The School of the Magic Drum 3: Anhangá

In the middle of the rainforest, where the trees grow right up to the sky and where the animals and plants all speak the same language, there is an unusual school. The school is run by a shaman, Pajé Iru, who doesn’t only teach the children literacy and numeracy; he also teaches them how to recognise nature’s magic and listen to its voices. Pajé Iru leads his class on a path of adventure and friendship. And when necessary, they use his magic drum Tupã to call for help from the rainforest’s mythical beings, who show them how to behave kindly towards nature and help to protect it.

Today, when the children arrived at school, they noticed that a strange wind was blowing. The leaves seemed to be rustling differently than usual, as if they were whispering something important to each other. The birds had stopped singing, and a few flocks had flown up out of the trees in alarm. When Pajé Iru, their teacher at the School of the Magic Drum, arrived, he looked around him and frowned.

“Today’s lesson is going to be a little unusual,” he announced to the children, who were watching him intently. “Today, you are going to listen.”

The children looked at each other, confused. Listen? But to what? They always listened to their teacher, but he can’t have meant that...and in any case, he had stopped talking. The only thing they could hear now was the wind.

“Nature cannot speak like we humans do,” Pajé Iru continued, “but that doesn’t mean it has no voice. If you listen to its sounds, you can learn a lot from them. And sometimes, you can tell that something has happened by the fact that certain sounds are absent. Today. I can hear that…