Black White/Chapter 3

OW, unless you gentlemen know how we make the balata rubber—and hardly any one does, except those who handle it—perhaps I should explain a little, so that you may understand more clearly what is to come. Everything about it is different from the work of collecting the more common rubber, which here is called caucho and in Brazil is named seringa. It comes from a different tree, grows in a different kind of country, is collected at a different time of year, is treated in a different way, and is used for a different purpose. Also, it sells for a different price, and that is why we collect it.

As you probably know, our Alto Orinoco is near Brazil, and the country there is much like Brazil—not open sabana, as here, but jungle; and there grows the caucho, along the river itself and in the bush round about. We used to work the caucho, but for several reasons we do so no more. First, the price fell. Second, the Orinoco is a man-killing river in its upper part, full of huge boulders and dangerous raudales which have smashed many a boat and swallowed many a man; so it is not worth while to bring out rubber for small money. Third, very few people now are left alive there, because of the killings by the murderer Tomás Funes and his army of cutthroats, from 1913 to 1921.

You can travel for many a long league in the Rio Negro country—that is what we call the Orinoco in the Territorio de Amazonas, because the only town in that territory, San Fernando de Atabapo, is on an ink-black river—you can paddle for many a day, I say, and see on the banks only empty palm huts and overgrown clearings. Ask what they are, and you will be told, “Old caucho camps.” Ask where the caucheros are now, and the answer is, “Killed by Funes.” The few of us who are left alive in that country do not bother with the caucho. We go after the balata.

The caucho grows in flooded lowlands, and its milk is collected in the dry season. The balata grows in the mountains, and can be worked only in the time of heavy rains. The gum of the caucho is rolled on a stick and smoked over a fire. That of the balata is boiled down in huge pans. The caucho rubber is used for many things with which you are familiar. The balata is tougher, and from it is made belting for machines, insulation for wires, and such things, for which the caucho is not so good. No, señor, the balata is not sent largely to your United States—almost all of it is bought in England.

Now, because the balata grows in the mountains only, and the only balata-growing mountains we have are those of the Parima region, we who would work it must leave our dangerous Orinoco and journey up the still more dangerous rivers flowing out of these mountains; more dangerous, because they are even more rocky and have fierce currents. There are very few of us, as I have said, who do this work in the Alto Orinoco country; and of those few all but I, Loco, the Madman, live in San Fernando de Atabapo and send out Indian scouts to hunt for new districts each year. I do my own scouting, because

Pardon? Why do we not tap the same trees each year? Because, señor, we do not “tap” the trees at all—we cut them down. So when we have worked a district once we have killed it. Wasteful, you say? Suicidal? Perhaps. But, señor, we live only while we may and we take all we can get while we live. What do we care for the years to come? We shall be dead then. And in this business it is every man for himself.

As I said, I do my own scouting, because Indians will not always tell you about all they find. What I myself have seen, that I know. I can not see clearly through another man’s eyes. Furthermore, I will not live in San Fernando—I do not like it. Every foot of its ground is soaked with human blood. Its very air is poisonous. So when other balata men are spending the dry season there drinking up their money, I am out in the wilds cruising about for new finds. You gold-seekers would call it “prospecting,” and so it is—only I prospect for trees instead of gold.

Now in this year of which I am telling you, I had worked out my district on the Padamo and decided not to hunt for another on that river. One reason for this decision was that the Guaharibos, the fierce savages who hold the country in which the Orinoco rises, had been growing troublesome in the neighborhood of the Padamo, and I knew that the next year they would be worse. I have a way of getting along well with most Indians—else I could not work balata, for all my men are Indians—but with those Guaharibos no man can get along. They are killers.

Besides this, I had tired of the Padamo country and had decided to prospect up the Rio Ventuari, which enters the Orinoco not many days above San Fernando: a river little known even to us men of Amazonas, and, I am very sure, known not at all to any one else, except the Indians who live there. That upland country is the homeland of the Maquiritares, with whom I have long been friendly. They had told me that on the Ventuari was balata. So now I headed for the Ventuari.

It was not until some time after White had left Bolívar that I began my long return up the river. As I come down only once a year, when I do come I make my stay here a holiday. I purposely remain until I am so tired of the town that I hate the sight and sound and smell of it; then it is a pleasure to leave it, and it is long before I crave to come back. That was what I did now. And when at length I sickened of town life I had my next year’s supplies loaded into my piragua, spread her sails to the east wind, and left this place behind at the rate of twenty leagues a day.

I had almost forgotten about White. Nothing about him had come to my ears, or about any of the girls he knew. Young Paquito avoided me, perhaps fearing that I might tell something about him—though he need not have worried. By the way, I never saw him after that night when he threw the knife; he was drowned a few months later, being caught out here on the river by a chubasco—a fierce squall—which capsized his canoe in midstream. Some caimán got him, no doubt. He has never been found.

When I passed the Caura mouth, though, I thought of White long enough to ask if any of the crew had heard news or gossip about the Americano. None had. So I forgot him again. He who sails his piragua up the Orinoco when the floods are past and the water growing shallow, as it was then, has plenty of things to think about.

We had steady wind while going west, as usual, and after turning south we got strong gusts from the hills as far as the Raudal de San Borje, beyond the mouth of the Colombian river Meta. Then the breeze grew light and uncertain, as it always does there; and with the dying of the wind we were attacked in earnest by the swarming little mosquitoes which are the curse of the Orinoco above the first raudales, and which we call la plaga—the plague. From sunrise to sundown these little demons are torturing the skin and sucking the blood; and at nightfall out comes the larger black zancudo de noche, whose bite is poisonous.

