. She prepared the mixture a few days ago for us to taste but wants to teach us the process from start to finish. 

The woman squatted next to a pot over a fire pit in the center of the room. The age spots on her chest and neck earned her all our quiet eyes. She uncapped the pot and let out some eager steam. With her bare fingers, she pulled two soft white yuccas from the boiling water and dropped them into the bowl. 

She beckoned at Ángel, who brought her a sweet potato. Using the spiky root of a walking palm tree, she grated the sweet potato into the yucca water and mixed the two. She covered the mixture with a rag and slid it into the shade, where she pulled out an identical bowl. 

Ángel and the woman spoke in Kichwa, and he shared with us that while this is not the case anymore, the beverage was traditionally fermented with the chew and spit method. 

“La chicha masticada,” she laughed. “I give my family everything. My hands, my tears, my blood.” 

Ángel laughed. “Even her spit is medicine.”

Later, we set off for the herb garden at the other end of the island. What I had imagined would be a slow stroll ended up another machete-wielding, root-thwacking hike through the jungle. Hairy vines swung into my face, and I jumped back, anticipating the hiss of a tree snake. The branches regrew behind us as we walked. 

Deep into the weeds of the river island, we heard an organized rustling from above. Ángel, trailing at the end of the group, put a finger to his lips. Like a gust of wind, dozens of furry, orange fingers exploded from the trees. A pack of squirrel monkeys swung over us, launching their limbs across the canopy. Their coat patterns looked like gray beanies and white sunglasses. Mothers leapt with squeaking baby backpacks. We stood beneath the rain of them, and they arced over us. They vanished just as fast as they’d come, but the trees still swayed.

I smelled the garden before I saw it. The manicured pasture was lined with white pebbles and littered with discarded roots—turmeric, licorice, curare. Scattered baskets sat filled with petals of jungle mint, achiote, and valerian. Harvested cinnamon bark and dried guayusa lay drying on flat stones. Cacao bean pods baked in the sun, ready to be split and fermented for chocolate.

A man in a wide hat introduced himself as our garden guide, and told us the names of each one of his seedlings. He crushed and rolled mint leaves between his fingers, passing them backward down our line. From a garden of weeds, he revealed vanilla bean and moringa, matico, a respiratory medicine, and lapacha, a cancer treatment when crushed and boiled and steamed. 

He revered the dirt, reminding us that everything we have in our drug stores came at one point, in one form or another, from Sachamama. She gives, and she also takes, he told us, pointing to a pile of compost. “Death is as important as birth.”

Ángel strolled behind, picking a piece off this root or that flower, passing up blossoms and stems and sticks for us to smell and lick and rub on our mosquito bites. 

Our garden guide led us to the last stop: a tree so tall her roots dwarfed me and spread wide in every direction. She was cloaked in gray bark and littered with dark patches like age spots on old hands. Deep, wrinkly grooves lined her trunk. Her presence was striking, but her wounds even more so. Short, methodical gashes peppered her bark at all heights reachable to human hands. 

Ángel stood before the tree and introduced her as a shaman. This tree offers her thick, red latex as a liquid bandage. The gooey drip dries quickly over a wound, bending and protecting like a second skin. She can treat diarrhea, gastritis, and inflammation. After childbirth, she helps women stop bleeding so heavy. This tree is the giver of life and death and blood and rain. Even her spit is medicine. 

Sangre de drago, he told us her name. Dragon’s blood. 

I looked at Ángel with wide eyes. Sachamama. He swung his machete with just enough force to crack into her bark, and thick, blood red sap dripped from her wound.