Going back the next morning at low tide, we kept a good look-out for M---’s shark, spreading out, walkers and riders, in hopes of surrounding him and cutting him up. There were half a dozen weapons among us, of which my heavy bowie-knife was not the worst; and we should have given good account of him had we met him, and got between him and the deep water. But our valour was superfluous. The enemy was nowhere to be seen; and we rode on, looking back wistfully, but in vain, for a gray fin among the ripples.
So we rode back, along the Cocal and along that wonderful green glade, where I, staring at Noranteas in tree-tops, instead of at the ground beneath my horse’s feet, had the pleasure of being swallowed up—my horse’s hindquarters at least—in the very same slough which had engulfed M---’s mule three days before, and got a roll in much soft mud. Then up to ---’s camp, where we expected breakfast, not with greediness, though we had been nigh six hours in the saddle, but with curiosity. For he had promised to send out the hunters for all game that could be found, and give us a true forest meal; and we were curious to taste what lapo, quenco, guazupita-deer, and other strange meats might be like. Nay, some of us agreed, that if the hunters had but brought in a tender young red monkey, [{282a}] we would surely eat him too, if it were but to say that we had done it. But the hunters had had no luck. They had brought in only a Pajui, [{282b}] an excellent game bird; an Ant-eater, [{282c}] and a great Cachicame, or nine-banded Armadillo. The ant-eater the foolish fellows had eaten themselves—I would have given them what they asked for his skeleton; but the Armadillo was cut up and hashed for us, and was eaten, to the last scrap, being about the best game I ever tasted. I fear he is a foul feeder at times, who by no means confines himself to roots, or even worms. If what I was told be true, there is but too much probability for Captain Mayne Reid’s statement, that he will eat his way into the soft parts of a dead horse, and stay there until he has eaten his way out again. But, to do him justice, I never heard him accused, like the giant Armadillo [{282d}] of the Main, of digging dead bodies out of their graves, as he is doing in a very clever drawing in Mr. Wood’s Homes without Hands. Be that as it may, the Armadillo, whatever he feeds on, has the power of transmuting it into most delicate and wholesome flesh.
Meanwhile—and hereby hangs a tale—I was interested, not merely in the Armadillo, but in the excellent taste with which it, and everything else, was cooked in a little open shed over a few stones and firesticks. And complimenting my host thereon, I found that he had, there in the primeval forest, an admirable French cook, to whom I begged to be introduced at once. Poor fellow! A little lithe Parisian, not thirty years old, he had got thither by a wild road. Cook to some good bourgeois family in Paris, he had fallen in love with his master’s daughter, and she with him. And when their love was hopeless, and discovered, the two young foolish things, not having—as is too common in France—the fear of God before their eyes, could think of no better resource than to shut themselves up with a pan of lighted charcoal, and so go they knew not-whither. The poor girl went—and was found dead. But the boy recovered; and was punished with twenty years of Cayenne; and here he was now, on a sort of ticket-of-leave, cooking for his livelihood. I talked a while with him, cheered him with some compliments about the Parisians, and so forth, dear to the Frenchman’s heart—what else was there to say?—and so left him, not without the fancy that, if he had had but such an education as the middle classes in Paris have not, there were the makings of a man in that keen eye, large jaw, sharp chin. ‘The very fellow,’ said some one, ‘to have been a first-rate Zouave.’ Well: perhaps he was a better man, even as he was, than as a Zouave.
And so we rode away again, and through Valencia, and through San Josef, weary and happy, back to Port of Spain.
I would gladly, had I been able, have gone farther due westward into the forests which hide the river Oropuche, that I might have visited the scene of a certain two years’ Idyll, which was enacted in them some forty years and more ago.
In 1827 cacao fell to so low a price (two dollars per cwt.) that it was no longer worth cultivating; and the head of the F--- family, leaving his slaves to live at ease on his estates, retreated, with a household of twelve persons, to a small property of his own, which was buried in the primeval forests of Oropuche. With them went his second son, Monsignor F---, then and afterwards curé of San Josef, who died shortly before my visit to the island. I always heard him spoken of as a gentleman and a scholar, a saintly and cultivated priest of the old French School, respected and beloved by men of all denominations. His church of San Josef, though still unfinished, had been taxed, as well as all the Roman Catholic churches of the island, to build the Roman Catholic Cathedral at Port of Spain; and he, refusing to obey an order which he considered unjust, threw up his curé, and retreated with the rest of the family to the palm-leaf ajoupas in the forest.
M. F--- chose three of his finest Negroes as companions. Melchior was to go out every day to shoot wild pigeons, coming every morning to ask how many were needed, so as not to squander powder and shot. The number ordered were always punctually brought in, besides sometimes a wild turkey—Pajui—or other fine birds. Alejos, who is now a cacao proprietor, and owner of a house in Arima, was chosen to go out every day, except Sundays, with the dogs; and scarcely ever failed to bring in a lapp or quenco. Aristobal was chosen for the fishing, and brought in good loads of river fish, some sixteen pounds weight: and thus the little party of cultivated gentlemen and ladies were able to live, though in poverty, yet sumptuously.
The Bishop had given Monsignor F--- permission to perform service on any of his father’s estates. So a little chapel was built; the family and servants attended every Sunday, and many days in the week; and the country folk from great distances found their way through the woods to hear Mass in the palm-thatched sanctuary of ‘El Riposo.’
So did that happy family live ‘the gentle life’ for some two years; till cacao rose again in price, the tax on the churches was taken off, and the F---s returned again to the world: but not to civilisation and Christianity. Those they had carried with them into the wilderness; and those they brought back with them unstained.