OFF ACROSS THE CONTINENT IN A BATALON
A clumsy cart, with its two wheels cross-cut from a single mahogany log,
and slowly dragged by a pair of mud covered oxen, crawled across the
open space before the settlement that had been left, after the Spanish
custom, in crude reminder of a plaza. Under the midday tropic sun the
quivering heat-waves boiled up from the baking ground and through them
the straggling line of high-peaked, palm-thatched, cane houses shimmered
in the glare. Under the torrent of heat the jungle sounds were silenced,
and only in the distance, from the river's edge, came the splashing and
clatter of the Tacana woman, with the happy shrieks of the sun-proof,
naked babies.
The wooden axles of the cart cried aloud for grease as a ragged Tacana
prodded the lumbering oxen; on the raw hides in the cart lay a tiny sack
of mail and beside it the tawny mottlings of a fresh stripped jaguar
skin. The cart stopped before the cane house of the intendente and that
functionary rolled lazily from his hammock and signed a paper; the
half-breed roused himself from the corrugated floor of split palm logs,
and disappeared in the jungle paths of the scattered settlement to
gather his crew, and by that I knew that at last my time for embarking
on the muddy, swirling current of the Rio Beni had arrived.
Eight hundred miles back, through cañon and mountain torrent, over the
giant passes of the inner Andes, lay the Bolivian capital of La Paz, the
last civilization from the Pacific shore. Two thousand miles to the
eastward from this little frontier nucleus of Rurrenabaque lay the
civilization that groped its way westward from the Atlantic, while
between were long reaches of desolate rivers, and primitive jungle.
The few whites--refugee mostly; two, I knew, had a price on their heads
on the other side of the Andes--popped out of their cane shacks to see
me off. Even in these remote parts, where distance is counted in so many
days' travel, the long river-trail to the Atlantic is reckoned out of
the ordinary. My big canoe would take me only to the Falls of the
Madeira, and yet it would be three months before the crew would return
to Rurrenabaque on their slow trip against the current.
My Rurrenabaque host, a dried-up little Englishman who had packed alone
on foot over the high passes to this interior, and whose reckless nerve
will pass into ultimate legend, flapped about in half-slippered feet as
he supervised the loading of my baggage on the _batalon_ that was
sluggishly swinging to its vine moorings in the current. His Cholo wife
with her flaring skirts, high-heeled, fancy shoes, and pink stockings,
fluttered amiably about, while a green macaw and its inseparable
companion, a big, gaudy blue-and-yellow macaw, crawled affectionately
over her shoulders. Such idle Tacanas, Mojos, or Leccos who incautiously
and curiously approached were pounced upon by my host, whose reckless
Spanish was somehow intelligible and efficacious. He impressed a little
Tacana man to carry my cartridge-belt.
"Wot ho, _chico_, 'ere you are, grab 'old! Wot ho, _sokker el_ rifle _y
los balas_, 'urry hup--_pronto_, _de prisa_, _vamonos_!" And the naked
little Tacana baby--for he was scarcely more than that--trotted proudly
along under the little load. "Abaht t' leave us, wot ho, yus! Goin'
'ome--I'm goin' 'ome myself, next year."
Next year! Wherever you go, however far off the main traveled trails you
may drift even into those unmapped spaces where the law is carried in a
holster and buckled on the hip, you will find them, American or English,
those who are scattered on the fringe of the world--and always they are
going home, and always next year! Home! Their home is where they are;
their lives, their affections, and the loyal little interests that
intertwine and make the home are all about them. And they realize it
only vaguely, when they have finally set a date for departure and it
begins to loom in the future like approaching disaster in the multitude
of little separations. Like my friend they may be
_compadre_--godfather--to half the river; little disputes are laid away
unto the day of their arrival, and their word is righteousness to the
simple Indian mind; in the land where there is no law they are ready in
emergencies to carry justice in the breech of a rifle; they have earned
the trust of the weaker, white or native, and stand forth in the full
cubits of their real stature--and always they are looking forward to
going home, next year! Born from out of poverty and the slums, with a
pathetic loyalty they dream of the land in which they have neither ties
nor friends and where a fetid alley in some sweated city is hallowed in
their vague desire.
[Illustration: THE TACANA BRIDES ADJUSTED FOR THEMSELVES COMFORTABLE
NICHES IN THE CARGO.]
Down on the gravel beach the Tacana crew was gathering. Each had his own
paddle, a light, short-handled affair, with a round blade scarcely
larger than a saucer and crudely decorated with native forest dyes. The
paddle, a plate, a spoon, a little kettle, a short machete, bow and
arrows, or perhaps a gaily painted trade-gun and a red flask of feeble
powder, constituted his entire equipment for the many weeks on the
river. Indifferent to the white-hot gravel, they pattered in bare feet
and tattered clothes--for unlike the Lecco, his near neighbor, the
Tacana is careless in his dress--and dumped a bunch of fresh-cut, green
_platanos_ in the bow. The soldered tins of rice, strips of _charqui_,
and the boxes of _viscocha_--a double baked bread as hard as cement that
does not mould in the tropic humidity, had already been stored. Two
Tacana girls, still children in years, but brides of two of the boys of
the crew, waded out and climbed aboard the canoe; the half-breed threw
aboard the little sack of mail; I waded out; the vine moorings were cast
off, and with a splashing of paddles and the last clattering farewells,
we swung out into the Beni's muddy current. The lonely little group of
aliens on the beach fired their rifles in salute, their diminishing
figures quivered and blurred in the heated air that boiled up from the
hot gravel shore as I emptied my magazine rifle in response, and then
they turned and plodded slowly back to their cane shacks.
