Now, in the morning light, Kermit was able to see the Cinta Larga village for the first time in its entirety. There was nothing to look at but a circular clearing, forty to fifty feet across, hacked and scorched out of the jungle’s heart, with a dozen or so huts arranged like spokes around a small central plaza and a steeply pitched playa leading down to a stream as black as the Rio da Dúvida and boiling from the winter rains.You might have fit the whole business into Sagamore’s North Room—right down to the bamboo cage in which a half-plucked harpy eagle fruitlessly flapped its wings. Virtually impossible to believe that more than a handful of Cinta Larga could live here, and yet, as Kermit and the Colonel crossed the clearing, some three dozen villagers, acting on some unheard cue, emerged from their huts and began to throng toward the strangers.Girls swelling with puberty. Mothers lofting their babies onto their heads. Old women with bent spines. A thin, crabbed stalk of a man, older than the sun, reaching with cadaver hands toward the white men.
What do You think about Roosevelt's Beast: A Novel?
