Kuraka of Pututus

The first sound came from somewhere above us.

A long note rolled across the valley, and conversations around me began to quiet. I looked toward the ridge and saw the Kuraka standing above the road with a pututu raised to his mouth. He sounded it again, and this time I watched what happened below.

People stopped what they were doing. A man stepped outside and shaded his eyes toward the mountain. Two women farther down the road turned toward one another. Someone called to a child who had wandered ahead. Whatever the sound meant, I seemed to be the only person who did not understand it.

Then, from somewhere across the valley, another pututu answered.

The sound was distant enough that at first I wondered whether I had heard an echo. A few moments later it came again, unmistakably from another place. The Kuraka lowered his shell and waited. Farther away, beyond the second call, a third pututu sounded so faintly that I almost missed it.

Something had changed.

People began moving with quiet purpose. There was no panic, yet the ease of the afternoon had shifted into attention. I watched the Kuraka listen toward the distant ridge before raising the pututu again. His next call moved outward, and somewhere beyond what I could see, another person would hear it.

I had watched a Kamayoq send her voice confidently into the mountains and understood something about the courage required to speak. This felt different. The Kuraka was listening as carefully as he was sounding the shell. His communication belonged to something larger than his own voice.

A condor circled high above the valley as another distant answer returned.

I never learned exactly what was being communicated that afternoon. Perhaps that was why I remembered it so clearly. I had spent so much time thinking about communication as something we send into the world. Standing there, listening to one mountain answer another, I understood that the message was still alive after it left the person who began it.

The Kuraka sounded the pututu once more. Far across the valley, someone answered.