At dark we arrived at a small lumber camp belonging to Cruz’s brother-in-law. I swam in the river, and by the time I was dressed again César had prepared supper. We were in our bedrolls by seven o’clock, under a canopy of nine-fingered cetico leaves, like black flowers pasted on the shimmering sky.
April 25. Mapuya.
This morning we left behind Alejandro and two of Cruz’s men, as well as some gasoline, green bananas, and other heavy supplies, the idea being to lighten the canoe for the shallows farther upstream and to increase speed. We get a different estimate of the time required to reach the original site of the mandíbula every time we pin Cruz down, the distance between this site, which I want badly to see, and the fossil’s present location on the bank of the Mapuya requiring, according to his mood, from two hours to two days; like most of these people, he has a childlike trust in our naïveté—well-founded, in Andrés’s opinion. Cruz is out for what he can get, according to the time-honored jungle law; he is still rankling over the idea that at the end of this trip he will owe us money, rather than the reverse. But meanwhile he is being very pleasant and spares nothing in the way of food, drink, and courtesy to keep us fat and happy. That he might try to hoodwink us, in other words, does not mean for a moment that he dislikes us. Having become hardened to this attitude, from the Amazon to Tierra del Fuego, I have come to the point where the fact that he might cheat us does not mean that I cannot like him. Nuestra Cruz is a bandit of a sort, no doubt, but he is a most agreeable one and would not harm a hair on one’s head unless he was well paid for it. Meanwhile he is running a taut canoa and is a most excellent cook: after two weeks of yuca and plantains, his cuisine is the finest imaginable.
To vary his larder, César paused this morning at the canoe of a native game hunter, from whom he obtained a pava, or wild turkey, some sajino, or wild pig (this animal is similar to the peccary or javelina of our Mexican border states), and a large black spider monkey; the latter came swathed in palm fronds with a vague retinue of flies. The subsequent singe, shave, and shower that this hominoid underwent at the camp-fire, preparatory to being gutted, is the subject of an atrocity photograph so terrible that I’m not certain it should ever be developed.
Shortly we came to an encampment on the bank where the men had three wild pigs, shot this morning. This evidence of game confirmed the tracks which scar the banks, but our own bad luck in this regard continues to hold firm. All we could see were crocodiles, on which Andrés was venting a long-term prejudice, not very effectively, with his .44 carbine. I had been speaking out against this sport since, unlike the large black species once common in these rivers and still readily seen in Mato Grosso, the white lagarto is not only harmless but worthless; I even told Cruz, rather pompously, that he ought to discourage people from shooting them, as he now has wild ideas of guiding travelers into the Inuya, and the caimans, in lean times, might make up for the absence of other animals.
KEY TO NUMBERS ON MAP 1
Marquez hacienda
First Lugarte hacienda
Camp on river
Coribene mission
Sirialo mouth
Rodríguez hacienda
Second Lugarte hacienda
Olarte hacienda
Fidel Pereira hacienda
Pangoa
Camp on river
Timpia mouth
Picha mouth
Sepahua mouth
Camp on river
Ganadería of César Cruz
Camp on Inuya River
Victor Macedo’s camp
Site of fossil jaw
Camp on river
But the day was a long one, and I am as much a hypocrite as the next man, and eventually my itchy trigger finger got the better of me. I took a few offhand shots with the revolver, a ridiculous weapon for crocodilians—though I had not meant it to be quite so ridiculous as it turned out. There then appeared upon the bank a ronsoco—the capybara, or water pig. This animal, the size of a fat, short-legged sheep, with a huge marmot face rather squared-off at the snout, is the largest rodent in the world and looks it. With the exception of a wood rat in the mission rafters at Timpia, it was also the first land animal we had actually laid eyes on since the miniature deer below the Pongo, and Andrés missed two hasty shots at it. On this flimsy excuse, I commandeered the rifle myself. Another ronsoco appeared, and I contrived to knock it down with a lucky shot through the neck. It staggered to its feet and a second shot, supported by a burst of revolver fire from Andrés, put an end to it: it rolled down the bank into the water. Everybody was loudly congratulating me, not least of all myself, and meanwhile the ronsoco sank. Though we probed for it desperately in the current, it was never seen again.
