Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

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.

CHAPTER XVII
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.