We had one more encounter, with a large bird standing in the path fifty yards ahead; the bird took off and sailed on ghostly white wings into some casuarina trees. Then the rain started-a real deluge. We dashed to the forester's hut. Inside, we found Maurice's father, Jaosolo Besoa-a small man with a mischievous air, in orange rubber boots and green fatigues over a white shirt and a tie. Jaosolo had been a forester in the Direction des Eaux et Forets for twenty years. The bird we had just seen, he said, was a crested wood ibis: "It is in the process of disappearing, because it is hunted by poachers. It is very rareonly found on the coasts. It eats ants. That is what it was doing in the path. We call it the akohoanala, or vampire."

       We talked about the indri. J aosolo said that the name came from the first European account of the animal, in 1782, by a Frenchman named Sonnerat, who reported that "indri" was the name the natives used. Actually, Jaosolo said, in Malagasy indri just means "Look at that." Perhaps Sonnerat's guides were pointing at one of the animals and Sonnerat thought they were saying its name. The Malagasy word for the animal is babakoto, or "grandfather ."

       "People here think they are the babakoto's sons, so they don't eat him," Jaosolo told us. "He cries between seven and one o'clock, most often twice, at nine and eleven. The song is a rallying cry, a cry of greeting for all the groups." Local legend has it that "the babakoto circumcise their newborn," J aosolo went on. "The mother sets a day for the circumcision and invites the neighboring groups to the ceremony; then she waits with her baby on a branch for them to arrive. Before birds or men are stirring, the father goes to the river and sucks up a mouthful of water to wash the wound. Someone from one of the invited groups performs the operation, cutting the foreskin with his fingernail, and finally tearing it off with his teeth. Afterward, the father takes the baby and tosses it to the mother, and if it falls to the ground it is left to die. They all take off, because if the babycan't cling to the mother's stomach it is thought to be sick."

       I asked how the local people had come to believe that the babakoto was their ancestor.
       "I don't know," he said. "But it's logical."

       It rained so hard that night that the water lines to the hotel were washed out, and water had to be heated in the kitchen and brought up to my room for me to bathe in. After dinner, J 0seph's daughters retired to their rooms to listen to the radio, and his wife withdrew into a French gothic novel. Joseph, Michel, and I stayed up in the restaurant listening to a nephew of Joseph's sing mellow Malagasy ballads with a guitar, and talking about the, form of life.
 

      THE next morning, I set out with Maurice again. Michel, assured that I was in good hands, stayed behind, waiting for the train to Antananarivo. The whole local population seemed to be on the road-the men with axes and brush hooks and bundles on sticks slung over their shoulders, hobo style, and the women with baskets of manioc leaves, sweet-potato leaves, breadfruit, or Chinese lettuce on their heads, to sell at the market in town. They all greeted us gaily as they passed. The greeting here was "8alaam"-"Good health." The creek sliding through the trees was about eight feet higher than it had been the day before. During the morning, we saw more kinds of birds than I had ever before seen in a single outing; they were so obliging that you could walk right up to them. Among the ones we identified were blue couas, opalescent green doves, magpie robins, rollers, vermillion foudias, sunbirds, drongos, warblers, forest kingfishers, rails, honeycreepers, cuckoo shrikes, blue vangas, and bulbuls. Seventy species have been identified in the reserve, but there must be more.

