“Oh no!” replied the tigrero, smiling in his turn; “it is not that.”
“What then?” impatiently inquired Ivan. “I’ve heard of negro-head tobacco. He’s not a tobacco chewer, is he?”
“Carrambo! no, señorito,” replied the tiger-hunter, now laughing outright; “that’s not the sort of food the fellow is fond of. You’ll see it presently. By good luck, it’s just in season now—just as the bears fancy it—or else we needn’t look to start them here. We should have to go further up the mountains: where they are more difficult both to find and follow. But no doubt we’ll soon stir one up, when we get among the cabezas del negro. The nuts are just now full of their sweet milky paste, of which the bears are so fond, and about a mile from here there are whole acres of the trees. I warrant we find a bear among them.”
Though still puzzled with this half-explanation, our young hunters followed the guide—confident that they would soon come in sight of the “negro’s head.”
Chapter Thirty Six.
The Tagua Tree.
After going about a mile further, as their guide had forewarned them, they came within sight of a level valley, or rather a plain, covered with a singular vegetation. It looked as if it had been a forest of palms—the trunks of which had sunk down into the earth, and left only the heads, with their great radiating fronds above the ground! Some of them stood a foot or two above the surface; but most appeared as if their stems had been completely buried! They were growing all the same, however; and, at the bottom of each great bunch of pinnate leaves, could be seen a number of large, roundish objects—which were evidently the fruits of the plant.
There was no mystery about the stems being buried underground. There were no stems, and never had been any—except those that were seen rising a yard or so above the surface. Neither was there any longer a mystery about the “negro’s head;” for the rounded fruit, with its wrinkled coriaceous pericarp—suggesting a resemblance to the little curly knots of wool on the head of an African—was evidently the object to which the tigrero had applied the ambiguous appellation.