Apart from the industries already dealt with, the occupations of the South American Indians of these parts consist in agricultural pursuits, hunting, fishing, making war, and holding festival. They are not a pastoral people and have no cattle; even the domestic pig is unknown, fowls are never seen, and dogs only exist in their wild state in the forest. There they are numerous enough, dun in colour, with ears erect. These Indians do not keep or train them, though some of the tribes away from this district have hunting dogs.[117]

The greater part of the agricultural work falls, as has been seen, to the lot of the women, though the preliminaries—the heavier work of clearing, cutting, and breaking up the untouched soil—are undertaken by the men. Each tribal house stands in the midst of a small clearing. In front is the big dancing ground, for though the dancing proper takes place inside the maloka, this outer dance clearing is used for the purpose of assembly, and for effective entries. Near by are the cultivated plots that belong to the chief. The Indian with his own private lodging in the bush, or any married Indian,—and all marry when they come to man’s estate—has his special plantation patch by his country-house, if he has one, somewhere in the neighbourhood of the tribal house if he is content with only his quarters therein. But no plantations are made actually surrounding the maloka; they are perhaps half a mile away, for, as a rule, the house stands alone. Sometimes a man’s plantation will be two days’ journey from the house of assembly, in which case a “country-house” is a necessity. The tribal plantations belong to the chief, as he, having all the unattached women, is better able to cultivate them.

To prepare the plots of ground the smaller trees are felled, the larger ones are burnt. The stumps of trees, cut about four feet above the ground, decay with some rapidity, and, directly the branches are dry enough to burn, fire is brought out and the clearing made into a gigantic bonfire, or rather series of bonfires, for the always damp wood will never do more than smoulder, but it is sufficient to destroy the brushwood and the tangle of creeping plants. There is then a savannah, a clearing such as is shown in the illustration (Plate XXVI.), a wilderness of charred posts and vegetable ashes which make most excellent manure. The ground is then broken up with wooden clubs, and therewith the men’s labour is at an end.[118] Henceforward their women take charge of the plantation—ike the Witoto call it before it is planted; it is akpho after planting.

The Indian plantation is no orderly market-garden. To begin with, the women have nothing but the roughest wooden implement, a wedge-shaped stake, with which to dig, and rake, and hoe. The ground is always uneven and broken; the charred remnants of the original vegetation are left to crumble beside the young growth, and the cultivated seedlings have to struggle for space and air with quick-growing wild things, forest growths and creepers that encroach on every side, and would speedily reclaim any cleared portions of the unconquerable bush were it not for the incessant diligence of the women. They go there daily straight from the morning bath, and keep up a constant chattering as they plant the cuttings of manioc, or tend to the pine-apples and the sugar-cane, while the men take to their canoes, or go a-hunting in the bush in company. I have never seen single Indians hunting or walking in the forest. For obvious reasons they never venture far afield by themselves, or even in very small parties.

Sowing is done during the rainy season, but beyond the fact that things then grow faster than when it is comparatively drier, there is no especial harvest time. Crops grow and ripen all the year round. The Indians are not grain-growing people. Rice is unknown,[119] and the only grain that is sown at all is maize. This, though much cultivated by the Kuretu, and by tribes on the Tikie, is not grown in any quantity by Indians south of the Japura. What there may be is very small. Coca, manioc, and tobacco are the most universally cultivated. The Witoto grow a little sugar-cane and it is occasionally found growing wild, but in very few places. Originally, I imagine, it was imported. The Indians do not use it for sugar, as sweet things do not seem to appeal to their palates, and “beer” is unknown. Half-wild pumpkins and plantains are to be found in most plantations; pines,[120] bananas, yams, papaws, sweet potatoes, and mangoes are found cultivated more or less. The yellow fruit of the guaranÁ is prized by these Indians, especially the Boro, and is used here by them in the preparation of a stimulating drink[121] similar to that in use on the Rio Negro.[122] The wild cacao,[123] though not common, is seen about here, but the tribes do not cultivate it. Manioc, which is also known as cassava,[124] is a plant that grows throughout the tropical regions of America, and in the West Indies. It is known also in Africa, and has been introduced by the white man into some of the Pacific Islands.

