The aroma of roasted meat and melting fat dominated the central plaza. The banquet was more than just a meal; it was a diplomatic act. Seated on straw mats, Guaraci the village Morubixaba, and Arandu the Karai(Shaman), received Cauã the leader of an allied tribe.
Ubirajara watched from a distance, helping himself to a portion of meat while keeping his ears sharp. The conversation between the chiefs was grim.
"The Tapuias descend from the north like a plague of locusts," Cauã said, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. "They do not respect hunting boundaries. They are attacking our patrols and burning the crops of smaller villages. If we do not unite now, we will be devoured one by one."
Guaraci nodded, his hand firm on his knee. "The pact is made. Tupi blood shall not be spilled alone. If war comes, our arrows shall fly together."
Ubirajara felt a knot in his stomach. Imminent war. He had expected to have months to get organized, but time was not on his side.
As the chiefs sealed the region's fate, Arandu stepped away from the circle and walked slowly toward him. His eyes seemed to pierce the very surface of Ubirajara's skin.
"I feel the breath of life has returned strong to your chest, Ubirajara. How is your head after the fever?"
"Healthy, Shaman," Ubirajara replied, measuring every word. "But... strange. I do not remember everything, and I have had dreams that do not seem to belong to this world."
Arandu tilted his head, intrigued. Ubirajara realized he needed a foundation for his ideas, and mysticism was the only place where his thoughts could truly take root.
"I saw a world where the forest did not exist. The ground was covered in a cold, grey stone. Upon it, thousands of people ran, as if they were always late for something they could never reach. Houses rose atop one another, touching the clouds, and at night they glowed with a light that did not come from fire."
Arandu listened in absolute silence. Ubirajara continued, describing rivers imprisoned in pipes and men who traded their souls for the effort of obtaining food they did not plant themselves.
"I know, Shaman... that time will come after ours. A world rich in goods, but miserable in spirit."
The old man did not laugh. He drew a straight line in the dirt and, beside it, a perfect circle.
"Common men think time walks like this," Arandu said, pointing to the perpendicular line on the ground. "One day after another, toward nothingness. But time does not walk; time turns."
He pointed to the circle.
"He who sleeps stays still, immersed in that line. But dreams cross the circle and allow one to see beyond the visible. You saw ahead, Ubirajara."
The shaman approached, the scent of herbs and smoke clinging to his robes.
"Of course, if you continue to feed ideas beyond your control, it will sicken you. You will leave the hunt for a time and learn from me. If you accept, you shall be my apprentice."
Ubirajara nodded. He immediately understood the move: Political Capital. Being the Shaman's apprentice was the perfect cover for his "oddities" and guaranteed a seat where the tribe's future was decided.
The next morning, the village woke under the weight of the promise of war. Arandu called Ubirajara early, and they began discussing the knowledge of the earth: Genipapo for ink, Yam for strength, and Manioc for life.
"Shaman, it is too much for me to keep alone," Ubirajara complained. "Human memory is a leaking pot. What if we could record it? Store knowledge in something that does not forget?"
Arandu found the idea fascinating, almost magical. They tried carving into dry clay, but the material was heavy and brittle. Ubirajara knew what he truly needed: paper.
Summoning a few young helpers under the Shaman's authority, Ubirajara began a process that looked like sorcery to the observers. Arandu sat on a nearby log, watching with almost scientific curiosity.
He sought out young tree bark and mallow fibers near the river.
"We need to break the fiber," Ubirajara explained.
He directed the helpers to beat the mass with wooden clubs until it became a pulpy paste. Then, he cooked the mixture in a clay pot with wood ashes. The potassium in the ashes acted as an alkaline agent, separating the cellulose from impurities.
After washing the pulp exhaustively, Ubirajara improvised a wooden frame with an extremely fine weave of bamboo. He dipped the frame into the diluted pulp and lifted it with a rhythmic motion, causing the fibers to interlace. A thin, damp film formed over the mesh.
"This will dry and become strong," Ubirajara said, laying the sheet onto a cloth. "We will be able to write on it with ink."
Arandu touched the damp fiber. "You wish to trap the message within the skin of a tree... If this works, Ubirajara, you will not just be changing how we learn. You will be changing the way we transmit information."
Ubirajara smiled. With writing, the transmission of knowledge would no longer depend on physical presence. He could manage resources, organize censuses, and establish laws.
But the paper was only the medium. The challenge of creating the code remained. Ubirajara did not want a phonetic alphabet; he needed logograms. Like Hanzi or Mayan glyphs, where the symbol represents the idea, allowing different peoples to understand the same message regardless of the dialect they spoke.
Huddled under the shade of a tree, master and apprentice began to map the world. Ubirajara dipped a sharpened wooden stalk into the black genipapo ink.
"What do you see here, Arandu?" he asked, pointing to the sky.
"Kuarahy. The sun."
Ubirajara drew a circle with a central dot. "This sign is not just the sun. It is light, day, and heat. Whenever it appears, we will know we speak of the fire of the sky."
The shaman frowned. "It is like body paintings, but they speak for themselves."
Ubirajara continued. He drew two crossed spears for "War." Two overlapping hands for "Pact." A stylized root for "Manioc."
