As he spoke, some small fish leapt out of the water and into the net. “Quick; quick with the forks!”
Half a dozen long slender canes, each ending in two metal prongs like those of a carving-fork, were instantly produced, and it was soon plain enough why such implements were required. Those few little green fish, so beautifully barred with red and orange, were like bulls in a china shop; they leapt, wriggled, or swam about the net, biting first the fish and then the net as viciously as rats; and Paez stared to see mesh after mesh snapped through before the Indians could eject them with their forks.
“If they could have got near you they would have bitten you in the same manner,” said the principal of the fishermen, when he had got rid of the last of the caribes. “Anything red will attract them. We dare not attempt to swim a spurred horse through here, for he would be bitten to death, or till he was mad, before he reached the other side. I have seen a white man killed by them, merely because he happened to have a red scratch on his leg when he entered the water.”
The cacique was interviewed, and not only granted 344 permission for the whole tribe to go on the hunting expedition, but announced his own intention of going; and, early the following morning, they all started southwards with a good supply of lassoes. The Indians—one of the Cariban tribes—were the finest horsemen Paez had seen; and this was the more noteworthy, inasmuch as the Caribs as a whole care little for riding; many of those of the forest regions and of the Central American mountains have never seen such a thing as a horse; and we know that the cavalry of the Spanish adventurers terrified the sixteenth-century Caribs as much as Pyrrhus’ elephants disconcerted the Romans and their horses. Yet these Venezuelan natives rode as if they had been born on horseback, and made no more ado of eating their dinner while they were in the saddle than as though it had been an arm-chair.
The nearer the cavalcade drew to the softer grass of the Llano, the more wild horses they saw; and Paez, who had never yet used a lasso, was for making his maiden effort on one of these; till the cacique warned him that “horses can tell things to each other;” and that these scouts, if chased, would easily escape and caution the larger herds, thereby lengthening out the hunt by an extra week or more.
But at length they saw enough of the animals to satisfy the most wary of caciques; they could only be counted by the herd; it seemed as though all the horses in America had been turned out to grass on this particular spot. From the matter-of-fact way in which the three troopers went to work, the chief saw at once that they had little to learn from his tribe; 345 but he bade Paez, in fatherly fashion, to keep close to him and “watch how he did it.”
The young officer’s riding was perfect; but, after his first one or two efforts with the lasso, he was tempted to forswear horse-catching. The thing would not go right; either he ran his noose too small, or too large, or it fell short, or missed wildly; or, worse still, got in the way of the other hunters, so that they gave him a wide berth. However, he persevered, and towards the close of the first day, actually succeeded in dropping the noose over the head of a fine black stallion; and in imagination he saw himself bestriding him proudly, to the envy of all his mess. But the beautiful creature, finding the thong about him, gave a leap that seemed to tear his captor’s saddle from under him; then another, that almost pulled the ridden horse off his feet; then sped across the plain as though he moved on wings.
Ramon Paez was certainly as strong as most young men of one-and-twenty who lead active outdoor lives, and he had distinguished himself in every variety of English sport from boxing to ferreting; but he could no more stop or haul in this wild horse, than he could have lassoed the Flying Dutchman. The line was as taut as a fiddle-string, and his own mount, unused to such diversions, was being drawn along irresistibly. How much farther did the outraged beast intend to drag horse and rider?
“Let him run himself out, Señor,” bawled one of his troopers, as the stallion fled past the outer line of hunters.