The sun blazed down on the open canoe, and on each side the heavy jungle
dropped to the water's-edge without the ripple of a leaf, and only our
progress fanned the air with a thin, hot zephyr. The Tacana brides
adjusted themselves to comfortable niches in the cargo, and chattered
gaily with the crew. Once in a while there was a tortuous passage choked
with snags that required careful work on the part of the helmsman while
the crew, perched on the thwart six on a side, hit up a rapid stroke to
fifty-five and once to sixty. The half-breed and I swung our feet over
the tiny deck aft and broiled.
[Illustration: AT THE TILLER PRESIDED A HUGE TACANA.]
The batalon was a huge, heavy canoe, thirty feet in length, with a beam
of about ten feet while the bow and stern were blunt, giving the canoe
the effect of a pointed scow. At the stern was a rudder with a high
rudderpost, and at the tiller presided a huge Tacana upon whose face
were the traces of the painted stains from some recent celebration.
Every stick in the batalon was heavy, hand-sawed mahogany. The cargo was
piled high amidships, with a view to its possible use as a breastwork in
the event of an encounter with savages, and it was not lashed in place,
for there were no more rapids, and the excitement of shooting them was
past.
The first day was short, for to make an actual start was most important,
and then on succeeding days the daily work from dawn to sunset flowed
easily along. We stopped for the night at Alta Marani, where two
Englishmen had a little headquarters of their own. They had a fleet of
dugout mahogany canoes with which they shot the river between Mapiri and
Rurrenabaque. Four canoes were lashed side by side, the cargo was bolted
under the decks, so that in principle, independently invented here and
by them, they were diminutive whalebacks like those of the Great Lakes,
and the gaskets and cargo tarpaulins were of pure rubber.
The years of frontier life had browned them like Tacanas; they spoke
half a dozen native dialects; barefooted and half naked, they could run
the river or hunt with any Indian, and their toughened skins were
indifferent to sand-fleas and mosquitos. One, a mighty hunter, painted
his face in ragged streaks after the manner of the Tacanas when on the
hunt. Wild animals, he claimed, seemed to have less fear of him, and in
some way he believed it blended the man with the flickering sunlight of
the forest. It may be, for I have seen the brilliantly mottled jaguar
skin flung on the ground in the forest become merged to practical
invisibility fifty feet away.
Half the night they sat naked to the waist in clouds of mosquitos and
insects, talking. The single tiny candle flickered in the cane-walled
darkness of their shack; the glittering eyes of the Mojo and Tacana
retainers gathered in the doorway to listen to the peculiar noises made
by white men in conversation. Here and there on the walls was some
splintered arrow--the idle souvenir of some little fight, a tapir
wallowed through the jungle across the river; and the occasional wail of
a wandering jaguar came to us as we talked for hours of Thackeray,
Stevenson, Dickens, Scott, Kipling, and "Captain Kettle!"
The last was first in adventure, but least in charm. "That fellow," they
said, "'e certainly did know a ship!" A few tattered books were there,
their covers long since gone, for they had been traded about over
hundreds of miles of this interior, and among them were Laura Jean
Libbey and Bertha Clay. Naïvely they asked me about the latter. "They're
books all right--but there don't seem to be much to them." And they were
pleased to learn that their prejudice was rather shared by the academic
standards of the distant outer world.
The lives, of these men, as they looked at the matter were filled with
trivial routine; romance, character, adventure--were the things bound in
books. "After the Ball" and "Daisy Bell" still lingered as great popular
triumphs of ballad and the Indians shuffled and grinned as these
calloused ditties quavered through the darkness. If I would stay, I was
promised all kinds of hunting--jaguar, tapir, monkey, wild hog, big
snakes, and, as an additional lure, only half a day's march back from
the river a brush with the savages! The palm roof of these men was the
last that I was to sleep under for many days.
[Illustration: NEVER WAS SUCH AN EXHIBITION IN THE HISTORY OF FIREARMS.]
Before dawn the next morning the little campfires of the crew sprang up
along the bank; the Tacanas shivered in the soft, cool morning air as
though it were a biting blast, and then, with the first rays of the
rising sun, we waded aboard once more and were off. Well into the
forenoon the Tacanas suddenly stopped paddling. "Capibarra, patrón!"
they whispered excitedly. On the bank, not forty yards away, stood the
capibarra, an amphibious, overgrown, long-legged guinea-pig sort of
creature, which blinked at us with startled eyes. From the steady
platform of the drifting canoe I fired, and missed. The second shot also
missed. In brief, I emptied the magazine while the capibarra darted
about in a panic, attempting to climb the steep bank. The bullets
spurted dirt above, behind, below, and before him.
The ninth shot at last laid him out dead. Never was there such an
exhibition in the history of firearms. The crew in the meantime had
unlimbered their shotguns and arrows, and were also pouring in a heavy
fire, and with equally unsuccessful results; it sounded like a
fair-sized skirmish. At noon, when we tied up to the bank, the crew
quietly departed into the jungle for game while I was busy; they would
take no further chances with the larder with me along.
"Why did you not tell me?" I spoke sternly to the crew chief, but he
only shuffled uneasily on his huge bare feet; it was later that I
learned it was believed that my eye-glasses were the evil influence that
made my rifle useless.