Your children and ours have shared beds for generations.

Much of your language and most of your science you learned from our scholars.

Listen, Shaman! Thy cult's holy words sailed to these shores aboard our vessels.

We cannot vanish, Shaman, for our blood is in your blood.

Tell me again thy true ancestors dwelled on these peaks, I believe you.

For the savagery that caused kin's blood to run down the steps of the stone pyramids,

that savagery is thine now, Shaman.

May thou pass as quickly.

(Last words at a Chichen-Itza garrote)

     Like the hint of a breeze born in an approaching gale sweeps a dragonfly from a pickerelweed, at first they came gently.  With children of languid smiles and perfect teeth they rose from the leather seats of their all-wheel-drive wagons and marveled at the coolness of the air and the benign touch of a sun still cutting a path through the haze.  They sought lodgings and lavished gold and compliments on the town's elders.

     "Such a handsome people, such a beautiful place. But don't you know terror is coming?  You must arm yourselves, be ready to defend your wealth."

     "We have no wealth but the Mother's favor," answered the elders and they suggested the chewing of coca leaves as a remedy to the Northerners' somber moods.  Yet, some of the town's Sages had seen the death counts on the video boxes and took to the jungle.

     One day the pelting of raindrops lost its cadence to a clattering rumble.  Out of the mist at the town's outskirts crawled a low-slung machine followed by yellow buses with windows covered with blinds and luggage piled on roofs.  Armed men went to houses, asking for food, offering no more than a nod for thanks.  Where they noticed the vehicles of the town's earlier guests, they grew cautious in their approach.  There were shouts, gunfire, screams, and the small faces peering from the buses' doors were yanked back to the inside.  Then the only sounds were of the dripping of the dew and the rustling of the leaves, and the children returned to their watching.  Munching on their guardians' loot, they did not smile or chatter.  Fear was in their eyes, and their heads swiveled without pause, in the way of an owl cornered in a cave.

     When night forced the pillagers to shelter, the town emptied over the forest paths.  Families set out for favored campsites, but their young men scattered, most headed to hunters' meeting places, a few staying, hiding, to observe the forthcoming events.

     The intruders tried to barricade themselves into a stronghold, but they did not enjoy their easily won territory very long.  Next to appear was a band of haggard men on foot, their muddy shirts crossed by ammunition belts.  They gave no quarter.  When the last cries ebbed from the bullet-pierced buses, blood dripping to the puddles below, the bandits sacked the town, breaking open every door, crushing every jar, devouring any scrap of food they could find.

     Outraged at the destruction of his home, one of the jungle sentinels collared an invader bent over a pile of rubbish.  The swine did not struggle or scream, but in a moan lost in gargling at the slashing of his throat there was all of the hopelessness, the horror of the killings that had only begun.

     At councils the Shaman held that the extermination of anyone other than blood kin was the only path of salvation for the tribes.  The more compassionate among the Sages argued that a smooth black hair, dark eyes, and a copper-tone skin weren't the only keys to Grace.  The many forms of beast, fowl, and fish showed the Mother's wish for a diversity of shades on the palette She had chosen for Her sketching of the world She gave to Her children.  The slaughter of the multitudes huddled by the fires in the forest clearings would be nothing but murderous strife amidst different bloodlines of the same family.  A teacher, a mathematician, said that the massacres would be futile, diversity had been cast in the bloodline of the Mother's tribes and that injury could not be mended.

     But the votes were taken to heed the Shaman's call.

     The jungle's bounty was the wealth of the Mother's people, he said.  Only dung, or dead wood, was meant to burn.  The alien hordes were no kin.  In their flight from cold and hunger these cursed creatures were despoiling the Mother's gift.  The unceasing rain they brought would wash their blood back to the sea, back to the shores whence they once came.

     Drumbeats rose under the trees, arrows flew when rifle bullets ran out, and those who were still reluctant to murder were handed knives to join in the killing.  Or die.

     The horror of those years.  The despair in the pulsing of a thousand wretches struggling for a place nearer to a fire.  A mob stripping a bush someone had claimed to be edible.  Hands clawing at dripping leaves, feeble bodies elbowing each other for another chance at life, only to collapse and convulse, their last breaths a salvo of retching.  Sour stench in the pouring rain, vines creeping on bones along every trail.  The furtive trot of the cannibals.

     Too weary to question their duty the warriors killed, and killed, and killed.  They soon were joined by plains and city dwellers whose hatred was rooted in the loss of children, families or friends imprisoned, disappeared in administrative morasses, or merely run to exhaustion and left for dead across the borderlands.

     Legend has the first massacre occurring at Nuevo Laredo. An onslaught of peoples and drivers brandishing passports had overwhelmed the border personnel at the bridge and in a crowd of astonished residents watching the hordes marching on the highway and spreading to the streets, someone said "enough!" and fired an assault rifle into the throng of invaders.  Someone shot back and within a half-hour the dead and wounded on both sides could be counted in the hundreds.   The story made news all over the world.

     In truth, the few weapons in the hands of the city's onlookers couldn't have been enough to account for such a great number of casualties.  It is likely that the Shaman had ordered the killings and the massacres were repeated at other entry points.   That's the trouble with border walls, they work both ways and they must have gates where interlopers are easy pickings.

     When at last came a chance to lay down weapons, a baby with blond hair was born in a warrior's remote village.  Evil doing, without a doubt.   Slaughtered with his parents, the infant was the first victim of the new horror that struck at the Mother's children themselves.  Who could recall the prediction of a mathematician?  What was this so-called science, this genetics gibberish?  Evil could attend any birth, any birth at all.  Vigilance would remain the task of the generations to come.  The swift work of a blade would keep the sight of an ancient's face from offending the Mother ever again.

     Next, A BOTANIST DREAMS