Once—and no one would suspect a clumsy looking balsa of tippiness—an extra heavy boil of water burst under the balsa ahead and shot Agamemnon and the Leccos into the water. Fortunately it was at the edge of an eddy and no serious consequences resulted except that it kept the Leccos diving in ten feet of opaque, muddy water, for half an hour to recover a rifle. And it took a half a day to get the rifle in shape again.

That night we reached Caimalebra, a rubber pickers’ shack, where was collected the rubber from a still further sub-divided picket line of rubber pickers, and here we camped, exhausted. The Ratama was just ahead and this could only be made if the river was below a certain stage. It was curious to watch the Leccos read every river sign; by this bush and that boulder they knew the height of water in any rapid above. Here in Caimalebra they announced that unless the river went down at least the span of a man’s hand, six inches, it would not be possible to get through the Ratama caÑon and rapids.

That afternoon they shook their head against going on, the six inches made it impossible. By morning it would be lower as they read the weather signs. A little stick was stuck in near shore to measure. In the dawn the river had risen six feet and was raging past the camp, carrying the usual collection of swirling dead driftwood and newly uprooted trees. Food was running low for we had taken nothing from the main camp, as they would need it all before we could get back. The Leccos had a little rice that was giving out, here and there we could get platanos from a rubber hut along the river, but the main reliance was to be on the country between these points. The day before a wild turkey, shot with a rifle for the shot cartridges swelled so that a shot gun was useless, was delicious but scanty. This day I took a balsa across the river to try for pig or parrot or turkey, or monkey if we were lucky, or something anyway, for the Caimalebra place was vacant of platano or food except for the small family there.

All day I tramped over the hardest kind of country with four of the Leccos, swinging down ledges by the jungle vines or wriggling through the masses of tangled growth in the trail of a Lecco with a short machete. And as a result—nothing. Once there was a parrot motionless in the fork of a tree high up and across an impassable gully and not worth while.

The river had dropped two feet and risen three later; all day it had been playing at this game and the heavy clouds in the hills made the prospects discouraging. It was a scanty meal that night. After darkness had settled a tropical downpour came up that showed no signs of abating. Steadily it poured until after daybreak and all hands slept as best they might, soaked to the skin. The shelter tent was in a thin, widespread brook that the upper trenching did not stop or divert. As fast as one built a little protecting dam it was washed away and the bank poured a steady stream into the river as from the eaves of a roof. And the river rose ten feet in the night. It seemed impossible that we could ever get around the Ratama, but there was not a half day’s rations left in camp.

It seemed as if it was useless to wait for the river and essential that we should get to the big barraca of Ysipuri where there were ample supplies for our party. There was no overland trail, it was through a jungle, six, ten, fifteen miles, you could take your choice of the Lecco guesses. So with a couple of Leccos we started. The others were to try the caÑon when they would, and reliance was well placed in them; there are no finer rivermen to be found anywhere in the world.

The hunting of the day before had seemed hard going, but it was nothing to this; up and down over gullies and waist deep in the tumbling brooks at their bottom; down sheer cliffs where the tropical vegetation grew so rank that a natural ladder would be formed by the tangle of interlaced roots or hanging mora, and skirting the face of ravines clawing a hand and foothold step by step. I carried only a rifle and twice I had to pass it to a Lecco and then had no easy task left. As for the two Leccos, they carried somewhere around a fifty pound pack each and barefooted swung along among the vegetation as easily as might a couple of monkeys.

Perhaps the river went down suddenly, though it is more likely that it was the removal of the diffidence that our presence entailed; at any rate, the Leccos themselves pulled through that night and reached Ysipuri with the balsas. For thirteen days we were held in Ysipuri, the river persistently refusing to lessen its height, while a succession of rains sent down a series of heavy freshets. It was not a dull time.

A Lecco was held as a prisoner by the agent on a charge of attempted murder. I saw him as in the dusk of evening he sat in the doorway of his prison hut taking the air. His wife and small boy sat with him and kept his legs muffled in an old poncho so that the heavy iron shackles riveted upon his ankles would not show. He was a fine looking Lecco and obviously of enormous strength. It seems that another Lecco was found with his back cut to ribbons, apparently from one of the twisted bull whips of that country, and with his breast beaten in.