The manioc is planted by the women about July or August, and according to Indian belief manioc can only be propagated by replanting slips of the old growth after it has been lifted up and the tuberous root removed. As it cannot reproduce itself in this fashion in its wild state, presumably it will grow from young tubers, or seed, but, according to Bates, it is not found wild in the Amazon basin.[125] The ground is hoed by the women, and scraped into rough furrows. Cuttings of the manioc plant are set in these in little holes. Eight months after planting the root is ready for use. It is large, fleshy, and very heavy for its bulk, each tuber weighing from half a pound to two or three pounds, and even more. It has been said of the variety known as the great manioc that a root will weigh as much as forty-eight pounds.[126] The ground will only carry two crops, so a fresh patch must be broken up after the second harvest. Indians will, however, always return to plantations no longer in use, on account of the different palm fruits which continue to grow wild there after they have once been cultivated; but the disused plots will never be tilled again for plantation, they are only visited for this purpose of securing the fruit.

Throughout the forest peppers are very common and plentiful. Some of the bushes grow to a height of ten feet. There are many varieties,[127] and peppers are grown, or allowed to grow, in patches on all the plantations.

I have said that the women are the agriculturalists and the cooks; nor do I know of any exception to this rule, for though coca and tobacco are tabu to all women, and their preparation is forbidden to the sex, yet the women grow the tobacco in the plantations, gather the leaf, and dry it in the sun. But the actual making of the black liquid is done by the men alone, and only men prepare the coca for use. Tobacco is not an article of barter among these tribes, as all grow it, and its preparation is no secret to any of the tribesmen. Cultivated coca is sown when the rains begin. The young seedlings need both care and attention.[128] It is eighteen months before the slender shrub will yield any harvest, though once grown the supply will continue for three or four decades. The shrub grows to some five or six feet high, into small trees in fact, with lichen-encrusted trunks. Both the common kind and a smaller-leaved variety[129] grow wild in these regions.

Men also must climb the trees to gather such fruits as the papaw and the seeds of the cokerite or the peach palms. Indians climb in what is practically a universal method, with a circling rope and a ring.[130] Their usual way is to secure the legs together about the ankles with a strip of the inner bark of a tree, and then, with arms and feet free, to use a bigger loop adjusted round the tree and hips of the climber for purchase power. For short climbs they will dispense with the bigger loop. Sometimes palm-frond is made into a ring for the toes, but with the forest Indians these are oftener left free to allow of prehensile action. With this simple attachment, made perhaps only of twisted liana, the native will work his way to a perilous height up the barest of tree trunks.[131]

As a woodsman the Indian is so far in advance of the European traveller as to make all comparison futile.[132] An Indian in the bush is wonderful. From his earliest days he has been taught to watch and note. I have known an Indian stop and tell me that when the sun was in a certain position, that is to say half an hour previously, seven Indians passed that way carrying a tapir, which had been killed when the sun was there—indicating another position. It was killed a long distance away, and the bag must have been a tapir on account of the evident weight. He took up a leaf on which was a spot of blood, coagulated. He pointed to tracks on the ground, to prove the question of numbers and distance. The men who passed were weary, he knew it by the way their toes had dropped on the ground. The breaking of a twig, the exudation of sap, is enough of a guide for the Indian to judge when the last passer-by came that way. I have been told it was within ten minutes, and shown a leaf. It had begun to rain ten minutes before, and the leaf, overturned by a passing foot, was wet upon both sides. A glance will suffice for an estimate of what animals passed, and when. By some intuitive perception, moreover, he will deduce in a moment whither the game has gone, and will make, not along its trail, but more directly for it. Yet close and accurate as his observation invariably is, when the Indian sportsman begins a tale of the chase it is exaggerated beyond the wildest dreams and liveliest imaginings of the most gifted sporting Munchausen among ourselves.

When an Indian is path-finding he judges both time and distance by the sun. If not attacked by an enemy, he will win his way home from anywhere, always at a jog-trot, and will probably do his fifty miles on nothing more sustaining than coca. A sense of locality is born in him, and from childhood upwards this is trained and developed by continued and varied experiences. To be able to judge by the sky, by the weathered side of trees, by the flight of birds, or the run of animals—above all to have a sense that is greater than all judgment—is a matter of life or death not once but continually. The inept are the unfit, and the forest will show them no mercy.

This minuteness and accuracy of observation comes into play again when the Indian is hunting. Death to his quarry from the tiny poisoned dart of the blow-pipe is certain, but not absolutely instantaneous. He also will shoot birds with a blunt-headed arrow that stuns but does no damage to the plumage. The shock appears to kill the bird. Hit with dart or arrow they may flutter a little distance before they fall. I have watched an Indian scores of times when hunting game shoot bird after bird in a tree, mark down where each fell, and eventually never fail to account for every one despite the density of the surrounding bush. Hardly a traveller but has noted and wondered at the same thing.

