Across the Andes

by Charles Johnson Post

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.

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.