Among the Cholo workmen it developed that each preferred to cook for himself with his own little pot and over his own individual fire. It was too great a waste of time and energy to have eighteen men building eighteen fires three times a day in order to cook their fifty-four meals. So a compromise was effected. The original Cholo cook—who was good for nothing—kept up one long fire on which the row of pots simmered. After each meal enough would be issued to each pot owner for the next meal. In the early morning the general day’s rations were issued. The Cholos wrapped them in smudgy bandanas and laid them away beneath their bunks—their bunk shack of cane, charo, being the first thing attended to—and then traded back and forth according to fancy, a little rice for a gristly shin bone of chalona, or some chancaca for a bit of coffee or chuÑo. Coca formed a regular part of the ration and was regularly used by all the workmen.

Agamemnon as a cook developed famously. As to results one could never properly place the blame upon him. With the exact and retentive memory of the utterly illiterate he followed directions with absolute fidelity. He was of the same family as that famous cook who, after having been instructed by the missus in cake-making, invariably threw away the first two eggs because in the original effort the first two had proved to be undesirable citizens. Agamemnon was of this order, yet he never failed to throw in all the frills of table service he could think of. This came from his days of stewarding on the Pacific coasters.

Every morning he appeared with a box lid for a tray set forth in fresh green jungle leaves and on it a species of muffin that he had developed or the boiled green platanos that took the place of bread, a tin can of jam, or some turtle eggs if we had been lucky in a trade with some passing batalon of Leccos. Coffee he served with a flourish and from his camp fire below the bank on which our tent was pitched he would bring up a bucket of hot water with which he could keep a continual service of clean camp plates.

In the intervals at meals he stood back and fanned off the wild bees that flocked to the jam and condensed milk tins. Two little holes pricked in the milk tins guarded them, but with the jam it was different; often a half tin of jam had to be thrown away, the contents solid with reckless, greedy bee suicides. They would light on the jam while it was on the way to your lips or stow away on the under side of the jammed muffin, compelling the utmost vigilance on the penalty of a diet of raw bees. With all the reckless handling they received, not one of them stung.

It was the ant that was the irritable, hot-weaponed party who went out a-jousting from the sheer lust of battle. They were infinite in variety from the sluggish white-ant that left the table a hollow shell of sawdust on up to the leaf-cutters and army ants to whom nothing was so precious as the straight line in which they were going. But the worst, the most vicious and accursed was the large black variety one of whom made a murderous attack upon me in the darkness.

He is nearly an inch in length. To the Leccos he is known as buno-isti and they also assert that he lives in very small communities in holes in the ground, not building the ordinary nests. Agamemnon had been stung and had promptly, darkey fashion, tied a rag around his head and stayed in his tent all night groaning. A Cholo boy was stung and he too tied a rag around his head and groaned throughout the night. It seemed absurd for a mere sting to have that effect and I looked upon them with a proper scorn. I have been stung by hornets and scorpions and the latter seemed to me, at the time, as the ultimate of all stinging sensations. I was wrong.

For some reason these buno-istis seemed to have a love for passing themselves in review up the guy rope, along the ridge pole, and down the other guy rope of the tent. By observing I noticed that no sooner did the buno-isti reach the bottom of the guy rope than he started back to the front guy and began another tour. One evening I stepped out in the darkness, my foot caught on a root and I stumbled; I clutched for the guy rope to save myself and the instant my hand touched the forefinger connected with a high voltage current that gave all the sensations of a red-hot sausage grinder. I had caught a buno-isti on his way up the guy rope.

A delayed lantern revealed a crippled buno-isti and a finger with an almost invisible sting on the first joint. There was no swelling nor did any follow at any time. Yet the pain was intense; I could feel it spreading from the finger to the hand and then, slowly with an acute torture that brought no relieving numbness up to the shoulder. There it halted. But for hours, as the camp watch showed, there was no sleep possible, not until the exhaustion from pain paved the way. For three days the effects lingered in the form of a bruised sensitiveness that made that arm all but useless. A scorpion sting is a gentle tickle compared with the buno-isti.

Slowly the camp grew. A patch of jungle was cleared on the high bank above the river beyond the reach of any sudden freshet. In the early days of the camp one of these freshets descended from the Andean foot-hills and before the last of the outfit had been carried to the high bank the Cholos were struggling in a current up to their belts or portaging by the aid of poles held out to steady them. Where the first hasty camp had been was a torrent of muddy waters and a tiny island cut off from us by a creek torn in the bank by the flooding river. The water rose five inches a minute for about eight feet and then slowly went back during the night a few inches.

For something like eleven miles down this river there was placer gold. Wherever a sand-bar or a sand bank showed it was of black, gold-bearing sand. Anywhere you washed you got a trace or color in the pan and sometimes thirty or forty bright flecks of gold glittering against the rusty iron bottom. But with that current, the uncertain rise of freshets, the distance from civilization and main supplies, only an Indian could wash out dirt and make a living at it. The plan was to prospect the placer area extensively and establish a basis for the permanent working camp that was to follow. The gold was there, but how deep to bed rock or hard pan, whether it were best to work by dredge or shaft or open workings, these were the questions that had arisen back in the world of civilization and were solved on the basis of the results of this first camp.