Blow-pipes are only carried by the Indians when hunting. They are weapons of the chase, not of war. Most of the tribes manufacture their own, but the Bara, who neither hunt nor fish, get theirs solely by barter from other tribes. The blow-pipe—obidiake of the Witoto, dodike of the Boro—made by these tribes is a heavier weapon than those made by tribes farther north.[133] It is constructed, like those of all tribes south of the Japura, in two sections, bound together with great nicety, and has invariably a mouthpiece made of vegetable ivory or a similar wood that fits round inside the mouth. These blow-pipes are from eight to fourteen feet long, with a quarter-inch tube, the outer mouthpiece being an inch and a half. They are sometimes made from reeds[134] by the Boro and Andoke, and I have seen small Boro boys with a hollow reed pipe, about half the ordinary length. This was merely a plaything. These are the simplest form of blow-pipe, and would appear to be the original type. Though I imagine reeds are always obtainable, for the flora did not seem to vary, as a rule the wood of the chonta palm is employed.[135] On the north of the Japura, the tribes, I believe, mostly make their blow-pipes of palm stems.[136] Two long strips of this wood are slit off by notching and levering with a stone axe, as already described. The chonta poles are trimmed, rubbed, and grooved with sand and a paca-tooth tool till they form the corresponding halves of a tube, which must fit most exactly. All this entails very careful and tedious work, so it is fortunate that time to an Indian is of no account. These half tubes are then fastened together and the bore polished with what is practically sand-paper. A string is dipped in some gummy substance, and then covered with sand. When dry, a fine polish is secured with this by friction. The blow-pipe is next bound from end to end with fibre-string, or narrow strips of pliant bark.[137] The whole pipe is then coated with some resinous gum, or wax.[138] A small bone is fixed about twelve inches from the mouthpiece, and this acts as a sight. Such a tube will send an arrow a distance of from forty to one hundred and fifty feet, and an expert hunter shoots the smallest birds at twenty yards. The chonta-wood pipe is the heaviest and most lasting, but I do not know if it carries farthest. The Indians’ accuracy of aim is extraordinary. The arrows, or darts, are about nine inches long, no thicker than a small match, and are tufted with fluffy down from the seed vessels of the silk-cotton tree,[139] the tuft being of a size to fit exactly into the bore of the pipe. The arrows are made of the leaf-stem spines of the Patawa palm.[140] They are carried in a quiver of bamboo lined with dried grass or fine rushes that protect the delicate darts. The poisoned points are partly cut through so that they break off in the wound. Once a bird or animal is hit the poison kills them very speedily. The silk-cotton for tipping the arrow is carried in a gourd that is attached to the arrow quiver with strips of cane, and to it is also tied the jawbone of the pirai fish, which is used as a file for the points of the darts. When the arrow is ejected from the blow-pipe there is a slight noise, like a child’s pop-gun, but it is not enough to scare the game.[141]

Indians are no more provident as hunters than as housekeepers. When game is plentiful they will kill and eat, kill recklessly, and eat to repletion. But game is not always plentiful. It may abound to-day and all be gone to-morrow. Even parrots and peccary will fail at times. Birds and beasts wander, and though the hunter can often judge of direction through knowledge of their habits, and—what in this instance probably governs them—which fruits are ripest and where most abundantly to be found, this will not altogether account for the fluctuations in the supply of game. It must also be remembered that in this respect the bush varies greatly, and even where animal life is not scarce it is apt to become so on the advent of man. Even apart from the disturbance caused by the hunter, game in the vicinity of any human settlement tends to disappear. The hunter must go farther and farther afield.

The Indian is an expert trapper. His traps though simple are ingeniously contrived, and seldom fail to act. An empty bag is due more frequently to absence of game than to the inadequate plan of the trap. Monkeys are caught with a running-noose loop snare made of liana, which is adjusted carefully along a fruit-bearing branch of a tree. Any monkey attempting to reach the fruit strangles itself in the noose, exactly as a rabbit does in the wire of an English poacher.

A shallow pan of water is the Indian bait for ground vermin. Round it they dig a ring of holes, about a foot across, on which are lightly spread grass and leaves. Rats, mice, frogs, and small snakes venturing to drink fall through into the holes that are deep enough to hold them captive till the trapper comes round and secures his catch. For larger animals the hunters dig a line of pits, with a sharpened stake fixed upright at the bottom of each. The game, corralled and driven over these, falls in through the sticks and leaves that hide the opening, and is impaled on the stake. The Karahone arm their pits with poisoned arrows, and dig a succession of these death-traps down a forest avenue.[142] A more complex contrivance is made with carefully poised logs. This description of trap is set in a forest run, the brushwood on either side is twisted and plaited into a rough fence, and the trap erected in the opening. The slightest pressure on the footboard releases the weight, and brings the heavy trunk down with a crash on the intruder. A trap of this kind will catch anything from a squirrel to a jaguar.