Here we could travel only slowly. Yet, by taking advantage of every short burst of breeze or by putting out the anchor ahead and hauling on the rope, we worked safely through all the bad places to Atures. Through this raudal of Atures no boat can go, for it is muy maluco—very bad. As usual, I had my supplies carted around the raudal by the oxen kept there for the purpose; loaded it into another piragua above, and went on, my men poling along the banks, as there is no wind above Atures and the up-river piraguas have no masts. We got through the other bad places in the regular way—poling or hauling—to the Raudal de Maipures, where we had to use ox-carts again and board a third piragua at the upper end of the portage, as is customary.

I was now in the Rio Negro country, and as Funes had garrisons of his murder-army at both Atures and Maipures—places of about six houses each—I had to give all the Bolívar news to his gangs. In return I was assured that no order to kill me had yet gone out, although it was known I had money, and no man with money was safe in the territory of Funes. I have never known just why the man let me live so long, unless it was to allow me to make more money before my turn came, so that he would profit all the more by my death. He intended to have me murdered in time, for after he himself was shot my name was found on one of his lists of men to be executed. But in that year when I was going to the Ventuari no plan to end me was known.

So I went on, and reached San Fernando, and talked a while with Funes himself. He was in very good humor that day—he had shot two brothers with his own hand that morning—and all went well between us. The next day I transferred my supplies once more, changing from the piragua to the long curial—dugout canoe—which I always use above San Fernando. And three days later I was at the Raudal de Santa Barbara, which is also the mouth of the Ventuari.

Now this raudal of Santa Barbara is a great bay full of islands, and a very confusing place to get through. I knew the Orinoco part of it well enough, having passed through it time after time while journeying up or down. And now I had only to bear to the north until I had passed from the part which I knew into that which I did not know, and then keep working against the current, in order to reach the new river. Less than half a day of this brought me out of the maze of islands and into the boca del Ventuari.

The river surprized [sic] and delighted me. Rocks were there, of course, and we met small raudales, but had not much trouble in passing through them; and the river was wide and sunny, with cool breezes sweeping down from the mountains which we could not yet see, and a marvelous amount of fish and game in the greenish water or the tree-tangle along the banks.

Tapirs swam along unafraid; peccaries came down in file to drink; monkeys of every kind, from the great red areguato howler to the pretty little mono tití, ran along the branches and watched us. Big black-and-white ducks—the pato real—floated along within stone’s throw; pavas, or wild peacocks, stood and stared at us; and by day and by night we heard along both banks the soft, mournful notes of the pauji, or wild turkey, which is always moaning, “Mi muert’ est aquí.” At sundown the edges of the sandy playas were alive with pabón and other big fish, splashing about in the shallows as they fed.

With all this fine food waiting to be taken, we lost little time in hunting or fishing. The water, too, had fallen so far that my men could pole most of the time instead of paddling, thus traveling faster and becoming less tired. So, though the current still was strong, we made good headway each day.

We journeyed several days before we met men. Every day we saw signs of men—a pole tripod where a tapir had been roasted, a tiny rancheria among the trees where Indians had camped while fishing, a few charred butt-ends of sticks, and such things—but nothing of the men themselves. This did not surprize me, for I knew that the Indians of this river were very wary by nature and had become much more so since the Funes gang had been in control at San Fernando; the Indians soon learn of such things, and when they know we Venezuelans are killing one another along the Orinoco they move still farther away from it and its tributaries.

From the freshness of some of the signs we found, I suspected that the men who made them had departed only a little while before we arrived, and that if I should beat the bush for them, or go up some of the small caños opening into the main river, I should find them. But I suspected also that if I acted as if hunting them they would decide my intentions were evil and fill us all with arrows or poisoned darts—for some of those Ventuari Indians are fighters, and all of them use the blowgun and that curare poison which kills surely and swiftly. I wished to meet some Indians, but not in that way. I wanted to make friends of them and then to get rid of my present crew.

These men were of San Fernando. They were good rivermen, and for my Orinoco traveling they were the best men to be had: for the Indians who work the balata for me will not go down the big river—when the gum is collected they take their payments of beads, machetes, knives, and such things, and then go back by their own ways to their homes in the unknown uplands. Also, the Orinoco between San Fernando and Bolívar is to be traveled only by rivermen who know every bad spot and how to go through or around it, and these things the men of the mountains do not know.

Now that I was in the Ventuari, however, my San Fernando mestizos were useful to me only as polers or paddlers, for they knew even less about this river than I. Worse yet, I knew that as soon as they returned to their town they would drink and tell everybody all they knew about my movements up here in the hills. That did not suit me at all.

So I watched for Indians and saw none. Dawn after dawn we awoke at the first paling of the sky, aroused by the hoarse rattling call of the hump-backed, needle-beaked black corocoro birds, which came flying through the morning mists to begin their daily boring for slugs in the clay of the river-banks. Day after day we wormed from side to side of the winding stream, following the right depths for poling and avoiding both the shallows over sandbanks and the deep holes which meant paddle-work. Night after night we hung our hammocks from the trees or lay under the stars on some dry playa, undisturbed by either tigre or caimán—for the big hunting-cats are few along the Ventuari, and the only crocodile is the little babicho, which is harmless to all but small creatures. And the men who lived in the Ventuari country we neither saw nor heard.

Then, on a hot forenoon when we had shot no game because we had more than enough cooked meat left over, we approached a noisy raudal. Below it opened a heavily forested, steep-walled caño. And out from this opening in the bank suddenly shot another canoe.