Across the Andes / A Tale of Wandering Days Among the Mountains of Bolivia and the Jungles of the Upper Amazon

CHAPTER XXIV THROUGH THE RUBBER COUNTRY

As we tied up, the next day, I saw the crew quietly sneaking their bows and arrows and feeble shot-guns out of the batalon. I stopped them, and, buckling on my cartridge-belt, prepared to go along. We all went, though it was a very hopeless party of Tacanas; but my luck had turned. Not a hundred yards from the bank we ran into a troop of six big, black spider-monkeys, and I got the entire troop; only one needed a second shot. It was pure luck, for shooting these monkeys is virtually wing-shooting with a rifle. They dash over their arboreal paths faster than a Tacana can follow them on the ground, and one’s only chance is when they pause to swing from one branch to the next. Never again was I able to approach the record of that morning, but after that the Tacanas always left their own weapons in the batalon when we hunted for the larder.

They could pick up game-signs as they paddled, and read the indications of animal life as though it were writ large in the silent forests. When we went ashore, they would string out in a long, silent line of skirmishers, and presently there would come the grunting coo of a monkey, the scream of a parrot, or some long-drawn animal-call. The big Tacana helmsman, who kept near me, would say, “There are three spider-monkeys over there, patrÓn,” or perhaps a red roarer monkey, whose bellowing love-song at sunrise and sunset carries through the still air for miles. Always it was as the Tacana said. The line of Tacanas could fairly talk with one another in an animal language that did not alarm the forest and would deceive any but a Tacana ear.

Sometimes there would be a wild hog, sometimes wild turkey, or a big, black bird very much larger and more delicious in flavor; but it was the monkey that was the standard diet for many days. With seventeen able-bodied appetites in the outfit, the hunt was a necessity, and monkey the most accessible game. If there ever seemed to be a trifle too much, the Tacana crew would rouse themselves during the night and have additional feasts, until by dawn the supply was gone. On sand-bars they would forage for turtle-eggs, and every day they usually collected a bushel or two of these. But it was monkey that furnished them with the greatest delicacy and the keenest pleasure in the hunt.

BUT IT WAS MONKEY THAT FURNISHED THEM WITH THE GREATEST DELICACY.

Though monkey-shooting was necessary and there was for the moment, the thrill of skilful shooting, yet the element of pathos dominated. A clean shot stirs no thought, but to wound first, as must happen in many cases, gives a queer little clutch at the heartstrings that can never be shaken off. The little monkey, the frightened, hopeless agony of death stamped on its tiny, grotesque features, dabbles aimlessly with little twigs and leaves, stuffing them at the wound; sometimes it feebly tries to get back among the branches that make his world, and, as you approach, there is never any savage, snarling stand where he meets extinction with the cornered heroism that seems for the moment to balance the scene. Instead, he pleads with failing gestures of forlorn propitiation, and with hoarse, cooing little noises, for the respite that would be far less merciful than the coup de grÁce.

Never will I forget one; it was a question of seconds only and as he lay there on the ground he waved the little hands at me as if to motion me back, he turned the little twisted face away with an appealing, deprecating coo from which, in this supreme moment, even terror was subdued. I have watched men on the field of battle with the death sickness upon them and where, even under these surroundings, while a spirit is struggling into the great mystery there comes the inevitable awe that lingers like a vision in the recollection.

That was human. Yet even here, before this sprawling, almost human figure, the feeble gesture, and the soft, caressing coo of final request I felt an emotion rising with a solemn dignity; it was life itself that was passing from the pathetic little body. I held back the Tacana who rushed up and the picture is still vivid of the flickering sunlight in the jungle forest, a few fallen leaves flecked with a mortal red, while a full grown white man and an Indian stood back silently in response to the fading appeal of a little, dying monkey.

For the daily hunt the canoe was moored where the jungle met the river, but every evening at early sunset the camp was made at the edge of some broad, sandy playa as far from the forest as possible. Long before camping the Tacanas had kept a shrewd lookout for recent signs of savages, and after chattering among themselves would indicate a playa that seemed proper and secure. The savages, primitive and nomadic, scarcely more than animals, offered no menace by daylight, but in the darkness lies their opportunity. With instinctive adroitness they can crawl through the jungle without a sound and be in the midst of a camp before it is awakened; but in the open spaces they are timid. They will line up fifty yards away and open with an ineffective volley of screeches and arrows.