A tapir is sometimes killed with a throwing javelin, which the Indians use with much dexterity, though when they throw anything they do it with an over-arm action, with a jerk as a girl would. Their skill with these javelins is not surprising when one remembers that they hunt two or three days a week from boyhood, and so are continually throwing them at animals. The javelin is a light spear with a poisoned palm spine at the point. A man carries seven of these in his hand, and seven more in reserve in a bamboo case—fourteen in all. These javelins are about six feet long, and an Indian can throw one a distance of thirty yards. Sometimes only five are carried in the hand, but seven is the more usual number. Though long they are very thin and light. The haft is usually made of chonta, or similar hard straight-grained woods. A spine is always fixed in the point, which is filed almost through so that it will break off in the body of the wounded animal. These spines are poisoned with animal putrefying poison. Of the heavier spears more anon.

Koch-GrÜnberg noted that tribes on the Tikie have well-defined and recognised hunting and fishing rights, but that when travelling any such rights are avoided. This is common to all Indians. They will even erect barriers in the bush and on the rivers, and they keep strictly to their own localities, otherwise quarrels would arise and war be the upshot.

The sporting proclivities of the tribes vary considerably. The Tukana are fishers, but not hunters. The Boro, on the other hand, though great hunters do not fish, at least I do not remember ever having been given fish in a Boro house. Certainly they are not such fishermen as the Witoto or the Okaina, who are the most skilful of all the fishing tribes.

Fish are taken with hook and line, in nets and traps, by poisoning the water, by spearing, and by shooting with bows and arrows. For fish-hooks these tribes have hardly anything but those that they contrive for themselves from wood, bone, or spines, and civilised metal hooks are greatly sought after by all of them. Napo Indians make hooks of bone.[143] The Witoto fakwasi is a fish-hook made of wood or palm spine. A spine is fastened to a fine stick, and this is baited with grubs, and used with a fibre line, or with a pihekoa, a rod and a line. Fish are caught to some extent with bait and laid lines.

Hand nets are made of chambiri palm-fibre in the same way that hammocks are made, but with a finer mesh; larger ones are constructed by fixing fences of wattle across the stream before the rivers rise. In the dry season the Witoto use nets to drag the pools in the river-bed. They also catch fish with baited nets, the bait being larvÆ, or some fruit attractive to fish, such as that of the setico, or the drupes of certain laurels. In the dry season they bale out the water from the shallower pools with gourds till the fish can be captured by hand.

Some of the fish traps are most cleverly designed. There is one known on the Uaupes as the matapi, which is simply a basket open at one end, but without sufficient space for fish of any size to turn round in. As fish are not able to swim backwards without the room to turn they cannot escape once in the trap. On the Napo the Indians spear fish most expertly, but other Indians depend largely on these and similar traps for their supply.

Fish are speared with a wooden trident or, rather, caught between its prongs, or stabbed with a bamboo spear that has a double-edged blade. Some of the civilised Indians of the lower Amazons have harpoons with detachable heads that they use for hunting the manatee, or river dolphin, but, in these upper waters, dolphins, if seen,—and that is rarely—are speared with tridents; the Indians have no harpoons, and the only thing that resembles a detachable head is the partly filed-through javelin. The Menimehe shoot fish with the bow and arrow.

By far the most wholesale and general way in which fish are obtained is through the use of poison.[144] The Indians procure this from the root of an evergreen bush, the babasco,[145] which they pound very fine. They dam the stream with a wattle fencing and then throw the mashed babasco in above this fish weir. The fish frequently jump out of the water, gasping as though they were being strangled, and the Indians secure those distressed fish in outspread palm leaves. Sometimes the dead fish drop down into a net, spread beside the dam to catch them; or the Indian fisherman will simply spear them when they are sufficiently narcotised. Dead fish will be found floating in the vicinity many hours afterwards. The Napo Indians put the crushed babasco in a basket and stir the water with this below the dam—so that the fish cannot escape upstream.[146] Witoto and other Issa-Japura tribes merely throw the roots into the stream, and the dam is made more to prevent the dead fish being washed away than to stop the live ones escaping. The poison works almost instantaneously on the smaller fish. The Indians on the Tapajos make use of a poisonous liana called timbo.[147] Its action is similar though not so immediate as that of the babasco root, and consequently it is of little use in quick-flowing waters. Neither babasco nor timbo affect the fish injuriously for human food.