The heart-wrenching tale of two children ‘stolen’ from their Amazon homeland and taken to Germany for the advancement of science is central. The narrative combines this tragedy from the past with a present-day search for truth, interwoven with Miranha folklore and the spirit-jaguar revenge. The ignorant, imperialist arrogance of the C19 perpetrators horrified me – and raised uncomfortable parallels about the oppression of indigenous people today.
A lot was said and seen in those days, when the jaguars were every-which-where without anyone suspecting a thing, when they seemed to step out from behind nothing at all: face of one half-hidden in shadow, face of the other half-showing in the sun. They were seen, too, in their moments of stillness, playing, peaceful, just so tickled with each other, over there by the Araracuara falls. And in every place they passed through, they had a different guise. Here, a black panther and a spotted one; there, two white jaguars, not a spot in sight; elsewhere, hefty, ponderous and big, bigger even than a Miranha warrior. A priest even told of praying for them, over on a rough patch of ground near Barcelos, and that they were very Christian, those two, but whoever heard that one said it was a tale of the highest order.