OFTEN WE PASSED THE LITTLE SHELTER OF PALM LEAVES.

Secure in this custom, the Tacanas set no watch, and we all slept peacefully depending on any savages that might come to furnish the alarm for their own attack. Though signs of them were all about, we were never molested. Often we passed a shelter of palm-leaves by the shore that had been used by some party that had come down to the river to fish; for only in the interior and on the smaller and absolutely virgin rivers and tributaries did they have their headquarters. Sometimes there would be a tiny dugout against the bank, and their camp-fire would send up a thin, blue column of smoke against the purple jungle shadows. The Tacana helmsman would throw the canoe beyond arrow-range, while the crew would cease paddling and call “Ai-i! ai-i!” across the river, the recognized call of amity. Sometimes there would be the glimpse of a timid, naked figure darting from one shadow to the next, a head peeping from behind a tree, and perhaps a wailing “Ai-i! ai-i!” in response, but rarely more.

Once we came upon a little party working their way in a dugout against the current under the bank. The Tacanas looked to their arrows and put fresh percussion-caps on their shot-guns, but the instant the savages spied us they scuttled up the bank and remained in its shadows till we drifted past.

Day after day passed in the slow monotony of routine. The low, flat country never varied; the hot, brazen glare of the Beni’s muddy current rambled in a twisted aimless course ever to the eastward. Always at the dawn the viscocha, or hard biscuit, was soaked to edibility in hot tea, and then we started in the soft, cool stirring of early sunrise. Slowly the cool breeze disappeared, the chatter of the parrots died away, the water fowl aligned themselves in motionless, drying groups, incurious and fearless as we paddled past their sand-bars and, like the opening door of a furnace, there came the fierce heat of the tropic day. The muddy river gave no hint of its depth or channel, and sometimes the canoe would run aground and the Tacanas would tumble overboard, laughing and splashing, to ease her off and then line out, with wide intervals, as skirmishers, to locate a channel that would pass us through the maze of submerged sand-bars. Not a thought was given to the alligators that infested the river, and the Tacana who located the channel would swim carelessly about with huge enjoyment. Again would come the steady splashing of paddles and the double line of rhythmic, swaying Tacana backs; then at noon the daily hunt and the drowsy resting in the forest shade while the Tacana girls busied themselves with the breakfast where a pig, a capibarra or a row of monkeys were slowly roasting on the hot coals.

A Night Camp on the Rio Beni on the Way Out

Rapidly the afternoon wears away until cooler, more mellow glow announces the approaching sunset and then the chatter among the Tacanas as they discuss the signs for the night’s camp. The little tolditas, the mosquito nettings, would sway from their poles in the gentle breeze, a quick supper would evolve from the remains of the noon breakfast and be followed by the issue of the cane-sugar alcohol. Sometimes after dark the Tacanas would paint their faces in streaks with the berries foraged at noon, and grimace and hop about the glowing embers of the fire with shrieks of joy. Any odd grimace or ridiculous streaking caused a riotous outburst, for their minds were as simple as infants’. Once—and it gave them delirious pleasure for a whole night—they set fire to an island of charo, the cane from which the walls of their shacks are made, and all through the darkness it crackled and burst in little explosions, as though a nervous picket-line were protecting our flank.

IT WAS ONLY THE SHACK OF A LONELY RUBBER PICKER.

Slowly the days passed, and it was with the most cheerful emotions that we at last picked up the first signs of the frontier toward which we were working. It was only the shack of a lonely rubber-picker, and the poorly made hut was bare to the verge of destitution. Its whole outfit was scarcely more than that of one of the Tacana crew; there was a cheap shot-gun, some powder and ball, yet the bow and arrows were his hunting mainstay to save the expensive use of the other. Near by there was an uncultivated patch of rice, corn, a few yuccas, bananas, and some tobacco-plants. Under the cane bunk was a pair of primitive rubber shoes, made of the pure rubber mixed with a little gunpowder, and smoked on a block of wood roughly hewn to the shape of a foot. I often saw these curious rubber shoes, which apparently can serve no purpose with their callous-footed wearers except that of stylish ornament. In one corner were a few, brown bolachos of rubber, which would be valued at twelve or fifteen hundred dollars in the market, but for which the picker would receive from his patrÓn not enough to free him from debt for his past and future supplies meager as they are.

