Black White/Chapter 10

IVE days later we reached the last and largest paragua on the Ventuari—the place which the Maquiritares call Uaunana: the round house from which, weeks ago, six young fellows had gone to visit friends on the Caura, and to which now only two of the six returned.

Yet, in returning, those two brought with them more men than had gone away; for with them traveled four of their own race from the caño down below, and we two blancos. So where six had left, eight came in.

Before leaving the house where White drank his first yucuta assehi, I had given my Macos their presents and told them to go home whenever they liked. But I had also talked secretly with the oldest Maquiritare, who seemed to be in authority there while the capitán was away, and received his promise that when the Macos went down-stream four well-armed Maquiritares should go with them; and that these four should stop at my caño and remain there guarding my supplies until I came down again. I had his word that the guards would stay at my place even if I did not reappear before the falling of the heavy rains. So now I knew that all was well behind me.

It had been a hard journey, these last five days. We had made no stops to visit other paraguas which might be up various caños, but had worked steadily toward Uaunana; and stiff work it had been. Here in the high sierra the river seemed to hold even more raudales than below; and the last of these was so bad that the Indians would not even approach it.

This was the terrible raudal of Monoblanco. To avoid it the Maquiritares worked the curial up a winding little stream at the left and took to the land; and for a long, hard day after that we were fighting our way over steep, densely jungled hills—four of them in all—following a trail so faint that even my wilderness-trained eyes often could not see it.

That day we ate nothing between dawn and dark; we made no halts, for the traverse had to be made in one day if we were to find shelter from drenching rain which poured down on us all day long. When at last we again reached the Ventuari, well above the raudal, and found there a little plataní hut where we could swing our hammocks in a half-dry place, we were a starving, exhausted crew.

At this upper port we were lucky enough to find a canoe—or, rather, an old, abandoned thing that had been a canoe. It was so battered and cracked that the Indians had to spend half a day in tightening it up. When all eight of us were in it the gunwales were only an inch above the water, and in spite of its pitching and patching it still leaked so badly that two men had to keep bailing all the time.

Whenever we met a raudalito, as we did several times, everybody had to go overboard and lift the crazy boat up through the bad water. At one such place the current threw my legs from under me, and I was carried down for some distance before I could swim to shore. I was glad that in those swift upland waters lived neither caimán nor caribe.

Such little accidents as this, however, are nothing to the river rovers of the Parimas; so long as a man lives through them he laughs and goes on, knowing that the next time he may split his head on a rock and laugh no more. Soon after this swim of mine we turned from the river into a narrow caño—the river itself now had become so small that it was hardly more than a rocky creek—and, a short distance in, found several dugouts at an opening in the bank, from which rose a well-trodden path. This, the Maquiritares said, was the Caño Uaunana.

I told the two who lived here to go ahead and inform their capitán that Loco León would soon come up the hill. Showing no more excitement than if they had been merely on a day’s fishing trip, the pair climbed the steep slope and were gone among the trees. The rest of us squatted in the shade and waited a little while. Then we went upward.

The Maquiritares had told me that this settlement of Uaunana was big, with mucha gente—many people. Knowing that they live usually in small groups, I expected to find here a paragua only a little larger than the one we had visited farther down. But when we came into the clearing near the top of the hill I saw that this place really was big. The round house was very wide; around it stood a ring of smaller shelters, open-sided, square-cornered, and ridge-roofed, where the cassava-making and other work could be carried on unhampered by rain; and at one of the doors stood a crowd of men, looking our way.

Though I learned later that nearly half of the men of Uaunana at that moment were away hunting or making dugouts or doing other things in the woods, those in sight numbered more than all the people of the settlement down-stream. That was why this place was so near the river; the tribe was large enough to defend itself against anything but a large body of riflemen, which was very unlikely ever to come here.

Straight to that door I went, and there I asked for the capitán. Since the tribe evidently was strong, I rather expected to meet a big, stern-faced leader. But the man who came to meet me, and whose quiet air of authority showed him to be the chief, was not at all of that type. He was shorter than I, with a kind, gentle face and big brown eyes that seemed to smile. Yet he was strongly built, and the calm eyes showed much intelligence. I judged him to be a man who loved peace, but who, if he must fight, could fight coolly and wisely.

