Beautiful Sacrifice

how to explain. “Where we’re going is very special. Villagers know about it, of course, but rarely visit.”
    “Taboo?” he asked.
    “Not exactly. Their lives and ceremonies center around the Jaguar Cenote, the Cenote de Balam, so there’s no reason to hike deep into the jungle. Village life doesn’t leave a lot of time or energy for sightseeing.”
    “No tours?” he asked dryly.
    “None, thank you very much. We don’t want this place trampled or loved to death. Leave that for the better-known sites, with their groomed grounds and guards and partially excavated ruins.”
    “I’ll be more careful with the jungle than it will be with me,” Hunter promised.
    Lina smiled. “The jungle thanks you.”
    She turned and pushed gently through a barrier of young trees, vines, and shrubs struggling against one another in the small opening left when a copal monarch had fallen.
    Watching, listening, Hunter followed, feeling like a water bug in a marsh. Everything was much bigger than he was, older, tougher. The vegetation’s struggle for light—for life itself—was timeless, all the more primal for its silence.
    “Why didn’t the Maya worship the strangler fig tree?” Hunter asked. “It can kill the biggest of trees.”
    “Many of the ceiba trees have just four main branches, like the four cardinal points. The roots are thick and obvious, their shoulders visible at the base of the trunk.” Carefully she picked a way through the thicket of shrubs and vines. “The ceiba trunk goes up and up and up, like a pillar separating the overworld from the underworld. No other tree is quite like it.”
    Only after Lina and Hunter had passed through the tangle of plants did she unclip her machete. She checked her wrist compass, adjusted course, and set off. He followed her over rocky ground, around godlike ceiba trees growing taller and taller despite the weak soil feeding them. Some of them had grown together until their trunks were intertwined in unnatural embrace. The ground around them was sterile, sucked dry by the needs of the mighty trees.
    The trail Lina followed was more unreal than real, better suited to four feet or wings. Claw marks reached above Hunter’s head on one of the copal trunks. Resin bled out, hardening in the air, ready to be used for the sacred, scented fire of Maya ceremonies.
    “Jaguar,” Lina said, gesturing to the claw marks. “Though I don’t think we’ve had anyone on the estate grounds killed by one since I was a little girl.”
    “You better be kidding.”
    She smiled and then spoke with the softness the jungle seemed to demand. “I am. Mostly. Our entire holdings are protected land for jaguars. No hunting allowed. No scientificstudy either. Abuelita firmly believes the cats should be left alone as long as they leave the villagers alone.”
    “What happens if a cat starts snacking on the locals?” Hunter asked.
    “Then the family or the villagers take care of it. That’s as it must be. If the cats didn’t respect and avoid people, there soon would be no jaguars at all.”
    The path became more obvious, although far from a well-beaten trail. Their feet made little noise and less impression on the jungle debris covering the ground. Only the occasional stain showed where boots had left marks on limestone rubble. The strident bird and monkey calls became part of the background, like an erratic heartbeat, noticeable only in its absence.
    A striped iguana watched them, clinging to the side of a rock as big as the Bronco. There was a rough face carved on the stone, barely visible through an overgrowth of lichen and moss. Hunter couldn’t tell whether the face was a finished work or started and then abandoned because of one crisis or another.
    Lina never paused. Nor did she find any need for her machete. Finally she clipped it back in place, deciding that Philip must have been on the path recently.
    He promised not to dig here without telling me. It was the price of me leaving him alone for the last four summers.
    But she knew that sometimes Philip’s promises were forgotten before the echo of the words had died. He wasn’t treacherous, simply self-absorbed. Something else would claim his attention and mere words exchanged between people would fade to nothing at all.
    The canopy above them rustled and a flock of macaws burst through, leaving in their wake a random rain of droppingsand half-eaten fruit. Red and blue streaked by, like tropical fish fleeing danger through a green