As we tied up to the bank, he and a boy helper had just gathered the rubber sap and were busy smoking it. A huge tin basin, a giant counterpart of the tin basin that sits on the wash bench outside every American farm-house, was half full of a white fluid that looked for all the world like a rather chalky milk; before it, in a little pit, was a tin arrangement something like a milk can with an open top out of which poured a thin, blue, hot smoke; and above the pit was a frame on which rested a round stick that held a globular mass of yellowish rubber previously smoked and cured. The round stick was rolled over the basin, a cupful of the new rubber was ladled over the mass as it was rolled back into the smoke, and there held and manipulated until the whole surface was thoroughly smoked. In the thin, blue smoke it at once turned a pale yellow.

Layer by layer the bolacho is built up with each day’s gathering of sap, and months after, when it is cut open and graded, the history may be read in the successive layers; this day’s sap was gathered in the rain, the paler, sourer color showing that water had trickled down the bark and into the little cups; the dirt and tiny chips show that this day was windy; and there in the darker oxidization of the layer, is revealed the fact of a Sunday, a fiesta or drunken rest before the succeeding layer was added.

IN THE THIN BLUE SMOKE IT AT ONCE TURNED A PALE YELLOW.

Sometimes as the batalon of the patrÓn makes its regular trip for collection, nothing will be found but a gummy residue of burned rubber, a rectangle of black ashes where the hut had been, and near by broken and mutilated remains of the picker; for the feeble trade-gun is only one degree better than the enemies with which the rubber-picker has to contend. In such an event the patrÓn curses the savages and, when these losses become too frequent, may return on a punitive expedition; for labor is scarce in these remote districts, and the loss is economic, not sentimental.

JUSTICE IS ADMINISTERED ACCORDING TO THE STANDARDS OF HIS SUBMISSIVE DOMAIN.

Farther down the river is the barraca of the patrÓn, a large clearing in the forest back from the bank of the river. Here survives feudalism, and justice is administered according to the rough standards of his submissive domain. Somewhere you will find the stocks, with the rows of leg-holes meeting in a pair of great mahogany beams. A pile of chain-and-bar leg-irons lie in a near-by corner, and a twisted bull-hide whip hanging from the thatch above. In an open, unguarded shed beyond was piled thirty thousand dollars’ worth of rubber,—it is only a fraction of the crop,—awaiting shipment, and in the early moonlight we sat with the patrÓn himself, a bare-footed, cotton-dressed overlord who was scarcely distinguishable from his own debt-slaves. And he, in his turn, was in almost hopeless debt to the commission-houses, who hold him by their yearly advances in trade.

Rarely now did the tolditas swing from their poles in a night camp on a playa; on down the river it became a series of visits—sometimes the daily voyage was longer in the darkness—but vigilance was now no longer needed in choosing a camp, and every night the Tacanas carried our outfit up the bank, where we slept serenely in a rubber-shed. Coffee reappeared, and the Indian wife of the picker or patrÓn served it at once on our arrival, and then rolled cigarettes from home-grown tobacco. Rubber was the talk—rubber and savages. There was no outside world, and I was a curiosity. The Brazilian boundary was yet a month’s journey with the current to the east, and Rurrenabaque, against the stream, was six weeks of hard travel to the westward. To them La Paz was a vague name, the metropolis of the world, perhaps, if their primitive existence has ever stirred to the idea of a metropolis.

Rubber and savages made their universe! Were the savages bad coming down? Well—they are bad this year down the river farther—a picker was killed last week only a half day’s march from the river. One of his men shot another the other day among the cattle, but two more got away! What will be the price of rubber? The last known price is already three months old in the quotations in Manaos. Money, real money, it was useless. Never had a gold coin looked so feeble and futile as on this river, where merchandise was needed. I bought a big rubber sheet and a rubber bag, and I paid a box of cartridges, a package of pencils, and a fountain-pen such as are peddled on the streets of New York; I was supposed to have the worst of the bargain!

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