Boy Scouts in the Philippines; Or, The Key to the Treaty Box

by G. Harvey Ralphson

As is well known, it is almost impossible to make headway in a Philippine forest without chopping down creepers and tangled vines. The bolo is always in use by parties hunting or exploring. It is a short, heavy sword, or knife, similar to the machete of Cuba, and is frequently used in warfare. In the hands of an expert it becomes a very effective weapon.

Gaining the thicket, Jimmie stood still and listened for some indication of the presence of his patrol leader. But the patter of the rain, the rustling of the great leaves, the scolding of the wet and alarmed monkeys in the trees about him, served to shut out any other sounds.

He walked as fast as he could through the jungle toward the center of the island, or in the direction which he believed to be the center. Always his way was uphill, and now and then he was obliged to draw himself up some acclivity by pulling, hand over hand, on a creeper trailing from a tree.

Certain that he could find his way back, he did not blaze the way. Here and there he hewed down a thorny limb which tore at his clothes, or cut a creeper from a tree, but he made no effort to mark his path.

Occasionally he came to a little glade, a space clear of trees but hemmed in by the eternal jungle just the same. Here the way was choked with rank cogon grass, growing from eight to twelve feet high. He found this as mean a growth to pass through as any briar patch or cane-brake.

Cogon grass seems a useless parasite on the bosom of old Mother Earth, and yet it presents a compensation in its gorgeous white bloom, for, like the poppy, the cogon is a show-piece of nature, and she flaunts it in places where beauty is needed, too. Jimmie had never seen a field of buckwheat in blossom, or he might have compared the cogon stretches to fields in the United States at certain seasons of the year.

Even in his haste, in the uncomfortable day, the boy stopped to gaze in wonder at the wonderful balete tree, which is a representative of the fig family. This tree begins life as a parasite, at least it springs to life in a crotch of some other tree. Here it thrives on the humus and decayed vegetable matter and sends long, winding tendrils down to the ground.

These tendrils take root and grow with such vigor that the supporting trunk is rapidly enveloped in a coalescing mass of stems, while its own branches are overtopped by the usurper, which kills it eventually as much by stealing its sunshine as by appropriating the soil at its base. When very old these trees possess a massive trunk, usually, with a large cavity in the middle where the trunk of the other tree rotted out. Some of the younger trees, however, seem to stand on stilts.

Jimmie saw many things to marvel at, for a Philippine forest is not at all like a forest in the states of New York or Illinois. In the glades he saw plants of enormous size, with leaves seven feet long. He came upon rattan or bejuco thickets, where thorns, pointing down the stems like barbs on a fish-hook, snatched at his clothes and clung to them too.

A variety of this plant has a stem, trailing on the ground, five hundred feet long. This stem is hollow and divided into compartments by diaphragms at the joints, like the bamboo. Each compartment contains about a mouthful of pure water.