LECCOS LOWERING THE CALLAPO THROUGH SHALLOWS.
One, a young Lecco about seventeen or eighteen years old, who handled one of the stern paddles, accidentally stepped off backward into the river. The others shrieked with delight as the Lecco struck out for shore. We saw him land, pull his machete out from under his shirt, and start chopping down some saplings. Perhaps fifteen minutes later, in the next milder stretch of river, down came the Lecco like a cowpuncher on a pony, only his pony was a bundle of mere sticks lashed together with vine, and in place of a rope he swung a bamboo pole, using it as a paddle. He was standing up like a circus-rider on his frail raft, shifting it with his pole over to where the current was swiftest, and he coasted down the inclined glissade between rocks, avoiding every little eddy and catching only the roughest and swiftest places, until presently he had worked his way alongside and stepped aboard again. His little bundle of sticks did not number ten, and not one was as thick as your wrist, while merely two bits of vine at each end held them together.
THE LECCO OF THE TWIG RAFT.
I asked what would have happened had the vine lashings broke. When that was translated to the Leccos, they roared with laughter. That, it was explained to me, was what they were hoping for, so that then he would have had to swim. Swim! A fine joke to swim rapids and whirlpools that looked like sure death or worse mangling. But I found later that any one of them could have done it on even worse passages. If they are sure to be caught in a whirlpool, they will dive, and the fury of the rapid itself troubles them not the least. A Lecco once, to avoid a whipping by his rubber boss, threw himself into the river and swam six miles in the worst section of the river without a thought. A German later attempted to swim the mildest of these, and his broken body was picked up in an eddy three miles below.
CHAPTER XIII
THE LECCO TRIBE
THESE LECCOS ARE AMONG THE FINEST INDIANS.
These Leccos are among the finest Indians, or semi-civilized savages, I have met. They are sturdy and muscular, with a distinctly Malaysian suggestiveness, and very superior to any of the surrounding savage tribes of the interior. Yet they have neither religion nor superstition; they have no legend or tradition, and their only historical recollection is from the time when quinine bark was the main river commerce instead of rubber—the time of the “Great Quina” they call it,—about half a century ago. They are brave and loyal, although not a fighting race, and have made but a poor showing against the neighboring tribes. Their life is on the river, chiefly this Rio Mapiri, and they stick close to its banks. Their sole work is transportation with these balsas and callapos up and down the river.
For months in the year the stream is virtually closed by reason of the rains and the impassable cañons. Down stream is simple and finely exciting, but against the currents up-stream, portaging or hauling the balsas through the cañons, where there is often barely a hand-hold on the naked walls of rock, and often vines must be lowered from above, drenched during the day and sleeping on the sand playas at night, is the hardest kind of labor. As had happened while they were trying to reach me on this trip, the food gives out—it is not a game country—and unless they are near enough to the goal to live on nuts and berries, as they did for two days on this occasion, they have to go back, replenish, and start over again, with all the previous labor lost. And there is scarcely a free Lecco among them; they are always in debt to the rubber barracas, who by the sale and purchase of their debts pass them as veritable chattels. With thriftless, unthinking good nature, they accept this condition and at the end of each trip will squander their credit-wages on worthless trifles. A Lecco friend of mine once squandered the wages of a whole hard trip up-stream on a woman’s straw hat and its mass of pink-ribbon bows that he wore for two days in great pride on the drift down-stream until it was lost overboard in one of the worst rapids. He watched it whirling off in the spray and foam with a childish pleasure and no sense of loss, but rather with the calm complacency of a man who had lost a trifle and could with easy labor earn another.