TWENTY-THREE DAYS AGAINST THE CURRENT
The next day the river was harder and steeper and the banks offered more
difficulties either for poling or dragging. From one side to the other
we shifted, losing hundreds of yards in crossing as we swept down with
the muddy current. And yet these crossings were never made until the
last moment when the poles could find no bottom and the steep bank came
down like a cliff into from fifteen to fifty feet of water. The little
rapids that were nothing more than riffles coming down--that is, in
comparison with the real cañons and rapids--were slowly poled and
dragged through with double crews, inch by inch around some jutting,
strategic rocky point and into the upstream eddy beyond. Boils of water
burst from under the balsas until you balanced with the Leccos on the
straining raft like rope dancers on the same strand.
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:
One--Bera
Two--Toi
Three--Tsai
Four--Dirai
Five--Bercha
Six--Ber-pachmo
Seven--Toi-pachmo
Eight--Tsai-pachmo
Nine--Ber-pela
Ten--Ber-beuncay
Eleven--Beri-beuncay-ber-hotai
Twelve--Beri-beuncay-toi-hotai, etc., etc., etc.
Twenty is simply Toi-bencai and beyond this few Leccos could go with
certainty, while some were at sea even up to this point. Yet they had no
difficulty in actual counting; it was simply over names for the higher
numbers that they stumbled.
Once more we began the poling and dragging. This stretch of the river
had given us no concern coming down, yet it was one of the hardest we
encountered on the long pull up. One rock that jutted from the shore
took my balsa an hour and a half to pass. Time and time again the vine
parted and my Lecco and I were swept down with the current and around in
the eddies, to repeat the process after we had paddled ashore and tried
again.
In another place we had to work the balsa up into the very spray from a
cataract only four feet high, but over which the river poured in a
thunderous volume, then cast loose with one mighty shove, and paddle for
the opposite bank, while in the meantime the balsa was being tossed in
the bursting boils of water at the surface or spun and dragged like a
chip by the whirlpools that floated with the current. Three times this
swept my balsa half a mile below--only one balsa made the crossing at
the first try--and it looked more than once as though we would be upset
for an uncertain swim.
That night we made camp at Tiaponti. Here a new cane shack had just had
the triumphant finish to a palm thatch roof and everyone in that little
finca was already drunk. From somewhere we got one precious chicken for
ourselves and the Lecco crews laid down to sleep, scarcely bothering the
cook; they were so exhausted. It was the only time I ever saw any of
them decline the opportunity for one of these festal drunks.
Early the next morning we started. One more day that was a little easier
and for hours we poled upstream against a gentle current along the bank
and picked wild guayavas from the overhanging trees. It is a delicious
fruit--although never since have I been able to find its kind, even in
the cultivated tropics. This wild guayava looked somewhat like a small,
gnarled quince on the outside; on the inside it had a most delicate pink
pulp beyond a little rind, a delicious pulp that combined the melting
flavor of the strawberry with the texture and modifications of a
superior watermelon. It was good.
That night we landed in Guanai,--twenty-three days of baffled progress
against the same river and the same current that had flicked us down
from this same Guanai in two days.