"Look at this one," he said, drawing an inverted triangle with a horizontal line. "This is the sign for 'Place.' If I put the 'War' sign next to it, we have 'Battlefield.' If I put the 'Manioc' sign, we have 'Farm'."
Arandu took the stalk. His hands trembled as he touched the paper. He tried to replicate the Sun sign. The stroke was imperfect, but the concept was there.
"This fixes the meaning," the shaman whispered. "If we send this paper to Cauã with the signs of the spears and the land, he will know of the attack without a messenger needing to memorize complex messages."
As the sun set, the two remained hunched over the fiber. Arandu quickly realized the potential: with those signs, he could count warriors, stock flour with precision, and map loyalties.
There, between the freshness of the forest and the smell of ink, the Tupi logogram was born.
Ubirajara spent the rest of the day in silence, but his mind operated at a frequency no one else could match. He observed the hunters returning: strong men, exhausted, their muscles trembling from the effort of chasing prey for miles. Often, they returned with only a handful of small birds or, worse, empty-handed.
To the warriors, this was expected. To Ubirajara, it was a gross logistical error.
"The caloric ROI (Return on Investment) is ridiculous," he thought, chewing on a piece of manioc. "We spend five thousand calories to hunt three thousand. We are operating at a deficit."
Dead meat rotted in less than two days in the humid heat. The solution wasn't to hunt more; it was to keep the stock alive. He needed livestock. And the white-lipped peccary, with its social herd structure and omnivorous diet, was the perfect candidate.
Sitting in the shade of the maloca, he used his new bamboo stalk and rustic paper to draw. Arandu approached, observing the precise lines forming a structure he had never seen.
"What is this, my apprentice? Another way to trap thought?"
"No, Shaman, this is a Corral Trap. Instead of killing the peccary in the forest, we are going to invite it to live with us," Ubirajara replied.
Ubirajara explained the funnel concept. Two long, converging fences made of interlaced branches leading to a circular enclosure. At the end of the funnel, a drop gate supported by a tension trigger.
The construction required three days of intense labor. Ubirajara had to use all his prestige as the Shaman's apprentice to convince five young men to help him. Abaeté walked past them and spat on the ground, laughing.
"Ubirajara builds a house for pigs while real men seek meat. Perhaps he wants to sleep with the animals so he doesn't have to hear the snoring in the maloca," the warrior mocked.
Ubirajara ignored him. He was focused on the engineering of the trigger. He used braided mallow fibers to create a pull-cord and a polished wooden pin that acted as a quick-release latch. A single touch on the hidden tripwire would bring the heavy log gate crashing down.
For bait, he didn't just use food. He used what he knew about fermentation: manioc scraps left in the sun until they exhaled a strong, sweet scent. The odor traveled far on the evening breeze.
On the fourth night, the herd came.
Ubirajara and the youths were hidden on a wooden platform above the corral. The sound came first: the snapping of branches and the characteristic clattering of peccary teeth a dry, rhythmic noise signaling aggression and readiness. The herd, led by an alpha male with prominent tusks, followed the scent trail.
One by one, they entered the funnel. The space was tight, forcing them forward. When the last pig crossed the entrance line, Ubirajara felt the adrenaline spike. He didn't pull a bow; he pulled a cord.
Thump!
The heavy log gate fell with a crash, digging into the beaten earth. Panic was immediate. The animals charged the wooden walls, but the woven vines were flexible and resilient, absorbing the impact without breaking.
By morning, the village awoke to a sound it had never heard at that volume: the clamor of an entire herd of peccaries trapped on the outskirts of the village.
Guaraci and Abaeté approached, spears in hand, ready for the slaughter. Ubirajara stood in front of the gate.
"No," he said, with a calmness that surprised even himself. "We will not kill them all today. We will kill only one; the rest we will raise."
"For what?" Guaraci growled. "Meat is for eating, not for looking at."
"If we kill them now, the meat rots tomorrow," Ubirajara retorted, looking him in the eye. "If we keep them alive, we have meat for the next sun, and the one after, and the month after that. They will eat our manioc scraps and the peels we throw away. We will turn waste into muscle. This is not hunting, Guaraci. This is security."
Arandu, standing beside him, smiled and touched the chief's shoulder. "The apprentice has seen the future. He has brought the forest inside the walls so that we no longer need to bleed for it every day."
Ubirajara's political capital jumped from "weird intern" to "innovative entrepreneur" in a single night.
Later, Tainá approached him as he watched the calmer animals begin to accept the offered food. She brought a bowl of water and looked at him differently no longer with the pity one has for an orphan, but with the respect owed to a provider.
"They say you've bewitched the beasts," she said, sitting beside him. "They say you are the first Lord of the Spear who don't use a spear."
"It's not a spell, Tainá. It's just... understanding how things work."
He looked at the animals. He was already planning artificial selection. The most aggressive would be the first to go into the pot. The most docile would be preserved. In a few years, they would have a domestic lineage.
Ubirajara realized that writing and livestock were two sides of the same coin. To manage resources, he needed information (paper) and a resource surplus (livestock).
The war with the Tapuias would come, and when it did, his tribe would understand the power of logistics in firsthand.