       Maurice led us through the kneedeep water of the flooded creek to see a sacred tree. It has a name, kakazotsi fantata, which, he told us, means "the tree whose name nobody knows." It was the tallest, oldest tree in the forest, he said as we stood beneath it and looked up at its crown, some sixty feet above. It was crowded by other trees, was cabled with lianas, and was partly wrapped in the embrace of a strangler fig, so it was hard to tell which leaves were its own. I looked with my binoculars and, after some time, made them out-or I think I did. They were small and simple-and that was as far as I could get with identifying them. Nobody-not the old locals who knew every tree in the forest, not the vazaha (white) botanists from universities in Europe-had succeeded in figuring out what tree it was, Maurice said. Later, his father told us, "The first branch is like Dalbergia [rosewood]. In 1963, a sorcerer named Petain tried to take part of the tree, and he would have died if he hadn't sacrificed a cow to the tree, as he was told to do in a dream. Then the forester before me tried to take a cutting of the tree, and he died that night." People came and danced under the tree, slaughtered goats there, left offerings of money, rum, and candy, he said-women who weren't getting pregnant, men who weren't having luck in love, people who wanted to get rich, students who wanted an "admissible" on their exams. Throughout Madagascar, venerable trees and prominent rocks are the site of observances having to do with ancestors. They are thought to be inhabited by a special category of spirits known as togny, who are associated with the hasina, the most sacred and highly revered of the dead. Often the rock will be draped with a white cloth. Someone had tied a red ribbon around the base of the kakazotsi fantata.

       I asked Maurice if the creek had a name. He said that it was called Sahatandra, after a man who died three years ago, and who had been the oldest man in the village. On the way back to the road, Maurice found a small boa in the grass, and picked it up and draped it around his neck. It was about three feet long, tan with brown lozenges whose edges caught the sun and by some optical illusion were reproduced as dazzling blowtorch-blue rings in the air slightly above them. In some parts of the island, the boa, or do, is thought to be an ancestral incarnation and is given a wide berth. Because the do often lurks in the cool darkness of family tombs, many Malagasy believe it to be the adult form of the worms that devour the corpses and thus absorb their spirits. This belief is not found on the eastern escarpment. "Here we believe our ancestors are the indri," Maurice explained.
 

      MOST of the people around Perinet belong to a small, politically unimportant ethnic group called the Bezanozano, who are lumbermen and slash-and-burn farmers, clearing the forest and planting dry rice. "The name Bezanozano means 'many small branches,' " Joseph said when Maurice and I joined him for lunch. "The people here make fires with many small branches. Other people use regular firewood."

       "What about the name of the creek?" I asked. "Now that the old man it was named for is dead, is the creek going to be renamed? Is it renamed every generation? Or will it always be Sahatandra?"

       Joseph called one of the cooks, a native of Perinet and himself a Bezanozano, from the kitchen. The cook said that saha meant "water" in the local dialect, and Tandra was the name of a girl who had drowned in the creek. Her father had lived near a waterfall thirty kilometres away.

       Maurice, irked at being contradicted, said that saha meant "garden plot," not "water."
       The cook said, "No, it means 'water.' "
       "I can't help you with this one," Joseph told me. "I know nothing about the origin of the creek's name. The best thing is to go into the village and ask the elders."

       So that afternoon Joseph and I crossed the railroad tracks and a footbridge over the river into which the creek emptied-also called the Sahatandra-and, sidestepping rivulets of scum, climbed a winding muddy path between two-story weathered gray houses with peaked roofs and balconies. The power lines were thatched with spiderwebs to which enormous spiders clung-N ephila madagascariensis, one of the world's largest orb weavers. A bad cold was going around the village; we could hear hacking coughs from within every second house. Joseph said there were seven thousand people in the village. It had been renamed Andasibe, which in Malagasy means the Big Station, in the early seventies. "The people in the forest are poor but happy, but here in the village there is more misery," he told me. "There is malaria,. and an un described mosquito-borne fever called the virus of Andasibe, which can be fatal if the person is unhealthy. The humidity takes its toll. I can't. sleep, because of the aches it brings on in my shoulder when I lie down. But the biggest problem is dehydration from diarrhea, which kills many children."

       In the central plaza, women sat at stalls behind piles of beans, potatoes, and taro leaves, and a youth was strumming a homemade guitar. On the wall of an alcove in which a man Was repairing a radio was a poster of John Travolta. Joseph said that television was due to arrive in Andasibe at the end of the year; a receiving station had been built on a ridge outside of town. I wondered how long it would be before television began to erode the local culture: how soon it would replace gossip and storytelling as the main way of passing the time, as it is doing all over the world; what it would do to these people's hold on their legends and history, which already seemed precarious.

