Gazing fixedly at the ravine below us, I waited anxiously to catch a glimpse of the animal. But I did not see him. I was beginning to think the jaguar might have run away when I heard the frightening growling of the big cat in the chaparral just behind us. I had the chilling realization that don Juan had been right. To get to where he was, the jaguar must have read our thoughts and crossed the ravine before we had.
Without uttering a single word, don Juan began running at a formidable speed. I followed and we zigzagged for quite a while. I was totally out of breath when we stopped to rest.
The fear of being chased by the jaguar had not, however, prevented me from admiring don Juan’s superb physical prowess. He had run as if he were a young man. I began to tell him that he had reminded me of someone in my childhood who had impressed me deeply with his running ability, but he signaled me to stop talking. He listened attentively and so did I.
I heard a soft rustling in the underbrush, right ahead of us. And then the black silhouette of the jaguar was visible for an instant at a spot in the chaparral perhaps fifty yards from us.
Don Juan shrugged his shoulders and pointed in the direction of the animal.
“It looks like we’re not going to shake him off,” he said with a tone of resignation. “Let’s walk calmly, as if we were taking a nice stroll in the park, and you tell me the story of your childhood. This is the right time and the right setting for it. A jaguar is after us with a ravenous appetite, and you are reminiscing about your past: the perfect not-doing for being chased by a jaguar.”
He laughed loudly. But when I told him I had completely lost interest in telling the story, he doubled up with laughter.
“You are punishing me now for not wanting to listen to you, aren’t you?” he asked.
And I, of course, began to defend myself. I told him his accusation was definitely absurd. I really had lost the thread of the story.
“If a sorcerer doesn’t have self-importance, he doesn’t give a rat’s ass about having lost the thread of a story,” he said with a malicious shine in his eyes. “Since you don’t have any self-importance left, you should tell your story now. Tell it to the spirit, to the jaguar, and to me, as if you hadn’t lost the thread at all.”
I wanted to tell him that I did not feel like complying with his wishes, because the story was too stupid and the setting was overwhelming. I wanted to pick the appropriate setting for it, some other time, as he himself did with his stories.
Before I voiced my opinions, he answered me.
“Both the jaguar and I can read thoughts,” he said, smiling. “If I choose the proper setting and time for my sorcery stories, it’s because they are for teaching and I want to get the maximum effect from them.”
He signaled me to start walking. We walked calmly, side by side. I said I had admired his running and his stamina, and that a bit of self-importance was at the core of my admiration, because I considered myself a good runner. Then I told him the story from my childhood I had remembered when I saw him running so well.
I told him I had played soccer as a boy and had run extremely well. In fact, I was so agile and fast that I felt I could commit any prank with impunity because I would be able to outrun anyone chasing me, especially the old policemen who patrolled the streets of my hometown on foot. If I broke a street light or something of the sort, all I had to do was to take off running and I was safe.
But one day, unbeknownst to me, the old policemen were replaced by a new police corps with military training. The disastrous moment came when I broke a window in a store and ran, confident that my speed was my safeguard. A young policeman took off after me. I ran as I had never run before, but it was to no avail. The officer, who was a crack center forward on the police soccer team, had more speed and stamina than my ten-year-old body could manage. He caught me and kicked me all the way back to the store with the broken window. Very artfully he named off all his kicks, as if he were training on a soccer field. He did not hurt me, he only scared me spitless, yet my intense humiliation was tempered by a ten-year-old’s admiration for his prowess and his talent as a soccer player.
I told don Juan that I had felt the same with him that day. He was able to outrun me in spite of our age difference and my old proclivity for speedy getaways.
I also told him that for years I had been having a recurrent dream in which I ran so well that the young policeman was no longer able to overtake me.
“Your story is more important than I thought,” don Juan commented. “I thought it was going to be a story about your mama spanking you.”
The way he emphasized his words made his statement very funny and very mocking. He added that at certain times it was the spirit, and not our reason, which decided on our stories. This was one of those times. The spirit had triggered this particular story in my mind, doubtlessly because the story was concerned with my indestructible self-importance. He said that the torch of anger and humiliation had burned in me for years, and my feelings of failure and dejection were still intact.
“A psychologist would have a field day with your story and its present context,” he went on. “In your mind, I must be identified with the young policeman who shattered your notion of invincibility.”
Now that he mentioned it, I had to admit that that had been my feeling, although I would not consciously have thought of it, much less voiced it.
We walked in silence. I was so touched by his analogy that I completely forgot the jaguar stalking us, until a wild growl reminded me of our situation.
Don Juan directed me to jump up and down on the long, low branches of the shrubs and break off a couple of them to make a sort of long broom. He did the same. As we ran, we used them to raise a cloud of dust, stirring and kicking the dry, sandy dirt.
“That ought to worry the jaguar,” he said when we stopped again to catch our breath. “We have only a few hours of daylight left. At night the jaguar is unbeatable, so we had better start running straight toward those rocky hills.”
He pointed to some hills in the distance, perhaps half a mile south.
“We’ve got to go east,” I said. “Those hills are too far south. If we go that way, we’ll never get to my car.”
“We won’t get to your car today, anyway,” he said calmly. “And perhaps not tomorrow either. Who is to say we’ll ever get back to it?”
I felt a pang of fear, and then a strange peace took possession of me. I told don Juan that if death was going to take me in that desert chaparral I hoped it would be painless.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Death is painful only when it happens in one’s bed, in sickness. In a fight for your life, you feel no pain. If you feel anything, it’s exultation.”
He said that one of the most dramatic differences between civilized men and sorcerers was the way in which death came to them. Only with sorcerer-warriors was death kind and sweet. They could be mortally wounded and yet would feel no pain. And what was even more extraordinary was that death held itself in abeyance for as long as the sorcerers needed it to do so.
“The greatest difference between an average man and a sorcerer is that a sorcerer commands his death with his speed,” don Juan went on. “If it comes to that, the jaguar will not eat me. He’ll eat you, because you don’t have the speed to hold back your death.”
He then elaborated on the intricacies of the sorcerers’ idea of speed and death. He said that in the world of everyday life our word or our decisions could be reversed very easily. The only irrevocable thing in our world was death. In the sorcerers’ world, on the other hand, normal death could be countermanded, but not the sorcerers’ word. In the sorcerers’ world decisions could not be changed or revised. Once they had been made, they stood forever.
I told him his statements, impressive as they were, could not convince me that death could be revoked. And he explained once more what he had explained before. He said that for a seer human beings were either oblong or spherical luminous masses of countless, static, yet vibrant fields of energy, and that only sorcerers were capable of injecting movement into those spheres of static luminosity. In a millisecond they could move their assemblage points to any place in their luminous mass. That movement and the speed with which it was performed entailed an instantaneous shift into the perception of another totally different universe. Or they could move their assemblage points, without stopping, across their entire fields of luminous energy. The force created by such movement was so intense that it instantly consumed their whole luminous mass.