CHAPTER VII
WILD HUNTING COMPANIONS
In the days when I lived and worked on a cattle-ranch, on the Little Missouri, I usually hunted alone; and, if not, my companion was one of the cow-hands, unless I was taking out a guest from the East. On some of my regular hunting trips in the Rockies I went with one or more of my ranch-hands—who were valued friends and fellow workers. On others of these trips I went with men who were either temporarily, like John Willis, or permanently, like Tazewell Woody and John Goff, professional guides and hunters. In Africa I sometimes hunted with some of the settlers, and often alone or with my son Kermit; but even more frequently with either Cunningham or Tarlton, the former for many years a professional elephant hunter, and the latter by choice and preference a lion hunter. Both of them, I think I may say, became permanently my friends as the result of the trip.
Often, however, my companions were not white men, but either half-breeds and people of mixed blood or else wild natives of the wild lands over which the great game roamed. To some of these men I became really attached. Not a few of them showed a courage and loyalty and devotion to duty which would have put to shame very many civilized men. Almost all of them at times did or said things that were very interesting because of the glimpses they gave into souls that really belong to a totally different age from that in which I and my friends of civilized lands are living.
December, 1913, and January, 1914, I spent in the remote interior of Brazil, on and near various rivers which form the headwaters of the mighty Paraguay. It is still a frontier country; the province is known as the Matto Grosso, the province of the great wooded wilderness. Yet it has a civilized and Christian history which runs back for over a century. It is on the eve of striking material development, and, nevertheless, it is still primitive with a primitiveness half that of a belated Europe, half that of a savagery struggling over the border-line into an exceedingly simple civilization. Out of these diverse and conflicting elements, and with a century of comparative isolation behind it, the land has produced a far more distinctive and peculiar life than our own frontier communities ever had the chance to develop. It would be difficult to find in any country more charming and better-bred men than some of the gentlemen, the great ranchmen and the political and social leaders in city life, whose generous hospitality made me their debtor. But the ordinary folk, and especially the Caboclos, the peasantry, although with many sterling qualities, were of a type wholly different from anything to be found either in Europe or in temperate North America.
The land is largely composed of the pantanals, the flat, wide-stretching marshes through which the Paraguay and its affluents wind. Where the land is low it is covered with papyrus and water-grass; if a few feet higher, with open palm forest. It offers fine pasturage for the herds of cattle. In addition there are mountains and belts of tropic jungle and forest, and to the north rises the sandy central table-land of Brazil. There are no railroads, and no highroads of any length for wheeled vehicles. The rivers are the highways. Native boats, with palm-thatch houses and cooking-ovens of red earth on the decks, drift down them and are poled or towed up them. A few light-draft steamers, running every week or fortnight, connect the widely scattered little cities. They are quaint, picturesque little cities, without a wheeled vehicle except the water-carts. The one-story houses enclose open courtyards. The walls are thick, and the windows and doors very high, so as to let whatever coolness the night air carries fan the sleepers in their hammocks. In the bigger houses there are beds in the guest-chambers; but the hammock is really the bed; and in the inns the bedrooms have rings in the walls from which the traveller hangs the hammock he has brought with him. After nightfall the men sit at little tables under the trees in the public squares or outside the taverns, and through the open doors and windows of the houses, in the mysterious darkness, are the half-seen figures of girls and women; and stringed instruments tinkle in the still tropic night.
When Portugal still ruled Brazil, the first of these cities was founded, toward the end of the eighteenth century. At that time it could only be reached by a long voyage of peril and hardship up the Amazon and the Madeira, and then by mule back. No place in the world is now so remote from civilization as this little capital of the "Great Wilderness" then was; but its life was fervent under the torrid sky. Governors, generals, priests were there, slaveowners and gold seekers; killers of men and lovers of women. There was a palace and a cathedral and a fort, adorned with paintings and carvings. All are in ruins now; the rank vegetation of the tropics, beautiful and lethal, has covered them and twisted them asunder; for the strange little one-time capital city is dead, and those that dwelt therein have left it.
The next comers followed a route that led from the opposite direction, the south. These were the Paolistas. At São Paulo, almost under the Tropic of Cancer, the Portuguese conquerors married with the women of the native Indians, and made, first slaves, and then soldiers, of men from many Indian tribes. They all became welded together into one people, speaking Portuguese, but largely, and probably mainly, Indian by blood; and being of various martial stocks, with the morals of the viking age, they grew into a community of freebooters whose raiding expeditions, carried on with the utmost energy, daring, and ruthlessness, spread terror far and wide. Early in the nineteenth century these hardy horsemen and boatmen, searching for gold, land, and slaves, penetrated to the headwaters of the Paraguay, and with their advent began the first rude change from mere savagery to that which held within it the germ of civilization.