At Chacruna: Toé (Brugmansia suaveolens): The Path of Day and Night

Glenn H. Shepard Jr

Henchi, a young man from a remote Matsigenka native community in Peru’s Manu National Park, left home one morning to go hunting in the vast and preserved Amazon rainforest around his village. It rained, and towards the end of the day when he had not returned, his relatives got worried and went out to look for him. They found Henchi, half-conscious, bruised and cut by palm thorns, sprawled at the base of a large Pouteria tree, a favorite fruit of monkeys. He had climbed into the treetops to recover a monkey, fatally shot with an arrow, that had gotten stuck in the branches. But he slipped on the wet bark and fell more than fifty feet to the ground. Henchi’s spine was broken in several places, he couldn’t move and was in great pain, oscillating between consciousness and unconsciousness, between life and death. Everyone, including Henchi himself, thought he wasn’t going to survive... continue reading.