The manioc is planted by the women about July or August, and according to Indian belief manioc can only be propagated by replanting slips of the old growth after it has been lifted up and the tuberous root removed. As it cannot reproduce itself in this fashion in its wild state, presumably it will grow from young tubers, or seed, but, according to Bates, it is not found wild in the Amazon basin.[125] The ground is hoed by the women, and scraped into rough furrows. Cuttings of the manioc plant are set in these in little holes. Eight months after planting the root is ready for use. It is large, fleshy, and very heavy for its bulk, each tuber weighing from half a pound to two or three pounds, and even more. It has been said of the variety known as the great manioc that a root will weigh as much as forty-eight pounds.[126] The ground will only carry two crops, so a fresh patch must be broken up after the second harvest. Indians will, however, always return to plantations no longer in use, on account of the different palm fruits which continue to grow wild there after they have once been cultivated; but the disused plots will never be tilled again for plantation, they are only visited for this purpose of securing the fruit.
Throughout the forest peppers are very common and plentiful. Some of the bushes grow to a height of ten feet. There are many varieties,[127] and peppers are grown, or allowed to grow, in patches on all the plantations.
I have said that the women are the agriculturalists and the cooks; nor do I know of any exception to this rule, for though coca and tobacco are tabu to all women, and their preparation is forbidden to the sex, yet the women grow the tobacco in the plantations, gather the leaf, and dry it in the sun. But the actual making of the black liquid is done by the men alone, and only men prepare the coca for use. Tobacco is not an article of barter among these tribes, as all grow it, and its preparation is no secret to any of the tribesmen. Cultivated coca is sown when the rains begin. The young seedlings need both care and attention.[128] It is eighteen months before the slender shrub will yield any harvest, though once grown the supply will continue for three or four decades. The shrub grows to some five or six feet high, into small trees in fact, with lichen-encrusted trunks. Both the common kind and a smaller-leaved variety[129] grow wild in these regions.
Men also must climb the trees to gather such fruits as the papaw and the seeds of the cokerite or the peach palms. Indians climb in what is practically a universal method, with a circling rope and a ring.[130] Their usual way is to secure the legs together about the ankles with a strip of the inner bark of a tree, and then, with arms and feet free, to use a bigger loop adjusted round the tree and hips of the climber for purchase power. For short climbs they will dispense with the bigger loop. Sometimes palm-frond is made into a ring for the toes, but with the forest Indians these are oftener left free to allow of prehensile action. With this simple attachment, made perhaps only of twisted liana, the native will work his way to a perilous height up the barest of tree trunks.[131]
PLATE XXVII.
ERYTHROXYLON-COCA
As a woodsman the Indian is so far in advance of the European traveller as to make all comparison futile.[132] An Indian in the bush is wonderful. From his earliest days he has been taught to watch and note. I have known an Indian stop and tell me that when the sun was in a certain position, that is to say half an hour previously, seven Indians passed that way carrying a tapir, which had been killed when the sun was there—indicating another position. It was killed a long distance away, and the bag must have been a tapir on account of the evident weight. He took up a leaf on which was a spot of blood, coagulated. He pointed to tracks on the ground, to prove the question of numbers and distance. The men who passed were weary, he knew it by the way their toes had dropped on the ground. The breaking of a twig, the exudation of sap, is enough of a guide for the Indian to judge when the last passer-by came that way. I have been told it was within ten minutes, and shown a leaf. It had begun to rain ten minutes before, and the leaf, overturned by a passing foot, was wet upon both sides. A glance will suffice for an estimate of what animals passed, and when. By some intuitive perception, moreover, he will deduce in a moment whither the game has gone, and will make, not along its trail, but more directly for it. Yet close and accurate as his observation invariably is, when the Indian sportsman begins a tale of the chase it is exaggerated beyond the wildest dreams and liveliest imaginings of the most gifted sporting Munchausen among ourselves.
When an Indian is path-finding he judges both time and distance by the sun. If not attacked by an enemy, he will win his way home from anywhere, always at a jog-trot, and will probably do his fifty miles on nothing more sustaining than coca. A sense of locality is born in him, and from childhood upwards this is trained and developed by continued and varied experiences. To be able to judge by the sky, by the weathered side of trees, by the flight of birds, or the run of animals—above all to have a sense that is greater than all judgment—is a matter of life or death not once but continually. The inept are the unfit, and the forest will show them no mercy.
This minuteness and accuracy of observation comes into play again when the Indian is hunting. Death to his quarry from the tiny poisoned dart of the blow-pipe is certain, but not absolutely instantaneous. He also will shoot birds with a blunt-headed arrow that stuns but does no damage to the plumage. The shock appears to kill the bird. Hit with dart or arrow they may flutter a little distance before they fall. I have watched an Indian scores of times when hunting game shoot bird after bird in a tree, mark down where each fell, and eventually never fail to account for every one despite the density of the surrounding bush. Hardly a traveller but has noted and wondered at the same thing.