Drunk with power, I now proceeded to cut down two crocodiles in rapid succession; with a rifle, even from a moving canoe, a crocodile is not quite a sporting shot. I then felt bad, as I had known I would in advance, and for the rest of that day did not lift a finger against them. Meanwhile, Andrés was trying his luck with the revolver, with predictable results: nevertheless, one remarkable shot, fired in anger, killed a young lagartito as dead as a doornail, after the first shot had missed by a distance of not less than ten feet. We are hoping, of course, for a tapir, and Andrés is talking guardedly in terms of jaguars.
We arrived at the encuentro of the Mapuya about three that afternoon. On the clay bank above the junction there was once an extensive rubber camp, which prospered in the days of the “black gold”; until last year a military garrison was maintained there, as a check on the wild Amahuacas farther upstream, but now the huts sink slowly beneath the jungle. These Amahuacas, the same mentioned by Cruz, live in a naked state on the upper Inuya and are said to be very treacherous; according to the lingüísticos, the Inuya station is presently the most precarious of their missions. The linguist there has a small band of loyal Indians, but other groups come in constantly on raiding parties, and he is unquestionably in serious danger. These same tribes, about 1910, put an end to rubber operations in this area by wiping out the camp at the Mapuya encuentro. More than sixty people died, according to Cruz, and only one solitary woman escaped. This was token revenge for the Indians, who had been shot down like rats throughout the selva of Peru, Brazil, and Bolivia. Someone has estimated that the number of Indians butchered in the few decades of the rubber boom exceeded all the lives lost in World War I—this figure entirely apart from the thousands who died in slavery. To this day the wild peoples of the interior rivers are considered by most South Americans as subhuman creatures, to be shot on sight—not, it should be said, that North Americans are in a very good position to bewail this matter.
The Mapuya is much smaller than the Inuya, but it is still deep enough at this season to permit good progress, and we arrived toward dark at the lumber camp of Victor Macedo, one of whose peons is the discoverer of the fossil. On the Mapuya, in late afternoon, we had seen a lovely pair of swallow-tailed kites, that most graceful of the hawks, swooping in gentle arcs over the shadowy slow stream; a few of these birds still survive in the wilderness swamps of the southern United States.
April 26. Quebrada Grasa.
Until the very last minute Andrés was skeptical about the existence of the giant bone. But there it was, sunk in the mud of the Mapuya bank, and it is almost everything Vargaray said it was: a mandíbula so large and heavy that it takes, if not six men, at least four strong men to lift it. Its great weight, which must exceed two hundred pounds, is less a consequence of its size than of its matter: beneath the smears of petrified clay which have adhered to it lies a solid block of petrified marble-like stone.
It appears to be the small upper jaw of an enormous animal, though of what age, and whether mammal or reptile, I am not equipped to say: we shall learn this, hopefully, in due time. It measures twenty-four inches across what was once the roof of the mouth—the corresponding distance in our own jaw might be an inch and a half—and twenty-eight inches in a line drawn from the front teeth sockets to a line drawn throug
h the rearmost sockets on both sides. There were twenty-six teeth in all, though none remain, and the sockets are approximately round in shape, of a more or less equal size, somewhat larger than a silver dollar in diameter—in short, a formidable apparatus. On the upper side there appears to be, beneath the clay encrustations, at least one petrified nostril, as well as a large cavity behind the snout, as if the creature had ended its own life by lowering its head and charging headlong into a boulder.
Otherwise I am at a loss to describe it, so protean and amorphous is it; I have taken a photograph of César seated in the mouth, for want of any finer inspiration. César and I had a mild celebration, on pisco and a Peruvian vermouth called Gancia, I believe, both of which tasted excellent. We sat up very late by jungle standards, before bunking in with the peons of Macedo’s camp—Macedo himself is absent—including the proud Juan Pablo, who described at some length how he found the jaw. César was attired in a handsome pair of white pajamas, surely the sole pair of pajamas which has ever found its way into the Mapuya. Really, he is a man of parts and continues to surprise me.
This morning at six I set off with Juan Pablo, another peon named Luis, and my friend Guillermo Tejo, of César’s crew, to visit the original site of the mandíbula and determine if the rest of the animal is still visible. Andrés has given up walking for life—his ankles are still swollen from our trek in the jungle valleys—and he felt, in any case, that he would only slow us down. Though genuinely surprised and impressed by the jaw, he has no real interest in it and is most anxious that we leave here quickly, to insure his arrival in Lima five days hence. As for César, he did not pretend to an interest he did not feel, but elected to stay and savor his breakfast.
Andrés’s decision turned out to be the right one, for it took us nearly an hour and a half to reach the place, and the going wasn’t easy. The first half-hour or so we poled up a side creek or quebrada in a small canoe—the stream is nameless (the Mapuya itself cannot be located on available maps, since its region lies in those great blanks of jungle cartography which are generally labeled “unexplored”) but, because of the shiny oil slicks which ooze from the mud of the bank, is called by the peons Quebrada Grasa, or Grease Creek. The slippery banks of deep mud were enough in themselves to give the place its name, and we had to ford the stream a number of times, sometimes over our waists in water.
About two miles above the Mapuya, Juan Pablo stopped at a rocky place in the stream bed. At this exact spot, he announced, he had found himself one day standing on a submerged rock and, happening to look down, discovered that he stood in something’s mouth. He called out to Victor Macedo,who was nearby. Macedo was at first impatient, but came over at last and had a look. Together they managed to lever the thing to the shore.
This occurred last November. Vargaray, who lives near Atalaya, must have heard the story shortly thereafter, and he bore it with him downriver to Pucallpa, where he told it to me in the early days of January. The story was still too young to have grown very much, and was thus one of the few cases where a barroom rumor on the Amazon turned out substantially as advertised. Since November, Juan Pablo has discovered two more fossil sites, one of which contains, embedded in a rock, the petrified shell of a giant turtle, and the other a variety of enormous bones.
We located a few more bones this morning in the river bed, but whether these belonged to the possessor of the jaw would be hard to say; in any case, the great bulk of that animal was buried or missing. Since the bones were too heavy to carry back with us, I encouraged the men to leave them exactly where they were, on the theory that any horsing around we might do would only make things harder for the properly equipped expedition which might come after; I asked them to take the same precautions with the other sites as well.
We found also the skull of a modem sajino. Like the fossils, this was petrified, though the ivory of the tusks was still fresh and white, and it would be interesting to know what geological characteristic of this region permitted petrefaction millions of years ago as well as now; perhaps it is the oil. Finally, we found a living fossil, a sleepy baby crocodile, representing a family many millions of years old and slowly disappearing from the earth; Guillermo claims it is of the dangerous black species, and its color, unlike that of the young animals seen here and there along the rivers, is certainly black rather than bamboo. Guillermo lashed its mouth with fronds of palm, and we are taking it back with us as a mascot.
From Juan Pablo’s information I was able to construct a crude diagram of the other bone sites. They are some distance from the first, more than a day’s round trip, and I now very much regret having encouraged Andrés to accompany us to the Mapuya, since he is most anxious to get back for his anniversary, and we will not be able to stay here long enough to make even a cursory investigation of what may prove to be an important paleontological discovery. (It now seems to me, too, that I want very much to visit the wild Amahuaca tribes upstream; it’s a pity, and infinitely frustrating, that I wasn’t more decisive about this while we still had a chance to drop Andrés off at Atalaya.)
I haven’t said that I’ve had a magnificent morning. I have. And curiously, the magnificence did not consist of finding what we were after—more poor old bones, and thus a certain scientific confirmation of the site—but lay instead in the purity of this jungle stream. Only a few woodcutters like Juan Pablo, seeking the isolated cedro and caoba trees, may ever have ascended this quebrada, and there is no mark of the white man’s heavy hand upon it. Its still banks are laced with the tracks of tapir, capybara, and other creatures, and its clear water, running quietly on sandy shoals, sparkles with the flash of the pretty sabalo. In the bends the water runs beneath stone banks and is a pure, limpid green, and the trees which lend their leaf color to the water soar away in great white columns. The queer and clumsy hoatzin huffs everywhere in the lower branches, and hidden birds of unknown shape and color whistle and answer down the cool silences, in counterpoint and incredible clear harmonies. The tree frogs loose their prodigious croaks, and from a mile away resounds one of the mightiest sounds in nature, like nothing so much as an ominous moan of wind, the community howl of the mono colorado—the red howler monkey. In the stream itself lie the striking shells of a variety of mollusks, including a gastropod so large—the size of a very large pear—that it is difficult to believe it is not a marine creature. (Louis Agassiz, a century ago, pointed out the marine character of the dolphins, fishes, and other aquatic fauna of the Amazon basin.) We paused to breakfast on a kind of nut, the Indian name for which has now escaped me, and I wondered why the stream itself was so much more exciting than the bones we had found in it—more exciting than the first sight of the great jaw itself the night before. And it occurred to me that, aside from its beauty—for it is precisely this inner, mysterious quality of the jungle, represented so well by this lost stream, that I have been searching for and feel I have found at last—there was an adventure here, an exploration, however timid.
It is adventure I have missed a little in the past few days, and which a visit to the wild Amahuaca tribes would restore. These days have been fun, they have even been exciting—I note here with surprise that one of the original aims of the expedition is practically accomplished—but they have lacked that element of the unknown, the unpredictable, that the ordeal of the mountain river had in abundance. We know now where we will be from one day to the next, and that we will have enough to eat: we carry our food with us, and there is plenty of it. Everything is organized, everything taken care of, and I think back on the first days of the journey with a faint regret. As so often happens, we did not comprehend, did not evaluate our experience until it was all over and gone forever from our days.
The one thing I missed this morning was a bright, early sun, not so that I could take photographs—though, dutifully, I had the damn clicking thing along—but for my own appreciation of the scene. So often, in the places which have moved me—the Pongo de Mainique is the classic example—the sun has been obscured, or rai
n has made photography impossible, as if the mystery of these places was better preserved in one’s mind and heart than on the flat face of celluloid. If one depends on a photograph to recapture the feeling of a place, disappointment is inevitable. (On a less spiritual level, I dislike the presence of a fragile mechanism and its leather-coated accouterments swinging like goiters from my neck while 1 am trying to move quietly in a wild place, especially since I am also, invariably, carrying binoculars. Perhaps it has something to do with a boyhood dream of moving like an Indian, or with the fact that I take poor pictures.)
These reflections are recorded as we slide downstream on the Mapuya. We left Macedo’s camp toward ten o’clock, having settled with a joyful Juan Pablo for his find; Andrés was impatient to leave, and Cruz himself was anxious to get going before Macedo reappeared, in case the latter should demand some money for himself. Juan Pablo was paid with César’s money, out of the bonus he was scheduled to receive in the event we were able to obtain the bone, and Cruz was not so happy about this that he wished to pay Macedo as well. Considering the probability that the bone, monetarily, is not worth what it would cost to cart it to the slag heap—for I don’t think bones have much monetary value, even to museums—Juan Pablo was handsomely rewarded, the five hundred soles de oro he received being equivalent to six weeks of his puny wages. Juan Pablo is a strong, modest man with a huge, enchanted smile, and I wish him joy of it.
Two hours later—we are nearing the Inuya—Cruz is clearly still in pain, but is showing his customary gallantry. We are bound downstream, moving rapidly, as we will be for the next four or five days. The sun is shining, and my gut is full of majasz—a fat, striped tailless agouti, shot by Guillermo on the beach last night—and the fresh heart of a chonta palm hacked to earth by Guillermo’s deadly machete. This is not the same chonta from which the black Indian bows and spears are made: only the very top part of the tree, still growing, is used for food, and the wastefulness of its destruction is only exceeded by letting it stand, to rot unused in the mindless luxuriance of this un-peopled river.