Abandoned in the Amazon

Chapter one

The snake twisted itself around my neck, its head resting upon my shoulder. Lifting up its head, the constrictor wrapped the rest of its body around my neck. I could feel its every muscle slowly contracting.I stroked his head, lifting up his body and putting him into the nearest tree.

"Hunter!" Amache called. He was my best friend, and the only one who called me that. "It is time for your chores. Go to the mango field today."

I live with the Marubo tribe, which is an Amazonian tribe. We live in the tropical rainforest known to the outside world as the Amazon. But to us, it is home. My name is Hunter Cerera. Cerera is an Amazonian name. My parents named me with an Amazonian surname in hopes of traveling here someday. When finally they were given a chance to go, they took me with. I was only 17 months old when they left me, right near the hunting grounds of the Marubo with only a stuffed blue donkey. The Marubo took me in as their own, even though I looked completely different from them.

The only feature we had in common was hair. We all had long black hair, but they had dark reddish brown skin and I was pale white no matter how much sun I got. Their faces were also built much differently than mine.

      After my parents left me, I never saw them again. The last good memory I have of them is them telling me a story about the donkey and a yellow bear and maybe a pig. I have treasured the donkey since that day I became a Marubo, and I still have it, almost sixteen years later.

I walked back from the crop field, the mango basket considerably light for the warm season.  Unfortunately, the girl that weaved my carrying basket was really young and didn't make it very strong, there was a hole. Two mangoes fell out of the hole making it bigger. As I bent down to pick up the mangoes, I felt my legs swept out from under me. My whole basket tipped over as I fell, and I landed on top of some. The group of laughing teenagers walked away to get dinner, shouting,

"Dumb bacuri orphan!"  They left me bleeding on the dirt. Bacuri is a fruit with a milky white inside, so they were calling me a dumb white orphan, which was mostly true, so it wasn't really an insult. Anyway, I wasn't dumb, l was the only one who could count. The Marubo don't really need numbers, but the numbers help sometimes. I got up painfully. Mako was going to be so disappointed. He was like a second father to me, even though I had no real father. He was the shaman. This was the third time for seven sun-ups l ruined some crop. Tossing some mangoes into my bowl, I threw the rest in the forest.

Eating my bruised mangoes, I looked around at the rest of my tribe, eating fish and acai berries. Would I ever fit in? Laying in bed that night, I wondered about the question l asked myself every night: where were my parents?