The Hunted by Peter Clenott

Synopsis

Searching for a downed helicopter in the primordial rain forest of the Amazon, a geological survey for the mining company Free Amazonia discovers the remnants of an indigenous tribe. All that survives of this tribe are five individuals: the elderly shaman Antanajo; two young boys, Tinqo and Ushon; Weihexa, a seven-year old girl with unusual gifts; and a newborn whose name is Suyape. Against their will, the five Ipanao Indians are brought to the nearest medical center. In depth examinations show one disturbing thing. There is something wrong with their DNA.

A half world away David and Cecelia Goncalves are studying another recently discovered tribe lost to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. Cecelia is going for her PhD studying ‘non-contacteds’, tribes with little or no contact with 21^st century civilization, who happen to live in environments put at risk by the modern world. Unbeknownst to the Goncalveses, the Kerawan share a significant trait with the Ipanao. When Cecelia and David learn of the discovery of a previously unknown indigenous group from their home country, they leave New Guinea and rush to the Amazon to confront the Ipanao.

THE HUNTED is the young adult novel of Suyape Goncalves, adopted and brought to the United States by Cecelia and David Concalves. Now 17, an average American teenager, she has been protected by her adopted parents. She knows only that she was found in the Amazon but knows nothing of Weihexa, Tinqo and Ushon. But she has made accidental contact with other indigenous kids: Anana, the Inuit; Anni Kristina of the Finland Sami; Apanie, the Australian aborigine; Tran Xuan Chai of the Ruc; and Tegay, an Ethiopian Surma. They all share one genetic trait, a trait handed down for tens of thousands of years, dispersed to the survivors of those who witnessed the landing of a strange people during the time of the last ice age. These survivors, now scattered and living in the last pockets of earth free from civilization, are being hunted. For buried in their DNA, locked in the recesses of their minds, lies the secret to the forebears of humanity, forebears who want the earth back.  

In the language of the Ipanao, Suyape means ‘she remembers’. And Suyape Goncalves does remember. In fact, under the right circumstances, she can remember everything from the birth of her people to the present. As Free Amazonia begins destroying the pristine rain forest in search of precious metal, as the world’s ecosystem is endangered by global warming, and as the unseen enemy known as the hunters bear down on them, Suyape and her friends must unite, discover the truth of their past, and defeat the enemies of the earth, human and otherwise. THE HUNTED will be a series of novels each one pitting Suyape, her non-contacted friends, her fun-loving sister Fabia and her boyfriends Brian Gendron and Quasar Onyuko, against different forces that would alter the environment for profit and for survival. For the earth and all of its inhabitants, what Suyape Goncalves remembers may be all that lies between them and extinction.

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