Like the other Indians, he looked at me, then at White, then back at me, with no change of expression. When I told him who we were and why we were there together, he nodded slightly, but seemed not to understand all I said. So I asked whether he spoke Spanish.

“Pocito,” he answered. “Only a little.”

Then he moved his head toward the door. We went into the central room and sat in hammocks, and I looked around at faces. Among those new to me I saw four or five from the Padamo. Calling one of these men to me, I asked if the Rio Padamo had moved since I left it—I was finding many Padamo faces on the Ventuari. He smiled and answered that the Padamo was where it had been, but that very few Maquiritares were there, and soon there might be none.

For some time past, he said, the Maquiritares of that river had been talking of moving elsewhere. All the Maquiritares do this at times, for they are—how do you say it? Semi-nomadic—yes, that is it. They live for a time in one place, and then they abandon that place for a new one, perhaps many miles away. And now, since I had left the Alto Orinoco on my journey to Bolívar, the savage Guaharibos east of the Padamo had become very bad, as I had foreseen. They had repeatedly attacked the Maquiritares, for no particular reason, and in the fighting both sides had lost men. So, since the Maquiritares had no desire to remain there longer, they had journeyed up into the higher hills and gone to whatever places pleased them best. Most of them now were on the upper Caura, not many days from this settlement.

At this I was all the more glad that I had left the Padamo for the Ventuari, and thanked the luck of Loco León for leading me here. As this was the place where White’s way and mine were to part, I felt that I had best be about my own business of getting men. But I said nothing of it just then. I only asked how many men here spoke Spanish.

Very few, I was told. These people of Uaunana seldom went near enough to Spanish-speaking people to need the language. They were not so wild as the Maquiritares of the little Rio Gueseta and some other small branches of the Ventuari, who would have nothing whatever to do with any blancos, but they were well satisfied to stay here and see nobody but their own people. Then the man telling me these things grinned and added, as if it were a great wonder, that one of the Uaunanans who could speak Spanish was a woman.

She was the oldest daughter of the capitán, he said; and whenever a Maquiritare who knew anything of the Spanish tongue came here she made him give her new words and tell of all he had seen in other places. It seemed a great joke to him, so I laughed. Then I asked more about my Padamo people—where they were, and how to reach them from here, and so on. The wordy daughter of the capitán was quickly forgotten.

After a time White broke into our talk.

“Say, can we get more of that yucut’ ’sehi here?” he asked. “I feel as if it would just hit the right spot,”

“Aha! So you are beginning to like it,” I said. “I think it can be had. I too would like some.”

So I asked, and before long we each had a gourd of it. When it was gone he arose and yawned.

“Go on with your palaver,” he said. “I’m going to walk around and inspect the works.”

And he strolled to the door, stopping once to look at a drum hanging on the bark wall. The two Maquiritares who had been with him on the Manapiare drifted out with him.

For some time after that I talked with those who could understand me well, and, at times, with the calm little capitán. I was not yet ready to speak of balata—that would come later—but I learned all I could about the new paraguas on the upper Caura; for if I could get the same Indians to do my work on the Ventuari who had done it on the Padamo, it would be much more simple than dealing with new ones. Also, it would be far easier to gather new ones when I had the others to talk for me. That is always the best way to bring our Indians to you, señores—to talk to them through their own people, who can tell the doubters that you are a buen hombre.

By the time I had learned what I wished to know and had decided to make a journey southward to the Caura—for that was what I did decide upon—it was quite late in the day. White had not come back. Now an Indian came in and said a few words to the capitán. The ruler’s eyes hardened a little; but then he looked as calm as ever, and made neither move nor answer. Whatever he had been told, it seemed not to disturb him. But I had noticed that slight narrowing of the eyes. And, for the first time since he had gone out, I thought of White.

Waiting a minute or two, I then stood up, stretched myself, and slowly walked out. The capitán silently came after me. Outside the door I saw nothing unusual. Neither did I see White. As if only exercising my legs, I lounged along the curving wall until I had gone nearly one-third of the distance around the paragua. Then I saw White—and women.

He was leaning against a corner-post of a shed where men seemed to be slowly working at something, and, with his wide helmet tilted over one eye, he was smilingly talking to several young women just outside. Rather, he was talking to only one of those girls; the others were standing and watching. The one girl seemed to be talking more than he.

