The Pishtaco: The Fat-Stealer of the Andean Roads
Most of the beings in this chronicle steal blood, breath, shadows, children. The Andes — with a precision that says everything about the mountains and their history — feared the thief of something else entirely: fat . The pishtaco — the Quechua-speaking highlands' name for him; the Aymara south knows him as the kharisiri , older tellings as the ñak'aq , "the butcherer" — is a figure met on the lonely roads of the high country at dusk: a stranger, and always a particular kind of stranger — tall, pale, bearded in the old accounts; booted, hatted, equipped; a foreigner, a priest, an engineer, a doctor, depending on the century — who overpowers the solitary traveler by force or by a magical powder that drops them into unwakeable sleep, and then, with instruments the tellings describe in surgical detail, extracts their fat : from the kidneys, from the back, from the body's deep reserves — sometimes killing outright, more often (in the kharisiri versions) leaving the ...