As there is surplus of everything here, evil gifts have been bestowed as well. Poisonous insects sting for life; the fierce jaguar and fatal vampire, whose velvet kisses are a death-brand, bite for life; so do snakes; and the huge boa crushes the bones of its victim. The strong attack the weak, the cunning inveigle the unwary. Injurious or beneficent, all must fight for life, joining in the great struggle. Each variety contends with every other, vegetation fights to keep out animals, animals with birds, insects with one another, and all against the water, whose level silently rises over its foes. So man must struggle against nature. The jungle is his only teacher. He takes from it what it offers. He is the mere imitator of the vegetable world, a product of it in modified form. He sees strife in air, earth, and water. His religion can conceive only strife of two extremes, dying and living, evil and good, one injurious, the other beneficial. Evil spirits inhabit birds and beasts and whirlpools of the mighty rivers. The dim forest is filled with powers of destruction. They lurk in the black lizard and less dangerous ones in the parroquets. Since all sickness is brought by evil spirits, it is they to whom prayers are made. Some jungle savages believe in a transformation into animals and name their children for them. If there are any thoughts of a future life, they are in jungle terms. After death these people wish to be turned into animals, which sometimes happens. “On the eighth day a red deer jumped from the grave and ran away into the forest. They did not see the soul enter the deer, but they saw the deer rise from the grave”! Some worship sun and moon, an Inca custom. But the moon with its phases and its weird shadows in the jungle is involved in special mystery. These savages understand the jungle, but facts plain to us compose their mystery.
If a man is sick, something grows near by to set him all right again. They use nature’s remedies against her poisons, as they have learned from birds and beasts to do. They collect various sympathetic medicines, such as teeth of poisonous snakes, and carefully fix them in leaves and tubes of rushes—powerful specifics against headache and blindness. They fill flask-gourds with balsams, and collect odorous gum for incense.
War is their only object lesson, so quite naturally their only preëminence is in the art of killing. The chief cause of war is stealing of women; some are worth as much as a hatchet, some only the price of a knife. In times of fighting the savages howl through a giant reed in blood-curdling discord. They shoot with parrot-feathered cactus-arrows dipped in famous poisons, or thrust through an enemy with a macana—a wooden sword as sharp as steel—or fell him with a club of wood like iron. Then they make drums of his skin to serve as warning to his friends. They protect themselves with a shield of creeping plants interwoven, covered with a tapir skin and edged with the feathers of parrots.
The only amicable exchanges between tribes are the poisons done up in reeds into which they will dip the arrows used each against the other. Some poisons, made by women and old men, can kill an animal without injuring his flesh for the use of man. Some make him merely wither away. Some do not take effect until three days after the wound is inflicted.
The whole history of man, beginning with the Stone Age, could be studied among the wild tribes of Amazonian Peru. The largest tribe numbers nearly twenty-five thousand, many but a few families, and one tribe has now not a single member left. Differing each from the other, they are similar only in that they all represent the first steps of human development.
A savage of the jungle perforates his face to insert feathers and shells; he gouges it with sharp flints and rubs in indelible color. He slashes his lips both within and without and stretches his ear-lobes as far as the shoulder. Then he inserts knobs of chonta-palm wood. He paints his face yellow and suspends a red bean from his nose. Or he paints his face in the four quarters, blue, yellow, red, and black, and dyes his hair red with achote, his body orange with armatto, staining it in design with dark juices. The Prios color their teeth; others leave their teeth unstained and wear a long, yellow mantle. The Conibo flattens his head, or that of his child, between boards into fantastic shapes, leaving holes through which the cranium can develop. He leaves single locks of hair on conspicuous promontories. Toucans’ feathers are stuck to them with wax. On days of celebration he dances in ropes of iridescent birds strung through the bills, his bead girdles of barbaric design hung with humming-birds as tassels. He knows no fashion but personal caprice. There is no limit to the vagaries of the world about him, neither are any suggested for his own decoration. Cross-wise over his shoulders he slings long scarfs of brilliantly colored birds hung at the end of chains made of their little leg-bones, along with boxes of poison for his arrow-heads. His necklaces are of the teeth of jaguars, wildcats, and monkeys, or of the curling teeth of the white-lipped peccary. From his anklets and wristlets of heavy, wooden beans he shakes a jungle call, wielding a feather scepter in savage rhythm about the stiff feather halo upon his head.
As might be expected, the jungle savage adores music, if so it may be called. He imitates the cries of forest animals. Some tribes have war songs; then they use a bone flute or a reed. The Aguarunas have a violin with three strings. This is the most intelligent tribe, but they use their superior intelligence in reducing the heads of their enemies. One is often compelled to wonder whether greater brain-development means greater usefulness.
These seem to be the facts: The head of an enemy being cut off, poisons are poured into it, softening the bones so that they can be drawn out through the neck. They are then replaced by red-hot stones to which the head, reduced to one-fifth its original size, adjusts itself in the steam of a bonfire made of roots of certain palms.
A jungle story runs that a scientist from Germany tried to investigate these sinister processes. But his head, in miniature form, was soon stuck upon a pole. It could be recognized by the long, reddish beard, which had retained its original proportions.
To qualify as a warrior a youth must possess at least one reduced head of his own making. As time goes on, he adorns himself with more and more such trophies.