As we came near he drew from a pocket a small leather pouch and shook into his palm a few silver coins. These he gave to the young woman, who took them eagerly.

“Doce reales,” he said. “No tengo mas.”

And he shook the empty pouch to prove that those twelve reales really were all he had.

“What is this, señor?” I asked sharply. “You had best be careful.”

“Hullo, old Calamity,” he laughed. “Stand and deliver. This young lady is taking up a collection for herself. Says she wants plata to make herself a silver necklace. I’m cleaned—gave her a dollar and twenty cents. Now you come across.”

And, pointing at me, he told her:

“Él tiene mucha plata. He has much silver.”

She turned and looked steadily at me. I grinned, but not at her—it was at the joke he had put on me. But, seeing me smile, she smiled back and asked—

“Plata?”

I had no silver money with me, nor any other except a few gold pieces which I did not intend to give away. So I had to shake my head. She was disappointed, and her face showed it, but she did not ask again. She looked me all over, and I did the same by her.

Remembering what the Maquiritare had told me about the one woman here who spoke Spanish, it was easy for me to guess that she was the daughter of the capitán. Indeed, I might have known it without first hearing of her; for she looked like the chief, and an ordinary girl would not have dared to be so forward with a blanco.

She was pretty. Her brown eyes were larger than her father’s and filled with a warm glow; her face was more round, her features more softly marked, than his; and, though she had the strong frame of the chief, her figure was very shapely. From thick black hair, cut straight around in the Maquiritare fashion, to her well-formed feet, she was more nearly perfect than any Indian girl I ever saw elsewhere.

Like the other women, she wore only the bead guayuco, or apron, and bead armlets near the shoulders. And the bright sun lit up a skin hardly darker than my own bronzed face, and as clean and clear, though not so fine, as White’s.

Having seen what Loco León looked like, she turned her eyes to her father; and, laughing like a child, she shook the coins jingling in her hands and then held them for him to see. He glanced at them with a little smile, took one and scanned it on both sides, and handed it back. In his usual quiet tone he spoke a few words. Without replying or looking at either of us, she ran to the house, calling to some one within—perhaps her mother. The other girls followed her, probably to see the reales more closely and to envy her.

We men laughed a little, and White swung toward the Indians inside the hut, who had stopped working and were closely watching their capitán. Now their grave faces relaxed and they resumed work—they were hollowing out a log trough.

“And that’s the way it goes,” said White. “A chap stops on the corner—a shed-corner, this time—to watch some fellows work, and along comes the female of the species and tells him it’s tag-day. And what can the poor boob do? Dig down, as usual.”

I said nothing. There seemed nothing to say. But I thought he must have talked some time with the chief’s daughter before she felt well enough acquainted to ask for a present.

“Funny little cuss, isn’t she?” he added. “Got her nerve right with her. Says her name’s Juana, and her father’s is Juancito. How do all these Indians get Spanish names? Every one I’ve known had one.”

“They never tell their real names,” I told him. “Every Maquiritare gives himself a Spanish name when talking with a blanco. Why they do it I do not know. When do you leave for the Caura, señor?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” he yawned. “Pretty soon. Guess I’ll rest a day or so. Does this air up here make you sleepy? I’ve been yawning my head off all the afternoon.”

“It is because you have reached a resting-place,” I said. “I often feel so when I have finished a hard trip. But I do not feel that I have finished this one, so I am not yet sleepy. Tomorrow, or the next day, I turn south to the Caura.”

“So soon? I’m going to that same river, but north instead of south, and in a few days instead of tomorrow.”

“I should like to see you safely started homeward before I leave,” I said.

He swung and looked me in the eye; and probably he saw in my face what I did not say.

“See here, old chap,” he said in an annoyed tone, “you’ve pulled me out of a couple of holes, and I’m awfully obliged, and all that sort of thing. If I had a chance I’d do as much for you, and I’d back you to the last shot in the locker. At the same time, I’m free, white, and more than twenty-one, and mighty well able to stand on my own two legs. So far as my little personal comings and goings and talkings and doings are concerned, do you mind attending to your own business?”

“Not at all, señor,” I said coldly.

And I turned and left him.