The victim lived and this Lecco had disappeared. Presently he was captured and held in leg shackles, waiting for some indefinite arraignment. However, while we were at the barraca he escaped, leg shackles and all, and was not heard of until, some months later, he turned up below at our camp and we became good friends. There was the gravest doubt as to his guilt, the Leccos are most peaceful, and the whole affair was the result of a drunken fiesta of mixed breeds in which not one was fit to remember anything.

In addition there was a serious fight among the Cholos, Leccos, and rubber pickers one Sunday evening in which shots were fired, a dog killed, and a couple of men wounded slightly, while numerous others nursed unseen sore heads and bruises. An appeal for help was sent over the little creek that ran through the barraca and the agent called on us; so our little party of three white men, a half dozen of the more reliable employees, and the messenger splashed back through the darkness with our guns in our hands—in addition my heart was in my mouth—and reestablished order. It was a drunken fight over the favors of an old Lecco lady, a bleared old party of some fifty coquetting years.

In one day in the main shack two snakes were killed, one in a room and the other in the kitchen, both of the deadly German-flag species. Beautiful, slender reptiles they were, with broad bands of black broken at regular intervals with narrow bands of cream and vermilion stripes, and of exceeding venom. That same night as I threw open my blanket preparatory to turning in a third German-flag made a graceful letter S on the blue wool. Alarmed he darted off through the cane walls into the next room, the store-room. Two successive rooms were emptied before the snake was at last killed. There was not a man in the place who would have gone to sleep with that snake in the place, if it took all night to get him.

Then, just as we were about to start, a young boy was brought in, half Lecco and half Cholo, the son of a man who had been murdered while working in his little yucca patch up across the Uyappi River. He had been shot from behind through the stomach and had lain helpless until he died, although this boy, from his own account, was in the hut less than a hundred feet away all the time. The boy, he was not twelve, stuck to his story that he had heard no shot, nothing out of the ordinary. The chief agent in the barraca consulted with the Lecco crews who had brought him in.

“He did it,” they responded; “make him tell.”

He was flogged with a knotted rope’s end and though he still clung to his palpably false story—and also he had been heard to make threats against the old man. After the flogging he was locked up to face another later unless he should have repented.

Up here in nicely civilized and sensitive surroundings the flogging reads like the brutality of a savage tribe. It was revolting and yet—what would you have done? The intendente would have had him flogged with a twisted bull whip—do you know what that is or what that means? A twisted thong of rawhide whose blow, drawn skillfully in the delivering, cuts a strip from the flesh; where fifty lashes properly laid on are equivalent to death. And to have turned him over to the legal authorities—the legal authorities east of the Andes! They are there in name—but their functions are a joke. The best the boy could have hoped for would have been to march wearily day after day in leg shackles and chained to his guards or to any other adult prisoner, over the snows and blizzards of the high passes and then to rot dully in a Bolivian jail. Probably he could not have undergone the rigors of the march, and lucky for him if he could not.

As it was, he had the benefit of a civilized doubt and received only what the sentiment of his own people demanded. And he was not too old but what he could profit by it. By strict adherence to legalized forms, or those of them that would have been applied, he would have been killed by slow, indifferent inches.

At last the river went down enough and we were off. We poled steadily along through an unending series of rapids, crossing from one side to the other through caÑons and losing in the crossing all and more of the hard won ground. In one place in three hours we did not gain one hundred yards. And then came the rains again.

We barely made the farther side of the Uyappi when the river laid siege. It rose twelve feet in the night and held us three days in a little hut at the junction of the two rivers, raining for two of them. The agent at Ysipuri had joined with us as he too was going out on business, and his balseros combined with ours made a very respectable expedition. The tiny hut was built by one man for himself and into it each night crowded some twenty Indians. They held a dance, a queer, shuffling trot with dull, droning mumbles that passed among the Leccos as song, one night and the next day they spent in celebrating the birthday of one of the crew. Cane platforms were built in the hut until there were three floors, or tiers, to the eaves and on these we all crowded sociably.

Their shy diffidence gave way, they laughed and joked openly and with a childish innocence over any man being able to see out of glasses. They asked me questions of my home, my tribe, and my rivers, but the answers were Greek to them. They had no means of knowing the outside world. They answered my questions cheerfully, through an interpreter each way, of course. They taught me to count in the Lecco tongue, the Riki-riki as they call their dialect: