01 Amazon Adventure (4 page)

‘That’s one theory. The other is that the river is named after the Indian word Amassona, meaning boat destroyer. It’s not just the rapids that make it deserve this name. Some of the rivers are full of dangerous logs floating just below the surface. And where the main stream of the Amazon becomes as wide as a sea there are pretty bad storms. And then there’s the bore.’

‘What’s a bore?’ asked Roger.

‘A moving wall of water something like a tidal wave. It rushes up the river from the ocean. It may be ten or twelve feet high.’

‘I’d like to see that,’ Roger said.

His father smiled grimly. ‘You will. But I hope we’re in a bigger boat than this when it comes.’

‘How soon do we get a boat big enough so we can collect some animals?’

‘As soon as we get out of this river. Nothing bigger than this would get us down the Pastaza. But we don’t need to wait to collect little animals — and sometimes they’re just as important as the big ones.’

A sullen roar ahead warned that collecting would have to be postponed a little while longer. This roar was not like the last. It was a deeper thunder. The source of the thunder could not be seen. The river simply dropped out of sight, and where it disappeared vapour rose into the air.

‘Falls!’ exclaimed Hal. ‘We’d better stop and look this one over.’

At the right was a little bay in which an eddy circled. They pulled in to the shore, beached the boat, and then picked their way through the jungle to the river’s edge where they could inspect the falls.

At one point the water made a sheer drop of twelve feet into a mass of jagged rocks.

That’s where we don’t want to go,’ remarked John Hunt. ‘But see that slide over yonder? We can’t shoot it, but perhaps we could ease the boat down by the painter.’

This project proved fully as exciting as shooting the rapids. The boat was paddled to a position near the head of the chute but close to the shore where the current was not too strong. Everybody was tense with anticipation. Napo seemed to have forgotten the shadow of the condor.

They stepped out into the swift but shallow stream. The water came about chest high. What a good way to escape the tropical sun! The hunters did not wear the heavy hunting clothes common in northern climes. Thin shirt and thin trousers and a pair of South American sandals called alpargatas completed their costume. There was nothing that could be spoiled by a wetting — unless you were to count the tobacco in John Hunt’s pipe.

The contents of the canoe were fairly well protected. Even the guns were in waterproof cases. Ammunition was packed in an aluminium box as waterproof as a bottle, and camera, films, medicines, and valuable papers in another.

But Charlie, the Jivaro head, was merely tied by his hair to a thwart. He had weathered sun, rain and wave while alive and was just as capable of doing so now.

Hal and Napo held the painter. This rope attached to the bow of the boat was made of plaited vines and was as strong as hemp. They braced themselves against the rocks and let the painter out a few inches at a time, letting the boat into the chutes stern first.

Roger and his father hung on to the stern, one on each side. It was their job to guide the canoe down through the rocks.

‘If the water sweeps you off your feet, Roger, hang on to the gunwale.’

The boat was in a slide of water that slanted down like the roof of a house. The bottom was very uneven. Now Roger would be perched on a rock where the water was only ankle deep, and then he would drop into a hole up to his neck. He grimly hung on to the gunwale. The boat helped him as much as he helped the boat.

‘Not too fast,’ John Hunt yelled to the two who were paying out the painter. He could hardly make himself heard above the roar.

He spoke just too late. The advancing stern pushed him from his slippery foothold and he went over like a ninepin into a foaming whirlpool.

This could be serious. Whirled around beneath the surface, he might easily be badly bruised against the rocks. He might be knocked unconscious and be unable to come up.

The three looked anxiously for some sign of him. When they were about to abandon the boat to its fate and go to the rescue, his head emerged from under the stern. It came up slowly and Hal laughed with relief when he saw that his father’s pipe was still stuck in his teeth. The dripping face wore a surprised and rather offended expression. Dad was not used to being manhandled in this fashion by the forces of nature.

A little later it was dad who laughed. They were all aboard once more and slipping down a fast but not dangerous stretch under some overhanging trees. Hal was bent over, groping for something in the bottom of the boat. A dead snag on one of the branches slipped under his belt, and before he could make any remark on the situation, he was suspended in air and the boat was going on without him. He tried to grab the boat but got only a sack of potatoes.

There he was left, in a very undignified position, tail up and head down, hanging grimly to a bag of spuds. The snag broke and he and his potatoes took a bath.

The canoe had been beached on a sand spit and Hal was greeted hilariously as he staggered out, still holding his burden.

Lunch was served on the sand spit. During the afternoon there were more rapids, and more, and more, until it was a very weary foursome who beached the canoe late in the afternoon on a bank under some large trees that would serve as a hotel for the night.

It seemed an ideal place to make camp. A lovely pool a hundred yards across lay before it. Fish punctuated its smooth surface with darts and circles. Beyond the pool the jungle wall rose black but was topped by flowering trees that glowed yellow and crimson in the setting sun. Lazy white egrets drifted past.

Under the great ceibas where they proposed to make camp there was no undergrowth near the river bank, but it began a few yards back.

Where the clear space ended and the jungle began, John Hunt found a slight opening.

‘Looks like a trail,’ he said, and he turned to Napo. ‘Indians?’

Napo looked doubtful. Then he examined the soft ground and pointed to footprints. But they were not made by human feet.

‘Look, boys,’ Hunt said. ‘Here’s your introduction to the animals of the Amazon. These stabs are made by the hooves of peccaries.’

‘Aren’t they wild boars?’ said Hal. ‘I was reading up about them. It seems that they go around in gangs and don’t hesitate to attack men.’

‘You’re right. When they come around, the safest place is up a tree. I knew one explorer who was treed for three days and three nights.’ He examined other tracks. ‘Looks to me as if the animals come down here to drink at night. These tracks were made by a capyvara,’ pointing to tracks made by queerly splayed feet. ‘It’s the world’s biggest rat — as big as a sheep. And these are deer tracks.’

‘Yes,’ said Hal. ‘I’d recognize them anywhere,’ remembering the deer trails of Colorado, Canada, and the Maine woods.

‘But there is something I never saw before.’

The tracks he indicated were smooth and round as if they had been made by large saucers.

‘Tigre! exclaimed Napo. ‘This place is no good.’

That’s the tigre all right,’ Hunt admitted.

‘What’s a tee-gray?’ Roger wanted to know, for that was how both his father and Napo had pronounced the word.

‘It’s the Spanish word for tiger. All through Mexico and South America they call this animal the tigre although it is really not a tiger. It wears spots, not stripes. When we get over the Brazilian border where Portuguese is spoken well hear it called the onca, meaning ounce. Our own name for it is jaguar. But call it what you like, it’s the king of the forest.’

‘No good,’ wailed Napo. ‘We go back.’

‘He’s got the we-go-backs again,’ Hal said in disgust. ‘What a chance to get some photographs tonight if they come down to drink!’

‘And what a chance for them to get some nice little explorers,’ wondered Roger.

‘Don’t worry,’ dad said. ‘They’re not likely to attack us if we leave them alone. Besides, we’ll be well up out of their way — in our hammocks.’

The method of camp making was new to Hal and Roger, accustomed to the tents, canvas flies and sleeping bags of the north. The jungle traveller cannot be burdened with heavy gear. He sleeps in the open. For him, no canvas house completely sealed in with canvas door and mosquito netting over the windows. The Minneapolis clerk who takes a run up into the Minnesota lake country for a few nights carries more elaborate gear for camping in this land where the most dangerous beast is the mosquito than the experienced explorer takes for a year’s trek through the Amazon jungle.

In ten minutes camp was set up. It consisted merely of three hammocks strung between the trees.

The hammock is the bed of Amazonia. It was invented by the Amazon Indians and we owe our garden hammocks to their invention. Even in the town, the hammock is the only bed in most homes. All that one sees in the daytime is iron hooks in the wall — but at night the hammocks are strung up and the living room becomes a bedroom. Hotels, too, are furnished only with hooks in the wall. The guest is supposed to bring his own hammock.

But there are a few tribes in hammockland who do not subscribe to the custom, and the Jivaros are one of them. So Napo, instead of stringing up a hammock, made a hole in the ground. He was going to bury himself. The earth, superheated during the day, keeps the body warm during the night which is sometimes surprisingly chilly.

After the beds, three aerial and one subterranean, had been made, Napo took up his bow and arrows. ‘Me get fish,’ he said.

Dad suggested that Roger would probably like to see how fishing was done with bow and arrows. Roger went along, but he seemed to have something else on his mind. He kept glancing back at the break in the jungle where animals came out at night, and where Indians, too, might emerge. Who could tell? Anybody watching him would have seen that he was up to no good. But nobody was watching.

He went with Napo along the river bank and stayed with him until Napo had spotted a trout swimming about a foot beneath the surface and had pierced him with an arrow. Napo took the fish back to camp to be baked in mud for supper — but Roger went to the boat, got something from it, and disappeared into the jungle. Presently he strolled back into camp and joined in building the fire.

It was now quite dark under the trees but a flickering yellow light began to radiate from the fire. Ghostly shadows leaped about. A scream or two came from the jungle as a preliminary to the nightly chorus.

Hal shivered slightly and glanced at the point where the trail entered the undergrowth. Then his eyes froze.

‘Dad, look,’ he whispered. ‘An Indian.’

His father looked. There was no doubt about it. An Indian face peered from the brush. The light was too poor to see it distinctly.

‘Must be Napo,’ Hunt said. ‘He’s getting wood.’

‘Yes, but he’s getting it down near the river.’

Napo came up the bank with a load of driftwood.

Hal reached for his gun but his father said, ‘Don’t be hasty, they may be friendly. Let’s try a present first.’ And he took a small mirror out of his pocket. Indians liked mirrors.

Napo, following the gaze of the others, was much puzzled at what he saw. In his astonishment he dropped his load of wood on his own toes. This brought a yell out of him that further startled Hal and his father, but did not seem to disturb the face on the trail. And Hal noticed that Roger, too, was strangely calm.

‘That kid has more nerve than I gave him credit for,’ he thought.

‘Can’t see him plainly.’ dad complained, blinking. ‘But he looks pretty small. He may be just a boy. Perhaps only curious. Anyhow I’ll try him with this present.’

‘But I’ll back you up with the gun if there’s any monkey business,’ Hal promised.

Dad walked forward gingerly. Hal held his gun and his breath. Roger made a sound something like a snicker, but it may have been just a gasp of terror. The face on the trail did not move.

Dad was within a few feet of it now. He stopped and began to laugh. Then he reached into the brush and pulled out the head. It was Charlie.

Roger exploded with merriment and rolled on the ground, kicking and roaring. Hal laid down his gun, took Roger up by the seat of his shorts, and started towards the river. Roger wriggled free and disappeared into the brush. He continued laughing like a hyena.

Hal began to laugh too, and only Napo remained serious, looking from one to another of his strange companions as if doubting their sanity. Then he gave up trying to understand them and went to take the fish out of the fire.

He took out a mud ball baked hard and dry, broke it on a stone, and there was the fish, cooked to a turn. With some potatoes baked in the same fire it made an appetizing meal.

Then the Hunts retreated into their hammocks, and Napo into his hole. The blankets in the hammocks would be appreciated before morning. As for the mosquito nets, especially made with sleeves to fit over the hammock strings, they were not used for there seemed to be no mosquitoes around this camp site. To discourage ants and other small pests from crawling out from the trees into the hammocks, the hammock strings had been creosoted.

Roger squirmed and twisted, for he had never before tried sleeping in a hammock.

‘Don’t lie straight along it,’ his father advised him. ‘Lie on the diagonal. Then you won’t be so likely to fall out.’

But Roger was not one who could learn very much from being told. He had to learn from bitter experience.

Soon he and his father were sleeping soundly. Hal, clutching camera and flash bulbs, tried to keep awake but presently joined the others in slumberland.

Napo had buried himself well aside from the animal trail. His head projected oddly from the ground and moved this way and that as he looked about in the light of the dying fire, but before long it dropped and his eyes closed.

And, as the four slept, the forest awoke. ‘Awake for it is night,’ the animals seemed to say.

The cicadas began with a piercing chirp but managed to develop it into a screeching whistle. The tree frogs drummed, hoo-hooed and croaked. The nightjar made a sound like the wail of a dying ghost, if ghosts ever die. Strange creatures that had not yet been given long Latin names by the zoologists added their contribution to the din.