OPENING UP THE JUNGLE
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.
On a grass matting was an old woman, a very old woman, his mother, the
cacique explained. She was past all intelligence and in the last stages
of senile dissolution; huddled up in a corner, she murmured and clucked
to herself, meanwhile playing aimlessly with an empty pot and a few bits
of grass. The dulled eyes gave no signs of interest or understanding
when the old man spoke to her; she suggested more an animal, an aimless,
warped little monkey rather than a human being.
A few months later she died of old age and the old cacique, her son,
came with her body wrapped in a frayed matting and borrowed a pick to
dig a grave. He obviously was deeply grieved in the subterranean Indian
way, and yet there was not the slightest vestige of ceremonial or belief
connected with her death. She was dead, a hole in the ground was
necessary, and there alone and by himself and full of grief the old man
dug it in the remote jungle without any more curiosity in death or
religious expression than he would have felt in digging a post-hole for
a new hut.
We bought a few platanos and yuccas from this place and made our
breakfast there. Two hours after leaving a freshet from the rains in the
mountains ahead suddenly made itself felt and we were forced to camp
till it went down a little. We did not move until the next morning.