Up the Mazaruni for Diamonds

by William La Varre

THAT night we pitched camp on the left bank of the river. While preparing supper I was investigating the forest that circled the little clearing and almost jumped out of my skin when I heard, in soft voices, either side of me, the word “Me-a-ree.”

I am sure I jumped a couple of feet straight up. There, standing right beside me, were two of our Indian friends. They grinned at my fright. Such good woodsmen are they that they can come upon a person without making a sound. Their naked bronze bodies seem to blend with the forest shadows.

One of them had two paccu, the large, flat, delicious fish that they shoot with bow and arrow or sometimes spear. The other had a “maam” which is a bush turkey, not as large as our wild turkeys. This he shot with a blowpipe.

“Me-a-ree,” I exclaimed, as soon as I caught my breath. I shuddered to think how easily they might have killed me had they been enemies. A white man hasn’t a ghost of a chance with such clever natives if they want to get him, because he cannot travel in the jungle and forests down there without being heard, so keen is their hearing, while they can come right up to him, even when his eyes and ears are strained to see and hear, before he knows their presence.

“These are real uncivilized men,” I thought, as I looked them over, standing there in the dim, deep forest edge, with bow and arrow and blowpipe, with the fish and bird, their naked bodies almost the color of the trees and shadows. But when I came to know them better I discovered that if uncivilized meant a rude, uncouth, ill-mannered, treacherous, dirty and disagreeable people, then these natives were civilized, for I found them to be real “nature’s gentlemen,” kind, courteous, quiet and clean. It was father and son who brought the game. They asked for powder and shot for their guns. The father was a sort of chief of their own little tribe and he and his son each owned one of those priceless “lead” guns, the cheap muzzle loaders made expressly for such people. We had plenty of powder and shot and made the exchange.

You or I could never get any game with those “lead” guns because they will not carry far, they will not shoot accurately and they frequently miss fire entirely. But the skilled Indians are able to stalk the game so quietly that they can almost poke the muzzle of the gun into the ribs of the game before they fire point blank. We entertained them with showing them our modern guns, and with showing them their faces in good mirrors and with victrola music, at which they marveled greatly and chattered excitedly about it. Then, as silently as they came, they disappeared into the forest to go to their homes before the night mists should enshroud them.

I went down to the water’s edge to watch the last gleam of light, fast going, when suddenly there was the most terrific threshing about that I had ever heard.

Something gigantic, seemingly as big as a mountain, arose in front of me. I thought it must be a combination of crocodile and man-eating fish come out of the water to feast on me. Then I thought of something else.

“Good-night!” the thought flashed through my mind, “that nigger, Cavan, told the truth when he described the ‘Dodo’ as a hair-covered bird twenty feet high,” and I had visions of being transformed into either a Dodo’s supper or a Dodo’s slave. Instinctively I threw up my arms to ward off the terrible creature, and fell backward.

The “giant” arose and sailed out across the water. It was a toucan—that funny bird with the immense bill that we have seen in our picture books and stuffed and occasionally alive in parks. His loud flapping, hoarse croaking, and the spread of his wings in the deepening twilight made him seem fully as big as Cavan’s mythological “Dodo.”