Arms are carried ostensibly as a precaution against meeting with Indians and bad characters in the lonely recesses of the forest, and the men like to carry a knife and a good revolver, or, better still, a Winchester, to enable them to get a shot at any wild animal they may come across, the skins of these being much prized. They take a pleasure in presenting a visitor with a puma skin or other trophy of the chase.
Among these people one looks for, and finds, the primitive idea of hospitality, an unaffected welcome and willingness to give of the best they have. Here are men independent by virtue of their labour, which gives them sufficient for their daily wants. They have no thought for the morrow or what will be their lot when too feeble to work.
The axemen, who are natives of Italy and Austria, are very good workmen, but compare unfavourably with natives of the country, being extremely dirty in their persons, to such a degree that it is a disagreeable experience to have to interview them in an office, whereas the Argentine native puts on his best apparel when he goes to an estancia.
The forest workers are nomads, and, as the woods get cut out, move on to fresh camping grounds, leaving the woods to revert to their former solitude, a haunt for the wild animals, who creep back once silence has returned.
CACHAPÉS, AND OTHER THINGS.
To a man coming from the Southern Camps to the forest belt of Santa Fé, the cachapé must appeal as something peculiar to the district, and most essentially local. He has had a surfeit of carts with two wheels, each 12 feet high, and dragged by anything from sixteen to twenty-eight horses; Russian carts, like Thames punts on four wheels, no longer amuse him, while American spring carts are much too European to warrant unslinging the Kodak. But the cachapé—here is something not to be lightly passed over. Lying idle it may not strike him at first sight as a cart, but rather as a remnant of some revolution, when, tired of waging light operatic war, the army disbanded, leaving their gun-carriages to serve more peaceful purposes.
Two pairs of short, squat, enormously powerful wheels; between, and joining them, a roughly hewn pole and various chains in an apparently hopeless tangle. Yet see them in work—every niche doing its work, every chain taking ten per cent, more strain than it was ever intended to take, creaking, groaning, crashing into holes, crawling laboriously over snaps and trunks to fall again with its load of four tons with a jerking, swaying, and straining as though struggling to free itself from its load, and you recognise the raison d'être of the queer little cart.