From the bank at the water’s edge there stretched back a mass of matted jungle, creepers, vines, and underbrush and above, a mass of vines that tangled the treetops in great patches of aerial islands. Paths had to be cut, some kind of a working map made, the natural difficulties and conditions set forth, and the beginnings of the permanent camp put in form.

The eighteen men were swallowed up in the jungle. The clearing was scarcely made and burned before the jungle was again closing in and rising from the ground like sown dragon’s teeth. And slowly progress was made and up and down the river the camp became known and voyaging rubber traders and crews stopped as at a port of call.

One expedition passed the midday breakfast with us. Its head was an Englishman, a wiry, frontier hardened man who was on a punitive expedition at the head of his men, rubber pickers, balseros, and headquarters men from his barraca. Somewhere in the hundreds of thousands of acres that represented the rubber domain of which he was chief there was a boundary dispute. His trees had been raided and here, like a feudal baron—or rather like a salaried feudal baron, the fief of a plush-cushioned, rocking chair lord of a board of directors the half of seven seas away—he was at the head of his two callapos and fourteen Winchesters and a scattering of twenty bore, miserable trade-guns with their trade powder in gaudy red tins and a month’s rations for the expedition.

Again, a couple of Englishmen who had drifted down to Rurrenabaque, the last settlement of the frontier from this side of the continent, stopped as they were slowly poling up the river with a couple of new dugouts. Their crew was of Tacana Indians and these dugouts were the first known on the river. In effect these men had independently invented the “whaleback.”

The endless series of rapids made the callapo with its baggage platform a poor freighter. In their mahogany dugouts they had a series of deck hatches that, when the cargo was on board, were bolted down over rubber gaskets—rubber pure as it came from the tree and spread with a bundle of parrot feathers over a sheet of coarse muslin and then smoked in a hot, blue palm smoke. With a couple of these dugouts lashed together they proposed to shoot the little caÑons and the Nube, the Incaguarra, the Diablo Pintado and the Ratama. And they did, too, dropping paddles and clinging with tooth and claw to the bare wet decks on which they had omitted to put cleats or rope holds. But it was an eminently successful venture and they slowly chipped away with adze and ax until on their next trip they had a fleet of seven dugouts, each some thirty-five to forty feet in length, and from a single log of caobo, mahogany, or palo-maria, with which they could run the river in either the dry or wet season. With balsas and callapos, as our long delay in Mapiri showed, only under the pressure of emergency was it possible to get up the river.

As the work progressed it became evident that our original outfit was not sufficient to make any adequate preliminary development. It was not possible to get to bedrock without some machinery, a pump, and some means of sawing lumber for sheet piling. The Cholos were perfectly useless at whip-sawing a log. We tried them and the work was too gruelling. They were curiously inefficient in any line outside of their narrow experience. A block and tackle was an unsolved riddle, although they recognized its power. They would take it along cheerfully in the morning and then later send for some one to come up and work it; they could never fathom which rope to pull. Main strength and awkwardness were their reliance and when these failed—carramba, what more could be done?

According to the custom of the montaÑa they had been contracted for six months before a judge, an intendente, and amid all sorts of mystic ceremonials of red tape without which Bolivian law and custom looks askance. Five weeks had been a dead loss in Mapiri and two weeks more for gathering them and the time of actual transportation and then almost two months of work in camp came perilously near the expiration of their contracts when it was considered necessary to bring in a new gang. These were hungry to get back to their little villages and join in the high class carnivals and drunken dances. Some of the Cholos were worthless, while others would come back again after a rest on the other side of the Andes. Segorrondo, the squat little drunkard, was one of the best men in the gang and he had added a new adornment to his peculiarly unattractive exterior. In a fight with the major domo he had had his head laid open with a machete from over his right eye to almost the back of his neck. It was a mere scalp wound, fortunately for Segorrondo as the machete glanced.

It took six men to hold him while he was stitched up with six stitches. Beauty was to him no object compared with the pain of stitching, and when our surgical job was over, the effect of only six irregular stitches in a twelve inch cut may be imagined. Then we bandaged him securely, gave him an extra drink of caÑassa, and once more he grinned cheerfully. Later he and his antagonist appeared for another drink, each affectionately embracing the other. Without the slightest difficulty the wound healed, leaving an interesting scalloped pattern that was a source of much pride to its owner.

But it was obviously necessary to get out to the coast for machinery, supplies and another gang of workers. A proprio, a messenger, was sent overland up the river to notify the Lecco rivermen a few miles above and a week later four balsas and ten Leccos swung around the bend under the bank in the dawn and we started.

The crew of a balsa is two men, one fore and one aft of the platform with poles or a jungle vine for a drag rope. It is not safe for more than one passenger to each balsa for the narrow raft of a wood almost as light as cork is lightly balanced as a canoe. There is no freight worked up river, except rubber, and of that the big bolachas are wedged in under the stilts of the platforms.

Slowly the little fleet of balsas hugged the shore, poling against the current. Then across the river appeared a stretch of narrow beach and the poles were dropped and the balsa swung out across the current to the other side. Here the vine drag rope would come in use with one Lecco pulling and the other poling, and fairly rapid progress could be made. There was a short stop at a tiny Lecco settlement at Incaguarra where the chief Lecco, the cacique, lived. He was a shy, bashful, good natured old man who invited us into his hut where we gave him the customary drink.