WHILE PUMA SAT in the shade on the opposite side of the river from the City of the Moon, he kept an eye on what was going on across the stream through a second set of eyes, those of the powerful feline up in the branches above him.

They paid extra attention to Killa. She might be a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, but her mother's sister, the sixth in their line, had married a boy who was the youngest of seven sons. They in turn had seven sons, making Puma a seventh son of a seventh son. As such, his powers, once he discovered them, exceeded in some ways that of his cousin, Killa. The power of the human mind was extraordinary, once one knew how to tap into it. He had not just an understanding with animals, he could actually see through their eyes. Maybe not literally, but he had the ability to get into the mind of a puma up in a tree, for instance, and see the landscape below from his namesake animal's point of view.

In this way he had followed Killa and those outsiders she had befriended, able to keep himself out of view just behind, while watching ahead. Along the river he had used his favored animal, the puma, to watch from the trees, until that cat had inadvertently startled a flock of macaws. He had tried using one of the macaws after that, but the bird's flight was too unpredictable, and he was forced to spy on them the normal way, through good old human stealth. Not for the first time he wished he had the ability to shape shift, like the Apus, the ancient spirits of the mountains, and move with the grace that came with an animal's body, not just to see through its point of view.

Finally the next morning, he came across a puma stalking a maned wolf on an anteater kill. But that lasted only as long as it took for a jaguar to find both the puma and the wolf. And that sudden fury had jolted Puma right out of the trance in which he had been able to visually get close to Killa and her party. Puma had no doubt who had sent that jaguar to interfere.

From the summit of the hills, he had managed to keep an eye on their progress through a harpy eagle, out scouting for lunch. Once they approached the City of the Moon, Puma sat and meditated, and focused his thoughts until he again summoned his namesake feline, which had found a comfortable spot, high in the tree from which they both now kept watch.

Puma did not like what he saw. The outsiders, Englishmen he thought of them, like that old fellow called Fawcett, were studying the sacred statue dedicated to Mama Killa, goddess of the Moon. He saw that they had noticed the way she pointed back to the Old Country, and the City of the Sun, home to his people's lost heritage, and their greatest secret, their last remaining treasure that connected them to Inti, the Sun God. What was his cousin thinking, showing them this?

And who were these people anyway? The woman was obviously of native heritage, of people somewhere between the rainforest here and the land of Puma's ancestors, in the high mountains far to the west. That fact was apparently the reason Killa seemed to show trust in them. But he had seen the way the white man's eyes lit up when he realized that Mama Killa showed the way to the City of the Sun. He also remembered the stories the old man Fawcett used to tell, about the cruelty of the white man a hundred years ago, enslaving the tribes to cut the trees and harvest the sap for their rubber. A desecration of both human beings and forest. When the choice had to be made, Fawcett had cast his lot with the People who had taken him in. Which way would these strangers go?

Of one thing was certain; they definitely needed to be watched, and carefully. They had seen too much already. There were two ways to deal with outsiders who knew too much. Adopt them into the tribe if they simply had seen something they shouldn't have, meant no harm, and had something they could contribute to the people, in order to keep secrets safe. Or, if they showed an intention of exploiting that knowledge for their own gain, treasure hunting perhaps, they would need to be killed. Puma's ancestors had fought wars against the Spanish in order to preserve their heritage and their secrets. He had no compunction against eliminating these outsiders if necessary.