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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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.
[Illustration: 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!