       Joseph asked an old man leaning on a balcony above us about the origin of the name Sahatandra, and .the old man said, "Once, there were so many crocodiles in the river that it was lady [taboo] to wash dirty pots or laundry in the river." These were Nile crocodiles-mamba in Malagasy-which swam over from Africa during the Pleistocene and, I learned, have been hunted out almost everywhere on the island except in a few lakes in the north, where they are revered as ancestors. "A woman named Mme. Tandra was offered to the crocodiles. After that, they disappeared."

       "When was this?" I asked. "About eighty years ago," the old man said.
       Just then, the president of the Commune Rurale de Sambademba, the local representative of the pouvoir re volutionnaire, came up the path, and Joseph explained to him that we were trying to find out the meaning of the name of the river. He invited us to his office, and when we got there his clerk and an old woman in a bandanna joined in the discussion. The three of them agreed that, according to ancestral beliefs, a woman named Tandra had been sacrificed "more than a hundred years ago to keep the crocodiles from multiplying." It was clear that the dead continued to exert tremendous influence on the villagers' lives. But their reverence for "the ancestors" (razana) seemed more ideological than specific. I traced the genealogies of several villagers. None of them could go back more than four generations-typical shallow tropicalforest pedigrees. And yet another woman in a bandanna said that she had a hundred ancestors in her family tomb, and that once a year she and hundreds of her relatives gathered at the tomb, which was twenty miles from Andasibe, for the Famadihana, or Exhumation Ceremony. "Every year, we change the shrouds," she said.

        I asked how many of the ancestors they exhumed.
       "That depends on how much money we have," she said. "The shrouds are very expensive."
        "If you had only enough money for one, whom would you exhume?"
       "Your mother and father are usually wrapped together," she said. "You would do them first. You would do your grandfather before your uncle or brother."
        Did she know the names of all the ancestors in the tomb?
        No.

        (When I got home, I spoke to the anthropologist Robert Dewar, of the University of Connecticut, who has done a lot of work on Madagascar, and he explained that as the disintegration of the older ancestors progresses their bones are placed together and it is impossible to tell them apart. "In this part of the island, every Malagasy theoretically has the right to be buried in any of the tombs of his eight great-grandparents, but in reality he usually has a choice of only three," he said. "To be buried in a tomb, you have to have contributed to its upkeep. It could be on your mother's or your father's side. Or, if you marry a woman who is close to her mother's people, you could end up in their tomb. But if you couldn't stand your in-laws, that, of course, wouldn't happen. Basically, it all depends on what part of the family you want to deal with.")

       We met Jaosolo at the post office, and he said we hadn't got the story about the river's name right at all. There had never been crocodiles in the river, he assured us. This had simply been a case of a first wife's killing the second while the husband was away, and dumping the body in the river. "Tandra means 'beauty spot,'" he said. "The second wife had a beauty spot. Saha is definitely not a fieldit's a brook." But while there were no crocodiles in the river, J aosolo couldn't resist adding, there were definitely zazavavindrano-mermaids. "In December, they take handsome men and suck their blood, and their cold white bodies float to the surface." I have heard similar stories in Zaire and Amazonia. "Once, an old woman was stolen by the zazavavindrano," Jaosolo went on. "They needed a midwife. She was returned a month later unharmed, and the zazavavindrano gave her two cows. This is a true story. It happened in 1948 in Mananara, which is to the north. And during the construction of the railroad the zazavavindrano who live under the big falls at Ikuna stole an engineer, a surveyor, and eight bearers to live with them. Every December 25th, offerings are left at the falls." I wondered if they were meant as Christmas presents.

       When Joseph and I returned to the hotel, we spoke with an old Bezanozano waiter. "Jaosolo doesn't know anything," this man said. "He only came here in '57. There used to be many crocodiles. Every time a zebu, a cow, crossed the river, it was eaten, One night, the parents of Tandra, 2 rich family with many zebu, dreamed that the genies of the water wanted th~ girl. These were not the zazavavindrano but the razana, the spirits of th~ ancestors in the water-they wanted her."
 

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