A tapir is sometimes killed with a throwing javelin, which the Indians use with much dexterity, though when they throw anything they do it with an over-arm action, with a jerk as a girl would. Their skill with these javelins is not surprising when one remembers that they hunt two or three days a week from boyhood, and so are continually throwing them at animals. The javelin is a light spear with a poisoned palm spine at the point. A man carries seven of these in his hand, and seven more in reserve in a bamboo case—fourteen in all. These javelins are about six feet long, and an Indian can throw one a distance of thirty yards. Sometimes only five are carried in the hand, but seven is the more usual number. Though long they are very thin and light. The haft is usually made of chonta, or similar hard straight-grained woods. A spine is always fixed in the point, which is filed almost through so that it will break off in the body of the wounded animal. These spines are poisoned with animal putrefying poison. Of the heavier spears more anon.
Koch-Grünberg noted that tribes on the Tikie have well-defined and recognised hunting and fishing rights, but that when travelling any such rights are avoided. This is common to all Indians. They will even erect barriers in the bush and on the rivers, and they keep strictly to their own localities, otherwise quarrels would arise and war be the upshot.
The sporting proclivities of the tribes vary considerably. The Tukana are fishers, but not hunters. The Boro, on the other hand, though great hunters do not fish, at least I do not remember ever having been given fish in a Boro house. Certainly they are not such fishermen as the Witoto or the Okaina, who are the most skilful of all the fishing tribes.
Fish are taken with hook and line, in nets and traps, by poisoning the water, by spearing, and by shooting with bows and arrows. For fish-hooks these tribes have hardly anything but those that they contrive for themselves from wood, bone, or spines, and civilised metal hooks are greatly sought after by all of them. Napo Indians make hooks of bone.[143] The Witoto fakwasi is a fish-hook made of wood or palm spine. A spine is fastened to a fine stick, and this is baited with grubs, and used with a fibre line, or with a pihekoa, a rod and a line. Fish are caught to some extent with bait and laid lines.
Hand nets are made of chambiri palm-fibre in the same way that hammocks are made, but with a finer mesh; larger ones are constructed by fixing fences of wattle across the stream before the rivers rise. In the dry season the Witoto use nets to drag the pools in the river-bed. They also catch fish with baited nets, the bait being larvæ, or some fruit attractive to fish, such as that of the setico, or the drupes of certain laurels. In the dry season they bale out the water from the shallower pools with gourds till the fish can be captured by hand.
Some of the fish traps are most cleverly designed. There is one known on the Uaupes as the matapi, which is simply a basket open at one end, but without sufficient space for fish of any size to turn round in. As fish are not able to swim backwards without the room to turn they cannot escape once in the trap. On the Napo the Indians spear fish most expertly, but other Indians depend largely on these and similar traps for their supply.
Fish are speared with a wooden trident or, rather, caught between its prongs, or stabbed with a bamboo spear that has a double-edged blade. Some of the civilised Indians of the lower Amazons have harpoons with detachable heads that they use for hunting the manatee, or river dolphin, but, in these upper waters, dolphins, if seen,—and that is rarely—are speared with tridents; the Indians have no harpoons, and the only thing that resembles a detachable head is the partly filed-through javelin. The Menimehe shoot fish with the bow and arrow.
By far the most wholesale and general way in which fish are obtained is through the use of poison.[144] The Indians procure this from the root of an evergreen bush, the babasco,[145] which they pound very fine. They dam the stream with a wattle fencing and then throw the mashed babasco in above this fish weir. The fish frequently jump out of the water, gasping as though they were being strangled, and the Indians secure those distressed fish in outspread palm leaves. Sometimes the dead fish drop down into a net, spread beside the dam to catch them; or the Indian fisherman will simply spear them when they are sufficiently narcotised. Dead fish will be found floating in the vicinity many hours afterwards. The Napo Indians put the crushed babasco in a basket and stir the water with this below the dam—so that the fish cannot escape upstream.[146] Witoto and other Issa-Japura tribes merely throw the roots into the stream, and the dam is made more to prevent the dead fish being washed away than to stop the live ones escaping. The poison works almost instantaneously on the smaller fish. The Indians on the Tapajos make use of a poisonous liana called timbo.[147] Its action is similar though not so immediate as that of the babasco root, and consequently it is of little use in quick-flowing waters. Neither babasco nor timbo affect the fish injuriously for human food.